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I did play Thief and FMs, but I don't play it any more, except for major things like Black Parade. The clunky movement and antiquated Dromed editor is what discouraged me from interacting with it over the years. I regularly play and sometimes make content for TDM, because it has much better movement model than Thief. I know that most missions don't use it well, but if you construct your geometry (gaps, ledges, distances) using power of two measurements, movement and mantling feels fast and snappy. There's no need for regression in that regard, in my opinion, there's a need for assets and missions made with the movement model in mind, to showcase its strengths properly. Even if TDM originally intended to "simulate the stealth gameplay of Thief, many things will be familiar to veteran Thief players" the actual mod history was a bit different. The team came up with a mission platform that has its own identity when it comes to mechanics. The way assets were made might have been a huge mistake, but that didn't prevent the platform from growing. Since you like anecdotal evidence, noone other Skacky once said that TDM movement model was super clunky, after playing The Painter's Wife. It was really hard to convince him that if a mapper places geometry this poorly, and isn't aware what spatial measurements play to the strengths of a movement model, no movement model will save his mission. And there is no fixing of this problem on the engine side, although it's not the first time when TDM team tries to address the asset problem with engine changes, which I suspect will ultimately lead to even more problems down the line. In game development, things like core mechanics and player tools are locked-down first, in one of the pre-production phases, because all the levels will be constructed around them. Making changes in core mechanics in a project this mature is very risky, I assume you don't plan on going through all playable spaces in all released TDM FMs to check for errors. Instead of making incremental changes in fundamental mechanics, I'd encourage you to create a fork, or some kind of major version bump candidate, like 3.0, where all things could be revamped: movement, player tools, UI, new frob mechanics, perhaps with UI contextual icons, new training map to incorporate all that, etc. Once all new elements fall into place and create something new, with a map or maps to back it up as relevant changes, it will be easier to convince existing player/author base that it was worth it. I assume the existing fanbase is already fragmented, as a result of all those heated discussions around the topic. But with multiple versions available for download, the transition to hypothetical "TDM 3.0" should be easier. It could be similar to UE2 and UE3, and you could also use this as an occasion to draw the line for backwards compatibility. I know there are old systems and variables kept in place just in order not to break existing missions. This way you could e.g. redo the LOD system, implement lights using math functions instead of textures, etc.

Merry's Magnificent Mapping Co. Delivers Again! Chase Mercantile Screenshots Title: Chase Mercantile Theme: Bank Release: 2015/02/04 Mapper: Airship Ballet Special thanks: Nobiax for the custom loot models and textures, Melan for his textures and Xarg, Kyyrma, Oldjim, Phi, Melan, Cookie and Bikerdude for beta testing the map for me! Vault and courtyard ambiences made by me using this and this respectively. Build Time: 1 month and 13 days. Well, here it is! We're about 2/5 through the campaign provided I don't decide to extend it. While going back to change things with La Banque I was really enthused to see how much better I am at mapping already, so hopefully you will be too! This is the same deal as La Banque but bigger and better. It's physically about twice the size and a fair bit more complex with regards to objectives and the like. As a result, you get a ton of notes if you buy a lot of things! Having the notes in your inventory is integral to the system itself working, so hopefully you won't mind reading then discarding a bunch of pieces of paper. I've got plans for a somewhat cooler way to introduce the notes to the player, but you're stuck without for now. This is, of course, bundled with La Banque so all that gold means something now! It'll be on the mission downloader as Chase Mercantile so delete La Banque from your FMs folder because it's obsolete. I tweaked the former mission somewhat, spawning some new guards on expert and implementing a 500G/1000G KO/Kill penalty to your loot total across all difficulties. I also wrote a new briefing that hopefully doesn't show how bad I am at English anymore. It was only ever intended as a tutorial, however, so don't expect crazy difficulty there. There's tons of loot to be had, but even more if you're sneakier about it! The same goes for Chase, albeit far moreso: expert difficulty has pretty much 100% guard coverage, so good luck with that. Erm, what else... oh! I recorded the building process, so if you're curious or just fancy zoning out to some timelapses, you can see the map's construction from start to almost-finished here, although hold off until you're done to avoid spoilers. Note - Noclipping around like a mook will skip triggers that change things based on what you bought. It will completely negate the system in some cases and often brick your playthrough. Don't do it unless you've no desire to be able to finish! - As the note you start with says, you can bag up the loose loot in the vault into bags. Dropping these out of the starting window in the basement or at the alternate loot drop (if you buy it) will net you 3000 per bag, which translates directly into 3 gold for the next mission's asset shop. - Knocking people out will cost you 500 gold on Expert, and killing them will dock you 1000 on Medium and Expert. - Optional objectives will pay you gold immediately on completion. - It is impossible to acquire all of the loot in the map: there are variants of some that get swapped around depending on what you buy. Don't sweat it: there's tons anyway! Cheats Come to the thread because you can't find something? Look no further you casual! Obviously don't expand spoilers if you don't want spoilers. Where are the vault keys? How do I get into Chase's vault? How do I turn off the steam? What about the electrified gate? ...and the gas? Where is the sword? Where is the necklace? Where are the client records? Where are the financial records? Where's Turk Malloy? Look, you made a system I despise. The least you can do is tell me what to buy. Download links The Campaign Available on the in-game mission downloader as "Quinn Co." The Single Mission chase.pk4

Subtitle capabilities available in 2.10/2.11 are described in the wiki "Subtitles". For info about one new project using these capabilities, see the thread "English Subtitles for AI Barks". That project includes development of a TDM subtitle style guide. The thread here is mainly focused on ideas that would require future engine changes to implement. A. Automatic Switching Between Subtitle Languages Based on Settings This is a follow-on of a forum discussion between datiswous and Geep. It is desirable to have a standardized method for: subtitles to be authored in multiple languages, and so packaged and distributed as part of TDM and its FMs a gamer to dynamically select subtitles in a desired language The subtitle language choice might be controlled by the existing TDM language choice within Settings, or a separate "Subtitles Language" setting. B. Other Possible Improvements Requiring Engine Changes Most of these involve allowing the subtitle code to know something about game entities, and convey that to the gamer. Examples of useful knowledge: the ID of the speaker (or other source) the location of the speaker, relative to the player, the player's view, and other speaking AI. This type of information helps to disambiguate when there are multiple voices present. There are lots of ways such info is visually conveyed in other subtitle/caption systems, and might be added to TDM. C. Providing Subtitles for Existing FX These would have the "verbosity effects" subtitle tag. Beyond 2.11 capabilities, some of the location aspects of (B) would be pertinent.

You'll be surprised to hear but I don't quite get it either. Based on my understanding, there are a few confounding factors that make this a challenge. 1. We did a lot of work to ensure that the "included missions" were made part of the install so first time players would have a curated experience. Moving the missions back to the mission database might require undoing that work. 2. It is entirely possible to add the missions to the mission database while also being included in the installer but doing this will invite a few problems: 2a. What if the user updates the mission and then finds that their TDM install is somehow borked. They might run the installer to repair it and this will revert the mission version. If they fail to update their mission after this revert they might have incompatible save games that cause crashes and confusion 2b. What if a user starts downloading a mission update and at the same time starts a TDM upgrade ? 2c. Users opening bug tickets for a base TDM version due to problems seen in the included mission that are no longer present in the updated one, thus making it more tedious to narrow down duplicate bug submissions. 2d. Players seeing the missions on the TDM missions download page and downloading the package to install in the FMS directory then seeing duplicates in the mission list because the downloads page renames the packages with hashed filenames. All the above challenges revolve around potential user error and even though it should be obvious not to do these things, we have to compare the above to the vast swaths of folks who are begging to include TDM into Steam because unpacking a zip file and running an installer executable within a folder is "too difficult and confusing". One thing that we have the ability to do is change the file in the 2.12 installer repo so that if users run the updater it will apply the new mission. This change would not be visible to users so they would not get any alert about it. We would just have to announce it and hope that players watch for TDM announcements. I am doubtful anyone would want to work on it but I suppose that there could be some way to pass some sort of signal to the mission downloader when included missions have been changed on the installer side so they get a different update indicator. Still would be kludgy because you'd either be telling the player to exit TDM and run the installer or making TDM invoke the installer internally. So that is my take on "why" based on my own knowledge. Of course, part of my inability to "understand it" is due to my incredulity that we need to cater to players who are so below the bar in computer literacy that they would inflict these problems on themselves in the first place. None of this is an official stance just my own take on why the proposal to "let two updater processes control the same files in the same folder" has been rejected ( other than that such designs usually horrify programmers on a primordial gut level and if you mention that any program that does this you will see any programmer in vicinity instinctively reach for headache or stomach medicine ).

Ever since I worked on "Chalice of Kings" with Bikerdude, I have wanted to get flame particles with new particle glares into the core mod. My reasoning was that the candles have glares and the un-glared torches look mismatched. This proposal was met with mixed reactions, so (knowing the history of TDM feature proposals...) I have created a technical demo. You may download it here: zzz_flameglare.pk4.txt (fixed) Just rename without the .txt extension at the end and place it in your Darkmod directory. Here are some screens. Using particles for this is probably the wrong way to go now that Duzenko has an emissive light feature in his branch: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19659-feature-request-emissive-materialsvolumetric-lights/

Edit: in post 5 I discovered Whisper which does this task MUCH better. So don't use vosk. Some of the info till post 5 is still relevant for subtitle editing in Kdenlive in general. I previously posted about this in a status update. To make it a bit more in-view for the future I post the info also in this topic. I recently figured out how to make subtitles work for missions following this wiki guide: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Subtitles You can type in the subtitle-text manually either in the .subs or .srt files (in a text-editor) or use an video editor for that (recomended for .srt). What is also possible on some advanced editors including the free and open source multiplatform (Windows, Linux and Intel-Mac) Kdenlive editor is to auto generate the subtitle text for you from the audio or video file. You can then export to an .srt file that works directly in tdm. If you want to use the subs files for shorter sentences, you can just copy text from the .srt files. In Kdenlive you can install speech to text libraries from VOSK. For this to work you have to download and install Python. Info how to do the process of installation and usage can be seen in the following video (6.5 minutes): To sum it up: Configure first time: Install Python. (on Windows) During setup, you have to select Advanced Options and there mark Add Python to environment variables (super important!). In Kdenlive go to menu settings, click on configure Kdenlive. In that configure window, click in the left menu on Speech to text. There you click on the link to download speech models. On the website ( https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models ) you can click on a model download link, but keep the click pressed and move your mouse with the link to the configure Kdenlive window. Kdenlive then asks to install the model from url. vosk-model-en-us-0.22-lgraph is probably decent for most use cases. but you can install and test them all. To use it: First load an audio or video file into the view by dragging the file in one of the audio or video bars at the bottom (video: v1, v2 or audio: a1, a2). Click on menu Project > Subtitles > Edit Subtitle tool. You see an extra Subtitles bar on top. Now you select the audio or video file (it is sellected when it is outlined with an orange border) in the specific bar and then click on menu Project > Subtitles > Speech recognition. In the Speech recognition dialog, you select the correct language model and choose option Selected clip. After generation, you can preview the generated subtitles via the top right window. Make sure it is at starter position for playback. Using an audio file, you see a black background with the subtitles on top. Now you can tweek the position and edit the text directly in the Subtitles bar. This takes up the most time. Unfortunatelly the generation is not flawless, so you have to correct some words. Tweeking the subtitles for Requiem took me hours, becouse I wanted them to line up differently. Usually the subtitles are not generated as full senteces. This looks sloppy. If you want to add subtitles quickly without spending much time on it, it can be done this way. If you want to do it right, it still takes a lot of time in my experience. To export to .srt is shown in the following video: Although actually it's just one step: Click on menu Project > Subtitles > Export subtitle file. Alternativelly you can just save the kdenlive project and then the srt is exported as well. Every save will update the srt file. I might create a wiki article about it later. Kdenlive edit window:

The Thief2 FM "Mission X" was structured like that. But from the perspective of someone making or using a multiplayer system, it should be as general as possible so mappers can make whatever set-up they want for their FM, like that, or leave it open to the players to play it however they want. I think one way for the system to work most basically is have a coop mode (shared objectives, loot, scripts, etc.) and a "thieves vs. guards" mode (separate objectives, tracking loot count & capture count; it should probably be set up like the old Thievery mod) and those are pre-made so a mapper can just turn one on and tweak some things. Those are the two most popular MP cases for this game. But then if they want to, mappers could micromanage the parameters if they want to make their own mode, and the system should facilitate that. That was my thinking. But I think coop is the big one for us, since all of the FMs will already be set up for that, and that's the way I imagine it'd be most used. So that should come first.

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:

"...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm Ansome, a long-time forums lurker, and I'm here to recruit beta testers for my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short (30-45 minute), story-driven FM with plenty of readables and a gloomy atmosphere. Do keep in mind that this is a more linear FM than you may be used to as it was deemed necessary for the purposes of the story's pacing. Regardless, the player does still have a degree of freedom in tackling challenges in the latter half of the FM. If this sounds interesting to you, please head over to the beta testing thread I will be posting shortly. Thank you!

A couple more: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21739-resolved-allow-mantling-while-carrying-a-body/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22211-feature-proposal-new-lean-for-tdm-212/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22198-feature-proposal-frob-to-use-world-item/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22249-212-auto-search-bodies/

About Errors Running Recently-Created testSubtitles... FMs under TDM 2.12 Beta 3 Console gui parsing errors now occur in the FM's custom version of tdm_subtitles_message.gui, because Beta 3 no longer defines SUBTITLES_TEXT_BORDERCOLOR. To correct this, in the testSubtitles.../guis/tdm_subtitles_message.gui, comment out the 2 lines that say: bordercolor SUBTITLES_TEXT_BORDERCOLOR Or replace with the so-fixed and updated version of this file from testSubtitlesCynic, to be released shortly. Early testSubtitles... FMs created during the first half of 2023 may need additional surgery to run without error.

Author Note: This is a brand new mission and a new entry into the accountant series. There are some different than usual puzzles in this FM, so if you find yourself stuck try to think about your pathway forward in a logical manner. And if you're still having troubles then pop by this thread and ask (preferably with spoiler tags). This FM is brand new and serves as the first installment in The Accountant series, a few years back there was a small prologue style mission released however I felt that it did not represent The Accountant series so I decided to go back to the drawing board and do a whole new mission that's larger, has a better level design and has a story that lines up closer to what I plan to do with the accountant series. The mission is medium sized and you can expect between 30-90 minutes to complete it depending on your playstyle. Beta Testers Captain Cleveland Crowind Kingsal PukeyBee Skacky SquadaFroinx Voice Actors AndrosTheOxen Epifire Goldwell Stevenpfortune Yandros Custom assets Airship Ballet Bentraxx Bob Necro Dragofer DrKubiac Epifire Kingsal MalachiAD Sotha Springheel SquadaFroinx Available via in-game downloader File Size: 233 MB - Updated to v 1.1 (01.06.2018)

Here's the latest beta. I feel like this is about ready for a public release at this point. If no one has any bug reports or anything, and if I don't find any issues in the next few days, I'll start preparing the first public release. Beta 14 Matching game behavior on a bunch of subtler points. None of the below scenarios are likely to occur, but it's best to be able to handle them. TDM auto-converts FM file names to a valid form (lowercase, replacing disallowed chars with underscores, etc.). AngelLoader is now able to match non-converted FM names to their converted counterparts, so it knows for example "BaKerY;job.pk4" is the FM "bakery_job". TDM doesn't care what the pk4 inside an fm's folder is called. So "C:\darkmod\fms\bakery_job\bakery_job.pk4" will load just as well as "C:\darkmod\fms\bakery_job\totally_different_name.pk4". AngelLoader is now aware of this during scans and will not require the in-fm-folder pk4's name to match the FM's. TDM supports compressed FMs with the .zip extension as well as .pk4 when the FM is in the base FMs dir (hasn't been moved yet). AngelLoader is now aware of this, and of the priority order of the two extensions, and will choose the correct file when scanning/loading. In Settings -> Paths, the Backup Path area has been polished a bit. In Settings -> Appearance -> Show or hide interface elements, the checkboxes are now "Show" instead of "Hide", to be more straightforward. When scanning, the progress box will now show a message that it's getting TDM FM data from the server if it's doing so, rather than the more generic "preparing scan" message.

With that many maps what a lot of people are going to want is curation and quality control. If you want to know why Thief FMs are still pulling more eyes, that would be my guess. It's not even that the quality of the best Thief FMs are better than ours (IMO they are not), or that they have better tools for recommending them. The big advantage is that Thief has an popular and established lexicon for having those discussions. People know their expectations and can communicate them; and when they communicate their preferences they can reasonably expect to have them understood and satisfied. An excessive example (not biographical but a plausible hypothetical): The relevant point is that playing TDM is a major investment to the biggest demographic of people that might be interested in branching out. It seems like some people here don't recognize that dynamic. Some of us think that there are a bunch of quirky or vestigial irregularities in TDM that don't add much value to the established community and could be homogenized to to lower that barrier to Thief transplants. We are confused why you guys see it as so threatening. Personally I still feel like I haven't got a single straight answer. All that said on this specific mantling issue, I am actually sympathetic to the reactionaries. I love that the new speed was calibrated off of parkour videos. That was super clever. However the opposition has a point that our play characters are usually hauling like 25 kg of loot, gear, and body armor during a typical mission, judging by the in game models. And they are generally not in any big hurry. It it were me I would split the difference between the old and new speeds, or maybe go 70-30 in favor of parkour.

Announcing the release of the third William Steele mission! Summary Cleighmoor takes Steele inside Cleighmoor Gaol, where Warden Fielder likes nothing better than a glass of wine and some cheese, while watching a miscreant hang from his gallows. Steele is tracking down the evidence of his parents’ murder. The mission starts in the sewers, and progresses to Cleighmoor’s compound. The William Steele Missions Cleighmoor is the third of several Steele missions. Altogether they'll tell a story of corruption, greed, and revenge. At some point, I'll start packaging them as a campaign, in addition to the single missions. If you haven’t played WS1: In the North, or WS2: Home Again, I suggest you complete those before playing WS3: Cleighmoor. Download Cleighmoor is available in the in-game downloader. Problem with Suicidal AI Occasionally, someone reports that a distant AI commits suicide. Since one of the mission objectives is to kill only in self-defense, this fails the mission when it occurs. To avoid that, I've created a replacement *.map file that you can obtain here. After you've downloaded and installed the mission, create a new folder named "maps" so that you have: darkmod/fms/ws3_cleighmoor/maps/ Unzip the replacement *.map file and place the new *.map file into the maps folder. So now you have: darkmod/fms/ws3_cleighmoor/maps/ws3_cleighmoor.map This should solve the suicide problem. A new version of the mission will be released after TDM 2.05. Build Time Nearly 4 years. (This was my first attempt at a mission, and it sat on the back burners until being folded into Steele’s story.) I18n Cleighmoor is ready for translation. Thanks Thanks to the TDM team for creating a terrific platform for storytelling and stealth gaming. Thanks to my beta testers: AluminumHaste, Bikerdude, Goldwell, Xarg, Lux, Moonbo, Deadlove, and plotzzz. Thanks to Goldwell for his voice work on the conversations. And thanks to YOU, for playing! Known Issues This is a large mission. To ease the burden on older systems, consider shutting doors behind you as you go. If you experience low frame rates, please consult the Performance Tweaks page on the Wiki. Performance Tweaks For very low end PCs I recommend the following settings: V-sync is off AA is off Aniso is 4x or lower Advanced settings are simple/default Post processing is disabled Anyone having performance issues with TDM missions can put the following cvars into their Darkmod.cfg file. This will improve the framerate and stutter/chop when in-game, but may increase loading times a little. image_usePrecompressedTextures "1" image_useNormalCompression "2" image_useAllFormats "1" image_useCompression "1" image_preload "1" Important This mission requires TDM 2.01 or later. The William Steele story is heavy with readables. Please try to read every readable you find. Most importantly, Enjoy! Screenshots WS4: The Warrens Steele ventures into The Warrens, a dangerous area near Bridgeport's docks. You can find it here.

The real St. Alban was a pagan who became a celebrated religious personality, this All Saints Day 2010 The Dark Mod places its own spin on this mythical figure. Screenshots: Intro: "'Business' has been slow lately, even more so after most of my gear got snatched during a Watch raid... I've since been forced to hit the streets and pick pockets for a living. But my luck was about to change, last night I was approached by a red hooded figure with a proposition... As we sat down in a dark corner of a nearby inn, he told to me that the Builders of St. Alban's Cathedral in the Old Quarter had recently unearthed a discovery that might lead to the final resting place of some saint." " But before I do anything, I need to get my tools and stash from the evidence room at the local watch station." "with the hawks, doves will congregate they will drop honey from the cliffs wine will surge over the earth the sheep will wander harmlessly with the wolf then the wicked will rise, but to retribution" - 'scripture of St Alban' There is a new version out now, see the following thread St Albans Cathedral version 1.6 Build Time: about 2-3 months. Thanks:- Huge respect to the Dark Mod team for such a great mod and for all the hard work they put into it and continue to put into it. Special thanks to Fidcal, Serpentine and others for their help on the forums and to Testing:Ugoliant, Baddcog, Grayman, Lost soul, Bjorn and Baal (for doing all the Vp work in the town. Readables: Ungoliant and Mortemdesino for all awesome work on the readables. Resource: Fids, Grayman, Ungoliant - guis, models & images. Misc: Loren Schmidt - the author of the map I based the cathedral on. Info: # Like Thief2, some things are climable, pipes, wall vines etc.. You can also drop some of the keys, some door that are frobbabe mean there is another way inside - explore u taffer! # Due to TDM being a lot more of a resource hog than T2 I have been forced to limit the number of Ai in the mission, but they have better placement than my last mission. # On all difficulty levels the player starts with vertualy no tools/weapons, there are weapons to be found - read, read, read! # For the love of all that is holy, read the briefing otherwise you will problems completing the mission. Known issues:- # This mission will have less than optimal fps at a few points on the map, mid range DX9 card(X1900/GF7800) or higher required. # On low end PCs I recommend, V-sync is off, AA is off, Aniso is 4x or lower and that any and all background apps are closed.

Yeah, there's the last played date, but there's no (reliable) way to know if you actually completed the game on that date. What I mean by "no reliable way" is that the following would have to occur for the last completed date to be accurate: AngelLoader is running. You're playing an FM (say, Iris) on a difficulty you have not completed yet (say, Expert). You complete the FM, the game marks it as "completed on Expert" and writes that out to missions.tdminfo. AngelLoader detects the change to missions.tdminfo, reads it, and compares to its internal list. It sees that Iris' finished states differ between the internal database and missions.tdminfo: the latter has Expert marked, whereas the internal database only has Normal marked (or nothing, or whatever). It adds the Expert finished state to the internal database for Iris, and updates the UI. Because it catches every modification of this file and updates its internal database every time, it knows the difference in finished states occured on the most recent write. Thus, it could timestamp this and there's your last completed date. Unreliabilities: If AngelLoader were not running when the game writes the value out, then you have no guarantee of time anymore. Not only were you not there to catch the change event, but the file's last-write-time doesn't save you either: the file could have been modified any number of times (updating any number of FMs' entries) since the time of the updating of the actual FM you completed, and individual entries are not marked with the time of their finished state change. So if multiple FMs were finished between AngelLoader runs? Even if you went with the file timestamp, that's still only one. If you finished two FMs between AL runs, any information whatsoever about the time of completion of the first one is completely lost. Same if the game simply wrote over the file with unchanged data, that would lose your correct file timestamp too. If you finished an FM on a difficulty you have finished before, then the game will simply write out the same value resulting in no change to the FM entry in missions.tdminfo. AngelLoader will still detect the file modification and will still read and compare the file, but now no differences will be found, so it's impossible for it to know whether any FM's finished state has been changed, and thus it can't know whether you finished it that run or not, and can't datestamp it. The last finished dates of any FMs you completed before you set up AngelLoader are unknowable, period. It might be the last played date but it just as well might not be. We'd end up with a mishmash of correct data and guesses that may just as well be wrong as right. If you can't trust the data then I'm not convinced it's that useful.

Beta 7 TDM FM Scanner now uses a hybrid of local and server data for more accuracy. Titles, authors, and release dates improve. AngelLoader will auto-refresh its FMs list when new pk4 FMs are added manually. Localization packs (*_l10n.pk4) in the fms directory are now ignored: the game moves these to their appropriate folders on next start. I reckon this is now pretty usable. I'm working on an in-app downloader, but until that's done, you can use the game to download FMs and AngelLoader to launch them and manage their metadata.

Hello! I am going through the (painful) process of detaching some custom stuff I've made over the years from the base mod so I am not replacing so many tdm_ core files in my FMs. I'll be posting updates in here as I know a few people have used custom volta stuff in their missions. @Goldwell @Amadeus @Wellingtoncrab If you are using CUSTOM VOLTA arrows please replace this file: tdm_weapon_arrow.script - Ive updated this script with core mod changes - The only thing that's being replaced is: ARROW_ZOOMDELAY 3 // Shortened time from 6 to 3 seconds If you want to use the default 6 second zoom delay, just delete this file and remove it from your custom_scripts.script. If anyone knows a way I can change ARROW_ZOOMDELAY without overriding the entire file, please let me know asap. Thanks everyone

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

I was wondering if it's possible to make a program that generates a subs file from a folder with a bunch of srt files. I know this is too much to ask for, but I just mention the idea.. The lines are usely: srt "sound/sub-path-to-sound-folder/sound-file-name.ogg" "subtitles/sound-file-name.srt" Edit: I think I already figured it out using Python code. Just putting it here quickly so I can reproduce it later. import os, sys path = "C:/Progs/tdm/fms/mandrasola/sound/sfx/mandrasola/" path_sounds = "sound/sfx/mandrasola/" path_subs = "subtitles/" listfiles = os.listdir(path) for x in listfiles: print("srt " + '"' + path_sounds + x + '"' + ' "' + path_subs + x.removesuffix('.ogg') + ".srt" + '"') Generates: srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_guard1.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_guard1.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_guard2.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_guard2.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_lovell1.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_lovell1.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_lovell2.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_lovell2.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_lovell3.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_lovell3.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_lovell4.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_lovell4.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_lovell5.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_lovell5.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_lovell6.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_lovell6.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_ludmilla1.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_ludmilla1.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_ludmilla2.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_ludmilla2.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_ludmilla3.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_ludmilla3.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_ludmilla4.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_ludmilla4.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_ludmilla5.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_ludmilla5.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_ludmilla6.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_ludmilla6.srt" srt "sound/sfx/mandrasola/mandrasola_ludmilla_iwarnyou.ogg" "subtitles/mandrasola_ludmilla_iwarnyou.srt" Man this would have saved me so much time yesterday..

In-app downloading is turning out to be a lot more troublesome than I thought, and some of the auto-detection of stuff the game does is more troublesome than I thought too. So I'm thinking I could just make the first public release sans downloader and then take my time to develop something nice. Anyway, new beta. Beta 10 Auto-update finished difficulty when an FM is finished in-game. If AngelLoader doesn't have a last-played date already, it will pull it from TDM's database. But if it has its own, it will use that, because it's more granular (TDM's only goes down to the day). Sorting for the Archive column for TDM FMs now works correctly. "Play Without FM" for TDM now deselects any selected FM before running it. Don't know, just seemed cleaner. Think of a like a roundabout "download missions" button where you can go in-game with no FM and download some, I dunno. Added support for detecting in-place updated FMs, but only scan on next startup due to race condition with the pk4 Removed support for auto-refreshing on pk4 add, because the game adds pk4s individually to the fms dir before moving them to their own dirs, and we were trying to scan with each one (and failing due to locks and such)

New script for mappers: my flavour of a fog density fading script. To add this to your FM, add the line "thread FogIntensityLoop();" to your map's void main() function (see the example in fogfade.script) and set "fog_fade" "1" on each foglight to enable script control of it. Set "fog_intensity_multiplier" on each info_location entity to change how thick the fog is in that location (practically speaking it's a multiplier for visibility distance). Lastly, "fog_fade_speed" on each foglight determines how quickly it will change its density. The speed scales with the current value of shaderParm3, using shaderParm3 = 1000 as a baseline. So i.e. if shaderParm is currently at 1/10th of 1000, then fade speed will be 1/10th as fast. Differences to Obsttorte's script: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/&do=findComment&comment=310436 my script uses fog lights you created, rather than creating one for you. Obsttorte's script will delete the foglight if entering a fogfree zone and recreate it later more than one fog light can be controlled (however, no per-fog-light level of control) adding this to the map requires adding a line to your void main() script, rather than adding an info_locations_settings entity with a custom scriptobject spawnarg in my script, mappers set a multiplier of fog visibility distance (shaderParm3), while in Obsttorte's script a "fog_density" spawnarg is used as an alternative to shaderParm3 smaller and less compactly written script fogfade.scriptfogfade.map