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EDIT: Ignore the FPS counter, I'm using 8xAA for the screenshots. For the past year or so I've been working on increasing the quality of the carpet textures. Some of them are really REALLY low res. There's some that are actually 128px X 256px. They look really bad in game, but back then, we took what we could get. So using various tools including AI upscaling and hand crafting parts of the textures in photoshop, I think I'm at a point that I'm getting close to a good workflow. These won't be replacements for the current textures, but will be sat alongside the low res ones. They have been used in almost every mission in different ways, sometimes in non conventional ways, and I don't want to break the aesthetics of the current missions. They will show up as _HD in DarkRadiant's texture browser. Here's what I have so far. (Click on the images to see their fullsize) Here are some side by sides: Here's the images on imgur https://imgur.com/a/2G0f5ZF https://imgur.com/a/2G0f5ZF

Oh my frickin’ GAWD!!! I cannot believe something as STOOPID as this has messed me up so badly and pushed me into roping others into a pointless chase for help! After all of this, I went through my keybinding configuration again and found that when I was reassigning keys for screenshots and quick-save / quick-load I had looked right past the fact that it had mistakenly taken the left-click as my binding instead of the key I had intended!!! Until looking at these log files I hadn’t even bothered to look at the bindings because I was CONVINCED they were correct!!!! Apologies guys. Pointless chase, but we have success... I have a working game now. SO sorry to have wasted your time like this!!! I am, however, extremely grateful!!!!!

Almost a year ago I raised concern about reckless overriding of main menu GUI files (which explicitly say they must not be overridden) by mappers. I have changed ton of things now, and I think I'm ready to show the new version for beta testing. If everything goes well, these changes will be released in TDM 2.10. You can obtain the game build for beta testing via tdm_installer. Just check "Get custom version" on the first page and select "test-menugui-N" version in test build. Note that it is close to the latest dev build, and thus includes all the changes done since 2.09. Here is the list of customizations in the new version that I know of: Change background everywhere. Change music everywhere. Disable mission-specific screens. Briefing and Debriefing videos (done the "old" way). Replace briefing screen with whatever mapper wants. Custom mission loading GUIs. All of the above can be set independently for each mission in a campaign. Customize the "Wait until ready" screen. I did not expose the ability to change stuff in Credits screen, since in my understanding that's credits for TheDarkMod itself, thus mission authors should not touch it. The instructions about how to achieve points 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are given in "mainmenu_custom_defs.gui". Here are things which I have marked as deprecated and want to remove: Videos "controlled by SDK". The "old" approach can now be used both for briefing and debriefing, even in campaign. Custom title. As far as I remember, it has only been used to hack custom background into the menu. Why keeping it? Of course, all the missions which use deprecated features need to be fixed to rely on something else. The missions which override .gui files in unsupported way are most likely broken too and need fixing. All the other missions should work properly now. Here is the policy about fixing FMs: I will fix all FMs, unless mission author wants to do it himself. Fix will only change .gui files, nothing else. Fixed mission should work as intended in 2.10. Fixed mission should play well in 2.09, except that main menu can look differently, and probably briefing/debriefing video can be skipped. Every mission will be briefly beta-tested here. Not the gameplay of course (that would take too much effort), but various menu/gui interactions. Until 2.10 is released, the fixed missions will be stored on separate server and will only be available via special cvars tweaking. Ordinary players will still get non-fixed versions, since they most likely use TDM 2.09. In order to download fixed FMs, you should add the following line to "autoexec.cfg": set tdm_mission_list_urls "http://darkmod.taaaki.za.net/5323_menugui/missionlist.xml" If you want to join testing, I suggest copying TDM installation without FMs, then updating it to appropriate version and changing "autoexec.cfg". Trying to juggle with one installation will be confusing.

Yeah exactly, It also depends on the program used to generate the normals. A lot of "auto generating" programs have heavy default settings and do weird things. I do think these HD version look good and I wonder really how much trouble it would cause replacing the old ones. The risky thing here is like you said, these are used in tons and tons of missions so the potential for trouble is high.

I don’t necessary prefer a low res look, but a clean, less noisy look. Many of the dark mods normal maps were made incorrectly and add a lot of high frequency detail and noise. It would actually be beneficial to have more visually different carpet textures rather than HD versions of the current ones. I would suggest releasing these as a “texture pack” to the community to use rather than increasing the mod size and creating the _HD convention.

Yes, but my message was not (only) for you, it was more like an extra suggestion to the information you gave in your post.

I also had the scale wrong on the red carpet end piece. It's actually this size: So can't just replace it, it's different dimensions. Another problem I don't know if I'm going to bother fixing, is that some of the carpet textures don't align at all, as this is how they are originally uploaded to TDM, I can see how the middle transition texture was made from parts of the end texture, but they don't quite line up.

It's not straight up higher res. I've had to manually adjust some of the textures to make them better. The red carpet which is very popular, I completely remade the end part. So while the transition replacement is drop in: The end one isn't: So I can't just replace the existing one, as it will break it for all maps that use that texture. The others, the changes are much more subtle, usually involves warping the image in photoshop to get the parts of the texture better aligned, but different enough. There are some mappers who prefer the low res look, Kingsal being one of them.

If you still want indexed search than you could use software Index Your Files . This software indexes your files in a database very fast and searches are also very fast. I see now that is multiplatform (Windows, Linux and Macos), so I could actually use it myself in Linux.

Just fyi, this particular user you're responding to doesn't seem to be much interested in what I would call constructive criticism, so I wouldn't sweat it. See below comment of his on another mission. Other than that, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I definitely have a lot of respect for any mapper that releases anything. I say that as an expert mapper that is halfway through the beginner tutorial.

Exactly. I didn't expect anyone would want to actually want to read a 200 page mystery novel written by yours truly. And for what it is worth...I don't recall that particular book being particularly "central" to the plot either... I can't help but wonder if you may have missed or misread a readable somewhere along the way? As far as being "unfinished", well, I intend(ed) to do a sequel. And yes, I'm on my umpteenth attempt of that sequel... Regardless, I'm under no illusions that this was close to a perfect mission, or that every prop and plot device fit together perfectly. I found that a telling a story through a TDM mission is actually quite a challenging feat: (1) Players may not find readables/clues in the order you expect them to (2) They might not even find things you thought were obvious (3) They might completely misunderstand or read too much into a clue (I tend to do that as a player) This is in addition to the enormous amount of layout, design, and general "mechanical" work that goes into making getting the mission to work at all. This includes even small missions (which this was intended to be from the start), especially for beginners that are not familiar with all the tooling required to build a mission. If anyone hasn't had a chance to try making their own mission...try it! It is a lot of work, but it can also be a lot of fun! By the way, this isn't an attack on anyone that disliked my mission or thought it could be improved; just realize that the cost of admission was free.

@datiswous@stgatilov Today I updated my installer and the publisched sourcecode at Github. You can see the sourcecode at my github repo. And download and test the executable from there (use "download" button on that github page) We have to upload my installer and change the description of my installer at the downloadpage of TDM. (To someone who can do this: just download the binary from github, upload it and change the description at TDM downloadpage.) Note: This installer only prepares the gamefolder and sets permissions/shortcuts/uninstaller. The official tdm installer will be automatically downloaded & started to download the gamefiles. This installer can be used to avoid some beginners problems. (see these problems at tdm tech support forum) changes/update It uses now the official TDM installer (downloads the recent tdminstaller. As backup it can use version 27-5) i removed my version-downloader feature, because TDM installer has one inside. Made some components optional. Changed some texts and labels.

I miss those times... Are there any plans for any upcoming building contests? Perhaps something to ponder...