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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.

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 hope you didn't forget the (controversial) discussion about his implementation of a Resident Evil style save room in Hazard Pay. Or the change to the arrows, which one head shot zombies. These changes are anything but commonly accepted and wanted. Rather something he implemented, because he thought it was a good idea. Which is fair enough, but, it unfortunately leads to the lack of uniformity that I was talking about, when every FM author thinks he has to reinvent the wheel. Especially new players can't get used to how the game, weapons and enemies behave, if the behavior is different in every FM.

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

A House Of Locked Secrets: attached to this post are the Bow/Arrow, Blackjack and Shortsword scripts updated to 2.12. I didn't take any liberties. Blame snatcher if something isn't right. @Moonbo, @stgatilov z_ahouseoflockedsecrets_212_scripts.pk4

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.

Hey @stgatilov, sorry for the late reply. In looking at the tdm_weapon_arrow.script in A House of Locked Secrets, there is a comment line that says "Adjusted to stop the raising and lowering animations during a realm transition." From what I remember, when the player was switching between the physical and spiritual realms, if the player was holding a bow the lowering animation would play upon starting the switch and the raising would play after it. And so we modified the script to disable those animations during a realm switch. That was the only adjustment that should be present. I think if you look for the line "if($info_player_realm.getKey("transiting") == "0")" it should be quick to spot where those checks were made. Thanks! -Gelo

Also, I've built another console app, "datBounds", to visualize the bounding box around each bitmap character. Starting from your choice of .dat, .fnt, or .ref file, it generates a set of .tga files, e.g., stone_0_24_bounds.tga & stone_1_24_bounds.tga. You can optionally include a 2-hex-digit label on each bounding box. More about that in May. I'm using the results of this to understand the current complex codepoint mapping of the Stone 24pt glyphs, and develop the workplan and grid layouts for upcoming work.

Yeah, I can do that. Shouldn't be a problem, unless anyone has a particular objection to it being uploaded to the repo

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.

I used the mission.cfg feature in IRI2.pk4 and can confirm it works and they revert correctly after a mission change (at least for the cvars I edited)

2.12 we introduced the mission.cfg We just need to ensure that the cvars revert when switching missions.

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

I created discussion here and mentioned authors (maybe I missed someone though). Unlike the previous thread about main menu GUI overrides, I think the new one does not look aggressive . The main question there is why this was done, and how to adapt to avoid this problem now and in the future. Indeed, all the missions will be fixed by 2.13 even if some authors don't respond. Dev builds regularly break something, although usually it is done unintentionally. I added "known issues" point on the dev build, which happens pretty rarely. I apologize for the negative emotions this change has caused. Sometimes I am too rough in communications. Moreover, I am not a creative kind of person, I'm more a technical type of person. Thus I believe in interface boundaries, so in my mind the blame for breakage is always on the side that violates these boundaries. Anyway, I know I'll have to fix the breakage, probably myself if necessary.

To summarize bullet points: https://github.com/fholger/thedarkmodvr/wiki/Gamepad-support https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5400 Also an idea is having vibration while lockpicking: http://www.thief-thecircle.com/thief3/saamspreview.asp "Now, what are the differences in the controls between the Xbox and PC versions of TDS? For starters, lock-picking on the Xbox enables the force-feedback on the controller, so you feel different levels of “rumble” as you get closer or farther away from a successful pick. It does make lock-picking easier, especially when you’re in a hurry (while a guard is coming your way!) but you can always turn the rumble off if you’re a purist in playing everything to the hardest level possible."