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Well, I'm buying it so I'll let you know what I think. I also didn't care for the demo, but I'm taking the plunge and hoping for the best because I know they've fixed at least 800 bugs since it's release, and because the demo was probably a slightly watered-down version of what will be released on 10/18. There's a setting within the options screen to turn on advanced formations. I didn't experiment with them, but they offer some formations anyways. And just because you saw 3 or 4 maps doesn't mean there aren't any heavily forested maps. AoE2:Conquerors had like 20 maps to choose from, and you can build your own if you want with the AoE3 map editor. Random map generation options will also allow you some control over what types of maps get cranked out. If there isn't a black forest map upon release, I'm sure a fan will make one for download if you don't build your own. Yes, the stupid sounds irritated the hell out of me, too. But I'm hoping for the best on that; I heard they maybe didn't put all the sounds in the demo for file-size sake. If the demo actually had it all, then I'm hoping we will be able to put our own sound files in if we want. The graphics sucked on my machine, too -- but if you have a high-end system it looks gorgeous. Going from 512MB RAM to 1Gig helped a lot for me. Still a ways to go, but it was a lot better. You mentioned before you had to play F.E.A.R. at 640 x 480. Same here (when I had 512MB of RAM). So I bet the AoE3 graphics sucked as bad for me as it did for you. It's not Ensemble Studios' fault we don't have more powerful PCs. Trees also didn't fall down when chopped in the demo. I hear that was a bug and trees will fall in the final game. They've also made an option for a more minimized version of the UI (if I didn't say before. I'm too lazy to check my last post(s)).

Ah, I get it. So we are allowed to have faith in the release of an editor where we got no word, but we don't need to thave the same faith in a fan project? That it existed doesn't matter. Of course everybody kjnows that it existed, that was never the question. The question was wether it will be released. The sourcecode for Thief and Thief 2 also exists somewhere, but from our point of view it is just a myth. We can assume that it exists, but it doesn't really matter, because we don't have access to it, and we have no indication that we will get access to it. That's my point. Right now, it's easy to say, because with hindsight you always no better, but at the time the campaign was running the chances for the editor were just as existing. As I said. firsthand knowledge that is not transmitted doesn't count. So what? I't nice that some of you were contacted and in the know. That doesn't change the fact for all the others. An information that exists in some void is no information. Does a tree in the forrest make a noise if nobody is around to hear it? No it doesn't. It's as simple as that. Like Sherlock Holmes. He knows everything and it looks like a miracle, and after he explains it's its obvious. Afterwards you always know better. Since you seem to knew it, it may have been a "huuuge giveaway" but for others it was not. Making an icon is a job of about 1 hour if you don't know the tools well, so what kind of a giveaway is that? Of course. After all we were excited with the project. That's normal. If we were not as excited, we wouldn't be around now and continuing the work.

Since it is stated that at least one mission (not yet finished?) will be in T2 no matter what, I think that a change over to TDM might be... wow, while it's kinda scary, because it might fracture the community badly - and might even risk HI ever coming at all - it might instead have the effect of producing some serious content for TDM sooner than later, and might help convince people to "come over" to the dark side (as if that's necessary - it's perfectly possible to enjoy ALL the thief games at the same time - I do). From the look of Imperium that I've seen (and drooled - don't forget also that a lot of TDM members don't know anything about HI beyond being a watching fan), it'd be like suddenly having uber-mapping going on with the mod. There would also be contributions in art and design, which as we've all seen is quite impressive. Collecting, pooling, sharing ideas and... and stuff! is never a bad thing.

Well, I like this mission, as my votes show. The tavern was my favorite part. I didn't encounter any lock-ups or abnormalities. Thanks for another fun (but short) mission Bikerdude, and thanks for helping others get the most out of their missions too. Hopefully you don't get discouraged from mission making because of a couple bad reviews. I knew this was a speed build and my ratings reflect that. BTW I went back in the tavern and caused all sorts of trouble. I even got the guards to start throwing rocks at the wench and other people sitting at the table. lol If you get one of the guards to attack you and then his rock hits another one, it will cause them to fight. It reminded me of causing havoc in Deus Ex all those years ago.

Why so dark nbohr? Hm I am curious if you will really do a version 2 of it. I think it would be lavishness if you don't. It's hard to describe but this mission has something very familiar with the old thief games.. I don't know what it is, but it is one of the best missions in this regard.. Nevertheless it may be optimized in the way of do some variations of patrouling paths (many of them are easy to foresee) and making better use of the AI relightning (the one with the switch is great). Btw why are there no door handles?

Compared to the individual missions, definitely. Also, add me to the ranks of players who would replay a mission series if it was re-released as a campaign. I replay them in mission form as well, BTW.

I have nothing against cutting edge graphics and I love it, but I don't like that people think bad graphics are a reason to forget games. But speaking of judging - usually a good game has cutting edge graphics anyway. Like Oblivion - tends to be great game and graphics, DooM 3 - good game and best engine; ahem, Heretic - one of the first games on DooM engine, good graphics and design, what's funny I never liked DooM for its dirtiness and bloodness. My childhood games still, but I never got a hang of DooM, maybe because I had both together, not just first DooM, then Heretic, then heXen, just a box with 50 games on it, I was 6 years old then... What am I talking about? Sorry, dosed of, I'm an overreacting fan of SotSR and can't stop talking about it. I'll check Thief out tomorrow, and if you don't mind I'll tell you the pros and cons I will find there, if it finishes downloading.

I hope somebody comes with a mirror soon... To wait 520 seconds to start the download is unacceptable! & to buy a premium package to company I've never even heard of is illogical, but it being a new TDM mission I patiently waited and downloaded anyway ARGH!!! I hate Thief missions with a "no kill" objective, especially when the guards are wearing full armor with helmets. I'm guessing this a "ghosting" mission ??

How about a map "zone selection"? It would give a little bit of info, and wouldn't rely on a immersion breaking text (breaking because, me the player doesn't know anything that thief the character is saying. I can enter the chute? Cool i guess. What chute?). I always liked how in thief Official missions the maps were incomplete, guesses and just plain wrong. This could be incorporated with such a map (even on a campaing). Find out the alternate entrance? The mysterious, ???/blank zone on the next map would allow/show selection as the secret passage entrance, instead of the front entrance flanked by the guard towers, or the eagles nest, with the cannon room. Art wise it's harder though, but even a normal person can make a simple sketched map-in-a-napkin. It would probably be hard to allow arbitrary hot-zones selection though (programmatically). Maybe there is a vector library somewhere that you can check for a closed polygon and check for mouse "insideness" you can use in Darkradiant though. Or maybe just use rectangles, and specify that the overlay must be a image (that can show whatever form inside the rectangle it wants, other colors/more detailed image. I'm not sure. You'd want a usability engineer to ask for advice on this.

It's an issue if you're carrying over inventory across missions, but if it's not that then I don't see the problem releasing them sequentially as individual FMs. Then at the end you make the full campaign version ... That's, e.g., how Keeper of the Prophecies was done. (Actually, even if you are carrying inventory across or something like that, you just add it to the starting gear for the individual versions, and save the cross-mission stuff for the campaign version). I scripted out a campaign, and if I were to build it, my idea was to organize it as a series of 1-month builds to churn them out, and I'd release them together after the last one. It's just written as a single experience. Edit: Another option is to string the campaign together as you go, but also release saved games people can drop into their "Saved Game" folder -- at release & when there's a TDM update -- so people can at least start at the mission they need to without needing to replay to get there. (Is it possible to bundle saved games with an FM release? E.g., the player doesn't need to drop them into the folder. He just opens the "Load Game" menu and they're there in the queue. That would be convenient.)

It would certainly be useful if there was a way to save persistent data between missions that wouldn't be affected by code updates. Not sure how realistic that is though.

Missions w/o choices always drop you in places you know nothing about, so I'm not sure there's increased trepidation on the player's part if given a choice where to start. Map authors providing multiple start points can certainly have the briefing explain the (dis)advantages of each point. That fleshes out the briefing and gives the player some info with which to make a decision. I can't see authors providing more than 3-4 choices (otherwise it's too unwieldy, and players aren't likely to replay a mission more than a couple times anyway, if they do at all), so I don't see the added benefit of having a "pick for me" option. Besides, if a player plans to replay, that option is only useful the first time through, and of no benefit in replay, because of the possibility of the game randomly picking the same start point. From what I've read on the forum, the thought is that multiple start points increase the replayability of a mission, and players who want to start again at a new spot won't use that option.

I like the possibilities this opens up. However, I am not sure it is a good idea to let the player make a choice where he has no data to go on which choice is better/best. Always hate it if the game asks me to decide something and I haveno idea what the consequences are. Is option A, B or C better or worse? Harder to play, or will it seal areas that I can no longer reach unless I replay the mission? etc. (And a lot of people don't replay missions, so they would always have to make such a choice w/o any data). So giving the player more than just a short text is nec. here, maybe even a "auto-select for me if I am unsure" options?

He kind of missed the point. Replaying the old missions is a great way to measure the difference in the AI compared to the last time he played the mission.

there was no new missions since 1.07 update and i dont want to replay old

Here's a sample of what a mission author could put in their briefing text, starting with TDM 1.08: Here are the rules (so far): 1 - You can have any number of selections, and you should have a matching number of player starts in your map. 2 - The player can make a selection by clicking on the text. 3 - They can change their mind any time before ending the briefing, though they can't deselect a selection. Just pick a different one 4 - If they don't select anything, or the briefing doesn't offer a selection (existing missions) the game determines the starting point in the usual manner (whichever starting point has the lowest entity number). 5 - This method doesn't rely on teleportation. I haven't worked out any rules for the case where an author wants to also select a starting point using the difficulty level. Making the two methods compatible would probably require a naming convention for player starts.

Thats what I was trying to find out. With 8xAA it runs pretty well, averaging 40fps on the missions I've tried. The rest of the laptop makes up for the slightly under-powered GPU so it ticks along nicely enough.

This raises the larger question...what standards do we use to decide which AI get released with 1.0? Do we release only characters that have been switched to the new skeleton? The builder priest and elite guard are not likely going to be converted in time, yet we have at least two maps (St. Lucia and Chalice, respectively) that use them. Do we switch those characters for something else to release (doesn't work well for St. Lucia)? All the A-Level characters on this list: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=4712 will be ready, and maybe one or two from Level B.

Discussed here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=185202 I had a go at this and I can see it working quite well, with a bit of tweaking and possibly a few different "frequencies" of cloudiness for ambients of different sizes. With a proper map the varied brightness could give the impression of general soft shadows that are not linked with any particular geometry.

So far I have almost entirely used DR extracted from the ubuntu packages. I was previously able to compile it with Mandriva 2010 and 2010.1, but more recent versions have not bee successful. After copying the ubuntu version into my system, I normally need to make symlinks from the boost libraries and the gtk libraries from what I have installed to the versions DR is trying to use. So far this has worked pretty well. Both of my released missions thus far were built on DR ubuntu versions. The worst I have seen so far is a random crash which closes DR when I press a keyboard shortcut, such as 's' for the texture tool or 'esc' to unselect an object. But that is rather rare and I am in the habit of saving often and keeping a backup. If the question "Why don't you just use Ubuntu?" comes up, my extremely polite answer is this: I really don't like Ubuntu very much and much prefer the well-stocked package repositories for Mandriva/Mageia. I am running openSuse 12.1 on my laptop and enjoying it rather well and may migrate to it on my desktop if I don't like the direction Mageia goes in.

Is there any reason why the training mission and its assets can't be part of the main mod tree, since it is a "built-in" mission, rather than in a separate PK4? Or does the mod only support missions packaged as individual FMs? I too discovered a couple of minor issues in the training map some months ago (typos in readables etc) but couldn't see an easy way to commit the changes.

I only did a few missions as examples, I did not have time to hunt down all the different translations that were done over time and fiddle with the script. My hope was that somebody else could do this... There are a few italian translations I have not yet done (MadsMountain I think was one, WinterHarvest another one) and there might be other translations out there that I do not know of. That is why the old way was so bad - everything was so disorganized and nobody really knew what to do or what had been done... I don't mind, at least this is easy and benefits everyone

I have translated the training mission and Thief's Den to portuguese, but all I did was translate the text (replace the actual strings) and images (in Thief's Den case, manually editting), I dont think I even changed the original names of the files, not to break any links... I believe they are the ones listed on that server you posted? In this situation, if you play my translated missions, regardless of any language setting, you would get the portuguese texts right? I'll need to do it the right way when I have time... Either way, I have to get back to you Tels, I'm afraid we still have some work to do on the portuguese translation as I'm finding several things we need to improve/correct. Sorry man, youre having tons of work!

Excellent! Gonna download this now - so the AI is the main improvement which we will see in already finished missions?

I found a quicksave command, \save_game in console, on a walkthrough site. Ill look for the environmental setting, the lack of fauna is a little disconcerting. I figured as I was buying the game that it would turn into a corridor crawl but I am desperate for some new video game action. I will have fun figuring out different ways to whack the AIs for a few weeks at least. I originally bought Ground Control II but the disk was fucked up, kept telling me its was a bootleg copy. It looked like a lot of fun and I enjoyed GC1 quite a bit. Im also a big fan of the Homeworld series, titantic space battles always get my heart thumping.