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https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152224 There is a new mapping contest over on TTLG for the Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary and the organizers were kind enough to include The Dark Mod along with all of the Thief games as an options for making a mission to submit as an entry. The deadline is a year from yesterday and the rules are pretty open. I recommend going to the original thread for the details but I will summarize here: Rules: - The mission(s) can be for Thief 1, Thief 2, Deadly Shadows or The Dark Mod. - Collaborations are allowed. - Contestants can use any custom resource they want, though TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack. - Contestants can submit more than one mission. - Contestants can enter anonymously. - The mission(s) can be of any size. Using prefabs is allowed but the idea is this is a new mission and starting from an abandoned map or importing large areas from other maps is not allowed. Naturally this is on the honor system as we have no way of validating. Mission themes and contents: There is no requirement from a theme or story viewpoint, however contestants might consider that many players may expect or prefer missions to be celebratory of Thief: Deadly Shadows in this respect: castles, manors, museums, ruins inhabited by Pagans and the like, with a balance of magic versus technology. This is entirely up to the authors, though, to follow or not - it is just mentioned here as an FYI and, while individual voters may of course choose to vote higher or lower based on this on their own, it will not be a criteria used explicitly in voting or scoring. Deadline: May 25th, 2024 at 23:59 Pacific Time. See the TTLG thread for details on submissions and the voting process. Provided I can make the deadline I hope to participate. It would be nice to see the entire community do something together, and expressing our complicated relationship with this divisive game seems as good a pretext as any.

As for the clever way of getting the light angles for proper bumpmapping normally (atleast in the old days before shaders etc.) you had to use per pixel lighting to get proper moving light sources, quake did not support anything but ambient at the time which were static lightsources so some of us got crafty and hacked together real entity lights using per poly collision as a model. The result looked insane but it was really i mean REALLY heavy to run (tbh i doubt any card today could run it at 4K resolutions without going up in smoke and embers, no not even the 4090 ti). This was ofc not nice so we brainstormed it for some time and came up with an idea to use the players position to calculate the light offset, the result was quite a game changer at the time where the old code could barely run at 30 fps at 800x600 resolutions the new code could run it at several hundred frames per second at 1980x1200 on a geforce 3. I tried out the old engine on my current 1080 ti card and i actually had to limit the framerate it ran that fast.

I have no idea what's causing this. It's the oil lamp just inside that window on the upper deck of that room. Stuff like this drives me crazy. Also, while I was just sitting outside staring at it, sometimes the light bleed would just suddenly appear even when the door was closed, or it would remain visible after the door was closed and would disappear if you moved/looked around. I thought it might have been another door opening somewhere, but that doesn't appear to be the case. I can't seem to reproduce this at all. I thought it was a similar issue that I had in another section with the ambient light changing slightly, but I can't see any difference crossing between those rooms. Anyone else notice it?

Thanks: will look at the lights changing - that might be the same ambient thing that happened in the square I've fixed the readable already for an update I'm getting ready the pool - the lights are magic

I wanted to bring this up for a while and am sorry I took so long. As such this thread is based on an old observation, I didn't retest recently but from what I know this limitation still exists with the latest code. If others confirm it and the issue is considered solvable I may post it to the bug tracker as well. EFX for spatial sounds are an amazing addition we had in recent years, however they suffer from a noticeable limitation: Reverb only accounts only for the location of the player and not that of sound. Sounds originating from a place with reverberation will not cause any echo if the player isn't standing in that room... oppositely sounds coming from outside will be heard with the full extent of the reverb effect in the room you're hearing them from, they should be echoing less due to not originating from the reverberating hallway. Example: Let's say there's a Builder church with a large hallway containing a reverb definition, inside there's an ambient sound of chanting. If the player is standing in front of the church door, they will hear the chanting without any kind of echo: Only once they step through the door and walk inside the echo suddenly makes itself heard. In a realistic scenario you'll hear the reverberation of any sound coming from a room that causes it, even if you're standing far outside that room hearing this noise in the distance. The simple solution would be a mixture between the location of the player's camera and that of the sound source: Each sound gets 75% the reverb defined in the room it's originating from, then on top of that all sounds being heard by the player anywhere have 25% the reverb of the room the player's standing in (current functionality). The more realistic but also more complicated option would be to use the portal tracing already implemented for sound attenuation and make each sound pick up reverb from each EFX room it passes through, accounting for the room of origin the room the player's standing in but also the rooms it's passing through; That way a noise emanating on one side of a building and passing through open windows in a corridor to reach the player on the other side would still echo, even if both that sound and the player are located outside in an area without reverb.

Thanks for playing and the kind feedback re: the bugs: the brew tank is a new one - thanks for that. Will add it to the list for any future update. the bow: I think that's a TDM bug. I experienced it as well, but only the early days of developing the mission so I thought it had gone away, but I guess not: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21345-210-crashes-may-be-bow-frontend-acceleration-related/ the keys on the guard: never did get to the bottom of that one as I could never reproduce it.

Thanks! Hint for the safe code here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=485264 Actually, it's probably time I added these hints to the original post....

Listening to it again, it starts out fairly similar to other ambient music tracks, but then it adds a pulsing synth track, and eventually drums and guitars kick in. So maybe it's just that I lingered in the house longer than anyone else for some reason. As for the hints: Thanks again!

Yeah, the Hodgson house was playing some unexpectedly dynamic ambient music each time I entered it. It's pretty good actually, it was just not what I was expecting to hear for a random house. If I have time I can record a clip or search through the ambient music library in Darkmod's resources to work out which one it is, but I won't be able to do that tonight. Thanks for the hints (and the mission too, of course).

A couple of users have pretty consistent crashes with High Expectations. I have also experienced crashes with Windows on my own machine, but very rarely. I have a debug build of 2.11, but I haven't been able to get it to crash under that yet. I've attached the logs that @irisx has provided, and @DavyJones has the exact same issue. The only thing that stood out to me was in the qconsole.log: The ambient 'snd_tunnels' (underground_forelone_loop_z) for location 'location_tunnels' is now playing. Getting threadname failed, reason: No such file or directory (2) --------- Game Map Shutdown ---------- @irisx did you say you also have some trace file? Do any other Linux users have this problem (or not)? The issue seems to occur about 1.5 seconds after the FM starts, or as soon as you start to provide input (move the mouse or start walking, etc). qconsole.log Darkmod.log

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?

someone familiar with the quake engine should probably take the time and update xash3d with MH's vbo and shader driven code from remakequake, lately the code has made it into quakespasm as well (yep it is that good). it fixes practically all the gripes with the quake engine like seamless skyboxes, water effects, and a whole lot of nastiness with how planesides were calculated (was one of the big ones if you wanted PPL lighting). It is also uber fast and if someone took the time i have the code for some rather ingenious DOT3 bumpmapping developed by me and MH which uses a clever way of getting light angles to bumpmaps (in the old days you pretty much had to use PPL to make the bumpmaps look right but this was seriously heavy work on quake which only supported ambient originally so we had to use hacked entity lights coupled with PPL untill we developed this).

Spent some time on the mission! Wandered around the city, studying it for some time. Found another duplicated asset that produce flickering. It's under the table. I also found the source of "lines" artifacts. It's ambient occlusion. When it's enabled i see some black lines. That's weird. Also bloom makes whole level filled with it. Is that normal? p.s. looks like heavily compressed yt video just hide the artifacts. What a fail...

Has anyone experienced the following issues and can offer advice?: I'm having a problem where some beta testers have reported that belt-attached keys aren't frobable on some AI. I haven't been able to reproduce it at all, and not everyone has reported it. It might be intermittent as well (i.e. it will work on reload, etc). In a couple of places I have some visportals in outdoor areas (i.e. not simply covering a door or window). If you cross them the ambient light changes slightly. These aren't separate locations with different ambient settings or anything. Not sure what's causing it.

Thanks for the replies, gonna try those spoiler Tags again now for my short review (oh well it inserted one above my text now and I can't seem to delete it on mobile - this text editor is strange)

Just finished this mission and wow I gotta say in great honor to Grayman and of course the rest of the team picking it up, this was something I've never seen before in any other TDM mission, especially visually wise. I am so happy that grayson gave green light for other experienced mappers to finish his last mission. And what came out of this is really something special. I'll put my review in spoiler tags since I'm now referring to critical mission details. Edit - How do I put spoiler text here on mobile?? [spoiler] test [/spoiler][SPOILER] test [/SPOILER] [spoiler[spoiler [sfah

You can try my alternative footstep sounds package which addressed the things you described together with a lot of other footstep sounds both for player and AI if you want to. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17631-new-footstep-sounds/

Thanks for your input. If I understand the wiki article correctly it talks about the ambient music tracks. However my question was focused on the NPCs talking sounds. As far as I understand one can not achieve this with the overwrite attribute. But I could be wrong.

Mods can this moved again? @Acolytesix- can you make sure you post in the beta thread instead of this one please (this one is public, the beta thread is only for logged-in forum members): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

sure - I would only ask that you follow the thread to make sure you don't report stuff that has already been mentioned: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

How did you get this to work? I cannot get the sound to update by scripting this sort of thing: $location_room1.setSpawnArg( "ambient", "snd_somenewsound" ); if location_room1 is a location_info entity and snd_somenewsound has been defined in the atdm:location_settings entity. It just goes back to playing the original sound when I go back into room1.

heh i was thinking the same though it might just have been a glitch when writing the names are pretty similar. But for correctness it is called the dark engine and the newer version that allows us to run these beauties on win10/11 is called newdark. newdark is kinda interresting as it just suddenly popped up on a french forum some time ago by an anonymous developer with the alias le corbeau who allegedly got his hands on the original source code and started updating it for modern OS. this was the original thread i believe -> https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085 bikerdude was on that forum to when the patch hit i noticed hehe.

Okay, I had no idea, I have googled it up now and you are right, to my own surprise. Done, I´ve put some paragraphs which were previously not in spoiler tags into spoilers.

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

Pretty good medium sized mission with interesting story. I found it too difficult though, so I got stuck. Good that you have a hints section. But maybe it's an idea to give more in-mission clues for lower difficulties (although I wasn't playing on easy)? I found some "issues" that I post in screenshots later, but I found especially that the Ambient light in full darkness seemed too bright? Btw. Maybe also there's a lack of specular in some of the textures? Also this still has ambiant light related code in the material, which is overriding what the engine currently does? Don't know if that would matter. Btw. There's lots of redundant and double files in the pk4. especially in the textures, dds, maps and guis folders. So if you would make an update in the future, you could look into this aswell.