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-> https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/13-music-sfx/

I mentioned this in the improvements thread - https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/11058-things-that-could-be-improved/page/95/#comment-473534 Bright readables in a game that is 99% darkness literally burns my eyes.

@HMart, you took issue with me saying: This was my summary of what I thought you meant in these post fragments from a forum linked to by Ref 10 (namely, https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20100-idtech-4-gui-scripting/#comment-439778 )... I see I probably shouldn't have added the "[as float parameters]" to the ambiguous "as well" phrase, and perhaps "recommended TDM try" is too strong. Overall, would this be better? "In Ref 10, it is noted that in transition statements, a 4-value color vector must be either a literal or (less reliably) a definevec4. Using a #defined macro for the color vector won't work currently... an idea for a future improvement?" EDIT - I see that a broader revision was needed. So changed to this in https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=GUI_Scripting:_TDM_vs_Doom_3,_Quake_4 ====transition 4-6 parameters==== Often, transition statements have a pair of 4-value color vectors as their 2nd & 3rd parameters. As the discussion in [[GUI Scripting: References & Resources | Ref 10]] indicates, each vector is traditionally represented by a double-quoted literal: transition "matcolor" "1, 1, 1, 0" "1, 1, 1, 0.8" "300" This was id Studio's preferred method, but using a definevec4 user variable was a possible alternative. In addition, TDM can #define colors for transitions. Unfortunately, due to syntax differences, for a particular color, it is not possible to create a single #define that would work with both properties and transitions; thus: #define INACTIVE_COLOR 0,0,0,0.50 #define SINACTIVE_COLOR "0 0 0 0.50" See [[GUI Scripting: Preprocessor Directives]] for further examples. (Possible future improvement: Changing TDM's parsing to let a transition also accept color vectors with commas.) See also the discussion above about 4vect properties and _x, _y, _z, _w suffixes.

Recently I started listing the Abandoned Works on a wiki page. Looking through some of the project folders I encountered assets that were posted on the forum years ago (for example this fish), but I never read about them before. I don't think the forum is good for listing assets, it's off course good for discussing. So I was wondering maybe it's an idea to make a list of game assets, including scripts, centered in one place? Knowing the assets exists, people are able to find it on the forums (placing direct links on the wiki page will get outdated). I might have to ask people for permission.

For a while, I've been researching the under-documented GUI scripting language and writing up a new wiki series about it. Fruits of this labor can be seen here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=GUI_Scripting_Language As time, interest, and need allows, I hope people will it check parts of it out. It is certainly possible that I didn't get everything right; feedback can be offered here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21642-feedback-on-wiki-gui-scripting-language-series/ Thanks

Its a mission, I really want to like; but has a great many flaws I can't overlook. Mega-Giant Architecture; for 3 Meter tall people. (everywhere, not just the giant sized mansion!) Out-of-Order objective completion (not a flaw; just mabey missing scripting?), before its issued! A little TOO much back-tracking (all those objectives, and optional ones) There are good parts to it; its still certainly playable - and has unique pagan theme that IIRC hasn't been done anywhere else. I can't really fault having piles of readables - just any time a illegible handwriting font is used! (especially for objective related stuff!) Perhaps it could have been re-worked into 2 or 3 smaller maps, once a section is 'complete'? Good ideas, I haven't seen done elsewhere: 3D map with paths (mabey use a grayscale filter on it next time? for a more hand-painted look...YMMV) The whole Interesting distractions, implemented imperfectly; but still worth a look... Revisiting old areas... In short my rating: Play it if you've played everything else, its OK.

Gosh.. Since when did the image upload in the forums stop working... Anyway.. I tried out the new view setup - thanks a lot for all the advices. I positioned a little "attribute bar" to the right. So as soon I select an entity I can see its spawnargs. However what did not matter as it opened as a new window before does come to light now that it is just a small bar: The size of the spawnargs view is really small and there's lots of empty space that could be used for it instead - however I cannot enlarge the attribute / value part of the window - it just stays by a few rows. Maybe I'm doing something wrong - maybe it is a possible new feature in the next update - here is the screenshot: https://ibb.co/PcSmFT2

Thanks, I can also recommend gog galaxy. The idea of the custom tags is really nice, I'll have to try this out too!

DarkRadiant 3.5.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: More customisable layout, all windows and panes can be dragged and arranged Layouts like Embedded, Regular and Splitpane are superseded and have been removed Tweak: The LayerControlPanel's tooltip popup is now less annoying Tweak: Clarify distinction between Shadow render mode and other render modes Fixed: Show/hide Light Volumes for combined entities inconsistent Fixed: Currently applied particleDef not selected in Particle Selector Fixed: Layer visibility checkbox not reacting to double-clicks Fixed: Cannot toggle visibility of layers in Linux Fixed: Drag-and-dropping layers is not working in Linux Feature: Customisable Layout (click to see the videos) Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.5.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

1. If you want to use custom work (sound, models, textures) from released missions, best thing is to ask the author if he/she agrees. So far, Sotha is the only one who permits unlimited usage of his custom work (he expressed that here on the forums). He just wants to be credited. 2. If mission authors from released maps are not available anymore, then I do not know what to do. @Dragofer@nbohr1more: Any suggestions? I would say, that's the same situation as described above, just replace "released mission" with "abandoned work". As for my released work, feel free to use whatever you want.

Also, fllood isn't active on the forums a lot it seems, so maybe another person can give authorisation when @fllood isn't around? Just an idea. I guess I could pm this to fllood. Edit:

Would be interesting to also see a shot of the mission in DR too for mappers to get a better idea of how much there is and how dense (brush, patch and entity counts would be good too). @Baal Have you tried sending a PM to fllood? Simply pinging them with @ only gives them a notification when they log into the forums, while a PM will also get sent to their email.

Hello! I just joined the forums to report an annoying bug. I don't know if it's specific to this map or just a game bug but I have played most of the other missions and this is a first for me. Before i picked up the key to the junkroom i tried to open the door and i got the "needs junkroom key" message on my screen... but that message never went away. I had to complete the mission with that on my screen the entire time, overlaying all the other messages that appear. a reload/restart didnt do anything to solve the problem. A few of the on-screen messages at the beginning didn't make sense to me and were kind of cryptic, like a riddle i didn't get. one of them was something about an alarm? otherwise i liked the mission, pretty challenging and I know i missed some spots. cheers

@BaalStill there, nice Performance-wise those visportals will probably not have much of an effect, as they cover most of the screen and therefore don't really block anything off. It is hard to see due to the dark image, but especially the vp on the right looks like it is bigger then the gap left by the architecture, which doesn't make it very useful in regards to performance. As long as you don't tend to add houndrets of visportals in each area, they normally don't decrease performance at least. In regards to sound propagation I would expect them to do their job. You just have to make sure that if there are sufficiently large obstruders in the way (like walls), that the respective areas are seperated via visportals, which appears to be the case here. Pathfinding is not affected by visportals. That is solely handled via worldspawn brushes (unless the material used on them explicitely excludes this behaviour, like for triggers). I hope that helps and next time, a brighter image please

DarkRadiant 3.4.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Allow Layers to be arranged into a Tree Fixed: Readable Editor displays "shader not found" in view Fixed: Undoing snap to grid with prefabs causes crash Fixed: Include doc in building instructions Fixed: Decal textures causes DR to crash - (textures/darkmod/decals/dirt/long_drip_pattern01) Fixed: Skin chooser: double click on materials list closes window Fixed: Selecting and deselecting a filtered child brush through layers leaves the brush selected Fixed: Material editor re-sorts stages on pasting image map resulting in wrong material stages list and wrong selected stage Fixed: Crash on start if engine path is choosen (Doom 3) Feature: Layers can now be arranged to form a hierarchy Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.4.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

It's interesting because I recently read a thread on the Doomworld forums on people's opinions of single-segmenting maps in classic Doom/Doom 2. In other words, playing a map from start to finish without using saves - if you die, you have to replay the entire map. The general consensus was that saves are useful, however there was some merit in there being extra tension and challenge knowing that death couldn't be rewound easily by reloading a save. On the other hand (and speaking as an adult), people have to work and often have limited time for gaming. Having to replay a long map because you died can be quite off-putting and takes the joy out of a game if it happens often enough. Savegames keep the tempo going, keeps the feeling of progress going. Also someone pointed out that starting a map from scratch after a death is kinda like using saves anyway, just a single save at the beginning. You're just being tedious by denying the use of saves in this case. Dunno where I'm going with this. Trying to be diplomatic and say I can see all sides to the discussion.

Making great short-form content is challenging in a way that transcends medium and genre. There are many more full length novels that people would describe as sublime, or life changing than there are short stories which earn the same praise. Likewise for music, movies, and games. The near universality of this phenomenon suggests to me that it is not a lack of skill but a fundamental limitation of information density that biases us in favor of more expansive works... So, yes, the most acclaimed TDM missions also tending to be on the larger side should not be surprising. But with that being said, we should try to recognize shorter experiences of exceptional quality when they occasionally pop up. Case in point, I'd direct any new players to Sir Talbot's Collateral as one of the best stealth experiences I've ever had. This despite being entirely contained to one quite small and mundane townstyle manor-house. The amount of interconnectivity and flow Baal and Biker managed to pack into one 3.5 story building (hardly more than 3 rooms wide and 2 deep) is just astounding. (I should clarify that STC is a small mission, but not necessarily super short, due to high difficulty and some hard-to-access areas, but still a great experience for a very reasonable investment of time.) Something also to keep in mind: It's not impossible to get a great deal of enjoyment, even from a deeply flawed product, if one part of it clicks with the consumer. For instance I really enjoyed no-target and no-clipping around the mission In Remembrance of Him, despite it being nearly unplayable as a Thief/TDM level. The dilapidated Romanesque architecture was super cool, and I was hooked by the unusual story it was trying to tell (despite some questionable twists at the end... and a writing style that screamed for the intervention of a firm-handed editor). I'd actually be as or more interested in having a list of bad levels with some interesting feature--worth checking out--than in another enumeration of the current best-of-the-best. Iris was great. Phenomenal! But it took me the better part of two whole weekends just to get the first ending. I don't have that kind of time right now. Plus I don't expect to see it's like again very soon. A few more mission like In Remembrance of Him that I could buzz around for 30 minutes, seeing some cool sights, would be more my speed. And maybe we could inspire some quick and dirty spiritual successors in the pipeline that would capitalize on the qualities of such missions while dodging their downfalls.

DarkRadiant 3.3.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Remove menu options which are not applicable to current game Feature: Grey-out menu entries that are not applicable Feature: FX Declaration Parsing Support Feature: FX Chooser Feature: Renderer now takes "translucent" keyword into account Fixed: Lighting Mode Renderer draws hidden lights Fixed: Loading map results in "Real Hard DarkRadiant Failure" exception Fixed: Crash when trying to set default mouse or keyboard bindings Fixed: Unit Tests intermittently get stuck on Github runner Fixed: xmlutil thread safety problems Fixed: Some materials aren't displayed correctly Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.3.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

It's funny you mention volume. The brain-mimicking neuromorphic chips are likely going to be easier to scale up into an improved 3D architecture than traditional CPUs, because the neuron spiking models use on the order of milliwatts instead of hundreds of watts. Less heat, massively parallel, easier to scale up. At some point, planar chips are going to run out of steam and most high performance computing will move to 2.5D and 3D designs. Neuromorphic chips could be constructed in a way that makes a device similar in size to the human brain (~1.2 liters), or as large as can possibly be made at fabs. If the result costs millions of dollars, big companies will pay for it if it works. See the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine. There are orders of magnitude of additional performance left to pursue even after the apparent death of Moore's law. But the consumer hardware and dumb image models we have today already have artists spooked.

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

I found the forum post I did about it here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/9082-newbie-darkradiant-questions/&do=findComment&comment=459121 I don't think I got a reply, and we were near release time so I just gave up on it. It worked at some point, so was probably something on my end. Regardless, having to use a Perl script hosted on some obscure server that nobody maintains anymore doesn't seem like a robust process. I think you can build the FM from the start to support i18N and not have to use that script. That's the approach that I think I will take for my next FM. Looking at the Wiki page, it's not that clear how to do it so that's what I'll aim to sort out. But then again, unless there are plenty of people waiting in the wings to perform translation work, not sure how motivated FM authors will be to support this.

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.

DarkRadiant 3.2.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Show entityDefs related to selected models in Model Chooser Feature: Support for rendering blend lights Feature: Implement sorting of Interaction Stages Feature: Recognise type of "set x on y" spawnargs Feature: OBJ files: loader supports usemtl keywords directly referencing material names (without .mtl file) Fixed: Material editor: additional preview object in textures/glass/ materials Fixed: Every attempt to load a texture will trigger a SIGSEGV signal caught: 11 Improvement: Update to wxWidgets 3.2.0 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.2.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!