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A little "No Honor Among Thieves" v4 preview. Not too revealing. See if you can spot the new texture I created...

Liking how this landscape turned out so far. Just one of the areas in my new FM, in between two of the city hubs it's gonna have available to explore and do missions in. Odd as it may seem this is one of the areas with the best performance.

I got a whole lot done on the inside the past week, but decided to switch gears and try my hand at landscaping: SEED seems to do pretty well at scattering grass, but I need to tweak things to get them to floor better. I came up with a nice little trick to draw the image maps SEED can use to spawn entities: 1. Take a screenshot of the top view from DR, and import it into your favorite photo editor 2. Add a new half-transparent layer and draw your image map on top 3. Crop and export your top layer with the right settings, and apply it to your SEED entity

Actually now that I'm at it, I should share some of the first forest area too. The bandit forest... called that way because you encounter bandits who are the first foe you'll have to sneak past. And this is after it starts raining, technically halfway throughout the game. It's easy to make weather effects triggerable fortunately, which I think makes them more interesting and the FM to feel more complex.

It seems this process is finally over. I have repacked 33 missions out of 147, which for some reason take 6.5 GB out of 8.8 GB If anyone has objections or comments about the result of repacking, better say now. Note that you can test all the updated FMs yourself: the first post in this thread describes which version of TDM to install, and how to connect in-game downloader to updated versions. Also you can download updated FMs by direct links in the second post of this thread. My plan is to give a week or two to this, then merge my SVN branch to trunk. It means that all the future dev builds will include my changes, and will be able to work with updated FMs properly. The FM database, however, will not receive updated versions of FMs until 2.10 is released, or at least until the late moments of 2.10 beta phase (i.e. till 2022).

I managed to create this during the past 5 days, which is the only thing I find scarier than the fact I managed to make it at all. I'll start with a little background on what I wanted to do and why. I felt that TDM was in need of some kind of playable minigame. Not just because its beautifully flexible scripting and gui system makes it so inviting to code one, but I feel it makes missions more pleasant to go through. A lot of AAA games add complexity in little details to make them enjoyable. During a normal mission in the 3D world, players find brief minigames or side activities to distract themselves and take their mind off the main objectives, after which they resume playing the normal match; This gives the world a nice effect and makes it feel more wholesome overall. I'm presently working on a FM that will feature interactive city hubs, this is one of the things I wanted to have to make each city feel more alive. Onto how it works: This is a pk4 mod you can download and drop in your FM to enable the minigame. The prefab mechanical/game_blocks.pfb contains a functional arcade machine, the entity itself is static/mechanical/atdm:game_blocks. Once you've placed an arcade in the world and compiled your map, simply approach it and frob the screen to bring up the overlay and start playing. It's an item matching game with simple rules: When 3 or more items form a lump their group is cleared and the player gains score, the more score you gain the more items you unlock, however the game gets faster and more difficult. You use the movement keys as follows: Forward to disconnect from the device (un-frob and regain control of the player), backwards to project the active item to the ground when you don't want to wait for it to fall, left and right to move the active item. From here I'll list the important highlights individually: One advantage is that in its current form, the game uses no custom assets (images or sounds): Everything is achieved using the vanilla graphics and audio exclusively. The only three files are a def, a script, and a gui... the prefabs for the default in-world device is also included. Hence why for all the complex functionality it achieves, the pk4 is just a ridiculous 17.0 Kilobytes! The game is highly configurable using spawnargs. From the game rules to the items and background, most aspects can be customized per-entity. This means arcade on the map can have its own rules for items, scoring, leveling, not to mention its unique appearance! See the def and the editor descriptions for info on each spawnarg. The game is meant to interact with the world via targets. You can use multiple trigger_on_* variables to activate objects in various circumstances. This includes starting or ending a game, leveling up, reaching a specific level, or beating the default high score. The later can be used to open a door that's only accessible if you beat the game. I made full use of the gui system. The game is normally played on an overlay, however the entity represents a screen (textures/darkmod/decals/signs/decal_gui plane) which mirrors the same interface. This lets you see your paused game in-world when you disengage the device, even watch the items fall at the edges of the screen if you're facing the right way. There's even a spawnarg to disable the overlay and play only on the world surface, though turning off the overlay isn't recommended as it's much harder to see detail on the surface. Other than the script and entity which you can use with your own geometry, I also created a prefab containing a fully functional arcade game ready to place on the map. I tried making it interactive and operable by adding other in-world entities in the mix: You have a side door which can be lockpicked to give you access to the power button, which lets you turn off the device or reset an active game. When beating the high score, the other utility door will open and give you access to some loot. It also contains details like spinning machine gears, refractive glass screen, even a short-range projector for light emanating from the screen... all are toggled on and off with the device. Despite arcade games being a little questionable for a steampunk world, I stylized it so it looks fitting for the environment. Lastly there's a broken (unplayable) version of the prefab which you can add as an accompanying decoration. I'm eager to hear your thoughts and what you think. If you like this minigame, the best way to support the work I put into it is to include it in your FM and use it, I would enjoy that the most. I'd be happy if it could be included in vanilla TDM in some form... not just because I'd be humbled to have contributed my own creation, but I feel it would benefit the default game to have this accessible to mappers. I'm happy with the base entity and functionality which I think is as good as it gets... beyond that it might need a better model than prefab, perhaps someone could help with creating one? Feel free to look at script too and let me know if you feel it's coded right, if it's something easy I might further improve it. Important: When placing the pk4 in your FM directory, be aware that any existing tdm_custom_scripts.script will either override or be overriden by the game's and break stuff! If you're already using that file, edit the pk4 to delete it from there, then manually add the following line to your existing FM's: #include "script/tdm_game_blocks.script" And here's the pk4 of the initial release as of today, as well as some screenshots of how this all looks so far. Wish TDM had a builtin recorder so I could share a video as well. game_blocks_1.1.pk4

Fixed hide_distance for light entities in svn rev 9492 @stgatilov You might want to review this change

Have you tried Scripts > "Select all Models of same type"? It should select all entities with the same model spawnarg.

Note that when you enable com_automation for the first time, the Windows Firewall will ask you for permission. Most players won't have interest neither in mapping nor in having their game process to listen for connections - I think enabling this feature and confirming the firewall dialog should be something that is done on purpose, once when people start playing around with the editor. On the other ideas, I think there's nothing stopping DarkRadiant from launching the game with the +com_automation 1 parameters. That would be useful and resembles some of the functionality that was present in DoomEdit.

Starting TDM from DR would actually be useful I think. If you could hit a single button which would start the game, enable automation, compile and launch the current map, move the player position to the current camera position... this would really cut down all of the manual switching between applications, entering "testmap" etc. In this case players wouldn't need to worry about the automation feature, entering console commands and the like. The automation would just be there under the hood to streamline the process.

Mission "Hidden Hands: Vitalic Fever" by @JackFarmer and @Amadeus. It overrides mainmenu_background.gui for main menu background and mainmenu_briefing_video.gui to skip empty briefing page. Removed both files, then added this to mainmenu_custom_defs.gui: //stgatilov #5323: skip briefing state #define ENABLE_MAINMENU_BRIEFING 0 //stgatilov #5323: change background in main menu #define MM_BACKGROUNDS_META_ALLSIMPLE BackgroundCustomVitalicFever Also added mainmenu_background_custom.gui: windowDef BackgroundCustomVitalicFever { rect 0, 0, 640, 480 background "guis/assets/custom_title" BACKGROUND_DEFAULT_BEHAVIOR(BackgroundCustomVitalicFever) } As usual, everything is OK in new TDM, but TDM 2.09 now shows default background and displays empty briefing page.

Mission "A good neighbor" by @Amadeus It overrides mainmenu_background.gui in order to set custom background. Removed this file. Then added lines to mainmenu_custom_defs.gui //stgatilov #5323: set custom background for main menu #define MM_BACKGROUNDS_META_ALLSIMPLE BackgroundCustomGoodNeighbor Added mainmenu_background_custom.gui with: windowDef BackgroundCustomGoodNeighbor { rect 0, 0, 640, 480 background "guis/assets/custom_title" BACKGROUND_DEFAULT_BEHAVIOR(BackgroundCustomGoodNeighbor) } The updated FM works properly in the new TDM, custom background is visible in main menu. TDM 2.09 shows default background, as expected.

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

Mission "Volta 1: The Stone" by @kingsal. Overrides: mainmenu_background.gui (for custom background) mainmenu_briefing_video.gui (for removing empty briefing page) mainmenu_main.gui (no changes here) tdm_objectives.gui (squeeze 6-th objective, don't close by click) tdm_objectives_core.gui (squeeze 6-th objective) tdm_objectives_defs.gui (squeeze 6-th objective) So I removed all these files. Then added the following to mainmenu_custom_defs.gui: //stgatilov #5323: disable briefing state #define ENABLE_MAINMENU_BRIEFING 0 //stgatilov #5323: set custom background #define MM_BACKGROUNDS_META_ALLSIMPLE BackgroundCustomVolta And some code for background into mainmenu_background_custom.gui windowDef BackgroundCustomVolta { rect 0, 0, 640, 480 background "guis/assets/mainmenu/volta_menu_background" BACKGROUND_DEFAULT_BEHAVIOR(BackgroundCustomVolta) } The updated FM works nicely in the new TDM. Of course, custom sizes of objectives are lost, now there are 5 objectives without scrolling. Also, the parchment on difficulty selection screen looks dirty (old texture), I guess FM overrides it. In TDM 2.09, the mission plays properly, but main menu has default background. Also, the empty briefing page is displayed after video --- as expected.

I might port it to TDM, if I find the time. But a generic non-VR mod is actually trickier to do than for VR, and I have too many other things to do

Ugh, spent a week redoing these carpets by hand: Now I just have to get rid of the seam between them, I think it's a photoshop 2020 glitch. EDIT: You can see how the original texture didn't line up:

Wanderlust: Transsiberian https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/get-a-free-copy-of-wanderlust-transsiberian-on-gog-with-their-publisher-sale https://www.gog.com/giveaway/claim

@datiswous The Tielman Brothers, holy shit. I'm ashamed to say, but I didn't know this band. Impressive performance and somehow prophetic (considering the things that came about 20 years later). Will investigate and search for more, thank you for that!

Recently I found out about this Indo Rock band that I have never heard from: Something completely different: And some other nice song:

@peter_spySorry for interference, but I think that's the kind of language that can get you in trouble in this forums The silent committee is watching you I personally don't mind a little internet drama, but better me try to warn you than one day you just wake up and find out you're banned. Not that it would be end of the world, but still. Let's be cool.

I'm afraid you're not. You are showing a standard scene and just hide a lot of its lights. It's very clear that this gives a performance boost, nobody doubts that. It's just also completely meaningless, because doing so alters the entire scene. And so it becomes a completely different scene and not merely a "performance optimized" scene. As such, it is *not* suitable to determine whether culling lights by distance is an actual usable performance optimization. As I already explained on the Discord, the influence of lights on performance correlates with the amount of pixels it touches, because the most expensive parts of lights are the calculations done in the pixel shader. As such, the amount of tris is not as important, so you are looking at the wrong numbers. However, this is also the issue: when a light is sufficiently negligible to a scene that culling it could actually be an acceptable performance optimization, it will invariably also be touching a lot fewer pixels to begin with. Certainly a lot fewer than in your test scene. And that changes the whole equation, because if it's touching fewer pixels to begin with, it will have less benefit to not render the light. All we are asking here is a demonstration that in a situation where a light is barely noticable (visually), it is still sufficiently impacting performance that implementing a distance-based culling system for lights would be worth the (potentially considerable) development effort.

That wiki entry reads more like a technical white paper than a feature documentation; I certainly wouldn't expect ordinary users to plough through all of that. It's probably about time DarkRadiant's own online documentation contained some instructions for using the game connection feature. I hadn't added it up until now because the feature was somewhat experimental and in flux, but now that it's been in the software for a few months and has visible UI elements associated, it should be documented. Of course we all know that users hardly ever read documentation, so improving discoverability of the feature is still important even if it is also covered by the user guide.

See my last reply, was just typing it in the meantime. It shows how even removing only the torches and leaving the electric lights on has a notable improvement. Which would count as leaving the visuals relatively unchanged, especially if we had fading as well. Torches are lower range and acceptable... we'd also have even smaller lights like candles. The lever example is the best I can use right now: I can't test a feature that isn't yet implemented. But it's close to simulating what would happen. The map is easy to edit, you can make it toggle just the torches or something and see to what extent you feel that makes a visual difference. I did my best to provide a useful test case as much as I saw possible.

But these screenshots look nothing alike. Surely that's not what a player would want to happen just by moving a certain amount beyond some arbitrary distance?! Any LOD effects are usually meant to be deployed where a reduction in graphical detail gives a performance boost without being too noticeable to the player. Those lights being turned off is as far from not being noticeable as you can get.

Perhaps restructuring/rewriting the wiki entry could help as well. It's not even filed under Connection Feature yet. Anyway, 2-3 sentences on what it does, then setup instructions, and then the technical bit for the curious.

Sorry for that, JackFarmer. I would have been fine with you taking it on. I still haven't had a response so I'm going to leave it too.

I immediately recognised the first from Fallout 3. Great irony playing the song on a radio in a wasteland after a nuclear blast; I loved it Don't know other games using one of these, but the style would fit to Bioshock as well.

There are three different cities connected by two forest areas in a line. My goal was to experiment with having 3 city hubs in one FM, where you can travel from town to town and have to complete certain objectives in between areas. I didn't add weather effects in the towns themselves for performance and difficulty reasons, but have snowing in the mountains and raining in the forest. As the player navigates it creates the illusion that it starts / stops raining or snowing as you walk to different areas, so it doesn't look out of place for what's literally a miniature segment of a continent you can explore.

So that no misunderstanding arises: I'm out, because Petike has not clearly stated here that he is handing over the project and Shadow Creepr did not want to continue without his clear consent (he did not respond to a PM from her either).

Well it seems there was something problematic with my installation, because I updated to the latest SVN, exported the normal map from GIMP in BC5 format, and it works fine in game. I'm not sure what the problem was before — perhaps I was just testing with a game DLL which didn't have the latest changes. BC4 definitely doesn't work but according to the description here, this is a 1-channel format so it wouldn't be expected to. I'm pretty sure I tested all of the GIMP formats the first time, but maybe I was just being dumb and tested BC4 multiple times but never tried BC5 @duzenko I've uploaded the images here if you want to confirm that the formats are correct. The diffuse is DXT1 and the normal is BC5, although in this particular case I would probably keep the normal map as PNG since this is less than 10% of the size of the DDS (because it's a smooth gradient normal map which compresses well with PNG). @MirceaKitsune Feel free to download the linked archive and see if you can open the _local map. I'm 99% sure you will be able to because I can read and write it fine on Ubuntu using GIMP.

Interesting, did not know that. However, looks like some sort of DS clone (the "health meter" on the neck of the character) and the story (as far as one can tell from the render video)? A certain fraction (scientists/military guys/business men/you name it) uses prisoners for something weird - not exactly innovative. However, let's look at the result. Would be great if they would turn it in some sort of stealth survival horror. I agree with you on the ending of ds3 - they should have simply concluded the series with a decent ending - after all, one gets very exhausted fighting the apocalypse over and over again. The protagonists would have deserved it!

Related https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/18/what-is-pegasus-spyware-and-how-does-it-hack-phones?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other People never understand why it always gives me goose bumps when they use their mobile to make payments, banking, manage administrative and even medical things, having a huge amount of sensitive data on these devices. This spyware aside, they do not take into account that any mediocre hacker can access a smartphone in a matter of seconds, especially if it is used in a public WiFi.

@MirceaKitsune There seems to be communication breakdown here and on the bug tracker page As said above, I'm not planning to spend any time on hiding lights until I'm convinced it's practical By repro case I mean either an existing mission and a setviewpos for it, or a dedicated test map package file No repro case - no nothing Best regards

original ds was quite ok though it did have a few annoying bugs like mouse sensitivity, new one seems to be based on the frostbite engine so expect some heavy visuals. The original author glen schofield also has a project cooking with the callisto protocol which looks very promissing. What we can hope for is that they fix the clusterfuck that was ds3 and provide us with a decent ending instead of a cliffhanger.

@joebarnin Maybe you can spawn a new rope at the same location and rotation? Possibly a stuck rope arrow and/or the rope arrow result entity. Otherwise it'd have to be that the script waits for the player to get off the rope. For fixing this, it should be possible to either expose the detach functions to scripting or call them from teleportation functions. @MirceaKitsune The only thing I can suggest is to look at all the spawnargs, I have no experience making animals that are like humans. Search cooldown timers for a fact have a lot of spawnargs governing them. And maybe you need to set some kind of rank so other AIs know what to greet them as.

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-legal

@joebarnin I think you'll need to clear immobilisation flags from the player - MirceaKitsune's recent arcade machine posted to the Art Assets thread has a script that works with these flags. scriptEvent void setImmobilization(string source, float type); Used to set immobilization from a source. Warning: Not a finalized version. It's subject to change, so use it at your own risk.) Spawnclasses responding to this event: idPlayer Btw, this is how the player is detached from a ladder in the engine (Physics_Player.cpp): Yeah I think it's a bug that teleportation doesn't automatically do this. It could be worth a ticket.

Note that I have made a couple of minor improvements to the GUI. There is no full-fledged management widget or anything, but you can quickly enable/disable the camera sync or move the DR camera to the current game position using buttons on the camera view toolbar. I also rationalised some of the menu options, so enable/disable is a single toggle rather than two separate menu entries.

Mission "Hidden Hands: The Anomaly" by @JackFarmer. It has exactly the same overrides as in hhtlc: mainmenu_background.gui for custom background mainmenu_briefing_video.gui to skip briefing state mainmenu_newgame.gui for a size tweak on mod selection page (not necessary here) Removed all the overrides. Added to mainmenu_custom_defs.gui: //stgatilov #5323: skip briefing state #define ENABLE_MAINMENU_BRIEFING 0 //stgatilov #5323: change background in main menu #define MM_BACKGROUNDS_META_ALLSIMPLE BackgroundCustomHHAnomaly Added mainmenu_background_custom.gui: windowDef BackgroundCustomHHAnomaly { rect 0, 0, 640, 480 background "guis/assets/custom_title" BACKGROUND_DEFAULT_BEHAVIOR(BackgroundCustomHHAnomaly) } In new TDM, the update FM looks good: custom background is displayed, briefing page is skipped. In TDM 2.09, default background is shown in main menu, and empty briefing page is displayed --- as expected.

Mission "The Hare in the Snare, Pt. 1" by @Frost_Salamander and @Kerry000. The authors decided to avoid "forbidden overrides" by using custom title to change background in main menu. Now custom title is deprecated, so it should be reworked using new features. So I commented out custom title and set background "the new way" in mainmenu_custom_defs.gui: //stgatilov #5323: custom title image is deprecated! //#define MM_SHOW_CUSTOM_MAINMENU_TITLE 1 //stgatilov #5323: use new way of setting background instead //since image has parchment imbued, override only main page background #define MM_BACKGROUNDS_MAINMENU_NOTINGAME BackgroundCustomHareSnare #define MM_BACKGROUNDS_EXTRAMENU_NOTINGAME BackgroundCustomHareSnare Note that the background image has parchment graphics in it (because otherwise custom title hack would hide parchment). For that reason: I cannot set it on briefing and difficulty selection pages. I cannot even set it for in-game menu, because objectives screen will look broken. This I had to retain custom background only on the out-of-game main menu. Added mainmenu_background_custom.gui with: windowDef BackgroundCustomHareSnare { rect 0, 0, 640, 480 background "guis/assets/hits1_menu" BACKGROUND_DEFAULT_BEHAVIOR(BackgroundCustomHareSnare) } With new TDM, the mission looks nice, custom background shows on the initial page + various settings/new game/load game pages. I clicked through various screens, and did not find anything looking bad. In TDM 2.09, default background in shows everywhere in the main menu.

dead space is getting a remake https://www.polygon.com/22587408/dead-space-remake-release-date-ea-play-trailer

@stgatilov Thanks, it turns out that 2 .pk4's were blocking the installer: tdm_textures_window01.pk4 - this .pk4 had a duplicate ending in .pk4.temp, which I already deleted yesterday. Log: tdm_installer_1627146664.log tdm_textures_stone_sculpted01.pk4. Log: tdm_installer_1627146488.log I'm pretty sure I touched neither of them, but in any case, deleting both of them allows the installer to progress.

Perhaps you modified some pk4 manually? Or added some pk4/zip starting with tdm_ ?... Anyway, you can look into installer's logfile, find the error, look which file it was trying to open just before the error. Is it core TDM archive? Most likely it got corrupted. Try to delete it (or at least move away) and rerun installer again. Installer will download the missing file afresh. UPDATE: In any case, attach the logfile.

Thanks for your patience: A pk4 is now available containing my first release of the playable minigame. Just drop the pk4 into your FM directory and add the prefab to your map, dmap frob the screen and try it out! But remember it's a new feature tested only by me, there might be bugs so don't release any FM's with it just yet.

Got it. Regardless we should be able to get light models to hide if not the lights themselves.

I thought the same thing, but I figured I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's see if he shows up again.

I think here we need another distinction according to intent of a speech/medium, etc. Dirty jokes and porn do not have value in terms of discussion, because their intent is to entertain. They never claim to contribute to anything like a public discourse. A call for violence (at least in the context of a public speech) does not intend to entertain, but tries to reach people and get them to act. It is similar for other media. Your example #KillAllWhiteMen can be meant as a provocative way of advertising, but looking at what is happening in South Africa right now (where they literally are killing white farmers), it could also be seen as a literal call for violence. I think this is similar for "hate speech". In a calm situation, it will not do much. Maybe be seen as provocative or as someone simply venting. But in an already tense situation, it will pour oil into the fire and may have negative effects.

Hi JackFarmer, here is my try to create the image you wanted. In addition to chaning the handle of the sword, I also tried to change the shape of the guard and pommel to be more similar to grayman's picture. It is not 100% accurate, but it may suffice.

Just one sneak peak from mine for the time being.

An encounter with some rather unsavoury types is taking shape...