Why are there no more new fan missions in the missions section ?

[^^artin]

Sadly, since "In Plain Sight" in 2022 08.07. there was no more new fan missions available in the Missions section of "thedarkmod.com".

Is there any specific reason for this ?

Is no one producing new missions anymore?

Greetings Martin

[Xolvix]

People absolutely are producing new missions, it just happens quietly until someone's ready to reveal it or suggest a beta test. There's even a call for beta testers in this very sub-forum:

Crafting missions takes time. It's not unusual for there to be silence for a while and then multiple missions arrive from several different people within the same month.

[thebigh]

Creating even a small mission is a big effort and rather time consuming.

[demagogue]

My old answer to this question used to be, well, you know, you could always make a quick FM for everybody to solve that problem. A person could make a contest sized FM in like 1~2 weeks.

[^^artin]

@demagogue

I do know. I even tried years ago, but I couldn't even get the dark radiant running on my pc.

@thebigh

I do know. It' s just that no new missions came for an unusual long periode of time now, I would say.

 

I'm happy to hear that the fan mission editing is still happening !

Thanks for answering to all of you.

 

[thebigh]

18 hours ago, demagogue said:

My old answer to this question used to be, well, you know, you could always make a quick FM for everybody to solve that problem. A person could make a contest sized FM in like 1~2 weeks.

Yeh, I have to get mapping again.

[AluminumHaste]

On 2/26/2023 at 11:43 PM, ^^artin said:

@demagogue

I do know. I even tried years ago, but I couldn't even get the dark radiant running on my pc.

@thebigh

I do know. It' s just that no new missions came for an unusual long periode of time now, I would say.

 

I'm happy to hear that the fan mission editing is still happening !

Thanks for answering to all of you.

 

Keep in mind also that mission size, and complexity have increased dramatically since the beginning.
For a lot of veteran mappers, it can take over a year to get a map made and released.
The last dozen missions have for the most part been pretty massive, with new textures, sounds, scripts, models etc.
We seem to be long past the point of people loading up the tools, and banging out a mission in a few weeks that's very barebones. We still do see some of those, but I noticed in the beta mapper forums and on Discord, that mappers seem to make these maps, but don't release them, and instead use the knowledge gained to make something even better. Could just be bias on my part scrolling through the forums and discord server though.

[Shadow]

We had 12-14 releases in 2022 (some remakes), so seems an average of 1 per month. We are only in March, so just may be slow right now, but we can get 2-3 at once sometimes. You just have to replay all the existing missions, even for the 80th time. lol

[thebigh]

10 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

Keep in mind also that mission size, and complexity have increased dramatically since the beginning.
For a lot of veteran mappers, it can take over a year to get a map made and released.
The last dozen missions have for the most part been pretty massive, with new textures, sounds, scripts, models etc.
We seem to be long past the point of people loading up the tools, and banging out a mission in a few weeks that's very barebones. We still do see some of those, but I noticed in the beta mapper forums and on Discord, that mappers seem to make these maps, but don't release them, and instead use the knowledge gained to make something even better. Could just be bias on my part scrolling through the forums and discord server though.

 

It's a shame, because I like the small-to-medium sized missions. I don't always have the desire to play a huge sprawling masterpiece. Sometimes I just want to sneak through the City streets, get into the mansion, steal Lord Frobley's crown and get out again in 45 minutes. Those are the missions I like to play and so they're the ones I tend to make.

Edited March 1 by thebigh

[kin]

On 2/27/2023 at 3:03 AM, ^^artin said:

Sadly, since "In Plain Sight" in 2022 08.07. there was no more new fan missions available in the Missions section of "thedarkmod.com".

Is there any specific reason for this ?

.....................

https://voca.ro/1cP2zmhyTEHi

Couldn't resist

Edited March 1 by kin

[datiswous]

Personally I rather play small to medium sized missions, but this is against the will of most mappers currently.

Why not make a serie of small to medium sized missions with a storyline, maybe campaign, instead of one super large mission that takes 2 years or more to create. Seems more productive. If it's a campaign, just add missions to it via updates later.

[nbohr1more]

I spent way too long searching for this.

I cannot find the thread but we had a long discussion about large vs small missions and I think the final tally was that most players and map authors preferred missions that were nearly as large or larger than the original Thief missions such as Baffords.

TDM was partly a reaction to the smaller missions in Thief: Deadly Shadows and the hope was that we would eventually be able to offer missions that looked as good but were larger than TDS. Now we have some truly monster sized missions so the need to constantly create big mission might be excessive?

[Melchior]

I think the initial cost for mission setup/learning LEANS towards medium or large missions being released, than many smaller ones (of any quality level).

Seems this is a mission drought - probably because some big-masterworks arn't quite finished yet, and nobody made any mini-missions (this YEAR?!)

[thebigh]

2 minutes ago, Melchior said:

nobody made any mini-missions (this YEAR?!)

I'm working on one that's slowly coming along. I've got a self-imposed challenge that the whole thing has to fit in a 1536³ box. Skybox, "blue room", everything. The radii of speakers and lights are allowed to poke outside, but everything else has to fit inside.

This is roughly the size of Thief's Den 1, so enough for a decent-sized house and a small city streets segment, with plenty of verticality. Wish me luck!

[NeonsStyle]

It's good to understand that people making missions, this isn't their job. They don't get paid for it. So we have to find time out of our lives to work on the level. On the one I"m working on, I've been working on it for 5 years lol. I really need to pull my finger out, but time! 

In the meantime, try replaying some of your favourite missions in a very different way you usually do.

Edited March 4 by NeonsStyle

[JackFarmer]

You should read the two topics here by gokuda and Martin as a sign of appreciation; apparently many people are longing for new missions. So the more people here ask for new missions, the more encouraging that should be for authors.

By the way, it would be even better if many more players would post their opinion in the release threads of the respective missions; I think it doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. Because the knowledge that your own work is played by many people, might be motivating as well  - and was also likely to give the authors a better idea of how many people were playing the missions in the first place.

Personally, I would be very happy if there were many more campaigns (and there aren't many), because they are the only projects  where looting really makes sense to influence the following missions as a player through purchased objects.

 

[The Black Arrow]

On 3/4/2023 at 12:22 PM, JackFarmer said:

By the way, it would be even better if many more players would post their opinion in the release threads of the respective missions; I think it doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. Because the knowledge that your own work is played by many people, might be motivating as well  - and was also likely to give the authors a better idea of how many people were playing the missions in the first place.

Hmm...That does sound like a good habit, I really need to get myself to do that.

I can see one problem here being personal (not on my part) and that is being introvert, I'm very sure most people aren't too willing to give a negative review because they fear they'll get into a conflict and they don't want that, as an example.
Or they simply feel too embarrassed to make a review, let alone one in public and have somebody else get in the argument.

Honestly, to all that, all I can say is...Have no shame of yourself if others are trying to shame you for no good reason whatsoever other than their petty sycophantry.

[datiswous]

Some of us are natural writers and some of us are not. I personally have a hard time expressing positive remarks. When I'm satisfied, I've not much to say.

[cvlw]

I am in map-learning, map-making trudgery sprinkled with real life (or vice versa).

I don't imagine my first pubic map will compare with the great ones that have crossed the TDM threshold, but, it will be infinitely valuable to me to make one and provide one to all of you.

I hope to get it into your hands "soon!"

Clint

[wesp5]

So I'm not the only one who is waiting for new missions to play ;).

[ChronA]

A theory:

I think a lot of people either started or re-committed themselves to grand creative projects at about the same time during the first few months the pandemic lockdowns. That caused a surge of both high quality projects being completed and creators finding themselves in burnout during the last year, due to life returning somewhat to normal with the accompanying loss of free time. I suspect things will pick up slightly in the latter half of 2023 as the people who didn't finish their projects recover enough stamina for another push.

Expect a few years of weird boom-bust cycles going forward as the world recovers from the pandemic pinch and the resulting shockwaves (and I'm not just talking about TDM FMs either).

[kin]

I think this is the longest waiting period for a fm to show up in the download section.

[Xolvix]

Even if everything in your mission list has green ticks, there's still motivation to replay missions because there's just so many ways to do better. Whenever you complete a mission the game will autosave just before the mission stats screen, so reloading that save provides a means of reviewing how you did in your earlier attempt and what you could have done better.

You might want to replay on a harder skill level, you might want to try to achieve a higher loot score, you might want to get your stealth score closer to zero or ghost the entire mission if possible, etc. Some missions have optional objectives, did you get them all? Some have secrets, did you find them all? Whenever you play a mission for the first time it's never going to be optimal due to its unfamiliarity, so replays give you an opportunity to find a way to do better.

[thebigh]

I also replay missions I like just because they're fun.

[nbohr1more]

19 hours ago, kin said:

I think this is the longest waiting period for a fm to show up in the download section.

The longest interval was 10 months. That was between the 1.0 beta and 1.0 release time.

There have been several 6 month spans so to be the 2nd longest span ( 7 months ) we would need to have no mission releases before April 7th.