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From the perspective of making FMs for Thief, the value of the OMs is that they defined both the mythology and the gameplay. From the perspective of making FMs for TDM... well, let's be perfectly honest here-- the mythology of TDM is basically Thief with the serial numbers filed off. There's no need to establish it because in essence it's already established. So the pack-in campaign for TDM can treat plot as a secondary concern and concentrate on pure gameplay. Someone mentioned how different people like different aspects of the Thief universe. Don't fight that... run with it. Do something like "The Dark Mod: Chronicles" where the campaign is just a collection of unrelated missions, perhaps presented in flashback format. That would give the mappers the freedom to do whatever themes they want, without concern for any overarching plot.

Why do they need to be forced together into a campaign? That stifles the unique creativity of the individual mapmakers for no reason. Individual missions are just as useful for demonstrating new settings and features.

The existence of a campaign along with the release of the tools would serve an extremely valuable function-- establishing a baseline "style" for any future mods. Yes, it's great that FM authors will be able to customize practically everything about their missions. But from the player's perspective, it's also great to be able to start a new FM with certain valid expectations about how the gameworld will function. Things like how visible torches make you, how much noise footsteps make, how fast guards run, that sort of thing. If elemental things like that vary wildly from mission to mission, it will just annoy and frustrate most people. As Doug Church himself has said, "Thief is a game about territory. In each game the player and the AI have their safe zones, but to get to the player's goal they need to adjust that territory by changing the environment." Thus, to effectively influence the environment, players need to know the rules. Discovering the rules should be part of the learning curve for the game itself, not a challenge that every single FM poses. That's why an introductory campaign would serve to lay the groundwork for what the "expected" rules are, and then let FMs deviate from that on a special-case basis instead of for every little thing. That's pretty much how things developed with Thief FMs, so it should work just as well here.

We hope that FM authors will respect the Thief property and use Dark Mod to create 'Thief Inspired' missions. There is really no reason to use established characters. Providing you have a good story, the FM shouldn't need to 'borrow' from the Thief universe.

Hmm I wonder if I can get hold of a typical mediaeval helmet? There are some mediaeval societies floating around. If I can find a helmet, and I get organised enough, I could do some recordings and SPL measurements of various objects striking said helmet. A sufficiently padded helmet (and all mediaeval helmets I have seen were worn with felt or similar padding for both comfort and absorbing force), with the padding firmly attached to the inside of the helmet will significantly absorb the force of a fairly substantial whack to the head. A leather blackjack filled with shot will also distribute much of its force over a wide area. It wouldn't make that much noise, though it would probably be audible from 20 feet or so, depending on the accoustics of the area. Though audible, it wouldn't necessarily sound obviously like someone being attacked, however... A blackjack of the type in discussion hitting a padded metal helmet will distribute its force over a wide area, and the helmet will absorb a lot of the force and distribute it to the neck. The likelihood of this impact causing a knockout will largely depend on the angle of the blow - from behind the head, it will cause the head to move forward suddenly, and if the brain sloshes enough inside the skull, a knockout will occur, but realisticly, this will happen less than 30% of the time. If the blow is from directly above, the force will cause the vertebrae to compress and possibly break, and the result will be that either the neck is broken, resulting in death, or that the victim will be in excruciating pain, and will likely start screaming blue murder. Noisy guard running around looking for help! In any case, blackjacking someone wearing a helmet or not will be extremely risky in RL, as too much force will kill or severely maim the victim, too little force will simply cause momentary annoyance for the attackee. Therefore, blackjacking helmeted guards should have a random chance of success with a probability of about, say 10% (my guess without actually doing a series of tests) of actually causing a knockout, if you want to be at all realistic about it. and taking into account individual human variation (some people are more prone to blacking out than others), this guestimate should probably be even smaller. since I rarely used the blackjack in Thief (only when the game forced me to, like the first level of T2), I don't care that much, as long as missions don't force me to use the damn thing. Personally it is one of the things I would like to see excluded from TDM, but hey, I'm the minority here so I'll live with it... As far as I am concerned, oDDity is correct: helmeted guards should be extremely hard to KO, to the point of not at all.

I did something similar and then notched it back a bit. Ive uninstalled T3 though I MIGHT check out some of the few FMs that have come out. I take it as a sign of editor problems that there are only four missions on CheapThief, fact there is a dedicated link to the T3 FM tech support thread on Cheaps homepage. Anyone here tried out the FMs?

I am, however. I guess it depends on what sort of 'gameplay' you want, and what you mean by playable. For me good gameplay means sneaking around is just as difficult as if I were in a real, populated mansion trying to sneak around. For me good gameplay means using cover to hide behind, rather than being invisible in shadows. Shadows should help, as they do in RL, but you are not invisible or undetectable in them. I've played Thief to death a zillion times, and I now find wandering around invisible in shadows somewhat boring and unchallenging. I guess you could say I find it excessively playable. It is ridiculously easy to prance around in the shadows without the AI seeing you, even though you know that they should if they were real people in the same situation. That is bad gameplay IMO. I want the option to jack up the realism of the game to a level that is generally approaching what I would find in RL (as far as is possible with current technology). I want a much, much, much more intense challenge. I want daytime missions where there are no shadows to save you, and careful timing and patience are the only option. I want an extremely frustratingly difficult game that takes hours (days) of painstaking sneaking to finish a level. I want AI that will see, hear sense me as easily as a real human opponent would, in much the same way a real human would. I want to do it all without the use of weapons, and limited gadgets. I understand that I am probably in the smallest minority, and that I can't expect anyone to cater purely to my eccentric tastes, but it would be nice if at least there was the option (through difficulty settings or what have you). And if there is an implementation of sillhouettes that is not going to kill my framerates totally, even if it is not perfect, I'll take it.

Argh, this has been discussed a lot before. Yes, some team members have concerns that keeping track of silhouettes and AI lines of sight would be too frustrating, and others disagree. That's why, if we ever do find a way to implement it, we'll do extensive playtesting before putting it in the final version. Even simple hacks introduce a lot of complications if you think about it: How does the system know a doorway is a doorway? Are you relying on mapper placed brushes? If so, this is going to make the mapper's life hell, and may lead to maps with inconsistent behavior between missions and in the same mission if the mapper inconsistently placed the brushes. Those are the main reasons why special case brushes are bad. Even if the mapper did place some entity for every single bright surface, how are you going to update this in realtime to match the dynamic lighting? You might find a way to update for torches getting extinguished (although it would be hard since you'd have to make sure the torch was definitely casting on the object and you'd still have to take into account other light sources that were still on), but what about moving objects in front of light to cast a dark shadow on a surface that used to be bright and have a silhouetting entity? There wouldn't really be a way to detect this, since again we don't have access to the renderer to check if the surface is still bright or not.

oDDity is right - blackjacking every single guard in the level then running around free is no different than killing them all. I have a lot of fun on the missions where the blackjacking is restricted to a certain number. Way more tense, movie-like exciting things happen as a result. The problem is, without that arbritraty restriction, thief is to easy to reduce to a simple game of walk-behind-guard-whack, for each guard, till the level is empty. As far as gameplay is concerned, blackjacking is just killing without blood. Hopefully with our ideas to make it harder it won't be so simple.

They did fail to create a true stealth game - If you practise at swordfighting in Thief 1&2, you can become proficient enough to consistently kill every guard you come across, without any significant risk at all. Once you have figured out the AI and the swordplay mechanics, it is quite trivial to ironman your way through the game, and only on the levels where it automatically fails you for killing or being detected is it a problem. This is why there should be no swords (or weapons in general) for the player - they are not the weapon a stealthy, weedy thief would carry, they unbalance the game and turn it into a FPHF (First Person Hack-Fest), and they are generally just daft. If you want to play thief as a stealth game, dont pull out any weapons unless you have to. To really up the challenge, don't buy any gear between missions, and fire off all of your arrows at a wall when you start the mission so you can't use them in the mission. Don't use your sword, and only use your blackjack in the sections of the game that force you to (there aren't many). Only then you are playing a true First Person Sneaker. Install the difficulty mod that Ombrenuit mentioned.

Make Dark Mod missions?

I have to discent with general opintion on this one. I loved Morrowind. I liked digging into the story and having to track down different people's opinions to try to get some sort of ideas as to what was really going on. I guess I could see how it would be possible to get lost, since no one person could really give you a definitive answer. You had to talk to various characters and read between the lines to figure out what "really" happened. Even then there are some uncertainties. I'm going to say this, and probably take alot of flack for it, but if you play the main game the whole way through and talk to enough people, you'll find that Morrowind has one of the best plots of any game in recent memory. It has more to say about our modern world and the nature of "history" than any college course. The term "Apographia" doesn't even begin to cut it. As for the missions, some of them were a bit boring, but I guess i enjoyed a great number of them. I enjoyed the fact that I could go off and ignore the main plot for a while and just work on climbing the ranks in some petty factoin if I wanted to. Even if you didn't like the game though, you have to admit that Bethesda are the masters of mixing computer generated fractal worlds and overlayed content. They always are struggling to find the balance. In Daggerfall there was alot of fractal (in the Elder Scrolls Pantheon "Anu") and in Morrowind there was more overlayed human written content (in the Elder Scrolls Pantheon "Padomay"). I was tickled when I figured out that the residents of Tamriel had a cosmology and mythology that touched in places on what there world really was.... Particularly when I red the Redguard description of the "infinite snake that curls around itself, eating itself" and the world as "its skin". Pretty cool tribal description of a fractal procedurally generated universe. Anyway, enough fanboyism for the moment.

Well, to bring it back on topic..... I'm going to prepare to take a few rounds in the "War on Violence" and say that I actually liked some parts of GTA: Vice City. There was just something about driving aruond a city at a breakneck pace, running fromt the police while listening to Kate Bush that I couldn't get tired of. Note, that I particularly liked the driving around, doing stunts etc... There were parts of the game, like the freeform assasination missions, that I just skipped because I found them too objectionable. Still, the driving gameplay was fun for me. I spent alot of time doing the ambulence and pizza delivery mini-games. I was surprised at that, since I don't generally go for much in the arcade-action category, but I enjoyed the "emergent gameplay." Now, keep in mind that in real life, I'm a peaceful person who does positive volounteer work in the community and doesn't own a gun. (Ofcourse, as a side note, in some parts of the USA that makes me irresponsible for not being able to defend my neighbors against the government) I generally prefer more intellectual content in my games, but I do put up with a certain amount of "crap" because I figure it is the only way the makers can earn a living. For example, I enjoyed the Fallout series of RPG titles immensely. The first one had a very nice tragic arc. However, to play them you had to put up with alot of gratuitous violence (which was kind of part of the plot, sort of). I remember when I read the advertising copy about "turn your opponents into blood sausages" I almost didn't buy the game.

Okay... I think we can take it as a given that people will want to create TDM missions starring Garrett, or even recreate entire OMs. But of course, including Garrett's speech files or any other Thief assets in a TDM FM would be a copyright violation. So how about this-- Would it be possible to code TDM so that FMs can use assets stored in the original Thief CRF files? I'm certain this would be legal. It's exactly the same principal that's been protecting emulator authors for years now-- they prodvide the emulator, the end users provide the LEGALLY OBTAINED ROM DUMPS (wink-wink). So for TDM, end users would just copy SND.CRF, etc. from their (legally obtained) copies of TDP/TMA into the Doom3 folder and go. The CRF format itself isn't even proprietary-- they're just renamed ZIPs.

Do you guys have any plan to include any sort of multiplayer support to the dark mod? I'm sorry if you have said anything about this before but iv always dreamed of a game like thief, though i know this mod is COMPLETELY different, but with coop so i could take on the missions with a friend.

I realize this is essentially stealing the idea from games such as Dungeons and Dragons and the like, but I'm curious of what you all would think of this type of game play mechanic adding a little more to the formula. In games such as this, the rogue takes on a role that involves disarming traps for his party. He has the ability to detect traps which become marked on the map, either on a stretch of floor that when walked upon springs blades, or flame, or ice, and the like or the same deal except on an object. Yes, there have been traps in the thief universe in terms of puzzles, but I think this could present a much simpler type of trap. For a trap indicator there are many options for a good rogue. Perhaps the floor around the one that is trapped sounds slightly different, warning the perceptive player that he may be in danger. Perhaps it would be textured differently or have a glint to it of some sort? Trapped items may do the same. However, this "trap" wouldn't do anything more then to deal damage of some sort to the player, restricting the wary player's movements across a floor if they try to avoid the trap, and keeping the player on his toes about grabbing all the gold in sight if he sees that it has a shine differently then others. Grabbing the gold would spring the trap if left armed. In the case of a chest, perhaps the player might be alerted that the chest is trapped simply because the lockpicking sounds (clickety clackety) just sound hollow, different, distant. They might know that after they lockpick the chest, they may want to open it from the side as to not spring the trap on their person, but upon thin air, safe from harm. Disarming the trap could perhaps take a more unrealistic route and just require you to use your lock picks to "magically" find where the lock on the track is on the floor or the object and disarm it. Another route for disarming could be throwing an object that would spring it a safe distant away from ye. This may have been discussed before and if so, I apologize, but it could add some flavor to some missions if used correctly (sparingly enough not to make the player overly cautious, but a few well avoided traps would reward the player for his cleverness). Thoughts?

I actually never took into accountability the fact that the ideas could be implemented by the user, I guess that shows my dependency . One thing about these is the fact that they can only really be effectively used in a campaign. The reason being is that it has to be something that the player encounters and is made aware of early on in the mission cycle, and once they reach some of the later levels, they will be on their toes about traps. It's part of the reward theory of game design, but if implemented in only one random level, the player can't really stumble on it and effectivly learn from the experience for use later because that knowledge would only have benefited him if he had seen it in a mission prior. Although my favorite out of the traps is the trapped chest and I believe would be the best to implement in my own missions because of its simplicity; notification by the different sound it emits when picking it. If these traps, however, were standardized for example, in the dark mod campaign itself, this is a double edged sword. These traps would probably find their way into every mission imaginable, overused, and overdone enough to drive the player mad.

It's very good, but the missions aren't nearly as cinematic. There are pretty much no scripted events. The overall objectives are very similar between each mission. HAH! Keep your opinions on the matter to yourself The reason for no MP is purely a workload one. The rest is personal opinion.

Well this is cool then. When missions start rolling out in a year or two, there could be a "Requires Legacy Assets" tag for FMs that indicates a standarized subset of the TDP/TMA CRFs must be present in a specific location in the D3 folder.

or you could make missions which are suited for coop

Yah, this would just be an extra capability for those who really want to use those old sounds/voices/whatever, but don't want to risk getting a cease-and-desist letter from Eidos. I've done absolutely zero D3 modding myself, so I have no idea how the asset management works. If you just rename a CRF to PK4 and drop it in the Doom3 directory, can custom missions access its contents?

I've been pondering the very same idea in my head for some time. That if Thief art, sounds, etc., can't be distributed, instead an application or script or design method could allow the original Thief assets to be used if they exist on the player's machine. Yep, I have no doubt something like this will come into existence, whether designed as part of original release TDM or not. TDM missions with Garrett and Benny. Ha! :thumb:

Well, the player won't actually have a body, so in a multiplayer mode you wouldn't be able to see each other. So the base mod won't have any, but anyone who feels the need to mod the mod could do it themselves and release a multiplayer version of the Dark Mod. At least Doom has multiplayer support, no one has ever been able to make a multiplayer mod for the previous Thief games because those engines didn't support it at all. Once the Dark Mod is finished these guys can have a much deserved break, and we can start making missions. I don't think it will be too long after that when someone decides they want to tackle multiplayer. At least, that is what I've picked up from other threads. I'm just excited by the progress, and that it will probably take long enough for them to finish for me to learn the base mapping better.

Do you mean no multiplayer in the missions you will be releasing or no multiplayer supported by the base mod, like for the lightgem or something

In thief 1/2 when you run and jump into a square window on a wall, you sort of sit there ducked. You can't crouch or lean into or enter the building - you can only jump off. The window is clearly large enough to enter - in real life. Are such artefacts absent in darkmod? And I'll presume here that I can recode the physics part of the distribution to include some of my engineering knowledge and release my missions with "upgraded" physics...