Fan Mission: Scroll of Remembrance, by MirceaKitsune (03/11/2020)

[JackFarmer]

A little late to the party, however: Congratulations on the release!

 

[Zerg Rush]

I certainly had some performance issues on the outskirts of the hotel, but within this performance was normal, although I only have a fairly normal laptop (8 Gb RAM, 2 Gb AMD Radeon GPU.
The mission was quite fun, though certainly somewhat strange. Overall I love TDM and I want to congratulate the creators on an excellent job.
The only thing I can generally criticize is, that on the one hand my English is not very advanced and sometimes I find it very difficult to understand the clues well, adding that I am an older man with an already not very good view, sometimes with difficulty reading well the clues written in letters sometimes very small.
Still, so far I've managed to finish all the missions, sometimes without clues.

Edited November 22, 2020 by Zerg Rush

[MirceaKitsune]

29 minutes ago, Zerg Rush said:

I certainly had some performance issues on the outskirts of the hotel, but within this performance was normal, although I only have a fairly normal laptop (8 Gb RAM, 2 Gb AMD Radeon GPU.
The mission was quite fun, though certainly somewhat strange. Overall I love TDM and I want to congratulate the creators on an excellent job.
The only thing I can generally criticize is, that on the one hand my English is not very advanced and sometimes I find it very difficult to understand the clues well, adding that I am an older man with an already not very good view, sometimes with difficulty reading well the clues written in letters sometimes very small.
Still, so far I've managed to finish all the missions, sometimes without clues.

Thank you, glad you liked it! As a heads up: I plan to do one more performance fix at some point, where I'm going to try and portal the outdoor area into a few different zones to fix the performance problems there. Been working on a new map for days and the more I use DR the better I understand what I can and can't do with it.

As a general rule many TDM FM's require reading clues to know what to do next, so knowing english enough to read the books and notes is often required. In the case of this particular FM playing it without reading the stuff in the environment would also cause the point to be missed. I too wish there was a way to help people who get stuck on finding the next objective otherwise, as I also run into that problem a lot and know it can be frustrating.

[Zerg Rush]

Thanks for your answer, and in your mission, the clues were not so much the problem, it can also be finished although not everything is understood, although naturally some details are lost.
This problem of the clues is more present in some other missions, where there are readings of several pages in books and letters, sometimes with very small print that cause my nose prints on the screen of my laptop, this in your mission was not the Case.
I fully understand that it is not possible to translate each mission into many different languages, which would greatly complicate its development. But perhaps you can look for other methods to leave clues than just reading many pages in future missions..

I have recommended this game in many forums and among my friends since it's first v.2.0, and for some, although they like this type of games, they told me that the language is why they cannot play it. I know a little English, but there are some for which the texts could also be in Chinese, because they don't know anything about English.

Edited November 22, 2020 by Zerg Rush

[Hugo Lobo]

Just finished this mission. What started to be a below average heist mission turned to have a really nice and unexpected finale. I really like games and movies that makes you think and wonder even after we finished them. This FM was one of them.

Spoiler

Although the theory that we live in a simulated reality is nothing new, this narrative was presented in a refreshing way here.

Thanks for making this MirceaKitsune! I really hope that this is the first of many FM's.

EDIT: I just want to add that i had some fps drops outside, when facing the mansion. I suppose that it was because of the number of NPC's, because making a "g_stopTime 1" using the console made the issue almost unnoticeable.  

 

Edited December 23, 2020 by Hugo Lobo

[MrMunkeepants]

this was a good first mission!

I found the exterior quite plain, and the large central hall/staircase/banquet area boring, but the smaller rooms were much more interesting. I don't mean to be insulting or dismissive, but it is a common misstep for beginning authors to make huge areas with little of interest; from the other areas (and meta story) I'm sure your next FM will be even better

[Gerberox]

I tried to play this mission but the base game noises are so loud I barely hear game noises like speach, closing doors or footsteps if they exist.

I set SFX volume to the minimum (!) and every other sound settings are on max.

 

Edited March 12, 2021 by Gerberox

[MirceaKitsune]

21 minutes ago, Gerberox said:

I tried to play this mission but the base game noises are so loud I barely hear game noises like speach, closing doors or footsteps if they exist.

I set SFX volume to the minimum (!) and every other sound settings are on max.

 

I have a few ambiental sounds for wind, but they never sounded loud for me. The map needs a new update though (when I get around to it) since performance remains an issue.

[Gerberox]

No, it's not the wind but the noices which in theory are intended to generate tension but they are just annoying.

I just started another mission and they aren't present there even though I set sfx volume higher because every sound was quiet otherwise. Even footsteps and speech. 

[roygato]

I don't exactly get what noises you're referring to, but I checked it out anyway out of curiosity. The only thing I'd agree to be on the loud side is the ambient music that plays in the side rooms, but turning down the ambient volume fixes that. My sound settings for SFX and ambient music are equal, between the third and second highest lines in the volume bar, before any adjustments.

As far as performance goes, I can concur that it does indeed suffer a bit at certain points, namely when looking at the mansion at mission start.

Edited March 12, 2021 by roygato

[Gerberox]

So the ambient sound is the "music". OK, nevermind. It worked this way.

[nbohr1more]

On 11/22/2020 at 8:33 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Thank you, glad you liked it! As a heads up: I plan to do one more performance fix at some point, where I'm going to try and portal the outdoor area into a few different zones to fix the performance problems there. Been working on a new map for days and the more I use DR the better I understand what I can and can't do with it.

As a general rule many TDM FM's require reading clues to know what to do next, so knowing english enough to read the books and notes is often required. In the case of this particular FM playing it without reading the stuff in the environment would also cause the point to be missed. I too wish there was a way to help people who get stuck on finding the next objective otherwise, as I also run into that problem a lot and know it can be frustrating.

 

 

You might not need to utterly redesign the exterior. Just embed some caulk in strategic locations and add some more visportals. The ornate fencing around the border of the mission consumes a huge number of triangles and simply culling the ones behind the large building alone will probably grant you a nice FPS boost.

I have drawn a portal layout you can try out ( blue-ish lines):

 

Spoiler

 

[thebigh]

Well done on this mission! Occasional FPS issues notwithstanding (worst in the library of all places for me), it had a really effective style. At times it reminded me of House in Blackbog Hollow, or that challenge mission in Dishonored where you're at a party in a house floating in the void. Slightly oversized and empty perhaps but it had an uneasy not-quite-real feel that made the twist at the end fit well. Hope to see more missions from you!

[esme]

Well that was interesting

Spoiler

I climbed over the wall & found the guard before triggering the scroll

Also

Spoiler

01001001 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101110 01110011 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110001 01110101 01100101 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100001 01101101

Thanks, enjoyed that

[Thiefette]

Got around to playing and completing this today. Congrats, gives you lots to think about.

Spoiler

I had tried this mission a few times and could never get much farther than the main hall on the first floor, kept running into a guard so became frustrated with it. Decided to give this another try but made my way to the second floor to start. Wow, 4th times the charm lol. I found the switch in the attic and had no idea what it did - nothing opened, no lights turned off and you could only flip it once, so I did come here for a hint. Thanks for that  As I worked my way from top to bottom I found the other switches before I found the hint from the mechanic. 

It was kind of nice walking around, doing my thing and not getting hassled other than being told to move along. 

Thanks for all your hard work and I look forward to other missions from you. 

[AluminumHaste]

I don't remember ever playing this one, so decided to load it up and the starting area runs really poorly. 51 fps.

i7 12700k, Radeon 6800XT

 

Turning around and looking at the gate gets me to 240 fps. Not sure if this is just more AMD driver bullshit or what.

 

[MirceaKitsune]

Thank you for trying out the FM: I'm happy you liked it and that it's still being played today! Please remember it was my first map and mistakes may have been made especially then considering. I have several in the making which I still haven't finished over the years, but I may come back to this someday and hopefully improve it further. At the moment I'm still on a hiatus based on some personal issues... if I can resolve them I may return to making more content which I'd be excited to, maybe fixing this one up as well a little more.

[JiriH]

What a twist!

I liked your mission (my PC is i9, RTX 3080 so no low FPS complaints:) because it is unlike the others - open spaces, non-hostile NPCs. Figuring out

Spoiler

the switches

takes a while,

Spoiler

"pixel hunting"

may become boring. I would solve this by giving more specific hints - not as specific as the

Spoiler

boiler room

- e.g. making the items we discuss leak oil; or maybe "My diary, my husband invited the Builders in and they

Spoiler

busted a shelf in the library and cleaning the dust from all the books took weeks.

What i did not like is the bell fry and the building next to it - they are just an empty shells serving no purpose (other than lowering FPS;).

 

"Shader missing" - that was a good one!:-)

 

Thank you.

Edited May 18, 2023 by JiriH

[MirceaKitsune]

Thanks, glad you liked it! Can't believe this remains the only FM I got to release so far, despite having about a dozen in the works on my drive. IIRC it still needs optimization... I also never used monster clips since at the time I didn't know they were needed, amazing it works so well without them.

[cavador]

I am currently going through tons of Dark Mod FMs and replaying them. So far, I can play all of them in 4k resolution at a full 60fps without ever dropping a frame except for two:

1. Gem of Souls

2. Scroll of Remembrance

Both of these FMs drops my frame rate into the 40s constantly and they are both created by the same author. 

Edited January 27 by cavador

[MirceaKitsune]

Scroll of Remembrance was my first FM years ago: I made some bad design choices, it is very slow because of large areas with bad portals. Not sure if I'll ever be updating this again, working on other missions too at the moment.

Gem of Souls shouldn't be that slow, especially being such a small FM. Does this only happen outside? Likely the grass and / or rain if so. I also use cubemap lighting there, apparently Gem is one of the first FM's to do so, but I didn't notice a performance impact from that.

Edited January 27 by MirceaKitsune