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I'm back trying to finish what I started a year ago. I haven't had the pleasure of finishing or releasing any FM's just yet, but hopefully that will change soon! This mission is called Vertigo, I'll follow up with more screenshots as I progress. This project is a labor of love for the original thief games. Map is divided into smaller shape segments to help with optimization, it also gives me more flexibility with visual fidelity. I'm (mostly) using Springheel's modules. Visual inspiration: Thief 2014 Let me know what you guys think! Side note: I'm in the process of blending the road in better with grass, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Progress on the lava room I'm working on.

Finally integrated the road, thanks to @Amadeus, I copied the settings from Good Neighbor. Added a few effects and made myself a wallpaper to keep myself motivated while I continue this project, what do you guys think?

Videoscreen goat ^^ https://streamable.com/bvftb

Transparent video screens: video

Making some lava flow and sculpting some rock today.

For rat hunting. If your rats decided to build a bunker. Gas operated, box fed, falling block cannon with revolving loader mechanism. It is a mix of ideas from the Forgotten Weapons channel.

Catching some of these new fishes: https://streamable.com/qb49h

The Dark Mod got a big mention in this video about the history of the Thief series.

Peter the carpender ..err I mean Peter the spy managed to do an incredible work by creating a game ready model of my portrait from last year. He even build a small map in which you can admire the detailed work he put on the frame and watch the light dance over the normal and specular maps he created for this painting. You can download the map and the model here https://we.tl/t-JffhJLIE2p Also I attached a small preview, but I reccommend to load his FM ingame so that you can see all the details he put in there. Of course you're free to use it in your next FM project if you like to

Dark Mod forums are not your personal army.

TDM mentioned in gamers thief doc: The rise and fall of Thief at 31:40 in video:

Done:

An other example of what can be done with thes transparent video screens. It doesn't like skyboxes though (see end of video). video A loop of the owl, shoud be downloadable here: Owl Loop Otherwise here: OwlLoop Attached the .mtr file I use. Just put it in your materials folder and make a video folder and put a video named video.mp4 in there. Then make a 16:9 patch and give it the video texture. videoscreentransparent.mtr

In this instance, I thing playability takes presidence over absolute realism. It simply looks better if there is some ambient in these situations.

Very cool! I'm looking forward to seeing dinner parties happening behind mansion windows, as well as a distant scene of ships sailing to and fro for dock maps.

Woman standing in front of a window with a non-transparent video screen. video

The audio doesn't play for me, so I'll add a separate speaker with standard owl sound. Also, when the video patch is placed in front of the sky, the entire patch is transparent, so the sky shows through and the owl becomes a ghost. I'll have to see if there's a way to force the video to change its order and paint over the sky.

I just realized that immobilizing the player is actually not OK while the player is in mid-air. Sure, this is a very rare corner case ("grabbing an AI while in the air"), but playing out the animation and then dropping on the floor is really weird. It also still feels kind of weird, that the player view cannot be adjusted while the animation plays out. I will have to revisit the code.

I know. But if anyone else disapproves of torturing one of the most intelligent sea creatures in the world by simultaneously scalping and disemboweling them by ripping off their mantle, then making them "dance" by pouring salty soy sauce directly into their brain and heart, then I would appreciate help spreading the word of this travesty against sealife.

Alright- But I think its a poor design choice to make a feature everyone uses worse to encourage a less used feature. I think locking the player in place is too much of penalty for an action players do all the time. There is opportunity to lessen that penalty by reducing their movement by 50 percent or something during that animation. It makes sense to not walk during mantling, you're moving up in the Z direction.

wow Refleks! Absolutely stunning street scene. Love the attention to detail too. I had to do a doubletake to make sure this was actually TDM, haha

To slightly expand on Springheel's (entirely correct) answers: We have ambient light in dark areas because the object of this game is to hide in shadows, which means it is not feasible for the player to have to rely on a light source like the D3 flashlight. Although the Dark Mod player does have a hooded lantern, if you take this out you become extremely visible to all AI, so you can only use it when you are alone. While there are games which avoid ambient light and make caves completely dark, these are not typically stealth games in which the player needs to avoid emitting any kind of light. If Dark Mod missions were completely dark, then you'd either be looking at a completely black monitor (as Springheel says), which would be pointless and entirely un-fun, or you'd have to carry around a light source and alert every enemy you see, which defeats the object of a stealth game and turns it into a (clunky and hopeless imbalanced) hack-and-slash adventure.

As promised, here is the Arx: End of Sun fish set up as a wandering 'ambient' AI in TDM. Download link Remember to credit the EoS team if you use it (their asset licence is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported). It should work as randomly moving scenery. Anything else might work - I hit one with the blackjack and it bit back - or might not. EoS stopped its fish flying out of water with some custom code to allow a maximum flying height. In the absence of that, if you want to put one in open water all I can suggest is seeing whether a monsterclip 'ceiling' works. The AAS and scriptobject are from the Elemental, but the dimensions are taken straight from EoS; you may find the swim animation occasionally clips into the floor (presumably preventable with monsterclip if it's not sand/mud/etc.). This is the first AF/ragdoll I've made. I think I generally got rid of the bad behaviour, but fish are slippery creatures. Textures are in TGA format straight from EoS; you may want to convert non-normals to DDS before FM release. (Normal maps are actually unused by default; see .mtr for details.)

This is one of the most bizarre requests I've read in a long time.

That stuff is sick enough to report it. But i lost my Youtube account to their phone number collection campaign (they call it two factor authentication) some months ago. I will not pay for the account by giving them my phone number...

Not sure if TDM supports all Opengl blending options but I don't see why not, here are some links: https://learnopengl.com/Advanced-OpenGL/Blending Search for "Stage Keywords" in the link below https://web.archive.org/web/20170610204134/https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/materials.php That is strange, using photoshop as a example, add (GL_ONE, GL_ONE) in that case, seems to be behaving like photoshop "subtract", not photoshop Linear Dodge(add) or screen, in idtech 4 blend add behavior is like so, any color minus black, is added into the main surface color, this is mostly used to make glowing effects on characters and surfaces, so white in that case should show totally white ingame, perhaps TDM team should investigate, could be a render bug. Also experiment removing the keywords, forceOpaque, solid and sort.

Silhouette mage: video

Maybe some moderator should move these posts about videoscreens into a separate discussion, as people might find the information useful in the future and will find it better this way.

As I recall, "A Noble Home" does not work in versions newer than 2.03 (broken intro sequence). Goldwell was not happy with the original design so he created the new redesigned version rather than repairing the mission.

You could try making a separate alpha mask for each frame and on the material use makeAlpha() like nbohr1more suggested here.

That is a nice trick to do ambient "AI" at the distance but needs to be used cleverly, because the illusion will break easy in anything that the player can get next to. Also using real world animals or even people will look way out of place, but is very nice to do for example shadowing figures moving in the shadows or behind windows plus like STRUNK demonstrated, special effects, I used it before to do water caustics.

THANKS so much !! It works perfectly Great way to spend confinement. Merci beaucoup !!!

You guys aren't really calling this torture on video for klicks & likes "cultural", are you..?

Thanks! My goal is to have every part of the map have a personal touch. I believe it will give a very organic feel to the environment. Cheers! Yes, I am using patches. Thanks for the links, I will look into it Thanks for that, I'll download his mission and see if I can learn some things! I'll post updated images once I get it tackled, blending the road is my priority right now considering I will be using the method well into the missions final area.

Check Amadeus' recently released mission "A good neighbor". It uses patches with the following material: textures/darkmod/nature/grass/grass_edge/path/dirt/dry_earth_muddy_path

Overall this is an exciting list of new features! I noticed something kind of weird about the new body picking up animation. It feels good to kind of kneel down and pick up a body, however locking the players feet in place during the animation feels rough to me. It sort of breaks the nice flow of knocking out an AI , grabbing their body, and quickly retreating. Bug log here: #5202

A Night to Remember is technically Fieldmedic’s second-to-last mission (said last mission being Not An Ordinary Guest). Technical issues meant that it was taken down, but after some fixes were implemented by Bikerdude it was put back up again, hence why I’m just now getting to it. The mission stars the same protagonist from the later Not an Ordinary Guest, Sir Henry Doyle. Doyle is a nice enough chap who’s drowning in gambling debts that have resulted in his de facto servanthood to a noblewoman who uses him to steal from other nobles. Doyle has attempted to flee to the home of one Cromwell, but is contacted by the noblewoman who wants him to steal the blueprints to the Gottfried II, Cromwell’s in-development airship. In theory, this should be a simple job: The guests are asleep, there are no guards on the estate, and the only hard part should be taking enough loot to make it look like a break-in. Needless to say, things go very wrong very fast. This was made as a Halloween mission, and serves its purpose well. The horror elements are well-done, and do a good job of throwing the player off. Almost every room has some minor haunting, and it does a good job of reminding you that you’re trapped in this manor with a bunch of very angry beings. Said beings patrol the halls, damaging you if you get too close and sometimes ambushing you by walking through the walls. That being said, they’re easy to evade once you know where they are, but a new player can easily find themselves stuck waiting for the entities to move on. The manor itself is well-made, with some models that I haven’t seen in other missions. It feels like a mansion, and isn’t too confusing or difficult to navigate. The mission is thankfully free of the jank that you find in some of Fieldmedic’s other missions, with the only issue I noticed popping up very early in the mission; when chasing someone, you can take your time to explore the servant’s wing, even though the mission is supposed to fail you if you go too far off the person’s trail. Difficulty-wise, I found it fair, barring one secret location which you need to access on the highest difficulty (and possibly the next lowest, but I don’t think so). You can find out that it exists and where it is, but I thought that it was very easy to miss how to access it, since the two places aren’t connected (but are close). But on the whole, I enjoyed this mission. There are some minor problems, but it can still provide some good moments of haunted house horror and is one of the more unique missions in The Dark Mod. Recommended.

Were signals of no use? That looks to be how you're 'expected' to find out whether a mover has arrived or been blocked.

I can confirm that a monsterclip ceiling is required above open water to keep the fish from flying around in the air above.

I think idsoftware also made pitch black shadows for performance reasons and not only to force people to use the flashlight but I agree, ambient light should always be present, pitch black scenes IMO artistically just look bad and like you said they just strain the eyes more, imagine traveling on a all pitch black level, where the only thing you saw was within the radius of your flashlight cone, in real life light bounces around, so a single flashlight or candle can light a entire room, but in games especially those using real time per-pixel lighting like idtech 4, you will just see a circle of light surrounded by pitch black.

I originally threw that idea out of the window, but now that you/sotha show me this. I mean if that is ok? Lets see what the others say

@Sotha has a very nice solution to this, I think; he binds a light he calls "nightvision" to the player here, so it will only light up a bit the direct area:

Thank you! I agree, I believe a hybrid between the original and Thief 4 might be more fitting? I'm more or less trying to mimic the atmosphere to be more like Thief 4.

beta208-03 has been released. The list of changes is provided in its usual place. Remember that you must download tdm_mirrors.txt again from the link in the original post before running tdm_update. Otherwise you will not get the new beta release and will stay on beta208-02 instead.

Just played this mission for the second time for testing purposes and I noticed a couple issues. I'm playing 2.08 beta, not sure if that can affect any of these things. The first is that on the first playthrough the mission did not end. All the objectives except do not harm/do not kill type were checked, but nothing happened when I climbed into the sewers. The fence was standing on the street outside the sewer entrance. On the second playthrough everything worked as it should. The other issues were consistent for both playthroughs: There's also one spot in the garden, shown on the screenshot, where it's quite easy to get stuck, forcing the player to reload. Being unable to finish the mission during the first playthrough kinda soured the experience, but other than that this was super well-done, surely one of the best missions I've played so far, especially the graphical fidelity and attention to detail.

I have no interest in uploading outdated versions of my missions anywhere.

Hang on, are you saying that the CC-SA license used to distribute TDM assets is not in fact the regular Creative Commons license, but a sort of hybrid "Creative Commons + additional restrictions imposed by third party texture libraries"? That is certainly news to me. My understanding is that the "sharealike" terms in a CC license are a simple copyleft-style provision that ensure that recipients cannot integrate the content into a closed-source product. If you receive assets under a CC-SA license, you must allow the content to be redistributable under the same CC license. The "SA" section is not simply a placeholder for a list of other restrictions that are not mentioned by, or compatible with, the actual Creative Commons terms.

I don't know whether this will help with the loading times, but I recently found I had image_useCompression and image_useNormalCompression set to the default 1 (I was wondering why the colour banding on my TGAs was so bad in the game). According to https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/ these cause TGAs to get compressed at load time. Since TDM (currently) doesn't use pre-compressed normal maps, that might be one cause of loading delay, though I can't say I've noticed a big speed-up (and presumably setting 0 will use more RAM). The question of nominating recommended 'showcase' FMs comes up occasionally, but besides the point stgatilov makes, it raises other questions: what if A is a stunning, impressive mission but utterly brutal to inexperienced players? What if B is third in a series where the first two no longer impress so much? What if C is great fun but long since ceased to be a visual showcase for TDM? (I was going to suggest that instead of trying to list 'best' missions it might be nice to have an occasional spotlight on missions that made a splash in their day - n year anniversaries for former competition winners, perhaps, since they were already entered into a public ranking - but that idea naturally biases things towards the sometimes less pretty past.)