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Yes, I'm familiar with this sort of junk-science "analysis" assembled by journalists or random tech companies counting stuff in a database and using it to form some kind of conclusion. Side note: one of the dumbest articles I ever read was some lazy tech journalist trying to decide which Steam games were popular based entirely on the average total play time (in hours and minutes). He concluded that everybody hated "HL2: The Lost Coast" because the average play time was about 15 minutes, without bothering to check that The Lost Coast is actually a short tech demo that can be completed in a few minutes, so obviously people aren't going to rack up hundreds of hours playing it. For example, consider these numbers: So they count "Debian", which is an entire distro with thousands of packages, separately from "the Linux kernel" which is one component of a Linux system and already included in every other Linux distro. Does that mean the 2357 kernel vulnerabilities need to be subtracted from the 3067 Debian vulnerabilities, or have they already done that? Do the Debian vulnerabilities include only the kernel, core packages, or every package in the distribution (including Firefox, Thunderbird etc)? The article doesn't say, and the source data is not available since this is just a second-hand report of an "analysis" done by a random VPN company, not a proper scientific study. In any case, comparing an entire Linux distro with just "Windows" isn't a valid comparison, because a Linux distro includes thousands of third-party packages. In order to make that a fair comparison you'd also need to include Microsoft Office and everything in the Microsoft store under the "Windows" heading. I realise that everybody hated Windows 8, but I'm fairly sure that it didn't somehow magically vanish from history. So they're potentially including a full 16 years of extra vulnerabilities to Debian, by ignoring all versions of Windows released before 2009? Yeah, I'm sure that makes absolutely no difference to the analysis. No shit, Sherlock. They got something right at least. Nobody should be complacent about security, since all modern operating systems and software are affected by vulnerabilities, and need to be kept up-to-date with security patches.

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.

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....

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?

You can ask it if it is ethical to take other peoples content (art, music or even lines of code) from the internet without asking them and use it to create chatgpt. Because this is what it does.

Yes, I used control nets with a prompt describing the subject and style. There's also a seed number which by default is randomized, so each time you get slightly different results. When you get something that looks ok you can do some changes in editing program and then run it through img2img, again with a prompt. You can do inpainting where you mask the parts you want to alter. You can set weights that tell the program how strictly it should stick to the prompt or to the images that are used as the input. There are negative prompts too. Here are Cyberpunk concept art pieces that I converted using Stable Diffusion. It took quite a lot of work and manual editing. Original artwork by Marta Detlaff and Lea Leonowicz.

It's ethically dubious that AI was trained on works of artists without their consent. If you ask the program to generate art in a style of a particular person, that means that artist's work has been in a training database. And now it may put that person out of work. On the other hand how can you reserve rights to some statistical properties of somebody's work, like colors or how long on average the brushstrokes are. On the other hand there had been cases in music business like the infamous Robin Thicke vs Marvin Gaye where people were sued for using similar style, even if melody and lyrics are different. Here is a possible intro to a “Thief: the dark project” mission in a style of main protagonist Garrett: Bing got a little confused at the end.

Thinking about it more, I would definitely do it CG. I would have it be a similar art style as a game, but with massively higher poly-count, and path traced rendering. Because, these things just weren't possible to do back in the day. I would also come up with a relatively complex story, something like Super Mario RPG.

Thanks for the replies, gonna try those spoiler Tags again now for my short review (oh well it inserted one above my text now and I can't seem to delete it on mobile - this text editor is strange)

Just finished this mission and wow I gotta say in great honor to Grayman and of course the rest of the team picking it up, this was something I've never seen before in any other TDM mission, especially visually wise. I am so happy that grayson gave green light for other experienced mappers to finish his last mission. And what came out of this is really something special. I'll put my review in spoiler tags since I'm now referring to critical mission details. Edit - How do I put spoiler text here on mobile?? [spoiler] test [/spoiler][SPOILER] test [/SPOILER] [spoiler[spoiler [sfah

You can try my alternative footstep sounds package which addressed the things you described together with a lot of other footstep sounds both for player and AI if you want to. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17631-new-footstep-sounds/

Use something else? Seriously, Microsoft basically declared war on their customers a wile ago. Probably when they did this. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/241587-microsoft-finally-admits-malware-style-get-windows-10-upgrade-campaign-went-far Anywho, the point is that anything you do to make the modern Windows computer work for and serve you, will be undone by their updates. Designing interfaces to abuse and manipulate users and "wear them down" until they just accept what a company is pushing has become a literal art form; this practice is widely referred to as a "dark pattern". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern One example of a dark pattern, is giving you a "yes" and a "not now" selection of buttons, as opposed to a "yes" and a "no" button, perhaps with a "and don't ask me again" checkbox like we had in software in the 1990s. Hint for any software developers out there, how do you know when your interface is abusive? If you wouldn't put those moves on the opposite sex, then you shouldn't pull them on your customers. "Hey sweetie, would you prefer to go out with me today, or next week?"

Sometimes I wonder if I need to buy a bigger monitor and get some glasses to find all these secrets/loot people keep finding and I don't. Or maybe I'm just getting old. Anything other than suggesting I suck. Also props to the AI image generation. Those portraits I was thinking looked really good... almost too good, as if they were taken from somewhere. I read @Wellingtoncrab's post on the subject so I know it's all training data from other artists but it was still effective. I've been a bit mixed on the use of AI assets but honestly in this case, they worked well and blended in with the art style. I think used appropriately they work especially well on artwork such as custom portraits which would be difficult to do well unless you're a skill artist.

Mods can this moved again? @Acolytesix- can you make sure you post in the beta thread instead of this one please (this one is public, the beta thread is only for logged-in forum members): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

Maybe there is a sliver of hope that will change in the next 10-15 years. Tech disruptions suck for established interests, but they do have a way of making previously unprofitable products suddenly viable. The problems for an authentic Thief modernization are 3: Such a project needs high fidelity art and sound assets to secure an enthusiastic audience, but such assets are currently too expensive to produce at the optimal budget point for this property. (In fact it's too expensive for most properties, hence why AAA games are so damnably risk averse.) Generative AI stands poised to change this problem drastically, either for the better or the worse. If AI makes it trivial to churn out high quality custom assets for pennies, that would be revolutionary for the viability of niche hi-fi games. But if the AAAs use it to increase expectations again in their pointless graphics arms race that could conceivably leave us still treading water or worse off. The modern standards for rich game worlds requires an army of exploitable labor to build and populate. That again constrains the range of budgets and even the countries such a project can get built in. Procedural environment generation has the potential to solve this problem, but right now the tech is still premature. If generative AI leads to an explosion in coding productivity and creativity that would change, but that's a big if. The tech is almost certainly capable, but the will to train it could fail to materialize. Modern commercial game engines are not built to support deep stealth because of a chicken and egg problem. Anyone who wants to make a modern deep stealth game needs to sink a bunch of time into building or customizing an engine to do good stealth (with little surety of success). That again boosts the budget into a commercially non-viable range. But then because deep stealth games are not viewed as commercially viable, engines don't support it out of the box, shunting the responsibility to individual devs who will always struggle with the job far more than if the engine makers would do it. If we anticipate an explosion in general coding productivity, plus increased interest in classic immersive stealth mechanics arising from the popularity of ray tracing, maybe engine makers will start giving a damn. But I admit that one is a stretch. And, even in the best case where all these factors come together ideally, I suspect it's true that Thief is viewed as commercially toxic. The IP owners are unlikely to let it out of their dungeon unless some sort of ultra faithful indie spiritual successor makes a huge splash first.

sure - I would only ask that you follow the thread to make sure you don't report stuff that has already been mentioned: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

It is correct that the portraits are AI generated, but I would stop short of saying I “made” them. While there is a method to guiding and getting results which are consistent using these ai art tools, it isn’t really an art or craft. That belongs to the artists the “training” algorithm has stolen from. Pictures of AI posed in game were used as a starting image for all of the portraits. From there it was a combination of text prompts and other images being blended together by the ai into each iteration. I am not exactly sure how many times it needed to run through, but it was a lot. I did not use images from other games to influence the result, just old oil painted portraits (such as those by Rembrandt Peele) and feeding the images back into themselves. Sometimes I would feed a siblings portrait into another result in effort to create some kind of sense familial resemblance and bring in more consistency between the portraits without completely losing their relationship with their in-game counterparts (where they had one). Hopefully this makes it feel like the individual portraits of the Leicester family members were all by the same artist. All post processing as well as the frame and canvas materials and height information were made in substance designer. It is very difficult to use technology like this and not feel conflicted about it. Were we not a very small team working on a non commercial project I would not have done it. We did obviously all really like the portraits, but probably did not expect them to be the seemingly standout thing in a mission rather crammed with new assets.

heh i was thinking the same though it might just have been a glitch when writing the names are pretty similar. But for correctness it is called the dark engine and the newer version that allows us to run these beauties on win10/11 is called newdark. newdark is kinda interresting as it just suddenly popped up on a french forum some time ago by an anonymous developer with the alias le corbeau who allegedly got his hands on the original source code and started updating it for modern OS. this was the original thread i believe -> https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085 bikerdude was on that forum to when the patch hit i noticed hehe.

Okay, I had no idea, I have googled it up now and you are right, to my own surprise. Done, I´ve put some paragraphs which were previously not in spoiler tags into spoilers.

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

You can also type in the console: listCvars And every single CVAR will be listed. Then you can type condump cvarlist.txt and Darkmod will create a text file of your console history called cvarlist.txt. Useful if you want to see what commands you can use. Wow, we're up to 1042 CVARs

I played for 20 minutes today. It just looks fantastic. Whenever I look at the stuff from Amadeus, Bikerdude and my intimate enemy wellingtoncrab, I would love to delete all my stuff. You guys really have it going on. If I were to really use the term art (and I don't like the term because in my opinion it's too vague), it would apply to your work. Welli, Amadeus, Biker: I can't wait to see your next own missions; after that I'll probably stop mapping and you'll be to blame. Was it really worth it to scare away my genius? Grayman surely would not have wanted that! Yours Genius JackFarmer

We will look at some of this stuff, but SPOILER tags, please!!!

This may make sense in that the performance impact of the volumetric effect can scale with how much of the effect is filling the screen. We shipped with a “performance mode” but had to setup the entities by hand to do it (so it’s not perfect). If you change the LOD detail settings to “Low” or “Lowest” this will disable certain lights, particles and such that can be very heavy to render. You can try these settings and see if you notice an improvement. If not sending us some pictures of heavy areas (with spoiler tags please) will be helpful with tuning these “performance modes” in subsequent patches. Thanks for playing!

Interesting, although I'm not sure what to make of that. One of my favorite games (The Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena) was published by Atari, and, they don't even seem to care to keep the activation servers running much. Or remove/change the copy protection, which doesn't work at all on Windows 11. I really hope that Nightdive delivers at the end of May... I'm not one of the shit storm crowd (it's absolutely horrible on the Steam forums...), but, 7 years of development is a long time, and delaying the release obviously has become a bit of a habit, to say the least.