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On the wiki, I'm working on a set of pages with the title-preface and broad theme "The Parts and Whole". This looks at the hows and whys of map objects being formed into collections. The hub of this is The Parts and Whole: Overview Within the hub, so far, the section "Techniques that Affect DR Only" is built out with comparison tables and child pages. This covers these techniques: Hide/Show, Region, Layer, Filter, Group, Selection Set. I'd appreciate any eyeballs on the work so far. Please suggest or edit-in improvements. In particular, are there links to videos or other wiki or forum pages that you think most apt and should be added, e.g., to the "See Also" section? "The Parts and Whole" effort is mostly intended for newbies and so is not afraid to state the obvious at times. In some cases, it covers ground also handled by the necessarily-concise DarkRadiant User Guide, but with more depth and context. In other cases, the info was only found buried in forums. Because I'm trying to cover a fair amount of ground, the pages are text-only. Some of the child pages could benefit from screenshots some day.

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

I also feel you. I used to be a regular here in the forums, but since my son was born in 2022, it basically grunded to halt, although I still get the mails on threads that I wrote in. Ironically, your post in June about not having time got me back here and got me motivated to try and use some of my precious spare time to get some progress on the map I started years ago. I still have not been able to finish a map and want to change that, as long long as the community here is still active

Of course, it is one of the reasons for the decline of online forums, since the advent of mobile phones. Forums on a mobile are a pain in the ass, but on the other hand, for certain things there are no real alternatives to forums, social networks cannot be with their sequential threads, where it is almost impossible to retrieve answers to a question that is asked. has done days ago. For devs for internal communication, the only thing offered is a collaborative app, such as System D (not to be confused with systemd). FOSS, free and anonymous registration, access further members only by invitation, full encrypted and private. https://www.system-d.org

I don't recall a system for noise masking. It sounds like it'd be a good idea, but when you get into the details you realize it'd be complicated to implement. It's not only noise that that goes into it, I think. E.g., a high register can cut through even a loud but low register rumble. And it's not like the .wav file even has data on the register of what it's playing. So either you have to add meta-data (which is insane), or you have to have a system to literally check pitch on the .wav data and paramaterize it in time to know when it's going to cut through what other parameters from other sounds. For that matter, it doesn't even have the data on the loudness either, so you'd have to get that off the file too and time the peaks with the "simultaneous" moment at arbitrary places in every other sound file correctly. And then position is going to matter independently for each AI. So it's not like you can have one computation that works the same for all AI. You'd have to compute the masking level for each one, and then you get into the expense you're mentioning. I know there was a long discussion about it in the internal forums, and probably on the public subforums too, but it's been so long ago now I can't even remember the gist of them. Anyway the main issue is I don't know if you'll find a champion that wants to work on it. But if you're really curious to see how it might work, you could always try your hand at coding & implementing it. Nothing beats a good demo to test an idea in action. And there's no better way to learn how to code than a little project like that. I always encourage people to try to implement an idea they have, whether or not it may be a good idea, just because it shows the power of an open source game. We fans can try anything we want and see if it works!

The devs didn't title this thread, and @datiswous said they're attempting to mislead people by using Russell's name and a retro style to make it resemble Thief, which is cynical. I grew up on forums like I'm sure anyone who likes a game from '98 did. I actually left the Discord immediately after joining it because it was more off-topic doom-posting than anything relevant to the mod. I thought the forums might be better, but it's mostly just grown men yelling at clouds and telling strangers how mature they are, and a few brave souls actually developing anything. Depressing place, I'll just stick to enjoying new missions every 6 months without an account.

True, but, 1. this thread is called "Western stealth FPS with Stephen Russell", and, 2. nothing you said changes anything for me. The gameplay still doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. And, if you really think this forum is cynical, then you don't visit forums much. Actually, the majority of the users are are pretty mature, unlike in other forums.

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.

Hey, Every time I've try to use the Full Editor when PM'ing someone, and every single time I get an error. Whoever is in charge of the forum, is it possible that this could be fixed? Thanks Neon

I've often felt that door opening sounds were much too loud, so this sounds like a potential improvement. One problem is that certain cupboards with two doors actually play the sound twice at the same time (once for each door), making it double the expected volume. But even regular single doors often sound too loud to me.

If the "mission fails as soon as stealth score turns non-zero," that would not be good for ghost players. They might need to find out "how" they failed and experiment to avoid alerting guards. They might need to take those score points as a "bust". They might need to take those score points to complete an objective. Then, mission authors would need to encode exceptions into their missions, which would be a lot of work (if they decide to do it at all). However, part of what makes ghosting challenging and fun is when mission authors do not create their missions with ghosting in mind. Please see: Official Ghosting Rules: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148523 Writing code for these rules would be a huge undertaking. Ghost Rules Discussion: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148487 Creating an official mode could alienate these dedicated ghost players, because it would clash with what is considered ghosting in the community. Including the Stealth Stat Tool mod in the official release would be more useful. Or, making the audible alert states of guards quick and easy to recognize could help as well. For these reasons, I don't agree with an official "Ghost" mode. If the dev team were to do it, we should consult with @Klatremus so we get it 100% correct or not pursue it at all. (This ghosting bit should probably be in its own thread.)

TDM Modpack v3.6 released in the opening post Introducing... the (Standalone) Flash Grenade Mod v1.0 I see Flashbombs as reliable, chaotic but non-lethal, short-range tools. For this mod Flashbomb properties have been altered to function as such: Flashbombs are clumsy and loud but as effective as ever. Instead of throwing Flashbombs like a cannonball we now toss them. Instead of exploding on impact Flashbombs now have a fuse. Although we can still control the tossing distance with a long key press the range has been greatly reduced or limited. The goal is that players can learn by trial and error where Flashbombs should eventually explode, something extremely difficult to master with the original design. I will not dive into technical details but let me to say that each time I toy with different parameters such as propagation sounds, distances, object physics (gravity, mass, velocity, friction...) I get different but still reasonable results so I don't know anymore what parameters feel best and I settled for the moment on what I present here today. I remain open to suggestions on how to fine-tune Flashbombs further. Flasbombs are powerful and have no mercy with humans: Flashbombs can be useful to distract undead and clear a path: Flashmines may be subject to modding in the future (what do we need them for?) but right now they remained unaltered: The new "ticking" sound comes from the Hazard Pay mission so thanks @kingsal for this wonderful audio file! Speaking of Kingsal, Hazard Pay remains the only mission 100% incompatible with the TDM Modpack. I remain available to assist in solving this situation. I hope you have fun with this new mod. The download link can be found in the opening post. Here's the full changelog: ============================== v3.6 - New release ------------------------------ • STANDALONE FLASH GRENADE MOD v1.0: Initial release. • Modpack: Minor internal corrections, mainly to the Loot/Stealth combo. Cheers!