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I can guarantee you that some actual artists are using AI as a tool that complements the human mind. You can feed your sketches or finished work into it (image-to-image) to generate more details, and the best AI art seen today often involves an digital artist cleaning up the AI mistakes by hand (Photoshop). But in general, the artistically unskilled/uninclined are having their human creativity amplified by AI. People have ideas, and now they can make them a reality without hiring anyone or spending 10,000 hours learning how to draw. Exercising their creativity might inspire them to learn the basics of art, to become better at using the AI. I think you will see a drop-off in low effort content that is spat out instantly by AI, whether that's images, videos, or symphonies. In a sea of AI-generated content, the best or most interesting (viral) will rise to the top, and that will tend to favor the things that had some effort put into them. You might not even realize that AI was part of the process. If you listen to a symphony or other music created partially/fully by AI and you enjoy it, what then? Is it "bad" once you know AI was involved?

I've decided to make a list of my posts in this thread thus far. Only the posts where I shared images of real world locations for inspiration (mostly reference images of various historical architecture). 19th century octagon houses as inspiration for more fancy houses of industralists (12 May 2015) Old electric powerplant building in Poprad, Slovakia - red brick Gothic Revival stylistics (17 July 2015) - needs image fixin' Plas Mawr in Conwy, Wales - well-preserved medieval and early modern Welsh townhouse, with interior museum (29 July 2015) Castell Coch in Wales - reconstructed medieval castle, with minor 19th century industrial details (13 August 2015) + addendum Illustrations and concept art for Bree from various game projects (3 September 2015) Run-down Neo-classical manor house in a rural area (15 December 2015) - dated image links, I need to fix 'em Smaller but interesting manor houses and fortified manor houses in Slovakia (30 August 2016) Manor houses and fortified manor houses in Slovakia (13 March 2017) Environmental storytelling inspired by "reading" real world ruins (3 May 2021) Stokesay Castle rural fortified manor house, one of the few of its kind in England (26 March 2024) Houses, inns and market halls of medieval and early modern England (26 March 2024) Aberconwy House in Conwy, Wales - well-preserved 14th century Welsh medieval merchant townhouse (27 March 2024)

Google translated: https://rutracker-org.translate.goog/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6419292&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=nl&_x_tr_pto=wapp === There are lots of topics about black screens during the main menu. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/search/&q=Black screen&type=forums_topic&nodes=58&search_and_or=and

On the wiki, I'm working on a set of pages with the title-preface and broad theme "The Parts and Whole". This looks at the hows and whys of map objects being formed into collections. The hub of this is The Parts and Whole: Overview Within the hub, so far, the section "Techniques that Affect DR Only" is built out with comparison tables and child pages. This covers these techniques: Hide/Show, Region, Layer, Filter, Group, Selection Set. I'd appreciate any eyeballs on the work so far. Please suggest or edit-in improvements. In particular, are there links to videos or other wiki or forum pages that you think most apt and should be added, e.g., to the "See Also" section? "The Parts and Whole" effort is mostly intended for newbies and so is not afraid to state the obvious at times. In some cases, it covers ground also handled by the necessarily-concise DarkRadiant User Guide, but with more depth and context. In other cases, the info was only found buried in forums. Because I'm trying to cover a fair amount of ground, the pages are text-only. Some of the child pages could benefit from screenshots some day.

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

http://k.min.us/jCfGA.jpg "At night, they say, the Builders' hand comes loose from his mighty hammer and creatures wander out from their hiding places while he slumbers. But tis this night, above all others that unholy vapours cloak the land with gloomy curtains and night creatures dance and sing in the twilight. I can't say I'm looking forward to my endeavors this night.... I've been given a job by a Priest to retrieve two holy artifacts from an abandoned cloister in Eldin woods north of the city, simple job I thought, but the priest failed to mention the placed was haunted." Build Time: - version 1.0 was about 5 weeks, but we are now upto version 3.11. Thanks: Respect to the Dark Mod team for putting up with all my questions and knocking up the various updates in short order!. Special thanks to Flanders and Springheel for their models and my testers for helping me squash all the bugs etc. Testers: Flanders, Jaxa, nbohr1more, Aluminumhaste, Baal,l Oldjim, Cookie, Obsttorte, lux, Mat99, AluminumHaste, thebigh Readables: Darkangel/Flanders/b1k3rdude with special thanks to Flanders for his original story.. Resource: Flanders/Springheel - art direction and models. Misc: This is a homage to the original Thief2 mission from 2001 (The Cathedral of the Damned) Download: - The latest version is now available via the in-game downloader. Info: This version has been heavily updated from the original, this came about as a result of need to be compatible with TDM 2.10+ Repeat after me, "Read and explore, Read and explore" The mission is fully l10n ready. (thanks Tels) The mission now has EFX Reverb The mission now has Volumetric Light effects The mission now uses LOD settings for different detail levels There is now a script event related to the "Curse" A few new surprises... Known issues: This mission will have less than optimal fps at a few points on the map, but most of my testers with lowish end rigs (P4/HD4650) are getting 30fps+ at the worst spots) For very low end PCs I recommend the following settings: V-sync is off, AA is off, Aniso is 4x or lower, advanced settings are simple/default & Post processing of disabled and as a last resort the command line arg ' r_skipFogLights 1 ' (turns off the fog)

Hey all! I haven't properly played the Dark Mod since 2.05 or maybe even 2.04 until now and I've noticed that whatever I do in game the center and LFE channels of my 5.1 sound system remain silent. In other words, the output is actually 4.0 (2 front + 2 rear speakers) rather than 5.1. Now, I am not sure exactly but I recall no problems previously - until the EFX update 2.06, I think. I even found my older post about extremely loud LFE channel here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18741-really-loud-music/&tab=comments#comment-405277 As I understand, it is often made that the center and LFE channels are reserved for special sounds and not used often as the front speakers. For example, in Witcher3 center is mostly used for voices in the dialogs and the best way to check LFE is to use the aard sign magic. Or, in Skyrim it is known that LFE plays only when the dragon hits the ground. The first question is: do I have an issue with sound or not? Because maybe the sound output is ok and I've simply met no specific conditions utilizing the center and LFE channels? Minding my previous paragraph, I don't think it's EFX related but maybe the sound shaders simply changed since 2.05? This all brings me to another question: is there a way to check somehow in the Dark Mod wether the game outputs the sound correctly? About my setup now. I output sound via HDMI to Pioneer receiver with 5.1 setup. Everything works fine in modern games that provide 5.1 output support like the Witcher3 or Mortal Kombat 10 and 11. The windows sound configuration in control panel allows me to check all the speakers and it's fine. I have win 7 64 bit, OpenAl installed. The Dark Mod allows me to set 5.1 sound in options with no warning (I know that in other cases it gives a message like "your system does not support this sound configuration"). Please, help me to find out if anything's wrong with my setup and why my center and LFE channels are silent. Hate to start new threads but I didn't find anything related to my problem. Moreover, I feel the lack of sound-related discussions considering our community's interests.

I haven't played the mission yet, so, I can't comment on it. Regarding the criticism: I think it should also be allowed to note some things you saw as points of criticism. Actually, IMO, negative criticism is better than positive, because it points out what you maybe didn't think through thoroughly, or you simply didn't see when you created the mission on your own. I'm aware that there is a lot of work involved, and people do it in their spare time for their own or other people's pleasure. But, that really shouldn't be a reason to praise everything to the skies. Actually, I've seen my fair share of average missions which have been totally overrated. Again, that shouldn't knock anynone's work, and, I have no idea how this mission is. Just wanted to point out that noting negative things shouldn't be taken as discouraging, but rather the opposite. I've seen some mission authors for Dark Mod going from average to absolutely fantastic missions, because they learned what it takes to make good missions. It's an art, and obviously takes time to perfect.

I also feel you. I used to be a regular here in the forums, but since my son was born in 2022, it basically grunded to halt, although I still get the mails on threads that I wrote in. Ironically, your post in June about not having time got me back here and got me motivated to try and use some of my precious spare time to get some progress on the map I started years ago. I still have not been able to finish a map and want to change that, as long long as the community here is still active

Y'all should visit the MidJourney discord channel if you haven't already. The other big thing, the FOSS one, is Stable Diffusion. That's what I've been using (via the hugging space demo, which doesn't use a credit system), and it's typically awesome once you know what you're doing. But I don't know where people are posting it in a single place. It's coming fast and thick now. I'd say half of it is awesome, and the other near half is awesome but there's some little screwy bit you could fix up in a half hour. Then maybe 10% are duds. Of course the posts are going to be biased on the awesome end just because they've been filtered. The other thing I've noticed is suddenly a ton of art on Twitter and FB is AI art, and again it's typically great. Yeah, art belongs to the computers now. You can be in denial about it, and it'll take the next year or two to really settle in. But I think the die has been cast now.

People are going to get sued over this stuff, because of course they would. Pixel art won't be abandoned. It's an aesthetic that (some) people like, and bad artists don't make good pixel art. Also, AI will be used to make pixel art:

I'm OK with it when used appropriately. The current AI image generators are good starting points for various things, but there are often imperfections that one would still expect an artist to fix before using it. You don't just use Stable Diffusion to make what you want and you're done, especially if there are human characters in the image (fine details like faces, hands and such tend to appear slightly deformed and it's very noticeable). I'm also not a huge fan of using it to upscale textures for older games because the end result can shift the intent of the artist with some of the finer details, but again, that's only if the replacement is left untouched. If it's then modified by the artist to more closely match the original then that's fine I guess. A part of me is a bit uncomfortable with such AI because I tend to feel that art is the domain of the human rather than the machine, and I've heard the idea that AI will be able to basically replace all humans in the art-making process eventually. Maybe that will still happen, but if am aware that a bot made some artwork instead of a human then there's something lost. Art is one of the few things that still has some soul attached to it (excluding mass-market stuff), so I don't know if I'm being old-fashioned but I'd feel better if I knew at least the base of the work was still mostly under the creation of a human.

Of course, it is one of the reasons for the decline of online forums, since the advent of mobile phones. Forums on a mobile are a pain in the ass, but on the other hand, for certain things there are no real alternatives to forums, social networks cannot be with their sequential threads, where it is almost impossible to retrieve answers to a question that is asked. has done days ago. For devs for internal communication, the only thing offered is a collaborative app, such as System D (not to be confused with systemd). FOSS, free and anonymous registration, access further members only by invitation, full encrypted and private. https://www.system-d.org

The devs didn't title this thread, and @datiswous said they're attempting to mislead people by using Russell's name and a retro style to make it resemble Thief, which is cynical. I grew up on forums like I'm sure anyone who likes a game from '98 did. I actually left the Discord immediately after joining it because it was more off-topic doom-posting than anything relevant to the mod. I thought the forums might be better, but it's mostly just grown men yelling at clouds and telling strangers how mature they are, and a few brave souls actually developing anything. Depressing place, I'll just stick to enjoying new missions every 6 months without an account.

True, but, 1. this thread is called "Western stealth FPS with Stephen Russell", and, 2. nothing you said changes anything for me. The gameplay still doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. And, if you really think this forum is cynical, then you don't visit forums much. Actually, the majority of the users are are pretty mature, unlike in other forums.

So giving it none of those tags, but making the AI invisible, silent, non-solid, and on a team neutral to everyone would not work? Oh well, it was a horrible inelegant idea anyway.

Hey, Every time I've try to use the Full Editor when PM'ing someone, and every single time I get an error. Whoever is in charge of the forum, is it possible that this could be fixed? Thanks Neon