john9818a on 29/5/2017 at 04:40
I was going to post something similar to what Brethren said. Designing missions can be very time consuming, and while I don't regret working on my missions and releasing them, I feel that I focused too much on dromed and not enough on other aspects of life. I agree with working on one mission to start so that you can understand all that is involved.
R Soul on 29/5/2017 at 15:58
I think you should use the built in FM support system, which is much tidier than the old methods.
In your Thief2 folder you should have an FMs folder. Inside that, create one named after you own FM. Use (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146917) NewDarkLoader or FMSel. If set up correctly, you can run Dromed and select the FM you want to edit. Another useful feature is that you can look at other FMs for ideas, or make more of your own FM folders to try things out, and all their files will be kept separate from each other.
DavidMcMurdo on 30/5/2017 at 01:52
Quote Posted by R Soul
I think you should use the built in FM support system, which is much tidier than the old methods.
In your Thief2 folder you should have an FMs folder. Inside that, create one named after you own FM. Use (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146917) NewDarkLoader or FMSel. If set up correctly, you can run Dromed and select the FM you want to edit. Another useful feature is that you can look at other FMs for ideas, or make more of your own FM folders to try things out, and all their files will be kept separate from each other.
Okay I've done this... interesting. Could I set it up so that instead of having a folder for my whole campaign, I have a folder for each mission, inside of which is their own "Books" folder, etc? Or would this confuse things later on down the line when I need to combine them into a single campaign?
Zontik on 30/5/2017 at 07:39
My own short expierence: it's a bad idea to make missions separately and finally to join them into campaign. Can't advice the worse thing.
Making a campaign, you need to write a lot of things. The objects you use; the list of textures... after six or seven missions finished you will lost in a tons of custom resources and will start to add existing stuff again and again. If you have many repetitive archetypes, there is a reason to have a single gamesys for the whole campaign, but this method has its own problems.
If you decide to change map colors in a single mission, it will be an awful headache.
You will probably want to keep player's stuff (powerups or items) between certain missions, it's easy to set up but difficult to test. If you use campaign variables, it's even more difficult to test. You have to find balance if you use startup shop based on loot amout earned in previous mission.
The main advice is: write everything, don't try to remember. It's impossible to finish 12 missions in a year or two, and you memory will not serve well after 5 or 6 years full of another work.
Should I say about backups? Hope not.
Good luck.
Daraan on 30/5/2017 at 09:18
Quote Posted by DavidMcMurdo
Okay I've done this... interesting. Could I set it up so that instead of having a folder for my whole campaign, I have a folder for each mission, inside of which is their own "Books" folder, etc? Or would this confuse things later on down the line when I need to combine them into a single campaign?
I think that's what you should do. At the end you just have to copy everything together.
Concerning objects and other shared stuff I made my own folder in the root menu and added it to the resname_base in darkinst.cfg.
Further I changed the menu.cfg to have special save commands. One for each mission, which saves the .mis in the correct folder and also the .gam so every other mission will load the same .gam file.
