Search the Community

How about using TDM automation framework (and maybe pcem/qemu)? More info see: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19828-automation-features-and-discussion/

This is a really nice mission. It's just the right size and difficulty, looks great, and the mission objectives provide plenty of challenge without being obtuse. The manor seemed to be absolutely swarming with guards but there were always opportunities to slip by if you were a bit patient. I finished on the hardest difficulty with a perfect stealth score and about 1800/2024 loot.

Its not that people are dismissing the game because of lack of shouldering, but rather a combination of things. That would be a real argument that the following occurs; 1. People don't know how to keep from making noise when moving stuff around (holding creep). 2. People don't know when black jacking works and when it doesn't (general options menu toggle). 3. Blackjack hits overhead stone overhead archway or wooden foundation (was fixed). 4. Picking up a blackjacked guard should be easy and players should know how to do it right away (new). 5. Not know how to extinguish candles and lanterns (easier and new). 6. Not knowing about general gameplay tips specific to missions (new). 7. Not being able to use favorite addons together (new). 8. Being able to know how much loot is left in a mission and mission stats like stealth score mid mission to properly ghost w/o too much spent on replaying parts of a mission (pending and in a addon). 9. Guards either searching for the noise disturbance for too long, or giving up too quickly and thus making some small missions either really tough for small mistakes or far too easy to get through (difficulty changes proposed by some). Many of these are not fixable without a global tip system for first time players, a expanded tutorial mission, and quality of life changes (a general gameplay change is not always about accessibility, options and cvars exist for that reason, but sometimes its about making it so that a button press should do what most players intentions aim to do, 95% of the time.

I am 100% on board with optional bonus challenges (mutators) you can activate before launching an FM. Could be a nice project for me for 2.13. As posted in the "Hazard Pay" thread, my idea for a save restriction mutator is that you pay for each save with some resource like a water arrow or a health potion. Something that hurts, to make players who seek the tension think twice about saving. Another mutator idea was "Ghost", i.e., mission fails as soon as stealth score turns non-zero and blackjacking is disabled. I wonder why everybody jumped on the save restriction topic, instead of this mutator, which would be really useful for quite a few players, wouldn't it?

Time for a new contest eh? This contest will almost be a speed build contest since we are shaving a few days off the typical 3 month span of a standard contest. TDM has no shortage of horror themed missions but since we missed the chance to have a Halloween contest this is a "gift" to the large contingent of TDM fans who enjoy some horror in their life. I wont go crazy with bonus points in this contest but there will be a few incentives... The overarching theme of this contest will be placing the player in dangerous locations. Having to climb down into elevator shafts, narrow caverns pits, etc to acquire loot or trigger objectives. This theme is meant to be paired with an incentive to use vine arrows to escape (etc). There is no hard requirement to adhere to this theme but players can judge your theme score using this concept as a baseline. Bonus incentives: 3 Perfect votes added for creative Vine Arrow usage 1 Perfect vote for creative Mine usage 1 Perfect vote for creative Flash-bomb usage 2 Perfect vote for EFX audio 1 Perfect vote for Subtitles 1 Perfect vote for adding Translation string support As with the previous contest, we may need to add a scaling factor if there is lower than expected participation from voters. Standard Contest Scoring: Total Points = (gameplay * 3) + (Appearance * 2) + (Story \ Theme * 1) Max Possible = Total Votes * 5 (Outstanding) Category Score (%) = Category Points /Max Possible * 100 Total Score (%) = Total Points /Total Max Possible * 100 The vote count was equal in all categories for everyone so: TotalMaxPointsPoss (TMP) = AllCategoryVotecount(ACV) * 30 Full Weighted Score (FWS) = (Gamescore*3 + Visualscore*2 + Storyscore) / TMP Pre-existing maps: The contest will be for newly created missions. Authors can use modular assets and prefabs and limited pre-made map sections. If you wish to use an existing WIP mission, you will need to declare this in your release thread and other participants will need to agree that your mission should be allowed to compete. Otherwise, if multiple authors with WIP missions decide to join we can create a separate scoring for those missions. The submission deadline will be Christmas Day ( but we can extend the deadline if all participants agree to the request. ) Please declare you intention to join in the fun!

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.

To cater to both audiences. I mentioned LibreGameWiki as one example. nbohr1more mentioned other uses. Explicitly allowing reuse and spread will help TDM reach a wider audience and would hopefully attract more volunteers. More volunteers which can help improve both TDM versions. There are several benefits for a project of being in the Debian repo. One is that TDM Debian-users can report defects on any package directly to Debian (no need to register on separate forums). Debian may then fix the issue themselves (in their "TDM-libre" package) and will offer the patch upstream to TDM, who can then choose to accept or reject the patch. I envision "TDM-libre" to have the same capability of downloading any mission as regular TDM. The only difference is that "TDM-libre" would come packaged with the regular engine (which is GPL+BSD) and an included mission that has libre media/gamedata. When I play TDM by myself, I want the unlimited-play and can accept commercial restrictions. But if I were to promote it somewhere, or charge for a stream when playing online, or make a video, I would want a version without commercial restrictions (and can temporarily accept limited-play) to make sure I don't violate anyone's copyright. Perhaps. That's what I'm trying to find out.

I suggest you use the term "I", to make clear that it is something YOU want, and that you speak for yourself. But, as wesp5 mentioned, I don't really know what this is about, at all. And, I'm also wondering about all the newly registered people lately, who just arrived at this forum, and already want to revolutionize this mod. This is a thing I noticed 2 or 3 years ago, and which hasn't been present in the 15 years I play this mod and frequent these forums now. Really seems like a common thing these days, to not knock on the door, but kick it in, and stomp right in.

TDM has tons of textures from "free" texture resources that do not allow redistribution and cannot be incorporated into a commercial project. Someone would need to create a huge replacement pack of textures that do not break the look of existing missions and do not infringe on the copyrighted textures. Also, many artists who contributed to this project do not want 3rd party entities to use their work in commercial projects. They intended the models, textures, sounds, animations to be exclusively used for Darkmod content. You would either have to replace ALL assets or contact every contributor and ask them to re-license their assets. Many contributors are no longer active with the project and haven't visited the forums in years so it would be no easy feat. I cannot speak to Debian policy but I think that they treat installers that add non-free content the same as non-free content itself. One could argue that Steam is such an installer but I guess Debian would counter that there are a few fully Libre games on Steam. I think Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint need to consider a repo that allows for games (etc) that include non-libre content but intentionally offer this content for free to the community with no stipulations other than "don't try to sell it as a product".

The gamepad implementation allows for a great degree of flexibility to personalize settings, aside from a few minor issues that I mentioned here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22337-gamepad-bindings/ I would say that playing TDM with a gamepad works very well, especially considering that it was implemented as experimental and hasn't been changed since then. If I could, I'd go back to 2021-you and congratulate you on buying that gamepad. I notice that your DarkmodPadbinds.cfg looks very different from mine...

It seems like more and more "thief" and "thief players" is becoming a short hand to dismiss community members earnest desire to improve the game - which happens to be a barely legally distinct "thief style" game which was made by thief fans for thief fans and is "designed to simulate the stealth gameplay of Thief". Who is the predominant player base of the game supposed to be beyond fans of the thief games? Is there some better avenue to find feedback for the game beyond this forum? FOSS and linux forums? I have seen maybe half a dozen posts from that segment. I am a thief fan, I play thief fms, my association with those games is what drives me to play and make things for this game. Are we supposed to pretend the original games are not a huge reason why most of us are here at all? TL;DR version:

Thanks! 1) Doing LONG_PRESS PAD_A (what I, for lack of knowledge, call "jump-mantle" or "_jumpmantle") differs from doing PRESS PAD_A ("_jump"). "_jumpmantle" differs from "_mantle", so they must be mapped to different button-calls. "_jumpmantle" differs from "_jump", so they must also be mapped to different button-calls. This appears to be the case, but it is not evident (or changeable) in DarkmodPadbinds.cfg. "_jumpmantle" seems to be hard coded to always connect to the same button as "_jump" but with a long press. It is as if bindPadButton PRESS PAD_A "_jump" is not actually just binding PRESS PAD_A to "_jump", but rather interpreted as "link PAD_A (regardless of button press time) to behave exactly like keyboard SPACE for short and long presses". I would have expected the default DarkmodPadbinds.cfg to explicitly read: bindPadButton PRESS PAD_A "_jump" bindPadButton LONG_PRESS PAD_A "_jumpmantle" bindPadButton PRESS PAD_B "_crouch" bindPadButton LONG_PRESS PAD_B "_mantle" ... but neither LONG_PRESS PAD_A or "_jumpmantle" is listed in the file. If there are actions "_jump" and "_mantle", I suppose there must also be an action "_jumpmantle" since it is possible for the player to do all those movements: * "_mantle" does the movements "crouch on the high surface, then stand up" * "_jumpmantle" idoes the movements "jump slightly forward, then land standing on the high surface" * "_jump" idoes the movements "jump up, then land exactly where you started" If the actions "_jump" and "_moveup" are not synonymous, then perhaps the action "_moveup" is what i call "_jumpmantle"? 2) Thanks for the link! It was useful in more than one way. I'll link to that page from https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Bindings_and_User_Settings#Gamepad_Default_Bindings if I can get an account on the wiki, which proved more difficult than i thought (https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22327-how-can-i-create-an-account-on-the-tdm-wiki/). However, it does not answer my question how to find out the name ("<button>") used for a button on my gamepad. Basically, I would need to press the button on my gamepad and some program could tell me "That button is called 'PAD_A'". In my case, I have a gamepad "Logitech F310" (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logitech_F310_Gamepad.jpg) which has a "Logitech button" (see image) that I want to use. I was hoping to find out the "button name" for that button and then edit DarkmodPadbinds.cfg to map it to a function. 3) ... but if that button has an "unusual name" that TDM does not recognize, then it may perhaps not work. E.g. if that button is called "PAD_LOGITECH" and TDM cannot recognize that name, then I cannot map anything to it via DarkmodPadbinds.cfg. Using QJoyPad I can map any keyboard key to it instead, as a workaround, but I cannot map MODIFIER to it (since MODIFIER cannot be set to a keyboard key). If current implementation is still called "experimental", then I must say it works very well; @cabalistic: kudos for that! I may not have continued playing TDM had it not worked with a gamepad.

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

I dom't use it, i found it here with the filter set to OpenSource. the TOS and PP isn't excluding for an OpenSource app, if they use ads mean that they also need to pay an server for this online service. OpenSource is not synonymous with free either, perhaps after the beta phase it is no longer free, so perhaps you can take advantage of the fact that it is still free to create a series of textures that can be used or search another one in Futuretools. AI generated textures and assets, by definition, don't have any copyright, so you can use them as you want. https://www.futuretools.io/?pricing-model=free|open-source&tags-n5zn=gaming

I am going to sort-of reveal that this is loosely like the nature of my upcoming mission. I noted it here when JackFarmer asked about things that are coming along in this post: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/37993-jackfarmer/&status=3943&type=status It too is a builder church. The player is requested by a hopefully famous character in another mission to handle some business that is affecting the congregation. I am looking to invoke some info and history laid down in other missions as a hook story.

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.

I actually thought of the stealth score label myself: Score implies achieving something positive, but getting caught isn't something to be desired... a more correct name would seem like "stealth penalty". Having it decrease instead of increasing might not be possible though since you can trigger any number of alerts, there isn't a standard amount you can relate to and subtract from so you can come up with a percentage, like for loot where you know the maximum amount on the map.

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.

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/

I've made a change so that m_ignorePlayer doesn't stop the current alert from counting towards the alert score. Now the stealth statistics become +1 sightings, +5 score as soon as the player is fully detected, and seem to stay there regardless of what happens afterwards. One extra stealth score bug I noticed while testing this is that if an AI is fighting you and you duck out of sight for some seconds, then duck back into sight before the AI leaves combat mode, the time where you weren't visible is added to seenTime. Probably not as high priority to fix asap (i.e. during this beta period) as full detections counting as 0 score.

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

Yes, level 1 alerts don't count to the score.* If other people are being alerted by his barks, I don't know how attribution works. But I believe it's not going to be counted to the score even if it's attributed because we got rid of alert cascades, where 1 alert can cascade into stealth scores that go into the 100s. I haven't looked into the details recently, but if it turns out to be a trade off between these two bugs, stealth scores where a tiny alert cascades the score into the 100s vs. transmitted alerts triggered by a tiny alert only counting that tiny alert (and in the case of an level-1 alert, not counting at all), I think I still think we're on the right side of that dilemma with stopping the cascade. That's just my initial guess that that's what's happening, though. --- Re: your last question... At the bottom of the stat screen should be a down arrow. When you click it, it takes you to a new screen that shows you the exact break down of the Stealth Score. There are 5 alert levels. The first two are "suspicion", the first of which is not counted to the score (but is counted in the "Suspicions" count). So only 2nd level suspicions are counted to the score (x1). The next two are "search" (x2 and x3 I think). And the last one is a sighting (x5 I think it was?). I don't know what you mean by "the fifth number" because I don't have a screenshot of the stat screen on-hand and don't feel like playing a whole mission to completion to get one. If you post one and circle the number that you mean then I can let you know more specifically, if what I said doesn't already answer your question. * Footnote on that: A substantial number of FMs have the player putting AI on level 1 alerts even when they just spawn! Or in places it's impossible to pass without a level-1 alert. So there's a good case to drop it, at least from the stealth score, because it's ridiculously sensitive. And we still do count it in the Alert list! So it's not like you're completely "getting away with it". But we thought the score should be as fair-play as we could make it.