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This mission uses a cubic ambient light, similar to "Gem of Souls" so it will look strange if you are using the "Fresnel Mod". As a workaround, you can either put a copy of your tdm_base01.pk4 into the fm folder or extract the glprogs folder and place it into the fm folder. If there is interest, I can make a fresnel mod version that is compatible with this mission.

I don't have a bugtracker account, so no I don't believe there is any tracking for this. I'd be willing to do the actual write-ups, but I'd need to be inducted as a bugtracker person or have someone paste them in for me. I think I'd make three separate tickets at this point? 1. flashbombed state increases the blackjacking radius (the original post) 2. flashbombed state plays its animations properly (wellingtoncrab's june 9th reply here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22738-proposal-flashbombed-ais-become-blackjackable/#findComment-502037 ) 3. flashbombs deal damage to team 9 enemies (undead, not mentioned here but another glaring issue that makes them less useful than their original TG/T2 incarnations)

Brightness, gamma and ambient. Brightness and gamma are user settings mappers can't (shouldn't) change. My opinion is that players shouldn't feel the need to change these unless real-life conditions change around them (day vs night, lights on/off, new monitor, etc). What mappers do in their missions is setting a single or multiple "ambient" lights to their maps. We can think of it as "the mood of the map or area". This ambient can change between zones: bright fullmoon outdoors, pitch black sewers, blue ghostly atmosphere, etc. My opinion is that players should be able to adjust the ambient of a mission based on their preferences or current mood (brighter or darker). You can try this yourself. Set your brightness and gamma just how you like it. Launch this mission, bring down the console and enter, in example: r_ambientGamma 1.2 The mission suddenly is a tad brighter and the light gem and gui/hud elements remain unaltered. Mind you, r_ambientGamma is persistent: you have to set it back to 1 when you are done with the mission, otherwise it stays at 1.2.

I'm having micro-stutter framerate issues on this mission. Once per second or so, stutter. They started in the areas leading up to the , and have persisted ever since. Once every second or so, the framerate stutters. I gave up on the mission for a long time as a result because it became frustrating to play. Only way to fix is to save frequently and re-load the last saved game... whereby I can only go another minute or two before it starts stuttering again. If you don't re-load, the stutters just progressively get more and more severe. I've tested everything I can think of. Lowered all graphics settings to very low or off, including anti-aliasing, textures, LODs, shadows, soft shadows, parallax mapping, V-Sync, FPS cap, ambient occlusion, bloom, max FPS, field of view, and so on. Also tried going from Borderless to Fullscreen, and messing with some of the audio settings, as well. Other thoughts are appreciated. This map is the first and only time I've seen this issue. Feels like maybe a memory leak of some sort, but I don't know. I tried to leverage the following thread, but I don't see "autexec.cfg" existing in the darkmod directory anymore:

I haven't played the latest entry in the Lieutenant series yet but I am looking forward to it On the subject of darkness (or lack of depending on preferences) players shouldn't rely on brightness and gamma since it impacts everything, including gui/hud elements. Increasing brightness and/or gamma too much makes the game look ugly. Since the Tone mapping initiative by @Arcturus and @stgatilov got panned by our most exquisite members perhaps the right solution is an in-game ambient slider players can raise or lower at will in tiny increments. This slider must be dynamic and respect (mapper's) changes between different zones. I would probably place such slider somewhere in the inventory screen. When players click on the slider the inventory fades out to facilitate the adjustment. The slider has a visible mark somewhere pointing to the map's default ambient, that way players can tell where they are vs author's intentions. A different version of the r_ambientGamma cvar would be required. The new cvar should reset when switching missions or closing the game.

Not only fan missions, all three official missions (Training , New Job and St. Lucia) have different ambient so yeah, ditch it.

I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.

Lol, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. Yes I remember when it was a Doom 3 mod... I also remember running it on a Radeon HD 4670 and thinking things would significantly improve over the years performance wise. As far as I can tell, things haven't improved near as much as I had hoped, if anything some of the missions/added fx are far more demanding than ever. While I can still appreciate it for what it is, this tired old claim that one can't criticize something that is free doesn't make any sense. I admit that my initial criticisms were a little over the top/rude, after a night of drinking and frustration, but that doesn't mean I won't suggest improvements. I mean if someone left a pile of trash on your lawn, would you say "oh boy free trash!", not that this mod is trash but you get the point. There isn't much I can do about the environment size problem, though I find the LOD settings do actually help quite a bit with that. All I can suggest is alternative shaders and antialiasing techniques. For shaders it seems MXAO offers better performance and an up to date implementation, but there are many other Reshade shaders available that can do a good job of ambient occlusion and global illumination with minimal performance cost. TurboGI for example is built to run on anything, and I've also had good results with Large Scale Perceptual Obscurance. For anti-aliasing you really want to be using DLAA or DLDSR (pretty much the same Nvidia tech). Or some other form of a.i based supersampling available from modern AMD/Intel cards. If that's not an option you can at least enhance the in game aa with the MFAA setting in the Nvidia Control panel, and apply some SMAA via reshade. Beyond that I am not a developer, so I can only point toward other projects that have much better performance. Not all of them professional/corporate projects either, just consider what some devs have done with mods like OpenMW, Oblivion Reloaded, Community Shaders, Daggerfall Unity and the Dream mod. We're talking massive open environments with soft shadows and many other rendering techniques. I just find it difficult to believe that shadows can't have soft fuzzy edges without absolutely tanking performance, but maybe the engine really is that bad at doing shadow masking/filtering. If the engine really is so un-salvageable though are there not other options available these days that could provide a much better experience going forward? Cryengine perhaps, or whatever OpenMW is using?

My new mission, A Night in Altham, is available. We are already up to version 2! @Dave the Tafferfound an problem that deserves a fix, so here is version 2: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/y4r1dmziuq6clh2im3qz1/altham2.pk4?rlkey=m3cv5v6v70lxbc9xha61nuxoj&dl=1. I will ask @nbohr1more to update the databases. A special thanks to JackFarmer for several pieces of custom ambient music. They "complete" the mission, providing a unique feel to its locations. Also thanks to the many beta testers (jaxa, Shadow, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, thebigh, datiswous, Mezla, MirceaKitsune, Melchior, Acolytesix, TheUnbeholden, prjames, Bergante). Thanks to @peter_spy for his beautiful Builder Compound assets. This is a large mission, so be ready to take some time. I recommend that you do named saves occasionally (I actually implemented auto-saves for this mission, but it was causing crashes on Linux, so I removed it). This mission has a lot of keys, so it implements a key management mechanism. Keys are removed from the game when no longer needed. This includes when you use a key to open a door, or if you pick a door/lock that also uses a key. Most keys are automatically removed, but there are a couple that aren't (for example, if they open up more than one door). In a certain area, this mission uses the Keyhole Peek feature of TDM. Typically, this is when you lean forward (F key) into a door keyhole and you can see into the next room. But in this case you don't lean into a keyhole. It's a hole of another kind. It's an unconventional use of something that isn't used a lot in TDM; hopefully the mission context will make it clear when to use it. The mission does not use Keyhole Peek for regular doors. Be aware, there is a known problem on Linux, where the peek feature can cause a crash. Peeking is not required for mission completion. This has been tested on TDM 2.11a and the current dev build of 2.12 (dev16854-10518). Scary things warning: Difficulty settings make a difference. Things that are affected by the difficulty level: Enjoy!

Thanks, I'll have a look. Regarding the dark ambient, could just be that we have different monitors, with different gamma etc. I noticed the gamma and brightness in Dark Mod is a bit off as well, as I have a monitor with nearly perfect gamma, and, I need to set gamma to about 0.9, and brightness to about 0.8, which pretty much makes it perfect with the Training mission. Logically, a monitor with perfect, or nearly perfect gamma, shouldn't need any ingame adjustment. Unless the ingame settings were calibrated with a monitor with non perfect gamma. There are quite a few games now which look perfect in terms of gamma/brightness, and, I don't have to adjust anything, but, there are such games as well where I need to adjust it.

I do usually have my ambient a bit darker than usual. I find the 'standard' is too bright and, to borrow a term frequently used here, 'immersion breaking'. There is no reason increasing the gamma shouldn't help though. But... feedback acknowledged. @chakkman if you're still stuck:

And that's MY point, is that it is indeed quite demanding once you turn on any of the hacked in fx or try to use AA, as demanding as many much more modern better looking games. Also 4k isn't super demanding in comparably older titles, it's not the resolution itself that tanks performance, it's the overflow of the vram buffer. I'm playing through Tony Hawk's Underground right now @4k with several demanding shaders (mxao, ambient light), 60fps and barely topping %50 gpu usage. No soft shadows sure, but the game looks pretty good with all of those fancy shaders, and came out around the same time. Yes I only have 6gb vram to work with, but the 3060ti only has 8. I fail to see what this engine is doing that requires so much wasted vram. Perhaps it simply isn't implementing performance optimizations that would normally be in play at 4k, like scaling the resolution of effects independently from render resolution. I'm happy to discuss performance optimizations, but I'd prefer to do so with someone who actually knows what I'm talking about, not someone who is going to repeatedly announce that I'm not using a 4k card, which is obviously dependent on the content being rendered.

That's not what I'm saying at all. It's still an old engine at baseline. Maybe IDtech just isn't all that efficient overall, but I've seen other devs do some incredible work with it. For example, it's easier to run Dishonored 2 on my hardware than Dark Mod with all the bells and whistles, and I think we can all agree Dishonored 2 looks better and does a better job rendering open environments without performance drops. The way these effects have been added is more like Oblivion Reloaded, or ENB, though perhaps Oblivion Reloaded is a bad example because it actually runs quite well in comparison. They are not well optimized, particularly the shadow and antialiasing code, I've yet to even test volumetrics. The Ambient Occlusion method looks like crap compared to newer methods used in MXAO (reshade) or RTAO (Nvidia), and is quite a performance hog in it's own right. It's nice to have options sure, but there are simply far better options available via external methods. It's fine though, I'll just turn off the fancy effects and enjoy all the great fan created content, just would have been nice to know what I was getting into/what all should have been disabled by default.

Indeed like you said TDM engine is not outdated, at lest not like the original Doom 3 engine is. Yes is not using PBR and nanite and raytracing and all that new Unreal Engine 5 stuff that makes it a very fast engine ... not ... but the TDM engine has a ton of updates, above the original idtech4 engine from Doom 3, IMO has now more in common with idTech 5 than idTech4. And all done by a very tiny team of TDM players, with the necessary knowhow, on their free time, for absolute free. Man some people don't deserve to get nice things for free... And I'm not talking about you datiswous. To anyone wondering, here is some of the things TDM engine has above original idTech4 that I'm aware: - soft stencil shadows like Wolfenstein 2009 (original is hard stencil shadows only). - new shadow system using shadow maps. - volumetric lighting (aka god rays). - more advanced AI system (so more CPU heavy). - GLSL shaders support and OpenGL 3.x akin to D3D10/11 level, (original is OGL 2.0 akin to d3d9 level and uses ARB assembly shaders only). - modern multicore support (original is single core only). - unlocked framerate (original is locked at 60hz) - 64bits color support - Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - Parallax Occlusion Mapping And a ton of more changes, like LOD support, obj models support, improved gui system, improved scripting system, better window system with support for high dpi monitors and 16 by 9 and other screen ratios, etc, etc. None of these changes were easy to make and took years of hard work, again for free, for a free game that we wall consume without paying a dime. IMO the lest some people can do, is respect that! Enough said.

Not around ambient I don't think. Other people had issues because of missing 2.13 materials though. Maybe @Jnon used a darker ambient as well? Either way it shouldn't be problematic. Do you have screenshots to share or anything?

I know this is not the right thread for my question but I didn't want to read through the mission's threads for an answer. Why are the 2 newest missions pitch black?? Like there is no ambient light at all ... it makes playing a lot less fun ... Thought it was only 1 mission but both have the same so I guess it has something to do with new lighting system or something? Question is: how to get "normal" ambient light back?

The Adventures of Thomas: Lucy's Quest Author: gg 2022-06-20 Version: 1.1 Required TDM Version: 2.10 or higher EFX: Yes ============================================================== Cautionary note: This FM needs a strong CPU/GPU combination sufficient to play the more demanding TDM FMs. Just as for many or most of the new FMs being released with the new gfx possibilities opened up it does a world of good to tweak the advanced video settings for the best combination of settings for your PC. For example, on my weaker laptop I set shadows as stencil and soft shadows off. On my desktop I set shadows as maps and soft shadows medium. Bloom off. Ambient occlusion off. Since the FM was built and extensively tested at these settings I believe either should produce a satisfactory experience. ============================================================== Sound Credits: freemusicarchive.org music Aislinn04_-_Aislinn_-_Lovely_Maria freesound.org klankbeeld_horror_1 freesound.org/people/CarlosCarty/sounds/522687/ om_aum_mantra_male_chant_bb freesound.org/people/Still%20Frames/sounds/37720/ still_frames freemusicarchive.org music The_Mind_Orchestra_Bruwynn tecknic.bandcamp.com/album/the-dark-mod-ambience-and-atmospheres Zack Bower Ancient_2, _3, _5. Solemn_1 freesound.org/people/Jagadamba/sounds/256006/ group_chanting_om_aum ============================================================== Thanks to: The TDM/DR developers for producing such a beautiful machine. The keepers of the wiki pages which are looking very good these days. Sotha for his invaluable tutorial "The Bakery Job". This tutorial is a jewel. Springheel for creating an atmosphere. Bikerdude for... ideas how to do things and scale things. Playtesters and advisors Dragofer, wesp5, datiswous, shadow. datiswous pointed out some immersion breaking lighting faults, so I got the idea. wesp5 gave me some good advice on how to tell the story - so it's more understandable. Dragofer gave me some early advice on optimizing the mission, which gave me a couple of months work with results that are well worth it. Dragofer wrote a script which optimizes CPU calculations of AI interactions. Shadow helped by testing the script, as well as testing other attempts at optimization. With the script in action only the minimal of AI interactions in the player's vicinity are called to be calculated. The script provides a general benefit but the results vary from computer to computer. The script targets a CPU task. ============================================================== Gameplay: Notes attached to objectives contain essential information on gameplay, on who the good/bad guys are, on what the player must do, and why. Mandatory objectives are linear, directing the player along a route to the goal. Optional objectives can be completed anytime. ============================================================== CAUTION: spiders, rats, undead, necrophiles, cannibals, psychotic thugs, and some generally unsavory characters. No snakes, though. The spiders ate them. ==============================================================

============== -= IRIS =- ============== WELLINGTONCRAB TDM v 2.11 REQ Ver. 1.3 *For Maureen* -=- "Carry the light of the Builder, Brother. Unto its end." -Valediction of the Devoted "What year is this? Am I dreaming?" -Plea of the Thief Dear Iris, I am old and broken. When we were young it felt like the words came easily. Now I find the ink has long dried on the pen and I'm as wanting for words as coin in my purse. I can tell we are nearing the end of the tale; time enough for one more job before the curtain call... ============== -Installation- Requires minimum version of TDM 2.11 **Dev build dev17056-10800 (2.13) fixes several visual effects which have been broken in the mission since the release of 2.11. For that reason playing with that version or later is currently recommended** -Iris does not support mods or the Unofficial Patch- Download and place the following .pk4 into you FMs directory: Iris Download ============== *Thank you for playing. Iris is a large mission which can either take as quickly or as long as you are compelled to play. I hope someone out there enjoys it and this initial release is not completely busted - I tried the best I could!* *Iris both is and isn't what it seems. If commenting please use spoiler tags where appropriate. If you are not certain if it would be appropriate a good assumption would be to use a spoiler tag* *Support TDM by rating missions on Thief Guild: https://www.thiefguild.com/* ============== WITH LASTING GRATITUDE: OBSTORTTE - Whose gameplay scripts from his thread laid the foundation which made the mission seem like something I could even pull off at all. Also fantastic tutorial videos! DRAGOFER - Who built upon that foundation and made it shine even brighter! And whom also provided immeasurable quantities of help and encouragement the past couple years on the TDM discord. ORBWEAVER & GIGAGOOGA - For generously offering their ambient music up for use. EPIFIRE - Who lent me his fine trash and trash receptacle models. AMADEUS - Who was the first person who wasn't me to play the damn thing and provided his excellent editorial services to improving the readers experience playing TESTERS AND TROUBLESHOOTERS: AMADEUS * DATISWOUS * SPOOKS * ALUMINUMHASTE * JAXA * JACKFARMER * WESP5 * ATE0ATE * MADTAFFER * STGATILOV * DRAGOFER * KINGSAL * KLATREMUS - What can I possibly say? Playing this thing over and over again could not have been easy. Deepest thanks and all apologies. -=THANKS TO ALL ON THE TDM DISCORD AND FORUM=- ==SEE README.TXT FOR ADDITIONAL ATTRIBUTIONS & INFORMATION== HONORABLE MENTION: GOLDWELL - If I hadn't by chance stumbled into Northdale back in 2018/2019 I would probably still be trying to get this thing to work in TDS, which means it probably would not exist - though more details on that in readme. ============== Boring Technical Information: *Iris is a performance intensive mission and I recommend a GTX 1060 or equivalent. I find the performance similar to other demanding TDM missions on my machine, but mileage may vary and my apologies if this prevents anyone from enjoying the mission.* *Iris heavily modifies the behavior of AI in the game, how they relate/respond to each other and the player. So they may act even stranger than they do typically in TDM. Feedback on this is useful - as it can potentially be improved and expanded upon in future patches.* -=- This is my first release and it has been a long time coming! If I forgot anything please let me know! God Speed. 2.10 Features Used:

Hello, my name is Wolfmond, I am 41 years old and I come from Northern Germany. I am your new member. In my youth I played Thief: The Dark Project with great enthusiasm. Recently I discovered and started playing The Dark Mod and I am very happy that there is still an active community around this beautiful game. I am especially interested in level design and creating my own campaigns. In my spare time I like to walk around, record sounds (field recording), make dark ambient and experimental music, and code. My dark ambient music is available for free at https://wolfmond.bandcamp.com I'm currently working through the Youtube Tutorial from @Springheel and I'm really enjoying learning level design. I look forward to getting in touch with you and contributing my skills to the community. Best regards, Wolfmond ___________________________________ Hallo Ich heiße Wolfmond, bin 41 Jahre alt und komme aus Norddeutschland. Ich bin euer Neuzugang. In meiner Jugend habe ich mit großer Begeisterung Thief: The Dark Project gespielt. Vor kurzem habe ich The Dark Mod entdeckt und begonnen zu spielen und bin beigestert, dass es immer noch eine aktive Community um dieses schöne Spiel gibt. Mich interessiert vor allem das Leveldesign und die Erstellung eigener Kampagnen. In meiner Freizeit gehe ich gerne durch die Gegend, nehme Geräusche auf (Field Recording), mache Dark Ambient und und Experimentelle Musik, und programmiere gerne. Meine Dark Ambient Musik gibt es kostenlos auf https://wolfmond.bandcamp.com Aktuell arbeite ich das Tutorial von @Springheel durch und habe große Freude daran, Leveldesign zu lernen. Ich freue mich darauf, mit euch in Kontakt zu sein und meine Fähigkeiten in die Community mit einfließen zu lassen. Viele Grüße, Wolfmond

Hrm I wasn't able to type on *after* the spoiler and accidentally already submitted the reply.. (Does this forum somewhere have a raw mode where you type text with tags around them or something instead of this broken WYSIWYG editor?) Anyway, what I was gonna add: This was a great mission and I already played Away1 - I'm really looking forward to Away2, want to see how the story goes on

This post differentiates between "gratis" ("at no monetary cost") and "libre" ("with little or no restriction") per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre * A libre version of TDM could: ** Qualify TDM for an article on the LibreGameWiki *** TDM is currently listed as rejected https://libregamewiki.org/Libregamewiki:Rejected_games_list because "Media is non-commercial (under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0). The engine is free though (modified Doom 3) (2013-10-19)" ** Qualify for software repositories like Debian *** TDM is currently listed as unsuitable https://wiki.debian.org/Games/Unsuitable#The_Dark_Mod because 1) "The gamedata is very large (2.3 GB)", and 2) "The license of the gamedata (otherwise it must go into non-free with the engine into contrib)" and links to https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/LICENSE.txt Questions: 1) tdm_installer.linux64 is 4.2 MB (unzipped), which is far from the 2.3 GB which is said to be too large. Yes, the user can use it to download data that is non-libre, but so can any web browser too. If the installer itself is completely libre, does anyone know the reason why it cannot be accepted into the Debian repository? 2) If adding the installer to the repository is not a viable solution, would it be possible to package the engine with a small and beginner friendly mission built only from libre media/gamedata into a "TDM-libre" release, and add user friendly functionality to download the 2.3 GB media/gamedata using "TDM-libre" (similar to mission downloading)? 3) Would such a "TDM-libre" release be acceptable for the Debian repository? 4) Would such a "TDM-libre" release be acceptable for LibreGameWiki? 5) Would the work be worth it? * Pros: Exposure in channels covering libre software (e.g. the LibreGameWiki). Distribution in channels allowing only libre software (e.g. the Debian repository). * Cons: The work required for the modifictions and release of "TDM-libre". Possible maintenance of "TDM-libre". I'm thinking that the wider reach may attract more volunteers to work on TDM, which may eventually make up for this work and hopefully be net positive. 6) Are there any TDM missions that are libre already today? If not, would anyone be willing to work on one to fulfill this? I'll contribute in any way I can. 7) I found the following related topics on the forum: * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/16226-graphical-installers-for-tdm/ (installing only the updater) * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/16640-problems-i-had-with-tdm-installation-on-linux-w-solutions/ (problems with installation on Linux) * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17743-building-tdm-on-debian-8-steamos-tdm-203/ (Building TDM on Debian 8 / SteamOS) * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18592-debian-packaging/ (Dark Radiant) ... but if there are other related previous discussions, I'd appreciate any links to them. Any thoughts or comments?

In order to thank the team (and other mappers) for their relentless efforts in contributing, I hereby give the community.... Ulysses: Genesis A FM By Sotha Story: Read & listen it in game. Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwR0ORZU5sraTlJ6ZHlYZ1pJRVE/edit?usp=sharing http://www4.zippysha...95436/file.html Other: Spoilers: When discussing, please use spoiler tags, like this: [spoiler] Hidden text. [/spoiler] Mirrors: Could someone put this on TDM ingame downloader? Thanks!

Ulysses 2: Protecting the Flock By Sotha The mission starts some time after the events of Ulysses: Genesis, and continues the story of Ulysses. It is a medium sized mission with a focus on stealthy assassinations and hostage liberation. BUILD TIME: 12/2014 - 05/2015 CREDITS The TDM Community is thanked for steady supply of excellent mapping advice. Thanks goes also to everyone contributing to TDM! Voice Actors: Goldwell (as Goubert and Ulysses), Goldwell's Girlfriend (as Alis) Betatesters: Airship Ballet, Ryan101. Special Thanks to: Springheel and Melan (for proofreading). Story: Read & listen it in game. Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwR0ORZU5sraRGduUWlVRmtsX3c/view?usp=sharing Other: Spoilers: When discussing, please use spoiler tags, like this: [spoiler] Hidden text. [/spoiler] Mirrors: Could someone put this on TDM ingame downloader? Thanks!

The ambient in mine is a bit darker than 'normal' but it's not pitch black. I'm not sure why this would matter, but are you using TDM 2.13?

If it's the ambient I'm thinking of, I think it fits the dreary, rainy atmosphere quite well but that's just my opinion . I do agree however that that particular sound shader is too loud. I'll make a note for the next update. You probably already know this but you can turn down the ambient volume in the menu. I typically have mine set to about 50% (even for more normal ambient).