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Find attached to this post v0.5 of the Player Lamp, updated to 2.12 standards. The Lamp can run in parallel with other mods Updated tdm_player_thief.def from 2.12 Download the pk4 and place it in your TDM folder. Launch a mission and cycle through the weapons. Nothing else and nothing more. Enjoy! z_handheld_lamp_v0.5.pk4

I know you didn't asked for non TDM mappers opinion but man this decision makes me really sad, imo after so many years, with both shadow systems and still deciding to hard limit shadow maps, to only stencil can do, is like cutting the wings of a bird. Has a player, I can't wait for the day you guys finally decide to remove stencil shadows from this engine. EDIT: Ups I didn't saw the poll at first so my comment was a tad precipitated sorry about that.

It is possible that this is a setting that needs to be activated to work: https://mantisbt.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23221

As a mere player, I have modified Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell games. Of course it makes me happy to see folks documenting their methods, because I would not have known where to start without them. I don't have any coding knowledge, but simply follow instructions, and merely experiment a little. As for most of your questions - the more flexibility the better, for sure. Who wouldn't be happy? Always exciting to check in on what new possibilities modders have discovered, even if these features do not interest me, so yeah I have been regularly visiting certain mod pages (including yours). Idk what anyone gets out of flame wars. There was some drama around Far Cry 2 modders some years ago that was such a bummer to see, as the plagiarizing a-hole was the same guy who also actively introduced never-before-seen possibilities. TDM has left me content so far, so I haven't really cared about learning how to mod it, but now that 2.12 introduced a faster mantling which I do not like at all - I'd give it a go if it is not too demanding.

Mandrasola is a small sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter steals some herbal products from a smuggler. The mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank Bikerdude, BrokenArts and Ocn for playtesting and voice acting. Thanks goes naturally to everyone contributing and making TDM possible. This mission occurs chronologically before the Knighton's Manor, making it the first mission in the Thomas Porter series. Events in chronological order are: Mandrasola, The Knighton's Manor, The Beleaguered Fence, The Glenham Tower and The Transaction. The winter came early and suddenly this year. Weeks of strong blizzards and extremely harsh cold weather hit Bridgeport hard. With the seas completely frozen, a rare occurence indeed, most of the City harbor commerce has stopped completely. Vessels are stuck in the ice and no ship can leave or enter the City, resulting in the availability imported goods declining and their prices skyrocketing. One of these imported items is Mandrasola, a rare herbal product, which is imported overseas from the far southern continents. Mandrasola has its uses in alchemical cures and poisons, but mostly this substance is used for its narcotic qualities by commoners and even the nobility. The problem with Mandrasola is that excessive use is extremely addicting and the withdrawal effects are most grievious. Many are utterly incapable of stopping using Mandrasola and are transformed into quivering human ruins if they do no get their daily dose. And now this expensive and rare substance is running out from the whole City. Me and my fence, Lark Butternose, would love to grab this monopoly to ourselves: selling the last few doses in the City would probably be worth a fortune. According to Lark's sources, there remains only one smuggling lord who still has Mandrasola in stock. The problem is that this individual maintains an exclusive clandestine operation and only supplies a few nobles. Despite our best information gathering efforts we couldn't learn who the smuggler is and where he or she operates. Luckily we have an alternate plan. While searching for Mandrasola related information, we learned that a noblewoman called Lady Ludmilla is addicted to the substance and has paid high prices for small amounts of it. We also know that she has visited frequently someone in the Tanner's Ward waterfront, and since she goes to the area personally we believe she is visiting the smuggler. The plan is simple: I must monitor Ludmilla's most likely entryway to the Waterfront and then follow her to the smugglers hideout. I'd better be very careful around Ludmilla. She must not realise I'm following her or she probably won't lead me to her dealer. Hurting her is also out of the question. After she leads me to the smuggler's hideout, I can take my time to break in carefully and steal all the Mandrasola I can find. While I'm there it wouldn't be a bad idea to grab some loose valuables as well. I've now waited in the blistering cold for a few hours already. Looks like there are a few city watch patrols in the area to complicate matters... I think I heard a womans voice beyond the north gate. That must be lady Ludmilla, I haven't seen many ladies in these parts. I'd better get ready.. Links: Use the ingame downloader to get it. WARNING! Someone always fails to use spoiler tags. I do not recommend reading any further until you've played the mission.

I've been asked to post about the increased mantle speed in 2.12 as some folks have been curious about the change. After a lengthy internal discussion along with testing and input by several mission authors, it was agreed internally to increase the mantle speed. But during 2.12 beta testing, we would like feedback on any bugs or issues that you find. The reason for the change was to address feedback from players that mantling was "painfully slow", "slow and clunky", "mantling sucks - it's just slow", and so on. Several mission authors supported making mantling faster, and so the dev team decided to tweak the mantle speed. There were multiple implementations with the final implementation being a compromise. Also, the dev team studied some parkour techniques to ensure that the mantle phases and timings were good enough. The changes include: The original mantle phases were kept as that is what longtime TDM players are used to, and only the duration of some phases were reduced. Changed the pull animation so that it has both acceleration and deceleration rather than just deceleration. Tweaked the swaying back and forth a bit to work better with the increased speed. When the player in forced into the crouch position at the end of a mantle, crouch near the end of the mantle rather than the beginning in order to remove the sudden "dip" of the player's view. A majority of dev team members were against adding a menu setting, so being able to toggle between the old and new mantle speeds will not happen. It is recommended that you try out different "Mantle Roll" values as some prefer "0.1" and others prefer "0.5". We hope you all enjoy this adjusted mantle speed, especially the overhead mantle, which is now more consistent with the other mantle types. Bug tracker: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6343

Open questions for all. As a mere player, have you ever modified other games? Have you installed unofficial fixes, patches, updates, upgrades, expansions, mods? Were you happy it all was well documented? Were you happy that you could control what was being installed? Were you happy that it worked? Were you happy that you could install other stuff alongside without problems? Were you happy that you could uninstall it? Did you care about the authors or flame wars going on in obscure places of the internet? Players download stuff, sometimes read the instructions, install it and judge it. ---------------------------------- My friend Wesp5, Listen to the feedback. As a start, I would like to see the patch, or parts of it, in pk4 format. If you were to split your patch into standalone mods, which mods would you produce?

For easier inspection of various culling algorithms, I created a new debug cvar. It fixes the camera position that renderer frontend uses for culling, but allows player to fly around and see the same objects from different view point. Don't expect perfectly valid/sane picture, but I think it reliably shows which objects are sent to OpenGL for rendering. Here is the demonstration (bottom-left is clipped away in this video, but I hope it is clear anyway): It will be available in the next dev build. Maybe someone will find it useful for analyzing overdraw? P.S. Aside from that, "r_showtris 2" + "r_useScissor 0" should be useful for overdraw analysis too. It is questionable though whether you should disable r_useScissor in this case...

It's enabled by default in 2.12. Most players will keep it, I guess. On second thought I think we better not. The text on frob servers three purposes: Get to know the name of AI (if any) without the need of shouldering. Get to know the status (KO/Dead) of AI without the need of shouldering. Get to know if something is in the grabber, but this is minor, and it could only be considered a feature if all objects had a proper name. The player triggers the text with his/her actions. If we do it on highlight then it is us who is triggering it, and the player may or may not want it displayed at that moment. Back on topic, Yeah, this is something I noticed too. I like this idea very much. I think it could work. Also, a new arg for mappers: on_death_tongue_out.

I created the page: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Lightgem In the source I placed the following text: <!-- Page text made by forum user Fiver: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22327-how-can-i-create-an-account-on-the-tdm-wiki/&do=findComment&comment=491145 --> Personally I think the page isn't really necessary because the info is already present under HUD.

Hello all. I have a hopefully easy question. I just can't seem to search it properly. I want the player to select an item in the inventory (not drop to hands) and then USE (frob and then use key) on an object in the map. But, the frob should only happen when that object is selected in the inventory and not just general frob. If I am confusing this with triggering, I apologize. Is there an example in an exiting map that I can study that does this type of thing? I don't recall from any maps about this. Or, what is the general way to do this? The intent is to have the player find this inventory item and then go to various objects in the map and USE this item on the map objects. Advice? Thanks Clint

TDM Modpack v4.0 This new version of the Modpack is intended to be a long-term release. The Modpack is mature and stable enough to stay for some time how it is today, right where I want it to be: the foundation on which you build your favorite set of Mods for The Dark Mod. Good care was put to make sure the mods included in the Modpack stay true to TDM and neither the missions nor the gameplay are altered in any relevant way. Yes, we have more tools and skills at our disposal but it is up to you, the player, to make use of them or not. Play The Dark Mod your way. Compatible with 2.12 ONLY If you have previous versions of the Modpack I suggest you start fresh: disable and delete old mods. Use the mods included in version 4.0 from now on. TDM 2.12 introduces a great new feature and we can now have different mods from different sources running in parallel. Thanks @MirceaKitsune for pushing! Thanks @Dragofer for opening this door! What's more for 2.12 internal resources for mods have doubled and we can now load more mods than ever before and we are grateful for this! Thank you, @stgatilov! What's new in version 4.0? Starting with this release I am getting rid of the individual versioning and all mods are now at the same version (4.0 in this case). "TDM Modpack" is now the name of the project and the previous main "pack" has been split into two standalone mods: "Core Essentials" and the "Skill Upgrade". (The Skills are further split into their own packages and if you don't want a particular skill just look for the relevant pk4 and remove it). SHOULDERING BOOST - Decommissioned In TDM 2.12 we can now mantle while carrying bodies and the "Shouldering Boost" mod is no longer relevant and it has been decommissioned. In this new release of TDM we can also mantle while carrying objects therefore double thanks to @Daft Mugi for these quality of life improvements. Truly appreciated, thanks! SIMPLE SUBTITLES - New! Work on the subtitles is in progress and for the next version of TDM it is expected that players will be able to customize how subs are displayed on screen but until then, this new standalone mod offers an alternative for players looking for a rather simplistic presentation. Enable "Simple Subtitles", go to the audio settings and set the scope you prefer: Story [default]: Story only On: Story and general speech (Give it a try!) Off: Disable subtitles You can find more details of the mod in the opening post or in the readme included in the download. We must thank @Geep, @datiswous and @stgatilov (among other contributors) for the good work on the subtitles so far! Well done, guys! SMART OBJECTS - Present and Future Sometimes it is difficult to tell if an object is being held or not and the "Smart Objects" mod (now part of "Core Essentials") gets a little update and whenever you manipulate an object three dots [...] are displayed on screen: These three dots are a placeholder for real names, something I plan on addressing as a separate mod in the coming weeks... Here is the relevant topic: Nameless objects... a missed opportunity Stay tuned. INVENTORY MENU - Reworked The TDM user interface suffers from gigantism in some areas and the inventory menu has been re-worked and it is now delivered in a more compact format: The menu is 15% smaller and while the text has the same size as before item names are sometimes cut and I added a tip at the bottom to make sure the full name is always available. The updated menu is part of the "Core Essentials" mod. MINOR TWEAKS In each release of the Modpack I always tweak something and in for 4.0 I changed many things internally. You shouldn't notice any of the changes but it is worth giving the improved Whistle Skill a try... Here is the full changelog: • v4.0 New release - Major reorganization and global revision: Compatible with TDM 2.12. - All mods now share the same version (4.0 in this case). - Previous "Modpack" split into "Core Essentials" and the "Skill Upgrade". - Skill mods presented in their own, standalone pk4. - CORE ESSENTIALS: New, re-worked inventory menu. - CORE ESSENTIALS: New high mantle sound for our protagonist. - CORE ESSENTIALS - LOOT ANIMATIONS: Added scroll animation for paintings. - CORE ESSENTIALS - SMART OBJECTS: Display onscreen a subtle signal (...) when holding an item. - CORE ESSENTIALS - SHOULDERING BOOST: Mod decommissioned (alternative included in TDM 2.12) - SKILL UPGRADE - MANIPULATION: Improved script, smaller footprint. - SKILL UPGRADE - DISTRACTION: New approach (again). - HUNTER BOW: Increased radius of gas arrow effect. - BASIC SUBTITLES: Initial release. That's pretty much it for now. Thanks site admins, developers, mappers, modders and members of the community but more importantly, thank you taffer, for playing and supporting The Dark Mod. The download can be found in the opening post. Cheers!

The time has finally come for me to release my 5th mission for The Dark Mod. This project started sometime around 2015-2016 (couldn't find any old files to confirm) with me starting poking on a city mission and for some time I built quite randomly without a plan. I expected I could plot a story later; You can never go wrong with a city section, eh? I had a hiatus and did other projects in my life with model painting and skydiving and mapping became more and more scarce. Now and then I felt an itch to map and some kind of responsibility towards the mod team to produce something, to provide and give something back, if you will. At the start of the pandemic I started building more focused on this misson, but still no exact goal on what I wanted to achieve. Finally I decided I wanted a mission where you follow a person and the mission continued to grow in a linear fashion. I am not the quickest mapper and have severe problems on how to imagine a scene without building it first. This means that I often have to redo scenes and lots of stuff gets unnecessarily built just to be removed later, hence the almost absurd build time (about 1900 hours all in all). Betatesting came about and I got very good tips and feedback and decided to redo a lot of the mission. This need for a rework could have killed my motivation but fortunately, as the map was designed, it only required a modest amount of work and the mission became so much better for it! Sometimes I believe I'm somewhat of the uncrowned king of missions with a bit more unusual and experimental playstyles and this mission also have some elements that isn't used that much. In contrast to some of my other missions though, this one isn't depending on any quirky meter or sun shining down on the player (Reap as you sow *cough*). As mentioned, it is a sprawling city mission with lots of exploring that I hope will satisfy you! So DeTeEff gives to you: Who Watches The Watcher? ver 1.0 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YYoJJnxr2UbGxemTR-WoWmH64fbazusH/view?usp=sharing The night is creeping over Bridgeport. You squint in the street lights as you trot down the small alley to where you're about to meet your contact. As a man who straddles the line between lawful and outlaw, it's not often you have peaceful interactions with the City watch but as you're about to learn, this time they have more problems on their hands than to deal with petty thieves like yourself. You see the trademark silhouette of a City watch helmet approaching and you make a last take of your immediate surroundings, should you have to flee if things get awry. The guard presents himself as Albert and you listen carefully to his story and you quickly realise that you don't have much to fear from this man; The Citywatch has wrestled with some internal problems lately with missing reports and evidence that disappear. Albert strongly believes they have a mole on the inside that works for the Greynard RoughBoys; a band of ruthless thugs that doesn't hesitate to maim anyone who oppose them. You learn that he thinks the mole is no other than a Sergeant named Clerwick. Your mission will be to find this man, and collect intelligence on his doings for the night. And as it is payday, you should of course also help the inhabitants to carry some of their heavy purses. Mission type: Creepy elements? Undead? Spiders? Thanks to: My wonderful girlfriend who endures my constant talking about mapping and for helping me with readables and story design and some voice lines. Dragofer - Scripting help Springheel - All those modules Sotha - Hangman model Henrik Swenson for providing some ambients Digiffects Sound Library for some custom sound bites Betatesters: Acolytesix Datiswous Duzenko Jaxa Mezla Nort Prjames Shadow Thebigh Wellingtoncrab Wesp5 And a big thank you to the community for keeping the mod alive! I hope I haven't forgotten anyone... Known bugs: -The AI in TDM is inaccurate in some ways. They will sometimes behave strangely when returning to their original routes after being alerted, like sitting on chairs in weird ways or turning in places, especially if they meet another AI in narrow places. I have done my best to adjust these weird behaviours but with the complexity of everything that's going on and the player making different desicions/noise, it's probably impossible to adjust for everything. I believe I have ironed out the last wrinkles I can, with respect to my knowledge/skills. -Frobbing out of boxes/chests/drawers has always been a pain but I think this is largely an error within the code and how frobing works as the frob highlight wants to lock onto the box itself and not its contents. -There seems to be some kind of bug with the skybox, especially in places where there is water reflections present; The Sky/water volume switch between an opaque variant to a more translucent one. Neither is straight up ugly, but it's jarring to see the sky switch (as it seems randomly). I don't know what is causing this, and I have decided to let this one pass (if any players knows what is causing this, please let me know so can I squash this annoying bug. PLEASE POST ANY QUESTIONS/SPOILERS IN SPOILER BRACKETS

We are proud to announce the release of: The Dark Mod 2.12 ! The 2.12 development cycle introduced many large code overhaul projects. Most of these were to lay the groundwork for future fixes and optimizations. The final release is yet another leap in performance over the already impressive 2.10 and 2.11 releases. A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include: The Dark Mod 2.12 is a major step forward for mission designers! The culling system has been extensively overhauled to ensure that your CPU and GPU are not wasting resources rendering unseen geometry, lights, and shadows. Some of our best map optimization experts have achieved similar performance gains to what this new culling system does but it is a rare skill and we have even managed to improve performance on missions that were generally regarded as “well optimized”. Mission authors both new and old can follow standard mapping practices with no need to dive deep into sophisticated optimization techniques even for some pretty challenging scenarios such as wide open areas and long views. Players will immediately notice many missions that have made their system struggle with FPS now may be running much more smoothly! Smoother controls for players! Also during the 2.12 development cycle, work has been done to make controls more seamless and accessible. Frob can now use hold or click actions to use items. Once you get used to the mechanic, it will be hard to go back to using a separate “use key”. Mantling is now smoother, faster, and less prone to cause the player to clip through geometry. Leaning is now more subtle and less prone to cause motion sickness. To reduce the tedium of shuffling knocked out AI around to search for loot, you can now configure TDM to automatically loot any frobbed AI. A special thanks must go out to community member Geep! Over the course of 2.12 development, Geep has created subtitles for nearly all AI barks along with developing testing tools and procedures for this gargantuan task! You can see these changes in action by changing the Subtitles setting to “On” ( rather than “Story” ) on the Audio settings page. Geep also provided substantial feedback for our GUI and subtitle design process and edited font data to improve text quality overall. Datiswous has complimented the massive work by Geep to create AI bark subtitles by creating mission story subtitles for a large number of missions. Thank you! Turrets are now natively supported in The Dark Mod and can be paired with Security Cameras! Finally, the nasty 2.11 bug that caused AI to allow arrows to pass through them at certain angles was fixed by Joebarnin! Your assassin style play-throughs should be far less frustrating. See also, our 2.12 Feature discussions: To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder. Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.12, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.12 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.12. Use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates.

Merry's Magnificent Mapping Co. Delivers Again! Chase Mercantile Screenshots Title: Chase Mercantile Theme: Bank Release: 2015/02/04 Mapper: Airship Ballet Special thanks: Nobiax for the custom loot models and textures, Melan for his textures and Xarg, Kyyrma, Oldjim, Phi, Melan, Cookie and Bikerdude for beta testing the map for me! Vault and courtyard ambiences made by me using this and this respectively. Build Time: 1 month and 13 days. Well, here it is! We're about 2/5 through the campaign provided I don't decide to extend it. While going back to change things with La Banque I was really enthused to see how much better I am at mapping already, so hopefully you will be too! This is the same deal as La Banque but bigger and better. It's physically about twice the size and a fair bit more complex with regards to objectives and the like. As a result, you get a ton of notes if you buy a lot of things! Having the notes in your inventory is integral to the system itself working, so hopefully you won't mind reading then discarding a bunch of pieces of paper. I've got plans for a somewhat cooler way to introduce the notes to the player, but you're stuck without for now. This is, of course, bundled with La Banque so all that gold means something now! It'll be on the mission downloader as Chase Mercantile so delete La Banque from your FMs folder because it's obsolete. I tweaked the former mission somewhat, spawning some new guards on expert and implementing a 500G/1000G KO/Kill penalty to your loot total across all difficulties. I also wrote a new briefing that hopefully doesn't show how bad I am at English anymore. It was only ever intended as a tutorial, however, so don't expect crazy difficulty there. There's tons of loot to be had, but even more if you're sneakier about it! The same goes for Chase, albeit far moreso: expert difficulty has pretty much 100% guard coverage, so good luck with that. Erm, what else... oh! I recorded the building process, so if you're curious or just fancy zoning out to some timelapses, you can see the map's construction from start to almost-finished here, although hold off until you're done to avoid spoilers. Note - Noclipping around like a mook will skip triggers that change things based on what you bought. It will completely negate the system in some cases and often brick your playthrough. Don't do it unless you've no desire to be able to finish! - As the note you start with says, you can bag up the loose loot in the vault into bags. Dropping these out of the starting window in the basement or at the alternate loot drop (if you buy it) will net you 3000 per bag, which translates directly into 3 gold for the next mission's asset shop. - Knocking people out will cost you 500 gold on Expert, and killing them will dock you 1000 on Medium and Expert. - Optional objectives will pay you gold immediately on completion. - It is impossible to acquire all of the loot in the map: there are variants of some that get swapped around depending on what you buy. Don't sweat it: there's tons anyway! Cheats Come to the thread because you can't find something? Look no further you casual! Obviously don't expand spoilers if you don't want spoilers. Where are the vault keys? How do I get into Chase's vault? How do I turn off the steam? What about the electrified gate? ...and the gas? Where is the sword? Where is the necklace? Where are the client records? Where are the financial records? Where's Turk Malloy? Look, you made a system I despise. The least you can do is tell me what to buy. Download links The Campaign Available on the in-game mission downloader as "Quinn Co." The Single Mission chase.pk4

In the first post of the other topic Geep proposed: Then Stgatilov's answer: But I think applying subtitles in different languages shouldn't be too hard I would think, but I don't know how the current translation system works. The engine should apply the correct subtitles based on the applied language setting, this doesn't need a whole new language system I think. Not sure who's going to write those subtitles though. I can only do Dutch and English and nobody needs Dutch I think. I suggest further discussion of this to take place in topic https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21741-subtitles-possibilities-beyond-211/

Quite the challenge in the title, right ? Well, as long as it is not difficult to implement into the base game, I think we should finally resolve this particular collection of missing assets. In recent years, I've come across several FM makers clamouring for being able to make an FM with a female thief protagonist for a change. If we find someone willing to do the female player vocal set, I think it should be someone who can affect a voice that sounds neither too youthful or too old. That's, IMHO, key. The player character's male vocal set already sounds like it could belong to any deeper-voiced guy between 20 and 50. I have started this new thread in order to finally organise an effort to create a female vocal set. That's one of the few stumbling blocks left for more original protag creation, IMHO. Some three, maybe even four years ago, Lavender took a brave stab at this - if memory serves me right, she actually finished her recordings for the entire PC vocal set, they just weren't processed and suitable yet for publication. However, as Lavender has left the forums, we're basically back to square one. I think we should look into contacting the female voice actors we already have here on the forums and doing an assessment of their voice acting samples. There's got to be at least two ladies with an appropriate voice range for the female vocal set. I think women voice actors in their 30s, with a wide enough voice range, would definitely suffice for what is needed in that vocal set. Bear in mind that the entire vocal set is actually non-verbal, so there is no need to articulate anything. The whole set consists of a voice doing sighs, or noises during physical exertion (e.g. climbing, lifting), and so on and so forth. Though there are dozens of these purely vocal "lines", it's not that long a list, so the vocal set can be completed in a fairly short amount of time. The selected voice actor could do the whole thing in a day or two (or several days), we could then filter through the various takes, select the best ones, have our sound guys help with cleaning up any audio issues, and we could then work on implementing the whole thing as an alternate vocal set. It would be a really nice (if relatively minor) addition for 2.08. Particularly for mission builders. I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on how we should proceed, who can provide oversight for the effort, and so on. Wikilink to our voice actor article: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Voice_actors Wikilink to our article on the script for the player vocal set: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Vocal_script:_Player

You'll be surprised to hear but I don't quite get it either. Based on my understanding, there are a few confounding factors that make this a challenge. 1. We did a lot of work to ensure that the "included missions" were made part of the install so first time players would have a curated experience. Moving the missions back to the mission database might require undoing that work. 2. It is entirely possible to add the missions to the mission database while also being included in the installer but doing this will invite a few problems: 2a. What if the user updates the mission and then finds that their TDM install is somehow borked. They might run the installer to repair it and this will revert the mission version. If they fail to update their mission after this revert they might have incompatible save games that cause crashes and confusion 2b. What if a user starts downloading a mission update and at the same time starts a TDM upgrade ? 2c. Users opening bug tickets for a base TDM version due to problems seen in the included mission that are no longer present in the updated one, thus making it more tedious to narrow down duplicate bug submissions. 2d. Players seeing the missions on the TDM missions download page and downloading the package to install in the FMS directory then seeing duplicates in the mission list because the downloads page renames the packages with hashed filenames. All the above challenges revolve around potential user error and even though it should be obvious not to do these things, we have to compare the above to the vast swaths of folks who are begging to include TDM into Steam because unpacking a zip file and running an installer executable within a folder is "too difficult and confusing". One thing that we have the ability to do is change the file in the 2.12 installer repo so that if users run the updater it will apply the new mission. This change would not be visible to users so they would not get any alert about it. We would just have to announce it and hope that players watch for TDM announcements. I am doubtful anyone would want to work on it but I suppose that there could be some way to pass some sort of signal to the mission downloader when included missions have been changed on the installer side so they get a different update indicator. Still would be kludgy because you'd either be telling the player to exit TDM and run the installer or making TDM invoke the installer internally. So that is my take on "why" based on my own knowledge. Of course, part of my inability to "understand it" is due to my incredulity that we need to cater to players who are so below the bar in computer literacy that they would inflict these problems on themselves in the first place. None of this is an official stance just my own take on why the proposal to "let two updater processes control the same files in the same folder" has been rejected ( other than that such designs usually horrify programmers on a primordial gut level and if you mention that any program that does this you will see any programmer in vicinity instinctively reach for headache or stomach medicine ).

One way to do that would be to link the map with the location system. A mapper can already make a system to do that with the location scripts. Basically when the player enters a location (or a set of locations), it can trigger a script that switches out the map for one with that location highlighted. That's how Thief used to do it, and I think it's still fitting with the setting. Having a literal dot moving around the map would be much harder. I'm not sure we could do that without source code support. But It also wouldn't be as fitting to the genre. I'd be happy to see some mappers having a highlighting-map though, just for some interesting variety.

Well, it looks quite funny. The view rolls more than 180 degrees, turning the player into some kind of unnatural monster of sorts. The cvar to set this is "pm_mantle_roll_mod", and its value has been capped at 1.0 in order to keep the player within the human range. No exorcist needed.

In what way has any of this been "aggressive"? I ask, because I've tried to be the exact opposite of aggressive as much as possible. If I can improve here, I'd like to know. Have others been aggressive towards you? What are you insinuating here? I ask, because it sounds like you are either displeased with me personally, with the dev team as a whole, or with mission authors. What do you think needs to be addressed exactly? Would you mind making this clear, so we can improve? If it makes you feel any better, all of the player control and movement issues that I'm aware of that can be addressed have already been addressed. So, I personally don't have anymore player control or movement changes planned at this time. Regarding this mantle speed change, I proposed it internally and created the original solution. But the final solution was a dev team collaboration, and therefore I'm not the sole contributor of this change. The core team, including myself, already addressed this change. Are those the details that you wanted to read?

Not a fan of elevation... just makes direction harder to understand at a glance. I was thinking of just showing direction, not distance, on my proposed disk. If you passed X and Y coordinates unnormalized, I might have to take square roots in gui-script, which could be hard. I am unclear if we can meaningfully show distance at a glance as well on the disk. But open to experimenting with that as well.... In which case, the location dot would not be constrained to the perimeter, but could move towards the disk center point representing the player location. The radial distance (talking here about the disk viewed untilted) to the dot could be passed as a scaled vector, where x and y are each in the range 0 to 1. How best to scale that distance on the engine side? Could be logarithmic instead of linear. A radius of 1 would be the most far distance that sound could travel. A radius 0.1 or 0.2 would be right next to the player. Don't want to make it too close to the player dot, because it loses granularity of the perceived directional cue. Also, maybe (0,0) would indicate a special-case ambient/global sound, or player voice? Alternatively for representing a sound "next to player", the engine could pass a very low value (e.g., 0.01 radius), but the gui script would apply a minimum threshold like 0.1 or 0.2

Creating a new thread for this as it was being discussed in an old beta-testing thread starting here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/&do=findComment&comment=490751 I suppose the main questions are: when should this spawnarg be used, if at all? why was it introduced in the first place? Can we get it documented properly on the Wiki so misuse isn't propagated? @stgatilov @Dragofer

This. Same thing I say when it comes to content moderation on social media, something something about giving people tools to mute what they don't like seeing themselves instead of a corporation doing it for everyone Some difficulty settings should of course be set by the map, but I've also come to feel limiting saves might be a bit too much to have out of the player's control. I think there is a better idea: A mode the player can toggle, which can disable saving and loading on demand. Something so if you give yourself the challenge of a no save run, you don't forget and press the quicksave / quickload buttons like you're used to all the time. Of course you can just remember or not reload your save or unbind the keys, but a temporary setting like that could be a simple solution that's still fully a player choice.

So, I've got a confession to make: Up until recently, I hadn't really played a full FM in quite some time as I only did the occasional playtesting. I am currently trying to catch up and boy did I miss some gems! This FM is one of them and easily one of my all-time favorites. The save-system on expert combined with the incredible athmosphere of your mission created a tension I haven't felt in a Thief-style game in a long, long time. Thank you, thank you, thank you and bravo @kingsal. TDM and its mappers have really come a long way, competing high up there with commercial productions. Your FM inspired me in two ways: At one point, I died due to my character not jumping off a slope, eventhough I felt like I pressed jump at the right time. I think everybody of us knows this issue and you always have this kind of in the back of your head that you don't jump when the ground is not perfectly even. This failed jump was of course very annoying due to the saving constraints, so I instantly started thinking how we could solve this. There's a technique known primarily from platformers but also from FPS like Doom Eternal, and that technique is called "Coyote Time". It allows the player to jump for some short timespan after leaving a platform. We should maybe explore something similar for TDM, to make jumping off slopes more reliable. We have to be careful to not allow the player to cross further distances this way of course. I loved the save restriction and the tension it create so much, that I want more of it. I started to brainstorm and remembered the optional game mutators from Unreal back in the day. These mutators allowed you to enable extra challenges or modified physics etc. for your game. Coming back to the save restriction, a respective mutator for TDM could be that each savegame costs some resource. Some resource that hurts, like a water arrow or a health potion, to make the player think twice about saving. A mutator like that would honestly be my default play-setting, I think. Other obvious mutators could be "Ghost" (missions fails as soon as the stealth score is non-zero and blackjacking is disabled), "Ironman" (no saves), "Strong Enemies" (enemies hit harder, have more health). I shall follow up on both of these points soon.