OrbWeaver

Coincidentally I came across this "vault loop" myself only today. I liked it, but felt it was perhaps a little too heavy on the bass (which is very, very easy to do). It might benefit from either taking the bass track down a little (e.g. -3dB) or just rolling off the very low frequencies with a bit of EQ to make it fit more comfortably with the other sounds.

You could also use some of the functional textures like caulk if you only want placeholders that show in DR, however these will not show up in the game itself.

Oh, you mean you loaded each Ogg, edited it then saved it out directly as another Ogg? In that case it would not be reasonable to expect you to recreate each edit manually and save it out as a WAV, so Oggs will have to do. And yes, quality level 10 is perceptually lossless so it's probably OK in practice (I think the originals might have used this quality setting as well).

I doubt there are many (if any) such textures in the main mod distribution because they would be useless for released maps and therefore considered a waste of space. But introducing custom textures is very easy and you could probably whip up the placeholder textures you need in an image editor (or download them from elsewhere) without much difficulty.

I haven't yet checked out the sounds themselves, but it's always good to see people making these kinds of improvements. Polished sounds are one of the things which can really affect the perceived quality of the game. If these were to be added to the base mod (which is a decision for the team as a whole), it would be important to commit the original uncompressed versions (WAV, FLAC etc) as well, not just compressed .ogg files. It might become necessary at some point to make further edits (e.g. for consistency with newly-added sounds), or create new variant sounds using these as a base, but doing this with compressed .ogg files introduces additional compression artifacts and generation loss with each edit.

FlatPak or AppImage seem to be the leading options these days. I'll probably get rid of the vestigial Snap scripts; from what I've read Snap is Ubuntu's "me too" offering which is largely ignored by other distros, and was never really designed for desktop apps anyway. I did experiment with AppImage but ran into some problems with its expectations of what should go in the build directory. Its documentation is very limited and consists largely of long example shell scripts which you are expected to read and reverse engineer for your project. The FlatPak documentation looks much better and seems to include a proper tutorial on how to make a simple package.

It wasn't really the off-topic and political opinions that got him banned (plenty of people have posted those without receiving anything other than some pointed disagreement in return). It was the fact that he was personally insulting other contributors (calling them all manner of names like "incompetent", "fascist", "drunk", "insane" etc), and spamming the forum with so much low-quality garbage that 50% of the main page seemed to consist of his avatar image. There is no rule against suggesting improvements, criticising the mod, or explaining why you didn't enjoy a particular FM. Nor is there any rule preventing people from discussing their (possibly unpopular) political opinions in the Off Topic forum. But somebody who stomps around mapping advice threads, telling everybody else that they're idiots and fascists, should expect to be shown the door.

There's never any need to feel guilty about laughing at people who choose to make themselves look ridiculous.

I can almost imagine the briefing: Then it turns out the artisans are all fire-throwing mages, the Floating Point gem is actually 8 feet in size and cannot be moved anywhere, and the "client" is an escapee from the local asylum and wouldn't have the money to pay you even if you succeeded.

That's fine, and sensible. But that doesn't require physically-correct blackjack tracking, just sizing the "target cone" appropriately so that the guard's head is within the appropriate range and angle. That's dumb, and easily solved by ensuring that the head is within the target cone, not any other part of the body. No. Nor do I want the ridiculous Thief 4 blackjack animation where you kick the guard in the balls then run out of the shadow to take them down (alerting any nearby enemy in the process). Just the T1/T2 behaviour with an additional "head-only" check would be fine for me, and I would guess 99% of players. Good to know it's still on the radar. I'd even offer to look at it myself but I'm not really a maths guy and would probably break more than I fixed if I tried to dive into core game mechanics like this.

There seem to be two major causes behind the difficulty of blackjacking: The implementation is based on physics (tracking the exact motion of the blackjack model and calculating what point on the victim's head it lands), which adds absolutely no gameplay value but results in numerous failure conditions which are completely opaque to newcomers and seasoned players alike. The idea of being "too close to blackjack" is abject nonsense — if anyone has a gameplay explanation for why such a mechanic would be fun, I'm dying to hear it. Any suggestions to improve the mechanic or make it more forgiving are largely shot down by the "muh realism!" crowd. But...but...but... we need all these silly secret rules and failure conditions! Players should do 8 hours of blackjack training before playing this game! More difficulty means more fun, always and forever! Git gud, scrub! The end result of this is: players endlessly complain about blackjack difficulty, and have to work around the issue by quicksaving before every blackjack attempt because it might as well be a coin flip whether it works or not. To which the response is... let's restrict saving so you can't do this! Moooooooooar difficulty! Moooooooar fun!!!

It's all those damn Social Clubbers ruining everything... I remember finding the memorial in The Warrens. I figured Sir Taffsalot was some kind of musician based on the banjo, but never worked out if the glowing egg was significant or just a decoration.

I heard that the devs actually admitted that was a bug. It did make the game ridiculously easy. The idea of flashbombs is that they are tool for escaping in an emergency, not a method for knocking out dozens of guards in one go.

If someone can get a FlatPak of DarkRadiant working, we'll gladly add the build scripts to the repo. I tried creating a Snap once, but ran into numerous difficulties and eventually gave up. It took ages to startup, the OpenGL functionality was non-operative, and the application could not access the desktop GTK theme (because the entire GTK stack is packaged into the Snap itself) which meant it would only display with the hideous default Windows 95 theme. Applications I've used from Snaps or FlatPaks either draw their own theme (e.g. Blender) or include GTK themes and a theme switcher into the application itself (e.g. Inkscape). Presumably such internal theming would need to be integrated into DR unless the latest versions of Snap/FlatPak have managed to solve the theme problem some other way.

I don't understand any of this. It's all so self-contradictory and inconsistent. The player is employing the "best strategy" and "exploiting the mechanic", but he ends up getting killed. There's "no risk" (he dies) and "no chance of failure" (he wastes numerous arrows then dies) but at the same time it's "constant trial and error"? So this strategy which is supposed to be too easy but at the same time gets this player killed, is going to be made more fun and satisfying by imposing randomness and arbitrary restrictions to make it more difficult and unpredictable? Is there some evidence for this beyond the ideologically-driven belief that making a game more difficult automatically makes it more fun? Sorry, I'm just not getting it. Most missions have some combination of helmeted guards and/or no-kill objectives which would make a Sniper Elite headshot-based strategy impossible, even if it were as easy as you claim (and the video disproves).

While good publicity is always a good thing, that does not appear to be an account officially associated with id in any way. It's just a fan account run by an individual.

Definitely a graphics driver issue, but (1) we shouldn't crash or lock up no matter what, and (2) I wonder if we really need GLSL version 1.40 for a ZFill alpha shader (it can't be that complicated, surely). Can you run the actual game on this same machine? Because if the game itself can render correctly with these drivers, perhaps our own version checks are too aggressive.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Brexit. Internet censorship in the UK was increasing long before Brexit, and it is widespread in mainland Europe as well. There's the infamous NetzDG law in Germany (against "hate speech"); France has a law restricting criticism of abortion ("protecting women's mental health"); numerous people in Sweden have been fined for publicly opposing immigration policy ("hate speech" again); in Finland a serving politician was prosecuted for quoting a Bible passage ("homophobia"); in Switzerland a man was even prosecuted for blaspheming against Islam (you guessed it — "hate speech"). Brexit did not cause this problem, neither did it prevent it. Governments on both sides of the English channel are in total agreement that a censored internet is necessary. The irony is that the very concept of "hate speech" originated in the Soviet Union some time in the fifties, and was at that time opposed by the West who rightly saw it as an excuse for open-ended and arbitrary government censorship. Now, Western governments are frantically trying to leapfrog one another by passing the most restrictive hate speech laws without even trying to conceal the fact that the aim is blatant ideological censorship.

I already knew that the Online Safety Bill was probably the worst technology bill ever envisioned outside North Korea or China, but I hadn't heard about this particular pile of horseshit. If what that site is saying is true, the bill is actually so idiotic that I almost want it to pass just to see how hard it fails. "Extra-territorial jurisdiction" (doesn't exist), "forcing" open-source browsers to implement certain features (not going to happen)... what other abject stupidity can Nadine Dorries and friends come up with? I'm guessing "magic encryption that only law enforcement can unlock" will be in there somewhere too. It's actually embarrassing that even in 2022 politicians still don't understand that they can't control the worldwide internet.

Thanks, that will probably reduce some user confusion. For some reason I can't get the native Debian package to show up in my Ubuntu package managers (which it definitely used to), but I don't know if that's something I'm doing wrong or if Ubuntu have decided not to include it for some reason.

We've never released Linux packages on the main DR website, but you can download the latest version for Ubuntu from my PPA. https://launchpad.net/~orbweaver/+archive/ubuntu/darkradiant For other Linux distros or incompatible versions of Ubuntu you will either need to compile from source or wait for your distro's respective packaging team to release it (if they are prepared to do so).

The problem is you're defining better in a very narrow way — "more efficient at compressing data" — while ignoring other aspects which to most people are equally (if not more) important. Application support is one of those aspects. As your own experience with Windows 10 and WEBP shows, a "better" format is useless if nothing else supports it. Similarly, Opus might be better at compressing audio than Ogg Vorbis and MP3, but if you can't play it on your device of choice, it is no better at all. For most uses, wide application and device support is a far more important concern than squeezing a bit more quality out of a slightly smaller file. Especially given that storage and network costs are decreasing and the size difference between a 96 kbps and a 160 kbps file is practically irrelevant.

I can't imagine that making open chests unfrobbable would go down well with the ghosters. I believe some people take particular pride in making it look like they were never there after stealing everything, which would become impossible if there was no way to close opened chests.

I'd be happy with the T1/T2 mechanic whereby you automatically loot the contents of a chest when you open it. I have no idea why this was changed in TDM. It seems like another "let's make things physically realistic for literally no gameplay reason" mechanic.