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Cheers. Initially I was thinking of this for lights... later thought to include animated models too, mesh deformation isn't that expensive so I can see why there's little benefit. Especially as I realized per-pixel lighting would still be recalculated each frame, specularity also depends on camera angle not just model movement... technically we could frameskip that too but I'm getting way ahead of myself for what would likely be a tiny benefit Could this still work for lights though? Recalculating shadows when something moves in radius of a light is a big cost, even if it's gotten much better with the latest changes. A shadow recalculation LOD may give a nice boost. We could test the benefit with an even simpler change: A setting to cap all shadow updates to a fixed FPS. This would probably be a few lines of code so if you can give me a pointer I may be able to modify my local engine clone to try it. If it offers a benefit it can be made distance-based later. Another way would be to make a light's number of samples slowly decrease with distance, the furthest lights dropping to just one sample like sharp / stencil shadows: Shadow samples also have a big impact. What do you think of this solution as a form of light LOD, maybe mixed with just a shadow update LOD? These actually sound like they make sense; If you think it's worth it I can post those two on the tracker so they're not forgotten.

I was just reading a post over on TTLG about Thirith's experience playing Sable when he realized the game played significantly more smoothly, and the movement control was less wonky, at 30 fps than 60 fps, and then I see your post explaining just that. Edit: I should have double checked the date. I didn't realize when I clicked the thread that it didn't take me to the latest page but evidently to the last point I had read up to, which was more than 2 months ago. Sorry about that. Well it's still an interesting thing to point out anyway.

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!

I had a look at the C++ code, here's what I found (I'm no expert). There is code that attempts to deal with AI being blocked when on a path. Specifically, MovementSubsystem::CheckBlocked has this line: if (traveledPrev < 0.1) // movement is very close to zero traveledPrev is the distance travelled during the previous cycle. If this check is true, the system thinks that the AI might be blocked, and it starts processing movement a bit differently. With most AI, their walking speed is such that this check only happens when they bump into something. But the spider_child walks so slowly that sometimes this check happens even when isn't blocked. I think that's what is happening here - normal walking by the spider results in the movement subsystem thinking that the spider is blocked, so it has the spider back up and try a different path. So the spider looks like it is doing an animal patrol. The walking speed of an AI is determined by its walking animation. To test my theory, I made a custom spider_child that uses the ai_spider's animation, and sure enough, it followed the corner paths correctly (because it is walking faster). The downside is, the spider_child looked weird as heck, because the animation is made for a larger spider. So this really isn't a solution. Maybe the spider_child animation needs to be modified (sped up)? Or the code needs to handle slower creatures? I don't know. This explains why your timescale change allowed the spider to follow the paths - by speeding it up, it was moving fast enough to avoid that check in the C++ code. Edit: If you set "anim_rate_walk" to 1.6 or greater on the spider_child, it seems to work fine. Give it a try.

Example—be able to add oil to arrows then set flame to them using any of the game's fire sources. Food needs, being hungry will reduce movement speed, and make bow aiming more wonky, and have less time to nock the arrow before tiring. Player can buy food before a mission or scavenge it from the map. Could also kill any small animals like rats and eat them raw (risking disease) or make fire to cook them. Player will need to harvest firewood or make use of in game stoves. Injuries: if player if takes a heavy blow in combat, have injuries such as limping, injured weapon hand makes sword swing weaker, and bow wonky. Player can heal by health potions, or injury would naturally heal over a significantly longer time. Sword can also be knocked out of the players hand, if so they are without weapon, they can pick up an enemies sword or craft a melee weapon.

I'm using the version from kcghost. I just tested and I can't see any difference inside the inventory. On the stats itself it doesn't show the different loot types (still seen in the inventory), but instead gives more info on stealth score. Edit: I see Dragofer made an updated version of his script. I have to check that out. Edit2: That version works: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=21272&key=02755164a3bed10498683771fe9a0453

I looked but didn't see this video posted in these forums. It's pretty cool.

I've never actually seen the insides of an elevator but from what I know about electronics in similar settings from a few friends who did some work in the field, my guess is that it's an ARM system on a chip and it's quite possible that it runs Linux. And it's highly likely that it's separated from a chip that's taking care of the actual elevator movement, so you probably couldn't use the buttons for input. The reason for this being that ARM SoCs able to run linux are really not that expensive nowadays, whereas developing custom systems outputting graphics with a cheaper weaker chip has a large upfront cost. And if you're using a universal OS like Linux, you can keep the software side the same if the ARM chip you're using goes out of production and you need to switch to a new one. If these assumptions are true, running Doom on it would be easy provided there's some input method.

It wasn't a "sacrifice", it was a deliberate decision. People wanted the game to be as close as possible to the original, including pixelated graphics. If you ask me, the former version based on the Unity engine looked and felt better. But, hey... I guess I'm not the right person to judge that, as I never played the original, and always found that the art style of System Shock 2 is much better anyway. This also illustrates the issue with community funded games: Too many cooks spoil the broth. In game design, you need freedom, not thousands of people who want you to do this and this and that. Just take a look at the Steam forums and see how all those wimps complain again about everything. Hopeless.

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.

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.

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.

...and I finished the mission. I really like your idea no sword + no broadheads - it made the mission more enjoyable as I was scratching my head for a few moments how do I kill somebody (before trying the obvious:). This may be not much, but you nailed your goal perfectly! It made the mission longer and richer while not making accomplishing the objective tedious. Lots of vertical movement (building ledges), windows open (great indicator! - makes the game experience more... streamlined?) somewhere high up you cannot get to at the first glance. Good looking, rich architecture in several styles (I liked the hotel a lot). Architecture does not hamper player's movement (!) - although the map is quite big, boring running is minimal. Design: textures are a perfect fit for the architecture; the items on the scene make the locations rich and believable. The design was probably thoroughly tested as there was just a couple of occurrences where I jumped on a table etc., got stuck and had to NOCLIP my way out - great job! The only thing I did not like was spawning/endgame area (the cellars), where the lanterns make you walk blindly as their light cones obscure what is behind them (please see the attached screenshot). It has its charm, but I did not like it as it served no other purpose (e.g. walking blindly into a corpse;). I did not finish the Atkins objective. I did a lot of the subtasks on the list, but as I was not aware such a list exists, so I considered the subtasks just an eye/script candy. There is the bug with pool guard's key which was already discussed and is fixed. Overall: Such a nice mission! Rich for the eye, rich for the story. Thank you, it was a wonderful experience.

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?

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

@kin Here are more details about how I reduce footstep sound volumes. I extract the footstep sounds from tdm_sound_sfx02.pk4. sound └── sfx └── movement └── footsteps └── player ├── metal_jump_land01.ogg ├── metal_jump_land02.ogg ├── metal_jump_land03.ogg ├── metal_jump_land04.ogg ├── metal_run01.ogg ├── metal_run02.ogg ├── metal_run03.ogg ├── metal_run04.ogg ├── water_crouch_run01.ogg ├── water_crouch_run02.ogg ├── water_crouch_run03.ogg ├── water_crouch_run04.ogg ├── water_jump_land01.ogg ├── water_jump_land02.ogg ├── water_jump_land03.ogg ├── water_jump_land04.ogg ├── water_run01.ogg ├── water_run02.ogg ├── water_run03.ogg ├── water_run04.ogg └── water_run05.ogg I use a bash script (for Linux) that I wrote to reduce the volumes using FFmpeg. #!/usr/bin/env bash set -eu IN_DIR='sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player' mkdir -p output/"$IN_DIR" for i in "$IN_DIR"/metal_run*; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -filter:a 'volume=-4dB' output/"$i"; done for i in "$IN_DIR"/metal_jump*; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -filter:a 'volume=-10dB' output/"$i"; done for i in "$IN_DIR"/water_run*; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -filter:a 'volume=-10dB' output/"$i"; done for i in "$IN_DIR"/water_crouch_run*; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -filter:a 'volume=-10dB' output/"$i"; done for i in "$IN_DIR"/water_jump*; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -filter:a 'volume=-5dB' output/"$i"; done Then, I put the resulting output sound files in darkmod/sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/. (If I change anything in the future, updates will likely be at https://gist.github.com/daftmugi/68bcf3835fdb95e5a7b8148edcc14d38.)

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/

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/

What I would want from a new Thief game: Appropriate the Darks Souls (and Metroid Prime etc) free-roaming world design formula. I.e. make the entire game a single interconnected environment, with many diversely themed areas that densely link up to each other in interesting ways. This should not be a stretch for Thief because its already the gold standard for how we design individual mansion and city missions. (It doesn't need to be gigantic though. Think how awesome Iris was.) A new city with new cultural inspirations. This is one reason I think Dishonored feels like a worthy spiritual successor despite dropping the ball somewhat on gameplay. An Arabian knights tinged Bagdad/Cairo like setting would be interesting to skulk in, or a city with shades of 19th century Hong Kong/Shanghai. A new main character who is not a Garrett reboot. If anything our new MC should be a thematic foil to good old Garrett: someone in a similar situation but for different reasons, with a different outlook and character arc. Thief 2X did this well. For instance I would be fine with the MC being a young acolyte of a new Keeper order started by Garrett after Thief 3, but don't have him/her leave to become a thief out of hubristic pride. Have them turn thief out of desperation, post some disaster or failure. Make it something they are distressed over, then over time grow to appreciate the monomythic import of being "The Thief" in the Thief-verse. New factions for a new story and MC. While Hammers, Pagans, Keepers, town guards, and crime lords, were cool and thematic for Garrett's story. Our MC should have their own friends and foes. Maybe the city ruling families are a bunch of ancient mage clans. Some are austere isolationists with ties to organized crime, others internationally minded reformers who are embracing the City's steam punk tech. Maybe instead of pagans the new city has a cults of ancestor worshiping necromancers. Maybe the new Keepers are a dysfunctional confederation of ego driven lunatics and schemers, suffering from the neglect of an absentee leader who only seems to care about balance. It's still a detective story at heart. All the good Thief games are about slowly and sometimes incidentally figuring out who is the big bad and how your sneaky skills can stop them. That should not change. Maybe incorporate some light immersive survival elements, perhaps in the mold of Pathologic, but probably less oppressive. E.g. have the MC need to steal so s/he actually has money to buy food and pay rent on someplace to sleep during the day. Otherwise hit them with penalties. I would be fine with MC getting some supernatural movement tech like the Thief 4 Swoop or Dishonored Blink, but it should be late game only (unless the player sequence breaks, which would be a super cool option).

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/

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.