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Damn right, and I personally am going to keep making changes on how I want MY mission to be played and what I think is best for MY FMs. If that's not to your tastes, then I'm sorry these changes don't align with your preferences, but there are tons of other missions you can play that do. FM authors have ZERO obligation to provide uniform experiences that try to cater to everyone. Some people are going to enjoy these custom changes (I really loved the Resident Evil style saves, and I can't wait to see more missions with that) and other players are gonna be unhappy about them, and that's a crying shame, but it is not going to stop me from making FMs how I want them to be. Never once has a beta tester or a player brought up an issue about these kinds of choices I made for my FMs

Well that doesn't mean that everyone is d'accord with all the gameplay choices he made in these missions, does it? All I can say is that I never got the impression here or elsewhere that there are issues with the weapon behavior in TDM. Maybe apart from the blackjacking, which has been a controversial topic in the past. I can only repeat myself in arguing that the big problem is the uniformity of essential gameplay elements. The game just doesn't feel coherent, if every FM author changes important gameplay dynamics, and it makes it difficult and frustrating, not just for beginners.

Gosh you're right. As a result it only managed to snag spot #10 in terms of highest user rated TDM missions on thiefguild. Kingsal could make a mission where you crawl around like a baby in moon gravity and I might be right there with you saying it was a bad idea. It'd still be his mission so his choice.

Yep, moved on to greener pastures. BTW, what I quoted above from him will soon be untrue for Stone 24pt due to my upcoming bitmap surgery. Actually, the values in the current stone .dat file are already misaligned with what any archival font patcher script would produce, due to 2.12 tweaks with q3font & refont. I'll add a note to the wiki about this (explaining it better than here).

I don't think there's a consensus, or a general opinion that there are "issues" with the existing weapons. It's rather that FM authors take the liberty to change things to what they think is better. Or different. Or whatever.

Sounds great. Unfortunately you don't have to get very far in any discussion about either changing existing gameplay mechanics or about giving players more in game customization options to see why mappers stop bothering with the debate club politics and instead divert the energy to do what they can to address what issues they can themselves. There is clearly also a disconnect between how people think they feel about these changes and how they do in practice. Kingsal's missions seem to be widely considered as some of the most polished missions in the game, because they are a holistic designs that look, sound and play a certain way. As a result I have never seen a player complain about something like the run modifier being increased in a particular missions thread and it’s clear there are very few players who are ultimately conscious of anything besides that the overall experience feels good. So there is reason these get adopted by other authors. The players are entitled to their opinion - but it's the mission authors choice ultimately. And I can only speak for myself, but I came to TDM because I saw working examples of things I wanted in my mission. These were not “stock” or “standard”. They were achievable by virtue of the games extendability. If the day comes where we get locked out of that kind of control of our designs, I would probably walk.

I think this is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because the ability to customize exists does not mean most mappers will use it. On the contrary, if one considers the customization that are already available, we see that the overwhelming majority of mappers stick to the defaults. The exceptions are interesting also. Kingsal's the only mapper that readily comes to mind who habitually deviates from presets seemingly just for the sake of being different. However everything they make is clearly in service of cohesive visions. Hazard Pay, no matter how you feel about it, unarguably loses a great deal of its survival horror character if you take away the napalm arrows or the punishing save system. The Voltas don't need to use Thief style elemental crystals in place of TDMs arrow model, but the fact that they are there makes a definite statement about the author's awareness of their inspiration for their work in TDM from the original games, which in turn draws attention to other, subtler creative choices. I think it's also telling that some of kingsal's modifications have been adopted by other authors. As OrbWeaver said, "If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed." However, how can the community come to a consensus unless there are maps to showcase the advantages of new innovations? Requesting, or worse requiring, players to go in and manually change settings in order to experience a new mechanic is never going to gain any traction. Certainly it is not worth the effort of creating an entire map built around a new paradigm.

I agree entirely. Unless a mission is aiming to present a completely different gameplay experience (like making a rapid-fire archery-based combat mission instead of a stealth mission), I see no reason why things like bow aiming should vary on a mission-by-mission basis. If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed. If they are a matter of taste and there is no agreement on what the value should be, they should be configurable by the player and take effect in all missions. Imagine if every desktop application made its own tweaks to your keyboard layout or mouse acceleration because the author didn't personally approve of the default values. It would be a horrible user experience. Some applications actually do this with fonts, and yes, it's horrible. Potentially useful functionality made inaccessible because the author decided to ignore system font choices and DPI, and impose his hand-picked non-scalable 10pt font which I can barely read.

Here's a link with the Engine, Game and Input file in case anyone would like to dig in but don't own or have the game installed. Either for Performance or Quality optimization: https://github.com/honzi/files/blob/master/Config/Thief/2014/ThiefEngine.ini

As a player, one thing I'm also not too fond of is the lack of uniformity. I think mission authors should take into account that especially players new to the mod want to figure out how the weapons work, and, they will have a hard time doing so, if many missions tweak the weapons. Apart from the "WTF" moment, they will also not know what the default behavior of the weapon is. Also not a fan of some other things some missions introduce, like the different sounds for foot steps etc. Most of them don't improve anything over the default sounds, to be honest. They're rather worse, and irritate me every time I play a mission with custom sounds.

Some good news! Tels dug around further in his old computers and found some gold. Namely, a whole fonts directory that includes GIMP .xcf files. Tels says: "The XCF files esp. are what I used to manually draw the new characters (like adding dots to an u to convert it to ü etc.) They contain many layers with different characters, that are layout exactly in the place where they need to be for the patcher script." That is, for english stone 24 pt, one .xcf file contains two independent RGBA bitmap layers, that can be saved separately as two .dds files. A quick glance of that content appears to match the current distributed stone_0_24.dds and stone_1_24.dds. So I won't need to back-convert from DDS to TGA after all. @Amadeus, I think a copy of this should be added to the TDM assets repository. Could you do that? * http://bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/pub/scripts/tdm_font_source.7z

Hello all. I use a laptop with a small screen -- 14 or 15 inches, I think. So, screen space is very important. I rely on keyboard shortcuts and undocked windows extensively. The only issue I have at the moment is the aggressive docking of window panels. So, hopefully this is a reasonable layout for a small screen.

Do you disagree with the core defaults in general or is this a character-specific setup for your mission? Or is it a test or...? ---------------------------------------------- Sometimes we must take things to the extreme to see the whole picture. Let's pretend all these years mappers have been tweaking the player slightly and depending on the mission: You walk faster or slower. You jump very high or you barely get off the ground. You jump long or fall short. You can mantle high or low. You make more noise or less. The lightgem is more sensitive or less. You inflict or take more damage or less. ... Any thoughts from anyone about this scenario? I wonder how the playerbase would feel. My opinion is that the above tweaks are justified when a different universe is competently established. Or when a new, fully realized character is introduced. Otherwise we are tweaking simply because we can, nothing to do with the story.

"May his iron mold the current as we were molded. May his instrument expel all obstruction as we are his instruments." - Collected Sermons of Master Plumber Roto Rooter Few would dare cross the Bridgeport Plumber's Guild. Fewer still could glimpse their secrets and live. CC0 POLYHAVEN PLUMBER PACK BETA Includes: Fully modular pipe kit with optimized shadow mesh, two skin variations and near perfect grid snapping at grid level 4 Moveable plunger prop which is fully compatible with the AI weapon system Worry free CC0 license All credit to the great polyhaven.com for the original mid poly meshes - consider supporting them on patreon. I just decimated and then rebaked the assets as well as converted the maps from pbr and made the additional model and material variations.

The idea is that mapper can set spawnargs on map entity to override defaults from entityDef. If some entityDef is used only to dynamically spawn entity without any map entity, then it does not fit. I guess this is the case with arrow weapons, sadly. UPDATE: At some moment we discussed an option to specify "patches" to core entityDefs, but the idea never got far.

Are we switching 10 scripts for 10 defs? What if the core def changes sometime in the future and we then have not 10 but 15 or 20 missions from different authors with this def? What if, in the end, nobody is willing to change/enhance/improve the bow because of the trouble? This is the day people might look back to in the future, which reminds me:

Thank you for saying as such and clarifying the path forward with regard to these missions, I do really appreciate it

Yeah, as I said elsewhere, it's not so much that the missions are broken that is frustrating to me and several other affected authors, it's that there was zero communication to the affected authors that this was going to be happening beforehand. There is no reason why a message couldn't have been sent to the affected authors saying "hey, this will be broken in the upcoming dev build for X reasons. I thought you'd like to know before surprising you." Or even an open discussion beforehand about why these authors decided to make these customizations to begin with. Plain and simple, that's just a lack of respect. If you have the time to break these, you have time to communicate and see if there might be a solution to avoid all this (and there is!). And perhaps from YOUR perspective, you might think this reaction seems silly, unnecessary, and that this is totally fine, but from my perspective and that of a few others, it's not. EDIT: In addition, when creating or modifying existing assets, I and others take great care in making sure that these changes don't break existing maps. And if they do, we do whatever we can to own up to that and fix it. I do expect that same level of respect to be shown to existing maps so they aren't just broken with reckless abandon and no clear path forward.

Seriously, if devs are never allowed to make changes that break things, then the mod never moves forward. It's a bandaid, rip it off, get it done. That's the point of dev builds. And if people are downloading DEVELOPMENT BUILDS to play the mod and shits broken, guess what, they should have read the very first post of this thread. For the people eager to play with the latest state of development P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

Funnily enough, I was going to ping you and see if you wanted to draw the map. There is something included which could technically be called a 'map', but it sucks. The issue is the FM doesn't cover a huge area, but there is a LOT of vertical overlap so the options are a single map which provides vague guidance (the option I've gone with), or loads of tiny maps for each area (which would suit an automap probably).

You sure know but "missionspecific" can be anything: "byanyothername", "puzzle_solving_time"... Choose something that is unique to your mission not to conflict with any immobilizations in core.

Is it not possibly to just add a small script to these missions that only does this: #define ARROW_ZOOMDELAY 3 //VOLTA MOD Edit: I haven't installed the newest tdm version yet, so I guess this might be complete nonsense..

The training mission’s job is not cover the diversity of FMs across the entire platform. There are lots of stuff in volta universe missions which are not covered: explosive barrels, ammo crystals, loot you dislodge by shooting it with an arrow, completely different undead AI with a completely different damage model, etc Just like in northdale missions: neutral/hostile areas, in game shops, simplified lockpicks, etc Why would you need to be told any of this is happening by anything other than the game itself? That’s how games communicate: you play them.

You are confusing how the core game is packaged with a "standard". The “standard” TDM experience imo would actually be however the mission author intended the mission to be played. There are lots of different types of missions which as experiences deviate from anything packaged in the core game. You are not owed a disclaimer.

well, I guess this is just where we disagree. It isn't really a mapper's job to inventory and highlight every change they make because most players don't have an issue with it. There are a lot more important fish to fry if you wanna get an FM released