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Lots of neat stuff in this. Just finished playing the first mission, and it's very Skacky. Lots of crazy verticals. Pretty impressive effort.

Yeah. Maybe I'll update the mission someday if we ever get something like a "mission modifiers" feature. I have some ideas of how I could do it the non-fancy way with items or something. I don't know, but Volta missions will not have this feature

Black Parade is released ! https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429

Played Grounded difficulty a couple of times and could not get past the school in Bill's town. My first attempt I got stuck on first entry into the school. I couldn't sight the bow properly and I now think that was a glitch or a setting I couldn't figure out because this second attempt it worked normally. Oddly, whereas in easier levels I seem to get two uses out of each arrow, in Grounded it seems randomised and a new arrow might get 1 to 3 (more?) uses. I definitely got three uses. Anyway, this first area in the school took a lot of stealth takedowns every one of which needed a lot of trial and error because of the need to preserve ammo etc for the Bloater in the next area - and that's where I'm stuck. In lower levels, I always enter the gym with 3 nail bombs, 3 molotovs, and plenty of shotgun shells. I'd typically lob all or most of the bombs and molotovs at the Bloater right at the start and then run round like hell waiting an opportunity to blast it with the shotgun. In Grounded, despite HUGE effort to preserve resources, all I have left is 1 nail bomb, 1 molotov, and 6 shotgun shells. I also have just enough resources to make EITHER a health pack OR another molotov. That's when I discovered my health was near-zero! I gave it a lot of thought and decided I'd have to restore my health. So 1 bomb and 1 molotov. I knew this wouldn't work. Sure enough, I ran out of ammo pretty quick and died from a single hit. Has anyone ever got past this scene with 1 bomb and 1 molotov (on ANY level?) Presumably it must be possible because it seems impossible on Grounded to ever get enough resources to have more than 1 bomb (the one Bill gave me) and maybe 2 molotovs (the first one found on a corpse.) Believe me, I scrape the barrel for resources in EVERY scene and there is almost NOTHING anywhere! Every single bullet is precious. And almost no shivs so none ever to spare to open doors so how much resources did I miss that way? All I can think of is a crazy race run perfectly and never taking a hit and hoping to pick up dozens of shotgun shells from bare-fist punching of runners. This sounds near-impossible. (Although Bill did finally get off his fat arse and kill 4 infected in the final surge outside just before climbing that bus to get in the school. (I did that by racing around madly for a long time then suddenly forced to bare-fist a runner I was astonished to find it was the last one!) Maybe if I could survive by running round the gym he'd take down the Bloater? There are far more difficult battles beyond this so I doubt I'll bother.

Body awareness please. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20013-are-you-gonna-add-this/

If the "mission fails as soon as stealth score turns non-zero," that would not be good for ghost players. They might need to find out "how" they failed and experiment to avoid alerting guards. They might need to take those score points as a "bust". They might need to take those score points to complete an objective. Then, mission authors would need to encode exceptions into their missions, which would be a lot of work (if they decide to do it at all). However, part of what makes ghosting challenging and fun is when mission authors do not create their missions with ghosting in mind. Please see: Official Ghosting Rules: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148523 Writing code for these rules would be a huge undertaking. Ghost Rules Discussion: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148487 Creating an official mode could alienate these dedicated ghost players, because it would clash with what is considered ghosting in the community. Including the Stealth Stat Tool mod in the official release would be more useful. Or, making the audible alert states of guards quick and easy to recognize could help as well. For these reasons, I don't agree with an official "Ghost" mode. If the dev team were to do it, we should consult with @Klatremus so we get it 100% correct or not pursue it at all. (This ghosting bit should probably be in its own thread.)

I loved it. Awesome game. I faceplanted at the people who asked for quest markers in the Steam forums there... Herr, lass Hirn regnen. The game is so great, and so true to the original, because it doesn't hold your hand. When is the new breed of gamers gonna learn.

A couple more: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21739-resolved-allow-mantling-while-carrying-a-body/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22211-feature-proposal-new-lean-for-tdm-212/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22198-feature-proposal-frob-to-use-world-item/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22249-212-auto-search-bodies/

I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.

Latest TDM updated version of Hasard Pay While loading anew saved game Error: FILE SCRIPT\TDM_STATISTIC_MESSAGE.SCRIPT, LINE 5: STATISTC_MESSAGE_INIT REDECLARED any ideas ?

Confident no, desperate bad management. - How much do these oranges cost? - €1000 a piece - How crazy, this is not going to sell much. - Yes, but I'll only have to sell 1 or 2 a day to get rich.

Public release v1.7.6 (with Dark Mod support) is out. Improvements since the final beta 14 are: Fixed a few remaining bugs with zip/pk4 support. Game Versions window now properly displays TDM version. Import window no longer has a vestigial off-screen TDM field (because TDM doesn't need or support importing). Web search option is now disabled if an unknown/unsupported FM is selected. If an FM with an unknown or unsupported game type is selected, the messages in the tab area now no longer refer to Thief 3 ("Mod management is not supported for Thief: Deadly Shadows"). The full changelog can be viewed at the release link. The de facto official AngelLoader thread is here: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149706 Bug reports, feature requests etc. are usually posted there. I'll continue following this thread though. Thanks everyone and enjoy!

@stgatilov, thanks for sharing your thoughts about the original ideas behind the 3 levels, which I had not previously seen put so well. I was surprised that you considered that some of an individual AI's barks might go under "effects" instead of "speech". @snatcher likewise thought that, in effect, an AI's barks should be divided, though draws the dividing line elsewhere. I agree with you about the primary existing TDM audience for subtitles: those players appreciating help with spoken English, specially in dialects. I think partially-impaired-hearing individuals will also benefit. But, given subtitles in TDM and our newly prototyped method of indicating speaker sound source, I think we have an opportunity to enlarge the potential TDM community to include deaf players, or those who like to play games with sound off. This does involve sound categorization and visual cues, beyond just toggling story/speech/effects. Such cues could be universal (seen the same by everyone), or controlled by new options, to accommodate personal interest (or lack thereof). Let me be more specific. Consider the 2-level visual cues that snatcher preferred (while leaving open where to draw the line between the 2, or whether 2 is really too few). Examples of universal+fixed, which for barks could be done by me in the .subs file, are: bracketed vs unbracketed white vs yellow font, done by string markup. (This has significant drawback and limitations). Alternatively, there is categorization performed engine-side and passed to the GUI as one or more variables. The results could be universal, or the passed value(s) could be affected by additional optional settings. Displayed results could be, for instance: white vs yellow font, done by text font color choice Stone vs Carleton font wide vs narrow font wide vs narrow background field two different background tints or opacities colored border around backgrounds, with two different colors (Also, without involving new GUI variables, the engine could add brackets to selected strings) Turning to what additional optional settings might look like, at the basic level, you could just have an option that turns visual cues on or off. So, for example, if the visual cue was font choice, turning the visual cue option to off would cause all subtitles to use the same default font. More specificity is, of course, possible. (Maybe too, stgatilov, you could sneak in a related option to suppress "Just you wait!" audio and only play story clips!) If the barks were to be subdivided by the engine into (in this discussion) 2 categories, it could be done by a new per-line option in the .subs file, e.g, -cue 1. Or the categorization could be done entirely automatically on-the-fly by the engine, at the moment it's looking at the AI's current state & most recent state transition, in order to select a sound shader to play. It would probably use the standardized state-transition names as found in the AI .def files, e.g. "snd_foundDeadMale" rather than AI-specific sound shader names. So there would be a list of "snd_..." to determine when g_cue=1 instead of the default g_cue=0.

Indeed, but I imagined it was removed with the other stuff... now I hope it won't be, and if need be can be fixed to be compatible with TDM. The question is if it knows to work with our AI and entities, if we haven't done anything too radical to break it maybe we're lucky and it does! I should finish the FM I'm currently on, then I'll reload a previous one and give it a quick try to at least ensure nothing crashes or goes crazy.

You’re count of the purses seems to be correct - so I am actually not sure what is causing the aberration in the pick pocket statistics beyond something like the bug bigh is describing. There isn’t anything meaningfully different in how the attachments are setup that I can see. Will talk it over with the other devs and see if they have an ideas.

Good work! I enjoy short missions because things are nice and focused - you get in, you get out. Also I tend to do better with the loot amounts and I was able to get all the loot without too much trouble, which is rare for me. If I were to make a suggestion though - I found the intro briefing sequence a bit distracting because it was so obvious the narration was pitch-shifted to make a deeper voice. If you felt the original voice wasn't deep enough for your needs, I would either get someone on the forums to record it for you or just leave as is. That's my only real complaint and it's not even about the mission itself, so pretty good first start!

Beta 11 Fix finished-on state auto-update was unreliable Slighty improve scanner title/author detect Tags are now named some whatever regular-version-looking thing to force GitHub to put the newest at the top

I'd like to better understand what you want. The design of dragging bodies is to hold frob (key down) to drag and release frob (key up) to let go. That way it's impossible to walk away while unintentionally dragging a body. Plus, it's quick to grab and move several body limbs in rapid succession. This is thought to provide a better experience, especially for new players. Towards the beginning of this thread, I created a "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior" cvar. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22198-feature-proposal-frob-to-use-world-item/&do=findComment&comment=487580 "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior", default:"1" Which drag body behavior? 1 --- on frob key up, drop body (limb). 0 --- on second frob, drop body (limb), TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. That cvar was removed shortly afterwards, because it was said that it wasn't needed. With that cvar set to 0, a second frob would be required to let go of the body. Is that the behavior that you want? If so, I can add that cvar back. Also, I saw elsewhere that you want the ability to revert back to the old way. If you mean that all of the controls match TDM 2.11, that can be done with "tdm_frobhold_delay 0" and there will be a menu setting to disable it as well.

Extensive customization options are appropriate during the pre-release testing or early roll out of a new feature. The people testing the feature can't know yet what configuration will work best for them, much less the people making the patch. My expectation is that by the time you have to make a final decision about including this patch in the next official update of TDM, there will be a rough consensus about the optimal parameters for the new mechanics, and you will only need one toggle for the new behavior. Or, preferably, there would be no need for an option at all if we can only get over our OCD about preserving arbitrary semantic grouping in our key-bind allocations; and embrace a superior control scheme that's not designed around highlighting an old gimmick feature whose trendiness expired with the Half-Life 2 era of FPS. But that's a pipe dream. Maybe instead we can just all agree that the general>gameplay options are getting a bit crowded. Perhaps we could split some of them off into an "appearance" or "accessibility" tag. As more people make their own mods and we modernize our accessibility options it is going to become a problem regardless. Best to get ahead of it. I agree, and that is one of TDM's strengths. It borrows and combines many of the best features from the three beloved Thief games, but it also gives FM creators tools to expand their creative vision in new directions. To some Thief purists that will never be an enticing proposition. But I don't see this feature as throwing a bone to those Thief players specifically, but just player in general who are bouncing off our game because it deviates from some genre conventions for no obvious reason, which makes them think this is an unpolished product. It is true that Thief was what set these conventions, and (shockingly/s) it is mostly Thief players who are interested enough in TDM to give it a try... but our responsibility to address these problems (if we can) is the same as if AMD or Linux players were having technical problems with TDM. They are people who we want to be part of our community because we never know if one of them might make the next FM like Iris, or do something crazy-innovative with TDM that we can't even imagine!

Mods is the answer. The scripting system in TDM is like nothing I've seen before. I hope it expands further and further... Mods can bring new blood, new ideas, new mechanics, new sounds, new models, new textures... and who knows, new core features eventually.

Fair enough. Trying to think back to when I first discovered TDM, which is already almost a decade ago: I don't remember finding it that difficult, though for the greatest amount of time I played on the easiest AI difficulty for sight and hearing, eventually settling for Forgiving (2nd easiest). Also I still play every FM on its Easy difficulty which is pretty lame, I've been wanting to do Normal and Hard modes of ones I know and hope to get to that once I finish playing with some more modding ideas.

These are great ideas.

Not to be a nag, but I was thinking about the columns problem. If you go to the view source tab in the wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod&action=edit The raw table data is accessible directly: |- !align=left|{{TDM-FM|written|Written in Stone}} |Bikerdude, Amadeus, Dragofer |{{Forumlink|https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21265-written-in-stone-beta-210-only-20220128/}} |2022-01-28 |338 |Yes |Yes |CCC 22, Elixir |City Missions |Undead, Horror Themes |- Each pipe character represents one of the columns.

I'm the developer of AngelLoader, a fan mission loader/manager for Thief 1/2/3/SS2. I recently decided to try adding Dark Mod support. The latest release is here: https://github.com/FenPhoenix/AngelLoader/releases I'm going to keep a log of issues, ideas, notes, etc. here and we can discuss them or whatnot. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, feel free to post them here. TDM version requirement: I've only tested it with TDM 2.11. I'm not sure but I dimly remember FMs used to be stored differently at some point in the past? If so, it wouldn't work with those older versions. I assume people would normally keep their TDM install up to date, but just a heads up. How it works: In the Settings window -> Paths tab, choose your Dark Mod executable. Click OK. Now your TDM FMs will be detected, scanned, and added to the list. For the other supported games, there is the concept of "installed" vs "not installed", this is because they normally come in archive files and then the loader can "install" them (extract the file into the "installed FMs" folder). For TDM there is no such concept (FMs are always installed), so the green checkmark "installed" indicator means that that FM is the currently selected one (the one that is loaded up when you start TDM), and only one TDM FM can be "selected" at a time. This indicator is kept in sync with the game, so if you change your selected FM inside TDM, AngelLoader will update its "selected" indicator in-app. Notes & Issues: Deleting FMs: Deleting TDM FMs is not supported yet. I notice TDM itself doesn't allow you to delete FMs either; it has been noted that people have accidentally lost their data and so the option was removed. AngelLoader puts files into the recycle bin when it deletes them, and I could add the option, but figured it was okay to leave it out initially since the game doesn't let you do it either. Note, though, that you can still delete TDM FMs from AngelLoader's database if you've manually deleted the actual FM from disk first. To do this, first click the "Show only unavailable FMs" button (red X page icon on the top bar). Last Played and Finished-On-Difficulty: Finished-on difficulty is now autodetected. Last played date is taken from the game's database only if AngelLoader doesn't have one in its own (its own is more granular). In the FMs folder, there is a file missions.tdminfo which stores certain pieces of data about FMs. Included among this data is which difficulty the mission has been finished on, and the last played date (down to the day only). AngelLoader also stores this information, but it doesn't get these values from this file at the moment. Instead, the last played date (down to the instant, not just the day) is set whenever an FM is started, and the finished-on state must be set manually. I could have it watch the file for changes and update the finished-on-difficulty automatically for the current FM. This would override the user setting, but in theory should be accurate anyway. I could also auto-update the last played date, but because it's only down to the day, that would be less optimal than just setting it on FM start, which would give a more granular date and would have sorting working better. So if you played two FMs in one day, the latest played one would sort at the top. Mods tab is disabled: For NewDark games, there is built-in support for mods, and they can be enabled or disabled per-FM in an official capacity. I've disabled the Mods tab for TDM because - from a cursory look anyway - I don't think there's such a per-FM method of mod management. Language selection is disabled: In the Edit FM tab, there's an option to choose which language to play an FM with. I've disabled it for TDM because there's a language option in-game (not the case with NewDark) and I haven't looked into how I would scan a TDM FM for supported languages anyway. "Play Without FM" Option: For the other games, there is the option (in the bottom bar) to play them with no FM. For TDM there is no such thing as "no FM", but the option is still there currently. It will simply start TDM without passing it anything, and whatever FM it has selected will be there. I might remove the option since it doesn't really make sense. This might make people wonder "where's the button for TDM" but on the other hand having it isn't really useful. Not sure. Mission downloading and updating: An in-app mission downloader is in progress. There is no mission downloader or anything like that currently. It simply lists what you've got on disk. This means that to get new FMs or check for updates to existing ones, you still have to go in-game. I don't know how people feel about the convenience factor of this, having to go in-game to get your FMs and then back out to AngelLoader. However, duplicating the TDM download functionality would mean it might well break if TDM ever changes anything about its downloader. Custom resource stats: In the Statistics tab, custom resource display is disabled for TDM. I haven't looked into what sort of "custom" things a TDM FM can have and how I can detect them. I may do this in the future.

Terrific! The beta test thread is up: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22238-beta-testing-the-spider-and-the-finch/