jackiebean

True the names of food in Germany can be interesting. Nuremburger may be a brand or a type of bratwurst. For instance a Berliner is a pastry, which makes JF Kennedy's Berlin speech kind of an inside joke, if you understand he was calling himself a pastry. Nuremberger Bratwurst are excellent, with a tiny bun and a bit of mustard (delicious). Lots of cool places in Germany to use as reference for locations in TDM.

That is exactly why i got mad at Microsoft for pushing updates after Vista, because all of the sudden my expensive programs (photoshop, 3dsmax, sound editors) stopped working in windows 7. No way am i going to keep forking out money for programs that are just fine one day and then obsolete the next due to a new OS. they probably would not even get through the letter once they got to the sentence that starts going into asking for the models. It would get tossed in the trash. I had a similar experience asking for source code to crack the exact model structure for Kotor models, but it ended up being a very polite goose chase that ended up nowhere for a while, and eventually 10 years later it finally gained a bit of traction through a third party who was entrusted by the original Kotor developers with the source, but had moved on to other things. There are plenty of creative commons models and textures out there if one is willing to look and willing to give attribution. But most of them are so crude they are not worth the time needed to make them more detailed, or they are so over detailed they don't work in game engines all that well. The models they did make are pretty simple in terms of geometry, but the detail is added through normal maps and bump maps. It makes a very simple model appear to be way more complex and ornate. These guys probably turn out models in their sleep, which is possible after getting familiar with how to do it (repetition) but they get paid a bundle for each contract to stay cutting edge too, and their work is also the property of the company that developed whatever game they helped build. The real work in developing comes with the testing of areas, placeables, looking for ugly seams, or obvious gaps between prefab objects. All those areas are assembled out of prefab items with development tools, so each stick of furniture, plate, candlestick, wall section, archway, pillar... was all finished and then imported to the level building tools. Heck most video games have proprietary tools or plugins for 3dsMax or blender, and if modders are lucky we get a dumbed down version of them to add new content to a game several years later, if they didn't throw those away or lose them in some archive in a forgotten storage drive somewhere. the team here is doing great, individual modders or small teams making these Dark Mod levels are doing this for the love of it, and being that is what it is, they have a lot more to offer.

Don't need a huge budget or teams of people to make low poly HQ models, just a great workflow and technique. Once upon a time i was that good in 3dsMax, and just now starting to get there in blender. It helps to study 3d models from other games and figure out some of the tricks by reverse engineering, not to use the original models, but study how they are put together, and how easy it is to trick the eye into seeing higher detail.

no need to explain so i finally got the updater to work right and then switched to the nvidia driver and the game works great. i may have to tweak settings simply because it is running the GPU hard and the fan is nuts, but that is not due to the game itself, but the display setup is what i suspect. it is kind of annoying but the problem lies with the fact that it is a laptop, and i have a secondary monitor since the main one went out. if i could figure out how to completely bypass the built in monitor then it would probably behave much better, but i guess i may have to start saving for a refurb desktop from new egg or tiger direct. EDIT: ok, something new to add, for those who want the game to go to their external monitor in linux machines. If they use their Nvidia control panel or equivalent, and save to a new xorg config file, then they can force the laptop monitor off, and make the secondary the primary monitor in the xorg settings, which will allow the game to play in full screen on the external monitor, and the GPU will run a lot cooler. I was having issues with the graphics due to the fact i could not run it in full screen because it was forcing the laptop monitor back on (albeit without the back-lights behind the LCD, so basically black with faint details) and until i adjusted things i had to try playing in windowed mode, which is not very GPU friendly. Still have yet to figure out the controls and what the objective really is in the first mission, but i know it runs ok. I got killed by the first two guards. Now i have to find out if i can balance the graphics settings just right for better eye candy.

Yes I am fully aware of the time-stamp bug, but I was not aware of read only issues with the pk4 files, so that may be stopping the updater from running? If so then it may be a leftover issue from copying the directories over to the new install, since much of the time for some reason mint locks files copied from one install to another (even if I use the same Linux user name and password from one distro to the other) and I have to open the whole folder as root so I can take ownership of the files and change them to read/write. Not a huge issue and completely fixable. I noticed the time-stamp issue from one of the other posts i read and that probably explains why it keeps attempting to update the mission files because of the mismatch in some of them. I'm not sure if the update fixes the time-stamp or causes the problem to begin with, but i do not intend to update the mission files for a while and look forward to that bug and others being fixed in the next build.

I just recently built TDM on a lubuntu install, then had a serious issue where i had to make a new partition and install linux mint instead, but i was able to (so far) simply copy and paste the whole directory to linux mint and even run TDM, however i had problems getting TDM updater to run. I copied a newer version over to the directory but have not tried it yet since i have all the missions downloaded and updated anyway. Will probably be testing it out sooner or later when i have time. I think the reason i was able to just copy it over is because the dependency libraries are already installed in mint but not supported any more in lubuntu, which to me is weird, but i guess since linux mint is the most stable distro of linux (or one of the most stable distros), it makes sense they would cover more bases to support all these native games.