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Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/04/23 in all areas

  1. Absolutely loved the mission. Took me over 6 hours to beat, which I think is a record in terms of length. Got a bit over 14k loot before I resorted to using cheats to find the rest. There's some stuff I went out of my way to scope out.
    2 points
  2. Beta Testing: "Seeking Lady Leicester" As most people here know, grayman, longtime lead coder and mission designer (best known for the "William Steele" series), passed away in the spring of 2021 from cancer. According to grayman's will, his son has subsequently donated two unfinished missions to our community. These two projects are completely independent of each other and there is no relation to grayman's well-known "William Steele" series. The mission "The Black Mage" was completed by me last fall and released on Christmas 2021. Bikerdude along with Amadeus and Dragofer have worked for almost 18 months on the second incomplete mission "Seeking Lady Leicester", ready now for beta testing. This is a mansion mission, but it also includes outdoor areas. The playtime is about an hour if you run through it quickly, but if you want to see all the locations and secrets, you'll be busy for several hours. From the feel of it, I would say that this is an advanced mission, so it's surely above "The Black Mage" in terms of difficulty. I haven't played it myself yet, but I've looked at it, and it looks damn good, just like everything else Bikerdude has produced in the last few years. Please sign up here for beta testing, if you can test on 2.11 b4 or higher as this will be a 2.11 release. I then will provide you with details for testing via PM which will take place via Discord. It would be very nice if we could get a lot of testers for this mission, because this release will be the last one that will include graymans name in the authorship. He was very meticulous about testing, so let's not let him down. Jack
    1 point
  3. My dream is for forums.thedarkmod.com to link to thedarkmod.com
    1 point
  4. Bug tracker: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6215
    1 point
  5. What hardware are you all using for TDM VR? I've only experienced a Quest 2, but are any others better? Suggestions for what is recommended to get? What system did you get on sale @Jedi_Wannabe
    1 point
  6. Oh wow. I've been playing TDM since the time it was actually a mod for Doom 3, and I guess I always considered mastering KOs in this game to be something of a rite of passage, given there's always a chance you'll fail no matter your experience. Now you are able to get a visual indication of a guaranteed takedown, which I think is an overall positive but it takes some of the uncertainty away. On the other hand, I will freely admit to save scumming. I would often save before attempting a KO even if I thought it would have a high chance of succeeding. So I'm trading lots of saving in a mission for an animation showing the chance of success. At least there's a cvar to allow for both styles, I like that.
    1 point
  7. PLAYERS * Volumetric lights appeared late before the previous beta, so the quality of volumetrics in 2.10 was rather poor, and the dithering pattern was very annoying to look at. The feature received a lot more development, and now adheres to the standards of modern rendering. The dithering pattern is gone, performance should be much better, and now you won't miss volumetrics even if you prefer to play with stencil shadows all the time! (thread) * Thanks to a certain "AI-heavy" mission, the game code has received major optimizations. It is most noticeable in low performance conditions, when game modelling takes a lot of CPU time. Previously the game could easily descend into the "spiral of death" with FPS falling below 5, now it is way harder due to better scheduling of AI thinking. There is a variety of other game code optimizations which make our lives slightly better. * New version includes several optimizations for shadows, mostly stencil shadows. A long-standing inefficiency of stencil shadows with antialiasing is fixed, new tile-based optimization is added for soft stencil shadows (thread), small lights with large meshes work faster due to BVH efforts (thread). On the side of shadow maps, the rules for distributing the resolution budget are changed: small distant lights no longer steal precious bandwidth for themselves. * There are several improvements on gameplay side as well. The core mechanics of blackjacking enemies has received subtle, yet helpful improvements (thread). Now you can grab many close pieces of loot by holding down the frob button, instead of picking up each item individually. There are several improvements to crouching, making it more responsive (thanks to @Daft Mugi). The in-game downloader now supports "sort by release date" ordering. * There were a ton of small bugfixes for issues like: bow stuck after load, wrong strafe-walk sound, crash when saving shortly after the death of an elemental, melee combat crash, issues with leaning onto doors, missing fracture sounds after loading a save, X-ray glitch in the first frame, toggling solidity/visibility, lightgem on game load, etc. MAPPERS * The engine now supports OBJ model format. This format is much more popular than ASE and LWO. The engine loading code is very lightweight: it will use your model exactly is as, and load it very quickly. The OBJ format is preferred for large meshes due for faster loading times. The only possible downside is somewhat larger download size compared to LWO, although not much and not always (thread). * Renderer should deal with large meshes much faster, thanks to BVH optimizations. Recall that idTech4 was made for very low-poly models. When renderer frontend sees a "surface" in a model, it always treats this surface as an atomic piece, doing all computations for all of its vertices and triangles. This is very good for low-poly models, can heavily drag performance down with large meshes, as several recent missions noticed during beta. The BVH data structure breaks every surface into smaller chunks, allowing renderer to quickly cull away whole chunks. This makes a big difference in case of large meshes (e.g. terrain) lit by many small lights (thread). * You no longer have to write frob-highlight stages in materials, since they are added implicitly. The problem with these stages was that were very easy to forget, which resulted in no highlight on frobable items. Also it increased cognitive load and scared mappers away. While writing frobstages is no longer necessary, the old stages work just fine. So mappers can still customize frob-highlighting if they really want to (thread). * It is now legal to override a single decl of core game in your mission. Recall that "decl" means a material, a skin, an entityDef, a particle, etc. Note that overriding a whole file from core game always worked as expected, but overriding a single decl from a file did not work reliably before (despite the common belief that it should). * The major cleaning of shaders resulted in some changes in lighting model. The aim was to make TDM lighting closer to the standard Phong model, and make it more logical in general. The changes should rarely make a big difference, aside from probably stronger specular (thread). * Added error-reporting to the GUI scripting engine. Implementing GUI scripts is very hard, error-prone, and confusing. Aside from surprising differences in Doom 3 GUI behavior compared to e.g. Javascript in DOM, a lot of confusion was caused by total lack of any error handling whatsoever! In the new version, all possible errors should result in easy-to-understand console warnings, so writing correct GUI is much easier. Also, we fixed a few features, and added a few new ones to the GUI engine (thread). * dmap command received minor improvements. Yet another big rewrite happened for T-junctions fixing code, since it took tremendous amount of time on one mission. Also a few precision improvements were made. * Other small fixes and additions: added script functions getAnimRate / setAnimRate for tweaking animations added script function setObjectiveNotification for silent objective change added script function getCurInvItemCount for interaction with inventory added script variable "AI_ENEMY_TACTILE" to the base AI scriptobject, which is true whenever the AI is in tactile range of an enemy added spawnarg absence_alert_increase for loot items as a proper substitute for absence_alert, giving control over how much an AI gets alerted if that piece goes missing added spawnargs allow_idle_anims / allow_random_headturning for customization during a running mission, useful i.e. for cutscenes AIs notice broken fracture entities trigger_multiple now works on stationary AIs almost doubled tracemodel limits, raising the restrictive limits for making collision meshes for moveable items door movers can now call "used_action_script" whenever something like a key, lockpick or other item is used on them, if they have the spawnarg "call_used_action_script" "1". ASSETS * Many new assets from capable creators in our community have been incorporated into the core assets. These include: Loot assets: Detailed coins and ingots with accompanying lore. Link Ancient loot items suitable for museums, collectors and ancient sites, first seen in the Volta series. A tiling treasure hoard texture for those with unimagineable wealth. 6 detailed book skins including 3 that are lootable, a first for TDM. Link Security assets Highly detailed standing and wall safes - with or without an accompanying combination lock. Link The combination "safe lock" is now part of core assets and can be operated by either scrolling or frobbing. Mappers no longer need to track down this asset and include it with their FM files as a custom asset. Wall-mounted locks in the style of those commonly found in the original Thief games. Camgoyle sentry, a magical stone guardian based on the security camera shooting magical projectiles at the player, first seen in Written in Stone. The prefab also includes a power source pedestal. Link Fully useable audiograph for playing recorded sounds, first seen in the Accountant and Shadow of Northdale missions. A new full-featured scriptobject makes them easy to implement and control via spawnargs. Wiki Furniture assets Posh upholstered armchairs and sofas for the wealthiest nobles. Link A new high-detail grandfather clock with a working scriptobject and a mantle clock. Link A gothic-style cabinet. Link Office assets Including bundled stacks of paper, blueprints, a letter, crumpled paper, waste bins, an end table and an ornate table. Nautical assets Full-scale modular ship prefabs with interiors, allowing anyone to assemble a ship for a nautical mission in a matter of seconds. 1 merchant galleon and 2 smaller sailing ships are available. Link Link Link A large galleon ship wreck in 2 pieces for those sailors who have met an unfortunate end. Decorative assets An impressive multi-tiered wall fountain, first seen in the mansion in Noble Affairs. A new pair of marble lion statues. Link A standing stone menir with carved symbols on it, ideal for pagan missions. Link Stone pedestal with purple cloth for presenting valuable items. Textures High-resolution cobblestone textures for detailing the streets of TDM. Link Starry wallpaper. Lamps A set of 6 bronze vintage lamps has been added for particulary posh establishments. Link Thief-style charge post streetlamp. A new open-top carriage, the barouche. Link Miscellaneous other models, including: wall planter, 7 small "foliage" herbs, 2 mine carts, 6 shop signs, equippable feather duster and 5 decor plates * We fixed all loading warnings on all existing assets. This became possible after creating an automatic map generator which forces the engine to load all assets from every group. All the references to missing files are fixed too, which means a variety of assets have become available: Old noblewoman skin, plain mage robes skin, moor helmet, electrical arcs, stone window decals (5178), yellow banner skin (5563), wine barrel (Link), grass particles (5689), lampion lights and more graffiti decals. PROGRAMMING Under the hood, we updated third-party libraries, and moved to Visual Studio 2022. The "Debug With Inlines" configuration was split into "Debug Editable" (with hot-reload support) and "Debug Fast" (fastest debuggable). Marking the final step in transition to tdm_installer, the old tdm_update program is finally removed, with TDM packaging code extracted to standalone program.
    1 point
  8. I just found out about this on YouTube and tried it -- wow! I know I'm kind of late to the game but this is amazing! Thank you so much for this. I'm a long time fan of the Thief series and this is a dream to play. Running on Quest 2 using Airlink and a dedicated 5GHz router connected to notebook PC i7-9750H / nVidia GeForce RTX 2060.
    1 point
  9. A review of the game from a YouTube channel I follow :
    1 point
  10. I hate to be the devil's advocate, but I think the EMP-arrow is unnecessary. It's purpose is to extinguish electical lights. However, electical lights are meant to be not-extinguishable. If the map designer would have wanted a light source to be extinguishable in a specific place, he/she would have put a flame-based light source there. It would only make designing maps more diffcult as map authors would have to consider the possibilty that any electrica light source could be extinguished. The way it is right now is quite clear: if there is a flame-based light source it can be extinguished, if it is electrical you will have to find another way around or time it correctly so guards don't see you. The only thing the EMP-arrow would achieve is to blurr this definition.
    1 point
  11. Excellent, montag! Please do consider about the mission release part, though: why do it just for your own amusement, when you could give it for the community to play? A simple and short mission is better than no mission at all, right? If you run into trouble, do not hesitate to ask for help around the forums: there are many veteran mappers who are happy to help new mappers out.
    1 point
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