Yearly FM Statistics

[Springheel]

We had as many FMs last year as T2 did this year. I wonder what would happen if we were on top next year?

 

[grayman]

Looks like T2 is in a casual decline. If we'd only kept up the pace in '11 that we had in '10.

[Carnage]

Looks like T2 is in a casual decline. If we'd only kept up the pace in '11 that we had in '10.

 

Quality should always be more important than quantity and I think that certainly is something we saw this year. Just amazing how high the 'standard' is and even authors who are releasing their first FM stick to this.

[pusianka]

chearleaders: GO DARK, GO DARK MOD, GO DARK MOD! DAAAAAAAAAAAAARK MOD! YEEEEEEE!

[Hyeron]

Well... TDM's faring better than T1 AND T3, even if you add the FMs for both games.

Can't say 17 FMs is a bad number by itself either, those things take time, even more so when one tries to get something worthy out. I'm more worried about the global stats. It looks like a depressing decline. Let's hope 2012 brings us more taffing goodness.

[stumpy]

well i released 5 t2 missions in 2004, and only 1 tdm map in 2011. And that was only due to having more free time in 2004 than 2011.

Edited January 8, 2012 by stumpy

[Tels]

Here is another graph with the totals. I am not sure, however, why TDM has 52..54 (depending how you count NHAT) missions in total, while the graph in the first post only comes to a total of 50.

 

 

And here is the graph with the stats permonth, you can see that the trend is still nearly linear.

 

 

The spikes seem to corrospond with contests, so throwing a contest is a sure-fire way to get more missions. Although I think sometimes the quality suffers a bit due to the deadline - quite some of the missions seem to get updated later.

[Sotha]

Looking at Tels' almost linear graph, I'd say TDM should be pretty happy for the current progress. Could be worse, you know..

[Melan]

Sure. But I think many of us were looking forward to an explosion of enthusiasm that would bring several Thief vets and new people on board. Compared to those expectations, the response may seem underwhelming. Or were the expectations too high to begin with? Hm.

[SeriousToni]

I believe as the Thief 2 hype still isn't ceasing (which is not a bad thing, I like Thief 2 and it's FMs) there will not be an explosion for TDM FMs. May they come over as they get bored more and more to try to learn some new stuff. Or if they see TDM FMs that will blow them away and they say "Wow, I wanna learn and do that myself!" (The current campaign for TDM has that potential I am sure).

[Sotha]

I believe as the Thief 2 hype still isn't ceasing (which is not a bad thing, I like Thief 2 and it's FMs) there will not be an explosion for TDM FMs. May they come over as they get bored more and more to try to learn some new stuff.

 

Or maybe it is about old computers. T2 can probably run very well with any ancient computer. When people upgrade to TDM worthy gear, there would be no reason not to try TDM. Well, except the purchase of D3, which is more of an emotional one rather than rational obstacle. (I mean it is dead cheap.)

[SeriousToni]

PC Minimum System Requirements

P4 1.5Ghz CPU (or equivalent).

384MB of RAM.

64MB graphics card (see below for chip details).

2GB of free hard drive space.

 

Lowest supported GPU is a Geforce 4 MX (worse than Geforce 3).

Radeon 8500s, 9000s and higher.

 

I just can't believe that so many people don't have computers that won't fit these requirements

Come on people, get over to TDM - it is more fun to build anyways!!

Edited January 8, 2012 by SeriousToni

[Shadowhide]

PC Minimum System Requirements

P4 1.5Ghz CPU (or equivalent).

384MB of RAM.

64MB graphics card (see below for chip details).

2GB of free hard drive space.

TDM is completely unplayable on such machine

Edited January 8, 2012 by Shadowhide

[SeriousToni]

Really?

Doom 3 was released about 8 years ago.. I mean.. People should buy a new PC in these years somehow. You can't get along with even a 4 year old machine these days

[jay pettitt]

Looking at Tels' almost linear graph, I'd say TDM should be pretty happy for the current progress. Could be worse, you know..

 

Unfortunately that chart only really shows us that as more missions are released (over time) the total number of missions goes up. A relationship that is (hopefully) self evident and didn't relly need explaining with a graph. The monthly plots may be more interesting.

 

What Springers' plot suggests to me is that interest in Thief Fan Mission authoring may well be in free fall (as evidenced by the decline in T2 releases) and that The Dark Mod is only picking up a few crumbs.

 

It's not awful, but it's not a rosey picture. Download info would be interesting. Given the staggering amount of work that has evidently gone into TDM it'd be a damn shame not to keep pushing.

 

My experience of TDM mission making so far (I'm having a first go for the beginners comp) is that the Wiki is astonishing. Bags and bags of praise for that. But otherwise there's not much out there, especially lightweight stuff for people who might be casually wondering about taking some first steps in mission making. Komag's series of editing vids are great - but don't get much past installing Dark Radiant and making a box shape. Vids (done reasonably well) are really accessible and easy to digest and seem to be what the kids these days prefer. I think if there were some tutorial making guidelines (making good ones is a skill we're not neccessarily born with) and every mission author was compelled to make a vid tutorial by pain of death it might not be a bad thing - unless the result was the death of all existing mission makers.

Edited January 8, 2012 by jay pettitt

[RPGista]

Though I would agree with you to some extent, about the non-existance of widespread video tutorials for beginners done by this community, one must also remember that the Radiant map makers are fortunately very similar throughout games, and its possible to follow many, many video tutorial series with a lot of great information, for games like Quake 3 or even CoD series. There's a ton of material there for those games on basic to advanced Radiant editting that would almost always apply to TDM/DR too (apart from clear differences in entity names and textures). Some advanced techniques are not present on Dark Radiant (such as the terrain clay modeling that exists for new CoD games, or the real time texture blending), but if you can follow Komag's videos first, and then read through the brilliant A-Z Tutorial by Fidcal, you will have, in like a day or two, already a good enough idea of how to extract the generic information from all those other tutorials - I know because that's exactly what happened to me.

 

Just look at this CoD radiant Detail made Easy series of videos, for example:

 

 

What could be cool is to have a Tutorials sticky listing the most interesting videos around with info that would be easily applied to DR, maybe I can start listing some of the ones that were useful to me.

 

As for the numbers, I wouldnt be so fast to jump from the fact that the Thief series community might be slowing down, to the fact that Stealth games are somehow loosing popularity, and thus TDM is going to have a hard time. Thief has been around for a lot of years and interest from that community is bound to diminish with time, as with any game. That has nothing to do with TDM, which is inspired by them, but has its own community and its own life span.

Edited January 8, 2012 by RPGista

[Sotha]

It would be interesting to use the linear regression equation to estimate the amount of missions in the end of this year, and then wait and see how well the actual released map amount corresponds with the calculated one. Let's try to remember to do that next christmas...

 

But mission production is not all. Also, if possible, it would be interesting to see the community size and map consumption as a TDM success metric as well. Can we see forum member registration rates for past few years? Has the flow of people increased (spambots eliminated, of course)? I have a qualitative feeling that just recently many new active people have emerged. Also mod / mission download numbers would be fascinating. Using all these data one could make interesting predictions. Is the TDM community and map consumpion increasing?

[Springheel]

I'd love to see mission download statistics too but I'm not sure how to get them.

 

I'll also second Jay's call for more editing videos. Might be time to update some sticky threads, or a "beginner mappers start here" index or something. That vid above is quite useful but who is likely to find it when needed?

[brethren]

It's amazing to me that there are as many missions as there are for T2. It's 12 years after the game came out, and you basically had the equivalent of two full sized retail games worth of missions released. Pretty incredible, not many other communities compare such a long time after the original game was released - not even sure if HL2 put out that many single player mods last year.

 

Point being, it's a high bar to measure up to. It is a bit discouraging though that in its 2nd full year, missions for TDM actually went down by roughly 1/3. I suppose it's because people are still learning the editor and/or are working on big projects.

 

@stumpy - who are you as far as T2/TTLG goes? Belboz?

[Tels]

Does anybody know how to quickly make a graph from some data that has the following format:

 

2011-01-01 1
2011-01-02 3
2011-02-01 1

 

The result should look like this:

 

|
|
|
| ....#
| ....#
| #...#..............#
|---------------------------------

 

so that there is actually a "hole" between the days on the x-axis? E.g. I want the x-axis to be a time, and not just some random text that is mashed together. So far I have wasted over an hour with 2 different tools and I can't just get it to work

 

All I get is this:

 

|
|
|
| .....#
| .....#
| #....#....#
|--------------------------------

[demagogue]

I'll also second Jay's call for more editing videos. Might be time to update some sticky threads, or a "beginner mappers start here" index or something. That vid above is quite useful but who is likely to find it when needed?

 

Yeah the "Important Editing Links" sticky you started would be the ideal place for this, I thought.

You could add some newbie friendly sections (it's pretty much already targeting new mappers anyway), like key tutorials, and maybe a DR FAQ.

[Springheel]

It is a bit discouraging though that in its 2nd full year, missions for TDM actually went down by roughly 1/3. I suppose it's because people are still learning the editor and/or are working on big projects.

 

Yes, a number of maps/mappers that might otherwise have been released this year have been integrated into the campaign.

[jay pettitt]

It would be interesting to use the linear regression equation to estimate the amount of missions in the end of this year, and then wait and see how well the actual released map amount corresponds with the calculated one. Let's try to remember to do that next christmas...

 

Doing that in a meaningful way would be tricky.

 

For staters, the regression line in Tels' graph is meaningless - rather than tell us anything about mission releases, it's actually only a plot of the graph's axis

 

For seconds - there's not a lot of data and even less about the Dark Mod - it's only 3 and a bit years old.

 

Then you've got to decide what you want to look at. And why.

 

If you ignore year 1 (2008, when there was only one demo mission and which skews things) TDM *should* be pitching for ~25 FM releases in 2012. (Of course - you could argue that a campaign might be a much better goal)

 

But if you look at total Fan Mission releases across T1, T2, T3 and TDM at the moment you get a small upwards trend between 1999 and 2011. IF all things (from T1, T2 and T3) stay equal TDM will need to more than triple it's FM output in 2012 to take up the slack from the general decline in FM releases.

 

It's a little early to say - but it looks like the Thief FM community *may* be finally dying a long, slow, gurgling death. TDM may do well to look further afield for its audience. Or something else may happen. Who knows...?

 

The ttlg.de data in Google doc form

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_GB&hl=en_GB&key=0Ap9hliIrO9cFdFNCX3pOYVl5cHlwYWt1OEI1dFBLV2c&output=html

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap9hliIrO9cFdFNCX3pOYVl5cHlwYWt1OEI1dFBLV2c

 

@Tels - wha? 2011 is the year I guess. What are the other columns/Row data?

Edited January 8, 2012 by jay pettitt

[Tels]

It's a little early to say - but it looks like the Thief FM community *may* be finally dying a long, slow, gurgling death. TDM may do well to look further afield for its audience. Or something else may happen. Who knows...?

 

I am not sure why the community is dying a slow death if you are still getting more FMs per year than most people can even play

 

@Tels - wha? 2011 is the year I guess. What are the other columns/Row data?

 

SVN checkins per day, SVN files changed per day. The problem is I have not data for every day, but most software is not designed to use a timestamp on the X axis - they all just plot all the values they have.

 

Of course I could "fill" in the data with 0 for the days that are non-existant... but I have wasted more than enough time on this already...

[jay pettitt]

Okay - so that's date info (y-m-d?) and then SVN activity. Have you got a text file with the data?