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I'm unable to play this mission. After the briefing video and being given the choice of Easy, Medium, or Hard difficulty, it briefly says "Generating World" and then immediately returns to the main menu (Start this mission, ... Quit) From darkmod.log: [/game/darkmodglobals.cpp ( 372):INI (INIT) FR: 0] The Dark Mod 2.10/64, code revision 9815 (1435:9815) (then several entries, ending in:) [/game/darkmodglobals.cpp ( 428):FRC (FORCE) FR: 0] LogClass_STATE: 0 Has anyone seen this error before? If not, what should I do to get you more info? I played the other two Contest missions (Down and Out on Newford Road and Hazard Pay) without any difficulty. (I was spastic trying to install the beta (I tried to load the latest /dev build at first, which didn't work) and because it wouldn't go to other versions from there, I had to delete all of DarkMod, reinstall to 2.09b, and then installed Beta 2.10 V5; after that, I played the other two contest missions without difficulty.) - prjames

What an incredible mission! The design of this thing is so clean and the package so complete I have no idea how it was pulled off, especially within the contest. Incredible setting and atmosphere with some truly awe inspiring scenes. I should be finishing my mission right now, but how the hell can I with content as good as we are getting from this contest! 2.10 looks like it's going to have a hell of a head start.

The goals of the contest are unchanged (connect to other FMs and use new core features), its just about making sure the reward for using new features doesnt weigh more than the voting. Its also not the first time it was mentioned. And I'm a little surprised that most of us don't seem to really care about the contest aspect. I don't really mind since I generally prefer collaboration over competition, but I was around to see the Vertical (2010), Beginner (2012) and Halloween (2015) Contests and it felt to me like most participants were in it to win it. Ofc the outcome was only symbolic (i.e. no rewards except a title below the avatar) but I think people just enjoyed the good-spirited competition aspect and the voting at the end was an important part of that experience. Well, maybe that's just not feasible here with several of the participants dropping out and an uneven playing field overall in terms of mapping experience (12 years after TDM's release), number of authors and prior work on the FMs. Yeah 30% of the score sounds alright. My feedback would be that it's quite easy to max out the reward since you only need 2 features and 1 asset (i.e. volumetrics, secret tracking and a cabinet1-type furniture piece). Could reward use of more features by giving fewer points per feature, i.e. 2x and 1/2.

I have returned to TheDarkMod after a few years (I played it a lot around 2015-16, even tried making a map, it did not go anywhere so I donated those few assets). The missions are great. In this one in particular, the navigation is awesome. The city is very good. I have noticed a trend though: the puzzles are more complicated; a lever may open something *somewhere*. Do you think that large TDM missions are suffering from "puzzle creep", that the veteran and in-community players do not notice? [/spoiler] So you have to go *all the way back* to use the crystal key on the teleporter thingy? And I don't know how to deal with the burning crystals either. I ended up killing nearly all enemies in the mages' place, with sword and holy water, because, yeah, I need to figure things out and I can't be bothered to stealth from one place to another anymore, lol. I will try checking the readables and environment with a bit more patience and see. [spoiler] The old format for spoiler tags does not work, not does changing the '/'. Wow, what a way to advertise "I am dumb" XD IMO the best way is to place gradual spoilers in the forum thread. I know it's a bit of a burden on the authors but answering 20 questions disjointly from different users is one as well.

I agree. Waiting to release 2.10 until there is a stock of missions, but also extending the contest deadline to accommodate 2.10, seems like a bit of a circular dependency. IMO it might be best just to set a 2.10 release date, put the contest deadline a week earlier, and just go for it. I possibly misunderstood the scoring system, but I thought it meant that the asset/feature bonuses were either rewarded or not, and not included in the voting. Thus if I include features from 2.10 and 2.09, and an asset from 2.10, and average 3 across the board in the voting my score would be 6+5+2+3+3+3 = 22 of a possible 28. I think nbohr1more also has bonus points for the "connection" part but I'm not sure how that works.

Personally I think Moonbo's Requiem FM is about as good as one could wish for in terms of a spiritual successor to the Thief trilogy. The story hits all the important notes, and the level design is uniformly top notch across all the expected axes of stealth gameplay. And there is even a sequel that trailblazes entirely new territory from its predecessor in gameplay, story, and tone. That's just icing on the cake. Indeed there several FMs for TDM that I believe equal or even surpass the quality of the original games' levels. The trouble is how do you discover them in that giant downloader list? Are there other great missions in there that I have yet to find? That is undoubtedly the greatest current weakness of this project. The ability to sort FMs in the game client (i.e. both the downloader and the mission launcher) by date, size, and author would be a great help. Search by keywords or tags and support for grouping missions into collections would also be very useful.

On my end I was not “in it to win it” so to speak - I just liked the idea of participating as it gave me a firm deadline to actually try and finish the thing and I liked the concept trying to incorporate some kind of continuity with the whole mod into the mission. I was also looking forward to getting the voters scoring results. On the first point the contest absolutely paid out for me in spades - as who knows where the thing would be without it. I have a long list of polish bugs to squash, readables to proof read and some mechanics added in the late stage like the X-ray glasses could use some fleshing out so at the end of the day I am still happy if I don’t make the contest deadline and don’t qualify. I am very confident I won’t be far behind and I am looking forward to playing everyone else's missions!

OK, I'll try to rearrange to that directory layout. I'll have to lookup how to do that without screwing up Tortoise. I'm not on that machine at the moment, so I can't check your BTW. I don't remember about "branches", but I do remember a local "tags" directory... don't know if it was populated.

Ideally, you should have checked out "trunk" directory only, so that its contents get into "tdm11dev/darkmod_src" instead of "tdm11dev/darkmod_src/trunk". Do you BTW have all the "branches" and "tags" directories near "trunk" ? Maybe not, because they are still closed for public for some weird reason...

Hey, thank you very much for the kind words I'm happy you enjoyed the mission. I am a bit busy with RL things this summer and haven't been nearly as responsive on the forums as I should be, lol, but I am hoping to start work on another FM after that. As for the glitch, I'm not sure I have experienced that. I'll take a look this weekend and see what's what. Also, Dragofer, Biker and I worked on a newly released FM for the recent contest called "Written in Stone" so feel free to give that a whirl if you want

Moddb Article: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/community-unusual-gameplay-contest Based on the polls, I am proposing a 3 month "Unusual Gameplay Contest" starting on December 16th and running until the end of March. The standard voting convention is show in the topic poll. The Unusual Gameplay theme will be as follows: Non-standard Objectives (assassination, destruction, etc) ( Sprinheel's "A Score to Settle" matches this criteria.) or Non-standard play styles (Fieldmedic's mission "Reap as you Sow" is a good example, using a different method to trigger AI alert states, etc.) or Non-standard (strange?) maps such as "The Sword"... (Stumpy's "Illusionist Tower" might count here. Tels' Swift Mazes framework would also work well.) Please post your intention to join the contest in this thread. Late comers are welcome as long as their mission will be complete by the end of the contest. If anyone has a partly complete or nearly complete mission, please post the details in this thread and the participants will decide whether this is a fair entry as long as it's declared. This can also be used by voters to determine adherence to the intended rules and let folks balance their expectations accordingly (if needed). Unfortunately, the last poll on this wasn't clear enough but we can surely work this out in a civil manner in this thread.

Hey guys, I just got my digital life back after 5 weeks, can you point the way to that contest? Wasn't it a Christmas contest? How many entered? The latest 3 I've played aren't very Christmasy. I was voting more Halloween & cold Novembery...

Winner: The Rats Triumphant (Melan) Rankings: 1) The Rats Triumphant (Melan) 87.333% 2) Thief's Remorse (Airship Ballet) 82.738% 3) Golden Skull (Sotha) 80.667% 4) Spring Cleaning (Goldwell) 75.067% 5) Dead Drunk (Stumpy) 59.545% Calculations:

DarkRadiant 3.3.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Remove menu options which are not applicable to current game Feature: Grey-out menu entries that are not applicable Feature: FX Declaration Parsing Support Feature: FX Chooser Feature: Renderer now takes "translucent" keyword into account Fixed: Lighting Mode Renderer draws hidden lights Fixed: Loading map results in "Real Hard DarkRadiant Failure" exception Fixed: Crash when trying to set default mouse or keyboard bindings Fixed: Unit Tests intermittently get stuck on Github runner Fixed: xmlutil thread safety problems Fixed: Some materials aren't displayed correctly Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.3.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

Let me elaborate on this tactic: 1) Postulate some crazy concepts about historical events until one gains a little traction either by morons or people who find it to be an amusing meme 2) Test the waters in different forums and social media spaces to see how folks react to this 3) If the forum crowd is determined to be largely left-wing and rationale, overamplify how "idiotic" people are for believing XYZ and then slowly begin associating these "idiots" with anyone they consider their social or political adversaries until you get large numbers of forum members to rant about right-wing "Trump-tards" (etc) and foam at the mouth about all their political grievances 4) Pretend to be a right leaning person, act like a jerk, and get your posts censored 5) Go to right leaning forums and show them that this "theory" is being censored and see if you can get them to integrate it into the larger narrative of "true things that the left is censoring". ( Eg, add it to the pile of Qanon nonsense ). 6) Return to the left leaning forums to mock the right leaning folks for doing step 5. Mission accomplished, you've entrenched more poorly educated people into an absurd belief system and you've ignited a bunch of left-wing derision against them. This type of agitated polarization works well whether you are Putin, the Republican Party, Democrats, etc. Divide and conquer. Here's a tip: Nobody needs to grouse around about what "idiotic" things people believe. If you don't like people believing dumb things, then create a blog, youtube video, or podcast explaining the topic in easy ( and friendly ) terms to those you wish to evangelize into the world of being "not idiotic". The language of referring to people as "those idiots who believe" is a cancer that we suffer too much of these days with political propaganda organizations such as "Media Matters for America" (MMFA) who basically write a single set of political jokes about a daily topic and feed them to all the Late Night television hosts so that if you don't hear them say "republican person X did \ said this dumb thing" from one late night personality, you surely will hear it from another one and the version of what is told omits any nuance or rational counterpoint. In some cases, the words are out-right fabricated from out-of-context statements or things that MMFA thinks people will believe. Here's a perfect example: To this day, late night comedians treat the incriminating emails on Hunter Biden's laptop as "fake Russian slander" even though the New York Times has corroborated their authenticity and they are DKIM signed. They use the laptop story as a talking point about how Republican's are "pro Russian idiots" even though nobody of either political party would be happy to have the son of a vice president using his father's position to arrange financial scams and deals with geopolitical enemies ( China ). Because the latter information is largely invisible to over 50% of the US populace, it serves as a perfect place for political divide and conquer. If the entirety of mainstream entertainment and news are gonna bury or distort legitimate news stories about their allies, what are the chances that anyone will vote for a moderate "middle" candidate? The left will see right-leaning voters who discuss the laptop story as Russian traitors and the Right will see the left as "idiots" who get all their news from television comedians and insane "woke" SJW blue hairs. Perfectly divisive. People need to stop looking at the proles on the ground and start thinking about all the groups that are trying to pull the strings. So I state again, this is no place for astro-turfers, propagandists, and non-linear warfare. Nobody here really cares about what dumb things are floating through the brains of a small group of internet denizens. If these "idiots" grow in numbers, calling them idiots "louder" will not "cure" them or shrink their numbers. The only thing you will achieve is more entrenchment and polarization.

It still kind of makes sense to me for the contest deadline to be the 2.10 release - that still accomplishes the goal of testing 2.10 as there are still all the contest missions in development for it and eventually being beta tested. Then 2.10 also comes out of the gate with hopefully a bunch of new missions. Not just saying that as I want more time for my mission or anything….

Thanks for playing and the kind feedback re: the bugs: the brew tank is a new one - thanks for that. Will add it to the list for any future update. the bow: I think that's a TDM bug. I experienced it as well, but only the early days of developing the mission so I thought it had gone away, but I guess not: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21345-210-crashes-may-be-bow-frontend-acceleration-related/ the keys on the guard: never did get to the bottom of that one as I could never reproduce it.

Good news for everyone who needs to bridge the time gap for the current FM contest: As a 10 year anniversary I now finished the update for my Fan Mission. It is currently being reviewed by the Team who can hopefully put it up into the mission downloader. After the Update is officially available I'll update this thread with proper information. *excited screeching*