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All set! Version 4 is in the mission database now. Thank you!

This happened to me at random while I was walking around. I never had such a bug in any other fan mission before. In fact of all fan missions only in 2 I had crashes but for specific reasons and those were: in Inn Business on my attempt to disable the generator and in The Painter's Wife when I tried to kill the fire elemental, both FMs had error messages in the log while this one just hard crashes without any message.

Same here, spectacular visuals but my lowly 3060 is really struggling in outdoor areas. Disabling soft shadows, aa and/or volumetrics doesn't seem to help --prob. too much geometry? [Edit] The only other relatively recent mission with such a slowdown was A Bridge Too Far, before the optimizations that made it playable. I also had a crash in one of the rooftop areas, will see if it happens again.

Just started and the mission looks great, but are there recommended settings for this? Just went through part if the watch station, strolling around on the tower and it's become choppy af, I'm talking literal flipbook quality. My laptop isn't a gaming beast by any means (4970HS, 32GB, 4070 mobile), but that just doesn't feel right.

@MirceaKitsune I just went to play this, and noticed when you launch the mission the TDM splash logo screen plays in an endless loop unless you provide some input (keypress, mouse click, etc). I had this problem on In Plain Sight as well, and this is what I did to fix it: https://github.com/FrostSalamander/tdm-fm-inplainsight/pull/448/files I'm not sure it's the same issue for you (didn't check), but may want to look.

I've just released a minor update. I won't link to the release notes as they contain a minor spoiler, but people really want to know they know where to look. The main issue is making the navigation in the end area a bit friendlier, as lots of players were having difficulty with it. @nbohr1more it's now version 4, as the version you updated with 'required TDM version' was version 3. I've included that change in this release so you don't have to do it again. link: https://drive.proton.me/urls/X6SCH8QDCW#BM9hyzLnjASZ

Awesome, marvelous! Many thanks for this great mission! (...with a touch of Kafka ) I just played the easy mode but got in the end only one third of the whole loot - found no secrets. Surley there is plenty more to discover the next time. Me too, like I.C.H.I., had to two sudden crashes, and yes me too I found the sound of wind a bit to loud in the long run. What I noticed also were the strange positions of several rats...

@Jnon Thank you very much for this wonderful mission! I made it difficult for myself by just going around quite randomly and only near the end discovering some things that made some situations make much more sense .. and more easy. It's is certainly one to play again one day and take a different approach.

(Refering to the above post about the church model) Just for info: A while ago I made an upscaled version of this texture for this mission, which looks at least better i.m.o. in the dark. https://postimg.cc/jw49bzdz (Like the original, it does not include normals) You can review the look inside the latest beta version (1.04) of that fm.

This mission uses a cubic ambient light, similar to "Gem of Souls" so it will look strange if you are using the "Fresnel Mod". As a workaround, you can either put a copy of your tdm_base01.pk4 into the fm folder or extract the glprogs folder and place it into the fm folder. If there is interest, I can make a fresnel mod version that is compatible with this mission.

Congrats on the release! The mission is now available in the mission database.

I'm very glad to hear you're enjoying it! Yes: It was cramped from the start as I thought this would allow me to add more detail and get better performance for less work, which it did but at the cost of problems with player and AI navigation. Hence why the skybox can be seen in a few places since making the fences even taller would have ruined the atmosphere, I left it like that since this skybox feels right even when you can see the bottom.

Wow! Incredible mission. Completed in 1:09:30 on the medium difficulty, 5355 loot. I loved the detail work on every single room, alley, nook, and corner. I loved the sheer number of npcs wandering around (although this mission really highlighted how repetitive and wonky some of the TDM stock voice acting is...) and the "crime" system. I loved the incredibly goofy premise, how you can actually find out more about it by digging around the inn. I can't believe its only 7mb. Maybe a little bit cramped, and absolutely pushing TDM to its limits, but 9.5/10 incredible work. I found a few seams in the geometry and places where its possible to get a little bit too much of a look at the skybox (great skybox, btw!). Attaching some pictures with viewpos coordinates for reference. They were quite minor, and rather hard to get to, but the mission sort of encourages scraping the corners and boundaries of the map so inevitably I picked the wrong rooftops to try to clamber onto in my quest for cheese circles.

I don't have a bugtracker account, so no I don't believe there is any tracking for this. I'd be willing to do the actual write-ups, but I'd need to be inducted as a bugtracker person or have someone paste them in for me. I think I'd make three separate tickets at this point? 1. flashbombed state increases the blackjacking radius (the original post) 2. flashbombed state plays its animations properly (wellingtoncrab's june 9th reply here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22738-proposal-flashbombed-ais-become-blackjackable/#findComment-502037 ) 3. flashbombs deal damage to team 9 enemies (undead, not mentioned here but another glaring issue that makes them less useful than their original TG/T2 incarnations)

I'm happy to announce the release of my third FM: Year of the Rat. This is my first city hub map, focused primarily on story characters and environment. It's my most complex project to date, taking its fair share of effort to make which was a good learning experience. As an experiment I opted to use no scripts and rely solely on the default entities, as well as no custom assets apart from the map and splash screen hence the small pk4. It features a few special elements, such as factions that are hostile only when the player commits crime or a decoder lockpick used to open electronic doors. The beta testing thread can be found here, thank you everyone who helped find the most obvious problems. You play as a famous thief nicknamed Black Jack: A man who's pulled many crazy jobs in his life, only to be hired for an absurd and insulting task by an anonymous employer. The objective is pretty straightforward: Be kind to the mice and feed them some cheese! Your silly quest takes you to the Lantern Light district during the Lunar New Year celebration, a place where gangs and corrupt nobles do their dirty deeds together. What ulterior motives and unexpected twists could your adventure entail? While the most obvious problems were patched during beta testing, some issues can't be easily resolved due to the complexity of the entity setup and objectives, meaning you may encounter a few inconsistencies. Most notably surrounding AI, which may float above chairs and not react to alerts or oppositely send the whole map into a panic: This is mostly due to how the engine handles AI and alarms. The map is small since I wanted to add more detail without having to work on large areas, as such some places can feel cramped while the skybox may be visible up close. I'll be busy so further updates are unlikely unless I decide to add new content later... you're welcome to report any issues you encounter, but keep in mind that if something wasn't fixed it's likely known but difficult to address or due to engine functionality. Spoilers for objectives and secrets as follows: Download 1.2: Google Drive, Mega. Screenshots with minor spoilers for the various areas:

You're welcome! I really like the Volta missions. You do great work (visually, gameplay, and story)! Did you ever make any Thief II fan missions, or non-Volta TDM missions? EDIT: Oh, I see your signature listing some other TDM missions. I'll have to check those out Poor fish. They just want to enjoy their swimming around Do you mean the ones...

Yep, exactly. I decided to just plow through today after posting that and finish the mission. But it really was painful for the last hour or so of gameplay with the stuttering and frequent re-loads. Really nice mission overall. I love the Volta series

I wonder why the discussion lasts so long Yes, indeed there are several graphical settings which require tons of performance but don't work well enough. I think we are aware of it, but it won't change overnight unfortunately. If you have performance problems, use stencil shadows, avoid making them too soft, avoid too much antialiasing... Is it all, or did I forget anything? In general, tooltips in the settings tend to note which settings are overly taxing for performance. Comparing antialiasing to modern games is totally unfair, because modern games stopped using multisampling almost completely. They just use TAA without increasing memory bandwidth that much, of course it is faster. I'm not even talking about all that upscale/framegen.

I'm having micro-stutter framerate issues on this mission. Once per second or so, stutter. They started in the areas leading up to the , and have persisted ever since. Once every second or so, the framerate stutters. I gave up on the mission for a long time as a result because it became frustrating to play. Only way to fix is to save frequently and re-load the last saved game... whereby I can only go another minute or two before it starts stuttering again. If you don't re-load, the stutters just progressively get more and more severe. I've tested everything I can think of. Lowered all graphics settings to very low or off, including anti-aliasing, textures, LODs, shadows, soft shadows, parallax mapping, V-Sync, FPS cap, ambient occlusion, bloom, max FPS, field of view, and so on. Also tried going from Borderless to Fullscreen, and messing with some of the audio settings, as well. Other thoughts are appreciated. This map is the first and only time I've seen this issue. Feels like maybe a memory leak of some sort, but I don't know. I tried to leverage the following thread, but I don't see "autexec.cfg" existing in the darkmod directory anymore:

So I thought I had found a new and BETTER way of creating lit/selflit windows for TDM, but discovered fairly quickly that some window textures are already using this mething, but that unfortunaly the vast majority are not. The aformerntioned method is that we use the stock material def for the frame (so you retain the diffuse & bumpmap details), and then only 'blend add' the lit window panes which are a separate texture. An example stock texture that uses this method already - textures/darkmod/window/wooden_frame01/wooden_frame01_lit What we have above is an overlay of JUST the window panes, and its just this texture that is RGB boosted! I don't know why we HAVENT been doing this in the core mod all this time, and to quote @nbohr1more"Boosting the diffuse is a pretty poor way to achieve that effect." And unfortunately a LOT of the core window textures are using this poor method instead of the window pane overlay method. Ive already spent some time in establishments of lower affairs (the line from the gatehouse popped into my head, heh), making overlay versions for frost_salamander for his recently released FM. So when and create da repo for this that @Amadeus has already had a look at and used some in his upcoming wip - - https://drive.google.com/file/d/11168eiBj_m-Lu5d-8FLYUgM7J1MC_92h/view?usp=sharing

This was only ever supposed to be used as a facade/distance model. But upscaling the textures and making a prefab would be simple enough. But used in the right scene, it dosent look to bad.

Not only fan missions, all three official missions (Training , New Job and St. Lucia) have different ambient so yeah, ditch it.

Brightness, gamma and ambient. Brightness and gamma are user settings mappers can't (shouldn't) change. My opinion is that players shouldn't feel the need to change these unless real-life conditions change around them (day vs night, lights on/off, new monitor, etc). What mappers do in their missions is setting a single or multiple "ambient" lights to their maps. We can think of it as "the mood of the map or area". This ambient can change between zones: bright fullmoon outdoors, pitch black sewers, blue ghostly atmosphere, etc. My opinion is that players should be able to adjust the ambient of a mission based on their preferences or current mood (brighter or darker). You can try this yourself. Set your brightness and gamma just how you like it. Launch this mission, bring down the console and enter, in example: r_ambientGamma 1.2 The mission suddenly is a tad brighter and the light gem and gui/hud elements remain unaltered. Mind you, r_ambientGamma is persistent: you have to set it back to 1 when you are done with the mission, otherwise it stays at 1.2.

TBH, I'd rather have FM authors adjust brightness so that it's uniform among missions, otherwise you have to adjust the settings for every single mission, and, you have no uniformity in the game whatsoever. Unless people really like to have to adjust their settings for every single mission. I surely don't. The Training mission should be a reference, because, there is a dedicated section where people adjust gamma/brightness. Otherwise that section is really pointless, and should be removed, when it's all over the place in the other fan missions anyway.

I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.