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  1. I just read@motorsep Discovered that you are able to create a brush, then select it and right click "create light". Now you have a light that ha the radius of the former brush. Just read it on discord and thought it may be of use for some people in the forums here too.
  2. I like the general idea and it shouldn't be that difficult to do, at least for loot. After all we already get a different frob sound when frobbing loot so somehow the game must know the difference before the loot is accounted for! We could then e.g. use the black frob outline for normal items, which is rather unobtrusive, and one of the white outlines for loot, so that is really obvious. I doubt it can be extended to other important items though, because I don't think the game could do that without mission authors defining those, which won't be possible for all the hundreds of released missions. To me the main question is whether this has to be done in the core game or with scripting? Snatcher, are you already looking into this ;)?
  3. I just found this thread on ttlg listing Immersive Sims: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151176
  4. Recently revisiting the forums after a longer period of time I wanted to check the unread content. I don't know if I am doing this wrong since.. ever... but on mobile (visiting the unread content page on my smartphone) you have to click on that tiny speech bubble to go to the most recent post in a thread. If you don't click correctly you'll hit the headline and end up at post 1 in the beginning of the thread. It's terrible on mobile, since not only the speech bubble is really small and was to miss. But also the thread headline is just millimeters away from it so you go right to the first post that was ever made instead of the most recent ones. Am I doing it wrong? I just want to go through u read content a d the to the newest post from that topic.
  5. A@datiswous Ah yeah, well sorry, I was quiet busy and only visiting discord. First time here on the forums since months now I think.. Thank you for the subtitles. I encourage everyone who is interested in using them to download it from here as I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them myself into the mission. Again, thank you for your work.
  6. Of course, it is one of the reasons for the decline of online forums, since the advent of mobile phones. Forums on a mobile are a pain in the ass, but on the other hand, for certain things there are no real alternatives to forums, social networks cannot be with their sequential threads, where it is almost impossible to retrieve answers to a question that is asked. has done days ago. For devs for internal communication, the only thing offered is a collaborative app, such as System D (not to be confused with systemd). FOSS, free and anonymous registration, access further members only by invitation, full encrypted and private. https://www.system-d.org
  7. Ignoring is somewhat inadequate as you still see other members engaging in a discussion with the problematic user, and as Wellingtoncrab says such discussions displace all other content within that channel. Moderation is also imperfect as being unpleasant to engage with is not in itself banworthy, so there is nothing more to do if such people return to their old behaviour after a moderator had a talk with them, except live with it or move away. I'd be more willing to deal with it if it felt like there were more on-topic discussion, i.e. thoughts about recently played fan missions or mappers showcasing their progress, rather than a stream of consciousness about a meta topic that may or not have to do with TDM. I guess the forums already serve the desired purpose, or they just compartmentalise discussions better.
  8. @snatcher did you play the FM? @computertech82 Your review is almost identical to that of the other review bomber, neonstyle, who didn't play the FM for even 5 seconds but who noclipped to an area where he airdropped before the same door which confounds you. How did you get to that door if you didn't use a rope arrow in the vents? If you were a bit observant and were actually trying to play the FM you might've noticed that the building with that confounding door has two floors, the second of which is ringed by a wooden balustrade where a well placed rope arrow (!!) allows the nimble or even not so very nimble player an entrance to a hall where there's a shooting gallery of open windows to use the water arrows (the player should have 20 or more of them by now) to extinguish the confounding torches. There's also a keyed (!!! how awful !!!) door up there where the thoughtful player might expect a key might be snagged from off the ass of one of the guards sitting up ahead playing poker. That allows the easiest entrance. But oh what the hell. Once targeted by bombers ever targeted and there's nothing to do about it. In a post above I appended an edit to a response to vozka that, since it was an edit, probably went unnoticed so I'll repeat it here since it's really my last word for the time being, given my circumstances of having to learn how to edit all over again (yes, I found myself in a situation where I lost the ability to do even basics like change the ambient light setting! and a lot of the necessary fixes are difficult). @vozka I can now give a more coherent reply and I'm recovering nicely. I agree with every point of the critique and I'm in a quandary about how I should go about applying fixes. I think your preamble to the actual critique shows an exact understanding of what I was attempting to do in the FM. You understand that it is story driven. You understood the main elements of the story, that basically a farm boy of pagan background entrusts himself with a mission. His village needs help. Because he's earned a certain bad reputation and fits the bills requirement for having daring and a certain amount of cunning, so the mission is a natural fit; also amongst other things he wants to earn himself a good name. He has friends to help him along the way, and makes friends of friends along the road of the pagans. The FM uses devices to distinguish the pagans from the enemy they face and divides the space into distinct enemy and pagan areas, and areas in between. The pagans are opposed by corrupt nobles and their army of fundamentalist Builders, as corrupt as the nobles they serve. It's very black and white. Then there's the city guard who, being ousted from real power by the Builders are resentful and won't help the Builders and will ignore the player unless attacked or the player is caught trespassing in their inner court. That's about it. The critique mentions some gameplay elements that detract from the story and I agree about those. It also mentions gameworld failings that interfere with enjoyment, with gameflow and immersion. It seems to me that to fix these flaws will require a total rewrite of the FM, rebuilding the entire thing. For example, I understand the problems mentioned w.r.t. the lighting and know how to fix them, or at least bandage them over so technically there's no apparent problem. But I have a notion that the not so apparent problem here is in what's being lit. That there should be a rearrangement of things so light can be more focused and contrasted with the dark. I'm only starting to think through ways that I might do this. Needless to say anything like this would take time, probably a year, and I'm not sure whether I'm up to it. I've been playing a new mission by Kingsal and know I haven't anything near that level of skill. IMO the FM is unplayable right now. Actually I had asked that it be removed from the TDM database. I don't like the idea of leaving a blot. Thank you again.
  9. I don't recall a system for noise masking. It sounds like it'd be a good idea, but when you get into the details you realize it'd be complicated to implement. It's not only noise that that goes into it, I think. E.g., a high register can cut through even a loud but low register rumble. And it's not like the .wav file even has data on the register of what it's playing. So either you have to add meta-data (which is insane), or you have to have a system to literally check pitch on the .wav data and paramaterize it in time to know when it's going to cut through what other parameters from other sounds. For that matter, it doesn't even have the data on the loudness either, so you'd have to get that off the file too and time the peaks with the "simultaneous" moment at arbitrary places in every other sound file correctly. And then position is going to matter independently for each AI. So it's not like you can have one computation that works the same for all AI. You'd have to compute the masking level for each one, and then you get into the expense you're mentioning. I know there was a long discussion about it in the internal forums, and probably on the public subforums too, but it's been so long ago now I can't even remember the gist of them. Anyway the main issue is I don't know if you'll find a champion that wants to work on it. But if you're really curious to see how it might work, you could always try your hand at coding & implementing it. Nothing beats a good demo to test an idea in action. And there's no better way to learn how to code than a little project like that. I always encourage people to try to implement an idea they have, whether or not it may be a good idea, just because it shows the power of an open source game. We fans can try anything we want and see if it works!
  10. Things like these add complexity, make missions much more difficult, and also create chaos for players who like order and predictability. Games like these have to be predictable to some degree. E.g., I also never found that long patrol routes, and multiple guards who patrol the same are makes sense. Gameplay has to be predictable to some degree, otherwise it's no fun. Imagine a game like Splinter Cell with chaotic A.I. behavior. It would be unplayable. And no fun at all. I already find the cool down phase of A.I. alertness in TDM way too long, at least on the default difficulty and A.I. settings.
  11. I'm using the version from kcghost. I just tested and I can't see any difference inside the inventory. On the stats itself it doesn't show the different loot types (still seen in the inventory), but instead gives more info on stealth score. Edit: I see Dragofer made an updated version of his script. I have to check that out. Edit2: That version works: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=21272&key=02755164a3bed10498683771fe9a0453
  12. I like the idea that AI should remember things longer and get alerted if e. g. other guards are disappearing. Still this would probably make the original game much more difficult if the KO-immunity is turned on by this which means once alertness is high, you are forced to ghosting because nobody can be knocked out anymore! As for the CPT AI idea, this would make TDM be online always which I don't think is a good idea for a single player game...
  13. A fun mission for me requires a few things: I prefer smaller, more densely-packed environments instead of larger city blocks. That's not to say city missions can't be fun, but they run the risk of being exhausting, confusing labyrinths. From my perspective missions with smaller environments provided an increased chance of me finding all the loot, secrets, readables and other content. I've missed major areas in city levels purely because it's so easy to skip areas without realising it. I'm not a fan of undead and spiders because they can be difficult to kill, or at least, to kill without making a whole lot of noise. I like missions with human enemies because for the most part I can deal with them quietly, and as such it provides an opportunity to clear out areas first and then look carefully for loot and/or secrets. I really enjoy missions that have some sort of mystery, either as a starting goal to resolve, or when a seemingly straight-forward mission is designed to go badly and the mystery presents itself mid-mission. Keeps me engaged. I don't like KO or kill limits. I can tolerate kill limits more but I really hate having to limit the KOs I can make in a mission. I know some missions only have these limits on the higher difficulties, but sometimes those difficulties also have higher loot and even extra objectives that I want, but I have to deal with the KO limits alongside them. The best missions either don't have limits at all, or they are optional objectives that don't cause a mission failure if breached.
  14. TDM was never meant to be fully realistic, it would become impossibly difficult were that the case. None the less I still find myself wishing more could be done to make AI feel less like AI, especially when handling hostile encounters (usually the player). While like most aspects this could never be truly perfect, one area feels like it could be noticeably improved: Giving AI some form of long term memory, rather than just one alert level which goes back to zero after a short time. Here is the reason why I'm saying this: Walk inside your average heavily guarded mansion and step into the bright lights, making all the guards clearly see you and chase after you to attack. Once you've had enough fun repeating the process, hide somewhere and give everyone enough time to cool down. At the end of it all, hide somewhere in the shadows where you can barely be seen and let a guard walk past you: The guard will just say "is there something over there", at best waiting a few seconds and saying "probably just the shadows" before walking away... the same man that may have chased after you for 30 minutes and should by any logic know an intruder is still in the house, I mean come on Now I'm aware we have a basic persistence system: If I remember correctly an AI that's encountered the player and was alerted enough to draw their sword will have its acuity permanently increased by a slight amount. This however makes no noticeable difference as the AI behaves mostly the same. They'll keep telling fellow AI an intruder is in the area, this definitely helps but it's only a dialogue change not accompanied by noticeable modifications in behavior as you'd expect. Obviously massive modifications might be hard to do now without upsetting existing players since it would make everything harder. As such any such attempt would likely be an experiment and, if successful, a new menu option for the difficulty settings. Still I felt like suggesting my imagined solution just in case there's a point in considering tackling this. My idea: Replace the one-time bump in acuity with a paranoia level independent from the alert level... think of the existing alert system as short-term alert and the new one as long-term alert. The standard alert level of guards is slowly added to their paranoia level, thus the more time a guard spends being alert and the higher that alert is the more fear increases. Paranoia level may be allowed to decrease over time but at a far slower rate than the alert level: If an alert guard will typically take 3 minutes to fully calm down after losing track of the player, the paranoia level should take at least 30 if not 60 (real life) minutes to fully go down to minimum... even then it shouldn't drop below a certain degree after that point was reached, for instance just 50% of the maximum paranoia. This long-term fear level would have several effects on an AI as they patrol on their normal route... the ones I've thought about are: Increased acuity as they'll be more alert. This system would replace the existing simple bump we have in that regard, with a more fluid effect and also stronger effect. Increased playing of voices and idle animations: Due to being afraid the guard may talk to themselves or others a lot more frequently and babble excessively. Walking could be replaced by running for a while, even on path nodes that don't have the run flag. The AI would still patrol that same route just at a faster pace. As a map feature set by FM's: Some path nodes can be filtered by fear level, may already be possible with the simple system but I never tried it. An AI paranoid the player is still around but having resumed their normal patrol route may choose to patrol a more sensitive area it normally wasn't going to, which would be a fair way of punishing the player for being seen by having that AI start guarding a sensitive location from then on. If the paranoia level is allowed to slowly decrease, the guard may decide to go back on this decision... the player could then do something else for 15 minutes around the map till the guard abandons the paranoid patrol route. Here's an idea I like: AI randomly getting scared for no reason, thinking they see the player in every shadow even when there's nothing there. A scared guard normally walking on their patrol route would randomly become alert for no reason, typically when walking through a dark area, causing them to draw their sword or randomly run around for a second. The problem here is this effect would be random: Imagine you're hiding accordingly but a guard randomly freaks out and bumps into you, most players would find this unfair.
  15. I looked but didn't see this video posted in these forums. It's pretty cool.
  16. It wasn't a "sacrifice", it was a deliberate decision. People wanted the game to be as close as possible to the original, including pixelated graphics. If you ask me, the former version based on the Unity engine looked and felt better. But, hey... I guess I'm not the right person to judge that, as I never played the original, and always found that the art style of System Shock 2 is much better anyway. This also illustrates the issue with community funded games: Too many cooks spoil the broth. In game design, you need freedom, not thousands of people who want you to do this and this and that. Just take a look at the Steam forums and see how all those wimps complain again about everything. Hopeless.
  17. So giving it none of those tags, but making the AI invisible, silent, non-solid, and on a team neutral to everyone would not work? Oh well, it was a horrible inelegant idea anyway.
  18. What I understood is that the idea of TDM was born from that it was unclear if T3 would get a level editor at the time. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20050218173856/http://evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=268
  19. This one is really essential: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 Should work fine with the GOG version.
  20. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152224 There is a new mapping contest over on TTLG for the Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary and the organizers were kind enough to include The Dark Mod along with all of the Thief games as an options for making a mission to submit as an entry. The deadline is a year from yesterday and the rules are pretty open. I recommend going to the original thread for the details but I will summarize here: Rules: - The mission(s) can be for Thief 1, Thief 2, Deadly Shadows or The Dark Mod. - Collaborations are allowed. - Contestants can use any custom resource they want, though TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack. - Contestants can submit more than one mission. - Contestants can enter anonymously. - The mission(s) can be of any size. Using prefabs is allowed but the idea is this is a new mission and starting from an abandoned map or importing large areas from other maps is not allowed. Naturally this is on the honor system as we have no way of validating. Mission themes and contents: There is no requirement from a theme or story viewpoint, however contestants might consider that many players may expect or prefer missions to be celebratory of Thief: Deadly Shadows in this respect: castles, manors, museums, ruins inhabited by Pagans and the like, with a balance of magic versus technology. This is entirely up to the authors, though, to follow or not - it is just mentioned here as an FYI and, while individual voters may of course choose to vote higher or lower based on this on their own, it will not be a criteria used explicitly in voting or scoring. Deadline: May 25th, 2024 at 23:59 Pacific Time. See the TTLG thread for details on submissions and the voting process. Provided I can make the deadline I hope to participate. It would be nice to see the entire community do something together, and expressing our complicated relationship with this divisive game seems as good a pretext as any.
  21. Yes, we ported some BFG code. Both TDM and RB-DOOM3-BFG have radically changed the shader setup and render backends from vanilla (or vanilla BFG) so it may be difficult to reconcile the two. RB-DOOM3-BFG has a few things that we may be able to port without too much issue though.
  22. Yes, a well designed mission, with a number of challenges hitting the sweet spot - for me - of being not too easy and not too difficult. I had three problems - all of my own making - that involved a lot of going back over old ground. This was because I played this over a number of days, and possibly my memory isn't what it used to be. I knocked out Mr Burns fairly early (I knock out lots of people). When later on I then found I needed to do something with his body, I'd forgotten which of the many bodies was his. Ditto with Mr Sharpe. And I came across the hotel safe early, and the combination late. At which point I'd forgotten which building the safe was in(!)
  23. If an adusment knob in sound settings for player footstep loudness is out of question then how about silent boots in the purchuse section of the game before starting. It could be something similar to moss arrows. In terms of gameplay if someone decided to buy them would bring AI hearing a notch down, if not a notch up. Wrong choice would make a mission more difficult just like it happens with all the other tools.
  24. 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.
  25. Thanks! Hint for the safe code here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=485264 Actually, it's probably time I added these hints to the original post....
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