vozka

Right, I mentioned that above, this is not a final lowpoly version, I will reduce the polycount and possibly make a shadow mesh, same with adding doors. It also has 4k textures right now. I wanted to get it working as is first so that I know that my workflow is correct and I can test it in game. Could you upload a zip of the test mission with model that you used so that I can try it here please?

Thanks a lot, getting closer to creating correct materials. Unfortunately, this was not the cause for the object not loading in game, it still does not work.

Thank you! That helped me understand it better. The model now works correctly in DarkRadiant both as .ase and as .lwo. But it does not load in an actual level (the suffix is in lowercase). The console in dmap just says that it couldn't load the model and the game shows a black cube. I used the newer .lwo and .ase export plugins for Blender. No idea what it could be this time, so I uploaded the model and materials to dropbox if anybody wants to take a look: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jub4fqs36nw9af5/gothcab_darkmod.zip?dl=0 Note that this is not a final model, I will reduce the polycount and optimize the textures later, but neither is so big that it shouldn't work afaik.

Okay. Changing all textures to .tga worked, now they all get loaded correctly in DarkRadiant, the object looks fine in light preview. But when testing in game, dmap says that it couldn't load the file GothicCabinet_01.ase, that's why there's only a black box. This is, again, interesting, because I was already able to load the model once, although without a material, and I don't think that I changed anything but the material settings in the .ase file. Too bad dmap isn't more detailed about why it canot load. I'll probably try to export it to .lwo, tried .ase first because it seemed simpler and there's better instructions at the wiki.

Good, I made progress, but there are still some problems. It's still a bit confusing for me what's just the material name and what's the full texture path, but it works so far. I had to change \ to / in the model file, backslash works with builtin textures, but for some reason not with custom ones. However. Now the model looks okay and loads the _ed texture in DarkRadiant fullbright preview. As soon as I switch to lighting preview , I get blue checkerboard textures again. And in game the model does not even load - I get a small black cube instead. edit: right, DarkRadiant now says: [shaders] Unable to load texture: _default [shaders] Unable to load texture: textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab [shaders] Unable to load texture: textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab_local [shaders] Unable to load texture: textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab_s [shaders] Unable to load texture: textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab [shaders] Unable to load texture: textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab since all the files are .dds it's possible that some of my gimp export settings are wrong, I'll try some changes.

I may be a bit dumb. I found a few good CC0 models I'd like to convert to TDM. I should be able to make a low-poly version and bake materials, so everything else would be easy, right? Yeah, wrong. It's probably just some stupid mistake related to the way file paths are written in the material or model files, but I'm unable to find what it is. Thanks for any help. I managed to export the object as .ase and make it show up in DarkRadiant. I managed to assign it a built-in tiling texture. It works in game. However I'm completely stuck at creating and assigning a new material. I think I was already there once, I managed somehow to assign it a material that loaded the _ed texture in DarkRadiant, but it rendered as fully black in game. However, I was using the 2.08 beta and it may have just been a bug (switched back to 2.07 for the purpose of testing models). And because I'm possibly a moron, I broke it even more when trying to fix it and did not save the original state. Now I get the blue & black no material. DarkRadiant log says that it cannot find the material I guess: "[shaders] ShaderLibrary: definition not found: textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab" This is what my models and textures directory structure looks like: The testmission/models/darkmod/furniture/ directory only contains the file GothicCabinet_01.ase. The testmission/textures/darkmod/furniture directory contains the material files and the textures: gothcab.mtr, gothcab.dds, gothcab_local.dds, gothcab_s.dds and gothcab_ed.jpg The *MATERIAL_LIST section of the GothicCabinet_01.ase file looks like this: *MATERIAL_LIST { *MATERIAL_COUNT 1 *MATERIAL 0 { *MATERIAL_NAME "textures\darkmod\furniture\gothcab" *MATERIAL_CLASS "Standard" *MATERIAL_AMBIENT 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 *MATERIAL_DIFFUSE 0.8000 0.8000 0.8000 1.0000 *MATERIAL_SPECULAR 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 *MATERIAL_SHINE 1.8090 *MATERIAL_SHINESTRENGTH 1.0000 *MATERIAL_TRANSPARENCY 0.0000 *MATERIAL_WIRESIZE 1.0000 *MATERIAL_SHADING Blinn *MATERIAL_XP_FALLOFF 0.0000 *MATERIAL_SELFILLUM 0.0000 *MATERIAL_FALLOFF In *MATERIAL_XP_TYPE Filter *MAP_DIFFUSE { *MAP_NAME "GothicCabinet_01" *MAP_CLASS "Bitmap" *MAP_SUBNO 1 *MAP_AMOUNT 1.0000 *BITMAP "textures\darkmod\furniture\gothcab" *MAP_TYPE Screen *UVW_U_OFFSET 0.0000 *UVW_V_OFFSET 0.0000 *UVW_U_TILING 1.0000 *UVW_V_TILING 1.0000 *UVW_ANGLE 0.0000 *UVW_BLUR 1.0000 *UVW_BLUR_OFFSET 0.0000 *UVW_NOISE_AMT 1.0000 *UVW_NOISE_SIZE 1.0000 *UVW_NOISE_LEVEL 1 *UVW_NOISE_PHASE 0.0000 *BITMAP_FILTER Pyramidal } } } And lastly the gothcab.mtr file contains the following: goth_cab { // Use one of the predefined surface types like stone, glass, wood stone // or use this: // surfaceType 15 // and make the first word in the description below your texture type, // like so: // description "foliage" (This is a grass texture) surftype15 description "Gothic cabinet texture" qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab_ed bumpmap textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab_local diffusemap textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab specularmap textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab_s // This is the code required for frob highlighting this texture { if ( parm11 > 0 ) blend gl_dst_color, gl_one map _white.tga rgb 0.40 * parm11 } { if ( parm11 > 0 ) blend add map textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab rgb 0.15 * parm11 } // The following two blocks are required for the ambient shading: // TDM Ambient Method Related { if (global5 == 1) blend add map textures/darkmod/furniture/gothcab scale 1, 1 red global2 green global3 blue global4 } }

I had had the aliased font problem as well, BUT it seems to be fixed now without me doing anything, no idea why. The only thing I changed was that I set image_useCompression and image_useNormalCompression to 0, that was the first and only time I ever touched the console, and now I cannot find any broken parchments. Changing compression back to 1 does not break it. r_useFBO is set to 1. One perhaps important piece of information is that this is not a new 2.08 beta bug, I encountered it in fresh 2.07 installation as well (just forgot to report it among reporting other things), and it only happened with parchments using purple ink.

Oh, right, that makes sense. I like having additional objectives and restrictions, but I can be pretty dumb regarding puzzles. What about the spiders? is that intentional behavior? In the situation on the screenshot below the arrow just goes straight through the spider and breaks on the concrete floor.

Just played this mission for the second time for testing purposes and I noticed a couple issues. I'm playing 2.08 beta, not sure if that can affect any of these things. The first is that on the first playthrough the mission did not end. All the objectives except do not harm/do not kill type were checked, but nothing happened when I climbed into the sewers. The fence was standing on the street outside the sewer entrance. On the second playthrough everything worked as it should. The other issues were consistent for both playthroughs: There's also one spot in the garden, shown on the screenshot, where it's quite easy to get stuck, forcing the player to reload. Being unable to finish the mission during the first playthrough kinda soured the experience, but other than that this was super well-done, surely one of the best missions I've played so far, especially the graphical fidelity and attention to detail.

I got even more dramatic gains than you did. I have what used to be a mid-end laptop about 8 years ago, an Ivy Bridge i5 CPU upgraded with enough RAM and an SSD. With a bigger mission, Volta and the Stone, the loading time was 1:48 m with compression on and only 31 seconds!! with image_useCompression and image_useNormalCompression set to 0. Looking at the FPS at the beginning of the mission, I seem to have gotten a 2 FPS reduction with the compression off, but that might have just been statistical noise, I would need to do more tests to find out if there's an actual difference. But note that I have a Radeon 7650M, which is as I said 8 years old and basically a rebranded 5xxx radeon chip - I don't know whether its performance is even relevant for you. That's 18% reduction in loading time, not as dramatic as image compression, but imo nothing to scoff at. It might be more on slower CPUs like mine. I would think that it's worth considering depending on what the size difference is.

Again, this does not matter as long as the assets are published under creative commons and accessible in any way, even just inside the game.

I asked the owner of a different asset library (that I normally use for other work) about this situation and while he wasn't as specific as I'd like (he probably doesn't care about games, their primary use is archviz), what I got from his reply is that only the license is an issue. As long as the license prohibits redistribution and any use outside of the game, the fact that anybody can extract art from the game does not matter. Different stores might see it differently of course, the terms of use vary and some are quite vaguely written.

Right. This is what CC themselves clarify in the CC wiki I linked above. It means that TDM probably uses a nontrivial number of textures that infringe on cgtextures license. I have found in several threads that people noticed the clause that forbids redistribution as early as 2010, but they wrongly concluded that as long as the textures are distributed as a part of a level (=not a texture pack), it's OK to use them. This is not true, as long as the license is CC, the way in which they are packed is irrelevant. The only way to make it right would be to use a nonfree license.

I encountered the fully black lights and aliased fonts (mine were even less readable than yours) too, in The Accountant 1 & 2.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing here, but share alike is not related to the way the assets are distributed in TDM. Share alike is only related to the license used, it only means that anybody who uses TDM assets has to share them under the same license. That's how it's explained here: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Share_Alike This explicitly allows redistribution "as is". A better search term would be "cgtextures" since that's what the site was previously called. This gives me 59 results and some of them seem to have been used as assets although I have not checked too deeply. It certainly seems like using cgtextures was encouraged by some people and in wiki tutorials as well. EDIT: The question also is "has the cgtextures license always been limiting in this way?", which I cannot answer fully since waybackmachine is painfully slow for me today, but according to this thread it's been like that since at least 2012.

But according to CC they can redistribute them by themselves. They have to give attribution, do it noncomercially and with the same license, but as long as the assets themselves are licensed as CC, I don't see any reason why they couldn't be shared on their own outside the game. CC doesn't limit anything like this.

I have a few questions regarding the license of TDM assets in relation to using 3rd party roalty free models and textures (either as is or for derived works). I understand that TDM assets use the CC-BY-NC-SA license. This trivally means that for creating these assets we can use anything licensed under the same license, CC-BY-NC-SA, or anything under CC0. What about other CC licenses? From this page in the CC FAQ I understand that we can also use CC-BY and CC-BY-NC, as those can be relicensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. So far so good. I have noticed, though, that most asset libraries today (free or paid) use some form of "roalty-free license" or "asset license" which allow any type of usage without attribution, even commercial, except redistributing them in their original form. This includes some of the asset libraries that have been link around this forum as usable. This licensing is most prevalent with models, but for example textures.com also uses a similar license. This is from their terms of use: While textures.com explicitly allow using their textures in games in general, this section seems to be incompatible with CC-BY-NC-SA as CC in my understanding explicitly allows redistribution. But while trying to research this licensing issue I noticed that textures.com was used for assets at least in the past. So how does this work? Are there exceptions where TDM assets can use a different license? Or is textures.com a relic of the past from when licensing wasn't enforced? If it's the first case, there would be other potential sources of assets that could be adapted for TDM. For example I'm a paid subscriber to blenderkit.com, a library with almost 2000 models which can be used under a license that doesn't allow redistribution and some of them probably could be used in TDM's setting. They're mostly hipoly with PBR materials, so retopology and some material work would have to be done, but that's less work than creating models from scratch and I want to try to do it anyway. So what's the situation?

I just downloaded the 2.08 beta and tried it again and it seems that this issue has been fixed.

At this point I think we're going even more into speculation, but I don't believe that fantasy vs. dark and more realistic setting is a clear cut issue, after all Kingdom Come Deliverance is a pretty successful game. You may be right of course, but I don't think it can be said this easily. In any case I believe that while TDM probably won't be as popular as commercial stealth games, there is a definite unfulfilled potential. That isn't useful for me personally then. I'd appreciate a full release installer, where I download one big file, install it (with possible update check at the end) and I'm done. Lots of those mentions happened in earlier stages of development, I think that this plays a role. Again, I believe (and I know you probably disagree, just explaining my point of view) that publicity only works well if the product is polished and feels like a finished game. Also I for example did not know about TDM until I decided to play Thief Gold for the first time a few months ago. I remember reading about it in previous years, but people mostly said that it's not super stable and playable and only worth trying if you're a huge fan of Thief, which I wasn't. In retrospect I'm sure I would have enjoyed it. Absolutely understand. I believe it's solvable, but I get that a thing like this is way too much trouble. Too bad. Oh believe me, I know. I've been using open source software for a long time and I studied computer science so I do know a lot of coders and I respect that their interest in a hobby project is often elsewhere. But I don't have to like it :).

Right, but why does it matter if a small fraction of gamers play stealth games, when that fraction actually bigger in absolute numbers than it was 20 years ago? While this would no doubt be the best solution, I'd argue that making a small selection of "best of" levels that would be included in the base game and fixing all the small stuff that I mention above would be a good substitute that is actually doable.

Stealth games are probably less popular relatively, but not in absolute numbers I believe. Styx: Master of Shadows, which according to reviews is a decent but flawed game, sold between 500k and 1M copies until now, according to Steam Spy. This is in the same ballpark as Thief 2 a few years after release. The engine is not bad, imo the biggest problems it has are its not great performance and slow loading times - it does look dated next to modern fully pbr engines, but it works quite well with the dark, contrasting aesthetics of TDM and fully dynamic lights. Many popular commercial indie games look worse. What I want to say from the beginning is that as soon as you play a high quality level, have controls and graphics set up etc., this does not look like an old community mod, it feels like a fully fledged game. That's why I think it is very important to bridge the gap between downloading the game and playing a high quality mission, because in this gap it sometimes does feel more like a game engine than a finished game. And it does not have to be that way. And I believe that for any promotion to be successful, this polishing work has to be done first. You say that everyone who would want to play TDM already knows about it, I disagree - I think that catering only to players who are already desperate to play something like Thief and actively search on their own for something like TDM is precisely the reason why it is not more popular. If TDM as a whole looks more like a finished game and is promoted as such, I see no reason why players who bought Styx, or even some of the people that play more action oriented immersive sims like new Hitman games, wouldn't want to try it. As for Steam, after looking through the forum I have not found the reasons why it couldn't be done - I know there was some problem with greenlight, but right now there are open-source games on Steam and the need to pay a one-time 100 USD fee and probably create some official entity representing the game seem like small problems. It is entirely possible that I missed something though.

I used the official installer and while I didn't have problems with using it, I thought the process was a bit weird and confusing and it surprised me how long it took. I thought something like "oh, okay, it's probably downloading some missions from the library so that everything is up to date" and was disappointed when I realized that was not the case. I have not tried your installer yet, but from the screenshots it seems to look and work like a common installer most people are used to - I would definitely prefer that.

They're good missions and their difficulty is right. But Saint Lucia especially has problems. There's a wall you can walk through with a bit of effort, in place where it happened to me accidentaly. And right opposite of that is a wall that you cannot get closer to than about 0.5 m for some reason. There are also stairs in the courtyard that seem to have broken lighting (looks like they're fullbright). I can play it again and give you the positions if you want. The voiced tip about tipping over the hammer played in the wrong room, before I even managed to get to the room with St Lucia. And lastly there are two annoying things lacking polish. Firstly all the readables can be grabbed into the inventory, wich with the current inventory system creates lots of clutter or a need to drop everything back after reading. It would be much more sensible to have most of them readable in place. Secondly chests have frobbable bottoms, which makes grabbing items from them annoying. I see these things as outdated design which should be fixed. The training mission has similar problems, plus some missing words in books.There's also the problem of the archery range, where you get a couple vine arrows without any explanation of how they work, and it's easy to use them to get into places you were not supposed to go and get stuck there. In the object manipulation training there's a tip about looking under a hat to find a ring, so you manage to find a hat, see that there really is a ring under it, but realize it's so tiny it's currently impossible to be frobbed. That's bad design for a tutorial mission. There are other details, like there's a chain in the barn behind the archery range hanging from the ceiling, which for some reason cannot be climbed although there are climbable chains in other missions. It may seem like a pointless detail, but you're teaching new players wrong things about the game. I was just playing A Score to Settle and the main objective ( ) did not work even though I checked in a youtube playthrough that I did everything right. Considering this mission already had some problems once after an update, I assumed that it broke again. I don't know though, may have been a one time bug, somebody else should probably check. I admit I'm a musician and na audiophile so I may be biased in this regard. But I sincerely believe that in places where achieving AAA polish is relatively easy, it's absolutely worth doing so and it will help the game in the long run. Right, I only noticed the flashing issue and not the two other things in the bugtracker, but I'll look again. Happened in the training mission in the first climbing training areas, trying to mantle up on the construction in the courtyard. I can go back and get the position later. Right, thanks, I didn't know if that was an engine problem or a mapping problem.

One more thing regarding included missions: "A better solution would be to do the above and also select and include say top 5 missions (could be done by community voting) that are great in both the concept and execution, technically up to date and with varying themes. If better missions come out, there can always be another vote and a different set of missions integrated in the next release." There is another reason why this would be helpful: people modernizing assets (and I may be able to help here a little) could search which older or less detailed assets are used in the included levels and focus on improving those first, again to bring the overall polish higher. It would be great to have this as an automated tool that would show most often used assets in a set of levels, but I assume that's too much work with not enough benefit (and I haven't checked DarkRadiant yet to see if something like that exists already).

Hello everyone! I started playing The Dark Mod a few days ago and I'm pretty sure it's one of the best open-source games available, so naturally before even installing it (after reading reviews and seeing screenshots and videos) I was asking myself: Why isn't this more popular?? Sure, immersive sims are a bit of a niche, but some of them have a large number of raving fans recommending them everywhere 20 years after release - I see people recommending System Shock 2 and Deus Ex on sites like reddit at least once per month even though I don't watch gaming discussions a lot. Why aren't they recommending The Dark Mod just as much? What's different here? In my first post here as a random nobody, I will criticize TDM, and I'm aware that it may come off as arrogant. I'm doing it because I'd love TDM to be more popular and well-known and I believe that looking at it with fresh and naive eyes (although after 20 years of gaming and with a little coding and 3d graphics experience) might provide some value in this case. I'm strongly convinced that the key to not only retain new players and convert them into raving fans, but also for various potential media efforts to work well (including being on Steam, which as I understand it is still possible, although not planned right now) is overall polish and first impressions, which is an area where I consider TDM to be lacking the most. From the beginning I played TDM with a notepad open, writing down everything that I saw as an issue, especially those that seemed realisticly fixable. I'd like to contribute somehow, so I see this as a first step, perhaps I'll be able to do more in time. Here it is: Starting missions. I see this as one of the most important things, because nearly everyone will play any levels you include in the installation first and see them as an showcase of what TDM has to offer. Being thrown into a mass of missions to download with no easily reached information on their quality and limited other information is confusing and annoying. The best solution would be a complete high quality campaign, but that's not realistic. A good solution would be to fix issues that are present in the currently used levels and bring them up to date with best current practices. I don't remember having problems with the first mission, but I encountered several in both the training mission and The Tears of St. Lucia. By the way while the training mission is quite plain in some places, I believe that the concept of training on your own is good and I don't think it would have to be remade completely (as I saw someone saying around here). A better solution would be to do the above and also select and include say top 5 missions (could be done by community voting) that are great in both the concept and execution, technically up to date and with varying themes. If better missions come out, there can always be another vote and a different set of missions integrated in the next release. Mission browser. The fact that the game has to restarted to play a new mission is annoying. But the bigger problem is that the game doesn't tell me that or why that is anywhere. How do I play a new map? Oh, I'm supposed to install it? But it's already installed, I just downloaded and installed the game and it says that the map is already included...? A tooltip explaining this shown after first launch would help, perhaps also using a different word than "install". Missions have varying quality, sometimes simply because they were made for an older version of TDM when the state of the art was a bit different. Allowing voting and sorting by popularity would help tremendously. A featured most recently added mission could be shown by default, so that they have a chance to get ratings. A possibility to flag missions as being bugged in the current release would also be great. There are some weird clunky behaviors. The most annoying I've noticed is that only one thing can be downloaded at once, so when a mission is downloading and I try to open the description of a different mission, it won't load until the mission download is finished. And to close the loading box I have to exit to main menu and then come back. The loading is glacially slow. I realize this is probably a multifaceted issue complicated to solve, but couldn't the loading start in the background during the intro video/text, difficulty selection and shopping? That would be a huge improvement. Sounds in the menu: the clicking sound when you put a cursor over a menu item gets very audibly cut if you quickly move your mouse from item to item. I realize this may seem like a small detail, but it's literally one of the first things a new player will hear and it gives the impression that the person implementing the menu sounds didn't care much. If allowing the sound to overlap and play more at once at the same time would be too much of a hassle, just use a super short click sound where it won't be as obvious. Quicksave & Quickload It seems that the HUD overlay breaks for a fraction of a second when saving/loading, but I noticed that this is a known issue. The sound sometimes pops annoyingly, perhaps a super short fadeout/fadein would help. It's a bit weird that quickload doesn't start immediately when pressing the button. Even weirder that the game simply goes on until it starts and doesn't pause itself - that would help and should be easier to fix. Movement Always run is not very usable. Believe me or not, I actually finished Thief Gold and TDS with always run and preferred it that way, the difference is that you could press shift to walk or ctrl to creep, while in TDM you have to pres shift AND ctrl at the same time to creep. That's really uncomfortable. I cannot mantle to those high above head places while running. I personally don't like this, but if it's a conscious design decision, the game should definitely tell me this and give some explanation during the training mission. Seems to be fixed in 2.08 I seem to sometimes get quiet crouch-drops and sometimes not, even from low elevation, don't know why. Object manipulation it's very annoying to frob small items. This seems to be adressed for the next relase with an aiming dot if I understand it correctly, which is good, but I believe that small items like rings, individual coins or keys on corpses should also simply have larger frobbing areas. In the training mission I was not able to pick up a ring lying on a movable box at all. I believe that TDS used larger bounding boxes for item selection, so you didn't have to aim at tiny items precisely and it seems like a good solution to me. Item highlighting is sometimes nearly invisible - this happens with well-lit objects like candles or items right next to them. Picking up a an item and resting it against the wall or furniture while still holding it results in repeated and yet weirdly spaced clanking sounds even when I'm not moving anything, not even touching my mouse. This is especially weird when it's a candle making metallic sounds even though the candlestick is not touching anything. Also, door sounds are SUPER LOUD, which is weird because a thief won't be banging doors, and weirder because most guards either ignore them or only notice them when standing very close. Default keybindings for use item make no sense to me - how could I use a health potion or a flash bomb in the middle of a battle when the key (Enter or U) is nowhere near my left hand position or on the mouse? I mapped it to tab, no idea if that replaced any other key binding, but it seems to be working. Not sure if this happens everywhere, might be a problem with older missions, but I've seen NPCs do such long strides when on stairs that they're nearly sillywalking, even though they're walking in normal speed. This is all for now, I noticed more issues, but those seemed to be mission-specific and therefore more difficult to fix. I can write down issues I had with the 3 included missions if there's interest.