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After a considerable amount of time and work by a group effort, while betatesting was mostly on hold, a new beta build has been uploaded today. The FM has been improved & completed in all kinds of areas (such as overall presentation, readables, voiceovers, execution of the main story and new secret locations), and now the time has come to resume testing. Both new and returning betatesters would be very welcome. In fact, quite a few new betatesters may be needed as it's been a while since the last build. Here's another link to the Discord server: https://discord.gg/fP32yEn"

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I did just that - turned them off on curtain01_blue and it worked Looking at the map file // entity 2105 { "classname" "func_static" "name" "func_static_1889" "model" "models/darkmod/decorative/wall/curtain01right.lwo" "noclipmodel" "1" "origin" "-1546 1727 -33" "rotation" "0 -0.8 0 0.8 0 0 0 0 0.8" "skin" "curtain_blue" } You can't do that - use the rotation matrix to scale stuff At least disable shadows on entities on which you do that

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I just found a nice 40 minutes documentary by GVMERS, released 2 April, about Thief history and thief like games. It's called The Rise and Fall of Thief, and you can watch it here. Yes, it's considered old news by internet standards (10 days 1 month old) but i thought that if you are like me and consume everything thief related, you would like to know about it.

Current AO with "Low" setting has the same 10% performance hit on NV and AMD GPUs having maxed out the rest (Soft Shadows on Medium, no Bloom).

I've seen it, but there's only an implementation for DX12, and given the sheer size of the shader file, that would be a monumental task to port Also, it's using compute shaders, which we don't (yet) support in the engine. That's also what stopped me from using Intel's ASSAO, which seems conceptually similar, and going for the older, but simpler SAO.

It's a really nice mini documentary and a love letter to looking glass and the thief community.

Oh, absolutely, that's a bad idea in general, as it could increase drawcall count quite substantially.

Yes, but very barely. Feel free to turn off shadows on the curtain and see what happens :-). -Gelo

Sure! I was just getting at the Fake-AO decals. I've seen people use such decals on every step of a staircase. That's stuff we probably won't need anymore.

Looks like the curtain shadow to me Can you see the glitch?

Hey Duzenko, The only thing I can think of is that there is a hidden room under that carpet - possibly something in there is causing the glitch? -Gelo

We'll continue to use stains because they provide effects other than edge occlusion.

Any ideas about this glitch: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5251#c12492 It looks like the curtain shadow for the weak window light causes it

Fixed,thanks to stgavilov. Turned out it was an pagan ai whose mass had been set to 0 by a prefab boat bobbing entity I tried out. Removing it fixed it. Thank you

You can definitely see the situations where it contributes, daytime outdoor scenes and big stretches of light-colored textures that break up the texture and give it some dimensionality, both of which are kind of rare for our game environments, but it makes a big difference when it makes a noticeable difference at all.

I agree. Its also very good to have this community creating great missions, but it would be hard to create a consistent set of conected missions. I would love that too! But in a fan game we cannot have that. At least we have the most similar game to Thief so far. If I search on internet, I only see crap There is a very distint game, that I love so much as Thief, and thats Deus Ex, but they are different in the mood they create. I really love DeusEx too. Thief, Deus Ex, Ufo-Xcom and a few more games are in the Top5 of my list I think.

3dsmax (maybe Maya too, as an Autodesk product) has native .ase support. There are also der_ton's .ms (MaxScript) files for exporting and importing MD5 animations. They work with basically every Max version from starting from 4 or 5. You'll find them on katsbits site. It would be cool to have reliable tools for Blender, but every time there's an upgrade, the compatibility of non native stuff breaks, so plugins have to be maintained. Having FBX support in TDMwould be awesome. I'm using that FBX game exporter in my Unity project, and it works like a charm. The iteration is like 10x faster than with .ase. But that would probably require some major engine rework. I doubt it's something doable by one or two people.

Darkness_Falls glad to help btw not that it matters, but FBX 2006 has nothing to do with Maya 6.0 (from 2004) that version didn't exported to FBX yet. Now idtech 4 is a old engine, TDM team has updated it in many rendering side aspects but the way assets are imported and made for the engine have not changed that much, it was made before alembic based baked effects or baked large scale physics (like HL2 cinematic physics) were a thing, so in this engine you need to use the tools that were made for it, there's no other (easy) way, not without going through some crazy hoops, like the guy that made a Quake 4 level using Raytraced baked lighting, mixed with real time lighting (Strombine), even tho the engine has no easy support for that, but anything is possible if you think outside the box and are willing to work hard for it. To import particle effects from Maya into TDM you could, bake the particle rendering into a series of images (frames) and then just use a image strip or make a video animation and in TDM use a plane that always looks at the player showing the animation. Of course this way there's no real 3D depth for it nor the particle effect get affected by the lighting, but depending on the usage/effect that perhaps doesn't matter. IMO if particle effects is what you want to work on the best is to learn the DR particle editor. About importing models to TDM, yes you need to go through the following formats, (optional) MD3, (vextex animation and low poly static models) old quake 3 days format, MD5 the main recommended format for animations, well supported well integrated, used for skeleton based animated models only, can also be used for simple static models but no one uses it for such; (optional) LWO and ASE, two formats used for static models only, no animation supported, the first is a binary format, fast for the engine to load but "impossible" to edit by hand the second is a text based format (like MD3/5), "slow" to load but very easy to read and edit by hand, personally I recommend LWO (I use Modo...). So you need to export from Maya in any of this formats or find a tool that converts .fbx to this formats successfully, in last resort you can try Noesis.

That is because I fixed the material. tdm_decals_legacy.mtr Broken: textures/decals/stain01bwet { TWOSIDED_DECAL_MACRO qer_editorimage textures/decals/stain01bwet.tga { blend gl_dst_color,gl_zero map textures/decals/stain01b.tga } specularmap textures/decals/stain01b_s.tga } "Fixed" Rev 15923 textures/decals/stain01bwet { TWOSIDED_DECAL_MACRO qer_editorimage textures/decals/stain01bwet.tga { blend gl_dst_color,gl_zero map textures/decals/stain01b.tga } { blend specularmap map makeIntensity(textures/decals/stain01b_s.tga) } } The issue is that this "fix" is probably hiding a general issue with this scenario. If another mapper tries to create a decal with colored specular they will see the bug.

There are a lot of fantastic TDM missions but i've never sat down and tried to figure out which are my favorites until now. It's quite hard when you're limited to just five, but here's my pick for the top 5 TDM missions. 1. A House of Locked Secrets by Moonbo 2. Volta 1: The Stone by Kingsal 3. Penny Dreadful 3: Erasing the Trail by Melan & Bikerdude 4. William Steele 4: The Warrens by Grayman 5. Perilous Refuge by Dragofer & Crucible Team Honorable mentions A Good Neighbor by Amadeus Lords & Legacy by Kvorning Anything by Bienie / Sotha

Here's an alternative approach: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wHJGv1txRJrpcYnqR94BL3_kBRsVAn1n The difference here is that instead of generating a cubemap, you have a single texture with the front wall in the center and the sides/ceiling/floor in perspective: I feel like this will be easier for a mapper to make, either in-game or from an external source. For this one I took a 1024x1024 envshot from roughly where the window would sit (I didn't try to be too precise), and kept only the _forward texture. I brought that into Gimp and scaled it so that the front wall was a centered 256x256 square in the middle of the 512x512 texture (use the same ratio at any size). It doesn't matter if you end up with overhang on the edges of the image that get cropped off, but conversely you don't want to end up with empty space. The new shader will follow the same pattern of perspective and slide around the UVs according to your position. My problem at the moment is that it only works if you're facing one direction. I'm not sure what coordinate space all the incoming parameters are in and how to transform them into a space relative to each face. Can someone help out here? I think the fragment shader is correct and the vertex shader is wrong. Once that works, I think we could add back in the room scaling parameters too. For reference, I tried to follow the approach here: https://github.com/OBKF/Fake-Interior-Shader-for-GodotEngine. I took out the reflect() in the vertex shader because it was messing things up and that's where I think there's a clash in coordinate spaces or I was failing to normalize things properly. For those casually curious what this looks like, the github link has a sample video of this in Godot, you can see his input textures and the ability to scale the depth.