Dragofer

Fantastic, this blew up my expectations of how well done the effect would look. I've been watching a patch wink in and out of existence, after making a reverse variant of that script. The only downsides are, for one, that it needs specially prepared textures - so there'd still be some convenience in having a func_fadeEntity. For the other, that the glowing patch needs to be slightly behind the ordinary-looking patch, so at the moment you can't really have the glow effect on models. Would there be a way to make the ordinary texture override the glow texture so they can be in the same space? Would this .def simply be a func_fadeEntity - so, a coloured box with a line referring the fadeEntity function? I've looked to see how idTarget_remove is implemented and that seems to be how it's done. (I ran out of time for now to find this out). On a sidenote, some more for the record: crossFadeEnt($entity, '1 0 0', '0 1 0', 2); - gradually changes the _color of a colorme textured object or a light from red to green within 2 seconds.

For the record:$light.fadeToLight('1 0 0', 4); - changes the colour of a light to 1,0,0 within 4 seconds. It looks awesome when the whole room gradually turns red. $speaker.fadeSound(SND_CHANNEL_ANY, -30, 1) - changes the s_volume spawnarg of an active speaker to become -30 within 1 second What I wasn't able to figure out was how to gradually vanish, or materialise, an object (I sound like a magician). I've gone by Wiki - Script Reference and the closest thing I found was FadeEntity, but TDM refuses to load the map because that command is unknown, no matter what combination of upper/lower case I use. Any ideas please for how this last effect can be done in TDM?

Edit: partially solved

There's a mention on the Wiki - Sitting Behaviour for AI of this:

Here's a big lamp package containing lots of new models and all those I had already made, now systematically organised - this replaces anything else I've released that had to do with lamps. Screenshots of some of the new lamps: Album Lamp list Specs - All lamps except the hanging lanterns can be toggled by frobbing. - Most are up to around 1k tris, the more complex ones have shadowmeshes. - Covered lamps can only be extinguished by frobbing or gas. - Bullseye lantern is a moveable. - Gold lamps also have silver and brass skins. - Modified particles, light entities etc. I've also replaced lamp_glass_unlit_opaque_shadowcasting with a version which doesn't glow in the dark. - All non-oil lamps use colorme so that the glass has the same colour as the light. - All are .lwo's, including the older ones, which saves drawcalls in multi-material models. - Compressed package size 507kb. Known issues - Lamps using gaslightglass textures show up strangely in DarkRadiant because it tries to do translucency effects, but they look normal in DarkMod. - The bullseye lantern has resisted my attempts to make better light falloff images, so it's using stock light textures at the moment. Download In the first post of this thread I also made the models for these, but will need a bit of a break after digging around for this long in tdm's entity definition/material/skin/particle/lights files.

That is, indeed, a carpet. When I made the altar I looked through existing textures and saw that there was already a large selection of suitable ornate and plain fabric textures together with skins in stock, including the one you see on the altar which personally I thought was fitting, so I took those. As implied there are also non-carpet skins, but I think what you're looking for is something with Builder-themed decorations?

Thanks, with a little bit of extra work it's now looking realistic when it moves towards and away from walls and corners, except for a graphical glitch - the lamp now shines in both directions. Here were my steps: - textures/lights/xfalloff needs to be just lights/xfalloff - The falloff image wasn't quite right because it's bright only in the middle, so the lamp became very weak when it came close to surfaces. - So I duplicated the file and cropped off one half in Gimp so that it's bright on one end and becomes dark on the other end. The lamp intensity now changes realistically, but there's that glitchy backward ray now. - This was exported as .tga without RLE compression, origin at the bottom left. Also tried with RLE compression and/or origin at top left, same outcome. Some troubleshooting I made: - I've tried to exclude the possibility of a technical error by re-exporting the original. Another thing I did was to duplicate the original and inside of that file recreate the original bidirectional gradient. Both worked normally. - The cropped version was only half as long as the original, so I made a new version: I duplicated the original, deleted everything and filled in a new gradient. That didn't change anything - the backward ray was still there.

This is a stock light texture which uses brightround, like many others, as its falloffimage: lights/tdm_lanternlight I've literally been through all suitable stock light textures and they all cut off to black like this when they're set to project, it's strange.

This complements Terragen nicely - Space Scape for the sky, Terragen for the surrounding landscape: [Free version, Terragen 3]

Great, I'm glad you value these.

A handful models which I recently finished up for purposes of my mapping: Coffin A prop that will be needed in my story. Part of the testing procedure was checking to see whether a skeleton could be lifted into it and whether the lid would still close (not a spoiler btw). Fireplace This is precisely the kind of fireplace I'm after for my settings - this one was made in DarkRadiant. Builder Altar For a long time this model had strange black smudges all over it ingame - until Blender converted it into .lwo. That handily solved everything. Barouche Now, even with newly improved seating derived from Epifire's armchair, this one's ready for action. Download In the first post of this thread

I've been processing quite a batch of lamps but this one is giving me headaches. Can projected lights gradually weaken the further they shine, instead of abruptly cutting off to pitch black? -I've looked more closely at the lanternbot's lantern and it turns out to have the same issue. -The existing lanterns don't have this problem, but that's most likely because they're using omni lights.

When looking at historic ships' manifests (lists of passengers, cargo and so on) I saw that ships would bring one or two 'caulkers' with them as part of the crew. That made me curious about what's actually meant with 'caulk', the pink substance we know from DarkRadiant. As per dictionary.com: So you'd hope the ship caulkers would properly caulk the entire ship as otherwise they'd get leaks and the... performance would sink. That's a way to think about the purpose of the caulk material.

Nice one, this is a great idea for an app. I've found the dark forest generators especially useful for zoning into the kinds of sounds you come across there. In fact, it goes so far as to let you isolate the individual sounds with sliders.

Thanks a lot, I'm glad you appreciate it as both in Blender and in DR it's intensive work to make a ship. Regarding physics simulation, I do agree that Blender has fun gadgets. It turned a flat plane into a 720,000 tris ocean with sliders for wind speed, wave choppiness, foam etc. with a single modifier. But then mixing together a graphical shader for the surface amounts to arcane magic. I very much look forward to meeting this nobleman you know.

One way is to put a dark foglight into the water. Although there might be other ways?

@demagogue, thanks I've added him to the list. In the latest news, I've started making ambients as well (soundcloud)(edit: new tracks Tower, Threat and Wilderness) Distant Intent Tower Wilderness Threat Dropbox

Here's a caravel made in Blender, ready for download: And the sea is even animated (in Blender only... for now?) This is what it'd look like in DarkRadiant: Description: - A caravel is a 15th century merchant's ship of modest size, a common sight in canals and smaller harbours but also capable of making long ocean voyages. Specs: - Medium and dark skins - Open and closed versions handled via skins - Enough blackjack-safe height for 2 interior decks at the stern, elsewhere 1 interior deck (112 units) - 2 things I've taken care to do were to avoid long thin triangles, so the ropes and masts have extra subdivisons. The other was to use textures economically. Models: - caravel.lwo, 7800 tris of which 1500 shadowmesh - caravel_rigging.lwo, 1750 tris noshadows - caravel_model.lwo, 8600 tris of which 300 shadowmesh, a 1:80 scale model which includes rigging, wheel etc. - cannon_swivel, 800 tris of which 260 shadowmesh, to be mounted on railings - anchor2.lwo, 380 tris - anchor_winch.lwo, 340 tris - steering_wheel2.lwo, 680 tris of which 240 shadowmesh - gangplank.lwo, 56 tris - everything is found in darkmod/nautical Download: - Caravel package, simply place in your main darkmod folder In the first post of this thread - Blender source file, scale up everything by 10 when exporting https://www.dropbox.com/s/roejh0oz7cej31f/caravel.blend?dl=0

I'd use an invisible reversible objective for this: - have 2 potions, success makes the chest unfrobable, failure makes the chest frobable You'd have to make the potions undroppable to avoid exploits, and you might need to have a delay between each potion handout at the chest to give the objective enough time to react.

Thanks, and yes, I think good environmental sounds should find their way into the mod as they're generally short and having more varieties of these is objectively useful. For example, Gigagooga's ColdWind and CreepyWind were a godsend for one of the scenes I'm making where the winds we already have wouldn't have performed so well. And his draft sounds are a good complement to the wooden creaking sounds we already have for making desolate houses. Ambients-wise, there's already a huge selection of over 200 different soundtracks in the mod, but there are also 100 missions now. Looking through this list there are a lot of custom ambients made for TDM or Thief so it would seem easy to extend TDM's ambients considerably, also considering that new ambients weigh little compared to textures. A different option could be just to point mappers to where they can download custom ambients. Advantages I see in this are that the main TDM download stays smaller, the ambients list doesn't become overwhelming for new mappers and that it's easy to tell which ambients have been in use for the past 6 years and which ones are fresh. Agreed, that's quite essential around here. By the way, do you remember the name of the ambient composer on Youtube you mentioned in a status update last year? In other news: Added Undeclared Ambient haunted_something_is_wrong_here. An ambient that's already in the mod but doesn't show up because it doesn't have a soundshader (fixed in 2.04). It's a unique, tense piece. Added Uncle Peti's Sound Den Listening to darkwinter.com's selection, so far music for trees has stood out to me, in particular #2 and #3 in that album.

Ambient atmospheres are in my opinion one of the best parts of the Dark Mod experience, not just for getting a mission to have the right feel but also for inspiration and to have them playing in the background when creating maps. The more the merrier, so here's a thread to collect all the links to ambient music and environmental sounds that could have a spot in TDM's setting. Ambients from the TDM forums Gast's Eerie Lullabies Magnanimous Merry's Miscellanea Orbweaver's Dark Ambients Spadey's Ambients Radioteque's Ambients Kyyrma's Composing Ambient Tracks for Dummies - Kyyrma shows how ambient soundtracks can be made from a set of sounds. Also contains some of his finished ambients. Request for more interior sounds - this thread is a very productive community session where members came up with a large and good selection of new ambients. Uncle Peti's Sound Den Dragofer's Ambients - post #6 in this thread SeriousToni's Ambients - posts #8, 12, 15 and 19 in this thread Ambients from the TTLG forums Custom resources list Gigagooga's Ambients 1 - possibly the largest pack of ambient musics and nature sounds, all of them high quality. Gigagooga's Ambients 2 - this pack puts more weight on shorter swells/hits/pads to be layered on top of a subtle ambient. Gigagooga's Ambients 3 Yandros' ambient loop Sephy's Ambients - a large collection of ambient pieces, including many shorter ones which will be valuable for anyone wanting to try a layered ambience approach like in the Thief OMs and Full Moon Fever. Internet databases www.freesound.org - some of the better composers in my opinion are ERH and BrandonNyte. www.purple-planet.com - a large selection of all kinds of ambient and musical soundtracks to be used freely. www.darkwinter.com - an internet label that publishes a lot of dark ambient music under a Creative Commons license. www.endlessascent.com - sister website of Darkwinter for non-dark ambients. Youtube Asatru Dark - also has very nice reference images for outdoor stone memorials, statue arrangements etc. #4 Void by Raffaele du Marteau & #6 Dreaming of Nowhere by Raffaele du Marteau - possibly the most forlorn pieces I've found on the internet. Alacazam - a prolific Creative Commons ambients composer . Cryo Chamber - for-profit label for dark ambient music with a large selection on offer. Going by their Youtube comments they're fine with people using their soundtracks for games etc., although you'd probably need to buy the soundtracks first. Dark Ambient Mixed Session - as much ambient as something to have in the background while mapping.

Alright, this looks clearly in favour of the frob + insensitive to water approach. Possibly with the exception of moveable glass lamps in case the player decides to throw one into water. Other glass lamps don't shatter when they get hit so I think these shouldn't shatter either, to keep gameplay consistent.

The wind howls.. (Zombie's rocks are great for lots of things, including arctic landscapes)