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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.

i would say as long as i dont need special equipment to play it that is the minimum requirement for me not meaning wrappers for older directx or opengl bungles though the casual user might have some trouble getting things to run that i have had running for years. visually im more than satisfied with how system shock 2 looked the interface however can be a bit daunting for players of today. strangely atleast some older games can rival modern games in fidelity one example being timeshift which ran on the saber engine (yes the same engine powering the newer halo offerings). Try it in 4k and be amazed at the detail . the game itself is not widely known as it came out at the same time half-life 2 came out so it was overshadowed which is a shame as it is actually rather fun to play as a protagonist with a suit that is actually a working time machine. The story is newer fleshed out all that much but in essence you were a scientist working on the suit you wear when one of the other scientists jacks an older prototype to change history and tries to murder everyone in the lab your fiance included (well actually succeding atleast untill you get to take him down and travel back to just before the bomb went off), but theres a catch the suit does not allow paradoxes so it yanks you away from your own time after saving everybody. I guess the followup would have shed some light on how to get back to your own time again but the game flopped due to not having the big exposure the devs hoped for so it newer came to pass.

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

This one is really essential: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 Should work fine with the GOG version.

Perplexity.ai say Based on the search results, it seems that .kkrieger is a first-person shooter game created by a German demogroup called .theprodukkt. The game won first place in the 96k game competition at Breakpoint in April 2004. The game's size is only 97,280 bytes, which is much smaller compared to most popular first-person shooters that fill one or more CDs or DVDs, which may be over 7000 times .kkrieger's size [2]. The developer team achieved this small size by exploiting the Direct3D API and DLLs of the Windows operating system. As a result, .kkrieger can only run on Windows. It is essentially a demo showing how far the capabilities of Direct3D can be pushed with an absolute minimum amount of code [8]. Here are some technical details about how .kkrieger is created based on [13]: .kkrieger makes extensive use of procedural generation methods. Textures are stored via their creation history instead of a per-pixel basis, thus only requiring the history data and the generator code to be compiled into the executable, producing a relatively small file size. Meshes are created from basic solids such as boxes and cylinders, which are then deformed to achieve the desired shape - essentially a special way of box modeling. These two generation processes explain the extensive loading time of the game - all assets of the gameplay are reproduced during the loading phase. The game music and sounds are produced by a multifunctional synthesizer called V2, which is fed a continuous stream of MIDI data. The synthesizer then produces the music in real time. If you are interested in downloading and playing .kkrieger, you can find it on GitHub [0]. If you want to install it using Chocolatey, you can use the following command: $packageArgs = @{ packageName = "$env:chocolateyPackageName" url = 'https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2004/breakpoint04/96kgame/kkrieger-beta.zip' UnzipLocation = "$(Split-Path -Parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition)" checksum = '0de0b9abafd78cf7f57fb264c7136ace52b2653f5c675574d0f10eda0a654c9f' checksumType = 'sha256' } Install-ChocolateyZipPackage @packageArgs https://github.com/ZlayerHunter/kkrieger-script/blob/master/kkrieger.py

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.

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.