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Black Parade is released ! https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429

Body awareness please. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20013-are-you-gonna-add-this/

Fully agree. Do it right, if at all. As I said, I was just brainstorming what other things could be done via optional mutators. Also, of course if a player enabled mutators, there's no guarantee that the mission if finishable with those, so there should be some form of disclaimer saying that FMs weren't designed with these mutators in mind and that they might not work properly. The existence of mutators should ideally never affect any mapper in their work.

If the "mission fails as soon as stealth score turns non-zero," that would not be good for ghost players. They might need to find out "how" they failed and experiment to avoid alerting guards. They might need to take those score points as a "bust". They might need to take those score points to complete an objective. Then, mission authors would need to encode exceptions into their missions, which would be a lot of work (if they decide to do it at all). However, part of what makes ghosting challenging and fun is when mission authors do not create their missions with ghosting in mind. Please see: Official Ghosting Rules: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148523 Writing code for these rules would be a huge undertaking. Ghost Rules Discussion: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148487 Creating an official mode could alienate these dedicated ghost players, because it would clash with what is considered ghosting in the community. Including the Stealth Stat Tool mod in the official release would be more useful. Or, making the audible alert states of guards quick and easy to recognize could help as well. For these reasons, I don't agree with an official "Ghost" mode. If the dev team were to do it, we should consult with @Klatremus so we get it 100% correct or not pursue it at all. (This ghosting bit should probably be in its own thread.)

I loved it. Awesome game. I faceplanted at the people who asked for quest markers in the Steam forums there... Herr, lass Hirn regnen. The game is so great, and so true to the original, because it doesn't hold your hand. When is the new breed of gamers gonna learn.

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/

I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.

Good catch. I fixed the .gui name, and added afterwards this brief explanation: The value here is a path to a custom video material shader. It is set at runtime by the engine, based on information the FM author provided in mainmenu_custom_defs.gui as, e.g.: #define MM_BRIEFING_VIDEO_MATERIAL_1 "video/tdm_briefing_video" (In older FMs, the video was chopped into parts, in which case the engine updates the value just-in-time. See comments in mainmenu_custom_defs.gui for details.) FYI, there is a similar system for debriefing videos.

Did you delete the mission folder under darkmod/fms then download the latest version?

Yes it goes around behind the player. It's a single body of water so it makes sense to merge it all into a single entity. It's easier to manage that way. I don't know if I really expect this to be fixed, or if it's even a bug and more a limitation. I thought I would raise it because the issue with the torches has plagued me for my last 2 FMs, so I thought I would raise it for awareness.

Public release v1.7.6 (with Dark Mod support) is out. Improvements since the final beta 14 are: Fixed a few remaining bugs with zip/pk4 support. Game Versions window now properly displays TDM version. Import window no longer has a vestigial off-screen TDM field (because TDM doesn't need or support importing). Web search option is now disabled if an unknown/unsupported FM is selected. If an FM with an unknown or unsupported game type is selected, the messages in the tab area now no longer refer to Thief 3 ("Mod management is not supported for Thief: Deadly Shadows"). The full changelog can be viewed at the release link. The de facto official AngelLoader thread is here: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149706 Bug reports, feature requests etc. are usually posted there. I'll continue following this thread though. Thanks everyone and enjoy!

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.

Beta 13 More robust TDM file reading attempts: we now try until we can access them or until a 5 second timeout If a TDM file is not found at all, we now continue immediately and don't wait the 5 seconds Rework auto-refresh system to be simpler and more robust: Refreshes run completely on the UI thread now Refreshes happen immediately or not at all; no more deferred refreshes Refreshes are not allowed when the main window is blocked or disabled (mostly if a progress box is up) If a dialog window is open (Settings, About, etc.) then a "lightweight" refresh (UI update only) is allowed, but a "heavyweight" refresh (FM list reload, possible scan and/or readme cache update) is not. Remove installed status from unavailable TDM FMs (those not found on disk) Gracefully handle scenarios where some or all watched TDM files or directories may not exist (clean install, partially broken install etc.) Ignore empty or invalid FM dirs (dirs with no pk4 files in them; TDM clean installs may add an empty "saintlucia" folder for example)

Good work! I enjoy short missions because things are nice and focused - you get in, you get out. Also I tend to do better with the loot amounts and I was able to get all the loot without too much trouble, which is rare for me. If I were to make a suggestion though - I found the intro briefing sequence a bit distracting because it was so obvious the narration was pitch-shifted to make a deeper voice. If you felt the original voice wasn't deep enough for your needs, I would either get someone on the forums to record it for you or just leave as is. That's my only real complaint and it's not even about the mission itself, so pretty good first start!

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 11 Fix finished-on state auto-update was unreliable Slighty improve scanner title/author detect Tags are now named some whatever regular-version-looking thing to force GitHub to put the newest at the top

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)

Show me some receipts then. Cool features are cool because they create cool moments and stories. For example, mantling is super cool. If a guard is chasing you and there is a low roof nearby you can mantle up to make a clutch escape. And maybe then you find a hidden vent or something and your entire approach to the level changes. That's a cool moment and a cool story. Similarly, pinching out candles is super cool because it can create moments where the player needs to rush across a room and pinch out a candle before an enemy rounds spots them, changing how the player will approach the room. And I will freely admit, stacking boxes and planks with TDM's physics objects system is super cool. It opens up a lot of platforming possibilities. But where is the equivalent for the ragdoll bodies or being able to pick up and turn over every apparently-not-silver teapot? Ragdoll bodies could be cool if, for example, you could stuff bodies into chests or under beds to hide them. However I don't think anyone does that. Usually it won't work because the body won't fit and you will make a huge racket in the process of trying. In fact it is super-lame because it seems like TDM should allow that kind of gameplay with the ragdolls feature, but it doesn't. Same with object manipulation. What does picking up and manipulate every (non-valuable) plate, hat, cup, and apple actually let you do? You can throw them to distract guards, but that would also be true if they just went into your inventory, like bottles in other stealth games. There could also be loot or important items hidden under them, except in practice it can't be anything important because TDM's object selection is imprecise and its collisions tend to send objects flying or clipping into the world. So what we actually gets is coins and purses hidden under hats... gripping. Edit: Note, I'm not saying these gimmicky features should be removed though. That would break back compatibility with older missions, which no one wants. But we should stop giving object manipulation place-of-pride over more impactful mechanics like shouldering bodies in our tutorials, FMs, and default control bindings.

I'd like to better understand what you want. The design of dragging bodies is to hold frob (key down) to drag and release frob (key up) to let go. That way it's impossible to walk away while unintentionally dragging a body. Plus, it's quick to grab and move several body limbs in rapid succession. This is thought to provide a better experience, especially for new players. Towards the beginning of this thread, I created a "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior" cvar. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22198-feature-proposal-frob-to-use-world-item/&do=findComment&comment=487580 "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior", default:"1" Which drag body behavior? 1 --- on frob key up, drop body (limb). 0 --- on second frob, drop body (limb), TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. That cvar was removed shortly afterwards, because it was said that it wasn't needed. With that cvar set to 0, a second frob would be required to let go of the body. Is that the behavior that you want? If so, I can add that cvar back. Also, I saw elsewhere that you want the ability to revert back to the old way. If you mean that all of the controls match TDM 2.11, that can be done with "tdm_frobhold_delay 0" and there will be a menu setting to disable it as well.

Okay, now this is a super cool idea! Social roleplay always felt a bit underdeveloped in immersive sims of Looking Glass descent, but that's a thoroughly understandable compromise. Social roleplay potentially makes the NPC decision tree logic and sound/animation requirements explode in complexity, such that not even AAA game makers generally want to touch it. But there is new technology around now that I think can overcome a lot of those difficulties quite economically. This is something I really hope will be picked up and start rapidly evolving for TDM in the near future. But for now some initial reactions: It's quite sensible to just use headgear to simplify matters with the player model. Maybe as this evolves more the guard disguise could be a helmet plus sur-coat/tabard. That would be plausible for the PC to quickly slip on and would not change his/her arms, but it would make a more believable disguise. And it could be even more plausible by introducing light-armored variant guards wearing sleeves and gloves like the PC! A similar civilian set might be a wide-brim hat and an over-coat or great-cloak. I unfortunately don't have time (or skills) to dig into this now, but I'd love to know more about the implementation: Does it it make you more visible to NPCs that are against your purloined team? That seems like a reasonable balance concession. Does it take time to put a disguise on or off, and do you need to be concealed for it to work? Does doing thief-y things like stealing (from nobles) or mantling around like a damn-acrobat make your disguise degrade faster? I wouldn't expect that level of complexity with only 3 days work, but it would be cool. Speaking of complexity, it seems like you could evolve this further to give each NPC an individual suspicion meter for each player disguise. Then you could do away with the artificial suspicion meter and have more sophisticated roleplay situations. I am excited to see this develop, and I really hope it can soon find a home in some future FMs!

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.

@CountMorillonite You are using a version of the mission which uses "Rhand" instead of "Righthand". This version seems to be quite old and no longer supported. I tracked down a copy of your version to taffersparadise.co.uk. Perhaps there are other copies of this obsolete version out there in other sites. Close TDM, delete the fms/flakebridge folder and re-download the mission from the built-in downloader, which is the most reliable source. Cheers!

There was an in-game button to delete a mission. It was removed because mappers sometimes accidentally clicked it for their WIP missions, which resulted in removing months of their work. Since the feature itself is not much needed anyway, we removed it. In principle, you can simply delete the fms/qwerty directory manually. One possible issue is that a record in missions.tdminfo will remain. Maybe it will be deleted on next TDM start (there is some kind of cleanup), maybe not --- then it will retain some info when you reinstall the mission back.

I noticed that too. I'm definitely wanting to add a second URL field at a minimum, or per-game as you say. It'd be cool to be able to just go straight to the forum thread too, which I could do if I got it from that wiki page. I'm just nervous about getting stuff programmatically from the edit section of a wiki page, that just seems like it could change and the url is like some &action=edit which isn't an explicit filename (it's a command to generate a page maybe?) so maybe that could change too? If the text in the source code box were accessible by itself in some explicit file I guess I'd feel less apprehensive. Then again I'm totally inexperienced when it comes to web stuff. For example, http://missions.thedarkmod.com/available_missions.xml is where TDM itself gets the available FMs list from, though that list doesn't have any forum links or much extra info. Although incidentally I could use it to populate the FM titles, authors and dates instead of a local scan, maybe get a bit more accuracy.

Many thanks for supporting The Dark Mod, @FenPhoenix ! Web searches narrow results by site ttlg.com, you could make an exception for TDM FMs... EDIT - Ouch, my bad: it can be configured in the settings. Regardless, perhaps this is the time to have per-game search results settings with some defaults.