Leaderboard

Hello folks, I wanted to share some work in progress comps for the main menu visual updates. (these were done a while ago) These are working in game, but are still just examples. I haven't looked into any of the more complicated menus (settings, mission downloader, slide show mission briefings, ect) Right now I am not planning on changing the UX, these are purely visual updates. EDIT: In-game menus have a requirement that we use the same text color. (so we dont break custom guis in-game) I'll post some mock ups of those soon. Let me know what you think! Using custom missions screenshot (curtesy of @Spooks) Btw this NOT volta 3 (i wish), its just a comp Using the default background art: Mock up of the store (needs some work to make more legible):

The 'Attaching Props to AI' wiki page refers to this post and the follow-up by Obsttorte to state that "You cannot directly vary the presence of a def_attached item by Difficulty Level. A work-around is to clone your AI, then make them differ in their diff_n_nospawn spawnargs and their attached items." The very next reply in the thread after Obsttorte, to my amusement, was me also being unhelpful. Just about 6 years later (!) I'm in a better position to answer this question. You can use spawnargs to handle the case of props on AI without having to resort to cloning said AI, so if someone wants to edit the wiki with my info I'd appreciate it. The way to do it is with diff_x_arg_y and diff_x_change_y rather than diff_x_nospawn. You set up the key (or whatever else) to spawn on the AI conditionally per difficulty setting rather than not spawn conditionally after it has already spawned. Here is a visual example of the kind of spawnargs you need to put on your AI. This, for instance, will spawn a named, grey key on the belt of the AI only on the easiest difficulty. Do not give any 'default' values to these spawnargs, leave them undefined and only define them like this. The other way around — pre-defining these spawnargs (ie setting them as usual) and then "blanking" them through diff_x_change/arg_y — that doesn't work.

Thats the current plan! Tie it in with the New Job / St Lucia story.

I'm creeping closer to starting the real alpha testing stage of my VIP. Meaning I will play the mission from the beginning as if it was a real mission. I still have some graphical stuff that needs tending to, but gameplay wise, I'm getting closer... I guess it's fair game to send the mission to beta while still working on visual stuff to save time. Or what do you say? Is it too risky? Forgetting some important stuff and releasing a non tested version as finished?

Just for inspiration, a screenshot from the menu my old cyberpunk mission. I know it wil take time and lots of patience, to create a new menu. I wish you luck.

About 3.5GB or so. The zipped full download at moddb is 3.46GB https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/downloads/the-dark-mod-210-full-64-bit

I completely agree! The current parchment style fits the game perfectly so the atmosphere is never destroyed, even if you go into a menu. An example for a game where this is completely wrong would be in my opininon Dishonered, where the modern UI takes you out of the game the moment you open it!

Uploaded with ImageShack.us Infiltrate a keep and steal information. Took me a while to finnish this one, motivation comes and goes! I would like to thank nbohr1more and Pranqster for helping me test the mission and help sort out any problems. Bikerdude for fixing a lighting error. nbohr1more also made the awesome font for the preview att the missions section! And last but no least The Dark Mod team for making all of this possible! All your hard work is much appreciated! Errors and other dissapointing stuff No map Sitting ai will sometimes sit midair if alerted Sleeping ai might also sleep midair if alerted. Crouching on the balcony with your light on may/will cause fps to drop. No title on loading screen (Prefer it that way) Tell me if you spot anymore and i will update. Enjoy http://www.thedarkmo...ndetails/?id=56 http://www.gamefront...ftheo__2__2.pk4 http://www.4shared.c...theo__2__2.html /Theo

Hi all! First of all, since the "News and Announcements" section is read only, let me congratulate all Dark Mod team for keeping improving this amazing game. You are all incredible and, if i may, a little bit crazy to ster on Id Tech 4 c++ code. Now for the question. It looks like TDM Updater is still not picking the new version. Looking a little bit closer, i think the mirror list seems not to be working (any of them), because the tdm_version_info.txt content does not have the package data (versions, crc, file size) but instead have 404 not found messages. I tried changing the mirror priority and all of them seem to return the same. So my question is, you are aware of the problem? If so, do you have any estimation of when will we able to update the game. Thank you in advance. EDIT: nevermind... tdm_update.exe is deprecated. We should use the new installer.

TDM has come a long way since its standalone release, and I've been enjoying 2.10 quite a bit on my legacy machine, which finally is no longer prey to slow loading times! Because of all technical achievements in the past 3 or so releases I wonder if perhaps it could be a good time for the team to show some love to some more outwardly aspects of TDM. This is because I still think the TDM default package is a bit too bare-bones to incentivize new players to invest time into it, and there are some simple yet significant changes that I believe that could change that. I will try to make a short list of suggestions in no particular order for your consideration and for community discussion. Finish St. Lucia campaign - I think that one of the most disappointing aspects of the core TDM package is the lack of a full official campaign. I remember Springheel mentioning many aspects for the 3rd final mission were underway but left incomplete, and that these resources could be ceded to any interested FM creator who was interested in finishing the mission. Why not taking the initiative and do a public announcement? A better training mission - The current TDM training mission is a strange sandbox that doesn't blend too well with the rest of the package. I think something similar to Goldwell's Thief training mission remake would be a more suitable and shorter solution to teach the basics of the game while keeping it within the narrative. It could even be included in the St. Lucia campaign as Mission 0. Better, clearer main menu - even with the most recent changes, I still feel the TDM menu needs a redesign. I'm not quite sure what would be the best approach, so the only suggestion I have at the moment is to have the Mission Downloader available straight from the main menu, instead of being somewhat hidden on the corner of the New Mission section. This is mainly because the game focuses heavily on downloadable, content and thus should immediately point new players towards it. Two-mission community FM sample - one easy way to make the TDM package more complete is by adding a sample of two FMs to the main package - one short, and one long - so that new players can enjoy a small curated selection of what the game offers without having to browse the forums for mission descriptions. These missions could be selected by community vote and then tweaked before inclusion in the package, with the consent of their authors of course. A better intro sequence - The old glowing TDM logo video is really starting to show its age. I wonder if it could be replaced with a better hi-res version, or even with a simple logo texture with an after effect applied, discarding the need for an FMV sequence. Let me know what are your thoughts. I would like also ask the TDM team members if anything similar to these suggestions is already in development.

I can just imagine watchmen derping around after you on penny-farthings.

The RoE features that would be cool in some eventual action focused TDM mission but afaik were never transferred are, vehicle physics (physics based vehicles the player can ride), imo would be funny to drive around a slow steampunk vehicle and lastly weapons that you can mount, would also be fun imo to have a ballista type of weapon in some TDM mission , to kill me some zombie horde!

Another thing to be aware of is that the TDM gamecode (as opposed to the renderer) seems to have been built on top of the D3 SDK (before the whole engine went open source) and therefore not on the RoE gamecode. That's why the xray stuff didn't work properly before 2.10. So on top of what's been removed or altered, there are RoE features that never existed in TDM to begin with.

Yep, pretty much only the wood trellis and the wallpaper are custom textures in that, too, the rest is stock assets. OT I do quite like the new menu style. The original background concept drawings, by Springheel I believe, are very nice but the whole grainy and fuzzy aesthetic that the paper parchment menus have only gets older as time moves on. Not that we should be jumping to super-sleek, geometric stuff, but at the very least a resolution increase is sorely needed. UI ought to serve rather than impress, after all.

Heya!

Thanks! Haha I don't plan on touching the theme- I think its a nice hit of nostalgia/ vibe and at this point is iconic

I think the main menu music is really quite nice as is. It evokes lots of dark moody mystery.

Nice menu. Is it an idea to give the mainmenu music theme also a remake?

I think I'd also like that much better than to get monsters thrown in my back the whole time, and lots of shock moments which scare the hell out of me. I like Doom 3, but, I quit it at some point, because it was just too much of a shocker for me. I'm rather the guy for sublte horror, like the Amnesia games or Penumbra.

Good point, but we don't actually know that and I disagree that it would be "uglier" There would be a small handful of missions that have some discrepancy with the core, but it wouldn't be any more noticeable than the variety we have in hand drawn in-game maps, custom title screens, or custom briefing videos, ect. EDIT: Also it would be easy enough to give author's a packet of resources to update their custom guis to the new look.

I personally wasn't bothered by the difficulty of Tears of St Lucia when I first played TDM (this was before A New Job was released), but I did ironically felt frustrated at the safe puzzle in A New Job. The book points you towards the workbench, but it doesn't specify it's located in the basement, so I kept trying to find something at the innkeeper's two desks at his room instead! Anyway this is also the reason why I asked to include a couple of quality FMs in the main package, just in case the campaign doesn't immediately rub with them and so they could have a taste at how single missions work.

I think a difficulty star rating based on user input is not a bad idea.

Arkane games' menus are usually a kind of UI experiments, and they're usually bad in terms of user experience (Dishonored 2 and Deathloop, I'm looking at you). And while typically boring and generic, games from companies like Ubisoft or Square Enix have a lot of research going into UX and accessibility, so all the AssCreeds, Far Crys and Tomb Raiders might be worth analyzing in that regard.

Regarding the St. Lucia campaign, as a TDM newcomer, I do have a pretty strong opinion about it, that is, The Tears of St. Lucia is a major difficulty spike and is totally not for new players. I never finished it and was close to dropping TDM entirely, but thankfully I tried Melan's Return to the City and Spoonman's Full Moon Fever, which finally got me hooked. I believe it should be reworked to be more accommodating for those who are still learning how the game works. Another thing: TDM newcomers often look at the highest-rated, most-recommended missions when choosing what to play. A potential problem here is that these missions are rated and recommended by TDM players who already know the game, and most of these missions are huge and demanding. For example, The Painter's Wife is one of my favorite missions, but I wouldn't under any circumstances recommend it to someone new as they would just get overwhelmed. I'm not entirely sure what can be done about it. Maybe a note regarding the mission's size and difficulty in the mission download menu?

Well, you gotta admit that the question is a bit strange. A bit like asking how to run Skyrim in Endereal. If you asked if there is a way to bring the engine improvements of TDM to Doom 3, then it would have been more clear.

The tdm_installer mirrors are all different from this one. TDM does not create registry entries. I'm open for tracker suggestions. I believe it is not possible to have P2P sharing without tracker, at least I did not managed to do it.

I have been lost (usually in a very good way!) over the past few days as I've explored this mission. However, there's this guy named Tobin who's giving me a real hard time. My inability to locate this item notwithstanding, this mission is absolutely amazing. SO MUCH EXPLORATION, which is pure joy for me, and there is just -it bears repeating- SO MUCH of it. And it's all so beautifully put together. I know a lot of people enjoy the 'avoid the guards' mechanic, and I typically quite enjoy it myself, but I really appreciated the hostile/non-hostile markers and the chance to simply walk through some areas without worry. It was a lovely change of pace in a mission that I needed to spend so much time wandering around in. And those glasses!

I'm not sure I understand the question. TDM is already based on the DOOM 3 engine, so that would be modifying it back to accommodate what it originally used to run.

Here is a torrent file for 2.10 download. You won't be able to do differential update, but you will be able to use any torrent client and to pause/resume download intentionally or due to unstable network. Instructions are simple: Make sure the whole torrent is downloaded into fresh directory. Unpack contents of tdm_shared_stuff.zip into TDM directory. Probably download tdm_installer from website, maybe even run it to check that your installation is good. release210.torrent UPDATE: Added trackers to the torrent file.

If the current training mission is too text heavy, you could use conversations rather than readables to impart the necessary information. The training mission of T1 does this pretty well.

Are you doing fresh install? You can save a lot of time by upgrading existing TDM installation (of any version). Just remove everything except for pk4 files and run tdm_installer. Unfortunately, there is no option to pause and resume download. I'll create torrent, but it will be targeting http mirror anyway.

There's always the full download from moddb. You can also specifically select another mirror in the installer. This sometimes helps.

I think it looks great and should be added to core as an option for mappers to include (although I think the audio isn't entirely fitting). This is how my tweaked mission selection screen looks. If the image was a slideshow and the text was scrollable, with a max height (I couldn't find a way yet how to include those) it would be even better. Now that I think of it, the mission selection screen and downloader could be merged into one screen. where the not downloaded missions have a download button and the ones already downloaded you can activate directly.

I'm more than happy to beta test a mission that still has cosmetic touches to go in. Scripting, gameplay, and balance are all things that can be tested early on.

I think it's better to rush it than to procrastinate because there is no limit to perfection and it bogs everything down until it's never finished. You'll return later to polish it or you can let someone else do it and you may just approve the changes or modify, reject them as you please. The most painful is when something is left unfinished and it's never released IMHO.

The problem with UI, I'm afraid, is first and foremost a technical issue. The existing UI system is an absolute pain to work with, and any effort to implement any reasonable modern UI concept in that system will drive every developer involved in the effort absolutely insane. I'm only half joking. Before any such effort could take place, I feel that the system needs to be replaced entirely. But that is also a massive pain because there's no good option to keep backwards-compatibility with existing missions. And the most obvious candidates for UI systems are rather large dependencies. So while I agree with the necessity of a UI overhaul, I'm not very optimistic for it to happen anytime soon.

I did actually make a prototype which I thought was an improvement. But it wasn't liked and then we discussed adding more complexities which started to expand the time it would take me. Couple that with a lot of real life commitments taking up my time, it became hard to devote time to this. Now all of my spare time is put into finishing off the Shadows of Northdale campaign.

Do you mean the Crucible of Omens? I totally understand in that case, but I merely meant concluding the last unfinished mission of St Lucia. A three mission campaign (A New Job + St Lucia + Unnamed Unfinished mission) would be more than suitable. Why not appealing to FM creators to wrap up the conclusion? It's a matter of nominating a number missions which meet the requirements, a small file size being one of them. I'm thinking, for example, of Sotha's Coercion for the small one; it's only 10mb, and probably one of the best short missions available at the moment.

I meant this as an exercise in mirrored UVs technique. Both version of the fence and the door are unwrapped in one texture space. By creatively cloning and rotating faces that player will never see at the same time, I managed to save a lot of space on the texture and get better pixel density. The biggest downside of this technique is that it can require a lot of planning, and it's best suited towards inorganic props. While the unique faces that were used to build the above look like this:

I'm dropping my next standalone mission next week. And I wanted to give everyone a little teaser of what's to come by showing off my new briefing video. In it you'll hear a brand new voiced protagonist which is quite a bit different to the norm The mission was supposed to be featured in the Connections Contest but due to real life constraints I was not able to make the contest deadline. Because it was originally a connections contest mission you'll notice some references to the Volta universe (I was given permission by Kingsal to do so of course). With the extra time, I have spent it polishing and finishing up the mission which is now in beta and almost already to be released.

Finished this mission and I have to add to this second post that I also liked the good old "Garrett" attitude showing up through his cynical and ironic comments about the world around him.

Here's my video playthrough of Sir Taffsalot's Sword:

After all the research I've done so far and comparisons, including reading the history of the development of TDM. It seems TDM would be the best engine possible for DOOM 3. Any thoughts, or avenues to pursue on this from anyone constructive would be much appreciated.

Thank you for your responses. I'm glad there are others wanting to help in this. Clearly I won't be able to do it alone, there are too many new assets and features and special scripts that will be needed to achieve a proper cyberpunk conversion. At the moment I'm sitting a bit on the sidelines, have withdrawn from TDM and most FOSS projects. I've had certain experiences that have me very nervous of being active in other communities at the moment. I may try talking about them in private eventually... if I feel comfortable afterward, I may contribute simple mods and fun stuff again. Thanks for understanding.

It is not only technical issue, it is also an artistic one. The current visual style ("parchments") is spread across core files of main menu and custom GUI in missions (briefing, messages, etc.). If we change the core files to other visual style, that would result in inconsistent visual style in many missions. The end result would be uglier in general. That would be a terrible approach at the time when the training mission was started. For a native speaker, speech feels more natural, but for a non-native one, text is much easier to understand than speech. Of course, this is not an issue now with subtitles.