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This is just amazing! I'm a latecomer to TDM and have only tried out a few FMs. I didn't think anything could ever approach the immersive experience of The Painter's Wife, until now. Tip of a HUGE hat to Wellingtoncrab and their team for what must have been an enormous labor of love! Now to a request for some help re. House Ursine:

@Ansome's question is correct. Nothing in real life ever has a perfectly sharp corner, and one of the pieces of advice often given to newbie modellers trying to make things look realistic and avoid the "obvious CG" look, is to give sharp edges a tiny bevel so they look like something that might be manufactured in real life. The problem you've got in DarkRadiant is (1) dealing with tiny bevels using regular brush geometry is awkward, and (2) brushes aren't smoothed at all (unlike the cube on the right which actually has full smooth shading which you don't notice because of the tiny bevel). So unless you're willing to create imported 3D models with smoothed bevelled edges and place them on the corner of your buildings, adding bevels in brushwork might be more trouble than it's worth. Probably the most important things with brickwork corners is to make sure the bricks line up properly. There's nothing more obviously CG than a plastered-on brickwork texture which just ends in an unrealistic column of cut-off bricks, with mortar joints that are completely unaligned with the brickwork on the adjacent face.

I agree, that is an issue. It would be better if the system handling briefings/readables could be revised as you indicated, to handle individual sentences as #str_, rather than whole pages. Baring that, having a key field like "#str_This is a whole page\nfull of text that goes on and on and on [...] until done" would appear as a very long single line. That is nasty to look at in the Readables Editor, and even worse in the .langs file, where the too-long text would appear twice on a line (once with #str_ prefix of English version, another in translation). So for those, it would be better in the short term to stick to symbolic keys, e.g., existing #str_12345 or revised form #str_myfm_book_of_spells_page_1 I might add, in the longer term, enhancing the Readable Editor to use the .lang files would be an enormous improvement for FM authors and a significant accomplishment. A fair amount of work though, but probably doable in increments over several releases.

PaperBack: How to store arbitrary data on A4 sheets of paper https://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#1

Could people share some examples of Darkradiant window layouts you use? A screenshot is fine. I thought of making a wiki page with a couple of example layouts and what are the steps to make them happen in Darkradiant.

I'm just here to gush embarrassingly about another Wellington Crab mission. MD2: LHMN is a delicious bit of offbeat strangeness, dreamlike, surreal, but made odd sense to me at the right moments, so that I made it though the entire thing by myself this time, instead of being constantly (though enjoyably) overwhelmed as in Iris. Of course, it's lovingly crafted and peppered with clever little bits of window dressing that might seem distracting and extraneous in a lesser mission. I still have little idea what the overall story was, but I enjoyed every minute of the experience. Wellington Crab, you are a genius and an artist, and I look forward keenly to your next mission.

I think you need to do things at the exact moment in DR that the user changes a field, so you can capture both the old value and the new value. Would be way better if DR just handled everything natively, but could be done through a hook to an external script too, I suppose. Or some complicated logging.

Maybe have a lang file check script with suggested fixes. Or even a console command for checking translation file compatibility.

Cute mission, was a bit short though. Really loved everything about it, but was really expecting a longer mission until I saw that it was an April Fools' mission.

One of the problems with the old #str_number system, that would not be automatically solved in the new #str_phrase system, is lack of versioning/history. For example, suppose in the FM I provide a new string: #str_Mother! which (by magic TBD, ideally in DR) generates this placeholder in all the .lang files: "#str_Mother!" "Mother!" The translator in the fr.lang file later does this: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" Still later, the FM author revises the string in DR: "str_Mother!!!" In a naive implementation, this breaks the link to the existing translation(s), which becomes orphan in all the .langs, and creates a new entry: "#str_Mother!!!" "Mother!!!" OK, how could we do better? Case 1 (as above): the FM author knows the change is trivial, and so (at revision time in DR) might ask the translations to be retained but marked for review. So maybe the fr.lang files gets: // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother!!!" "Mere!" // Needs minor review with removal of the orphans (after they become comments and moved to before their replacements) Case 2, where the revision is not trivial: the FM author (at revision time in DR) might ask the translations to be replaced by english but marked for review, e.g.: #str_Mother of Pearl! causes the fr.lang files to have (with orphan removal as case 1): // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother of Pearl!" "Mother of Pearl!" // NEEDS REDO Then the translator could eventually fix it: // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother of Pearl!" "Nacre!" // Done 2025-03-14 by Henri

The main problem of the art direction of T4 is that is *ONLY* that kind of dark (=the "gloom" fallen over the City), prologue apart. Prologue atmosphere is just perfect

Well most things made of brick or cut stone have sharp corners/edges, so that's normal.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but just a historical note: the existing i18n.pl conversion script expects only a numeric value after #str_ in its pattern matching regex (and possibly method of hashing). I do think @datiswous's idea to have key/value pairs with values like: "#str_Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." is a good way forward. Maybe with this version, DR could actually choose over time to provide some .lang support. And probably the engine would have to create hash tables to avoid slow string matching with these long non-numeric strings. (Oh, one other thing, since we're talking about The Outpost. When I played it earlier the month under 2.12, my screen would periodically go black for a second or two, every minute or two. I wonder if anyone else sees this, or just my odd Intel graphics chip?)

Correctly me if wrong. Apperantly xdata formatting doesn't work well with the lang references. So this: maps/man2/mission_briefing { "num_pages": "1" "page1_body" : "#str_b1" "" "#str_b2" "" "#str_b3" } Doesn't work. You can only do this: maps/man2/mission_briefing { "num_pages": "1" "page1_body" : "#str_b1" } And then in the lang file you have to add the whole text of page 1 and get newlines via \n etc. So writing a (text only) briefing or readable and after that translating, is probably not something you want to do. I didn't actually test this with readable's, but it seems to me it would have the same limitation.

@Taquito TBH, I like the original Thief 4 screenshots better. Looks darker and more coherent. To each his own, of course.

I was looking into this a bit more and conclude that the translation system in itself is actually an universal external data system. So instead of xdata, you could use a #str_someword and then reference to that in the /strings/fm/english.lang file. Well I guess it's probably not really news for some of us. Edit: This actually works fine: File english.lang for Thief's Den "#str_Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." "Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." Then in the objective editor you add #str_ before every objective text. This way it's easier and you can still see which is which.

If it's supposed to be an octagon, I don't think the corners need to be bevelled. Certainly it looks much better to bevel square corners, but the angles of an octagon don't look bad imo. If you want a smooth cylinder though, the default cylinder patch has 16 sides, which looks smooth enough in game. That would be easier than bevelling 8 corners. Speaking of smoothing; I was pleasantly surprised to find that if you make a model in Blender with smooth-shading ticked, then export an ase file, it will retain the smooth shading when imported to darkradiant.

Query: when playing a level, how sharp must a corner in the level geometry be for it to look bad to you? I'm sculpting my current FM from scratch as there aren't many prefab modules fitting my theme and the question has been nagging me for a bit. I've been using bevel patches to smooth out 90 degree corners made of brickwork for a slightly more realistic look to them, but I'm not sure where else I should be smoothing out the angles of my level geometry. Most notably I have a larger room where the main center piece is a large octagonal tower made of brick and I'm unsure if players will find its sharp angles unappealing to look at despite its ornamentation. Try as I might to smooth out those corners, an octagon is still an octagon.

In my opinion this again strays a little too far from the original game, but it should certainly go into your modpack!

My issue with the Gold filter in HR is that overpowers all colors making the game monochromatic. These artistic liberties work on short games but in long games once the novelty wears down it could make the game feel monotone. Something similar happens in Thief 4. The art director made the textures almost colorless to add a bleak and sad effect to the game, cool but overtime the player might feel the game is dull and boring. Colors not only give look but also feel. Bur regardless. Here's my attempt to Replicate the Gold Filter in Deus Ex Art Director's Cut OFF ON The Directors Cut has this Pinkish Copper Tone: ON

It is not included in the Modpack. It is a little side project, that's all I know today. You know the drill: do what you please with the stuff I release. And if you can make it better or different: do it!

Snatcher, so is this part of your modpack already or will it be integrated when most items have been named?

The translation pack for The Outpost is now essentially the same as the one at Darkfate.org. I'll probably do this for most of the old dormant missions.