California, USAI wouldn't be opposed to moderate TDP and TG as well. Socrates and Voetiem are active for verifications but don't currently run the game. Alderius has been a series mod since the pages were created but as far as I know the last time he touched this game was 2 years ago and he's never verified a run. No need to start a thread, I'll just shoot a message over to Socrates and he'll flip the switch.
As a note I do have a partially completed setup guide for Thief 2 which I quit working on because interest from new runners was low. In either case, Old Dark can't be streamed natively with OBS because it utilizes DirectX 7, with which OBS and its variants are incompatible. I am able to capture it using Dxtory (a paid program) but it will have some lag even on a very powerful PC.
In Thief 2, we explicitly allow the New Dark engine and certain related patches as it is almost impossible to stream or even run the original patches on modern hardware. However as you have seen there are certain strategies that are impossible in the Old Dark engine that are possible with TFix and New Dark, specifically New_Mantle. But since the game is not especially competitive the issue has not been thoroughly discussed. It all depends on what kind of consensus the community arrives at. Personally I will only ever play this game in Old Dark, but I understand that not everyone has the game knowledge to make such an install run reliably.
I run 2.45 myself, a basic steam install. No problems for me thus far.
@KillChurch, when you disconnect from the steam cloud the game cannot write data to your save, but it can still read the local save file, meaning if you had a save before you disconnected from the steam cloud it will read that instead. You still have the new game option as far as I remember, but it isn't actually new game in the terminology we use, it's new game+ since you have all the items from your save file.
We had to manually navigate to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata"your user id here"\21690\remote
and rename the save file (in case I wanted to use it later for NG+). We would start every run with Leomire, who was hosting, hitting New Game and I would connect to him.
If you are playing coop, even from a completely fresh file, like snow said you will both have the Beretta and the FAS. You equip them before you both ready up because the cutscene trigger in the butchery is when both players have drawn their guns. So instead of having to pick them up you just hit your hotkey instead to save a couple seconds. There is no way to start a coop run without accessing the inventory screen because the second player has to join and this throws you straight into that screen. So I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to use items that you are given automatically. When me and my buddy used to run this, we disconnected our games from the steam cloud so that it would never save the game, so we were essentially starting from no save file every run. It doesn't really matter if you start with an empty inventory or not, it only loses 2 seconds and if you play on amateur you really shouldn't even come close to dying at any point in the run no matter how bad things go.
Okay, Chocolate, that's it, you need to leave. We'll be fine, just go.
Kil13r gives the best explanation to date as to what constitutes a "tactical reset." The difficulty with implementing and policing a rule like this though is sort of a human issue, because obviously deaths and boss resets give you the option to menu. Just as it seems arbitrary to require a reset after a death, it seems equally arbitrary to say "no menuing after a death." I'm sure you guys have all had moments where the Wesker quick kill just isn't working or you miss the U-8 rocket or something, and it would suck if you had to reset your 90 minute run because of something stupid like that because continuing reset-less would cost minutes. But if you allow that kind of reset, it has to be across the board, not just limited to the "hard" boss fights. The whole menuing thing is just weird game design anyway, so there's going to have to be some sort of arbitrary guideline in place unless people are in favor of allowing non-tactical resets, which sounds like nobody.
There was some NG+ run that got approved within a few minutes of being submitted a while back, I watched it and the guy's partner disconnected which means the run is invalid. Good luck finding that run now but I'm pretty sure it was in 3-3 on the last levers. I get that you aren't going to watch the run in its entirety but don't verify them unless you're at least going to skip through them 30 seconds at a time to make sure there are no shenanigans.
Go to your run and click the three dots in the top right corner, then click "edit run" and change the difficulty. It will probably have to be re-verified by a moderator, should be quick though since most don't actually watch the runs.
Not sure either. Been trying to figure out a way to do it consistently, but I only passed the trigger on quickload once, and even after doing the whole quicksave trick I think the max I got was 2 points before I messed it up somehow. Not that it matters for me because doing it with low agility is hard enough, but if you don't have to spend modules on agility you can get relocation earlier and save time in hydro.
Supposedly it's easier when both players are at 30fps, but I've done probably 30 runs that got that far, attempting the one-cycle pattern every time, on all different framerate settings (30, 30/60, 60/60, unlimited), and never got it once. It's been done on both console and PC though. Keep in mind that your connection quality probably affects your odds as well.
It's pretty much dead. I did a few multiplayer runs, because the maintenance glitch from older versions is less important in multiplayer, but none of them were even worth uploading. It's also pretty hard to get through a run without a server bug of some sort. But it's a great game, good luck tracking down the older version if you want to run it singleplayer.
Hi Ellieceraptor, this looks awesome! I just tested and it seems to be working great except for the issues you mentioned. I don't know much about autosplitting, but is it possible to use the trigger for the final cutscene for the final split? I assume you renamed the cutscene video files to prevent them from playing, but it might be worth looking into. As far as the timer restarting, I know most autosplitters define an int levelNumber and then use current and old function calls to split rather than hard coding each level in. For example:
{ int levelNumber : 0x00DA1E38, 0x124; } split { return current.levelNumber > old.levelNumber; }
and so on. That might work, but I don't know it's applicable for this specific game. Best of luck!
If it doesn't work for MOST of the community, we can't base the rules of the category around a third-party program that has been demonstrated to be largely non-functional.
Dread's load remover/autosplitter never consistently worked. Some people were able to get it to work, but the vast majority couldn't. I managed to get the autosplitter working but not the load remover. Probably a livesplit compatibility problem.
They aren't really changing, we're just rewording them so that they'll fit in the box for SRC's view rules tab. It's too clumsy for people to click view rules, then click on a link to a guide, then click on a link there to go to a google doc and then search for their category of choice there. In addition some of the bullet points in the doc aren't actually rules. There's stuff like suggesting that people skip cutscenes and encouraging players to record both screens which, while both are good practice, don't belong in the rules. There's also rules that are just entirely irrelevant, like banning infinite ammo for new game runs when it's not even possible to get infinite weapons in an NG file. So all that stuff is probably going to be left out.
The only thing that would potentially change how the game is run is the NG+ inventory thing. I totally agree with Auddy that no menuing and IGT is the way to go, and have stated so since the rule was implemented. I don't run the category so I'm not too invested in it, but NG+ is already a cakewalk with half-decent weapon choice on any difficulty (except maybe pro solo which nobody runs for obvious reasons), so I don't see why you would need to menu anyway.
There are several counter-arguments to this rule that are worth looking at. The first is that the mods have to go and click through the replay to see that nothing was illicitly added during menus. Well having verified several such runs I can safely say that it takes almost no time and that you should be watching most of the run anyway and looking for shenanigans in the gameplay as well.
The other counterpoint is that it is too limiting to try and play through the game without menuing, either because you need more healing items or because you need to switch weapons. That's where I'd like to see some discussion amongst the NG+ runners. But to make it clear, it's gotta be EITHER allowing menuing and going RTA, or using IGT. And it has to be a majority vote amongst people who run the game.You can't have your cake and eat it too. New Game uses RTA for very sound and objective reasons, and we need the same to make any change final for NG+.
