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I have been attempting to create a skin for a model. No matter how closely I follow the wiki tutorial, I can't seem to get it to work. Here is a pic of the model directory, the skin directory, and the skin file I wrote. I even tried to make a standalone copy in the skins folder, in case DR doesn't like digging through folders when pulling up skins. Am I missing something? Am I running into problems because skins cannot be made for .ase files?

Okay... so... I'll be honest. The verticality of the first mission blew my mind, made me really pay attention, explore. But the verticality of this mission made me frustrated. It didn't help that I kept stumbling upon things, without context. Moreover, some areas didn't have anything, but were traversable, while others had a plenty and required not a clear and direct path but some convoluted route that wasn't obvious to me. And the size of the level... It took me 4 and a half hours to search every nook and cranny, find and complete all objectives and discover the loot. But that time was split between two days, because I could only play before work, and I experienced CTD whenever I'd draw a bow inside the manor. So by the end I ran around like a headless chicken, trying to remember where I've left this NPC and where is that NPC and where the safe is... Now... some things really gave me a pause. For example, the direction of our poor LT's life XD Or the fact that we had such a horrible person working for our Target. But I really liked the story here. All the twists, the clues (that little thing in the cabinet damn), I liked using Thief's Highway... but man was I lost there. I would like to know... how was I supposed to find the Barrel? I had no real reason to actually head there aside from "I see a window open". But since I was thorough, I found the Barrel there before the readable mentioning it in the same place. Was there a hint pointing me there to begin with? (Did I miss it, like the combination to the safe the first time?) Also - the Safehouse dude was freaking me out.

Looks great, thank you! That looks even better: It's where DeusEx had its player status screen, feels even more like TDM with DX characteristics now I think I placed it above the light gem as that's where player info was technically being stored, with the new subtitles covering that position the move is a great decision. By the way: If anyone wishes to continue and improve this mod, I'd appreciate seeing your remixes of it. I had it mostly finished last time on my end; I think the main issue was upgrades require items to be placed on maps, augmentations may not work on every FM without a way for them to automatically spawn in random places... my imagined solution was to also offer upgrades based on loot gathered or other achievements but I never got around to adding that.

Maybe it's less time to let him do his work and re-checking the change history afterwards if necessary than to make him post edits here and insert them manually every time guys...

WOAH! Great work!! It's kinda funny that you have to take a potion, but that could actually be an interesting thing you buy at an in-game shop. maybe to herd zombie AIs? Anyway, this is cool and I hope you share a test map please

I wrote earlier that I owe this masterpiece a review, so... Here is my detailed review of this groundbreaking and seminal Mission Fan. SPOILERS ABOUND ! TDM PLAYER BEWARE, YOU'RE IN FOR SPOILERS AND MAYBE EVEN A SCARE ! This mission... subverted my expectations. Starting with the briefing video. Not since the days of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns have I seen such daring subversion right at the start. You're expecting one thing... then, bam ! I tried everything to infiltrate the mansion from the outside ! No luck ! Well and truly, expectations subverted ! NPC dialogue heard from the inside... stellar ! Brought a tear to my eye. Or was it just one of the raindrops that fell on my head ? What else brought a tear to my eye ? The senselessly slaughtered guard at the courtyard ! Clearly, a cautionary story that he who grabs a sword... and yet, forgets to dim his lantern, the fool... shall die by someone's sword or arrow. Figures ! That you hid the masterful sidequest of collecting the pennies-for-a-thought from the rather racy fountain, in order to later thoughtfully redistribute them to the poor and hungry street urchins of Bridgeport, is nothing short of design brilliance worthy of at least a two hours long, detailed GDC lecture. I'd watch such a lecture on a loop, 24 hours a day, twelve times a day. Brilliant stuff ! Ah, the side-yard, with steps and a basement entrance that looked and felt straight out of Thief II's opening mission, Running Interference... Could the cunning TDM homages to the classics get any better ?! Could they ? Well, soon enough, I discovered that, yes, they could get even better ! There was an even more amazing homage that I didn't expect ! Read on to find out what... The chefpick was... indescribably cool. I now yearn for it to be included in every single FM. The classic lockpicks feel completely passé. I knocked out both NPCs and... what is this unexpected social commentary ?! The knocked-out have names ?! I applaud your deeply incisive observation, worthy of a skilled chef with a kitchen knife, that the NPCs in games are not mere fictional constructs, but fictional beings with names, hearts and souls ! I confess, upon this moving revelation, I started shedding tears so uncontrollably, I nearly had to quit playing the mission. Yet, I pressed on, heartened and refreshed by such displays of humanity in a work of stealthy interactive fiction ! The commentary was no less subtle and stealthy, I tell you ! As subtle as the protagonist's gritty, grounded accent ! Two different entrances into the local vent system... I... I can't even... So many possible routes of entry. Truly, in the grand tradition of the TDM immersive sim design philosophy ! The choice of giving the intrepid protagonist a temporary rat companion, bribable by cheese, who fetches priceless hidden loot, was equal parts innovative and a hard-hitting social commentary on the abuse of animals for theft and burglary, and people "ratting out" their fellow tenants by revealing the hiding places of their priceless belongings ! I was deeply impressed ! I was thoroughly amazed ! You even had my 'stalgia sense tingling ! Why ? That minor element of your FM even reminded me of the old but gold Thief II FM campaign The Flying Age: The Abominable Flying Machines of Dr. Zeppelinger, where you escape a prison cell by giving a mouse a bit of cheese you've managed to find, and the mouse then provides you with a means of escape. I have scarcely ever seen such a wonderful duo of homages to other past LGS missions and fan missions ! Of course, the shocking revelation with the undead in the freezer was an even more biting commentary on the undead precariat of today, and their ruthless and dehumanizing exploitation by The Man, maaan, the snobby culinary establishment. Undeadkind merely want to roam their abandoned tombs and catacombs in peace (pieces ?) and get a bite or two out of a stray vagrant or drunk guard every now and then, no big deal. Society needs to be more charitable to undeadkind ! And you've even included a gas arrow up in the rafters ! You well and truly know your audience, as I'm an old, die-hard gas arrow collecting enthusiast. I am a sophisticated, yet simple man: I see a gas arrow in Thief or The Dark Mod, I immediately grab it, owing to its rarity. Thank you for such generous mission design. To cut a long story short, I have had a thorough, engrossing and moving cultural experience with this short-but-dazzling mission ! In the shadowed alleys of TDM fan mission sites, I have crossed paths with missions that were ruthlessly difficult and confounding, yet rewarding, but never have I played a mission this... authentic... avantgarde... thought-provoking... It even made me feel hungry ! Riveting, simply riveting. Like working on the skeleton of a 1930s Art Deco skyscraper. Ultimate verdict: 22 frommages out of 20, with a happy cheese-filled rat as the cherry on the top. (But what kind of frommage ? Cheddar ? Swiss cheese ? Gouda ?! I dunno. Don't have a cheesemaking degree.) In other words, I cannot rate this mission other than with the Chef Excellence Award for... Excellence ! *chef's kiss* Le Mission Légendaire Magnifique ! Roll over, Requiem ! Roll over, Crucible of Omens ! Roll over, Iris ! This, this... is the pinnacle TDM fan mission of all time.

@Petike the Taffer Well that was challenging, but I managed to get it to work with a dummy AI (but with a warning message). Using hide doesn't work on the dummy, as each time it moves it un-hides. You need to use an invisible model. I used the atdm:ai_base, which surprisingly worked with these spawn args so it doesn't interfere with the player position and is inert as possible. Then you just need to trigger a follow script, e.g.: void follow_dummy() { $dummy.setOrigin($player1.getOrigin()); $dummy.hide(); //not sure why this is needed, but it stopped working when I deleted it sys.wait(0.2); //needed to prevent game from hanging thread follow_dummy(); } Alternatively, I tried to just bind the dummy to the player instead, but then the follower ai wouldn't follow me.

I suppose your right. The Dark Mod was originally made to be a challenge for those familiar with the Thief games, in terms of difficulty and perhaps lower in accessibility to the newer players. It wasn't meant to be a re-creation of what its like to fight or sneak or stealth takedown enemies at all of those games or to mimick real life in anyway. Its just supposed to put all our skills to the test. With that said, I sorta wish the dark mod took a different turn and made the gameplay and difficulty more organic and natural, rather than always relying on bumping it up by forcing certain rules on myself when playing. Like no tools except lockpicks, no KO's, and no killing any human NPC's, put everything back where it was except loot, and keep being spotted to a minimum by only moving around when the enemies our out of sight if I can help it. Your mod is certainly a improvement by a significant margin because its got some consistency that I appreciate And its also got a whistle and peek through doors Great work of course.

Hey @MirceaKitsune Things can get pretty busy above the lightgem and I moved the HUD to the top right corner of the screen. The modded gui file is attached to this post. I hope you resume work on this promising mod someday! player_augmentation.gui

In order for the keys to spawn, you have to get hit by the elementals in the correct order (the order of the mushrooms lined up). So if the first elemental didn’t work (because you’re running an older version of TDM), you won’t get any keys. So you had no choice but to skip the whole thing.

Thanks a lot for your work on updating this.

yes, I can see what I need to do but can't accomplish it. I can't drop the item from inventory, it can't be used on plates or anything in the area... updated to 2.12 and got it to work. might have also been user error

I've seen fun workarounds like that in other game modding as well. Years ago, maybe even a decade, some fella who was making a mod for Mount & Blade over at the Taleworlds forums revealed that he put invisible human NPCs on the backs of regular horse NPCs, then put the horse NPCs inside a horse corral he built for one of his mod's locations/scenes and then did some minor scripting, so the horses with invisible riders would wander around the corral. The end result was that it looked they're doing this of their own will, rather than an NPC rider being scripted to ride around the corral slowly. Necessity is the mother of invention. I don't know about the newest Mount & Blade game, but the first generation ones (2008-2022) apparently had some sort of hardcoded issue back in the earlier years, where if you left a horse NPC without a rider in its saddle, the horses would just stand around and wait and you couldn't get them to move around. Placing an invisible rider in their saddles suddenly made it viable again, at least for background scenes, of riderless horses wandering around, for added atmosphere. First generation M&B presumed you'd mostly be seeing horses in movement with riders, and the only horses-wandering-loosely animations and scripting were done for situations when the rider was knocked off their horse or dismounted in the middle of a battle. Hence the really odd workarounds. So, an invisible NPC trick might not be out of the question in TDM, even though you could probably still bump into it, despite its invisibility.

That's the exact one I meant. I've tried it in my FM (a wait node converted into a follow node), but it doesn't seem to work once the character reaches the spot where it's supposed to trigger. The character just stands and waits in place, as usual or as with the wait node. Well, I don't really need a follow node in the FM I'm currently making, so I'll still have plenty of time to wait until a fully functional follow node becomes available. (There's also some potential path node workarounds if it doesn't get resolved, anyway.) Thanks, Amadeus. Interesting. The FM I might make in the future that might need the follow type node is still really far away, so it's unimportant now.

this sounds like something that'll need a custom def. I know you can bind lights to the player and a few other things; I feel like this should work too, but experimentation will be needed. If I have time today or tomorrow I might look into it

Darn - I was hoping you had somehow figured it out :-(. It's a bit weird that it doesn't work. The entity description even says: Think I'll raise a bug report - there doesn't seem to be anything in there about it now.

Oh shoot, I misread, sorry. No I haven't gotten that to work

I think what @grodenglaive meant was it doesn't work if the 'lead AI' is the player. At least that's my experience as well. Have you managed to make that work?

btw, the path node "path_follow_actor" is supposed to do just that, but it doesn't work (at least in TDM 2.11).

Having completed all missions (except the very recent ones) I find TDM not challenging at this stage. If I want get any enjoyment on a second play-through of a mission I set my own rules and I roll-play it. Here is where optional skills / add-ons / challenges / fundamental changes come into play. I wish missions wouldn't resort so often to no BJ or no kills and allow me chose who I want to be in any difficulty. I wish TDM had real challenges built-in. @STiFU is up to something, and I am looking forward to his updates on the progress. What I really want to say is that mods - as long as they serve a purpose and work - will find their audience, regardless of whether you use them or not.

I plan to gradually try out all or most of the different path node types and adjust them depending on the interaction. Though I don't plan to use it in this particular mission, I have a keen interest in the follow type, as I'll want an NPC to follow the player character in another, future FM I'd like to create. Never too soon to try out various functions while I'm already learning new FM-building skins after a long hiatus. Thank you for the suggestion. I completely forgot about the location system ambients as an option ! A few years back, when I was testing various stuff in DR, I did actually use that approach instead, once or twice. I haven't used DR much in recent years, so I eventually forgot about setting it up that way. Acknowledged, and I'll look into it. It'll save a lot of time concerning the audio side of the mission. My first few missions won't have much a natural environment, they'll largelly be small and focused on buildings or urban spaces, so I won't need to bother with detailed audio for rivers yet. I have an outdoor FM planned for later (it's in the pre-production phase), and I'll have a good reason to study it in greater detail. It's actually okay, I don't reallt need rectangular speakers. Given that I've been reminded I can set a main ambience for each room - something I did know before, but forgot, after not working properly with DR these past few years - I'll do just that, and use the speakers for more secondary ambience concerns. Handy indeed. A rectangular shape would be easier to remember. I'll just use the filters in the editor to put away the speakers if I ever the get the impression they're blocking my view. Also, I don't actually mind the shape all that much. As you and the others say, the size/radius of the speaker is the actual key aspect. I'm a bit disappointed it's seemingly not possible to resize speakers the same way you can resize brushes or certain models, though you can still tweak the radius numerically, manually. As long as I can work with that, the actual shape of a speaker isn't really important. My main concern is expanding the minimum and maximum radius areas to an extent where they'll be audible for most for all of the respective areas the player will visit, rather than fading away quickly once the player leaves the hub of the speaker behind. As was already said above, I'll use the different utility to set the main ambient for the individual rooms, rather than a manually placed speaker, and I'll reserve the speakers for additional sound effects or more local ambience. I've already added some extra parameters to the speakers I'm testing out in my FM, so I'll take a look at those soon, though I'll deal with the main room ambience settings first. I'd like to thank everyone for their replies. While I'm not surprised by the answers, I'm now more confident in working with the path node and speaker entities. On an unrelated sidenote to all of this, the same in-development FM where I'm testing the speaker placement and range was tested yesterday for whether an NPC AI can walk from the ground floor all the way to the topmost floor, without issues. Thankfully, there have been no issues at all, and the test subject - a female mage, whom I won't use in the completed FM, sadly - did a successful first ascent of the tower-like building that'll serve as the main setting. (That's all your getting from me for now, concerning the FM contents.)

If you can do this, I don't know how. But it's something I want as well and was actually going to raise it as a feature request. I think speakers are spherical so they model real sound which radiates from a source outwards. I find this doesn't work so well with some scenarios though: water. For example you want to hear the sound of waves lapping a shoreline or a running water sound for a stream, river or canal. If the shoreline or stream is on the longer side, you have to have a speaker with a huge radius to cover it and the sounds extends too far along perpendicular to the body of water. Or alternatively multiple speakers but then you have to manage overlap and it becomes a pain. wind. Same idea but vertical - if you have a long edge or balcony then you need a large radius speaker to cover it and it might extend too low so you hear wind noises on the ground. @Petike the Taffer If all you want is for a sound to fill a room, just use the location system ambients instead. But you can only have one sound I think, so you couldn't have say your ambient music and also a weather sound at the same time without using a speaker for one of them.

I wonder whether you can resize and reshape a speaker from a spherical shape into a rectangular shape that could fit in a room. I couldn't find a clear tutorial on resizing the speaker and altering its shape from the default sphere/orb shape. Odd. Maybe it's just a dumb pipe dream by me, but I'd find a rectangular sort of configuration for a speaker much better to work with.

Last night I got to play The Terrible Old Man. Nothing else worth saying that hasn't already been said. @Ansome Congratulations on your first release and thanks for sharing your work with us. Now do yourself and us a favor and bring on "The Raven" to TDM

I have the elemental issue. The first room doesn't need them for progress, but the second does. Not a single elemental teleports me. I used noclip to fly into the room to press the button and then ran to the exit. The third room had TWO elementals working. Orange and Blue, I think. But! In addition to the other two not working, the KEYS I need are missing in all four rooms. If I use "Show_Keys" command, they display them, but they're not even inside the pedestals. I bypassed that with Noclip again. The rest worked fine, every TP that supposed to work - does work, so I finally completed it. I liked it, but now I can't help but wonder what "piece of evidence" she meant On a fun (probably unrelated) note, when you get captured, you still have a blackjack and sword in your inventory, but you can't pull them out. So I thought my hands were invisible. Out of curiosity, I grabbed one of the knocked out guards and carried him inside the mansion... Yup, I still have him on my shoulders after waking up!