Fan Mission: The Imperial Sword [ 15yr Anniversary Contest ]

[Guest]

Off topic

Edited February 11 by tib

[datiswous]

On 10/12/2024 at 5:30 PM, chakkman said:

I wished the spiders were draggable

Did you try to drag them?

[chakkman]

Ok , should have phrased it differently: Dragging is weird. As if spiders had a very tiny center of gravity. 

Edited October 14, 2024 by chakkman

[STRUNK]

This looks very good and lots of ways to go about. I enjoyed it a lot.
 

Spoiler

I locked out the guard in te mansion by placing some chairs in front of the balcony door when he was up there : P

 

[chakkman]

Damn elite guards eh?  

[DeTeEff]

Wow! This is what the thief games are about; Nice city scapes, a very open canvas for the player to roam (not just a one way street).

GAMEPLAY 5 stars

I really loved all the sprawling passages and roof top-routes you could take. Wherever I went there was somthing new to be found. The guard routes was balanced and there was "almost" too much shadows, which is good; It is frustrating to have extremely tight spots where you get spotted almost before entering the light. I had no problems with the climbing parts and the pipes worked like a charm to grab onto. There was also no places where I got stuck. The only critisism may be that some stuff was a bit hard to frob (the decree in the attic and some loot in some chests) but that is ordinary TDM stuff

STORY 5 stars

I implement all custom assets in here, as many of them can be categorized with the story elements. Custom textures/models/interresting readables and the real voice actors to voice the custom dialogue. Top notch! Even as most fan missions consists of "getting in and taking that special gobbilydingo", this was (for me at least) a unique take.

VISUALS 5 stars

Everything beautifully detailed with lots of (I guess, custom assets). No clean/barren places to be seen. Nice use of moonshine in the windows and this ties in with my love for sprawling city scapes with lots of dirty back alleys and pipe climbing and different ways to get where you want.

I often have problems just to relax and play as a player (since I mostly build missions myself and rarely play) and since almost every mission I play is supperior to what I can produce, I have a dirty habit of searching out errors in other missions to remind me of that "these people can also make mistakes" and this was one of those missions where the mistakes were almost non existant. There was some models popping into existance (the flower pots outside the manor, when coming from the church gate. I guess these are for LOD/optimization. And maybe 2, Z-fights. Other than that, there was no errors I could spot!

Good work!

[Keruah]

Nice little mission. Didn't get all of the secrets in the first try, but I'm quite new to TDM and Thief in general, so cut me some slack here. The overall story and the map structure is superb. I love the given possibility to climb almost everywhere I want. I love this kind of stuff in the game. I think, there were some text errors here and there, but I don't care much since I'm not native to English anyway. Overall, very good work, and I love that it's quite accessible to newcomers without being too easy. Thanks for the mission, man. 

[grodenglaive]

Wonderful mission, the mapping is soo good

[The Black Arrow]

Great mission, I had a lot of fun playing it. I really enjoy how it has secrets, making the most curious explorers (like me) be rightfully rewarded.

I only didn't like the story much, but it's more about how it's something "new" that I've never heard of in TDM, than because it's bad. I've just found it to be something like "A poetic novella in a novel".

The graphics were amazing, I really love how detailed everything was, I especially love the fireplaces' shadows.

Some fantastic gameplay, not too frustating, do-how-you-want.

I rate this mission an overall solid 5/5.

[killsurfcity]

Very fun mission, but I’m stuck at the end as usual. First thing I did was find the sword, so that was nice, then I got caught up searching all the upper areas.

Spoiler

Is there anything in the high street area outside the window from the attic other than a plaque? There’s a whole area with lots of potential, and seemingly nothing in it 

I can’t get into the library either  Everything around there is blocked  

 

[chakkman]

8 minutes ago, killsurfcity said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

I can’t get into the library either  Everything around there is blocked  

 

Spoiler

Try to get up somewhere else.

 

Edited November 4, 2024 by chakkman

[killsurfcity]

I found it. Was a bit more complicated than I expected. ha!

[killsurfcity]

This was great fun! Finally finished, but had to pass on the secrets for now. I’ve been all over this map, and found a couple, but I’ve been at it too long already. 

One minor criticism is there were a lot of cool places to climb, and some weird little areas to find, but with mostly nothing there. No loot, no new doors or windows to check out. Imo if you’re going to have a bunch of secrets, this is where you should put them.

[Thiefette]

Congrats on the mission, always enjoy your work. Finished this up yesterday and loved all the climbing places, and nooks and crannies. Found all the plaques easily enough but the secrets were in some great hiding places. With some "oh, it can't be there but where else" thinking, I found them all . Thanks for all your hard work

[irisx]

Just finished replaying with 2.14b6, this time I only missed 2 secrets

Minor bugs (probably core-related):

1. doors, switches and chests are finicky, almost half of the time a single click will either do nothing, or initiate a slow open, or momentarily open then close etc.

2. maybe because of #1, I'm pretty sure I once managed to fetch *two* identical daggers from the captain's chest. Tried reloading it to re-trigger, but it never happened again. The only way I could imagine this would happen is if a script materializes the loot inside the chest and for some reason it got called twice. Or could it be that it was just the animation that repeated?

As with 2.13, the mission looks amazing, particularly the shadow and lighting tricks.

[bunnyboy]

@irisx I think both those are regressions in 2.14b. I've seen it inother missions too, and in b5. You can check the 2.14 beta release thread if its been reported?

[irisx]

@bunnyboy Yes, I confirm that there were mentions of both problems over the last week or so:

1. doors/switches/etc. not reacting as expected to short vs long frob (e.g. the behaviour of frobs is different when opening vs when closing a door, sometimes necessitating a double frob to get it un-stuck; that in 2.14 the control is confusingly activated upon button/key release instead of press etc.)

2. repeating animations and/or sounds when frobbing loot/keys

EDIT: just to confirm that I needed to do the "double frob with double sound" when trying to get the lord's (or was it the lady's?)

Spoiler

chest key

Edited February 28 by irisx

[thebigh]

On 2/28/2026 at 7:28 PM, irisx said:

that in 2.14 the control is confusingly activated upon button/key release instead of press etc.

Aha, maybe that's the reason for the double-frob-double-sound issue. It might be the semi-rare situation where you press frob while the item is in range but by the time you release frob you're out of range again.