nbohr1more on 6/10/2015 at 20:20
Sorry to poach but @Margotbean: The Dark Mod has a nice GUI based mission editor. If you have trouble making Thief missions maybe
you'd instead be willing to create "Thief Style missions in a setting very similar to the one in Looking Glass Studios Thief 1 and 2 games"?
(
https://www.thedarkmod.com)
This is exactly how we now are fortunate to have Bikerdude editing missions. He couldn't quite get the hang of Dromed but wanted to make Thief missions.
Not that I would discourage you from trying Dromed either. It's just another option.
margotbean on 6/10/2015 at 21:07
My oh my... I do feel a pile-up of sorts growing on top of me...
How can I possibly resist all this peer pressure?! :laff: :laff: :laff:
AntiMatter_16 on 6/10/2015 at 21:49
DromEd looks far more complicated that it is. 95% of the stuff in the menus you'll never use, unless you've spent a LOT of time learning the very esoteric ins and outs of it. Ironically enough, the DromEd Basic Toolkit was originally supposed to be a stripped down "basic" toolkit for Thief1/g which got rid of a lot of the advanced stuff from the NV toolkit it was based on that I never used. I got it fairly well streamlined, but I found myself missing a lot of the features I stripped out, so it slowly began to creep back in. And as my knowledge about DromEd increased, I found myself using a lot of commands through the console, which I ended up adding to the menus for convenience sake. So bam, the "basic" toolkit ended up more advanced than the NV toolkit it was based on.
As far as the arms race for FM complexity and expansiveness, I've kind of just resigned myself to being a niche author. While I sometimes do enjoy a metaphorical 5 course meal, I much rather prefer a small but tasty snack. So most of my missions are very small and extremely detailed and try to innovate with minor technical effects or features that maybe haven't been tried before. I recently tried playing a very expansive mission with extreme technical effects and detail that was extremely expansive, but it was SO FREAKING HARD I barely made it anywhere after playing hours and I haven't touched it since. It seems there's not only an arms race for complexity, detail and expansiveness, but also for difficulty. This really turns me off to a lot of FMs, so many of my missions tend to be fairly relaxed and laid back. Sometimes they're more of an experience than a regular mission. Difficulty does ensure that an FM's thread gets a lot of comment activity, which in turn means it gets more exposure and discussion.
If you want to start learning DromEd, start small in scope. You can't bake a 5 course meal if you can't put cheese and meat on a cracker. And there are those that prefer crackers with cheese and meat to 5 course meals anyhow. But most of all, create what you enjoy and enjoy what you create.
margotbean on 8/10/2015 at 05:49
Quote Posted by AntiMatter_16
If you want to start learning DromEd, start small in scope. You can't bake a 5 course meal if you can't put cheese and meat on a cracker.
I had a Java professor in college who said basically the same thing to me. Unfortunately, he had to tell me several times over the course of the semester, due to my stubbornness!
Thank you for the encouragement. :)
Thank you all for the encouragement and advice and personal experiences you've shared. I asked you how to get past my initial shock and revulsion over the Dromed interface, and you've done it. :) <3
Iceblade on 13/11/2015 at 01:44
I think something that might help is a look at the author statistics by year.
Here is a list based off of the Thiefmissions listing (using release dates) with Southquarters FM listing filling out the second half of 2013 and all of 2014 and 2015. I sorted by year and then author and counted by hand to reduce the likelihood of a duplication due to differences in the author field.
Year | Authors* | Teams/multiple authors** | Missions per Author/Team
1999 | 38 | 0 | 1.237
2000 | 38 | 5 | 1.512
2001 | 56 | 2 | 1.483
2002 | 60 | 3 | 1.429
2003 | 53 | 3 | 1.250
2004 | 52 | 0 | 1.462
2005 | 61 | 1 | 1.177
2006 | 73 | 1 | 1.635
2007 | 51 | 1 | 1.365
2008 | 57 | 2 | 1.729
2009 | 45 | 2 | 1.362
2010 | 48 | 6 | 1.296
2011 | 33 | 1 | 1.353
2012 | 31 | 0 | 1.290
2013 | 38 | 2 | 1.375
2014 | 26 | 4 | 1.333
2015 | 25 | 3 | 1.107
* - excluding multiple authors on a single work
** - JIS counts here as well as the TDM and T2X Teams
*** - Based on Total FMs per year from the beginning chart per total Authors and Teams; each team counting as one
So basically after a decade of dromeding, there were a lot more authors quitting than ones joining up.
Iceblade on 14/11/2015 at 23:30
Actually, this topic turned into something much more interesting than yearly mission stats.
IMHNSEO*, dromeding carries four phases of learning.
There is the basics - the stuff you'll largely learn from KOMAG's original tutorial with a bit of additional interface education (including shortcuts). While it may seem steep to get into dromeding, it isn't that bad if you take the first couple of tutorials step by step and iterate these steps to expand your "first map." This kind of stuff ends up being 90% to 50% of mission development depending on complexity and level of desired polish.
The next phase is where you are learning to deal with dromed's idiosyncrasies - most notably aspects like lighting and flows, texture alignments (I seem to remember the preview window not being accurate in older versions of dromed), common bugs (should be reduced in commonality with new dark), simple scripting (elevators, etc) and various good practices and tricks to streamline development and avoid problems. I'm sure a few tutorials or best practices threads are available that will speed up this phase, but it is more about practice.
The last major phase is the learning how to implement more complicated scripts or incorporate non-standard or complex elements into your mission (including adding custom materials). Expect to use forum and tutorial searches a lot, but eventually these aspects will become second-nature.
The actual last phase is where you learn how to push the limits beyond what has been done before with dromed in which you'll have to work on your own to accomplish your goal. This last phase is not something many will encounter since most everything has either been done before with dromed or a script has been added that does it.
For me personally, the learning curve was never a negative, it is how tedious dromeding is - primarily when it comes to filling out the levels with objects and fixing textures. It's very monotonous especially compared to the other, much more interesting aspects of mission building like architecture and scripting. I'd definitely love to join up with a dromeder who prefers decorating levels with objects but finds architecture problematic.
* - in my humble, not so experienced opinion
Dev_Anj on 14/11/2015 at 23:49
Quote Posted by Iceblade
For me personally, the learning curve was never a negative, it is how tedious dromeding is - primarily when it comes to filling out the levels with objects and fixing textures. It's very monotonous especially compared to the other, much more interesting aspects of mission building like architecture and scripting. I'd definitely love to join up with a dromeder who prefers decorating levels with objects but finds architecture problematic.
I don't really have a problem with placing objects around a level, but yeah it's not as engaging as making the skeleton of the mission, AKA the architecture. I'm still learning how to implement script functions though, and obviously I'm not much of a Dromed user as I just started 2 months ago.
Iceblade on 28/11/2015 at 05:30
Found this old thread while searching through for some answers to old FM: (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20656) "Who Really Cares Anymore?"
Wow, really amazing to see that anybody had this thought way back in 2001 especially considering how much the community would end up growing and the level of expansion and variety would come to the mission library. The first full decade really was quite an amazing ride. Just a pity RL finally managed to sap the community's activity these past few years.
Of course most of us "old" taffers probably wouldn't be able to keep up with the mission creation rate of yesteryear anyway.
Dev_Anj on 28/11/2015 at 06:48
To be fair, a lot of fan missions, especially the early ones in the 2000-10 era tended to be rough around the edges and I don't think most of them are actually remembered. Sure it was also a time of great authors like Digital Nightfall, Melan and DrK, but many more have merely released a few rough missions and then stopped making anything.
I know that the mission building activity has slowed down on the surface, and it was inevitable considering how newer games with more options available in their editors have come out, not to mention lots of previous fan mission makers getting busy and having more real life commitments as they grow up, but I definitely think that while the overall number of missions has gone down, there's more polish and technical details to most of them in general. For instance, we definitely see far less missions which are simple mansion break in affairs with a very small and simple layout. With several projects releasing on the horizon, I would say there is still hope for the fan mission making community, it's not going away anywhere.
Iceblade on 28/11/2015 at 07:24
True, but even rough around the edges many missions have been quite excellent in a variety of areas.
