Search the Community

Yeah I would say I agree with @stgatilov - while I think it does work as is you probably need less movement of the blackjack to make the indicator effective and the shorter the animation that still fulfills the intended purpose the better probably. Though the visibility issue in dark area makes sense - I haven’t really run into this personally yet so couldn’t say how much of an issue that is.

I just read@motorsep Discovered that you are able to create a brush, then select it and right click "create light". Now you have a light that ha the radius of the former brush. Just read it on discord and thought it may be of use for some people in the forums here too.

I think the reason the dev forums exist is to provide a place where the implementation of features can be discussed without getting mixed up with other debates when someone believes what the devs are doing is wrong. We often post public discussion threads for features with subjective elements like the frob outline, because community feedback is very important. But there will always be vocal defenders with strong views for or against certain features, or how exactly it should be implemented in their opinion. At some point a decision has to be made and be carried through, which is what the dev forums are for. Almost all of the threads are very technical, basically explaining and discussing recent or potential code changes with other devs. Its hard to say. Its a hobby the devs do in their spare time, so people come and go when they're in the mood and when they have the time. The team page is mostly accurate except for some relatively newer additions like myself.

I think it is a good idea! Our ingame mission downloader and mission view has long been subject of multiple improvement suggestions. Due to the sheer mass of missions that have been released in the last 15 years, things got really cluttered and especially newcomers will have a hard time finding what they want. However, improving the ingame guis is quite a task, so a web-based application might really suit this scenario well. Maybe we could even add a linke to it from our ingame menus, so user can access it quicker. Some more things to think about Would users be able to add custom tags and downvote / upvote certain tags, much like the system of Steam? This would also allow to add tags like "beautiful", or "difficult". Actually, the more users can contribute to this system, the better, because it will be automatically maintained then. The browser should also contain a flag for whether the FM belongs to a connected series of FMs or not and have the capability to go to the previous or next FM in that series. There should also be a flag for fully fledges campaigns. Some might like a flag whether or not an FM is "ghostable".

I have never stated anything like that. I for one don't necessarely see those principles beeing hurt by what I have written or the example I gave above. A fail-safe route doesn't necessarely mean that the route is one that can be taken by ghosting imho and even if you assume this implication, a setup could also be such that it isn't fail-safe to begin with, but can be turned into such a situation by a minor change by the player, like taking out a guard or a torch. It comes down on how you interpret those principles and how close you want to stick to them. Not doing it in exactly that manner, even if on purpose, isn't rebelling. I know the original games were ghostable and that may even be by design. Deus Ex can also be played without killing anyone. But in most situation I would claim that ghosting (or in the example of Deus Ex not using violence) isn't the easiest and most straight-forward approach to a situation, especially when playing the first time. In TDM fms this is mostly the case, and that's something I am not happy with. Others may differ in there opinon, maybe even the majority. But when we are talking about what makes a game enjoyable, we are talking about a mainly subjective matter anyways. Not everyone has the same expectations towards games and not everyone expects TDM missions to be an exact copy of Thief, even if the latter served as inspiration. And in regards to what TDM is based on: The main motivation for starting the mod as far as I am aware of was the disappointment felt by many about Thief Deadly Shadows, which is probably based on the same fail-safe principles. So the question is on whether said principles are as important for the members here as you consider them to be. That is true, I could have written that in a less polemic way. I just tried to express that the success of those titles may appear as an questionable argument if most of those series aren't produced anymore. This would be a valid point if we would talk about what makes a game or a mission better in regards to how customers experience it. That was what I basically read from your post. He worked on successful titles hence he know how to make successful games. Something I don't doubt, but what isn't the point I was trying to make. This is a hobby. I am not here to do something successful, I don't have to create something a lot of people like. This is not my job. I basically use this as a way to express myself. This has come up in many discussion involving you. You are coming from a professional point of viewing things (which is fine and valid) while others trying to have a good time so to speak. I just assumed that you already know that I am not talking about improving fms in terms of how successful they would be when sold. Maybe my assumption was wrong. In that case you are right and we misunderstood each other. Nevertheless I said that I know that presentation and that I understand what it is about. I see that this is a good approach for making games as a living and that it might be a good guideline even for hobbyists. But there are other approaches to game design as well, some of which are not as popular, some of which are mainly applied in other genres maybe. I just think it doesn't hurt to involve those or our very own ideas, too. This isn't rebelship. The point I am trying to make in many of those gameplay discussions is actually that I get the feeling that mappers often don't have a fleshed out strategy when it comes to creating engaging gameplay. (#) That is probably not even because they couldn't have one, but it is simple not their main focus when creating missions. All I want is to get more focus on that aspect, as in the end we are talking about a game, so gameplay has, at least for me, priority. Obviously they could do this by applying proven strategies like the one you are talking about and this alone would improve the quality of their fms. But they could also apply a different one or come up with their own. They just have to have a strategy. (#) Sorry for the wall of text. @DragoferAs you are a moderator, can this discussion be moved to its own thread? I start to feel bad for abusing poor Goldwells thread and we are clearly off topic here. Thanks in advance.

Because you obviously didn't read my posts carefully. And I am tired of repeating myself. But maybe this equilibrium helps: you can decide to not eat -> you fast you may have nothing to eat -> you starve So fasting and starving is the same?! "Play the game the way you want it." Who invented that slogan? Ubisoft. Or developers in the creation of a mainstream title. If you don't like the game, change some setting til you like it. Typical modern game design. And as you write yourself: it's like that for you. Is it such a burden to accept that others have a different perception. You are comparing apples and pies. The ability to take out enemies is a fundamental part of the gameplay. A savegame system in full control of the player is not. But it is ok for you to decide that they please you?! I don't say that every mission has to implement it, not even that it would be good if the majority did. What I say is that missions designed around this could be different from what we have now, both in terms of gameplay and immersion. Of course it will not please everyone, but current fms do neither. And if there would be a few fms which you personally don't like, but which others may see as enrichment, you still think it is up to you to decide that those fms are bad and they shouldn't exist?! I mean, the whole point of your post is: "I don't understand you so you must be wrong."

I think having the deadline be the 2.10 release date would also be a viable option, and it would make sense to extend the deadline if 2 out of 6 contest FMs (by goldwell and jonri) won't make it for RL reasons. This would of course require an expected 2.10 release date to be set. Note that the team recently agreed to wait with the 2.10 release until some time after the contest FMs have been released to see what bug reports appear when a wider circle of players has access to them. Regarding fairness - the contest rules IIRC didn't mention that authors couldn't team up or had to start from scratch, so we have 1 multi-author FM and 1 FM that was already in the works long before the contest. I think it would be good sportsmanship for those 2 FMs to adhere to the original 28th deadline as closely as they can - but ultimately we want to have polished FMs that enrich TDM, so maybe those FM authors should just list what they did after the 28th so voters can take it into account if they wish to. I believe this is mainly the video briefing for the former FM and my reworking of the "Hitman" script as well as bug fixes for the latter FM. By the way, I'm now also listed as an author for the FM started by Amadeus and Bikerdude since I've contributed substantially to its development by way of my offer to assist all contest participants with implementing new features and solving problems they run into.

Figured I'd ask about this here before posting on the bug tracker, there might be a reason why it hasn't been done yet. Let me explain my reasoning first: When creators are working on multiple FM's at once, each one will obviously be located in its own directory. Most FM's contain custom assets and definitions, when working with maps in DarkRadiant you need to select their data folder for additional defs. This is done by going to File - Game / Project Setup - Mission and selecting it there. The issue: Let's say you want to take a break from one FM and work on another. Each time you load a map from a different FM, you also need to go to that menu and select it from there, otherwise custom assets won't be detected and appear as missing in DR. This is quite a bit of an annoyance. Suggestion: Is it not possible to detect and automatically select the active mission from the path the map is located in? We know every map should be located in "darkmod/fms/name/maps", so why not automatically extract the maps directory and set that to "darkmod/fms/name"? If there's an issue with getting such detection right, we can at worst simply store this information in the map.darkradiant file, so even if the player needs to first select it manually the choice is remembered per map and automatically reverted when you load it. We could technically do this with the other settings in that menu, such as Game Type and Darkmod Path. Not sure how much we need it for those unless someone is working with multiple installs and wants the convenience. Sounds good if doable but the important one is the mission directory as that must always be changed with the map you're editing.

Got it, tested and it works! For anyone else looking to use this trick, these are the full arguments you need to pass to your shortcut and add after darkradiant.exe, obviously for your respective FM and OS: /home/mircea/Games/Quake/TheDarkMod/darkmod/fms/testing/maps/test.map fs_game=fms/testing Note that for thedarkmod.exe you need a different format for some reason, it's "+set var val" instead of "var=val". +set fs_currentfm testing But you can't use the Recent Files list to jump between editing FM's and have it automatically work: If my suggestion is possible as an option I hope you can keep it in mind. For now I'll add those shortcuts to every FM I'm editing which helps!

I just found this thread on ttlg listing Immersive Sims: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151176

What patch is that? Sorry, I'm very unaware of non-vanilla TDM stuff, so I really have no idea what exists, aside from the FMs. That sounds like the stats tool I was asking for, though.

Recently revisiting the forums after a longer period of time I wanted to check the unread content. I don't know if I am doing this wrong since.. ever... but on mobile (visiting the unread content page on my smartphone) you have to click on that tiny speech bubble to go to the most recent post in a thread. If you don't click correctly you'll hit the headline and end up at post 1 in the beginning of the thread. It's terrible on mobile, since not only the speech bubble is really small and was to miss. But also the thread headline is just millimeters away from it so you go right to the first post that was ever made instead of the most recent ones. Am I doing it wrong? I just want to go through u read content a d the to the newest post from that topic.

Making great short-form content is challenging in a way that transcends medium and genre. There are many more full length novels that people would describe as sublime, or life changing than there are short stories which earn the same praise. Likewise for music, movies, and games. The near universality of this phenomenon suggests to me that it is not a lack of skill but a fundamental limitation of information density that biases us in favor of more expansive works... So, yes, the most acclaimed TDM missions also tending to be on the larger side should not be surprising. But with that being said, we should try to recognize shorter experiences of exceptional quality when they occasionally pop up. Case in point, I'd direct any new players to Sir Talbot's Collateral as one of the best stealth experiences I've ever had. This despite being entirely contained to one quite small and mundane townstyle manor-house. The amount of interconnectivity and flow Baal and Biker managed to pack into one 3.5 story building (hardly more than 3 rooms wide and 2 deep) is just astounding. (I should clarify that STC is a small mission, but not necessarily super short, due to high difficulty and some hard-to-access areas, but still a great experience for a very reasonable investment of time.) Something also to keep in mind: It's not impossible to get a great deal of enjoyment, even from a deeply flawed product, if one part of it clicks with the consumer. For instance I really enjoyed no-target and no-clipping around the mission In Remembrance of Him, despite it being nearly unplayable as a Thief/TDM level. The dilapidated Romanesque architecture was super cool, and I was hooked by the unusual story it was trying to tell (despite some questionable twists at the end... and a writing style that screamed for the intervention of a firm-handed editor). I'd actually be as or more interested in having a list of bad levels with some interesting feature--worth checking out--than in another enumeration of the current best-of-the-best. Iris was great. Phenomenal! But it took me the better part of two whole weekends just to get the first ending. I don't have that kind of time right now. Plus I don't expect to see it's like again very soon. A few more mission like In Remembrance of Him that I could buzz around for 30 minutes, seeing some cool sights, would be more my speed. And maybe we could inspire some quick and dirty spiritual successors in the pipeline that would capitalize on the qualities of such missions while dodging their downfalls.

A@datiswous Ah yeah, well sorry, I was quiet busy and only visiting discord. First time here on the forums since months now I think.. Thank you for the subtitles. I encourage everyone who is interested in using them to download it from here as I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them myself into the mission. Again, thank you for your work.

Functionality was broken between 2.10 and 2.12 dev. Currently you need 2.12 beta to make this work. Here is a test-mission with 4 possible briefing configurations with added Starter Location selection: text_mainmenu_briefing.gui - Standard text-based briefing nav_mainmenu_briefing.gui - Sotha's Advanced text + image based manual navigated briefing anim_mainmenu_briefing.gui - Sotha's Advanced text + image based auto-animated briefing vidintro_mainmenu_briefing.gui - Only Starter location selection briefing, for when video-briefing is used. The test-mission is set-up as a 2 mission campaign, where only the briefing for the first mission uses the location selection. This can also be used as a starter base for the functionally used inside your own mission. To test it, you have to rename one of the above gui files, so that the filename is: mainmenu_briefing.gui To make it work, you have to unzip the 7-zip archive inside tdm's fms folder. After that, you have to navigate to subfolder gui and unzip the file assetz.7z in it (I had to do this because of filesize restriction). Would be nice if someone could test it. Edit: I linked to it on the wiki: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Briefing#Controlling_Where_the_Player_Starts starterlocation_test.7z

Everything is closed source, there was a low property limit, and a mechanism slowly adding to that property count during mission making, so FMs don't compete with OMs too much (removed by Snobel years later), and the only way to make any custom content is to have a very peculiar version of 3dsmax (5.1) and other odd tools (e.g. MilkShape for animation).

I wouldn't be surprised if most of the heaviest FMs have plenty of potential for being trimmed down to a smaller archive size. Mappers who've been around for a while tend to have ever growing suites of their own custom assets which they drop in at the start of each of their WIPs, and I doubt everyone goes through them at the end of the mapping process to check which ones aren't used or have meanwhile been added to core assets. This is probably especially true in FMs that contain hundreds of custom assets, since they can only be checked by hand at present. In any case, we're fortunate to have considerable reserves both in storage space and bandwidth for FMs, so I don't think there's a real need for mappers to go out of their way to trim down their FMs (like we did with TPW, which was in a way treated as a challenge). Low-hanging fruit should in my opinion still be plucked, and as Orbweaver says, abnormal file sizes can be indicators of underlying problems that should be addressed.

Yes! Written in Stone is/was one of the missions I am currently playing, and this was the conclusion I came to as well. I think the story (what I have found of it) even supports this course of action. These are clearly not happy people. Killing them is a mercy. However it seems I am just not good enough at combat to kill all the enemies with the resources I had collected to that point, so I ended up putting Written in Stone on the back burner in favor of other FMs. At some point I'll return to it and most likely finish it up using notarget. The world geometry itself is lovely and I want to take my time to admire it without having to worry about enemies. In terms of trying to diagnose what made the balance between exploration, puzzle solving, and enemy presence not work for me in this mission I'd draw a comparison to Iris and Hazard Pay, which presented similar challenges for exploration and puzzles but did not make me want to genocide the entire map. The first useful thing they did was prominently signpost important locations for the player, often with actual sign posts in the game world, and in Iris's case with markers on the map. Secondly they provided lots of safe corridors (that were easy to find) for efficient traversal between key locations. These safe spaces also often included overlooks or vantage points with clear views of the hostile areas so they player can get an understanding of the layout and plan their next moves without time pressure. And lastly in places where the player does not have the benefit of signage, maps, or prior visual scouting, these FMs revert to a much more linear level design. (Like a vine with side branches, instead of a spider's web or tree like labyrinth.) Now that I think of it, a lot of my most favorite TDM FMs follow these rules: Requiem, William Steel In the North and Home Again, Volta 1 and 2... That's not to say I think being lost or needing to make your own safety (Rambo style) have no place in TDM. (Perversely, Down in the Bonehoard has become my favorite T:TDP mission, and it breaks almost all these rules at various points.) But in those cases where being lost or ultra-violent is the intent, I believe the change in playstyle should be supported by tailored story beats and a generous equipment loadout.

Higher-level alerts cost more to the score. It's not exactly rocket science. An extra point per level except the highest is even worse, and you can't count level-1 because half the FMs have the player spawn with level-1 alerts. Well more importantly it's not counted in the original rules for ghosting, which is what it's originally for. But to your point, not knowing where the Stealth Score comes from makes it even more arbitrary to the player. It has to come from something, and it's going to be arbitrary no matter how you spin it, so may as well explain how it's made if it's going to be there at all. Anyway it's well out of the way.