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That sounds like a good project for a member of the community to take on.  ;)

TRPG2 is still probably my favorite in the series, so I was already kind of considering taking a stab at it, but now I feel like I have to put at least some effort into it.

Will Telepath Tactics: Liberated and/or Together in Battle be Steam Deck verified?

I'm just a newbie and I do not really know what's a 'Global Moderator?'

Moderators are responsible for enforcing the forum rules, and have elevated permissions that enable them to do so. They're capable of locking/unlocking, moving around, and deleting posts and threads, as well as being able to receive reported posts.

Is it some special title that you can only get under special circumstances?

With great power, comes great responsibility. The circumstances are so special that Craig (the forum owner/administrator/wonderful game designer) has only ever granted the position to two users. (At least as far as I can remember, in the couple of decades I've been here. Was there ever a mod other than KZ on the old forums? Ert wasn't promoted until the new forums, right?)

Can I get it?

Umm... you'll want to talk to Craig about that one.

I've played the game all the way through only once, and defeated Cygnus via the "Facts and Logic" route. I intended to reload and actually go through the fight against Cygnus, but never did. Now I know what I missed! Thanks for sharing!

Have you considered selling the 3d models for the titular True Messiahs, once you've sold out of physical copies of the game? It'd be fun to pull them into a Tabletop Simulator game at some point.

Wait, were we not supposed to be providing belief so that the Reality Hole can consume us all and terminate this dark timeline?

Massif Press' Lancer, a science-fantasy mech-building tabletop game set in a utopian spacefuture!

I'm going to have to save the link to their itch.io page, in the event I ever manage to convince my group to play something than D&D. Any fun stories you'd like to share?

live-action role-play of the apocalypse

I didn't realize True Messiah had gotten that popular. Are you sure it's just role-play, though? It would certainly explain why this timeline seems so dark, if it's not.

Lately, I've been playing a game of "Do I actually want to abandon running my Curse of Strahd campaign, or did I just not get enough sleep last night?"

I've only played through it once, but here are my notes:

Cutscenes

• The text feels a bit too big, at least in the introductory scene. The ability to scale that down would be nice.
• Still, it feels A LOT smoother than Telepath Tactics did, so props.

Recruitment/Character Management/Camping

• The ability to see what stats a physical attribute modifies would be extremely useful. I was able to piece together some of them (e.g. Migraine = lower mental resist) but a tooltip (even just the stat icons and the modifier) would be nice.
• My first instinct when trying to view the next page of recruits was to try scrolling down, much to my great sadness. If possible, it would be a subtle but impactful change to that screen.
• One evening, a Mechanic came by selling golems. I tried purchasing one, and the noise and animation played, but no aura was deducted from my total, no golem entered my roster, and the golem remained in the available list. Examining the same golem again, it had a cost of 0 aura, but still did the above instead of entering my roster when I clicked "Recruit". I wasn't able to afford any of the other golems, despite the UI showing I still had 1487 aura on hand. After dismissing the Mechanic, aura had been reduced as though I had purchased my new friend, but my new friend was nowhere to be found.
• I don't know that it's absolutely necessary, but it would be neat to be able to visibly sort the roster based on name and other stats listed.
• Less a bug and more a typo, two of my recruits were playing "Words Ablaze" before bed. The very last section of that description was "head off to bed./They conclude after hours of play, tired but happy.}" with all the odd punctuation present as well.

Battle

• Left-click and drag to pan felt super unintuitive compared to a lot of other strategy games I've played, where drag-left-clicking is usually used to select a group. Maybe think about using right or middle click for panning?
• The big selector square that follows the mouse around felt unnecessary when I wasn't actively targeting something like a skill or movement.
• I discovered (by accident) that you can cancel targeting a skill with a right click, which wasn't obvious at first (unless I just skipped reading it in the tutorial). A nice big cancel button might be handy here.
• I love the idea of characters giving little battle quips when they use a skill or fall in battle. I just wish the longer ones lingered a little bit more before dismissing themselves. I wasn't able to finish reading some.
• In the final combat of the demo, my spearman had learned Hold, and used it to keep a swordsman from getting to my healer. Only the swordsman ignored the blocked spaces, entered and ended in one, and used Sword diagonally to attack my healer. Ummm... what?

Other

• I loved the original music, and the new stuff here absolutely slaps.
• I agree with Sythion about graphics. Backgrounds and items look pretty nice, but character sprites and portraits felt out of place. It was nice to see a rest animation, though.
• Some attack animations (notably the photokineticist's light blast) felt a bit slow.
• I'm glad I found the option to disable Camera Zoom. That would have gotten old fast.
• The ability to change graphics settings mid-combat going forward will be a must. There were several times I wanted to take a screenclip, but couldn't because I couldn't downgrade from full screen to windowed mode
• Overall good things.

-- improved the writing and scripting for the lift weights camp activity.

Does this mean there's chance for a sufficiently-powerful kineticist in the party to come one-up everyone with some applied tactile telekinesis? I hope that's what that means.

An in-game searchable reference for scripting and other documentation is in the works, but I simply haven't finished implementing that yet. (Scrollable drop-down menus are a real pain to code, so I'm hoping to avoid that approach!)

That, I definitely believe. Any kind of in-game reference would be an extreme improvement, so I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Can you attach a copy of the map that's causing the game to crash upon testing?

See attached.

• do you have logs from any of the bugs (i.e. the window not closing on creating a new campaign, or the dialogue editor creating duplicate trees, or testing making the
  game throw an exception?) The 'L' button should save a log in the campaign editor much as it does in the main game.

I didn't even think to try. I went back to try recreating the issues, and have attached the resulting log files.

I pressed 'L' when trying to re-crash the testing function, but no dice in getting a log file. I did grab a screenshot for you, however useful that may be.

Another note on the map testing functionality: Loading a map with no armies or characters starts the battle, but does nothing. Looks like you're missing some validation to ensure the map is even functional? (I attempted to get a log file of this as well, but no luck. Have another screenshot, I guess?)

I tried pressing 'L' from the character creation menu, and no log file. Something might be eating my keypress between the keyboard and the function that spits out a text file. I eventually got a log file, but it made me wait a few minutes to appear, and doesn't appear to be the one I was looking for.

• stats and growths in the character creator actually do have mouseover tooltip explanations--do I need to make the mouseover area larger so they're easier to find?

I went back to look, and it appears you do actually have tooltips! I was initially hovering over the name of the stat, not the icon, so I didn't see them. Expanding the area to the text, at least, probably wouldn't hurt.

• when you ask for drop-down lists on text fields in the various editors, do you mean that displaying 1-3 predictive text suggestions isn't cutting it--or did those not come up for you?

The predictive text suggestions came up, but without a list of valid entries directly front of me to reference, it can be hard to remember what's actually available and what everything does. If I want to "AddCharacter" to the map with a script, the modding chapter of the original TT manual lists 10 different actions that start with "Add". None of them actually do what I need, though. "SpawnChar" does. Being able to quickly see what's available would be a tremendous help. Skimming through the manual is one way (and how I had to look up the correct action, since I haven't played with TT's scripting abilities in a couple of years), but having to tab out to search through a PDF can be tedious, especially if the campaign editor is being run in full-screen mode to maximize visual real-estate.



Completely unrelated to anything else, something occurred to me tonight: Would it be possible for the default volume on the title music to be lower? With the big *brawwww* at the beginning, I jump out of my skin if I don't turn my speakers waaaaaaay down before starting it up. I had this complaint with the original engine as well, but I don't think I voiced it.



-Edit:-

-- the game now gives you the option to turn on a battlefield grid. (It's ugly, IMO--but people seem to want it, so...)

Hey now, I like a good battle grid! It makes it easier to judge distances at a glance!

[Overall impressions:]

My notes are a bit more scattered and not as detailed as I would like. I didn't get to test every feature tonight, because I'm not sure where my time went.



Overall impressions:

• Most menus felt oversized and too much like a game. It didn't feel like something I would want to potentially spend hours working with. Reducing the font and text box size would help make it feel more manageable.
• Some fields (anything to do with skills or battlefield conditions or scripting actions) could benefit greatly from a dropdown list component (like a little arrow-down button that would bring up the list, maybe filtering based on what's already in the text box).
• The music in the background was fun at first, but being able to turn it down (more likely off) is going to need to be a necessity. But it'll also need to be a different control than the in-game music, so that you don't need to keep updating the volume settings any time you switch between the two.

Campaign Overview Screen:
I entered the name of my new campaign, "Revenge of Squash", and clicked "Proceed", but nothing happened. When I clicked "Proceed" again, it told me that the campaign already existed. I had to cancel out of the name entry, then load the campaign to actually continue.

[spoiler=Revenge of Squash]Squash is my cat. He's always hungry. In this campaign, he assumes human form and sets out to get revenge on the evil, invisible spriggat/fairy who keeps emptying his food bowl.[/spoiler]


Character Editor:

• The idea that species determines class struck me as odd, but it's an understandable restriction. I would have liked to be able to create new class names and set their portrait type, though.
• Being able to set a character's pronouns was a nice touch that some of my friends would appreciate having available.
• Paging on the character portrait details screen misbehaved, and oddly. Page 2 and 3 of the Scars/Beards/Etc list were the exact same.
• Stat Grows and Starting Stats could really benefit from tooltips describing what each stat actually does.
• The Equipment Masteries section baffled me. Some explanation or more detail there would be good.
• Some things, like Skill Progression and Inventory, felt like they would be easier to interact with if they weren't text boxes so much as drag-drop-adjust controls.

Music:
I like the expanded music options, and could see myself using some of them in Tabletop RPG sessions (Out of Your League!) if there's a new soundtrack for sale. I'm especially curious to hear what this new "[X] Custom/CustomAssetInfo" track is ;).

Dialogue Editor:
Adding a new script or dialogue tree would create two with the same name. Closing and re-opening the dialogue editor got rid of the duplicates, however.

Map Editor:

• Zooming in/out had an obnoxious *whooom*ing noise.
• Zooming in/out felt too slow, and not responsive at all. A snappier/less-smooth zoom would be nice in the map editor, if nothing else.
• The default zoom level was waaaaay too close, especially for how long it took to zoom back out.
• It would be cool if the "Next Scene" option had a drop-down list of already-existing maps.
• The palatte swapping on the tents on the Army setup screen wasn't working correctly. They stayed mostly purple.
• Weather effects (on the editor screen, at least) felt wonky. They fell in a nice cuboid shape, regardless of how the map had been shifted around.
• The elevation tool could probably be implemented differently. Maybe left-click to increase, right click to decrease? Having to move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen and back any time I accidentally raised something too high got old quickly.
• Something like a toggle-able grid overlay would be helpful.
• Object previews on the object screen had quite a few big "?" in there.
• Some character settings, like initial rotation/orientation, would benefit greatly from being editable outside the "Edit Character" menu. Maybe right clicking a character to rotate it clockwise? If nothing else, being able to jump straight to a character's edit screen with a right click would be a huge improvement.
• I'm very confused about how ground tiles actually work now.
• Being able to rotate the map (maybe holding the scroll wheel or some other keybind) would be a wonderful addition both to the editor, and the game. You're already starting to utilize Unity's 3D capabilities, why not go all in? If they rotated as the camera did, it might even help the 2D sprites feel more natural with the rest of the graphics.

Campaign Testing:

• I was confused when I didn't find this on the map editor screen, but instead on the campaign overview screen. I feel that having to exit the editor just to test the map you're working on would get old very, very quickly.
• When I clicked the "Test Campaign" button, and started my test map, I got a "Very Very Long Army Name's Turn!" popup, along with the portrait of a bow-woman in the bottom left of the screen. The game then froze entirely, save music. More graceful exception recovery?

Let me know if you need more clarity on anything. If I came across as rude or cranky, it wasn't intentional. It's been a long day of testing/debugging other software for me.

I have not yet, I'm afraid. It's on my to-do list, though. Back in the original TT days, I considered taking a stab at a campaign creation tool, but never got very far. (Thankfully. It would have been a train wreck.) I'm curious to see how easy to use it is. Actually, I think I might check it out tonight.

That's niceee. That's reallllll nice.