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Ah, pity I wasn't reading the forums back in February. I'm fond of that game, along with Bugbear's other early title, Rally Trophy. I was never too good at FlatOut, but it was always a hoot to play.

A basic little detail we don't yet have is breakable decorations, I was wondering what is up with that and if maybe we can change it. Mainly thinking of new small decorations: I believe breakable crates or barrels were once experimented with, the entity may still be there but I've never seen them used, maybe someday those can be finished too. Just like metal goblets / plates / vases / bottles you can pick up and throw, it would be nice to have alternatives made of fragile transparent glass. The difference being that when they hit a surface past a certain velocity, they disappear and shatter into glass shards... I believe the fundamental system for this already exists with breakable glass panels? Gameplay wise they'd have a particular property: When they break they should make a louder noise, causing a slightly higher alert that makes AI look there for longer, not as much as the noise arrow but somewhere between it and throwing a conventional object. As a potential penalty, stepping on a small glass breakable should shatter it which is hearable to AI, FM's that use them may encourage being a bit extra careful where you're going.

This sounds like something suitable for a mod (or an individual FM where the author desires this kind of mechanic), but not as a core gameplay feature.

This kind of mechanic would break a ton of existing FMs. Some (I dare say even most) mappers often choose electric lamps so that they can't be extinguished or turned off, forcing the player to time their movements through the light. There are of course switchable electric lights, but that is up to the author on how they want to implement those. It would definitely be fun to see an FM implement this Splinter Cell-style mechanic, where the mapper has designed their map to function in such a way, but to add this as a core feature would break the gameplay of countless maps

I couldn't help thinking of another realism related suggestion, don't know if it was discussed before but it seemed like an interesting idea. If this were to be changed on existing lights by default, it would have minor gameplay implications, but the sort that make missions easier in a fair way. So... electric lights: Like the real ones of the era, they're implied to use incandescent light bulbs... the kind that in reality will explore and shatter upon the smallest impact, and which like real lamps are encased in glass or paper. In any realistic scenario, shooting a broadhead arrow at a lamp or even throwing a rock at it would cause it to go through the glass and break the light bulb inside. Is it wrong to imagine TDM emulating this behavior as a gameplay mechanic? Just as you can shoot water arrows at flame based lights to put them out, you'd shoot broadhead arrows at electric lights to disable them... you must however hit the glass precisely, there's no room for error and it must be a perfect shot. As a way to compensate for the benefit, AI can treat this as suspicious and become alert if seeing or hearing a lamp break, or finding a broken lamp at any time if that's deemed to provide better balance. A technical look at implementing this: Just as broadhead arrows can go and stick through small soft objects such as books, they should do the same if you hit the glass material on a lamp, while of course still bouncing off if you hit metal: Lamp glass would need a special material flag that sends a signal to the entity upon collisions but allows arrows to go through, unlike glass in other parts of the world which is meant to act as solid and changing that everywhere would break a lot of things. When pierced by an arrow, the lamp should immediately turn itself off while playing a broken glass sound and spawning a few glass particles. The glass material should be hidden if the model is a transparent surface, or replaced with a broken glass texture in case the glass is painted on a lamp model without an interior... obviously this would be done by defining a broken skin for the entity to switch to. This does imply a few complexities which should be manageable: Existing lamps supporting this behavior will need new skins and in a few cases new textures, the def must include a new skin variable similar to the lit / unlit skins in this case a broken skin. Any electric light may be connected to a light switch, we don't want toggling the switch to bring the light bulb back to life... as such a flag to permanently disable triggering the light from that point on would be required. For special purposes such as scripted events to reset the world, we should allow an event to unbreak lamps, setting their state back to being lit / unlit while re-enabling trigger toggling. What do you think about this idea and who else wants it? Would it be worth the trouble to try and implement? If so should it only be done for new lights or as a separate entity definition of existing ones, or would the change be welcome retroactively for existing missions without players and FM authors alike feeling it makes them too easy?

Since I'm bored and haven't posted in a while and yet still finished Thief 4 a few times, I feel compelled to post. In response to a number of observations @Rio_Walker made: Seeing your hands and all the animations newGarrett would do was fun... at first. But given all the looting and environmental interactions the game has it really did slow things down a lot, especially when the game would occasionally realign the player just perfectly before playing an animation to open a drawer. If they had an option to disable these animations or speed them up significantly I'd have been happy. I've played using the Custom difficulty with the option to disable focus and the experience is kinda mixed. While it does make things a bit more traditional without the superpower ability to find loot more easily, it does seem like the game is designed very much for focus and disabling it can hide things you never even knew were present. If it weren't for the focus for example, I would never have noticed the "special" candles hidden around the city that talk when you light them. This game reminds me of a movie that has been reshot several times with footage from separate reshoots blended together with bad editing. It's painfully clear the story has been chopped and changed over the many years of its development and there's assets in the game that clearly had greater importance in a previous iteration but for which their plot points were cut. The most obvious example is the automatons. There's a dude who provides missions on obtaining pieces for one he's building, but apart from that there's also signs in other areas they had more importance (e.g. you see rooms full of them when going up an elevator, the Baron has disassembled ones on tables in his cutscene, etc.) Some plot elements just feel not fleshed out because they had to cobble together something to create this Frankenstein's monster of a game from so many elements. The ending sucks and is incredibly abrupt. Do we even know what the deal is with that half-built ship? Probably another abandoned plot point. With all of its problems, I still kinda like it in so far as its general gameplay. But it doesn't have the longevity of something like TDM or the classic Thief games especially with all the user missions available for them. Oh well, maybe I'm just pining for what it could have been in the hands of a better developer.

Yes, I've been working with a mapper who ardently adheres to the principle that only moonfacing windows should cast moonrays indoors (so about 1/4 to 1/2 of all windows), even though this is a powerful tool for creating an atmosphere and for maintaining some gameplay challenge. I found that this approach often ended in scenes that had only dim and uniform ambient_world lighting, which meant players couldn't really appreciate many of the details. Something I've seen in things like Dishonored is the use of sourceless lights to add highlights to scenes that otherwise contain no lit lights. That could be an especially viable approach in a mission like this which has a haunted theme.

Overall, your pack seems almost perfect to me!) Maybe it would be possible to add a frob outline like in the unofficial patch. I only play with the Steam Deck, and using the console on it is very difficult. After all, each button on it needs to be configured separately. Maybe if someone suggests what I can directly configure in the config, it will completely solve my problem. I haven't played many missions yet, and the ones I remember are the two standard ones and "No Honor Among Thieves." There are a lot of items in these missions. Adding new skills has become frustrating for me because it takes a long time to find the right item in my inventory, and this happens every time. I also wanted to say that I haven't found a proper use for the OBSERVATION, COMBINATION, DISTRACTION, and ALTERATION skills. I play on the highest difficulty and don't feel like it's too hard for me, and all these skills, in my understanding, are designed to simplify the gameplay. In theory, MANIPULATION should also be on this list, but I found a use for it.) But no matter where or how I use OBSERVATION, I always see blackness. Maybe it depends on the map? The main problem is still the inventory. I would like it to have fewer unused items.) I even throw away picked up books and scrolls after reading them to keep them from cluttering up my inventory. I also installed the original Thief games, and it feels like they have a lot fewer items. That's how it is.

@snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.

I had this discussion a lot with my Bloodlines Unofficial Patch and honestly, nobody really knows what an unofficial patch can or should do, because a) it's unofficial and b) many developers add or change features with their patches (just look at CP2077 2.0 or TDM itself). I kept the name because it's similar to the other patches I do and does not stray as far away from the original game as e.g. Snatcher's Mod. Also to me, being able to extinguish candle flames but not oil flames, or enemies getting magically immune just by noticing the player are bugs. If not of the pure computer gameplay kind, then certainly of the consistent world building kind ;).

It occurred to me that, by now, this package goes well beyond mere bugfixes by including a range of gameplay changes (i.e. adding the ability to frob-extinguish oil candles, which isn't a bug that was patched). Maybe players would have a better idea of what this package does if it had a more fitting name, similar to how Snatcher calls his work a modpack? In other communities the term "unofficial patch" is typically associated with collections of community fixes to bugs that exist in the core game and were never addressed by the devs. Most players would therefore expect an "unofficial patch" to provide them the same experience as originally intended by the devs, but without technical problems.

Congrats on the release! Remember to check ThiefGuild as well as the DarkFate forums (via Google Translate) for additional feedback.

I thought it would be convenient to collect in one place a list of all mods\addons\improvements created by the community for TDM. After surfing the entire forum I collected the following list of mods, and I present to you their list below. I will be glad if you correct me and provide any other links to mods that I may have missed. Graphic mods Fresnel Mod (MoDB link) Flame Glare Mod (MoDB link) ModPacks Unofficial Patch (MoDB link) TDM Modpack (MoDB link) (with the possibility of separate installation) Gameplay mods Augmentation Mod Wearable disguises Player Lamp (beta) Adjust player speed with mouse wheel Stealth Statistics Tool & Loot Stealth Stat (MoDB link) Textures TDM Texture Mod Small UI tweaks Reflections to all materials containing specular maps Sounds New Footstep sounds Collection of adjusted sounds by Anton Thiefier Sounds Blackjack Draw/Sheath SFX (MoDB link)

I have updated the patch for 2.12, here is the changelog: v2.0 04.03.2023 ---- Added names being shown on frobing bodies or items, thanks Snatcher. Resorted mission list including "A" and "The" in alphabetical order. Updated to version 2.12 and removed several fixes that are included. Moved helper options from the gameplay page to the difficulty page.

Some changes were made to the training mission, but this process began while 2.12 was already in beta testing, and it became too extensive. To my knowledge this mainly consisted of adjustments to the messages in order to match the new 2.12 control scheme, addition of a vine arrow training area, some minor gameplay changes as well as major visual changes. A last minute major issue caused the mission to be reverted to its 2.11 state except for the adjustments to the popup messages. The training mission is slated to undergo proper beta testing of its own later on.

I took a quick look at the training mission and I didn't notice many changes in the first place. Some new windows on walls that didn't have them, but was something gameplay related changed? I found there are still a lot of unique items missing in the object handling section which I added in my patch for example. The main issue I have with the TDM training mission hasn't been tackled, namely that it isn't a mission at all, just a loose collection of tutorial areas. Which is fine when you want come back and re-train something, but bad if you want new players to have fun discovering TDM! Yes, the two campaign missions try to do the latter, but in other games the training/tutorial is done much better in a linear fashion (e.g. Half-Life and Opposing Force) or is even integrated in a story (Bloodlines and many others). It would probably be a lot of work, but maybe it would be possible to modify the training mission, so it represents a linear sequence in which you learn one basic principle after another while actually playing a mission that is has a story and is fun! If you really think people are going to replay it, maybe shortcuts could be added to the single areas. Right now all areas start from a central room, maybe they could be connected so that there is one way where you enter a door and go around the whole room to exit at the end? (If people agree, that the training mission should be changed, maybe we should open a new thread for this discussion.)

TDM Modpack v4.0 This new version of the Modpack is intended to be a long-term release. The Modpack is mature and stable enough to stay for some time how it is today, right where I want it to be: the foundation on which you build your favorite set of Mods for The Dark Mod. Good care was put to make sure the mods included in the Modpack stay true to TDM and neither the missions nor the gameplay are altered in any relevant way. Yes, we have more tools and skills at our disposal but it is up to you, the player, to make use of them or not. Play The Dark Mod your way. Compatible with 2.12 ONLY If you have previous versions of the Modpack I suggest you start fresh: disable and delete old mods. Use the mods included in version 4.0 from now on. TDM 2.12 introduces a great new feature and we can now have different mods from different sources running in parallel. Thanks @MirceaKitsune for pushing! Thanks @Dragofer for opening this door! What's more for 2.12 internal resources for mods have doubled and we can now load more mods than ever before and we are grateful for this! Thank you, @stgatilov! What's new in version 4.0? Starting with this release I am getting rid of the individual versioning and all mods are now at the same version (4.0 in this case). "TDM Modpack" is now the name of the project and the previous main "pack" has been split into two standalone mods: "Core Essentials" and the "Skill Upgrade". (The Skills are further split into their own packages and if you don't want a particular skill just look for the relevant pk4 and remove it). SHOULDERING BOOST - Decommissioned In TDM 2.12 we can now mantle while carrying bodies and the "Shouldering Boost" mod is no longer relevant and it has been decommissioned. In this new release of TDM we can also mantle while carrying objects therefore double thanks to @Daft Mugi for these quality of life improvements. Truly appreciated, thanks! SIMPLE SUBTITLES - New! Work on the subtitles is in progress and for the next version of TDM it is expected that players will be able to customize how subs are displayed on screen but until then, this new standalone mod offers an alternative for players looking for a rather simplistic presentation. Enable "Simple Subtitles", go to the audio settings and set the scope you prefer: Story [default]: Story only On: Story and general speech (Give it a try!) Off: Disable subtitles You can find more details of the mod in the opening post or in the readme included in the download. We must thank @Geep, @datiswous and @stgatilov (among other contributors) for the good work on the subtitles so far! Well done, guys! SMART OBJECTS - Present and Future Sometimes it is difficult to tell if an object is being held or not and the "Smart Objects" mod (now part of "Core Essentials") gets a little update and whenever you manipulate an object three dots [...] are displayed on screen: These three dots are a placeholder for real names, something I plan on addressing as a separate mod in the coming weeks... Here is the relevant topic: Nameless objects... a missed opportunity Stay tuned. INVENTORY MENU - Reworked The TDM user interface suffers from gigantism in some areas and the inventory menu has been re-worked and it is now delivered in a more compact format: The menu is 15% smaller and while the text has the same size as before item names are sometimes cut and I added a tip at the bottom to make sure the full name is always available. The updated menu is part of the "Core Essentials" mod. MINOR TWEAKS In each release of the Modpack I always tweak something and in for 4.0 I changed many things internally. You shouldn't notice any of the changes but it is worth giving the improved Whistle Skill a try... Here is the full changelog: • v4.0 New release - Major reorganization and global revision: Compatible with TDM 2.12. - All mods now share the same version (4.0 in this case). - Previous "Modpack" split into "Core Essentials" and the "Skill Upgrade". - Skill mods presented in their own, standalone pk4. - CORE ESSENTIALS: New, re-worked inventory menu. - CORE ESSENTIALS: New high mantle sound for our protagonist. - CORE ESSENTIALS - LOOT ANIMATIONS: Added scroll animation for paintings. - CORE ESSENTIALS - SMART OBJECTS: Display onscreen a subtle signal (...) when holding an item. - CORE ESSENTIALS - SHOULDERING BOOST: Mod decommissioned (alternative included in TDM 2.12) - SKILL UPGRADE - MANIPULATION: Improved script, smaller footprint. - SKILL UPGRADE - DISTRACTION: New approach (again). - HUNTER BOW: Increased radius of gas arrow effect. - BASIC SUBTITLES: Initial release. That's pretty much it for now. Thanks site admins, developers, mappers, modders and members of the community but more importantly, thank you taffer, for playing and supporting The Dark Mod. The download can be found in the opening post. Cheers!

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

"...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm Ansome, a long-time forums lurker, and I'm here to recruit beta testers for my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short (30-45 minute), story-driven FM with plenty of readables and a gloomy atmosphere. Do keep in mind that this is a more linear FM than you may be used to as it was deemed necessary for the purposes of the story's pacing. Regardless, the player does still have a degree of freedom in tackling challenges in the latter half of the FM. If this sounds interesting to you, please head over to the beta testing thread I will be posting shortly. Thank you!

At first I thought it was some wild precision bug but it looks like the skin might be nonsolid somehow and SteveL's change made the nonsolid attribute work? Either that or skin detection is somehow borked in this map. Feel free to edit the map, I'm no expert mapper but I might be able to perform some workaround by manipulating the entity. Edit: I fixed it with the following change: // entity 4 { "classname" "atdm:mover_door" "name" "atdm_mover_door_8" "lock_picktype" "-" "lock_pins" "0" "locked" "1" "solid" "1" "model" "atdm_mover_door_8" "origin" "710 -248 2050" "rotate" "0 90 0" "snd_close" "door_shut_06" "snd_open" "door_open_08" "used_by" "Balcony_door_keey" // "skin" "door_007_1" // primitive 0 Will upload the fix to the mission database. I don't see anything wrong with the door_007_1 skin but I would advise testing it in-game before using it going forward until this is fully sorted. Edit 2: The updated mission is now available in the mission database. Feel free to offer other fixes to this mission as long as they do not: Change visuals Change gameplay design ( Any purely bugged things that the mission author acknowledges "needs fixing" such as keys that are inaccessible or critical items that fall through surfaces when touched, etc can be fixed by any mapper and submitted for validation by the team. )

@grodenglaive I think random head turning might be plausible for specific characters, if they're supposed to be paranoid for some reason. But you should let the player know in advance that they're always looking over their shoulders. I don't know if Elsevier has any reasons to be paranoid, but it could be plausible in his case. It could even be one of the reasons why Astrid had a hard time seeing him insert the safe code. The doors thing, at least some interior doors were auto-closing too. I was specifically thinking of the dinning room doors when I wrote that. I think there were more auto-closing interior doors, though. Personally, my potato doesn't have any real issues with performance in this mission. Only on the outside the frame rates drop below 60 sometimes, but never enough to make any noticeable difference to the gameplay. That said, I wonder if you could use double visportals on the outside doors. That might help, as the inner portal should close more often, without needing to close the doors. I use double portals sometimes because of that. But it needs testing to know for sure whether it helps or not. (It also requires adjusting info_locationSeparators, as they can only touch one portal). Also, the big visportal in the water that separates the front yard from the spider area seems to be always open. I wonder if having two visportals in a V shape (from the top view) instead of that one, would help closing it. Or some similar configuration that doesn't interfere with the view from the watchtower.

New script for mappers: my flavour of a fog density fading script. To add this to your FM, add the line "thread FogIntensityLoop();" to your map's void main() function (see the example in fogfade.script) and set "fog_fade" "1" on each foglight to enable script control of it. Set "fog_intensity_multiplier" on each info_location entity to change how thick the fog is in that location (practically speaking it's a multiplier for visibility distance). Lastly, "fog_fade_speed" on each foglight determines how quickly it will change its density. The speed scales with the current value of shaderParm3, using shaderParm3 = 1000 as a baseline. So i.e. if shaderParm is currently at 1/10th of 1000, then fade speed will be 1/10th as fast. Differences to Obsttorte's script: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/&do=findComment&comment=310436 my script uses fog lights you created, rather than creating one for you. Obsttorte's script will delete the foglight if entering a fogfree zone and recreate it later more than one fog light can be controlled (however, no per-fog-light level of control) adding this to the map requires adding a line to your void main() script, rather than adding an info_locations_settings entity with a custom scriptobject spawnarg in my script, mappers set a multiplier of fog visibility distance (shaderParm3), while in Obsttorte's script a "fog_density" spawnarg is used as an alternative to shaderParm3 smaller and less compactly written script fogfade.scriptfogfade.map

Very interesting unusual gameplay mission! I found two non-interactable fork-mines. Do they have any meaning?

Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.