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If someone wanted to expand the core of assets today and add an asset that is not CC-BY-NC-SA, say it's something like CC-BY-SA, CC-BY, CC-0 or public domain, how is that handled today?

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

"...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm Ansome, a long-time forums lurker, and I'm here to recruit beta testers for my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short (30-45 minute), story-driven FM with plenty of readables and a gloomy atmosphere. Do keep in mind that this is a more linear FM than you may be used to as it was deemed necessary for the purposes of the story's pacing. Regardless, the player does still have a degree of freedom in tackling challenges in the latter half of the FM. If this sounds interesting to you, please head over to the beta testing thread I will be posting shortly. Thank you!

*looks at Shadows of Northdale folder* ... Yeah screw it, what's another 5-10 mb among friends? Especially when the assets look so damn cool!

Something I was thinking of: Even if some assets are non-commercial, are all assets at least accounted for to make sure they're credited accordingly and can be distributed? I ask following an issue in another great project I work with called Red Eclipse: They don't have NC assets but did have a few texture packages they had to remove because they later found out their clauses were incompatible with the project. If this hasn't happened in well over a decade it's very unlikely anyone would complain today and request removal for any reason, but if any resource had its license misunderstood that could destroy existing FM's unless perfect replacements were found. Obviously I presume the team never included any asset randomly found on the internet without verifying their explicit requirements in detail, but it doesn't hurt to check. I think the best that can be done otherwise would be to have a list of which assets are libre or have the NC clause: That way a map can choose to use those models and textures that are free if the author wants their FM to be fully libre, albeit this would handicap an author in what packages they can use. If core assets like character models or textures are also NC, the idea is likely pointless as you can't make a FM without those, at best you can skip a few texture packages... not sure about other things like core scripts or defs, since they're technically code I presume those are GPL?

TDM Latch Pack (Beta) By Frost_Salamander and wellingtoncrab with special thanks to Dragofer Tired of picking another lock or hunting for that missing key? Imagine The City is itself an elaborate lock, and you are the key. Embrace progression through careful exploration and navigation of the environment. Embrace the latch pill: Included is a new entity type and scripting for a door mounted toggle lock, or "latch", as well as new CC0 assets and prefabs. https://github.com/thedarkmodcommunity/test-latch/wiki Example Video Asset Pictures All models and textures in this pack are released under CC0 license and may be used freely without need of attribution. We waive copyright to the extent that possible, but aren’t lawyers. Latch Lock Features Supports single and double doors across all cardinal directions, as well as trap doors Uses the location system to handle context sensitive frob highlighting of the latch and the doors Automatically determines the correct latch state on map start based on the targeted door's "locked" spawnarg Options for rotate, translate, or both with unique sound slots for each Supports any model or func_static To get started head over and grab the latest release (available with or without demo content) and read the getting started guide. This is a beta release - so your feedback is appreciated!

Making a note: During the 2.04 development cycle: Source Revision 6550 Assets 14407 the door on the balcony became nonsolid for the player It was still working on Assets 14406 and Source 6544. 6544 was introduced at 14404 and no other binaries were added between. 14407 only added binaries ( compared to 14406 ) so this was not an asset \ def issue. Edit: During the 2.04 dev era ( 2015 to 2016 ) we still compiled game dll's. The breaking change happened in Rev 6551 ( the tdm console only renders to binary revision ) Changes: https://github.com/stgatilov/darkmod_src/commit/3f6f6f62bbba029bbcfec271ef08cac68fbfc2e4 @stgatilov I don't see any problem areas in this commit. Can you confirm?

New script for mappers: my flavour of a fog density fading script. To add this to your FM, add the line "thread FogIntensityLoop();" to your map's void main() function (see the example in fogfade.script) and set "fog_fade" "1" on each foglight to enable script control of it. Set "fog_intensity_multiplier" on each info_location entity to change how thick the fog is in that location (practically speaking it's a multiplier for visibility distance). Lastly, "fog_fade_speed" on each foglight determines how quickly it will change its density. The speed scales with the current value of shaderParm3, using shaderParm3 = 1000 as a baseline. So i.e. if shaderParm is currently at 1/10th of 1000, then fade speed will be 1/10th as fast. Differences to Obsttorte's script: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/&do=findComment&comment=310436 my script uses fog lights you created, rather than creating one for you. Obsttorte's script will delete the foglight if entering a fogfree zone and recreate it later more than one fog light can be controlled (however, no per-fog-light level of control) adding this to the map requires adding a line to your void main() script, rather than adding an info_locations_settings entity with a custom scriptobject spawnarg in my script, mappers set a multiplier of fog visibility distance (shaderParm3), while in Obsttorte's script a "fog_density" spawnarg is used as an alternative to shaderParm3 smaller and less compactly written script fogfade.scriptfogfade.map

IMO it's one of these cases again, where you try to solve asset-level problem by making changes on the engine level. What I'm interested the most though: let's say I have custom candle assets / entities in my WIP that work like in Thief 3 (first frob extinguishes candles, second one picks them up). Will these changes break it?

I'm thinking existing maps are kept as they are today, and keeps using the same assets as today. This so they can stay the same as today and won't deviate from how their author intended them to be. The existing missions won't be libre, but it is quite possible that the authors don't want them to be libre. If an author of a mission said "this mission itself is libre, but it relies on NC assets" then it would be possible to replace the NC assets to libre assets and the entire mission would be libre. Yes. If a mapper wanted to create a libre mission they would need to restrict themselves to only using libre assets. In this post, I suggest that Dark Radiant should allow mappers to search/filter media/gamedata by license (if DR does not already do this). Such a filter functionality would help facilitating the creation of a libre mission.

I was thinking of creating new libre assets that will complement existing NC assets. Not necessarily replace them. I'd be interested in hearing more about what the licensing issue on Steam was. If it was the NC assets, then a TDM-libre with a basic libre mission released initially could encourage a mapper to create a more developed map, also with with libre assets, that may qualify for inclusion on platforms currently not allowing NC assets. Perhaps. Or perhaps a developer decides to join the project because they like the idea and want to work on it. In that case this thread will provide a good overview of different aspects of this.

TDM is already a niche genre. If we release it to a niche platform, it will be niche²! Since we would have to strip TDM off all its assets, recreate some and build a demo FM around it, it wouldn't be more than a tech-demo, i.e., there is no game, which would be niche³. It's just not worth it! We even did not release on Steam due to licensing issues and on that platform, we actually could have gained a huge player-base. No TDM dev has ever showed interest in doing such a thing and that also goes for most of our community. It's not going to happen unless you do it yourself. Be prepared to put at least 2 years of full-time work into this project.

I'm definitely interested in this. In the past it used to worry and upset me that some of the assets are CC-BY-SA-NC: Not because I'd care to sell them in any conceivable format, but because it made the project seem less libre and FOSS and Linux friendly. I remember my only disagreement was with some developers being against FM authors taking donations for their own work on their personal maps and stories, I think that's more problematic but ultimately accepted and respected it since to me that's secondary and I'm just happy TDM and DarkRadiant exist for us all to create worlds with. As stated before, many of the existing assets would need replacements that look the same way. Since the authors of old FM's can't be expected to re-texture all of their maps, those replacements would need the same names or an automatic conversion script, and have to look in such a way that they fit the old textures just right at any transformation. This isn't impossible but something I find unlikely as few people willing to do the effort may find it useful enough to work on one. Such a transition could perhaps be considered if we ever switch to high-res textures: Many of the images could be upgraded with replacements someday... maybe this time we can avoid going for semi-libre assets and use fully FOSS compatible ones. I've also been dreaming of a cyberpunk conversion for years, to have a TDM that's less Thief and more DeusEx taking place in a futuristic environment... also unlikely to happen but the hope in my attempt was to ween off of the stricter assets.

Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.

Unless we add some special subdirectory for addons, I'm afraid they look like core files. And having duplicate decl file in core assets is a problem worth complaining about. Also it might be a bit uncertain which decl wins in the end in such situation.

With TDM 2.12, after the credits finished, the "Mission Complete" screen did not display. I found that the screen was black and I could hear my footsteps when I tried to move around. I think the reason for the mission not completing successfully was that the "Do not kill or harm allies" objective was never marked as "1 = STATE_COMPLETE" instead it was left as "0 = STATE_INCOMPLETE". Note, I didn't use noclip throughout the mission. Same as: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18054-fan-mission-the-accountant-2-new-in-town-by-goldwell-20160509/&do=findComment&comment=458491

How about using TDM automation framework (and maybe pcem/qemu)? More info see: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19828-automation-features-and-discussion/

I think the game treats everything inside "fms" as "mission assets", and everything in game root directory as "core assets". You can check it at the start of game console, where all the paths are listed.

Depending what happens with the legal status of content produced by generative AI, some contributors might not only want to but be legally required to distribute their assets under a more permissive license. We have already seen AI generated textures in at least one FM. There is precedent from the US copyright office that all such works are automatically in the public domain and asserting any kind of copyright claim about them is fraud. That includes CC-BY-NC-SA, as all copyleft licenses still depend on asserting ownership over the work in order to set conditions on its use. Even CC0 is not actually the same thing as public domain.

You've had almost 20 years of random people submitting assets to the mod. Would be nice to assume everything is done properly, but what are the chances that some things weren't? I don't know if it's even possible to find that out at this point.

Just want to mention some locations that are hosting our data, as examples. Like our game(-sourcecode) can be installed from opensuse official game repo. And darkradiant from a ubuntu repo. We got the game(and assets) on moddb. I tried to get tdm installer / binary on several app repo's, but others succeeded. And We all tried to get tdm (game & assets) on steam and Gog. But got it my old installer-frontend on tdm's download page and a package on playonlinux (tdm windows on wine). And my written tdm-wiki article about installing tdm on several os'ses. https://software.opensuse.org/package/thedarkmod?locale=si Official game Repo listing: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Games Opensuse Build service: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/games/thedarkmod Darkradiant on ubuntu https://packages.debian.org/sid/darkradiant Tdm wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Installer_and_Manual_Installation

I feel that tweaking shaders visually does more harm than good in the end. Here is one example of what shader tweaking leads to, and where I'll do yet another visually-breaking change: 6354 Before that is was untweakable specular which also broke visuals: 5044 What a game engine needs is a universal model (preferably well-known) with several tweakable parameters. In fact, the very idea of PBR and why it wins today is that it models real physics, and thus it works more or less the same way in every engine and scenario. It is a well-known standard (with minor variations). We can't have PBR yet (and maybe forever), thus we stick close to Phong reflection model, which has been around for decades and is also quite standard. Artists should make assets that would result in a beautiful picture, not shaders. But they can't do it if we have some weird non-standard lighting model which changes every year. We should never tweak shaders based on how average missions becomes seemingly nicer to us! If someone decides to add normal mapping, it should behave as an approximation for how real high-resolution surface should behave in our model, not as some kind of "beautifier effect". If you want to add some effect which is outside the current model, it should be done in a way that: it does not change how the previous model works (and how current missions look) it can be tweaked by understandable parameters it is applied in all shaders and all lighting the same way I believe we already have fresnel and rim, but it is kinda hardcoded and not present in all shaders. Yet another result of someone tweaking shaders based on how it looks and not on how sound it is mathematically.

OK. Thanks! In my case the issue is moot because I don't know how to do it. Hence my plea for help... If an FM author built their mission using assets that are licensed CC-BY-NC-SA (which I believe all do), if I understand correctly then that means they must license that mission under CC-BY-NC-SA too. Which in turn means anyone can build further on their work as long as they follow the conditions stipulated in the license. It seems odd to release a work under a certain license and then say "but I don't want you to do what the license explicitly grants you to do". "Applying a Creative Commons license to your material is a serious decision. When you apply a CC license, you give permission to anyone to use your material for the full duration of applicable copyright and similar rights." (https://creativecommons.org/faq/) If an author once benefited from the license when they created their mission, why would they not want others to benefit similarly from the same licenses? The license requires their name be mentioned in every remix that follows. At the same time I can understand that some creators more than anything want to create. The desire and drive to create may be so great that they accept conditions during the time of creation, to give them artistic freedom and to use the best available assets; contitions that they regret later when their work is finished and published, and they want to keep control over it. For the OMs I think the project as a whole would benefit from a relaxed and welcoming stance towards changes.

@stgatilov Can answer this one. I think there's an argument for having this as a material effect to make assets stand out but I am not sure about "tying it to the ambient" light when we eventually plan to have those lights globally render proper fresnel at some point.