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Yet another breaking change, I'm afraid: 6346 Sounds have a bunch of parameters: minDistance maxDistance volume shakes soundClass The base value for each parameter is set in sound shader. However, it can be overridden with a different value in spawnargs (e.g. "s_volume" "-10") or in C++ engine code with SetSoundVolume (used extensively for footsteps). Unfortunately, Doom 3 engine has a special case: setting some parameter to zero means it will not override the base value. So there is no way to override sound volume with 0, because setting zero would mean "use value from sound shader", while setting 0.1 or -0.1 would mean "use volume = 0.1 or -0.1". This behavior causes confusion. It is especially bad when volume is set programmatically, because e.g. volume of player footsteps is computed as a sum of many modifiers (run, crouch, creep, in water, etc.) and it is hard to be sure you don't get zero sum in the end. The idea is to fix this mess and add a "don't override" special value in the system. Speaking of spawnargs, it would work like this: "s_volume" "13.4" = override with value 13.4 "s_volume" "0" or "s_volume" "0.0" = override with zero "s_volume" "" (empty string) = don't override Right now there are tons of zero values set in these spawnargs. It is not clear where the author intended to override with zero, and where he wanted to drop inherited override and use base value. I guess for compatibility reasons I'll have to replace spawnargs "s_volume" "0" with "s_volume" "" in all missions.

If I update this map I'll see if I can figure out how to fix that bug. As for the loot, I do tend to hide treasure a bit more thoroughly than most mappers. People keep giving me grief for it. But if you've looted the decoy secret and uncovered Mr. Pidgeon's secret stashes (big clues if you read all the pages of the notes he's left around), as well as scoring all the pickpockets, you should be almost at the Easy loot goal already.

I believe the engine sets mindistance = 1 and maxdistance = 10 if they are not set explicitly in the sound shader. At least that's what I see here: https://github.com/stgatilov/darkmod_src/blob/trunk/sound/snd_shader.cpp#L154 Anyway, if DR sets spawnargs to the same values as in sound shader, that's not a problem for the suggested change in the meaning of zero value. But setting maxdistance = 0 will be

Since TDM 2.06 is such a different animal to the other 2.x builds (which are also much different to the 1.x builds prior to 1.08), I thought it would be a good idea to see what folks can do when armed with our performance tuning wiki: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks How low can you go? Certainly, you can no longer do tricks to make TDM run on DX8 hardware with unless that hardware fudges GL2 support via driver workarounds. If you set image_downsize to 16 can you run this on 64mb GPU's? How old of a CPU supports Multi-Core? I'm not expecting a large number of respondents but those who wish to go into their storage and revive an old ATI X1600 or Geforce FX 5900 to see "can it run" please post here.

Oh well, had a good run but I was finally able to reproduce on 2.13. I had to disable Subtitles. I guess they were helping to prevent the crash in some odd way.

As of the latest 2.13 Dev Build (dev17026-10712): I am unable to reproduce the crash in The Transaction @Daft Mugi@datiswous@Frost_Salamander@snatcher@kingsal @Araneidaecan you repro in 2.13 dev ?

Taffers, Time ago @Obsttorte and I worked on an AutoHotKey script that allows to control the player speed with the mouse wheel. In a further attempt to reduce the amount of critical keys this game demands I also created back then a script that allows the Left Alt Key to act as a lean modifier: Left Alt + W = Lean forward Left Alt + A = Lean left Left Alt + D = Lean right I never got around publishing the script because it isn't as good as it needs to be but I think we can debate regardless whether such a Lean Modifier Key would be welcomed in the core game or not. The most interesting aspect in my opinion is that we can claim back important keys such as Q and E and use them for other purposes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Here below is the script in case anyone wants to give it a try (you must be familiar with AutoHotKey). The required key bindings for the script to work are: Move forward [W], Strafe Left [A], Strafe Right [D] Lean Forward [Numpad8], Lean Left [Numpad4], Lean Right [Numpad6] You can of course change the script to your liking.... #IfWinActive ahk_exe TheDarkModx64.exe ; run only when TDM is in focus <!w:: while (GetKeyState("LAlt", "P") && GetKeyState("w", "P")) { Send {Blind}{Numpad8 down} } Send {Numpad8 up} return <!a:: while (GetKeyState("LAlt", "P") && GetKeyState("a", "P")) { Send {Blind}{Numpad4 down} } Send {Numpad4 up} return <!d:: while (GetKeyState("LAlt", "P") && GetKeyState("d", "P")) { Send {Blind}{Numpad6 down} } Send {Numpad6 up} return Cheers!

I'm looking for the setting that controls the number of difficulty levels in the options menu. The current "hardcore" setting is not challenging enough for me, and I'd like to make it more difficult, like this one for thief. I can edit the Darkmod.cfg file and would like to know if I can create a separate *.pk4 file with this file, removing everything unnecessary except the parameters I need. Will the game load the default settings from the game root and the additional data from my file? Of course, it would be better if you could tell me how to create an additional difficulty setting. I've searched through all the archives and couldn't find what I need. Thank you for your help.

The commit which introduced unconditional writing of the s_mindistance and s_maxdistance spawnargs was this one: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/commit/541f2638c810588ada12e9a28360f16df6143d45 and it appears it was intended to fix this bug: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6062 The current logic is to set the spawnargs to the same values as in the sound shader, if a shader is set: // Write the s_mindistance/s_maxdistance keyvalues if we have a valid shader if (!_spawnArgs.getKeyValue(KEY_S_SHADER).empty()) { // Note: Write the spawnargs in meters _spawnArgs.setKeyValue(KEY_S_MAXDISTANCE, string::to_string(_radii.getMax(true))); _spawnArgs.setKeyValue(KEY_S_MINDISTANCE, string::to_string(_radii.getMin(true))); } This happens in the freezeTransform method which is called after performing some manipulation of the speaker entity such as moving or resizing it. In this case _radii is the object which contains the modified speaker radii, so this code is persisting the modified radii into the relevant spawnargs. This seems to be working correctly when I manipulate a speaker with a valid sound shader. The only way I can get 0 is by creating a speaker with a sound shader like blackjack_swing which does not have radii defined. In this case the speaker has a default minimum radius of 0.0 and a default maximum radius of 10.0. We could avoid setting a radius at all, but then the speaker just appears as an entity box rather than a sphere/circle, which I assume is the original reason for setting a default value. Right now I have no idea what code path would lead to having both a minimum and a maximum of 0.0. I think we'd need more detailed reproduction steps. This is the current logic for setting the spawnargs on speaker construction (rather than manipulation, which is the previous code): // Initialise the speaker with suitable distance values auto radii = soundShader->getRadii(); entity.setKeyValue("s_mindistance", string::to_string(radii.getMin(true))); entity.setKeyValue("s_maxdistance", radii.getMax(true) > 0 ? string::to_string(radii.getMax(true)) : "10"); So there is a specific check that s_maxdistance is greater than 0 before setting it as a spawnarg. Code similar to this has existed for many years, as far as I can see, and I have to go as far back as 2009 to find something different (originally all speakers just had hardcoded 16/32 radii to make them visible).

There's been talk over the years on how we could improve texture quality, often to no avail as it requires new high-resolution replacements that need to be created and will look different and add a strain on system resources. The sharpness post-process filter was supposed to improve that, but even with it you see ugly blurry pixels on any nearby surface. Yet there is a way, a highly efficient technique used by some engines in the 90's notably the first Unreal engine, and as it did wonders then it can still do so today: Detail textures. Base concept: You have a grayscale pattern for various surfaces, such as metal scratches or the waves of polished wood or the stucco of a rough rock, usually only a few highly generic patterns are needed. Each pattern is overlayed on top of corresponding textures several times, every iteration at a smaller... as with model LOD smaller iterations fade with camera distance as to not waste resources, the closer you get the more detail you see. This does wonders in making any texture look much sharper without changing the resolution of the original image, and because the final mixture is unique you don't perceive any repetitiveness! Here's a good resource from UE5 which seems to support them to this day: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/adding-detail-textures-to-unreal-engine-materials Who else agrees this is something we can use and would greatly improve graphical fidelity? No one's ever going to replace every texture with a higher resolution version in vanilla TDM; Without this technique we'll always be stuck with early 2000's graphics, with it we have a magic way of making it look close to AAA games today! Imagine being able to see all those fine scratches on a guard's helmet as light shines on it, the thousands of little holes on a brick, the waves of wood as you lean into a table... all without even losing much performance nor a considerable increase in the size of game data. It's like the best deal one could hope for! The idTech 4 material system should already have what we need, namely the ability to mix any textures at independent sizes; Unlike the old days when only a diffuse texture was used, the pattern would now need to be applied to both albedo / specular / normal maps, to my knowledge there are shader keywords to combine each. Needless to say it would require editing every single material to specify its detail texture with a base scale and rotation: It would be painful but doable with a text injection script... I made a bash script to add cubemap reflections once, if it were worth it I could try adapting it to inject the base notation for details. A few changes will be needed of course: Details must be controlled by a main menu setting activating this system and specifying the level of detail, materials properties can't be controlled by cvars. Ultimately we may need to overlay them in realtime, rather than permanently modifying every material at load time which may have a bigger performance impact; We want each iteration to fade with distance and only appear a certain length from the camera, the effect will cause per-pixel lighting to have to render more detail per light - surface interaction so we'll need to control the pixel density.

I'm trying to get DR to work with my Godot projects, to replace TrenchBroom, but my first attempts haven't been fruitful. I need DR to see my project's textures, 3D models and entity definitions. I told DR where to find my game in the Game Setup window, but I'm having some issues. As far as entities go, I think I'm probably fine. I unpacked a few of TDM's .pk4 files and found the folder def with many .def files. I tried placing misc.def and tdm_base.def in there, to see if DR would load those entities after restarting, and it does but only if the game type is TDM. I'm probably fine with that, as it makes no difference, as far as I can tell. The Godot importer only cares about the contents of the .map file, which I know I can export in a few formats, so that should be fine (Q3 at least should work fine). However, DR is not seeing my project's textures. I don't know if DR can work with .png files, but I brought in some .tga files from TDM for testing and DR doesn't see them either. So something is missing, but I don't know what it is. I tried placing the textures in a textures folder at the project's root, but nothing happened. Although ideally I'd like to have the textures in root/assets/textures. I haven't tried to use 3D models at all yet, so I'm in complete darkness about that. I wonder what formats DR supports, though. I usually work with .obj, which bypasses Godot's import weirdness.

allmost sounds like the haswell turbo core feature ?, my 6950x also has one core who runs at a higher speed than the rest (3.8 ghz) but otherwise it behaves temperature wise. if i link the cores temperatures rise somewhat but it does OC up to 4.5 ghz which is not to bad for the 6950x but then temps rise to 55" idle and damn near 80" when it has to do something .

@The Black Arrow That's a good analysis. I don't disagree but we're referring to different time periods with different quality aims: In the early days of 3D and low-res CRT screens when we had 256x256 textures, detail textures were used to make surfaces appear as if they have 1024x1024 textures... today in the age of 1080p monitors such texture can appear blurry from up close, we want to make 1024x1024 textures appear of 4096x4096 quality. Back then the goal was to get at least a little bit of perceived sharpness, today the goal is to see those microscopic details on every surface as if everything is real... while the concept of detail textures is old it scales to cover both aims. As you correctly pointed out, the ideal solution would be upgrading the actual textures themselves. Sadly there are two big problems with this that will likely never be possible to overcome: Someone must create or find identical textures to replace existing ones, which have to retroactively fit every old FM. That would be a huge effort for so many images, and will not look exactly the same way so people would complain how "this wall used to be made of small red bricks which are now larger and yellower which isn't what I intended and no longer line up". An advanced upscaling filter may be able to bump the resolution with good results, this would be a lot less effort and retain the exact appearance of textures. The even greater issue is storage and memory use would go through the roof. Imagine all our textures (from surfaces to entity skins) being 4096x4096 which would be the aim for decent quality today: TDM could take over 100 GB of drive space, you'd need at least 16 GB of RAM to run it, and the loading time of a FM will be 5 minutes. Detail textures are a magic solution for both problems: They're overlayed in realtime on top of the standard textures without changing their base appearance. This means you see pixels several times the scale of the image without requiring any image to actually be at that resolution, no vRAM or loading time increase. And if detail layers are disabled with distance you also don't lose FPS in per-pixels calculations when distant lights update.

HAZARD PAY 1.5 [ TDM 2.10 REQUIRED] AUTHOR'S NOTE ================================ Hello! Its been a while since I’ve released something so I figured I'd join the Connections Competition and make a stand-alone adventure to try out the new 2.10 features. ================================ DESCRIPTION ================================ This is a medium size mission with an emphasis on adventure and stealth combat. !!! WARNING !!! I recommend NORMAL if you're looking to cruise and HARD / EXPERT if you're looking to sweat a little. EXPERT uses a prototype save room mechanic and is very tough. ================================ PLAY IT ================================ Requires TDM 2.10 DOWNLOAD HAZARD 1.6 ================================ PLAYTHROUGH ================================ Courtesy of Filizitas Part 1 Part2 Part3 ================================ CREDITS: VOCALS courtesy of the very talented : Goldwell, Mortem Desino, and Yandros. TESTING by the diligent and awesome : Amadeus, Epifire, Goldwell, Mike_A, and Moonbo ADDITIONAL SCRIPTING provided by the very talented Dragofer ADDITIONAL AUDIO by the masterful Goldwell PLAYTHROUGH by Filizitas

Alright, so, I'm a Texture Artist myself for more than 20 years, which means I know what I'm talking about, but my word isn't law at all, remember that. I've worked (mostly as mods, I am a professional but I much prefer being a freelance) with old DX8 games up to DX12. When it comes to Detail Textures, for my workflow, I never ever use it except rarely when it's actually good (which, I emphasize on "rarely"). This is one reason I thought mentioning that I worked with DX8 was logical. One of the few times it's good is when you make a game that can't have textures higher than what would be average today, such as, World Textures at 1024x1024. Making detail textures for ANY (World, Model) textures that are lower than 128x128 is generally appealable. Another is when the game has no other, much better options for texturing, such as Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping. Personally, I think having Detail Textures for The Dark Mod is arguably pointless. I know TDM never had a model and texture update since 2010 or so, but most textures do seem to at least be 1024x1024, if there's any world texture that's lower than 256x256, I might understand the need of Detail Textures. Now, if this was a game meant to be made in 2024 with 2020+ standards, I would say that we should not care about the "strain" high resolution textures add, however, I do have a better proposition: Mipmaps. There are many games, mostly old than new ones, that use mipmaps not just for its general purpose but also to act as a "downscaler". With that in mind, you boys can add a "Texture Resolution" option that goes from Low to High, or even Lowest to Highest. As an example, we can add a 2048x2048 (or even 4096x4096) world texture that, if set to Lowest, it would use the smallest Mipmap the texture was made with, which depends on how the artist did it, could be a multiplication of 1x1 or 4x4. One problem with this is that, while it will help in the game with people who have less VRAM than usual these days, it won't help with the size. 4096x4096 is 4096x4096, that's about 32mb compressed with DXT1 (which is not something TDM can use, DXT is for DirectX, sadly I do not know how OpenGL compresses its textures). I would much rather prefer the option to have better, baked Normal Maps as well as Parallax Mapping for the World Textures. I'm still okay with Detail Textures, I doubt this will add anything negative to the game or engine, very sure the code will also be simple enough it will probably only add 0.001ms for the loading times, or even none at all. But I would also like it as an option, just like how Half-Life has it, so I'm glad you mentioned that. But yet again, I much prefer better Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping than any Detail Textures. On another note...Wasn't Doom 3, also, one of the first games that started using Baked Normal Maps?

sadly the upcomming 8xxx series from amd will only be for midrange atleast according to leaks (grain of salt maybe ?). well it would be something quite different thats for sure not sure if 32 gb vram would actually help (what is the max texture size today ?), it might help if they really go nuts with the detail level in upcomming titles but i suspect this might take longer as the game companies dont want to alienate players with less vram. ofc it will come at some point but i dont see it in the near future. the 2 and 3 gb vram chips might actually make a dent in the bus width war. what the hell happened with hbm memory ???, the old fury cards could actually do 4k no problem with only 4 gb vram because the hbm memory was so blazing fast.

The Dark Mod 15th Anniversary Contest! To celebrate our 15th year, we are holding a fan mission contest! The Dark Mod project trundles onward for it’s 15th year in a row. In that time we have improved our game engine in countless ways and have grown to over 170 missions! To celebrate our perseverance and the years of improvements to come, we are hosting a contest to mark 15 years since the 1.0 release! Now is your time to demonstrate the mission design that best exemplifies your personal style and capabilities! Please consider entering this event! Unlike most recent contests, there is no defined theme and we are simply going to score based on our standard metrics of Story, Gameplay, and Visuals with our standard weighted scoring: Max Possible = Total Votes * 5 (Outstanding) TotalMaxPointsPoss (TMP) = AllCategoryVotecount(ACV) * 30 Full Weighted Score (FWS) = (Gameplay score*3 + Visual score*2 + Story score) / TMP Contest Submissions should be provided before October 16th so that players can start playing and celebrating on the 17th! The players have been keen to relay that they would like really creative missions so it may be worthwhile to examine our “Community Unusual Contest” to get an idea about the wild range of possibilities we offer to designers. Also, since the contest submission is in October, there will probably be an increased desire for Horror themes. The Dark Mod 2.12 was just released so including new 2.12 features is strongly encouraged. Finally, it might be nice if authors name their protagonist Corbin to match the included missions. ( None of the above suggestions are requirements for the submissions. ) Please post your intention to enter in this thread. Thank you! The Poll on this is to demonstrate the intended design used in the mission release threads.

This was a great purchase for me, covers all my needs, and brings me up to immunity to any massive chip shortage as a result of geopolitics. It appears to be running a core at 4.2 GHz basically forever even with low usage, but is quiet most of the time. Clearly faster than the i5-6600T despite the years of quad-core stagnation. The higher TDP and hyperthreading really helps. I doubt there's any noticeable improvement going from HD 530 to UHD 630 iGPU, but it does gain the better H.265/VP9 HW decode that came immediately after Skylake.

I just stumbled across this comment from @stgatilov and was wondering if the GUI-based debrief was implemented. Turns out is wasn't, so consider this an official feature request My own requirements aren't terribly complicated - just the ability to either: display a page or pages similar to the briefing show just a custom image (e.g. a newspaper article or something) display a readable like in the game (again the newspaper example works here). Not sure if it should display before the stats screen or after? I've only put about 2 minutes of thought into this, so I imagine others will have more to add. Also, I'm scared of working with GUI files, so making it as simple as possible would be great (especially if it's just to display an image).

For the people eager to play with the latest state of development, two things are provided: regular dev builds source code SVN repository Development builds are created once per a few weeks from the current trunk. They can be obtained via tdm_installer. Just run the installer, check "Get Custom Version" on the first page, then select proper version in "dev" folder on the second page. Name of any dev version looks like devXXXXX-YYYY, where XXXXX and YYYY are SVN revision numbers from which the build was created. The topmost version in the list is usually the most recent one. Note: unless otherwise specified, savegames are incompatible between any two versions of TDM! Programmers can obtain source code from SVN repository. Trunk can be checked out from here: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/ SVN root is: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src Build instructions are provided inside repository. Note that while you can build executable from the SVN repository, TDM installation of compatible version is required to run it. Official TDM releases are compatible with source code archives provided on the website, and also with corresponding release tags in SVN. A dev build is compatible with SVN trunk of revision YYYY, where YYYY is the second number in its version (as described above). If you only want to experiment with the latest trunk, using the latest dev build gives you the maximum chance of success. P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.

But sound spawnargs are merely overrides. You should not set them at all if you don't intend to override the values set in sound shader. Also, how does moving anything affect sound distances? Whenever you move sound, you should only change its position/orientation and nothing else, shouldn't you?

ok so after getting myself a rtx 3070 im left with a bit of a wonder about all the fud on the net. elitist users claim the 3070 cant do 4k (debunked it handles 4k just fine but you need to lower the texture resolution in some titles to not overshoot the frankly rather low amount of vram -> 8 gb). some back and forth on the 2080ti some claim that the 3070 is faster while others claim the 2080ti is. (from my own experience the 2080ti is a bit faster in 4k while the 3070 is a bit faster in lower resolutions). if you play exclusively in 4k go for the 2080ti -> reason it has more vram 11gb vs 8gb this might not sound like a huge deal but the extra 3gb helps a lot with ultra high texture resolutions. debunked (claims that the 3070 uses newer dlss features, it does not. the 2080ti supports the exact same dlss features that the 3070 does, it even supports dlss 3 minus the framegen feature. some claims the 3070 uses newer tensor cores which are faster, well is they are i dont see it... the 2080 ti has 4 times the amount of tensor cores compared to the 3070 while the 3070 has around 1000 more cuda cores hmm ???). the real reason i think the 3070 got so popular is that it delivered close to the same performance of the insanely overpriced 2080ti, i cant fault people for that choice but i would like some realism in the comparison and not something based on just the price. the 2080ti was a highend card back when it was new while the 3070 is a mid range card at half the price of the 2080ti with at least comparable performance but lacks enough vram to play all titles at 4k with everything cranked to the max. playing hzd forbidden west on the 3070 atm in 4k with everything on max except texture resolution which i have on high and i get > 80 fps with the framegen mod and around 45 fps without it (dlss is flaky in this game though), the 2080ti in the same game in 4k gets around 100 fps with the framegen mod and 55 fps without it with texture resolution at the highest setting).

Ok, but you could also load all maps in your campaign, but in a different order. Or you could make a copy of the map and change some things. So it doesn't have to be an entirally different mission (which indeed might be too much work). So for example the first mission has an objective to place the plans to build a bridge over the river in a specific place. Then the next mission has that bridge (map1), or does not have that bridge (map2). Mapper only has to make a copy of the map and remove the bridge (and maybe a small amount of other things). I just think that having only one specific order is pretty restrictive. But if it's a lot of work to implement it might not be worth it.