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About halfway through the level as we speak. Damn, son. You've got some serious design chops @Wellingtoncrab. I'm wondering if you've always just done this as a hobby or if you're at a studio somewhere, and if you have any other work visible online. The scene lighting and architecture is excellent, the writing, the loot placement, etc... Feels like The Painter's Wife 2.0 as others have said. Hoping you'll give us more in the future.

I've played through this a few times so I'm familiar with the architecture & I have a good idea where a lot of things are, if I had to hunt & search it'd be a lot harder Thank you for the tip, I'm looking in the wrong place

The spoiler tags aren't for you, it's for the rest of us reading this thread so WE don't get spoiled. Thanks for spoiling the frobbable book on a shelf for the rest of us. EDIT: I'll be unsubscribing to this thread to avoid further spoilers. Maybe I'll check back after I've finished the mission Amadeus

Interesting, although I'm not sure what to make of that. One of my favorite games (The Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena) was published by Atari, and, they don't even seem to care to keep the activation servers running much. Or remove/change the copy protection, which doesn't work at all on Windows 11. I really hope that Nightdive delivers at the end of May... I'm not one of the shit storm crowd (it's absolutely horrible on the Steam forums...), but, 7 years of development is a long time, and delaying the release obviously has become a bit of a habit, to say the least.

A little preview of the ongoing work: Since 2.11 has some major changes to shader architecture, I had to rebuild my design. In addition to restoring all my basic features, I gave considerable thought about how finicky and full of fudge factors my last design was. For the longest time, I have been unhappy about what I call the "velvet effect" on diffuse surfaces. This seems to happen because the original design has the fresnel multiplied by the diffuse. I went to great lengths to achieve the following conditions: 1) Set a dry looking default fresnel for diffuse textures 2) Make specular fresnel match the look of the specular reflections from above 3) Don't make everything shiny ( an issue that was caused by fresnel in 1.03 due to a default minimum boost in specular to everything ) 4) Avoid the velvet effect Happily, I have achieved all the goals and then some. How did it do it? Like some of my earlier designs, there are two different fresnel equations for specular vs diffuse. Diffuse has a hard-coded low power constant which spreads the effect wide over surfaces rather than being a rim effect The specular fresnel power value is initially high but is multiplied by the specular texture causing shinier values to have tighter fresnel that looks more like specular How did I apply the fresnel effect to diffuse without multiplying it or causing the velvet effect? I multiplied the diffuse fresnel by 1.0 minus the specular texture ( inversion ). This caused all the shiny areas to remain dark but brightened low or no specular areas. This still was too foggy when added to the top of surfaces so I then also multiplied the results from the inverted specular pass with an inverted diffuse map. This cause the effect to retain most of the diffuse features without becoming too high contrast or causing neutral textures to glow. Finally, probably the biggest change was that I was able to adapt one of stgatilov's changes to make the entire underside of structures darker the way it used to be in 1.03. This has a dramatic improvement to scenes like the one above. Here are the 2.11 files ( currently requires building from SVN source ). I will attempt to back-port my improvements to the 2.10 shader a little later. tdm_interaction.glsl interaction.ambient.fs.glsl Since the new dev build is out ( dev16617-10107 ) here is a pack file to place in your darkmod dev build folder: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/211-alpha-dev-build-fresnel-mod Edit: Woo! I got the down-shading to work in 2.10: vec4 worldN2 = normalize( params[var_DrawId].modelMatrix * vec4(N, 0) ) ; vec3 worldL2 = vec3(0, 0, 1); float NdotL2 = dot(worldN2.xyz, worldL2); float downshading2 = min (( NdotL2 + 1.38 ), 1.0 ) ; gotta cleanup the rest of the shader design and I'll post a new version.

I've got most of the way through this mission and can definitely see the "Grayman quality" at work. Unique and consistent architecture with a mission-specific distinctive look, and a layout that makes sense. However I am stuck because I have only found two of the poetry books — despite clearing out the entire castle, knocking out every AI, and looking inside every container I can see, I still cannot find volume 2 anywhere.

Actually the settings were not solely introduced due to the varying sensivity over different missions. In some they were super sensitive, in others they were almost deaf. This is due to mission authors sticking to the default acuity settings despite the fact that different level architecture leads to different average distances between player and ai. The majority of the team members back then however decided it should be up the players to make those adjustments. It might be used for other purposes now, but that was not the intention. That is indeed a bug then. Will look into it. That's odd. The calculations performed to determine whether the indication animation should be played and the ones performed when actually performing the blackjack are the same. I'll look into it. You misunderstood the point I was trying to make. Knocking out ai is a fundamental gameplay aspect. It might be true that performing this is more challenging in TDM than it was in Thief, but it should still be possible. That you have to alter gameplay settings for this to work is not desireable. (I'll see if I can dig up the discussion, as it's been a few years.) EDIT: I've corrected my statement regarding the acuity sliders. I couldn't find the discussion regarding the ai too sensitive vs. ai too dumb, but I know we had it once (caused by a review of TDM). Another thread was about that it is too easy to kill ai, another that the ai could be more challenging. It all boils down to that TDM was designed as a more challenging experience, but as this caused the game to take more time for unexperienced players to get into it, the idea arose that it would be great to have dozens of different difficulty sliders. The major issue with blackjacking though was that players have problems with properly hitting the enemy, not necessarely with them beeing to sensitive. So although those settings obviously affect blackjacking, too, that's not the main reason for them to be introduced. None of this is relevant here, though, as the changes made do not affect the acuity. So whether or not you are able to approach the ai is untouched by this, but what happens once you try to take them out is what should have changed. If you perform a blackjack attack said attack should succeed if all conditions are met (as far as judgeable by the player). It shouldn't fail because you hit a part of the body you wasn't even aiming for. The blackjack should not get hung up on level geometry that isn't even in you field of view during your attack or only at the edge of the screen (the typical ceiling beam issue). The indication is for new players to help them get a feeling on when a blackjack attempt should work. I guess experienced players would turn it of either way. We have to see whether we get it to work in a relyable way. If it is causing more confusion then aid it can be removed (it's only an extra, nothing that needs to be added).

Personally I think this is the worst idea ever. The Reason forums has LOADS of info and knowledge, built up through years and years. I'm really sad to see it go away, and I can't understand why they've made this decision. https://www.propellerheads.se/forum/showthread.php?p=1579099#poststop

Welcome to the New Mappers Workshop! This is a communal workshop for new mappers who have never made a TDM mission before. Each week or two I will make a tutorial video and help to guide everyone through the process of creating a small, complete mission. I'm hoping the participants will feel free to ask questions, no matter how small--we're all here to learn from and encourage each other. Since I expect this thread to get fairly busy, I'm going to be heavy-handed about removing off-topic content. ====================================================================================================================================================================== Lessons often include links or other written instructions; direct links to the lessons are collected below: Lesson 1: Planning http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=407999 Lesson 2: Visportals http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=408253 Lesson 3: Your First Room http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=408484 Lesson 4: Decorating Your Rooms http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=408785 Lesson 5: Connecting Your Rooms http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=409215 Lesson 6: Outdoor "Rooms" http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=409322 Lesson 7: Creating Doors http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=409547 Lesson 8: Functional Props (ie, entities) http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=409731 Lesson 9: Immersive Details (sound/particles) http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=410258 Lesson 10: Advanced Brushwork (ladders/water) http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=410667 Lesson 11: AI http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/?p=411192

Not only that, the architecture is wrong for the area as well. Just look at buildings in southern France! Unless this alternate world has a whole different climate, in which case the area would look different too of course... P.S.: There is a saying here in Germany that goes "Was nicht passend ist, wird passend gemacht." or "What does not fit is made to fit." in English. Therefore I will replace the France maps with England maps in the patch.

I never spend much thought about that, I only replaced two maps that pretty much show that Bridgeport is in southern France with old maps of England on which you can hardly see anything, least of all the exact location of Bridgeport. In my opinion this makes the world much more consistent and does not change other details, as like you say, Menoa could be Ireland and the moors could be from Spain. These are less consistency problems to me than the climate, the architecture and the language. If you don't want those maps changed in your mission just don't use the patch. Otherwise I could also make it so, that in your missions the old maps are used if you provide me with a list of affected missions...

When I tried your .exe, I got this: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21477-water-effects-not-rendered-through-warp-glass/&do=findComment&comment=475732 You also suggested trying the 'latest development build'. I asked if that can be obtained using tdm_installer, and you said 'yes'. That's what I reported here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21477-water-effects-not-rendered-through-warp-glass/&do=findComment&comment=475856 So - I am probably doing something wrong but not sure what

Springheel did already create a lot of double architecture models and added entries to fixup.txt (thanx! but they were accidentily commented out. Now I did remove the comment signs and checked that we indeed have both files. There are twe exceptions: #models/darkmod/architecture/castle/castlepillar.lwo => models/darkmod/architecture/pillars/pillar01.lwo #models/darkmod/architecture/castle/castlepillarbig.lwo => models/darkmod/architecture/pillars/pillarbig.lwo The first is a double entry, on the second the new file doesn't exist. Now we need to: * rerun fixup.txt on maps again. I can do this easily on the test maps, but need permission on the other maps * remove the double files. I got a script for it already, but I need permission to do so as it can break not-yet-fixed maps.

Got the controller working perfectly with TDM! The issue appears to be that joysticks based on the older D-input architecture aren't recognized by our engine: You need to use the X-input (xbox controller) architecture. Currently there's a bug in the Linux kernel module which causes the controlled to not be initialized accordingly and require a script to fix after it's plugged in; With this script I can successfully use my new gamepad to play TheDarkMod on Manjaro Linux

Above 3 items are released now, on the "Barks" thread: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21740-english-subtitles-for-ai-barks/&do=findComment&comment=483331

Instead of that, you could, in that time period, start learning your own missions and in doing so become more active on the forums, learning from others. It's also great to understand how things work in the engine, when you play. It might spoil some immersion though.. Or learn to build games with other engines, like Godot for example.

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake? And thank god they got rid of unity, that engine is total trash garbage on anything over 60 fps. Just spend 5 minutes on steam forums for Unity project games, and there's just thousands of people complaining about poor performance, stuttering etc.

Played this mission on medium level and enjoyed it very much! Don't let my comments disappoint you, this is only minor stuff from perfectionist's perspective. The architecture of the city is very clever and credible, however I actually missed a bath tub and perfume table in the mansion. It might be behind the fixed door in the mansion In some readables Pell Street is mentioned, but it's not on the map. Is it outside the ward and inaccessible? Or did I just miss a street sign somewhere? I stumbled upon the hidden safe I could not frob it at all. No (denial) sounds with the lockpicks, tried all keys, but none interacted. Very annoying! Reading this thread I seem to be the only one experiencing this, as it hasn't been mentioned before. I suppose it might be an incidental bug then. Another bug I encountered in the mansion. In this thread the Detective Challenge is mentioned, but I can't remember reading about it in-game, for example in the objectives list. Did I miss something, or is it just Furthermore, I did not understand why I could pick up the loan paper As mentioned before, it was a bit disappointing I couldn't liberate