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As Tdm missions have become more complex and larger the load times have continued to increase. This would be alright if they were reasonable to begin with. Playing Crucible of Omens running off a Samsung 850 evo ssd I get about 1 minute of loading time. My best uneducated guess is too many assets are loaded at mission start rather than dynamically loading them in over time? My other thought is this engine may not be suitable for dynamically loading assets and by extension large in game areas? I suppose it was originally running Doom 3, a corridor style shooter from what I've seen. Just speculation but it definitely negatively impacts the experience for me. Most of my games load up missions within 10-20 seconds. Seems like the only way to enjoy Dark mod will be to fire up the ram disk.

I've been playing The Long Dark recently. It is beautiful and calming. And scary and hopeless. For an early access game it is really well done, not many bugs. Wake up, cook some water, eat breakfast, go to the blistering cold to scavenge food and supplies, hunt deers, check your snares for rabbits, sneak to avoid wolfes, try not to get caught in a blizzard, get lost and freeze to death. There is a grasshopper-style gameplay: slowly but surely you will run out of supplies, which forces you to explore in advance and move to another location when the resources run thin. It may be a good idea to leave some minor supplies to your old base, you never know if you return there when you are lost, freezing, dehydrated and starving. Permadeath (no savescumming) is inevitable, and the player's job is to stay alive as long as possible, which is usually accomplished by optimizing resource consumption and securing safe way of gathering more. It may get repetitive after a while, but new content is added occasionally. The game will later have a story mode, which will give more objectives than simple survival. One of my favourite gaming sessions took me on an exploration mission for a new area. Suddenly, dense fog came and I lost track of my surroundings. I got completely lost very quickly. I tried to start a campfire under a bridge to keep warm, but a snowstorm came, forcing me on the move. I panicked, simply chose a direction and pressed forward, hoping to find some kind of house to spend the storm in. I never found one. I tried to start fires to keep me warm, but failed the blizzard doused them and I simply lost my firewood and tinder. Soon I completely ran out of tinder and firewood. The night came and the storm ended, but then came the wolves and the cold. I was taking side tours around the wolves to stay safe, which slowed me down. I was freezing, starving, and dehydrated. I was sure I was gonna die. But somehow I ended up in a familiar-looking area, which I realized was my earlier base. I had even left minor stuff there. I was saved and the feeling was something games don't usually provoke in me. Funny thing was when I later mounted more well equipped explorations to the area I was lost in during the storm, I found multiple dwellings and lots of equipment. Even a gun! It was sheer bad luck at every turn that had made me pass through the area, never hitting any of them in the blizzard. I suppose that could easily happen in real life, too, if visibility is only ten meter or so. Then again, I was fortunate enough to wander back to my old base. Few wrong turns more and my 40+ days old character would have been done for. The game is now on discount on steam. Read some reviews and give it a go. This week they will be enrolling a new update with new content. If you like survival games, this is a must. Hint: Do NOT read any spoilers or look at maps of the game areas. One of the great fun is learning to ropes and exploring the world. Reading spoilers will ruin the surprise and the fun.

Hey, playing Sotha's first Ulysses missions atm. While i really love the mission so far, it showed me once again a problem i already discovered in other missions, grayman's "In the north" mission to mention especially. and that is the in parts excessively long paths A.I.'s walk in some missions. While i can understand that some may think it adds to realism and unpredictability, it makes it damn hard to hide bodies for example. For example, in Sotha's mission, i blackjacked the guy working in the steamworks, and hid his body in a nearby room i lockpicked, in a niche which was lit by a candle on the wall, which i extinguished. I spent about 5 minutes in that room, searching for loot, or items to pick up. In these 5 minutes, noone entered, or left the room. Then i went out of the room, and got to an outdoor area in front of the manor. I spent about another minute and a half hiding in the dark behind a crate, to see what's going on outside, and even blackjacke a guard patrolling outside in that time, then all of a sudden, the door i came out of opens, and some housemaid comes out. So i went inside again to see where the hell she came from now, and realized she had even lit the candle again, and probably saw the body of the blackjacked steamworker too. Guys, isn't that a bit too much? I mean, as i wrote, i can understand the added realism and all that, but for playability, it has to be a bit predictable. Stealth games don't work without a bit of predictability. In reality, you won't stand a chance in most cases due to the way real people behave, how unpredictable they are, and coincidence. In a game, i have at least to rely a bit on things i can foresee, and i can't foresee a housemaid entering the place i hid a body after like 10 minutes, lighting the torch i extinguished to darken the niche i hid the body in. That's a tad too much really. It makes it almost impossible to know where you can hide a body so that noone stumbles over it. It has always been predictable in the original Thief games, it's predictable in games like Splinter Cell or Chromicles of Riddick too. So please, consider there's also people who blackjack everyone in sight, and need to hide the bodies somewhere. There's not only people who ghost missions. As i said, that's not to say i don't enjoy the missions, and this one in particular, it's really great, and it's awesome how creative some people here are. Just felt like mentioning this, because TDM really gives me a damn hard sometimes. I mentioned it in another thread already: The original Thief games were considered as very hard games by most of the game press. TDM is a lot more harder even. At least my personal view is that it could be a little bit easier sometimes.

Hi all, me again Now that I've learned how to take screenies on DM (thanks to Aluminumhaste) I wanted to post one that I took but I got an error saying that the image ext that I used was not allowed in these forums, It was .jpg so I changed it to .png and I got the same error again. They're on Photobucket.

In another thread: The advice on long thin triangles is often mentioned, but I always have the same question in mind when I read it: how best to triangulate a long thin surface? Easy enough to understand that for two triangles that have the same area, the graphics card will do better on an equilateral one than a long one. But usually the choice you're faced with is between two long triangles and twenty or so equilateral ones, like in the common case when you have to triangulate a long thin rectangle like the edge of a wall. What's better then?

I'm wondering if anyone ever checks new posts in the Fan Missions Forums? I've posted 4 questions asking for help for 4 different missions that I can't finish because I"m stuck, and I don't get any help. I posted a question this morning so I don't expect an answer right away for that one. Its frustrating because I would like to finish them. I've read through the posts for each mission and I'm not getting anything from them. If there's someone who could help me I'd really appreciate it. Thanks I guess I'm spoiled from the TTLG forums.