chumbucket91

Completed in 1hr7min with about 2100 loot on the Normal difficulty. This mission was pretty fun! I liked the overall level layout and the little side areas and stories in all the readables. The museum itself was a nice challenge to get through, and felt like it worked well with TDM's mechanics and engine - I distinctly recall hiding in dynamic shadows behind the bar counter in the cafe area, behind open doors, on top of display cases, and lots of other locations because of all the torch bearers. Good stuff! The map did a great job building tension in the plague district section, which I quite liked. The first path through the district felt quite creepy even though it turned out to be a relatively empty section of the map. The return trip after the museum sort of suffered for that same emptiness, though - the tension is gone after you've gone through it once. Maybe there ought to have been a shortcut back to the starting area after you get the statue, or some surprises spawn in the plague district after you get the objective? I did find the sort of half-shortcut, and used it, but I feel like that section of gameplay could have used something more. There were polish issues with the geometry that took me out of the experience a bit - I saw some light leaks (things that ought to be solid and in the dark, but were very brightly lit) and z fighting in the rafters of the museum and at the bottom of the maintenance shaft in the sewer section. The front of the church and the back hallway down to its tomb were conspicuously flat and boxy, the rafters in the museum didn't really look like they were held up by anything, and I think the columns at the front of the museum could have used bases and crowns. This is like a 7-7.5/10 for me. Good stuff! Excited to see more in the series.

In lieu of finding a middle ground for a max audible distance, I wonder if volume falloff calculation should be more than a function of distance for these sounds? Like maybe Z distance should matter more than XY distance, or maybe there should be a ray cast between the player and the source of a footstep for solids and that should change the volume if it intersects. Those are dumb spitball-y ideas, and I'm sure theres probably some prior art here from either the TDM team or Thief/other video games that I am unaware of.

So I decided to give this mod some testing because I agree overall with the idea behind the mod and that the problems its trying to address are indeed problems worth solving. To test it, I installed each of the .pk4 files separately into my TDM install and ran through 15-20 minutes of "Full Moon Fever" on its easy difficulty. I did not test any of the changes in the .cfg files, just the new sounds and sound shader definitions. I liked the gameplay improvements of the sound shaders - it was much easier for me to creep up on AIs when I needed to and I felt generally like I had a much more intuitive feeling of how loud I was being when running around. Getting caught felt much more fair on average, and I actually debated turning the AI's hearing capabilities up to "challenging" a couple times (which I would never do in vanilla TDM). As far as the new sounds themselves go, I think my favorite pack overall is the volta pack? But I wasn't completely happy with any of the three options. I think I'd probably pick and choose between them to arrive at a set that I thought sounded uniformly good. I liked the new weapon impact sounds that I heard, although I wasn't paying as much attention to those as the footsteps. I think this mod is overcorrecting on the volume of AI footsteps, though. At points in the interior of the mansion, it sounded like AIs were patrolling right next to me when they were in fact on a completely separate floor of the building. With two+ AIs patrolling in different relative locations away from me, the game turned into an overwhelming cacophany of footstep noises pretty quickly and I lost the ability to keep track of where AIs were just by listening for them. This was a cool mod and an improvement overall, and I'd support something like it being integrated into core TDM. But I don't feel like this exact setup is quite ready as-is.

Well Met! Unintentional comedy of the test videos aside, I support this idea in general - I think it does accomplish its stated goal of making the characters look a little less stiff. I think I prefer the earlier videos that apply the rotation at the spine? Applying the rotation at the origin seems a little bit off if you focus on their feet while they turn+move. Hard to articulate what I'm seeing, but it seems less natural or floatier somehow (to my admittedly untrained eye). Also, I think keeping the effect subtle is important here - having exxagerated movements fits better on cartoon-ier characters, whereas TDM's general house style leans more towards gritty realism.

Hey @stgatilov, Just downloaded 2.14 stable and installed my autosave mod again. So far I'm able to load the saves it makes after closing and reopening the application in Iris and Seeking Lady Leicster. The saves even have screenshots now! I saw the flurry of bug tracker activity in the issue you posted, and I would say at this point that your efforts have paid off. Thanks for looking into this for me! Autosaving adds a huge QOL improvement to TDM for me personally over TG/T2, so I'm glad it seems to not be occasionally hanging anymore.

"Hang" definitely describes my issue - and since I'm in a loading screen, I really can't send the game engine any input to make it crash, which would be the second part of that bug description. It seems likely that there is some kind of bug with my script that only happens on loading a save. Its a map-start autoload that spins off a thread so I can only imagine what that bug might be, and the console isn't giving me any info.

NOT SO FAST MR CHUMBUCKET how dare you think your own code is fool proof! Ok, so slight story time: I wiped my install of TDM and then reinstalled the latest beta and a fresh copy of High Expectations. Then, I redownloaded my save file from google drive and put it in the FM's save folder - and was able to load the save file! After that, I redownloaded all of the other FMs I had and re-installed my WIP FM into my folder, and I could still load my save. Then I changed all of my config settings back to the way I had them before, and could still load my save. Then I redownloaded my autosave.pk4 mod - and my save loading freezing problem returned as described in my OP. We have a culprit! I have a new question for this thread, then, because I would very much like my autosave mod to function and not cause save-loading to hang for no discernable reason. This "mod" is a single .script file located in the \script\ folder. Its entire content is the following: #ifndef __TDM_AUTOSAVE__ #define __TDM_AUTOSAVE__ /* --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * * This file is added to The Dark Mod's Script Inclusion chain in tdm_main.script * * This is intended for players who wish to install addons with custom scripts that should be available * in all missions. Mission authors must use tdm_custom_scripts instead. * * --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ #define MAX_AUTOSAVES 5 #define AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL_SECONDS 300 void autosave() { float save_count = 1; do { sys.wait(AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL_SECONDS); string fname = "__autosave_" + save_count; $player1.saveGame(fname); sys.println("Autosaving '" + fname + "'"); save_count += 1; if (save_count > MAX_AUTOSAVES) { save_count = 1; } } while (1); } void user_addon_init_autosave() //If any of your addon scripts need to be initialised at map start, add their init function here. See the line that has been commented out with // for an example. { thread autosave(); sys.waitFrame(); // contingency in case no addons are specified } #endif what have I done wrong with this script?

This mod is actually one that I made, and it calls `saveGame` every five-10 minutes with an auto generated name. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22647-quick-and-dirty-autosave-mod/#comment-499784 The save file I uploaded that we are looking at is not an autosave, and that mod has been compatible and functioning correctly for several versions now. It is, indeed, a tiny script-only mod. The checksum changed because I made the adjustment to the loading screen gui recommended in frost salamander's post earlier in this topic ( https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23119-loading-saves-just-hangs-after-closereopen-the-game/#findComment-506750 ). This mission is, flare box warning notwithstanding, bitwise identical to the latest version in the repo available to the mission downloader. Also, this issue was present before I followed that advice from frost salamander. I suppose I can go undo that change/redownload the .pk4 since it didn't fix the issue anyways. I will revert to a clean install of both the latest TDM beta and this particular mission, just to clear some red herrings out of our debugging work. Interesting! I'll go test this.

Ah, ok - that makes more sense. Here's the result of `condump console.log`, which includes lots more detail. console.log

You got it! My current TDM version is 2.14 #11195 according to the main menu, which I believe corresponds to beta 5 or 6. This is not the first time this has happened to me, though - this also happened in 2.13 stable, and earlier 2.14 betas. This is currently happening in Lieutenant 2: High Expectations . I set `logfile 1` by hand in the main menu, and then attempted to load the save, and then had to alt+F4 to escape the application. I've attached the resulting log file to this post. There's... not much to it. My Darkmod.cfg file contains a line that reads seta logFile "1" but I can't find a corresponding qconsole.log anywhere in my install directory or appdata for that? Does that log file have more info or a different name? Or does that line not write a log file for some reason? I've uploaded the content of my save folder, which includes only the one save that's causing the issue, to google drive here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXRkV563gnigTzNAVnIzYU7bHcKYXORv/view?usp=sharing Let me know if this link doesn't work for whatever reason. qconsole.log

Save version compatibility isn't the cause of this - this currently broken save was made in the same beta branch that I'm using to try to load it. I have noticed the error message they added while upgrading between 2.14's beta branches though, and I just wipe all my saves and start from scratch when it happens.

Gah, it was a red herring. I altered fsx.gui to no longer have the entire windowDef Action section and, while the warnings are gone, the save still gets stuck while loading. Thanks for the assist, at any rate

Hey, that's worth a shot! So, when the load gets stuck and I have access to a console, I attempted to loadGame "sav" and the load restarted, but got stuck at the exact same place. HOWEVER, there was some interesting warning text in the console when this happened! WARNING:unknown destination `FlareBox::rect` of set command at \fms\highex\highex.pk4/guis/map/fsx.gui:<line number changes> I've attached a screenshot - you can see me running the command at the very top of the console history, and then warning text. @Frost_Salamander since you're the FM author - do you happen to recognize that particular gui script? I'm sure its not necessarily fresh in your memory but maybe you could shed some light on whatever that flareBox rect thing is, which might help me get to the bottom of my hang issue?

Yes, generally the keybind is ctrl+alt+` (key next to number 1 for non-QWERTY/non-US keyboards), and I can open it in the main menu and ingame reliably. I have to use it to dmap the FM that I've been working on for awhile now, and I also use it to noclip around other people's FMs when I want to see "behind the curtains", so to speak. I was able to take that screenshot with it opened, which I hope is proof that I can use it haha. Its only when a save is loading, and loading correctly, that the keybind is unresponsive. Is there another way to interrupt the game during load that can open the console, that I am unaware of?

This has been a recurring issue for me over the past year or so and I'm finally fed up enough with it to make a forum post about it. I've not been able to find anything else with either a forum or discord search, so I'm hoping I can get some troubleshooting assistance here. Sometimes, on larger maps with lots of custom assets and/or scripting, when I'm attempting to load a save file the game just... hangs. At like 1% loaded, in the loading screen. This happens to me a lot with Seeking Lady Leicester, but also has started happening to my most recent playthrough of The Lieutenant 2. Some relevant notes: - I am on the latest beta branch, but this has been happening to me since at least 2.13, so I don't think its a beta-specific bug. - I'm on Windows 10. - Starting a fresh run of the map does not ever reproduce this problem (I can reliably fresh-load a map even when I can't save-load it), and it doesn't happen until I close the game and reopen it (so, if I start a new mission and play a bit, I can reliably load save files if I get caught or whatever. Its not until I save after a long gaming session and try to pick up where I left off later that I occasionally hit this bug). - Usually I get around this issue with a complete reinstall of TDM? But my most recent reinstall didn't do it for my playthrough of Lieutenant 2. - Once this happens to me, there's no way for me to close the game or go back to the main menu. I have to alt+F4 or Task Manager kill TDM. - When I'm loading a save or a new map and things are working correctly, I am unable to open the dev console during the load. However, when I get stuck in this bad state, the dev console is openable. I've attached a screenshot of the contents of the dev console just in case its illuminating, although there are no scary looking errors or warning text that I can see. If we want me to try any commands when I get into this state I'd be happy to poke around. Let me know if this explanation makes sense, or if there's anything I should try or any debug info I should poke around the game's folder for.