OrbWeaver

Seeing as I was poking around in the Difficulty editor anyway, I went ahead and implemented editing of difficulty names, which is apparently supported by the mod but hadn't yet made it into the DR interface. The layout is slightly changed to use a dropdown instead of tabs, which makes it possible to add a custom edit button: Clicking on the edit button shows a simple dialog in which you can edit the current name: The changes are then reflected in the dialog and saved into the current map: I haven't tested it in game but I assume it should work because I'm writing the changes to the spawnargs specified by the wiki (and already used by DR to display the difficulty names, even if you couldn't edit them).

My understanding (and I might well be out of date on this) is that image_useNormalCompression should default to 0, because we do not supply precompressed normal maps and compression of normal maps tends to look bad, but image_useCompression should be left on (1), because compression of regular images is normal practice and these are supplied as pre-compressed DXT files anyway (in fact they may ONLY be supplied as precompressed DXT files, which means that some combinations of disabling image compression will result in all-black environments since the non-compressed original images cannot be found).

Many people would say the same thing about beef or pork. I've often heard it said that if the average person saw what happened in a slaughterhouse, they would give up eating meat in a heartbeat. Animals are reported to scream in terror and pain as they are half-stunned, beaten to death or even skinned alive by overworked, emotionally numbed operatives who have long lost any capacity to care about the humane treatment of the animals they are paid to slaughter by the truckload. But imagine the chaos that would ensue if every ethical vegan made a thread on the forum asking us to mass-report a YouTuber who posted a video about cooking steak.

Dark Mod forums are not your personal army.

This actually solved the slow loading problem for me, so thanks for the suggestion. I guess that raises the question of why image_useNormalCompression is defaulting to 1 in the first place, given the problems it causes. Perhaps it is intended as a "safe" default for people with low-memory GPUs.

I do remember having at least one discussion about this kind of issue, and I was concerned about it back then. I think somebody wanted to use a library of royalty-free sounds which could be used provided you "integrated" them into some larger production (i.e. by mixing them into a song or a movie soundtrack), but specifically prohibited distributing the sounds by themselves. But we are distributing assets by themselves, because we literally have a subversion repository from which people can download individual assets and use them however they like. And even if we only distributed assets as part of a complete level, it is trivial for people to extract individual assets from the mission archive, and the CC-BY-SA license explicitly allows them to do so provided they maintain the same CC-BY-SA terms when redistributing.

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.

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.

I wonder if some of the slow loading comes from the fragmented nature of the resource storage. A map contains references to various other assets which then have to be looked up and loaded from various other PK4 files: textures from here, models from over here. I don't know exactly how it's implemented at the PK4-loading level, but perhaps the need to seek and extract each of these individual assets from different files results in an inefficient, non-pipelined load process. Perhaps it could be accelerated by writing out a "map package" which includes all of the assets for a particular map (not just custom ones added by the mapper), and then pre-emptively pushing every asset from this package into memory at the start of the load process, rather than waiting for the map to request particular assets individually which then have to be extracted from the PK4 virtual file system.

Agreed. The need to restart the game is a legacy issue from when the mod was based on closed source Doom 3, but now everything is open source there is really no need for this weird behaviour other than of course the (presumably considerable) amount of developer time needed to get rid of it. Agreed. I haven't complained about it much because I assume it is heavily system dependent, but I can actually load and start playing entire other games in the same time it takes just to load a single mission. Agreed. I have no idea why the design decision for frobbing was to have a highlight that was just about visible in complete darkness and almost completely invisible in well-lit scenes, particularly when some of the most important frobbables are light sources like candles. I suppose it was a reaction to Thief 3's garish blue frob highlight, but even in Thief 1 and 2 the frob highlight was easily visible.

The statistics from Germany are very interesting. They currently have over 27000 cases, almost as many as Spain (33000), but only a small fraction of the deaths (115 versus over 2000). This is potentially very good news. Germany is apparently testing a lot more people than other countries, which means they are probably finding a lot more people with mild symptoms, resulting in a very high number of cases even though relatively few people have died. Other countries (including the UK) are mainly testing people who are in hospital, resulting in a much higher case fatality rate because the mild cases are never seen. If the German statistics continue to hold, this suggests that the disease has an actual mortality rate closer to 0.5%, rather than the 5 - 10% case fatality rate we are seeing base on extrapolating statistics from other countries.

I went shopping on Sunday morning and was pleased that I was able to get almost everything I wanted. They were overflowing with fresh fruit and vegetables (which I guess can't really be stockpiled because they would go off). There was almost a whole aisle full of toilet paper, but it was only one type: 9-packs of basic white, not super-soft quilted Andrex or whatever. However there was absolutely no pasta, noodles or tinned vegetables. I wonder if some of these things are shipped from Italy or Asia and the lack of supply means they cannot be restocked even after the supermarkets have introduced per-customer rationing.

"Plague Contest" sounds like a good name to me, because it fits the quasi-historical period. "Corona" is a Latin word meaning "crown", but would not have been associated with disease in medieval times since viruses had yet to be discovered or named by the scientific community.

I don't need no educayshun. Jebus will cure the Corona virus, hallelujah! But remember to buy lots of mah leather-bound bibles and colloidal silver.

But there is no way to solve the learning curve and time investment problem. Creating stuff is difficult and time-consuming, and software that helps you create stuff is necessarily complex because creativity is such a vast field of endeavour. It would be exactly the same if you wanted to learn to paint in PhotoShop, or make 3D models in Blender/Maya/Max/Lightwave, or compose music in Cubase/Sonar/Pro Tools/Reason/REAPER/Renoise/whatever. Some of these programs have better interfaces than others, of course, but all of them are going to be overwhelming for a new user that hasn't followed any tutorials. Even if it were somehow possible to make an incredibly dumbed-down version of DarkRadiant, what you'd end up with is the Microsoft WordArt of level design, which might allow absolute beginners to churn out almost identical maps which they thought looked awesome but everybody else had seen hundreds of times already. It would hardly be worth the effort to create such a tool given the low quality of work it would produce. Admittedly I've never used UnrealEd, and maybe it is absolutely awesome and intuitive, but I find it difficult to believe that you could spend years and years creating content for Unreal but find DarkRadiant to be beyond your reach. If you can drag the mouse pointer, you can create wall and floor brushes; if you can right click and navigate a menu, you can insert other entities. Creating more complex setups like patrol routes and frobable switches is of course going to be more complex but that will be true no matter what editor you are using.