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It took awhile to get used to the size of this mission. The long loading times didn't help, but after passing a certain point, I get it now. However, I will say this - the AI is crazy on this map. I started, right? And the first thing I see - all guards going ape because some thug cut loose. I sat in the dark corner, for like ten minutes, waiting for them to calm down, because I figured I should look around for loot (I only found some of it much later when I was returning here after finishing the mission) The same thing happened later, when I needed to pass an abandoned mansion. I waited for the epic battle, instead it was a massacre, but like an idiot I saved AFTER I left the tunnel, not before. So I couldn't reload and see if next time the battle will go differently. (Am I crazy or do leather thugs spawn after a moment?) I had to use up all gas arrows to pass that part because they kept trimming the bushes. The evidence part got me confused because I dropped a piece of evidence, but it didn't count, so I dropped everything that said evidence. Only then it counted, but later, as I was still hunting for loot, I finally remembered that I had a vent key and came looking and found yet another piece of evidence?! Finding Smythe was funny, because he kept saying "Show yourself" and the moment I did... I gathered skulls before I was prompted to, but Edgar... I don't get it. edit: Those glasses, tho. Holy crap, I did not expect to see "actual glass" in this game. The hidden room took me ages to find, despite TWO blatant hints. But I was sleep-deprived at the time. There was one snag, and one confusion that I had. The snag was that, when I finally reached the alchemist, the note told me to use the vent, right? But... I couldn't open the second vent in his lab. I don't know which key I was missing for that. So I figured - I could just go back the same way... and game CTD. I walked there again - CTD. I noclipped through that locked vent, killed the spiders, and tried to open the doors to my left (got spooked by friendly guards) - CTD. Only when I walked right and up the stairs did I finally progressed. Not sure what that was about. The confusion, however, came from Builders. I knocked out most of them in the Builder's outpost, but when I dealt with the Mr. Nom-nom-zom, they vanished. I guess they needed that many people to dig him out of the spider outhouse? (Never found the second news flash either) I still somehow missed 3.5k, and noticed that lights kept poking through walls (there is a piece of light pointed at doors leading into the inner garden of Builder's outpost that nearly got me killed a few times) Overall, however, this was an impressive piece of work.

As soon as I started, I was hooked. Intro, our thief's reactions (can never have enough of those), cutscenes (YES!), dialogue with NPC's... It was great. And the further I went, the more it opened up. Overhearing conversations, a freaking tape recorder?! I found a very sus table in the pantry, and thought that maybe I need to light the candle, which did nothing. But you gotta admit, that looked like a puzzle of sorts. Turns out I was overthinking it... I too completely missed the hidden "chest" with the second book, only after coming here did I went back and found it. , but it's sad that Mage's readable turned out to be only partially true. =D Thank you for your work and release!

I think it's a good idea if done that way - a new light asset that mappers can use. Seems to lend itself especially well to streetlamps. Could be fun to use. I might try to make one using stims, just for schitzengiggles.

What Stgatilov mentioned about the psychological aspect of some lights being breakable and others not is going to be the toughest hurdle for you to overcome with this idea. Realism with the clear glass casing idea is nice, but you are still fighting against the rigid Thief programming that electric lights are always unbreakable. It needs to be very obvious, perhaps best identifiable at a glance, that it can be broken by the player. Consider how all explosive barrels in video games are red: it immediately differentiates them from regular set dressing barrels. I don’t believe that I would be able to consistently identify or interpret a clear glass bulb as different from any electric light. Add a red stripe to them, give them a specific recognizable light texture, make them look inherently damaged, etc. You may need to sacrifice a degree of realism in order to communicate what is thus far a contradictory mechanic to the player effectively.

That's why last night I went with the idea of making new lamps with this mechanic: They should have transparent clear glass casing and show the light bulb inside, making it obvious they're different and can be shot. Something like this should make them easy to distinguish: Indeed I run into the painting problem myself: I always check every painting to see if it highlights and can be looted. Then again it's the same with doors in some FM's, which don't use a special door handle to make it clear that's a decorative door and not one you can go through.

It might then be best to add it to new light models designed for the purpose. The visual cue should be making them more glassy and fragile looking: Existing lamps look pretty solid, we can argue those were made of reinforced glass built to withstand powerful impacts, something something Inventors Guild... in contrast we'd have a few lamps with very transparent glass that show the light bulb inside, their design shows their fragility and makes it clear those are meant to be shot.

Breakable lights might be an interesting concept so long as they are not implemented retroactively. Add a loud sound or other punishment for breaking them as you see fit, but it would still change the difficulty and design intended by level authors if you applied it to all previously made levels. I would also suggest that if you instead intend to make breakable variants of existing light models that you add a clear visual indicator that the light is breakable, otherwise it would require explicit messaging to the player that electric lights are breakable in that particular FM. I’m hesitant to see something of this sort added as it is in stark contrast to Thief precedent, but I would be more supportive of it if it was added carefully and responsibly.

It's okay! I'm down with any option hence why I asked. But I agree: Most players would likely not approve of such a change being done retroactively and affecting all old FM's, so it would likely be best as a derivative entity for mappers to use in the future based on new or existing lamps that can provide one. In any case it would likely require engine changes, not something you can currently do with a script: Lights already use their own hardcoded script classname which can't be overridden. Even if it weren't for that I don't think there's a way to intercept broadhead arrow collisions and check what kind of surface they hit, even with the Stim / Response system. There should probably be two new spawnargs: A breakable boolean enabling the feature on an entity, and a skin_broken to specify the skin used when a light was smashed.

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

Sounds like a good idea to me. I'm all for breaking glass, also windows (the "penalty" is that it should be very loud to A.I. So, a thing you surely will only do very rarely.). I think this will take a lot of consideration on the mapper side, though. Amount of arrows in the starting gear and in the mission itself, consideration where to put destructable lamps, and where to avoid them. Not to mention that I don't know how much effort has to be put in the technical side (making the lamp destructable and killing the light it sheds). Thinking about it, I think it kinda defeats the "stealth" element, doesn't it? Why would you make loads of noise and possible alert half the A.I. in a mission, for pretty little benefit? A thief surely will do everything to avoid that kind of noise and attention.

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.

You cheeky nandos. XD Have you not considered using the screen? She walks behind it, there is a shadow of her lifting her arms, the light flickers - POOF - model swap, she steps out clothed. Although, there had to be something preventing the player from walking behind the screen. I liked how you handled her undressing to begin with. What startled me earlier tho, along with creepy music while the Builder's priest sings in the background, is the dress mannequin... with human hands.

The light coming from the windows was actually added in the very last update before release. Originally, only the windows facing the moon were lit up and projected moonbeams, but Dragofer remarked that following purely realistic lighting practices often results in an under-lit mission. Although I also find it a bit strange that such stark moonbeams are coming in from all the windows, I think the lighting of the pre-escape sequence is all the better for it. Thanks for playing my FM, Hightide, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

So, I just retextured the caulk brushes to shadowcaulk and this seems to be working fine. Suitable fix??? However, I did find another light leak right next to this one:

this was a nice little mission, though just long and twisty enough to create a sense of dread! next Dark Mod update needs I fully expected the bottles to become important later, and they did. The layout was a bit tubular, especially coming back - having some new pathways open up and others close at the big trigger would have been interesting. I didn't try to get onto that first balcony because I figured I would reach it later. Well, I did but I did find it a little strange that the moon was low on one side of the house, but there was such strong light coming in windows from both sides even on the lower floor. It added atmosphere, but I kept wondering where it was coming from (since the surround area has been built up, and probably overshadows the house).

Another leak in Written in Stone near start (230 -1820 65): This case is more interesting because it is not just light leaking vs not leaking through a wall. Here we see view-dependent scissoring rectangle which limits the light effect. The light source is in the farthest area behind a wall (on the middle of the two far visportals). There is no way to cast a ray from the light source through visportals that would reach the viewer area: if you hit one of the far portals, then you surely don't hit the near portals. So the frontend decides that the light is not active in the viewer's area. Then the light scissor is bounding rectangle around all the visportals. Normally, the wall in between should occlude the light, but apparently it was set to noshadows. This wall seals the areas, so this is the same kind of bad input as usual. But the resulting behavior is indeed interesting. So I wonder how should we fix it @Amadeus @Dragofer

@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.

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

Yes, I think I agree. Fifteen years ago TDM was brand new. Nobody had a firm idea of its future direction. People just made the levels they wanted and had a blast. I think we should do that again. Hence, I humbly submit Proposal 5 Proposal 5) No expectations, restrictions, set theme, or requirements. Anything goes! Make a mission, any mission you want! Be as creative as you like, or stick to tried-and-true formulas if you prefer. Make a huge sprawling masterpiece if you're up for it, or a little bite-sized gem if that's more your style. Just put something out there.

I think only in your last mission it could be useful though. In Plain Sight doesn't have a map I think. It's interesting, I might give it a try. It's not actually so hard it seems. You just have to create a layer for every location that you paint over the map, making it semi-transparant in a specific color (in fm A House Of Locked Secrets it's light-blue), or maybe that isn't need, because it could be specified in the gui file I think. Then you have to export all layers as seperate files. Krita has an export command for this and Paintdotnet a plugin. Then you have to specify all the files with the correct (info-)locations in a gui file. I wonder if this could be scripted.. Edit: So it's not very difficult, but just a lot of work.

Apologies, this is where I went wrong. It happened to be a volumetric light shadow I was looking at

I'm no graphics nerd, but I can barely tell the difference between the two. What I can tell from messing around a bit: soft shadows of low quality look like garbage with both maps and stencils (EDIT: wrong, I didn't realize I was looking at shadow maps for a volumetric light shadow. Stencil definitely looks better). increasing soft shadow quality decreases performance in both implementations. I think the CPU/GPU of the end user would influence which is gives better performance both maps and stencils can produce a pixelated shadow if you look close enough. (EDIT: wrong. Again, was looking at a volumetric light shadow). I tend to use maps, because for whatever reason I seem to get a few more FPS out of them. As a mapper, I am certainly NOT interested in endlessly tweaking a scene to make the shadows look perfect. I just don't care enough. If they look shockingly bad I will put some effort into it though (which will probably mean just disabling them for the offending entity). It's rare that I feel this is necessary though. So I guess I don't really get the argument that stencils are amazing and maps are crap. I just don't see it or am too dense to notice. (EDIT: indeed I was being dense. I was comparing shadow maps with shadow maps because I was looking at a volumetric light shadow). Also, in my last couple of missions I had graphical bugs that only showed up with stencil shadows enabled. It would be nice to not have to deal with that all the time.

Changelog of 2.13 development: dev17042-10732 * Restored ability to create cvars dynamically, fixing bow in missions (5600). * Fixed issue where .cfg files were saved every frame (5600). * Added sys.getcvarf script event for getting float value of cvar (6530). * Extracted most of constants from weapon scripts into cvars (6530). dev17035-10724 * Support passing information between game and briefing/debriefing GUI via persistent info. Also changed start map & location selection, added on_mission_complete script callback (6509 thread). * New bumpmapped environment mapping is now default (6354). * New behavior of zero sound spawnarg is not default (6346). * Added sound for "charge post" model (6527). * Major refactoring of cvars system to simplify future changes (5600). Known issues: * Bow does not shoot in some missions (only in this dev build): thread dev17026-10712 * Nested subviews (mirrors, remotes, sky, etc.) now work properly (6434). * Added GUI debriefing state on mission success (6509 thread). * Sound argument override with zero now works properly under cvar (6346 thread). * Environment mapping is same on bumpy and non-bumpy surfaces under cvar (6354 thread). * Default console font size reduced to 5, added lower bound depending on resolution. * Added high-quality versions of panel_carved_rectangles (6515). * Added proper normal map for stainglass_saint_03 (6521). * Fixed DestroyDelay warning when closing objectives. * Fixed the only remaining non-threadsafe cvar (5600). * Minor optimization of depth shader. * Added cm_allocator debug cvar (6505). * Fixed r_lockView when compass is enabled. dev17008-10685 * Enabled shadow features specific to maps implementation (poll). * Auto-detect number of parallel threads to use in jobs system (6503). * Improved parallel images loading, parallelized sounds loading, optimized EAS (6503). * Major improvements in mission loading progress bar (6503). * Core missions are now stored uncompressed in assets SVN (6498). * Deleted a lot of old rendering code under useNewRenderPasses + some cleanup (6271). dev16996-10665 * Environment mapping supports texcoord transforms on bumpmap (6500). * Fully disabled shadows on translucent objects (6490). * Fixed dmap making almost axis-aligned visportals buggy (6480). * com_maxFps no longer quantizes by milliseconds on Windows 8+. * Now Uncapped FPS and Vsync are ON by default. * Supported Vsync control on Linux. * Added set of prototype materials (thread). * Fixes to Stone font to remove stray pixels (post). * Loot candlestick no longer toggle the candle when taken. * Optimized volumetric lights and shadows in the new Training Mission (4352). * Fixed frob_light_holder_toggle_light on entities with both skin_lit and skin_unlit. * Now combination lock supports non-door entities by activating them. * Added low-poly version of hedge model (6481). * Added tiling version of distant_cityscape_01 texture (6487). * Added missing editor image for geometric02_red_end_HD (6492). * Added building_facades/city_district decal material. * Fixed rendering with "r_useScissor 0" (6349). * Added r_lockView debug rendering cvar (thread). * Fixed regression in polygon trace model (5887). * Added a set of lampion light entityDefs.

big problem with that is that we are nearing a point where the electrons cant travel safely anymore (something to do with things on the quantum level), i guess they need to speed up development of light based computers or get smart with autoreconfiguring gateways internally in processors.