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So here's the starting area of my first mission. As yet unnamed, it's a short mission set in the streets of Bridgeport in which you have to escape the City by finding a way past the city wall and a bunch of irate Watch guys guarding it. I'm still finding my way around with DarkRadiant but I think I captured the feel of the grimy back alleys of the City pretty well. I dialed the ambient up high so you can see everything. In actual play I will be using a combination of a very dark ambient and the "night vision" technique shown by Sotha in his "Bakery Job" tutorial videos. I'm really slow at mapping and I fuss over everything so, with luck, I might have something beta testable by the end of the year.

Phew, it's almost exactly been 3 years since my first post about my VR modification for TDM. Three more versions of the game have been released in the meantime, and with them come performance improvements that I feel it's finally viable to continue my work on the VR adaptation So without further ado, head on over to https://github.com/fholger/thedarkmodvr and grab the latest release. It's based on the future 2.09 version, but is fully compatible with a 2.08 install. Although I've tried to make the VR version use its own set of resources (separate `darkmod_vr.cfg` and shader folders), I'd recommend you make a backup or copy of your TDM installation to be able to get back to the flat version cleanly without effort. Please heed the README in the repository, particularly about the choices of VR backends. Some noteworthy information for this new version: performance should be considerably improved from the old alphas. That doesn't mean it's perfect - although the CPU bottleneck is now completely gone, the game is now severely fill-rate limited. So if you have a current-gen headset with high resolution and/or a weaker video card, forget about any supersampling or AA. I also strongly recommend to stick to stencil shadows and disable soft shadows and ambient occlusion - the latter isn't that impressive in VR, anyway, and simply not worth the GPU cost. And even then, there will be some scenes in some missions where reprojection is just unavoidable, even with the beefiest GPU. That being said, I have tried a multitude of maps, and I think it's very playable. the UI is finally usable! Both the menu and ingame HUD elements are projected to a virtual screen in front of your sitting position. It's not the most elegant or immersive solution for the HUD, but it works vertical mouse movement is excluded from the VR view - this was suggested by some of you way back, and I think it makes the experience much more enjoyable. It can make it a little hard, though, to aim with the mouse for actions like frobbing items, because there's currently no visual indication to where the mouse is pointing. I'm planning to add one asap, but in the meantime, you can equip a weapon to get a vague sense of your mouse orientation. If you do want to re-enable vertical movement in the view, set 'vr_lockMousePitch' to 0 in the console. Other than that, I hope you enjoy this new version. Let me know which improvements you'd like me to work on first. Also, there are probably any number of render and other bugs still left in there somewhere. If you find one, please report them over at the Github tracker (https://github.com/fholger/thedarkmodvr/issues), so I can keep track of them.

Hidden Hands: The Lost Citadel ============================================================== Title: Hidden Hands: The Lost Citadel Filename : hhtlc.pk4 Authors: Jack Farmer with Amadeus & Joebarnin Date of release: 03.08.2020 Version: 2 EFX: Yes ============================================================== Hidden Hands series: I - Initiation II - Vitalic Fever III - The Lost Citadel ============================================================== Available via the Dark Mod Mission Downloader (Version 2) ============================================================== Jack Farmer: Mapping & drafts Amadeus: Editing and revising of all texts for readables, narration and dialogues, testing of gameplay and gameplay mechanics, all alpha testing & performance optimization joebarnin: Beta testing lead, debugging and debugging reports Beta testers: Krilmar Joebarnin Cambridge Spy manzanita-crow Shadow Voice actors: New Horizon: The educated Builder & Brother Gilbert (Briefing video) Goldchocobo: The naive Builder, guard (A union of its own) Jedi_Wannabe: Two guards (Of monsters and master guards) AndrosTheOxen: Jonus, guard (A union of its own) Boy Lag: Guard (Evolution of the peasants) Malasdair: Narrator (Briefing video & in game comments) Special thanks to: - Springheel, Sotha, and Fidcal for the tutorials - VanishedOne, HMart, Destined, Grayman, Joebarnin, Dragofer, demagogue, AluminumHaste, STRUNK, Geep and ERH+ for patiently answering my questions and solving in-game issues - All voice actors & beta testers for their great support - All others not mentioned here who answered my questions in the Newbie thread or via PM Pilfered items: - Setup for the main menu animation originally developed by Goldwell for "Snowed Inn" - Portal sky with trees originally developed and arranged by Dragofer for "Down By The Riverside" - Selected cliff sections originally developed and arranged by Dragofer for "A Perilous Refuge" - The scary, red-eyed Builder ghosts that have been originally developed by Bienie for "Longhorn Lodge" - Floating boat set-up originally developed by Bikerdude for one of his missions Contributors from the Inventor's Guild: - STRUNK created a prefab (S.T.A.R.S) used for various puzzles and mechanical items, he also helped with models - Dragofer supplied the experimental func_mover entity (modified by STRUNK to fit the mission purposes) - Joebarnin provided the script alteration for the mechanical locks - Grayman adjusted the switch/door mechanics for all sliding doors and fixed several AI problems Additional ambient sounds by gigagooga All other new ambient tracks and sound effects produced and mixed by Jack Farmer Explosion sound taken from freesound.org produced by tommccann Drowning man sound taken from freesound.org produced by muses202 Engine room machine sound taken from freesound.org produced by Astounded Electric zap taken from freesound.org produced by Joel_Audio Briefing video by SirSmokeALot "Walk On Roses" (in game version) RC Deickler - Drums & loops R. Recum - Keyboards JackFarmer - Bass, rhythm & lead guitar "Walk On Roses" (title screen reprise) RC Deickler - Drums & loops R. Recum - Keyboards gigagooga - Additional ambient outtakes This mission is dedicated to all past & present Dark Mod and Dark Radiant contributors - thank you for all of your hard work over the years. ============================================================= Listen to another crazy inventor and learn more about his sick brain! Marvel at the latest inventions from the Inventors Guild! Sneak through long forgotten ruins and face (yes. I know, once again) the unspeakable evil! Show the undead that the living are not to be trifled with! Solve puzzles the complexity of which would even melt the brains of Nobel Prize winners!

There is no safe way to knock someone out in real life. Not with a bump on the head, not with choking. Even using a poison dart dipped in some anaesthetic would not be safe, because anaesthetics need to be carefully matched to the patient's body weight. We all know this. It doesn't matter. The Dark Mod is not a reality simulation. The blackjack exists because the aim of this game is to deliver an improved version of the Thief gameplay experience, in which blackjacking was an important mechanic. That's all there is to it.

Story: Thanks: Thanks to peter_spy for creating the wonderful Builder Complex module set used in this mission. Thanks to my beta testers: Cambridge Spy, Mezla, kingsal, Amadeus, manzanita-crow, Kerry000, Shadow and Suave Steve. Downloads: Gallery: Thank you for playing! What did you think of the mission? I look forward to your honest feedback! Hints, Tips, Walkthroughs, Spoilers(!): - This mission will greatly reward those taffers who like to explore a mission thoroughly. It is possible to go directly for your objectives, but you will be missing a lot of content. - Many windows are openable, leading to new areas or private residences. - If an area seems hard to navigate due to patrols, chances are you can circumvent it. - Those who like a challenge and some extra replay value owe it to themselves to visit the cultist's apartment on Vicolo Torcere.

As my custom assets work has increasingly shifted from models towards scripting, I'll open a new thread here to contain any scripts that I write which can be reused in other missions, starting with the A ) Presence Lamp This is a Lost City-style lamp that brightens and dims depending on the presence of the player or an AI. It fades between 2 colours and can trigger its targets whenever it switches fully on or off, so it should also be viable in various other situations. The standard setup consists of the following: - a trigger_multiple brush. The spawnarg "anyTouch" controls whether AIs, too, are able to activate it - a presence lamp, highly recommended with a colorme skin - one presence light, or any other light with appropriate spawnargs The targeting chain is trigger brush -> lamp -> light When the player or an AI stands in the trigger_multiple brush, the lamp switches on and starts a short timer. Subsequent triggers reset the timer. If the timer runs out because no one's standing in the trigger brush anymore, the lamp switches itself off. Notes - Multiple trigger brushes can target the same lamp, and one trigger brush can target multiple lamps. However, each presence lamp can only target one light, so if you want i.e. a bouncelight you'll need to hide an additional silent presence lamp somewhere and target it from the same trigger brush. - The lamp and the light use their own colour spawnargs respectively, since setting 0 0 0 on a lamp would make it appear pitch black. - Technically the trigger brush can be exchanged for anything else that triggers the lamp every 0.5s (this number can be changed via "update_interval" on the lamp), i.e. a trigger_timer. - This was originally named the proximity lamp and was one of many scripting jobs for The Painter's Wife. I've renamed it to "presence lamp" because the mapper may place the trigger brush(es) wherever he wishes: proximity to the lamp is not a factor. Credits go to Bikerdude for putting together the crystal lamp models. Download Presence Lamps - Google Drive Place or extract the .pk4 into your FM archive, then look up the presence lamp prefabs. If you already are using other custom scripts, remember to add the presence lamp's .script to your tdm_custom_scripts file. B ) Teledoor This is a Skyrim-style door which opens just a bit into a black_matt "void" before teleporting the player to a different area of the map, which may represent the other side of the door. This is used for connecting physically separated map areas with each other, such as when there's an exterior/interior split of a building or ship to allow for more mapping freedom. [Full Thread] C ) Mass Teleport This is a teleportation setup designed to seamlessly teleport the player and any moveables between two identical-looking areas. This allows the mapper to link 2 physically distant areas with each other while maintaining the illusion that they're connected. The teleportation zones should be free of AIs as they can't be teleported like this. [Post]

Hi there, I picked up blender a week ago(having a little bit of experience with modelling in the past) and I am trying to recreate a building from my home town. [EDIT UPDATE SCREENSHOT] I wouldn't mind some tips on keeping clean topology like straight lines and stuff like this... It actually drives me nuts. [EDIT] Also I am still thinking how to deal with the lower level brick sculpting, would love some suggestions. Also congrats on the updates, I haven't been here for years but you guys really haven't been just sitting on your asses all this time Really nice to see all that.

Hello! I sat and read a book and felt an urge to map/play TDM, so I went to the computer and started up the mod and saw that my current version was out of date. I haven't mapped (seriously) for some years but I see now that you've released 2.08! It makes me really glad and brings tears to my eyes that the dev team still cranks out exellent content! I must bend away my thoughts and thinking of "I cannot make anything useful..." and try to make another mission! In other words, Fieldmedic is not dead, I'm trying (again) to take up mapping! Cheers!

I find the skill in blackjacking should lie in maneuvering yourself into a position where you can knockout an AI and hide the body without getting detected by other AIs. Once you’re in that position, the blackjack should always function reliably as long as you aim at the head from behind - you shouldn’t have to worry about things like hitting the nape of the neck (without a crosshair) or standing at a certain distance, which I wouldn’t label elements of difficulty but rather potentially frustrating inconveniences. It’d certainly be a case where realism should give way to gameplay. The Thief games take this too far in that hitting any bodypart from any direction will knock them out, and they don’t get alerted by you running up to them, but that aside I think they’ve got it right with respect to my previous paragraph. I only rarely hear someone complain that Thief’s blackjacking is too easy, but it comes up again and again that TDM’s blackjack is too unreliable.

I've done some more steps: Fix up the materials and skins so they're properly usable in TDM and DR. This included compressing to dds, creating editor images, moving to the right folders, renaming etc. This has also reduced the .pk4 size from 110mb to 70mb. Create the first .def: the model. This defines which mesh is used, which animations are available for it and which events should happen when during those animations (i.e. play footstep/attack sounds, disable/enable IK). This is enough to make a func_animate. I used the horse as a base and looked up the werebeast and human base defs for further animations that may make sense for a dragon. Make a FM archive out of it with a test map named "dragon" containing 4 func_animate dragons looping various animations. They can be triggered, i.e. via script or lever, to toggle their animations between those specified in the "start_anim" and "anim" spawnargs. So now you have a test map with functioning animated models to work with in order to get the assets into a polished state: Dragon v0.4 - Google Drive While working with the files I noted down various things: As you can see the dragon is only about knee high currently. Some joint names are in German. I've included a .txt file with translations in the download so you can change their names. I've had to comment out the animation channels (torso and legs). Idk which joint(s) should be chosen here - here's a list: Some joints have abbreviations which don't make sense to me, i.e w1_L, ACT_neck_1 or back_S_1_R. Either that's animation jargon, or maybe you can work out their function and find better names? There are already a lot of IK-named joints. I guess this might facilitate implementing IK? Some consistency issues with some of the joint names that would be good to solve in order to avoid potential problems in the future: IK isn't always capitalised: ik_ACT_tail_5, ik_tongue, ik_underarm_L, ik_underarm_R These joints contain full stops: paunch.002, w_C_L.001, w_C_R.001 Apart from the German joint names, some are capitalised: Bone, Hand_L, Hand_R, The model should use one of the colours as default and the skins be updated accordingly. The model def contains a lot of additional anims, commented out, that don't exist yet but could imo make sense for an AI dragon: The sleep_down anim seems to be broken, the .def stops working if it's included. I'd suggest making the colours less vivid to make them fit TDM's world. Skyrim's dragons would make for good inspiration for the colour palette imo. You'll need to know which frames should be accompanied by sounds (footsteps and attack sounds). The archive contains a start for the AI entity def. To make it more realistic as an AI, it'd help if the wings stayed closer to the body throughout the animations. Speaking of wings, those spikes sticking out of each wing seem way, way overdimensioned. Samson has actually updated the md5 importer/exporter for 2.8.

Some time ago I started investigation for a better differential update algorithm. The first attempt was known as time-travelling tdmupdate (also "tdmsync"). The second attempt has been much more cumbersome, but I think it has reached some usable state. Here is the new tdm_installer: Windows (32-bit) Linux 64-bit Note that it is not a finished application yet: it has some important features missing, probably bugs also. If your TDM installation is important to you, better copy it before running the installer on it. Please read the comments below to know how to workaround some issues. If you select "Get custom version" check, then you will be able to choose which version to install. Notice that it includes the very first dev build of TDM (with manbeast changes and the new experimental rendering backend). Needless to say, development builds of TDM come unsupported: they are very likely to contain bugs. They are not intended for normal playing. We would be happy if you report bugs for recent dev builds of course, but won't mind if you wait until next beta phase. Obviously, old versions of TDM won't get any fixes Some known tdm_installer problems: 1) Installs/updates cannot be canceled/interrupted properly yet. If you click on "START" button, there is no turning back except for killing the process in task manager. 2) It is strongly recommended to always enable "Force scan" check on the first page. It will spend some time, but will save you from error at the end of installation procedure. Normally, you don't need to scan if you did not modify your installation after previous install. But it's better to be safe yet. 3) The installer does not unpack zips yet. So after install you will have to unpack everything from tdm_shared_stuff.zip manually. 4) As of now, the installer downloads data from the main TDM server. It is rather slow, so think twice before running it in empty directory. Instead of clean install, better copy all tdm_****.pk4 files from any existing installation into a new directory and run updater there. Note that you can see how much data is going to be downloaded on the page with "START" button.

NO! Also, what he said:

Encumbrance system in a game like this? Not really a fan. The purpose of the game is to steal and gather as much loot as possible, without engaging or killing the AI. So then along comes an encumbrance system that punishes the player for doing exactly what the game is asking them to do, alerting guards with more noise and giving the player more incentive to either engage, kill or blackjack the AI to keep them out of the way. A system like that has been brought up a few times over the last decade, and it still clashes with what I think are the core values of the game. It's not a 1:1 life simulation, it's still a game. lol

Sometimes I just want to come here and say stuff like "hah, how about those biscotti biscuits, eh? Tried for the first time and my mind was blown into a million tiny biscobits. They're pretty good! also, I'm a dad now. anyway, bye" But I feel a new topic would be too strong, and I'm not yet sold on the Discord. I was an avid IRC user in the past (where I met my current wife, btw) but even so discord still doesn't work for me, I don't know. So yeah, I am a dad now! that is actually a thing. He looks like me and is very tiny and I love him. Also, the easiest personality to raise a child I've ever seen! this is baby easy mode, for sure. He barely screams and cries and just generally makes my life happier. The day before he was born I was super insecure and afraid. Would I love him? would I raise him well? as soon as I held him I knew that if anything happened to him I would murder an entire football team with my bare hands and then kill myself. As grim as that sounds this is actually a good thing. Also, a good use for this topic is for all of us to dump our TDM-unrelated game dev projects! I decided to make a game for the SEGA Mega Drive (Genesis for the Americans). It's a grid platformer akin to Flashback, prince of persia, blackthorne and others. I reject the term "cinematic platformer"; I think it's silly. But, brushing aside nostalgia, the only things I like about those games is the animation, obviously, and the grid snapping. There is potential for strategic gameplay in grid-based games and I think those games I mentioned should have focused less on precision platforming and more on semi puzzle gameplay. So I'm making it a stealth game! I don't think Mega Drive has any of those yet. Having some fun with debug logs: I have currently 4 game dev projects, which I cycle through periodically, but this is my main obsession right now.

I agree with demagogue that you should just do it if you like the idea and than post the results here. People who like it will adopt to it and maybe start creating their own papercraft. In terms of motives I guess that buildings are a good starting point, as their are compareably easy to build (mostly right angles and rectangle surfaces). When posting the pdf it would probably be adviseable to post some recommendations for the type of paper to use for those without any experience in papercraft to avoid frustration. An appetizer

Your view in real life doesn't bob up and down because your brain compensates for any small movements. Adding movement to the game would make it less like real life, not more. It would be like adding blinking.

Hello everyone am Fr my english is not perfect. ༼ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°༽ I did Thief 1 and II longtime ago and i enjoyed that game ,even re did them with the hd mod. And now that i have a real computer i will enjoy TDM. good job you did. Any missions recomendations ? Will there be news missions in the futur also ? I will stream too time to time i take my time when i play this kind of game and dont rush anything. https://www.twitch.tv/micropoint_ Keep doing anyway you did a great job and TDM add lot of great features.

I'm looking for a few beta testers for my new mission, "Now and Then". It's a medium-sized mission. I'll create a thread in the Beta Testing forum shortly. Please sign up here so I can get a feeling for how many testers are involved. Thanks!

This might be helpful:

The LWO export script has now been updated to support Autosmooth settings. A new option is present in the export dialog, allowing you to choose No Smoothing, Full Smoothing (looks the same as ASE), and Use Autosmooth settings. If you choose Use Autosmooth settings, the settings of Autosmooth in Blender will be exported into the LWO file, allowing you to use both smoothing and flat shading on the same model without needing to manually split vertices.

I find this incredibly vulgar. Whatever your views may be, there's no excuse to deliver them with such obscenity. I understand we have lax forum rules that permitted Kurshok to start this thread on equally inflammatory premises, as we rarely come into situations where we need such rules, but at this point any civil space on the web should draw the line.

I have quite a few assets from WIPs I'll probably never use elsewhere, so I thought I could share it here. Some of these are older and not necessarily matching the TDM lore, but I hope someone will find use for them. In terms of package format, I'll be creating 7zip packages with just model and/or texture files, so you can place them wherever you like in your project. I'll also include example material or def setup. I'll leave textures in .tga format, so you can make edits on uncompressed source and save as .dds later. So first up is a door/frame/key combo: https://www.dropbox.com/s/57y7okpioa6mv5s/01_door_frame_key.7z?dl=1 See readme_notes for design / placement instructions.

Hi, I am currently working on my first mission. You can download the files from my google drive here.I would appreciate any feedback you could provide. I have provided the aas32, cm, map, and proc files. I don't think there is anything else I need to add. If I need to upload more just let me know. Thank You.

That's correct. The ai needs to "see" the missing entity marker, and that depends on the lighting. Punishing the player for carrying lots of loot is really a bad idea as stated by others. But the major reason given, that it punishes the player for doing what the game requires from him or her, is also applyable on things like ko limitations or no kill objectives. I mean you are giving the player broadheads, fire arrows, mines and what else and then tell him not to use it. That is pretty ridiculous. The main issue here is the mission design. Of course it sooner or later breaks immersion if the player collects 40 vases, 20 golden plates, 12 paintings etc... But there is no reason for mission authors to clutter the mission with loot. Simple place less. Of course taking out too much guards will leave an almost empty mission that provides no more challenge and stands in contrast to the actual idea of a stealth game. But mappers can place ai in a way that taking them out is a worse option then sneaking by them. I don't see Thief and TDM as ghosting games, were the player should not interact with the ai at all. You have your tools for a purpose, and killing is an option, of course. Leaving an ai alive and conscious should be the best option in most situation and not something the player does because it is trve (in terms of how real Thief pros play such games ).

TDM 2.08 comes with a wealth of new monster characters that’ll be sure to enrich future missions: Manbeast by Kingsal Werebeast by Diego, Springheel, Obsttorte & Destined Clothed and running zombies by Springheel Flame bearing skeletons by Springheel There are some things to be aware of if you are a mission author interested in working with the werebeast or manbeast: The werebeast is only partially completed in terms of animations and vocals for now, so it’s recommended not to use it the same way you would a regular AI. Some important issues were found in the last minutes of this dev cycle, in particular concerning the manbeast (i.e. LOD and material definitions). The fixes came too late to make it into this release, so please download this patch and place it in your mission’s folder if you intend to make a mission with manbeasts. If the patch was successful you’ll see a new top-level folder named after your FM in ‘Create Entity’ listing all the changed entities. There’s no need to extract the .pk4. If you see someone working with the manbeast characters, please point them to this patch to make sure they’re using it.

Several days ago I was thrilled to hear that TDM 2.08 contains several new characters along with other fantastic improvements. Seeing how much work had been done on this release gave me a motivational boost to try contributing something myself, especially having worked on porting human(oid) characters to TDM in the past... this time I wanted to submit something that can hopefully be included in vanilla TDM perhaps with 2.09. As I was testing the new release I remembered an old submission on Blendswap called BGE Dragon, featuring a polished quality dragon for the now defunct Blender Game Engine, notable for the fact that it comes with animations for walking / running which makes working with it easier as you don't have to make those yourself. I always felt dragons would fit the theme of TDM wonderfully and allow for some amazing missions, to be fair suggesting them had long been on my mind... remembering how easy it was to work with this one, I figured I'd do the groundwork and instead submit a blend that contains everything needed to port it to The Dark Mod. I'm happy to announce I now have such a blend available! The first thing was the polygon count; The original mesh is pretty high poly, clocking at about 30,000 polys which may be too much for TDM on most people's devices. I played with mesh decimation then did some manual corrections, managing to retain acceptable quality while generating models with okay polygon counts: lod0 = 9.306, lod1 = 6.009, lod2 = 3.218, shadow = 2.265. The original quality mesh is still included in the blend file, so if we need to re-generate any LOD version this can be easily done at any time. Next I worked on separating the armature into two objects, based on the example for the human model I built my previous characters upon: The real armature that deforms the model and is used to export animations, with a control armature driving its bones that's only used to design said animations inside Blender. As the control armature uses a complex IK setup for bones this took some toying with, but in the end I could generate a simple armature which will hopefully work in exporting the md5anim set. Speaking of animations I made sure those are also covered. For the endlessly looping walk and run animations I added markers that identify the frames between which they must be exported to get a seamless loop. I next turned the idle animation into a randomly occurring gesture, then proceeded to animate everything else from scratch to obtain: Walk Run Idle (with two random gestures, stretching / pacing and looking around) Sit (with "lay down", "stand up", "idle" animations) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Sleep (with "lay down", "stand up", "idle" animations) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Attack (two types, bite and slash) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Die (brief animation at the end of which the ragdoll system is supposed to take over) An example gif of the idle gesture from the Blendswap submission, converted to and intended as a random occurrence in-game: From here on I need your help and am calling on the artists who helped create the new monsters (eg: Manbeast) to aid in making this come true as well! I've done most of the work as far as the model goes, putting aside any tweaks that might be needed (eg: model scale and animation length). I'm also going to work on the texture next to produce the proper maps... my target is to have 4 different skins / colors in total. I also believe I can produce the sounds having already found promising submissions to start from on OpenGameArt. But before putting more work into this, I wish to be sure someone can help with the remaining steps so we can get the model in the game. What I need from fellow developers should be: A new AI type for the dragon. Note that it's not intended to fly, especially not in its initial implementation; Later on we may add a fly animation and data to the AI for knowing how to use it... for now I only care to have it work like the spider, wandering around and attacking if it sees a hostile entity. This should thus be easy if we can copy another monster's code. Exporting the assets from Blender to TDM, particularly the model and animations. As I don't have an AI nor a test case handy nor ever worked with exporting TDM animations or models for non-human characters, I need someone else to generate and test the mesh files. First the md5 mesh for each LOD, everything is included in the blend even the low-poly shadow mesh... afterward the armature actions for it need to be exported to md5anim files. Lastly the defs need to be written, along with any other step I may have missed to make the character actually work. I should be able to do the material based on my previous examples once I finish the textures, so don't worry about that part... please just make sure the materials in the exported md5mesh have the same name as the material names in Blender. Download blend version 0.5 I look forward to hearing your thoughts! If any developers or experienced contributors confirm they can take care of the integration, I can get started on the remaining assets soon

The import/export script for 2.8 is a little picky about how the meshes/armature are grouped - you will need to add them to a collection. Take a look at the readme file for the script - it should help clear it up. Looks like I may need to add some better error checking to it. Hope this helps io_scene_md5_28-readme.pdf

As a minor note, tdm_installer will soon allow publishing user-made versions --- that's what "Custom Manifest URL" is for. It is not implemented yet, but soon will be. I'm not sure if it would be easier than simple posting exe + shaders directory though.

I stumbled upon another little problem with the heatHaze shaders. They use some projection math to calculate their effect, and that does not play well in VR - it leads to eye bleed. I'm not familiar enough with how heatHaze works to know if there is a "proper" way to fix it for VR, but for the moment I've replaced the dynamic projection math with a fixed constant. Looks okayish, good enough for now, I hope. I think I'm getting close to a new alpha version that I'd feel good enough to release

TDM 2.08 Released! We are proud to announce the release of The Dark Mod 2.08! Long in development, many fixes related to Multi-Core, Uncapped FPS, and the 64-bit migration are now available. TDM 2.08 goes further with the process to modernize coding standards in TDM, replacing legacy OpenGL functions and ARB Assembly shaders with modern techniques. Mappers will be pleased to see many new quality assets as well as enhancements to rain, fog, skylight, AIs and visportal diagnostics. For the eye-candy crowd, new Bloom, 64-bit color mode, and SSAO options have been added! For Linux users, the project can now be compiled via CMake. A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include: Better Visuals: Cabalistic has finally added the much requested SSAO feature to TDM. Using a method called Scalable Ambient Obscurance, now areas with flat ambient lighting come alive with new detail! He’s also implemented a new Bloom method, and brightness and gamma will no longer interfere with desktop brightness. Better AI: Grayman has refined the AI yet again, for instance ensuring that sitting and lying aren't thwarted by obstacles. Better Gameplay: The player’s ability to move and interact with the environment has been improved thanks to fixes to mantling as well as climbing ropes and ladders. Ragdolls are easier to handle and shouldering them is accompanied by an animation. Better Mapping: The mapper’s toolkit has seen several enhancements. A new X-ray surface and new spectrum spawnargs modify how objects are perceived. Rain is much less taxing and uses static collision detection to limit its fall. New visportal diagnostics make it easier than ever to track down notorious internal leaks. Better Performance: The dev team has as always been hard at work making improvements to performance and laying the groundwork for even more improvements in the future. Multi-Core’s stability has been enhanced and is no longer listed as an “Experimental” setting. New Assets: Many quality textures and models were added by both Team members and community contributors. Especially of note is the inclusion of Kingsal’s manbeasts and Springheel’s new zombies, and expect to catch glimpses of the werebeast. If you are a mission author, please take a look here. New Sounds: The player’s movement is now accompanied by new sounds when mantling, swimming and sliding down ropes and ladders. To update, simply run the tdm_update.exe file in your darkmod folder. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.08, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!

I bought this once in a museum here in the city I live. It is called "Romantical Knight's Castle" (the castle is romantic, not the knight ), so it is fictive and roughly scale 1:120. I have never designed such thing myself, but I knew a guy who did this, designing and building them. I never saw them in real but he has shown me fotographs: Gothic Cathredals, a Version of Versailles (two meters long or so, no kidding). But I have built the castle in the image posted. Took me something in between 10 and 20 hours. It is actually quiet a relaxing hobby.

Next up is this cabinet. Not much to write home about, this was my first furniture model for TDM. The drawers are not usable, so all the handles were baked on flat surface. Note that the back has lower pixel density to save on texture space. In most situations it should be facing the wall, not the player. https://www.dropbox.com/s/o6dpxg52a7hlx9s/03_wood_cabinet.7z?dl=1

I’m sure this will have been discussed before, and I admit I haven’t checked through the other 82 pages of this thread. But I believe, and have done for some time, that the biggest problem with the game is the combat system. I acknowledge that some regard Thief as too easy, and I know TDM has different difficulty settings. But the easiest TDM setting is still too difficult, and in no way comparable with Thief. I’m currently using TDM 2.08, 64 bit, but have also used previous versions. Here specifically is what I don’t like. 1. The blackjack is too erratic. I realise that, just as with Thief, some AI cannot be blackjacked but, with those that can, success or failure can sometimes seem to depend on miniscule difference of proximity or timing. Some of us don’t like ghosting, we prefer to clear the AI out the way as much as possible so we can admire and explore the wonderful map the author has created, and get to work on any puzzles they have set us, at our leisure. But all too often frustrating multiple reloads are required because an AI won’t go down. And once they are alerted by an unsuccessful BJ attempt, the following additional problems arise. 2. AIs have elastic arms. They can cause you damage at what seems like 8 or 9 feet from their bodies, and can do so through walls. This is even true of weaponless zombies, their swiping arms balloon out and catch you from way off. By contrast the player can only seem to cause damage when they are within 2 or 3 feet of their target, using the blunt knitting needle that is the short sword, a weapon which is particularly ineffective against the undead. 3. And when you’re hit, you put away any weapon you’ve drawn. It’s right that you take damage, and possibly have to pause, but not put away your weapon. What, so you can shake their hand? Many of us have come to TDM from Thief and continue to play Thief FMs as well as TDM. Can’t we have a combat difficulty setting in TDM that mirrors Thief’s gameplay more closely?

My old friend Andreas urgently needs my help. He asked if I could meet him at the Lion's Head Inn, our favourite retreat in a quaint part of the city called Mirkway Quarter. He’s got a small apartment nearby where he makes a modest living off paintings he sells to pompous nobles and the odd merchant. Not long ago, his wife Lily was hired as a servant at the manor of the local alderman, one Lord Marlow. Now she hasn't been home for days. Andreas went to the manor looking for her, but the guards shoved him into the gutter and warned him not to return. Andreas is certain that something bad has happened, and I don’t think he’s wrong. Gallery Authors’ Notes It all started many years ago when Shadowhide laid the foundation for a sprawling and convoluted city and worked with MoroseTroll and Clearing to create a macabre storyline to befit this medieval metropolis. At some point, however, the beast grew too large to handle, so he handed the keys to the City to Bikerdude and Melan. Together, the two worked tirelessly, passing the map back and forth, each playing to their respective strengths. Notably, Melan reworked the story concept, toning down many of its darker, R-rated elements. Eventually Melan, too, moved on in 2017, but by then large swathes of the community had become involved in this map’s development. Mapping work was contributed by Baal, Grayman, Fidcal, Ubermann, Skacky, and Flanders, while Destined, nbohr1more, and Obsttorte wrote story texts. Several scripts were provided by Grayman, Baal and Obsttorte, such as an elevator with scissor gates, a TDM first. Even after all this input, the daunting task still remained to transform what had grown into the largest TDM map ever made into a playable mission. Bikerdude hammered away at this for some more years still, on and off between other projects, until in early 2020 when he deemed it ready for public viewing. It was then that Dragofer and Amadeus joined in. In the months that followed, the trio reworked, finished, and polished the mission in nearly every aspect, fully writing out and editing the story as well as adding countless scripted effects and (with help from Bienie) many new readables. The good working atmosphere and pooled creativity brought forth several new secrets, of which the largest likely hasn’t been done before in TDM (hint: check the libraries). In the very end, the name “Fractured Glass Company” was drawn up to refer to everybody who was involved in creating this very special mission. Without the hard work of all these people, most of all Bikerdude and Shadowhide, this mission would likely never have seen the light of day, let alone become what you see here before you. The mission is, as Bikerdude puts it, a homage to Thief 1 & 2, and it’s our hope that you catch these vibes as you explore and enjoy this mission. Credits - Mapping: Shadowhide, Bikerdude, Amadeus, Baal, Dragofer, Fidcal, Flanders, Melan, Skacky, UberMann - Original Story Concept: Clearing, MoroseTroll, Shadowhide - Story & Readables: Amadeus, Bienie, Bikerdude, Dragofer, Destined, Melan, nbohr1more, Obsttorte, Shadowhide - Editor: Amadeus - Scripting: Dragofer, Baal, Grayman, Obsttorte - Voice Acting: AndrosTheOxen (Andreas), Joe Noelker (Player) - Video Editing: Bikerdude (briefing), Goldwell (briefing intro) - Custom Models: Bikerdude, Dragofer, Dram, Epifire, Grayman, Obsttorte - Custom Textures: Airship Ballet, Dmv88, Hugo Lobo - Custom Sounds: GigaGooga, Sephy, Shadow Sneaker, alanmcki, andre_onate, Deathscyp, dl-sounds.com, Dmv88, dwoboyle, eugensid90, gzmo, lucasduff, mistersherlock, qubodup, randommynd, richerlandtv, sfx4animation, Speedenza - Betatesting: Amadeus, Biene, Bluerat, CambridgeSpy, Dragofer, JoeBarnin, Kingsal, Krilmar, ManzanitaCrow, Noodles, S1lverwolf, s.urfer Download Note: this mission requires TDM 2.08, which is now available for download. Please be aware that old saved games will no longer work after you upgrade to 2.08's release build. Note: it’s highly recommended to run this mission using the 64-bit client (TheDarkModx64.exe), since there've been frequent reports the mission won't load on the 32-bit client (TheDarkMod.exe). Both are found in the same folder. The mission is available from the ingame downloader. In addition to that, here are some more mirrors, as well as the official screenshots for anybody uploading this mission to a FM database: Mission: Google Drive / OneDrive Mission (slimmed down version for 32-bit clients): Google Drive / OneDrive Official Screenshots: Google Drive / OneDrive Hi-Res Map: Imgur

As a community mod, I think one of the jobs of FMs is to help develop the lore. So make something up, and if it's good enough it will become part of the canon.

@Diego Seems like your messages or email isn't working? I wanted to reach out to you about getting a hold of the original source files for the werebeast if possible - Im gonna be getting this guy polished up and working for 2.09. Are you by any chance able to send PMs? Maybe your inbox is full?

Hello, all. This thread is meant as a follow-up companion piece to my previous thread listing royalty-free music by Kevin MacLeod that could be usable for new missions for The Dark Mod. In this thread, I take a slightly different approach. Instead of focusing on one author and his royalty-free music, I'll be writing an ever-expanding list of songs, compositions tracks and ambients by various musical artists that could come in useful for mission makers working on FMs for TDM. Aside from ambient music for background atmosphere, I'll also be listing some historical music and compositions from the real world's ca 14th-17th century that are in the public domain and could be used as background music in your missions, provided that someone does a royalty-free recording of them (i.e. not released on some payed-for album, but at most a royalty-free album or online collection/archive). Please note that, though I will try to provide you with links to royalty-free versions of historical compositions in particular, I sometimes might not be sure of the status of some of these recreations/recordings and you'll have to snoop around for their royalty-free status on your own. However, if you do confirm that, e.g. some freelance artist recorded a well-known 16th century piece of music, and is giving it away royalty-free, possibly with the only necessity being attribution, then please let me know and I'll include any download links and the details concerning necessary attribution. Thank you ! And now, it's time to begin... Royalty-free ambients As in "free to distribute and use (though possibly with attribution)", not necessarily "free of the TDM universe royalty". List currently To be added (TBA) Historical background music - lute and similar string instruments La Rossignol ("The Nightingale"} - a Renaissance era piece, anonymous composer. This one was written as an instrumental duet for two musicians. So, if you'd use this for a scene of AI characters playing their instruments, you should use two such characters for added believability. Here's what the composition sounds like when played as a duet on: - lute (obviously the most medieval/Renaissance instrumentation) - acoustic guitar (example 1) and acoustic guitar (example 2) - 11-string guitar what it sounds when played as a duet on an 11-string guitar - licensed album version (presumably lute) If you find any royalty-free version in good quality, let me know. Lachrimae ("Tears", sometimes known as "Seven Teares") by John Dowland - another Elizabethan era piece, by a 16th-17th century composer. Various reconstructions: - on lute (example solo performance at the Metropolitan Museum) - on lute, with vocal accompaniment (lutist and female soprano) - on lute, violas, and other (six musician ensemble performance) - on viola da gamba (five musician ensemble performance) Lachrimae Pavan ("Teary Pavane / Pavane of the Tears") by John Dowland - a variation on the previous composition, for the Renaissance pavane style dance. Various reconstructions: - on lute - on acoustic guitar (example 1), (example 2), (example 3) Again, I'd like to find a royalty-free version of these two compositions. Frog Galliard - one more by Dowland, for now. Another composition for a Renaissance dance style, the galliard. Reconstructions: - on lute (solo performance) - on lute, deeper sound (solo performance) - on acoustic guitar (example 1), (example 2), (example 3) Royalty-free version would be appreciated. Greensleeves - by an anonymous 16th century author, quite possibly a folk song of the era. Trust me, you know this one, even if you don't know the name. It's one of the most well-known bits of Renaissance secular and courtly music in the popular imagination. (Trust me, it's been referenced in everything. Even the first Stronghold game from the early 2000s had an in-game character sing a made-up ditty to the tune/melody of this song.) Reconstructions: - on lute (solo performance) - classical guitar (solo performance) - acoustic guitar (solo performance) I bet there's a royalty-free version of this one somewhere. I'll snoop around, and if you find one before I do, let me know. In taberna quando sumus ("When we are at the tavern") - anonymous period song from the 14th century, of Goliard origin. Written and sung entirely in Latin (so if you can explain Latin within the TDM setting or use only an instrumental version, go for it). An unabashed drinking song, you could use this for more rascally Builder priests/monks or for various commoners and lower-ranking noblemen while they're having a good time at the inn. A pretty well-known song even nowadays (though the most famous melody for it might be the more recent arrangement). Reconstructions: - example performance 1 - example performance 2 Again, an entirely royalty-free version of this one could come in handy. Historical background music - by Jon Sayles Jon Sayles is a musician who runs the Free Early and Renaissance Music website. His recordings are in .mp3 format (so you will need a conversion to .ogg and he's made them all freely available. The instrument he used for his musical reconstructions is the classical guitar. Some examples of Sayles' reconstructions of period music by anonymous or known authors: Saltarello, based on the late-medieval and Renaissance dance tune from Italy Madrigal by Anthony Holborne Al fonsina by Johannes Ghiselin Ich weiss nit by Ludwig Senfl So ys emprentid by John Bedyngham, mid-1400s Riu, riu, chiu, famous 15th century Spanish Christmas carol Fantasia, by Orlando Gibbons, late 16th and early 17th century Die Katzenpfote, German-speaking lands, anonymous author, 15th century A gre d'amors, 14th century, anonymous French author Nightengale (unrelated to La Rossignol), by Thomas Weelkes El Grillo, 15th to early 16th century composition by Josquin des Prez The Witches' Dance, by anonymous, Renaissance English composition Ma fin est mon comencement, by 14th century composer Guillame de Machaut In Nomine, late 15th and early 16th century composition by John Taverner Ricercare ("ricker-caré", nothing to do with rice or care), by Adrian Willaert Fantasia by Thomas Lupo, 16th-17th century English composer The Nite Watch, composed by Anthony Holborne - appropriate for TDM Plenty more where these came from... Historical background music - from the A-M Classical website This website offers plenty of freely available, royalty-free .mp3s of early and classical musical compositions and instrumental songs. The only thing you need to do is provide attribution, as everything on the site is via a Creative Commons license (this is noted on every page). Counting Christmas songs from the Middle Ages and Renaissance alone, I was able to download loads of them already years and years ago. Though they're far from epic recordings, if you're just looking for a competently done free version of these compositions, this is an excellent site. A few examples of medieval music from the A-M Classical site: Angelus ad Virginem (played quietly on organ), Diex soit en cheste maison by Adam de la Halle (organ and other instruments), Greensleeves (this is for a carol version of the lyrics, but the melody is the same as standard Greensleeves) Historical background music - by Vox Vulgaris The Swedish band/ensemble Vox Vulgaris aren't very active nowadays, but they did plenty of early music recording in the early-to-mid 2000s. From what I've read about their song releases, they're okay with others using the songs from their 2003 album and other material they've done. I don't know if their website is still around (there's an archived version) and whether you can still contact the band members, but if you'd like to be extra sure and ask, go ahead. I don't think they've changed their copyleft stance to their own works, but it pays off to be sure. So, here are some of VV's own takes on period music: Cantiga 166 - based on the eponymous song (full title "Cantiga 166 - Como póden per sas culpas (os homés seer contreitos)"), by Spanish composer Alphonso X from the 13th century (yes, king Alphonso X ! They didn't call him Alphonso the Learned for nothing). To provide you with a point of comparison, here, here and here are versions by other artists. (If I remember correctly, this particular VV song was also used by moonbo in his Requiem FM, as part of an inn's muffled background music. I did a real double-take when I played the mission for the first time and recognised it.) Cantiga 213 - based on the eponymous song (full title "Cantiga 213 - Quen sérve Santa María, a Sennor mui verdadeira"), again by Spanish composer, king Alphonso X from the 13th century. To provide you with a point of comparison, here and here are versions by other artists. Saltarello - based on the well-known melody for the Italian late-medieval Renaissance dance, the saltarello (also the saltarello trotto specifically in this case). To provide you a point of comparison, here and here are versions by other artists. La Suite Meurtrière - I can't quite source this one, it might be their own original composition, though "in the style of" some particular period music. Rókatánc (Fox Dance) - this is a really wild bit of period dance and festive music, possibly Hungarian-inspired, given the name. I think this would fit both a tavern environment or some public event for the nobility and patricians, including an armed sparring tournament or similar. Final note from me New suggestions are always welcome as I expand this thread. For any suggestions concerning Kevin MacLeod's royalty-free music, please use the other thread I've already made, purely for listing MacLeod's stuff.

I'm in the process of creating WS6 (Baleford Museum) and WS7 (The Builders' Forge). I hope to release them simultaneously in the next 6 months, health permitting. I'm at the point where it's time to install the voices for a few conversations and monologues. If you're interested in providing some voice acting, please let me know. Experience isn't necessary (new voices are ALWAYS welcome), and I'll walk the inexperienced through the process. Just make sure you've got a good setup (so we don't need to manually filter out background noises, for example). I won't be doing any post-processing on your voices; what you say is what we'll hear. I'll be managing the ogg creation and sound shaders and folder management, so all you need to worry about is your performance. I have some of the scripts finished, so we can dig right in as soon as you're available. Thanks!

So, out of curiosity I installed TDM 2.05 - which is dead simple with stgatilov's new tdm installer, btw. Holy shit, was that first VR alpha bad. Hard to believe I ever released it in that state As far as performance goes, it's a bit of an interesting picture. The new builds win leaps and bounds when it comes to CPU performance - that is not surprising to me, as I've invested a lot of effort in that regard. CPU performance in the old builds does cause quite a bit of reprojection in certain scenes e.g. in "A new job", whereas with the new builds I can go through the entire mission without reprojection. However, GPU performance may have deteriorated somewhat. The old builds don't have the profiling tools of the newer ones, so it's difficult to pinpoint what's going on. But looking at SteamVR's frame graph, the GPU is spiking a bit more in the newer build. The baseline looks very similar to 2.05, but every third or fourth frame GPU time spikes, and as a consequence there may be less GPU headroom. Which, consequentially, could cause more reprojection in GPU-heavy scenes, as scenes with many lights potentially are. I think this is probably a "regression" in the base game, but definitely worth looking into. Although, it isn't really a big difference, and I also need to point out that the comparison is a little unfair, as the old build does have some graphical glitches. Also, I have briefly tried The Painter's Wife, and as you would expect, it is not a smooth ride throughout. The open city parts are prone to reprojection - there's just too many lights at once. It wasn't outright bad, though. Might still be very playable, depending on your tolerance for reprojection.

It's up to the mapper to decide what loot sends AI into alert. That's the best compromise between punishing the player too much and having AI stare blankly at a missing painting without noticing.

These are the ruins of Gräfenstein Castle in Germany.

I already tried wrong codes and it was like you guessed, I opened the door first. In the end I used noclip to get inside I only wanted to know if I missed something and to give you a bug report. As for "The Painter's Wife", in my opinion they overdid it. You spend little time on the ground at all! I love TDM for sneaking, not platforming ;).

Congrats on the release Bienie! This is a wonderful mission with some great exploration, stealth, and fun world building. Everyone should check this one out!

Very cool! I'm not sure a dragon is a logical next step for filling out the AI roster, but its definitely impressive. I think this could be a cool animated set piece in a mission, but jumping right into making this a fully functioning enemy type that works in missions is crazy. To your comment above, spiders are general easier because they're essentially a ball with legs that can turn on a dime. There's lots and lots of problems with trying to do a quadruped this size, not to mention making it fun to sneak around and engage with. My sense is that something like this could work really well as an animated set piece/ scripted thing. For instance a mission where you need to steal from a sleeping dragon and waking it up fails the mission. Start with that and then think about making a fully functioning AI type.

@grayman Cheers for the prompt, the final piece has now been documented in the page two Guide Post Phew, I think that documents everything to find and discover secret and quest wise, though I might add some extra stuff in about the different ways to deal with the Assassin rather than just how to find them. Hard to believe documenting this FM has consumed the better part of the past week or so of my life. Good work chaps.

Welcome back, and hope we will see something from you again! Sadly, I have not been very active either; the last time I touched DR was in 2016 - I am planning to change that, but life always gets in the way. Whether you will make something or just play the new missions, it is great to see you again!

I'm still around. Do I need to continue recording? I've been waiting on feedback to the 20+ files I sent previously, but I think I would need to redo them.. I've had to replace my mic since it keeps shorting out. Plus, I discovered spikes on our mains which was causing hissing.

Fixed in svn rev 15979. Thanks to everybody

So, I got stereoscopic rendering working. Unfortunately, I'm currently unable to get OpenXR working reliably with SteamVR. It's throwing runtime errors, and generally seems to cause significant CPU overhead. It's entirely possible I'm doing something wrong, but the same code seems to work fine with the Oculus runtime, so this might also be early adopter pain on the SteamVR side. I'll need to dig a little deeper to determine whether I need to open bug reports or not. Anyway, for the time being I added an OpenVR backend and am trying to keep them in sync. That shouldn't be too hard as long as I'm not diving into input handling. Issues I'm currently focussing on: Light scissors. They are vital for performance, but I need to recalculate them for each eye view, and if done improperly, they can lead to flickering lighting or even mismatched lighting between the eyes. It should be a fairly simple calculation, but oddly enough I still struggle with some border cases. Still, might be good enough for a first alpha. Subviews, particularly mirrors, are broken, which is expected, since they need a different approach to adjust them to the eye views. Should hopefully not be too complicated to fix. Other than that, I think the version I currently have is already a massive improvement over the previous alpha. UI (both menu and ingame elements) render to a virtual screen that is placed slightly in front of you. Not the most immersive solution for the ingame elements, as now the lightgem basically "floats" in the air in front of you, but it was a simple solution that makes everything usable in VR, so a good starting point, I think. Also, I uncoupled the mouse vertical movement (pitch) from the VR view, which makes it a lot more tolerable to navigate in VR, I think. Downside is that it makes it a little harder to aim and pick up stuff with the mouse, as you don't have any indication where you are pointing at until an item lights up. Will need to figure out a way to render a simple 3D pointer target to indicate mouse aim. Performance is alright; I'd hoped for more, but current headsets have increased the resolution quite a bit, and TDM is ultimately fill-rate limited. That means there's little (if any) room for AA or supersampling, and you better keep expensive effects like soft shadows or SSAO off - the latter isn't really that important for VR, anyway. I played through "New Job" with my Index set at 120 Hz and could keep that framerate most of the time, but there were a few instances with reprojection. Not too bad, though, but this is with an RTX 2080 Ti, so... There's still one relatively simple optimization that I can do that should save a bit of fillrate.

Congratulations on putting together this epic-scale map with some interesting and frustratingly, fun missions. I can tell a lot of work went into it from many different people. I enjoyed the main storyline, the idea of the player being more than just a simple thief. And how you can choose the method of exacting revenge on the villain makes it more than just a Mario World level —collect coins, free the princess... Oops! She's in another castle. And as much as I enjoyed the missions, I do feel the need to share my critic of the map. Humans build cities based on a geometry for planned growth or asymmetrically for natural growth. This map uses neither and is difficult to navigate. All the buildings have near identical exteriors in the dim light, there are no landmarks to reference. And the street signs are dark placards sitting in the dark, of limited use on the ground, but definitely not helpful if you've gone vertical. Another issue with the mapping is that, because of the hodgepodge of structures, there are many areas where you can literally walk on air (Hill Street is a good example), or get pushed sideways during a jump by an invisible wall. The latter is a feature found throughout the map. I have no suggestions on how to fix this other than through a walkthrough in Dark Radiant. But about the layout of the city, I do have a suggestion. It's based on my past work within government public works. And I give it as advice, to be regarded or disregarded —not for me to be a know-it-all or an attacker. I know a ton of work went into this project. Any building that was constructed by the government, a church, or wealthier faction should be part of a geometry. It can be part of a grid —polar or Cartesian— a militant triangle, star, diamond, etc. (as long as it's pointy), or your choice of polygon. Poorer areas, or places where the sprawl has grown with the city's population, are normally going to be like tree branches or rivers. The passageways flow around larger buildings (connecting to but not overpowering geometric ones) and natural formations. So for this map, the area around the church, the clock tower, and all major buildings housing the wealthy or government services (electrical and water centers) should be on a geometric pattern. This includes the verticals. The pipes and lines should radiate out in the same pattern as the ground-level roads. The "sprawl" is not random. There is a pattern to how sprawls develop, and often it grows like a tree. main branch of traffic forms, and the smaller branches bud out after that. If the sprawl is growing out of decay, the original large structures will look more like rocks in a river if you take a bird's-eye view. In areas where geometrical growth meets asymmetrical growth, in a newer city (only a couple hundred years old) you often find its a no-man's zone. There's not really any established business or housing from either side that seems to be permanent. It's in flux. Older cities will still maintain the line, but there is a mix of well and poorly funded architecture. Two of the biggies for navigation are the facades and the roads. In an area around a well-funded, high-profile project such as a church, the church will decide the look of the area. If its design is sedate and dark, many of the major structures in the neighborhood will to reflect that. And the road, which is normally funded by the builder, will be uniform in that area and wider than those found elsewhere. So around our theoretical church, that's in an older city, the buildings should show signs of having started out from the same designer. The roads should all be the same material and wide enough for high traffic or parades. A more recently built clock tower nearby our church will have it's own sycophantic buildings, but in better condition, and its own unique, wide pavements. If the structures' properties meet, then there is a distinct border. More often than not though, there is an intermediate section of sprawl that connects the two areas. Where sprawl sits closely between two properties, it leans more towards one design or the other. This is not really important for smaller maps. Smaller maps are tiny sections of larger geometry or asymmetric growth and can be treated independently. There are fewer high-level patterns to consider, and the above topics won't affect a player's run. But on a large map such as this one, consideration to city planning and growth can drastically increase a player's ability to navigate. One last note. This advice is given based the growth of a city considering material wealth only. Vying political factions and wars will change the footprint of various parts of a city in different ways than I described above. Asymmetric and geometric patterns will still arise, but density and direction will be different.