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The Complete Vengeance for a Thief Campaign


Sir Taffsalot

The Complete Vengeance for a Thief Campaign  

17 members have voted

  1. 1. Visuals

  2. 2. Gameplay

  3. 3. Story



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YES!!!!!!!!!!

 

Thank you and congratulations on the release :D

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Just finished the prequel, clocked in at 45 minutes which was real nice. I have yet to play the others again however I have played their originals and enjoyed them :)

 

Here are my thoughts on The Angel's Tear

 

 

 

I love the architecture and design of the whole mansion, the whole place is insanely massive. The very cool room at the top with the frobable telescope (very Thief 2 esque btw) and that secret room were very cool. The idea of putting the bookshelves in glass casing was excellent as well (an idea i'm going to have to steal now myself :P), the library room and the gallery were both some of my favorite rooms as well. The church was very cool and having it accessible from inside the mansion was badass, another idea that gives me T2 mansion vibes. I also really enjoyed the custom toilets/bathing areas, very cool!

 

In terms of negative there were a couple of minor bugs here and there such as the elevator which didn't seem to work for me and just went straight through a solid brush.

Also while the architecture was very large and good some parts of it felt neglected such as the rooms downstairs, also for a massive mansion it just feels so empty most of the time. Occasionally there are guards drifting around but there needs to be more loot to pickup and I can understand the idea of having filler rooms with not much in it but they seemed to be very frequent or there would be a massive room with only a couple of pieces of loot. It felt like my thieving abilities were being stretched far too thin and I wished there was more to do, more items inside rooms (or possibly shrinking the size of the room down a bit) and just a bit more lively.

 

The ambient in this was perfect by the way, you managed to keep everything well balanced and use the right music in the right place (which seems to be difficult for most TDM mappers) so top job there!. Overall I really liked the FM and look forward to replaying the others in your campaign plus whatever others the future may hold ;)

 

 

 

Edited by Goldwell
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The in-game downloader is erroring out trying to download this (it also only tries to download the 3rd mission only for some reason? smaller package, 25.0mb). I thought it may have been because of the old missions still being on my hard drive initially, so a possible conflict with trying to overwrite them could have existed so I deleted them but the error persists.

 

So I just downloaded the version in the thread instead and dropped the pk4s in my darkmod/fms directory after deleting the old vfat1 and vfat2 directories, works fine.

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The in-game downloader is erroring out trying to download this (it also only tries to download the 3rd mission only for some reason? smaller package, 25.0mb). I thought it may have been because of the old missions still being on my hard drive initially, so a possible conflict with trying to overwrite them could have existed so I deleted them but the error persists.

 

So I just downloaded the version in the thread instead and dropped the pk4s in my darkmod/fms directory after deleting the old vfat1 and vfat2 directories, works fine.

@Guff, let me check the links, gimme a sec...

My previous upload got corrupted, to re-uploaded. Try now.

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Congrats on the release. One question, though. Why didn't you put them together in a campaign (like NHAT for example)? Just curious.

 

Looking at the screenies of Angel's Tear and the new areas in the other missions I must say that your building skills have really improved a lot, not that what you've build before wasn't good ;) It's nice to see mappers getting better and better. Congrats therefore, too. *thumbs up*

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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The visuals in the new mission are pretty great. It just felt kind of devoid of readables or interesting things going on. There were a lot of empty rooms and loot was sparse for the size of the mission.

 

The original mission was mostly the same as I remember, but there's no longer a one-way exit from the prison so you can't miss required loot anymore and be stuck unable to finish on expert. It still has some typos "loose" instead of "lose" in some readables, "brotherooh" instead of "brotherhood" in the objectives. The horse near the hammers has an idle voice that is a hammer priest's voice still. I laughed about the "fifty shades of black" book again when I saw it.

 

I haven't played the second mission (the museum) again yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Edited by GUFF
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Congrats on the release. One question, though. Why didn't you put them together in a campaign (like NHAT for example)? Just curious.

 

Looking at the screenies of Angel's Tear and the new areas in the other missions I must say that your building skills have really improved a lot, not that what you've build before wasn't good ;) It's nice to see mappers getting better and better. Congrats therefore, too. *thumbs up*

For story line reasons each installment needed it's own timed briefing played at the beginning. Even with Nbohr's kind help we couldn't get it to work in the campaign format. So it was a choise between timed flow briefings or the campaign set up. I decided not to go for the campaign set up because due to objectives, time gaps between FMs and story, look and weopon carry over was N/A.

 

Thanks for the kind words.

"I believe that what doesn't kill you simply makes you... stranger"

 

The Joker

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I'll get back on the ball with the merged briefing. It's just a bit tedious to work it out and I got burned out with the lead up to the v2.03 release

promotion (which I didn't get together as well as I had hoped :( ).

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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What's the problem with the briefing? Can't you define one for each mission?

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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Using a "button controlled briefing" within the context of the new campaign code fro briefings requires you to juggle some of

the elements. I think I've got it mostly figured out but if you can reconcile this:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Briefing#Advanced_Editing_for_Button_Controlled_Briefing

 

with this:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Setting_up_Campaigns#Briefings


in a simplified example, that would be helpful.

 

( I see that NHAT's briefing has better detail on this but it still requires some changes to work as desired.)

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I got burned out with the lead up to the v2.03 release

promotion (which I didn't get together as well as I had hoped :( ).

No? The Moddb announcement is pretty spiffy!

Edited by Airship Ballet
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Thanks !

 

Now, I understand that part 1 and 2 got updated.

But the internal downloader isn't aware of that, although both pk4's got updated on the server.

 

@Sir Taffsalot & Bikerdude:

would it make sense to update the version to 2 for these in the database?

As long as the version sticks to 1, one will never receive the update in a reasonable way.

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Thanks for the release!

 

My impressions are roughly the same as for the already released missions. The architecture looks good, and interiors have a nice, subtle Art Deco impression which evokes Thief 2. Some of the scenes are downright gorgeous: the gallery with the great staircase, the library, or the room where you find the Angel's Tear; the abstract statue in the museum... The lighting is tasteful, and there are ingenious bits like the elevator. It seems you have been relying on modular building, and some of those modules are very attractive (those bookshelves should be in the core mod!).

 

That said, the vastness of the spaces comes at a big price. Some of the rooms, like that big two-level marble wonder, are large enough to accommodate a small contest mission. They are largely empty, or filled with copypasted content. This not only makes exploring them uninteresting, but through repetition, makes it harder to navigate through the mansion. The same goes for the city segments, where you can break into almost completely identical rooms with different furniture through the city.

 

The scale has a further effect on AI patrols. They are so sparse and so lost inside the vast spaces that they are very easy to avoid. In the first mission, I only got a stealth score of 2, which has never happened before. Fortunately, things become progressively harder later on, with the museum having some pretty devilish sneaking challenges.

 

I don't want to knock the mission pack for this, since this is evidently your personal style, but I do believe having fewer areas, and having more which are individual (where your building skills really shine), would be a tremendous improvement.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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