skacky on 3/8/2017 at 09:48
Glad I'm not the only one bothered by texture mods. I always find it a bit insulting that all your careful work on texture combinations and alignment is somehow not good enough for some people and they play a bastardized version of your mission with some texture packs. Case in point, most of my texture work on Endless Rain is thrown into a dumpster fire when you play it with Thief Gold HD. Some textures are so completely different and have such different texture alignment/orientation that the level just looks godawful and completely unlike my vision. Not only that but these textures also clash with the other custom ones I used which, while higher-res than the originals, are still somewhat low-res.
I won't lose sleep over it but it still annoys me.
SlyFoxx on 3/8/2017 at 12:53
Never bothered with tex mods mostly for the reason skacky pointed to. Didn't want the hassle of disengaging this or that to play a FM and certainly didn't want to superseded a designer's intention as I understand just how much effort goes into making one. Plus I don't really revisit the OM's very often so I have little interest in an upgrade. But I do think that the new packs must bring a lot to the table and dress up the old girl especially for those who are new to the game and might be put off with the original lo-fi look.
marbleman on 3/8/2017 at 13:05
Quote Posted by nicked
If you're using stock textures, you could just make renamed copies of the textures you're using, and package them with it instead. Not like it'll bump the filesize up much if it's the original pcx files.
Just out of curiosity, do they have to be renamed? Won't drop-in replacements do the trick? For example, copying texture folders from root T2 folder into your FM folder. Theoretically, it should override any mod.
I personally prefer even OMs in vanilla look.
Yandros on 3/8/2017 at 14:39
I wonder if someone who talks to DJ Riff could point him at this thread to see the opinions being expressed by the FM authors about this.
john9818a on 3/8/2017 at 15:15
Is it really necessary to use Tafferpatcher? I simply installed Thief 2 and then I unzipped each version of NewDark into my Thief 2 folder as they were released. The only mod I added was the water texture. Everything else is stock and I never have any issues with gameplay or how a mission looks.
skacky on 3/8/2017 at 15:17
It's not necessary of course, but a vast majority of people just install TafferPatcher/TFix without disabling the bundled mods. TFix doesn't have anything like NTEX but it does have T2 replacements for quite a lot of T1 textures that just look plain wrong imo.
LarryG on 3/8/2017 at 15:33
Quote Posted by marbleman
Just out of curiosity, do they have to be renamed? Won't drop-in replacements do the trick? For example, copying texture folders from root T2 folder into your FM folder. Theoretically, it should override any mod.
I personally prefer even OMs in vanilla look.
If the user uses the uber_mod_path configuration variable, then, no, drop-in replacements won't work. The only way to guarantee not having a mod override the textures is to avoid OM texture names. And that includes things like water and lava.
Quote Posted by john9818a
Is it really necessary to use Tafferpatcher? I simply installed Thief 2 and then I unzipped each version of NewDark into my Thief 2 folder as they were released. The only mod I added was the water texture. Everything else is stock and I never have any issues with gameplay or how a mission looks.
That's how I got into this trouble late in my mission development. My working setup was just that, a manual NewDark implementation. But I wanted to test how TafferPatcher differed since so many fans use it for their installs. And I was unpleasantly surprised by the result.
marbleman on 3/8/2017 at 15:36
So the only way to guarantee the look is to import all original textures that you use as custom ones and intoruce all of them to the gamesys? Sounds like fun :D
LarryG on 3/8/2017 at 15:43
That, or trust in the fans reading the readme for your mission where you tell them that your mission is NOT COMPATIBLE WITH any mods (or with mods A, B, C, ...) and that any attempt to use those mods while playing your mission will cause their PC to explode and hatch a kraken which will proceed to eat them and their entire neighborhood before your local militia is able to turn it into sushi.
Seriously, I'm hoping that someone will take fmsel, the "demo" fm selector application whose source is included with newdark, and upgrade it to detect the use of mods and a special note in the readme (format TBD) of an FM and warn/prevent the fm from loading until the user allows the fm selector to temporarily disable the mods.
Yandros on 3/8/2017 at 17:34
Instead of a note in the readme, it should just look for a config value in fm.cfg, something like "disallow_mods", and disable mods in that FM install folder.
