MirceaKitsune

Is there a setting in TDM to change the audio frequency and / or buffer length? This seems like a buffering issue, when the audio stream is overloaded with data and needs a bit of time to catch up.

I couldn't find a separate openal_log.txt which makes sense since it's seemingly mixed with the realtime console output. I looked more carefully to make sure and indeed: The broken pipe messages are spammed constantly while the sound is crippled, but disappear the moment the audio fixes itself.

I moved both the mesh and rig to their own collection, but the exporter still keeps erroring out when I try to produce a md5anim in 2.8. Any additional thoughts?

Till I get around to exporting the new md5 set, I updated the link to the Blend file in the first post, to include all my fixes mentioned above.

Thank you, I see now. The issue was probably that I have them in multiple collections simultaneously. I shall try to re-export them later.

The Blender 2.8 md5anim exporter is throwing an error when I attempt to export any animation. And since I already saved the new Blend with it I can't go back to 2.79 either. Anyone know what this could be about? Here's a screenshot of what happens and the error I get when I attempt exporting:

Progress made so far: Scaled the model up by 8. Let's see how that looks... judging from the screenshot it should be about right. I'm not applying the scale to the objects as this breaks the rig, hopefully the exporter doesn't mind as IIRC it uses the state of the mesh as seen in the viewport. Reduced the length of the spikes poking out of the wings to about half. Renamed some bones to translate the german names to english, or remove uppercase letters at the beginning of names where they didn't belong. I could only rename some of them however: Touching other bones causes the control armature to break and not animate the root armature properly. The wings are kept close to the body in every animation and only move slightly. They poke out a bit at times to avoid clipping, but only by a small amount. Slightly desaturated the red and green skins, as well as somewhat reducing the intensity of the glossy texture. I don't know how to change the default skin given there doesn't seem to be one: Each skin is registered by its color and one needs to be picked when referencing the model. I'm not sure if I'll have time to export the new md5's today. I'm aiming to first implement some of the new animations you suggested, mainly turning and pain as those are essential ones that I forgot. I'll test it using the map in that pk4 then update it with my changes.

Dragofer: Thank you for the great help! Sounds like there's a lot left to fix, I've taken note and shall look into it. It's nice to see how the model looks in-game for a start. The bone names came this way with the blend: I didn't think renaming them would be important, I'll see how far I can go considering I'd have to change them on two rigs for consistency. I'll look into shrinking the spikes on the wings too, and yeah now that I understand collisions better I shall change the wing animations to always keep them close to the body. Model's much tinier than I expected, looks like I should scale it by about 10x? Textures and colors should be very easy to tweak... at least the specularity looks okay, maybe I'll make it just a tad darker. Note that the animations starting with "ik_" in the blend file are used by the control rig, which uses complex bone constraints to achieve the desired effects... I can't change that without breaking everything but this is only important in Blender. And thanks for mentioning the md5 exporter for Blender 2.8, I'll update to that as well in this case.

Yes, original normal map and I generated the specular. They're all 4096px so it's very high quality too: Wasn't sure if that's considered too high-res for TDM, hopefully the engine handles them well and they won't need to be downscaled to 2048px. That is the purpose. I also decided to pick up this model seeing how TDM 2.08 included several new characters, figuring developers who are knowing in this field are probably active again and the momentum could be used to add even more interesting stuff for 2.09. The ones I ported in the past aren't suited for vanilla unfortunately... this is probably the only one not using the human skeleton I'll be making after hearing how complex custom rigs are to set up. I'm not sure if the creators of the new creatures check this section regularly and will see this... maybe sometime I'll note them to ask if they can help, if that's okay. As for maintaining, I have the blend source and can seemingly export the model and animations long as Blender 2.79 keeps working fine for me. I have no idea about the rig manipulation code and AI though, that's something I never touched and the part I hope someone who like this idea can help out with.

Some good news: I spent today checking if I could export the md5mesh / md5anim set. The exporter gave me errors on both, the armature and mesh alike needed to have their bones and vertices fixed (I updated the blend file in the first post). After fixing everything the export worked! At least as far as I can tell from the export process, I didn't test them in-game as there's no AI or def: I'll have to re-export in case there are issue with the model scale, model orientation, the speed of an animation, or anything else wasn't exported properly. As long as the exported data isn't corrupt or broken for any reason though, I should be able to manage this step too... note that the Blend is for Blender 2.79 as the md5 exporter hasn't been yet updated to 2.8. On top of that I have now finished the textures. My target of 4 colors was successfully reached: Black, white, red, green... each one with different eye colors too. Further more I included the material and skin file, those should be ready to use. Download it here (0.3) Other than the sounds which I'm only touching if things move forward, this should be everything in terms of assets... they are fully untested of course, notify me of any issues you find and I'll try fixing them and producing new md5mesh / md5anim sets. What's needed now is the part I have no idea how to do: The AI, the skeleton settings, and the def to make use of them. Considering what was discussed earlier my suggestion would be: First copy the AI / defs of a fitting monster and put this model on it, in order to make sure it's properly scaled and the animations play well. Once the mesh and textures and animations are confirmed to work, find a bounding box side that fits... I'd suggest enough so it covers the wings in the idle pose, for some animations they might clip through walls but we'll see if that's an issue and adjust it later. Only at the end once this is all done setup the ragdoll physics, the IK for aligning the feet to the ground, and the rotation for the mouth bone for lip-syncing when playing vocals. Does that sound like a good approach?

I see what you mean now... yes I remember that effect on human characters and indeed it would look very ugly without that. I'm assuming it's not as simple as "project the foot bone to the ground each frame" and may take more work and tweaking to get right. I initially assumed the only unusual aspect about this would be the larger bounding box and everything else is already there in the code, but things are a bit more complicated now that you point them out in detail (the story of all software development). Another issue I was thinking of yesterday but forgot to bring up: We will want to have lip-syncing on such a large model, as not having the muzzle open for vocal sounds would be pretty obvious especially on such a large creature... the armature bone is there but has to be properly rotated by the code. I assume ragdolls will also require adjustments so each bone bends the right way and we don't get noodle limbs. As I have no idea how to do those things I hope there are other devs motivated enough to be willing to help out... in the meantime I'll look into finishing up everything else I have knowledge in doing to leave only what I can't do up.

It will obviously be a large creature. In terms of size I was wondering how we could make it just big enough so that it makes sense for a dragon, but at the same time small enough so the map doesn't need to be too large for them to walk around. I was thinking something between x1.5 and x2.0 the size of the horse (less than twice as large but more than its size plus half). There is a walk and run animation in the blend, they're meant to be normal md5anim's but we'll have to see about exporting them properly. Theoretically we already have quadruped creatures: The horse even if it doesn't attack, or the spider which is theoretically feral even if it has more than 4 legs... *shivers* As far as fitting the TDM theme goes I had two thought processes there: First is that we long had some fantasy elements, such as zombies and skeletons and missions with magic, and now with 2.08 we have the man-beast which is technically somewhat of an orc... dragons felt like a logical next step to complete the set on this side of the fence. The other thought was that TDM has such a nice steampunk / medieval atmosphere, and dragons are so closely connected with that in folklore, thus the two would go like toast and butter; I'm sure if anyone here remembers a movie such as Dragon Heart many will have the thought "it would be cool to do something like this in TDM". Fan missions are based on many themes though: Some are completely "down to Earth" without any magic or fantasy elements, others have just alternative biology such as giant spiders, others have undead zombies and skeletons which imply witchcraft and wizardry: The idea of assets is to give every mapper the tools to create the one they want, in a way that fits the steampunk theme of course. For starters though I'm hoping to at least have this as a pk4 mod which FM's can include and use... if there are strong reasons against defaulting it I'll be able to live with that, though I'm hoping to at least have it of default quality which this model should help greatly with.

Several days ago I was thrilled to hear that TDM 2.08 contains several new characters along with other fantastic improvements. Seeing how much work had been done on this release gave me a motivational boost to try contributing something myself, especially having worked on porting human(oid) characters to TDM in the past... this time I wanted to submit something that can hopefully be included in vanilla TDM perhaps with 2.09. As I was testing the new release I remembered an old submission on Blendswap called BGE Dragon, featuring a polished quality dragon for the now defunct Blender Game Engine, notable for the fact that it comes with animations for walking / running which makes working with it easier as you don't have to make those yourself. I always felt dragons would fit the theme of TDM wonderfully and allow for some amazing missions, to be fair suggesting them had long been on my mind... remembering how easy it was to work with this one, I figured I'd do the groundwork and instead submit a blend that contains everything needed to port it to The Dark Mod. I'm happy to announce I now have such a blend available! The first thing was the polygon count; The original mesh is pretty high poly, clocking at about 30,000 polys which may be too much for TDM on most people's devices. I played with mesh decimation then did some manual corrections, managing to retain acceptable quality while generating models with okay polygon counts: lod0 = 9.306, lod1 = 6.009, lod2 = 3.218, shadow = 2.265. The original quality mesh is still included in the blend file, so if we need to re-generate any LOD version this can be easily done at any time. Next I worked on separating the armature into two objects, based on the example for the human model I built my previous characters upon: The real armature that deforms the model and is used to export animations, with a control armature driving its bones that's only used to design said animations inside Blender. As the control armature uses a complex IK setup for bones this took some toying with, but in the end I could generate a simple armature which will hopefully work in exporting the md5anim set. Speaking of animations I made sure those are also covered. For the endlessly looping walk and run animations I added markers that identify the frames between which they must be exported to get a seamless loop. I next turned the idle animation into a randomly occurring gesture, then proceeded to animate everything else from scratch to obtain: Walk Run Idle (with two random gestures, stretching / pacing and looking around) Sit (with "lay down", "stand up", "idle" animations) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Sleep (with "lay down", "stand up", "idle" animations) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Attack (two types, bite and slash) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Die (brief animation at the end of which the ragdoll system is supposed to take over) An example gif of the idle gesture from the Blendswap submission, converted to and intended as a random occurrence in-game: From here on I need your help and am calling on the artists who helped create the new monsters (eg: Manbeast) to aid in making this come true as well! I've done most of the work as far as the model goes, putting aside any tweaks that might be needed (eg: model scale and animation length). I'm also going to work on the texture next to produce the proper maps... my target is to have 4 different skins / colors in total. I also believe I can produce the sounds having already found promising submissions to start from on OpenGameArt. But before putting more work into this, I wish to be sure someone can help with the remaining steps so we can get the model in the game. What I need from fellow developers should be: A new AI type for the dragon. Note that it's not intended to fly, especially not in its initial implementation; Later on we may add a fly animation and data to the AI for knowing how to use it... for now I only care to have it work like the spider, wandering around and attacking if it sees a hostile entity. This should thus be easy if we can copy another monster's code. Exporting the assets from Blender to TDM, particularly the model and animations. As I don't have an AI nor a test case handy nor ever worked with exporting TDM animations or models for non-human characters, I need someone else to generate and test the mesh files. First the md5 mesh for each LOD, everything is included in the blend even the low-poly shadow mesh... afterward the armature actions for it need to be exported to md5anim files. Lastly the defs need to be written, along with any other step I may have missed to make the character actually work. I should be able to do the material based on my previous examples once I finish the textures, so don't worry about that part... please just make sure the materials in the exported md5mesh have the same name as the material names in Blender. Download blend version 0.5 I look forward to hearing your thoughts! If any developers or experienced contributors confirm they can take care of the integration, I can get started on the remaining assets soon

Never had this particular issue with any other game and its audio. The 32bit engine does the exact same thing as the 64bit one. I looked in Darkmod.log, the in-game console, and the bash console when running the engine from it: There's one suspicious message which appears to be spammed countless times among other normal messages. AL lib: (EE) ALCplaybackAlsa_mixerNoMMapProc: available update failed: Broken pipe The other stuff sounds a bit more complicated to toy with at the moment, especially as I'm not sure where the OpenAL log is located or how to enable it on Linux (the console variables might be different).

Though the years have passes I'm still keeping this thread closely in mind. Especially since I already tweaked and simplified a model so that it's ready to animate / export, but there hasn't been an update for over 3 years now! This was especially brought back to my mind on learning that TDM 2.08 included new characters and I'm thinking that maybe the developer who worked on those could help with this as well? I just checked that the link to the blend file still works and to my surprise Google Drive hasn't dropped it. I tested to make sure that it will open up in the new Blender 2.8 which it does. Note that for the textures you'll have to use "File - External Data - Unpack all into files" but I verified that works too. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5lE6Cy2gg_rT3FsYzlNSWJiVkU Do we have anyone willing to pick this up please? All that's needed is some base animations for starters (idle, walking, attacking), exporting the md5 / md5anim then creating the def and material. I don't have the full knowledge nor presently the time to setup a test map, but do know we can start from the spider AI which should provide the proper starting functionality.