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I'm proud to announce the release of The Lieutenant 4: A Reciprocal Gambit Huge thanks to beta testers: @Mat99 @Bikerdude @Cambridge Spy @Shadow @DavyJones Screenshots: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCit3B 800x600 versions for @nbohr1more: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCir1t Download link (version 2): https://drive.proton.me/urls/PV79JTNVAW#7zDvAvipKG0I TDM 2.13 required. Enjoy! Frost

Aight well if I'm poking around posting fm reviews, code change suggestions, and asking for tech help I might as well also put up my work. Putzing around with DarkRadiant is quite fun. Not sure when or if I will produce a full map but, considering that I haven't touched dromed or made maps for other games before, I'm really happy with what I've got so far. Kudos to the tooling designers for making something reasonably idiot-friendly. One of the first things the A-Z tutorial tells you is to not use 0 0 0 for ambient lighting, and I immediately said nuts to that lol. I'm really enjoying the harsh darkness and the contrast from light sources. I didn't intend for it to happen, but I've ended up with something that looks like it crawled straight out of TDS. It also makes traversing the level have an interesting trade off - you need light to see, but enemies can see you carrying it and if its in your hands you have to drop it to pull out the bow or mantle stuff. I'm trying to build a whole level around this "mechanic"/"gimmick".

Coming along nicely...

"Dame Fortune is a fickle mistress. Every time she opens a door, she throws a brick through your window..." I'm happy to announce that my second FM, "The Last Night on Crookshank Lane", is now available on the Mission Database: https://www.thedarkmod.com/missiondetails/?internalName=crookshank Backup download is also available here: https://share.anon-kenkai.com/crookshank.pk4 Big thanks to @Airship-Ballet, @wesp5, @JackFarmer, @taffernicus, @Bergante for beta testing and feedback. Special thanks to @datiswous for generously providing in-mission subtitles. This is a much bigger and more ambitious FM than my first attempt, and it ended up taking a year and a half to complete. It was also a very educational lesson in the importance of proper map optimization. It's a sort of soft-sequel to "The Threepenny Revue", but not part of a series per se, and can be played as a standalone mission. I took inspiration from FMs like "The Painter's Wife" in TDM, and "The Sound of a Burrick in a Room" from Thief Gold, and although I'd never put myself in the same league as either, I was always impressed by their size, scope, and detail. City exploration FMs have always been my favorite, and those maps and others like them inspired me to take a crack at something similar. Enoy!

An abandoned underground pagan temple...

And for my fellow authors out there, some DR shots -

It's nice to get back to modelling sometimes. Probably one of my last ones. Original painting by AB, virtual carpentry by me.

A quick demo video of using a fire arrow to blast jump up to new heights. It may be loud and harmful to the user, but it's still a fun option! Done on the mission "Tears of St. Lucia" on Expert... which thankfully doesn't seem to affect the self-damage.

@OnlyTaffingCowardsHideLook dude - we have next to no rules here but that doesn’t mean you get to do our act however you want “because internet”. I think you have established you don’t have much to elaborate on in terms of your feedback about the game not running as well as you would like at 4k. So it follows you do not need to argue or pick fights about it. Unless that is the actual point. There is appeal in working within the limitations of older technology that not everyone understands. The “trash” as you put it, represents an opportunity for us to express something we might otherwise not be able to. So you are free to criticize it, but you don’t need to denigrate it or our members while doing so. Even if no one stops you, it’s not welcome here.

Love that skybox....

UPDATE! Version 2 is now available. It addresses most of the issues people have found, but the main highlight is a new in-game map provided by the talented @Airship-Ballet! Unlike version 1, the map isn't in your inventory to start with. You need to find it but it's not hidden. Changelog: https://github.com/FrostSalamander/lt4/releases/tag/2.0 Download: https://drive.proton.me/urls/PV79JTNVAW#7zDvAvipKG0I @nbohr1more could you please update the FM database?

Fall 2025

So for comparison, this was the very first blockout pass -

If value the games you buy, you should sign one of these petitions - SIGN THE EU CITIZENS INITIATIVE: - https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home SIGN THE UK PETITION: - https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/ EU petition is @ 826K- needs to hit 1'000'000 UK petition is @ 97K - needs to hit 100,000 A video from Gamers Nexus on the subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ahH6HrtTc ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EU: This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state. Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher. UK: The government should update consumer law to prohibit publishers from disabling video games (and related game assets / features) they have already sold without recourse for customers to retain or repair them. We seek this as a statutory consumer right.

Indeed like you said TDM engine is not outdated, at lest not like the original Doom 3 engine is. Yes is not using PBR and nanite and raytracing and all that new Unreal Engine 5 stuff that makes it a very fast engine ... not ... but the TDM engine has a ton of updates, above the original idtech4 engine from Doom 3, IMO has now more in common with idTech 5 than idTech4. And all done by a very tiny team of TDM players, with the necessary knowhow, on their free time, for absolute free. Man some people don't deserve to get nice things for free... And I'm not talking about you datiswous. To anyone wondering, here is some of the things TDM engine has above original idTech4 that I'm aware: - soft stencil shadows like Wolfenstein 2009 (original is hard stencil shadows only). - new shadow system using shadow maps. - volumetric lighting (aka god rays). - more advanced AI system (so more CPU heavy). - GLSL shaders support and OpenGL 3.x akin to D3D10/11 level, (original is OGL 2.0 akin to d3d9 level and uses ARB assembly shaders only). - modern multicore support (original is single core only). - unlocked framerate (original is locked at 60hz) - 64bits color support - Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - Parallax Occlusion Mapping And a ton of more changes, like LOD support, obj models support, improved gui system, improved scripting system, better window system with support for high dpi monitors and 16 by 9 and other screen ratios, etc, etc. None of these changes were easy to make and took years of hard work, again for free, for a free game that we wall consume without paying a dime. IMO the lest some people can do, is respect that! Enough said.

The Problem Readables are available in a wide range of TDM bitmap fonts. Unfortunately, the majority of these fonts lack non-ASCII glyphs for European languages, and it would be a prohibitively lengthy task to craft them. This is one of several translation hurdles. (Another is soliciting, organizing, and distributing the work of human translators; see “AI for Translations: An Exploration” for work on an alternative. This also promotes the use of meaningful alphanumeric #str_ IDs - possibly automatically generated – instead of traditional numeric.) A Proposed Solution Suppose that when a particular page of readable is shown, it is shown first is English, with the mapper-specified font (e.g., Camberic), and then, after a number of seconds, shown in the current user-selected language, with a different font (e.g., Stone), one that offers the needed diacritics? And with the translated font size scaled down to accommodate potentially more-lengthy translated strings? Both the English and translated text can be viewed in sequence. That opens the door to “quick and dirty” default translations, e.g., machine translation. In particular, the reader may sometimes be able to work-around any layout problems and sub-optimal translation by consulting the English text. (Nevertheless, default translations may sometimes miss subtle nuanced hints, so the ability to improve them with tweaked text is a necessity.) The Proposed Mechanics Recall that the game engine currently passes these values to a readable’s gui: gui::title gui::body With a multipage readables, the content of these parameters changes as pages are flipped. For clarity, it is proposed to replace them with: gui::titleEnglish gui::bodyEnglish gui::titleTranslated gui::bodyTranslated The latter 2 would be just like gui::title and gui::body, except that they would serve empty strings when the current language is English or there is no translation available in the current language (and so be used for gui code program logic, to suppress a transition). Observe that this behavior does not substitute an English string for a missing non-English string. Skip the remainder of this section if details are not of interest. Each stock readable .gui would need a one-time conversion to use them. Instead of the traditional 2 winDef overlays for text, there would be 4, corresponding to the 4 text-passing parameters just mentioned. This allows the translated text to fade in while the English text fades out, when an onTime event starts the transition (at 2 seconds in this example). Here is the fragment of .gui code that has been altered: Aspects of this Design – Transition from English The transition is timed, so no extra “Translate” button is shown, nor a hard-to-come-by hot key required. If you want to see the English again, you would briefly navigate away from the page to another, then return; or, if a single-page, close and re-open it. A simple implementation (as the code above and example below) uses a fixed, hard-coded time. Alternative Mechanism. At some cost to code clarity, it is probably possible to get by with just the 2 normal text-passing parameters (gui::title and gui::body) and their traditional 2 overlays, though additional variable(s) would be needed for tight time-synchronization between engine and gui; and overlapping fade-in/fade-out between English and translation would not be possible. Advanced Version. In the longer term, timing could be made more flexible, by passing it as parameter from the engine, e.g.: “gui::transitionTime” Where does this value come from? While it could somehow encoded into the .xd file by the mapper, I prefer a different approach. Have the engine calculate it from character or word count of the body, with user-specified globals for reading rate and min and max bounds, e.g.: sys_readablesWordsPerSecTransTime sys_readablesMinTransTime sys_readablesMaxTransTime A drawback of a timed transition is that additional reading time is needed to get to the translations, which may, with immobile readables, increase risk of discovery by guards. So having these additional user controls would let a user get to the translations faster, even skip the English entirely by setting bounds to zero. A Simulated Example – FM “readableTranslationFadeIn” In the absence of engine support for the 4 text-passing parameters, it is still possible to make an approximately-functional mockup using some hard coding. However, this prototype DOES NOT suppress the transition when the current language is English. That is, it shows (rather than prevents) an English-to-English transition with change of font & font-scale. TDM with the languages set to “Francais” (French). The first screen shot shows page 1 of a 3-page scroll, momentarily displayed in English with Camberic title and body. After a few seconds, it transitions to the second screen shot, in French in Stone font. With accents. While shown here as a scroll, this approach should be easily adaptable to books and sheets. About the Example’s Implementation The screen shots are from a prototype FM: readableTranslationFadeIn Notable files are: guis/readables/scrolls/scroll_calig_camberic.gui, a custom override of the standard Camberic scroll readable, with the translation transition mechanism from above, plus additional simulation fakery described below. strings/all.lang, a UTF-8 file containing 6 #str_ (2 per scroll page – title & body) in each language section. Only the [English] and [French] sections were implemented. The English example content was loosely derived from the St. Lucia FM. The English text (without #str_ structuring) was manually converted to UTF-8 French using Google Translate (website, not API). strings/english.lang & french.lang. These were generated from all.lang using my gen_lang_plus program to create the 8-bit “ANSI” versions as required, e.g., ISO-8859-15 encoding for French. xdata/readableTranslationFadeIn.xd, that contains the #str_IDs for the 3 scroll pages. Within scroll_calig_camberic, this simulation had this fakery: “gui::title” and “gui::body” were stand-ins for hypothetical parameters “gui::titleTranslated” and “gui::bodyTranslated”; The English text was hard-coded, and the appropriate content selected by actual parameter “gui::curPage”, to make up for missing hypothetical parameters “gui::titleEnglish” and “gui::bodyEnglish”. The READABLE_FADE_TIME is currently set to 2 seconds for testing. Probably 5-6 seconds would be better during game play. Aspects of the Design – Font Scaling As mentioned earlier, the translated font is scaled to make the text smaller than the original, to accommodate languages that need more room. A simple implementation (like in the example code) uses fixed values with “textscale”. So the textscale for the two Translated winDef overlays is smaller than for the 2 English winDef overlays. Specifically, in the example GUI code, the text scaling factors from the original Camberic readable were retained: textscale 0.4 // titleEnglish textscale 0.31 // bodyEnglish and supplemented by (with a different font, namely Stone): textscale 0.33 // titleTranslated textscale 0.24 // bodyTranslated The goal is to keep the rendered text smaller than the original English rendering for languages with more characters per sentence. These values, while hard-coded, will differ across readables (due to different starting fonts), and would need to be experimentally determined. But this treatment, with just a fixed scaling value that is independent of both text content and current language, is unlikely to be very satisfactory. Better ideas, needing additional engine modifications, will be considered in a follow-on post. Additional Considerations When Authoring the XD File. Recall that TDM is relatively inflexible when using #str_ within an .xd file. So this form will not work: "page1_body" : { "" "" "#str_fm_scroll_camberic_pg1_body_parish_inspection_excerpts" } Instead use "page1_body" : "#str_fm_scroll_camberic_pg1_body_parish_inspection_excerpts" With the 2 leading linebreaks moved into the #str content as leading \n\n. When Testing. If there is a mismatch between the TDM Language setting and the PC’s language setting (e.g., under Windows), then some characters may turn out wrong or indicated as missing (e.g., as boxes). The degree will vary by language, and is unlikely to be seen in the initial English render (because that’s almost all in ASCII, common to all the ISO encodings.) Even with such mismatches, the translation can be reviewed as to overall length and where linebreaks occur. Be aware that direct editing of *.lang files is not recommended, and could risk converting from a particular “ANSI” raw 8-bit encoding into “UTF-8”. Applying this Technique More Broadly. A few fonts have oddball glyphs for certain characters, e.g., a skull and crossbones in Treasure Map. This would require special handling during translation. For Briefings, Objectives, and Messages, similar approaches can be conceived. However, for each of these (and different from readables), only one particular font is routinely offered. And there are alternative designs to be considered. For instance, the English and Translated text could be shown simultaneously side-by-side in various ways, instead of sequentially. The Objectives have the additional complication that the font size is already user-adjustable.

That looks interesting. Nice, thanks for letting me know, I will definitely give this a try! Didn't now that. Never mind then

I see your power plant and raise you my own! Relatively safe to your body. Additionally, part of the vent system, And finally, a a pair of complete mystery images that I leave to speculation. https://imgur.com/UXw9PoR https://imgur.com/brhpBVA https://imgur.com/DMEwWCE https://imgur.com/hx7VP3I https://imgur.com/fgvu49f https://imgur.com/Q28PZ2I What a treasure trove Bikerdude... Wonderful to see

Here are some screenshots of Skacky's textures that Biker and I have been trying to make TDM-ready. We could actually use some testers to if people would like to try them out:

First of all wow so much impressive stuff recently in the thread. I can't compete at all. What I've got is definitely rough, and I am well aware that certain textures are muddy at the moment. Second, this isn't quite abandoned yet, but don't get your hopes up. I'm usually very tired from work and if my stuff gets finished at all it will be a miracle. Yes, I am disregarding the advice to make your first stuff simple. Yes, I am being a hardhead. Gamma and brightness adjusted to make things more visible in the screenshots. It's a prison break-in mission with a twist. No interior to the prison yet, just exterior walls and a safehouse far in the countryside. Not exactly "Victorian" design. I'm going for a feeling that the institution is more modern than most stuff we have seen in TDM. The "death antennas" surrounding the walls are just cobbled together from previous contributor's work. An upside down water tank on a steel pole, with some high voltage transmitter looking stuff on the sides.

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I think it comes down to peer pressure (people will notice if an FM is extremely demanding, and mention it during the beta testing phase), and peer assistance (mapping help from people who know what they are doing). Maybe there are things that can be done with the engine that can help support more gigantic "open world" style maps but I'm not sure what they are. It is reasonable for hardware recommendations to go up as the game evolves over decades and mappers push the limits. A bargain bin i3-10105 smashes the old A6-3400M I used to play TDM on, and multiple cores can actually be utilized. Le code it yourself geg I say excuse the rudeness as long as the criticism is anywhere near valid (debatable). Man's sober now at least. It's actually quadruple the pixels: 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 2560 x 1440 = 3,686,400 (~1.78x 1080p) 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400

The absence of rope arrows forces you to consider alternatives, which I think was the point here. I also felt that there was supposed to be rope arrows but that I missed picking them up. It forced me to explore other means to forge ahead, which I found. Again, that was deliberate. Same with the "fastened" doors. It hinted to me that there was something on the other side, but I had to find a different way to get there. It all comes together when you finish the mission. Getting from the end of the mission to the beginning is far easier than getting to the end from the beginning. This is important for those who have to return to collect unfound loot. There IS one wall pipe that is climbable. I don't think there is any ivy however. Some of the jumps WERE a bit tedious. That's always a turn off. And it was indeed dark. Particularly when you're trying to spot a ledge to creep along. Maybe this is a Ver 2.13 issue with the lighting. I don't know. But I managed to complete the mission and totally enjoyed it. Still can't find all the loot though. When you have verticality like this, there's bound to be an isolated window to burgle or some bird nest teetering remotely.

Bye bye!

And we know exactly how well it works out when tech-illiterate lawmakers start dictating the functions of technology they don't understand. "We don't care about this physics shit! We passed a law that requires you to provide faster-than-light travel and you nerds better figure out how to make it happen!" I don't even understand what these petitioners are asking for. Do they want a law that compels providers of online games to keep the servers running forever (even if the company goes bust)? Provide a refund if the servers have to be switched off (even if the company has already gone bust, and has no money to pay for it)? Implement an offline mode for games like WoW where it makes no sense? Or just never provide online games in the first place? No matter what they're asking for, I'm pretty sure what they're actually going to get (if the law is passed) is games publishers simply not selling into the EU/UK market at all. Just like the web sites which are now blocking UK visitors because the dumb fucks who passed the "Online Safety Act" mistakenly believed they had the power to regulate the entire internet.

While all the quality of life improvement on game preservation that this would imply is nice, i think the key takeaway is the part that says: "prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers " So as not to actively disrupt usability - Which should not be a technical problem, the worst it implies is that one should revert to at least being able to run the game in the launch status on systems it was meant to be run on. For disc software that is literally to not allow for 'disabling remotely'. for online bought, it is conserving for access -or allowing users to conserve for access- a working launch or/and a designated patched/stable version. For example i do want to retain the option to be able to play an original version of a game after its been remastered.

Awesome, thank you very much for the help!

Hi there I've been playing the dark mod for a while and have been taking notes on a few things that I feel if changed, would make for a slightly better and more enjoyable experience. 1 - Moving sideways when climbing ladders, pipes, nets, vines, etc, is ridiculously slow. Garret does it way faster in Thief 1 and 2... hell, even I can move sideways faster while climbing ladders and I'm no thief! Speeding it up a bit would make for more satisfying maneuvering, and also more fitting given that Corbin is an agile and experienced thief. 2 - There is no falling to your death sound. I was playing The Painter's Wife a while ago, and I fell to my death multiple times, and it always felt so weightless and anticlimactic doing so. In Thief 1 and 2 you could hear your bones being crushed whenever that happened. Having a sound cue like that would make me very very happy, or at least less frustrated from dying, which I do, a lot, because I suck. 3 - On the topic of dying, it would also be nice to add an option to enable a loose camera with physics instead of the Doom 3's standard tilted perspective and pointing 80º or so degrees upwards whenever you die. It looks so jarring to me that I feel even a standard camera animation pointing downwards like in Thief 1 and 2 would look better and more fitting than that abrupt cut. 4 - This is a small nitpick, but the water footsteps sound a bit off. Everything else in the sound department is generally very good, but the water footsteps sound as if someone dipped their fingers on a bathtub and is moving them around. It lacks impact. Thief 1 and 2 sounded better IMHO. 5 (bug) - And lastly, there is a bug that I want to report. For some reason you can't see your compass underwater. You can scroll through and view every item in your inventory (you can even read underwater!), except the compass that for some reason completely disappears. I noticed this when trying to navigate through a maze of underwater tunnels in a FM a while ago. That's all folks.

Hi ClockWood, Yeah, besides that there are a couple of player dying sounds that are also very anticlimactic. Yes. Fortunately @SeriousToni came to the rescue with his Alternative Footstep Sound Package

Just finished this amazing mission. I really like how dense the world is, and the story intrigued me. It is a very good one! Personally I believe this mission to be my favorite. Overall, thank you all who worked on this map for that amazing experience! One question, however, bugs me a bit.

It's possible that cvar isn't archived or something like that. Whatever the reason, you can probably get around this by adding that cvar to your autoexec.cfg in your darkmod folder.

I've had a brief look at the code. It indeed looks like unbindPad only unbinds the pad buttons. However, I just discovered a workaround: try setting in_padDeadZone to 2.0 . This increases the deadzone to values the sticks can never reach, effectively disabling the sticks.

Airship saved me. Turns out the problem all along was that I had saved the .sndshd as text rather than as All Files type so it became a .txt instead of a .sndshd.

@Sullomethanks for taking the time to play! I am glad you had a good time @datiswousyes the speech from the shop owners is specific to the mission. If you make subtitles I would be happy to integrate them.

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The mission database has been updated. Thank you!

I mention this in case it's useful: https://libretranslate.com/

Hi! Here is the link to beta2 of the russian variant of Iris - https://cloud.mail.ru/public/jLUn/n2fPr2WDe It has been already published at darkfate.org. But I still do not have enough skills to fix the Mason font...So I wil try all my best in the next 3 months...

A hearty congratulations on the release! Two FMs in one week?? We're getting spoiled

Yum... = )

The 5500X3D is now also a thing...

Thief Guild page ready https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/89591/the-lieutenant-4-a-reciprocal-gambit

This game takes place a few hundred years before Thief 2014...but after Deadly Shadows, so it's possible Hammers and Pagans may still be around in smaller numbers.

As you suspected, activating g_lightQuotientAlgo 0 makes AI notice missing objects again. Whatever the issue is, it seems tied to the new light estimate system.

Oh thanks for reminding me. Time to catch up on a supposed masterpiece.

I almost forgot that it is released this month. Already pre-ordered it.

How is blackheart manor coming along?

This seems like a futile process to me. We all love TheDarkMod and tremendous work has been done on the engine, but I suspect that when developing a new project, especially commercial, almost everyone would rather go for a more modern engine because the reality is that stealth games are a relatively small niche and you need everything you can get to make people notice and buy your thing. TDM with its historical limits on polycounts (unless switching to lightmaps removed that?) and other features that we're used to and have no problem with but that are not exactly state of the art in my opinion just isn't "it", and it's only going to be less and less "it" over time, despite being a brilliant game on its own. And making the game fully libre just so it can be included in certain distributions' free repos, while stripping out almost everything that makes TDM what it is, the community content, doesn't make sense to me either. If anything that could hurt its reputation because people who tried that wouldn't experience the actual game. I only skimmed parts of the thread, have I missed a good reason to do this? Also, another big issue that I think wasn't spelled out explicitly enough: I too thought that it would be awesome to have TDM on Steam. After looking into it, being educated by others and doing some searching I found out that TDM very likely contains a nontrivial amount of old content that may be seemingly re-licensed as CC-BY-NC, but legally cannot be, as its original license does not allow it. I'm talking specifically about old textures.com content - it uses its own asset license that explicitly disallows being released as CC (because CC allows redistribution anywhere and textures.com license explicitly prohibits that). Yet some of those assets are a part of TDM, and it's likely that nobody knows for sure which ones and how many there are. Textures.com was at one point even recommended as a source to create assets on the wiki. So you may get permission from some old mission author who doesn't even remember that he did this, but his content can still be non-free and in fact infringing on its original license. Realistically nobody cares because there's no damage to textures.com being done (the textures are not being redistributed anywhere, they're "just" being incorrectly rebranded with a license that would allow it), but it makes the whole libre thing even more difficult.

Maybe you can test with these cvars: Because maybe it could be related to the new AI vision system that is implemented since 2.13

Yep, if your a PCIe 3.0 user you'd be better off buying a 3060 12gb.