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I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.

It has a plugin system, but if you are happy with textpad, then no reason to switch I guess. Actually it doesn't matter, you still would have to open 7zip and then probably open every file seperatly. This isn't worable in your case. But I think you should be able to open seperate files in Textpad this way, because 7zip unzips it temporarly and passes the file to the default external editor (I think), so the editor (Textpad) doesn't need to read inside the pk4 file.

Well the original reason I came up with it was to have the possibly of an alternative regular door. When the player opens it, they get teleported right behind the door, like as if they entered through it. This means the door never has to be auto-closed (for performance) and you don't bump into it when opening. But I guess ai will have an issue with teleportation so wouldn't be able to use that teledoor. Btw. what happens if there's an ai patrol route in the location the player gets teleported to and the player ends in the place where the ai is at that moment?

Damn I just had this bow crash but didnt have the debugger. Please mention me if you guys come up with a solution in here. For some reason I feel like Im getting it more than others, it might be because I use a lot of arrows when testing my missions.

Public release v1.7.6 (with Dark Mod support) is out. Improvements since the final beta 14 are: Fixed a few remaining bugs with zip/pk4 support. Game Versions window now properly displays TDM version. Import window no longer has a vestigial off-screen TDM field (because TDM doesn't need or support importing). Web search option is now disabled if an unknown/unsupported FM is selected. If an FM with an unknown or unsupported game type is selected, the messages in the tab area now no longer refer to Thief 3 ("Mod management is not supported for Thief: Deadly Shadows"). The full changelog can be viewed at the release link. The de facto official AngelLoader thread is here: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149706 Bug reports, feature requests etc. are usually posted there. I'll continue following this thread though. Thanks everyone and enjoy!

I have an idea. From time to time, these kind of guard create a penis during animation. This penis creates a thread during spawn, but it starts it as DelayedStart(0 ms). Instead of running the script immediately, it stores its entityNumber onto the callstack of the script thread. Let's suppose that for some reason penis gets destroyed immediately, and bow attachment gets spawned at this exact moment: then the bow attachment reuses entityNumber of the penis. At some moment suicide thread wakes up, reads entityNumber from stack, and kills the entity with this index --- but now it is bow attachment instead of penis. That's a simple explanation why dangling pointers are dangerous! However, if this really works like this, the whole scripting should be completely broken, since scripts in general often wait long time, and all the entities they reference might die during waiting. I can hardly believe this situation is always handled that bad. I'd like to ask people who have used scripting a lot. What happens if you have a local variable X of type "entity", then you do "sys.wait(1.0);", and then try to use X but it has died during waiting?

I see you are trying to make subtitles system more complicated, but I don't understand what's the reason. And I prefer not to add complexity/normalization if not needed. If someone needs visual cues, he most likely needs them for all sounds. Why do you suggest adding another parameter about visual cues to subtitles definitions?

I would agree with @snatcher, and I think it was the original idea. Speech level is for people who hear sounds well, but don't understand spoken English well (like me), especially if it is stylized (e.g. drunk). Effect level is something even more widespread. It might be useful in the distant future for people who have problems with hearing or just lack speakers/headphones today for whatever reason. I heavily doubt we'll be able to support this case properly, but added this level early anyway. For instance, "Heyyah!" should most likely be on Effect level. Story level was added as default for TDM veterans who also hear well but don't understand English well (like me). I don't want to see these "I've got him cornered here!" and "Just you wait!" all the time, it's enough that I hear them all the time Whether speech is dangerous or not does not matter. If some speech has angry tone instead of quiet, then you can add exclamation mark to carry this information (useful in case player has hearing problems). But whether guards are just talking calm or already want to hang player up --- that he should understand himself by reading the text and listening to intonation. Actually, I don't like the idea of giving any visual difference between Story and Speech for this exact reason. We use subtitles to help player understand English, not to help him draw correct conclusions from it. He should be able to understand himself whether some text is important for his quest or interesting, or not.

Good work! I enjoy short missions because things are nice and focused - you get in, you get out. Also I tend to do better with the loot amounts and I was able to get all the loot without too much trouble, which is rare for me. If I were to make a suggestion though - I found the intro briefing sequence a bit distracting because it was so obvious the narration was pitch-shifted to make a deeper voice. If you felt the original voice wasn't deep enough for your needs, I would either get someone on the forums to record it for you or just leave as is. That's my only real complaint and it's not even about the mission itself, so pretty good first start!

Ok, I understand now. The name "Open Doors on Unlock" fooled me for some reason. There are regular doors (and windows) that can expose you and then there are trap doors, manhole covers, chests, strong boxes, jewelry boxes, wardrobes, cabinets, desks, panels, showcases... and the game treats them all as doors. Tricky business.

Beta 11 Fix finished-on state auto-update was unreliable Slighty improve scanner title/author detect Tags are now named some whatever regular-version-looking thing to force GitHub to put the newest at the top

There is certainly a lot of garbage, conspiracy videos and mediocre influencers on YT. This naturally happens on any platform, especially on Odysee, although the reason is more understandable there, since Odysee is based on Blockchain, this makes it impossible to delete any inappropriate content, moderation, can only hide the videos if they are reported, but this only transfers them to LBRY. But YT does not have this problem and the moderation there is quite quick in deleting content that in its opinion is inappropriate, but this corresponds more to political reasons and content that is uncomfortable for Google, rather than other idiocies or complaints from users.

I have certainly done my share of awkwardly shoving bodies into dark corners and behind furniture in TDM. I don't think I've ever successfully put them inside or under furniture. TDM bodies are (rightly) pretty rigid in my experience. However, @AluminumHaste, you have repeatedly shown yourself to be the top authority and wizard on what is or isn't possible in TDM. If you want to put up one of your meme-worthy videos I will gladly eat my words on this point. I am ready to be dazzled by the dozens of ways TDM lets you hide bodies. Otherwise slow experimentation and experience must convince me. I think the reason you need the current system is that TDM's un-shouldering is deliberately way more restrictive than Thief's, and the reason for that (circa 2010) was to force you to use the fancy new ragdoll dragging gimmick. You have Stockholm syndrome. That is why I think this matter must be debated. The nays have successfully argued that we can't have easy and maximally-discoverable candle pinching because there are two or three missions where you need to move a lit candle, among dozens where you need to pinch them, and you-all will continue to argue that easy and discoverable body shouldering is a mistake because it makes life marginally harder in the occasional situations where manual body dragging is needed. But what we should be debating is a patch to make unshouldering less restrictive. Or maybe I'm off my rocker. Unfortunately I can't prove a negative, so it is up to you to provide counter examples where these systems create fun gameplay challenges. Show me the receipts and you win.

Maybe the reason is that these sounds are non-streaming in the engine...

Is there a way to make multiple sounds while getting multiple items? That would be enough to make the player check the inventory. Also auto-search could be the final reason to accept the current implementation ;): short-frob shoulder body, long-frob auto-search body and grabbing it for movement.

I'd like to better understand what you want. The design of dragging bodies is to hold frob (key down) to drag and release frob (key up) to let go. That way it's impossible to walk away while unintentionally dragging a body. Plus, it's quick to grab and move several body limbs in rapid succession. This is thought to provide a better experience, especially for new players. Towards the beginning of this thread, I created a "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior" cvar. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22198-feature-proposal-frob-to-use-world-item/&do=findComment&comment=487580 "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior", default:"1" Which drag body behavior? 1 --- on frob key up, drop body (limb). 0 --- on second frob, drop body (limb), TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. That cvar was removed shortly afterwards, because it was said that it wasn't needed. With that cvar set to 0, a second frob would be required to let go of the body. Is that the behavior that you want? If so, I can add that cvar back. Also, I saw elsewhere that you want the ability to revert back to the old way. If you mean that all of the controls match TDM 2.11, that can be done with "tdm_frobhold_delay 0" and there will be a menu setting to disable it as well.

Emotion won over reason.

There's no change regarding that. I would have already created a cvar to switch the behavior if it were simple. The code would almost double in size, become very difficult to read and understand, and it would be very hard to test all of the possibilities. I'm sorry this is the case. I spent time on it for you, but the code results were not good. At the risk of causing some confusion to some folks, here is the technical reason. Both the rat and the body in Heart of Lone Salvation have their body entities set as (shoulderable 0). The "fix", or tweak if you will, is to only allow "hold frob" on body entities set as (shoulderable 1). The result is that regular guards and bodies use "hold frob", the rat and other non-human creatures get grabbed on regular frob, and that body in Heart of Lone Salvation gets grabbed on regular frob.

Extensive customization options are appropriate during the pre-release testing or early roll out of a new feature. The people testing the feature can't know yet what configuration will work best for them, much less the people making the patch. My expectation is that by the time you have to make a final decision about including this patch in the next official update of TDM, there will be a rough consensus about the optimal parameters for the new mechanics, and you will only need one toggle for the new behavior. Or, preferably, there would be no need for an option at all if we can only get over our OCD about preserving arbitrary semantic grouping in our key-bind allocations; and embrace a superior control scheme that's not designed around highlighting an old gimmick feature whose trendiness expired with the Half-Life 2 era of FPS. But that's a pipe dream. Maybe instead we can just all agree that the general>gameplay options are getting a bit crowded. Perhaps we could split some of them off into an "appearance" or "accessibility" tag. As more people make their own mods and we modernize our accessibility options it is going to become a problem regardless. Best to get ahead of it. I agree, and that is one of TDM's strengths. It borrows and combines many of the best features from the three beloved Thief games, but it also gives FM creators tools to expand their creative vision in new directions. To some Thief purists that will never be an enticing proposition. But I don't see this feature as throwing a bone to those Thief players specifically, but just player in general who are bouncing off our game because it deviates from some genre conventions for no obvious reason, which makes them think this is an unpolished product. It is true that Thief was what set these conventions, and (shockingly/s) it is mostly Thief players who are interested enough in TDM to give it a try... but our responsibility to address these problems (if we can) is the same as if AMD or Linux players were having technical problems with TDM. They are people who we want to be part of our community because we never know if one of them might make the next FM like Iris, or do something crazy-innovative with TDM that we can't even imagine!

Wow! This is something interesting. You have areas 177 and 179 (you can detect them using teleportArea command) with 8 visportals between them, all in same plane. I hope this is as intended, and you really have many separate visportals? This should be perfectly valid of course. FloodLightThroughPortals searches for all visportal sequences which might get some light rays through. For some reason, it manages to go back and forth between areas 179 and 177 something like eight times in the same sequence. It is not forbidden for the traversal to go through the same area many times, but it is forbidden to go through oriented visportal twice. However, there are too many possible sequences of going through 8 two-sided visportals, and the code obviously tries to enumerate and save them all. At some point it bumps into 32-bit integer limits and everything crashes. By this moment it has wasted 32 GB of RAM so I don't think it would live long even if it did not crash here. You don't have the issue in 2.11 because: This is a dynamic light from some lantern bot, TDM 2.11 only runs this function for static lights. TDM 2.11 does not try to save all sequences, it would only enumerate them in horrendously slow time. I think some lantern bot crosses the visportal between areas 179 and 177 at this moment, causing the issue. Also, you can most likely reproduce it in 2.11 by putting a large enough light at the same location (12565.0205, 411.300110, 522.249939).

Is there some reason that the custom head can't be just given to the player at the outset (in some def file), and not swapped? Might be more stable, I'm guessing.

Seems like an inoffensive suggestion to me. It would not provide much of a challenge though since all one need do is let go of the mouse and voila: perfect stillness. For that reason, to work as advertised I feel like it would need to be tuned to be a non-factor 98% of the time, such that even veteran players would forget it exists until suddenly, surprise! here's an edge case where it matters. Like: only movements greater than 90 degrees per second trigger the effect. Basically it would just be an in-game jump scare mechanic. If something makes you as the player character involuntarily jump or flinch then that has a chance of being spotted. In the hands of a devious FM author that could make for some extremely memorable scripted moments. That's all just in principle though. In practice, this is an idea that would cost development energy to implement, and we want to make sure that investment is committed wisely. Remember how the community flipped the f*** out when Hazard Pay had the audacity to restrict saving, going so far as to make a mod specifically to negate the author's intent, and basically ensuring that no FM that's not a deliberate troll will ever use that feature again? Great use of resources that was. /s

Because of the latest reports in this topic I just re-played this mission in TDM 2.11a and I didn't run into any issues. For some reason though the map is duplicated, which is annoying but apparently harmless.

RE Glitches with the Stone (aka Stone Print) font. Probably the minor artifacts with this font - mentioned in the bugtracker - are due to the fact that this file is missing from the distribution: tdm_fonts01\fonts\english\stone\fontimage_12.dat <== MISSING which I surmise causes the 24pt font to be used instead and scaled down. There is some reason to believe the missing file was present at one time, because the corresponding .dds file is present: tdm_fonts01\dds\fonts\english\stone\stone_0_12.dds And the russian paths have both the .dat and .dds files (2 of the latter in the case of russian) for this font. (I think trying to copy the russian version of .dat to the english branch would fail big time.) If someone with access to an archive of very early TDM full distributions can check to see if it is available, that would be great. That would be the best way to go, because that file may contain hand-tweaks to the font spacing. Otherwise, it could be regenerated from the .ttf file and tweaked, a somewhat fraught endeavor (at least if I were to attempt it).

Not to be a nag, but I was thinking about the columns problem. If you go to the view source tab in the wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod&action=edit The raw table data is accessible directly: |- !align=left|{{TDM-FM|written|Written in Stone}} |Bikerdude, Amadeus, Dragofer |{{Forumlink|https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21265-written-in-stone-beta-210-only-20220128/}} |2022-01-28 |338 |Yes |Yes |CCC 22, Elixir |City Missions |Undead, Horror Themes |- Each pipe character represents one of the columns.