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Since there is no official feedback thread yet, I'm posting in this topic. I hope that's okay with OP. I've now played through most of the training mission. Didn't quite finish the sneaking part yet... Got busted after not quicksaving for a while, mostly because I was too busy being blown away by everything. My intention was to provide some constructive criticism righty away, but it seems this will have to wait, because the annoyances were apparently minor enough to be completely overwhelmed by just how slick this thing is. Off the top of my head - the lockpicking is fantastic, IMO. It really seems to capture the fiddly, attention-demanding nature of the task while not being too frustrating (lockpicking difficulty currently set to average). I liked how I found myself completely immersed in it, eyes half closed and all. Thumbs up. I initially feared combat might be awkward, but my doubts were put to rest after a couple of fights. It's hard, but when I got the hang of it, I started really enjoying it. Maybe too much... I actually find it fun enough that I don't even mind getting killed in the arena, which is most of the time. When I managed to string several attacks/blocks/counter-attacks together for the first time, I felt a genuine thrill of accomplishment. I think I'll keep the parrying system on "auto" for now, though

I think it's also worth mentioning that the vast majority of this mission was completed in a single week. It's a great example of what you can do in a relatively small amount of time with TDM.

You're welcome, and thank you! I would definitely encourage anyone thinking of doing some mission creation to give it a go. DarkRadiant is a lot easier and faster to use than certain other level editors I could mention.

Thanks DingDong. Glad you enjoyed it. There's a lot more fun on the way! Combat wasn't finished in St. Lucia but you'll find in the new training mission that it is much advanced. Also much improved are the collision and footstep sounds. The player scraping objects against hard surfaces still needs fixing but generally they are very good now. btw you should put a spoiler around the cause of the alert you mentioned.

I suppose it could be considered rare depending on your playing style, but I was giving the scenario of jumping off the table as an example. There are other times when the same type of - dare I say it - acrobatic ability, comes in handy (not only when evading guards). I wasn't aware that a quick tap wouldn't initiate the auto mantle though, I'll have another go through the SL mission and give this a try. I suspect that I simply want it to 'feel' the same as Thief, where I would hold the space key when making any type of jump. Still, I don't have a problem with changing old habits, though as Komag says this may need to be tweaked a little.

Nice job, Diego. I'm sure there are some mappers who might enjoy a statue of hercules in their mission....

The first load always takes a long time (there's a ton of data to load), results varying of course with the horsepower of your system. I've ranged during development from a P4 1.4GHz to a core 2 duo 2.66GHz, and the difference is quite remarkable. The newer system loads maps probably 10 times faster than the older system, and that boost is of course also felt in map compiling time and running the editor too. Regardless, that's only for the first load of a mission. Once it's loaded, re-loads of the same map take literally two or three seconds at most. I don't believe we can have much control over how fast it loads, else id would have made Doom3 maps load faster out of the box.

Yeah I tried that as well, the exact figures as above but r_mode changes to 3 after I start the game. Oh I forgot to mention, I also tried it through console and then vid_restart but that doesn't work as well. Haven't played any TDM mission in a while, but you're saying I can set widescreen settings through the menu?

Just think of your FM as a space station. Perhaps a submarine is a better analogy because I think any leaks are described as 'coming in'. Different modules are made of walls and connected together by doorways sealed by airlocks. The whole space station needs to be sealed against the void and each module needs to be sealed against the other modules except via the airlock when it is open of course. These internal 'airlocks' are visportals. In Dromed these are made automatically and invisibly when you 'portalize'. You see them as black panels sometimes if you get an error in a doorway both in Thief 2 and in Doom3. That is because they go black when closed which you don't normally see because it's inside a closed door or round thenext bend. In Doom3 you make them manually but then you don't need to make 'room brushes' to propagate sound so they cancel out. It becomes second nature to fill a doorway or a bend in a corridor with a visportal. It means the software only has to process the part that the player can actually see and so improves performance. When you drag out a simple solid brush you can click a button to convert it to a room. But all it is doing is converting the one solid brush into 6 panel brushes - 4 walls, ceiling, and floor. Or you can just drag out the panels manually. It seemed odd to me before I started doing it but everyone finds it natural probably within minutes of actually doing it. Take a look at http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?...Getting_Started which is a mission I thought I'd 'nearly finished'.

Melan, before the startpack I still recommend you spend a day or so with the A-Z to build the tiny demo to grasp the basics. You don't need to follow or apply every section. You can skip over things you feel comfortable with. When I said building is only half of it this is the same in Dromed. When you are building raw terrain, progress seems fast. Depending on your methods within weeks you can have lots of rooms. You can build a small mansion in say 3 weeks. Then spend 2 weeks adding AI, readables, setting up objectives, and most important, fixing problems (this varies depending on how techy or how simple you made the FM.) Then a week testing yourself and polishing it off. Then beta testers test it for a week or two. Then you spend a week fixing the stuff the beta testers reported. Some faults. Some recommendations, eg, that climb is too hard. Oh I managed to get over a wall but there is no way back. It's too squeaky clean - needs more dirt and grime decals everywhere. And so on. Finally one more week and you release 9 weeks after you started. Probably you thought you were nearly finished just after the 3 weeks mark when you were adding the details? The above is not to put you off. 9 weeks to build a nice little mansion FM is fine. Just don't consider it finished too early. I 'finished' Nightwatch for Thief 2 about August 2006. I mean, *really* finished it. Terrain, AI, readables, objectives, the lot. Then I started my own thorough game testing. Now of course I had tested everything over and over while developing but now I was polishing it over proper play testing. Every day I scribbled down note of things to fix. pages of them. TWO MONTHS later I submitted it to beta testers expecting they would sail through it and find very little wrong. *WRONG!* It was eventually released at the end of January 2007. Admittedly this was a complex, very techy, 4-mission pack but you get the idea.

Did you read through this page here? http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?...Mod_Differences As you've finished DromEd missions, I don't think this warning about "geometry = half the work" applies to you. It's basically a heads-up for rookie builders, who never built a thiefy mission before. People seem to have the tendency to get DarkRadiant and rush off planning their massive 7 map FM campaign with ground breaking features and open forests and lava! which will of course be finished in two months. They over-estimate pure geometry and under-estimate the amount of work which should go into readables, hints for players, playtesting, bugfixing, balancing. I guess experienced DromEd mappers don't need to be warned of that.

The biggest tip I can give any newcomer is to think small. The most common error beginners make is to have a grand over-ambitious plan that uses up months of effort, become a millstone round your neck and is never finished. This is true not only for the extent of terrain but also size of buildings and views which cause performance problems not even the expert can always solve. Always start with a modest, simple plan with minimum potential technical difficulties. Once you have properly finished your first little mission then you have a better idea what is in store if you try to do something bigger. Consider also that building the terrain is only half of making an FM which leads to the second most common error of beginners - "I've nearly finished!" No you haven't. You're probably about half way. You've only finished when you have done all the lighting, readables, AI and patrols, monsterclipping, visportalling, decal grime, etc. etc. and it's packaged up in a distributable pk4, with fully working objectives and fully tested and approved by beta testers.

I just had to log in and say, congratulations TDM team. This is looking to be a great mod, it's even convinced lazy-ass me to try and make a mission in DarkRadiant. Congrats.

I have created both Thief 2 and Dark Mod FMs and can confirm that to make a similar mission is probably easier and faster in Dark Radiant to produce a Dark Mod FM than the equivalent Dromed FM. This is very subjective of course but what is certain is that there not a lot in it. In other words I guarantee it won't be harder to make a Dark Mod FM. In addition to all that, the end result is always better. For every hour you spend building a Dark Mod FM it is certain to be better quality. So it's better *value* for the same effort. If you drag out a Dromed room and texture it then the same effort in Dark Radiant is bound to look better because the texture quality is far higher. If you insert a model then the quality of that model will be better, and so on. You can drag out a brush in Dromed to produce a simple room and texture it in half a minute in Dromed. You can do a similar thing in Dark Radiant by dragging out a brush. Of course, there is a learning curve but if you start with our guide you will quickly be producing FMs. You can browse through this to get a feel for what is involved. Good luck!.... http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?...e_Start_Here%21

GC: What is the full path to your map? Is it doom3\darkmod\maps ? That is, the common maps folder? If not, what is it? What are you using to run doom3. Is it tdmlauncher? If so, which mission is installed? If not tdmlauncher then what are the command line arguments of the property of the shortcut you are using?

Are you trying to make a doom 3 map or a TDM mission?

Well I just played again and I'm happy to say everything worked perfectly. No squiffy screen resolution, no freezes, no problems with the water. I even got the debriefing screen at the end of the mission. It was rad as hell.

Ok, now with some time to think about it, I think the priorities go like this: 1. Minor: Re-export existing animations so that they use the pauldron joints. Currently there are still several animations that clip the pauldrons on the citywatch. I meant to make a list but haven't gotten to it yet. 2. Some "sitting" animations. Currently, AI can sit, and look great doing it, but they don't actually look like they're *doing* anything while sitting. Animations that simulate the character doing something a sitting person might do, like "eat", "drink", "write in a book" or "turn page" would be useful. 3. Female animations. Right now, we cannot have any female characters in a mission because we are lacking animations for them. I'm not sure whether female characters will need a new skeleton or whether they could make do with the same skeleton but just different animations. However, I think female characters takes precedence over rare monsters like revenants.

Yeah I think Doom is fully patched up. I'm sing the Steam version with RoE so I assume it's all up to date. The video card is an ATI Mobility HD3450, which can run both Doom3 and TDM fine even on Ultra High settings, so I don't think it's overtaxing. My drivers are all up to date as far as I know, but I'm not even sure this card is upported anymore. I think the video settings issue is linked to my laptop's native resolution of 1280x800, which isn't supported in Doom 3's settings. I don't know if that's a problem for TDM. e: The card is supported, and I just got the latest drivers. I think I have a save near the end of the level so I'll give it another shot and see if the mission complete screen appears correctly this time... e: Still nothing.

Well, we HAVEN'T released the mod yet. We have only released some beta missions. I don't think you have any idea how much work goes into getting something to work on "ONE" operating system, let alone EVERY operating system. I mean, that takes in Windows, Mac, and Linux. We're volunteers, with families and jobs, we can't possibly do everything. If you can't get the mod to work, then tell us what problems you're having and we'll try to help you sort it out. Post some error messages, or whatever is happening. Don't just say, "I can't get it to work and you all don't work hard enough". If it's user error(that means you), we can likely point you in the right direction. If it's a technical error with the mod, we'll try to help there too, but an installer would make absolutely no difference if it's a technical error. The only thing an installer would be any good for is placing the beta mission folder in the right spot, and really somebody should be able follow the simple instructions on how to run the mod. If others with Vista 64 are playing it, then you should be alright as well. Long story short, tell what the problem is...don't tell us how to do our work when you don't understand the complexity behind it.

So true. Thief allows a very specific voyeur perspective that can play alongside and intertwine with the mission goals. Widow Moria is an example, or the plot in The 7th Crystal FM. I must get around to playing more FMs.

I was about to say Wolfenstein 3d had more fan maps -- but same as for doom applies here. Thinking about it it's never fair to compare these numbers since games in general are so different. Different options for gameplay and different support for modders. I mean it would be pointless to do great single player maps for Quake3 so you cannot compare this to Thief. And there would be thousands of user generated places for KotOR if Lucasarts wouldn't be so restrictive about all that Star Wars stuff. What seems to be unique about the Thief community is it's longevity. It's not just some hundred fan missions lying around, abandoned on some server. The ability to tell stories (or more imply them) within a fan mission sure has something to do with it. off topic: I dare to disagree. Once you get the hang with Q3 you'll notice the hard part is the right distribution of items. These balance or unbalance the gameplay -- building a real good map comes close to rocket science.

I know I'm late on the train, but I played through St. Lucia yesterday (only played Thief's Den long ago on a crappy computer) and I must say that I have been almost speechlessly impressed throughout. TDM nails the Thief feeling just right, and that's the point. Going through this thread, I can see that most of my issues seem to have been resolved since last year so I won't comment on them. However, there are two particular points that I haven't seen mentioned : The default doom 3 red mask for death (more like 'masque of the red death' right) or injury is sloppy, enormous, ugly and hurts me inside every time I get hurt :'(. Did you change it since ? I very rarely use combat at all when playing Thief, but still I tried here and was really disappointed. I voiced my opinion on the recent combat gameplay videos on TTLG with a bit of vitriol, and obviously Saint Lucia had the same problems : Animations lack inertia and there's hardly any sense of contact between a weapon and a body. I don't really know how to solve this latter point, maybe the player hitbox are a bit too big, and there should be more 'hurt' animations for the AI. A word to jdude finally : very good job on this small enjoyable mission, really beautiful and fun. Enjoyed it a lot.

Wow, not a lot of changes in the last two years. I wonder what their licensing is going to be like? The first thing I thought when I saw their little bat-demon was how long it would take before someone dropped it into a TDM fan mission....

Nutshell Review: This map is so awesome it almost made me cry when I played it. ***** Short review: I have, so far, played all 4 missions available for TDM (Thief's Den, St. Lucia, Closemouthed Shadows, and Ship4) several times. I can't get enough. The game looks awesome, the physics are impeccable... its utterly amazing. Seriously, this is just outstanding. I wait with utterly batied breath for any signs of a new map. ***** Detailed critique (for the patient): Things that are better (than the original games): - Graphics. TDM is head-and-shoulders above the original games, or any mod out there. T3 with the texture pack enhancements come very close, as the Doom3 engine accomplishes many of the same things; however, while the two might look similar, the performance of the D3 engine is light years better (once it loads). - Physics. T3 looks great, but feels horrible. It takes approximately forty seven minutes to lean left or right in T3. Jumping in all three games (but especially T3) gives the impression of floating through jell-o; much more realistic here. Mantling is FANTASTIC in TDM - the game seems smart enough to mantle into a small, crouch-sized opening without any idiotic shenanigans or control acrobatics necessary. Mantling from a rope-arrow was effortless and about how I'd expect things to work. Arrows that hit walls bounce everywhere and can be recovered. Objects within objects (Like, say, a key stashed in a boot) are just amazing. There's actually a skeleton in one of the crypts, visible through the cracked lid... it isn't just a texture, it actually appears to be an object. How completely awesome. - AI. Though certainly _not_ without its problems, the AI in the original games and most mods is kind of deaf, dumb, and blind. The AI in TDM is... frightening, frankly. As in, I had to steel myself in order to try to blackjack someone, because these guards are alert and can take you apart very quickly. (This also has something to do with blackjacking's current state of "really, really difficult", but more on that later). - Stealing. In specific, taking an item that is NOT treasure isn't the huge problem it is in T1/2/3... you can put it back down without causing a ruckus, or even making a sound. This fixes the problem loot glint was designed to fix without resorting to being the tacky spectacle that loot glint actually was. Also, the range with which one can steal things feels extraordinary, but not inhuman... well done there. - Blackjacking. In particular, the idea that knocking someone out has to do with a blunt object hitting a skull, and NOTHING to do with how "alert" or "alarmed" a person is. YES to the idea that you can still knock someone out even if they know you're there and are looking right at you - this is how it should have worked all along. As difficult and admittedly buggy as blackjacking still is in St. Lucia, I consider this part of it to be a fix for a bug that originated all the way back in T1. Also, yes to the idea of not being able to knock someone in a helmet out! That's another idea who's time has come. - Dragging bodies. GOD YES. I literally applauded this decision in the comfort of my home while playing. I don't think people realize how hard it actually IS to pick up an unconscious body and heft it around over one's shoulder... you'd have to be REALLY fit to do this as effortlessly as it seems to be done in the games. Dragging, and dragging by body part, no less, is a huge improvement over the originals, even and especially because of the problems it causes (one leg getting caught on a doorframe, etc). (EDIT: just read that you can actually shoulder them, in St. Lucia - haven't tried it out yet, but I hope it is SLOW). - Death animations. Seriously, this is gloriously done. Shoot a broad head into a guard's eye, and tell me that doesn't look completely, fantastically realistic. It is an improvement over the slow-fall deaths in T1&2, and the utterly ridiculous, spring-loaded, body-folds-in-half ragdoll effects of T3. While we're on the topic, the blackjack animation actually looks like a strike with conviction, instead of a gesture. Well-done, there. Things that are as good as the original games: - SWIMMABLE WATER. (Dang, T3... what were you thinking??) - Frobbable highlight (Death to blue. Again, T3, WTF.) - Lighting, provided a shadow can alert a guard (I didn't see any opportunity to test this in any of the missions) - Ability to see/navigate in the lowest of lighting conditions Things that are worse than the original games (aka things I see as "problems" - and I'm leaving out obvious bugs and known issues, like the menu-thing, the texture thing, and the blackjacking difficulty thing; they are bugs, they do exist, but I know they're being adjusted and worked on and people are probably sick to death of hearing about them. Instead, I'm focussing on things that I either haven't seen reported as bugs, or things that appear to be intentional that I don't like. As such, this is going to be a pretty short list, composed almost entirely of minor nit picks): - Candles. Good idea, problematic implementation: Can't pinch 'em out, but you can pick them up. However, if you pick one up and run with it or throw it into water, it stays lit. I think just moving a candle should cause it to go out, unless it is moved very slowly and deliberately. - Oil lantners. They look like you should be able to pinch them out (see above), but I couldn't douse them even with water arrows. Bah! - Sound. Footsteps on stone are far too loud for someone who should know how to walk softly, even in penny loafers (and why does the thief sound like he's wearing penny loafers? I've been saying this since Thief 1, but... shouldn't he be in moccasins or something??). I realize there is a gameplay aspect to this, certainly; footfalls have to make some noise on each surface type. I also realize the mod's mission to stay faithful to the originals. However, if we can improve the status quo (blackjacking regardless of alert status, dragging bodies), then the crux of the complaint is that a thief should have a sound advantage here, the same way he has a light advantage; I would expect that a thief walking on stone would be, say, 50% quieter than a guard walking on stone, all other things (like hard-soled shoes) being equal. And that difference of volume should, IMO, be applied to whether or not a guard gets alerted to a thief's presence. - Sound again - sound seems to propagate everywhere, though I wonder if this is an engine limitation. I didn't notice a volume change when a door is opened or closed (though I DID notice that guards will be less likely alerted to your presence through doors... maybe my imagination?). As such, this is a pathetically minor gripe, but there you go. Also, it'd be nice to lean into a door (like in T3) to "hear" through it, but that's way more RFE than "bug". - Torch light creates still shadows everywhere; I'd expect shadows cast from open flame to flicker (yeah, I'm TOTALLY nitpicking now, especially since this would likely destroy performance in some areas). I can see how candles and oil lamps - things with small, largely un-flickering flames - would cast still shadows, but I kind of expected all the shadows in the crypt to be moving. ***** The bottom line, for me, is that even in its pre-beta condition, The Dark Mod is the rightful heir to the Thief throne. It is very arguably a better looking, feeling, and playing game than T:DS turned out to be, and I'm one of those people who actually liked T:DS and didn't think it deserved as much negative criticism as it got. Bravo, well done, and thank you all for doing this. I can't wait for more.