Geep

@Zerush, good to know about these. Related: in Sotha's "Skybox Tutorial", I removed the bad link to Terragen, and put in a little commentary about Terragen 4. But it requires someone who has actually used that tool (or an alternative) for an FM to really refresh that article.

Evidently a modern version of Terragen (now Terragen 4 and Terragen Sky) is available: https://planetside.co.uk/

Thanks. I was thinking more of the terrain generation than skyboxes. Tho some of these offer skybox generation with depth, that can be converted to 3d meshes. Probably fine for Unity or Unreal engine. (For instance, peeked at a vid by "AI Protagonist" using skybox.ai plus convertio to get to .hdr file, then import into Unreal as a landscape+skybox dome). Anyone worked out a plausible DR/TDM workflow beginning with such starting points?

Got around to trying this out. The winter skybox and landscape were excellent, especially when viewed from the rooftop. You mentioned using 16-bit terragen to build the terrain. I wonder if there's a more modern (but free) tool these days? Crafty use of teleporting+FX. (The Boy Lag playthru video does a KO early on, so doesn't show any of those. His loss.) Like others, I had some performance issues at the start. With my weak GPU, I had frame stutter under fresh-download 2.13 and so downgraded my settings. Sounds like 3 hypotheses have been floated for that - you mentioned parallel moon light translucent exterior windows needs visportaling Only other problem I saw: 2 instances of the movable rough oak chair sunk into desk or floor. I thought the light-leak under the wizard's gown was a feature, not a bug... radioactive shoes or underwear? I enjoyed the straightforward story and colored lighting, and always go for rats. My dexterity and patience were a bit strained in two places (landing on windowsill; rock hopping), so I used magic (cough *noclip* cough). Don't hate me. EDIT: After seeing your hint about the 2nd secret, I went back to look for it.

Here's a new wiki entry on an old but under-explained topic: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Books_with_Illuminated_Capitals,

I was just looking at that. I'm currently thinking to go with MIT License, since that's also used by the .Net Framework components I'm redistributing. Except for non-software (like app icon), probably CC Non-commercial 3.0 Share Alike. For now, I plan to just add a link to the wiki to the license; later, on next code update, add it into the zip download. Edit: Link to license done.

There is a line in the source code Form1.cs: /* by Geep for The Dark Mod. Open source as with other TDM assets */ Yeah, pretty vague. I agree that, since I'm releasing source in a .zip file, I could easily include a license file. I'll have to research what that might say, which might take a while. The 60,000-character LICENSE.txt file distributed with TDM installs is not a good fit for this.

I just released a prototype Windows-desktop app, LangPeeker, for quick lookup of translation strings associated with #str_ values. For the whole enchilada, see the new wiki entry https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=LangPeeker

About those Stone 24pt artifacts... I've finally had a quiet hour to figure this out. I made a mistake in my 2025_Jan_Cumulative_2024_Font_Updates.zip release. That had 2 subfolders tdm_fonts01_updates_only tdm_fonts01_updates_plus _unchanged_from 2.12 Of interest here are stone 24pt font files, particularly: stone_0_24.dds, stone_1_24.dds, fontimage_24.dat In (1) these Stone 24pt files are the correct updated and tested ones, originally packaged in my June 20, 2024 release. In (2), these files are older, of 2.12 vintage; I evidently missed replacing them when merging old and new files. @Amadeus or @nbohr1more, please correct this for the next beta (or final) of 2.13. Thanks. @snatcher, @wesp5, kudos for catching this.

@wesp5, @snatcher, I can now see the artifacts. (My test program the other day was ignoring the beta5 fonts dats & dds... duh!) At least the Y and W ones, the T is perhaps there at the edge of perception. There are also other problems that have re-emerged. I'll need to research this.

Assuming you're talking about the sliders having a range of 0 to 10... A value of 6 for iconSize would be about 1.3 for the underlying cvar. A value of 6 for Weapons/Item Text Size would be about 1.05 for gui_small_TextSize. You multiply those and a factor of 0.16 in the GUI code to get the effective font textScale, which would be 0.22. So this would use the Stone 24pt font. Since I'm not seeing it on my screen (which is not the world's highest rez), is anyone else?

@nbohr1more, I looked at your new Translation Packs column in https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod, chose Stumpy's "Dead Drunk" marked as having a translation pack, downloaded it (running 2.13 beta5), and no signs of translation pack. Is this because 2.13 isn't officially released? If so, how do people (namely me) get the new translation packs right now? When the official release occurs, I assume the download will include the translation pack if available. Will the Mission Archive web page once again have the "#" marked for translated versions? I remember there was a wiki page somewhere that said, for a given FM, what particular languages were actually translated. Is that now up to date too? BTW, from what you posted a while ago, there are some translation packs that are the traditional style and some with the DarkFate style. I'm interested in understanding the latter.

Maybe this: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4726 Yes, and that led me a summary of that info in the nbohr1more's new "Translation Pack" column in https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod

That is the Stone font, but whether it draws on the 12pt, 24pt, or 48pt bitmaps depends on the size you tell it to show, based on how you set the "Icon Size" and "Weapons/Item Text Size" sliders on the Video/General/HUD Opacity page. Or corresponding cvars (see table in https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=GUI_Scripting:_Getting_System_CVars). That said, I slid the sliders throughout their ranges, looked at the 2 instances of W in the left corner and right corner text, and saw no stray dots appear. (I did see the W shift horizontally at one transition). What do you see when you try this?

@nbohr1more, I just recently noticed that back in Oct you reported in https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152771 I didn't see anything about this in the current "What's New in 2.13". Will this new functionality actually happen for 2.13, and if so what FMs can now be re-downloaded to get the enhanced translation packs? Particularly "early TDM missions [that] also have German, Italian, French, etc translations". Pointer to any new bugtracker/forum/wiki info about this appreciated.

The Stone 24pt fonts used in subtitles should be fully fixed, and I'm not seeing a problem with them on my end. Other fonts, not so much for 2.13. Can you be more specific about what font and circumstances?

I was setting up the Win11 taskbar to pin beta5, and tried TDM "Windowed" mode to make the taskbar visible. But then I couldn't move the mouse cursor (with the main menu clockhand cursor shown) to the taskbar, or really outside the inner active area of the window. Makes the Windowed mode kinda useless.

Release of gen_lang_plus v 1.0 My new C++ version of gen_lang.pl, called gen_lang_plus, is now available. For a comparison and complete description, as well as downloads, see the new wiki page Gen_Lang Programs. There are some modest improvements and bug fixes compared to gen_lang.pl, which it is hopefully positioned to supersede. In the larger picture, having this code as C++ may facilitate partial re-use, e.g., perhaps as future capabilities within TDM or DR. Thanks, @Amadeus, for providing me with output file samples to compare against.

The engine can give up on rendering something with vertices that are off grid or aligned only with a very fine fractional grid. Try realigning with a coarser grid.

Just testing my new redo of gen_lang.pl ported to C++. I see that the [hungarian] section of main-menu all.lang has a lot of instances of characters that can't be encoded into the target iso-8859-2 encoding, so become '?' in the hungarian.lang file. (I can provide a long list of strings with this problem.) By far the most frequent specific character problems: the o-double-acute character was "represented" at one time by o-tilde (a common hack) in all.lang u-double-acute was evidently "represented" by u-circumflex. These representations are probably now unhelpful. Both utf8 (in all.lang) and iso-8859-2 have valid codepoints for these 2 characters. However, I am reluctant to mechanically change this... do we have a hungarian-speaker to review this?

Just trying beta2. On my dev box (Win11, Intel integrated gpu), I'm not seeing any change in main menu font clipping with r_tonemapOnlyGame3d setting. I do see a slight change in perceived sharpness, although its hard for me to say how much is due to font edge effects and how much due to the parchment color change. Unrelated: In the console, my cursor now appears with a twin ghost. That is, there's the main vertical bar, and then appx. a character's width to the right, a second, fainter vertical bar. Both blink and advance in synchrony.

That's interesting. I've not been following this "tonemapOnlyGame3d 1" initiative, so have particularly nothing informed to say about the underlying cause of the main menu font clipping or whether clipping can be avoided while retaining benefits for this new option. I'd like to clarify my previous comment, that could be read as suggesting that clipping could be avoided by repositioning characters in font bitmaps. That would be a vast, vast time sink.

@nbohr1more, could you please arrange that the dat and dds files from my recent cumulative font update are incorporated into 2.13b2? Thanks. (I double-checked that the Stone 24pt dat & dds therein are those from mid-June, as expected.)

Version 1.6 of datBounds is released, to support further work with Mason and Carleton fonts. Main changes: Supports REF files with refont v2.5 headers for 512x512 bitmaps Adds options scaling_ok and raw_metrics. Fixes shaderName and other issues preventing .tga generation. Shows filenames during write. See the datBounds wiki page for details and links.

Done