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Keep in mind also that mission size, and complexity have increased dramatically since the beginning. For a lot of veteran mappers, it can take over a year to get a map made and released. The last dozen missions have for the most part been pretty massive, with new textures, sounds, scripts, models etc. We seem to be long past the point of people loading up the tools, and banging out a mission in a few weeks that's very barebones. We still do see some of those, but I noticed in the beta mapper forums and on Discord, that mappers seem to make these maps, but don't release them, and instead use the knowledge gained to make something even better. Could just be bias on my part scrolling through the forums and discord server though.

Recently a thought came to my mind, for which I wanted to ask the people here nicely of their experience with Minecraft. For me, I never bought or played the game, but the videos and media that you can see on the internet about what people created is really appealing. I was wondering if there's a way to create medieval buildings and castles to play as a thief against hostile NPCs. This seems like an alternative to build little adventures withoud Dromed or Dark Radiant. But as I said, I don't know much about Minecraft itself. I did a few googles and saw, there was a "sneaking mode" mod and also a bunch of medieval texture mods, some even with story modes. Are there any Minecraft players here? Can you tell if there's a way for a thief / tdm experience both in play and level creation? Please feel free to share your experience!

YOU TAFFERS! Happy new year! Deadeye is a small/tiny assassination mission recommended for TDM newcomers and veterans alike. Briefing: Download link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JWslTAC3Ai9kkl1VCvJb14ZlVxWMmkUj/view?usp=sharing Enjoy! EDIT: I promised to someone to write something about the design of the map. This is in spoiler tags below. Possibly useful to new mappers or players interested in developer commentary.

Seems to confirm: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5718 does it happen in the latest dev build: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20824-public-access-to-development-versions/

I've been wanting to post this topic for many months now. It's a continuation to ideas I posted a while back, regarding my wish to create a total conversion for TDM, adding a cyberpunk theme alongside the original steampunk world. The reason for making a new thread is that I have a plan laid out by now, but will need help from the community with it. I wish to know how many people would be willing to help out, so that I may know whether I should start laying out the foundation of this project. I will explain exactly what I plan to do in the form of a FAQ below, so that I can easily cover every aspect. This is going to be long, so make sure you have some time before diving into it! If you want to go straight to the points about what I require and skip the rest, read the titles in red which cover the essential paragraphs. What is this all about?The idea is in part inspired by one of the favorite games in my childhood, DeusEx - The Conspiracy. I used to spend weeks playing through it every few months, drawn by its adventurous story and its dark yet appealing environments. Since the last few years, it's been a dream of mine to create a FOSS cyberpunk stealth game with RPG elements, that would be entirely unique (similarly to how TDM is unique from Thief) yet have the same feel and atmosphere I loved about it (once again like TDM has the same atmosphere as Thief). My earliest thoughts were on trying to achieve this in Xonotic, which is a GPL licensed arena-type shooter I've been a long time contributor to. Of course I eventually abandoned the idea... mostly given that Xonotic has no features for single-player mechanics, such as saving / loading or any kind of AI except bots treated as real players. Then more than two years ago, I finally discovered The Dark Mod. After playing it for some time, I quickly realized it's by far my best option to making such a project come true. Why The Dark Mod, instead of building the game from scratch? It was designed to be a steampunk stealth game after all!The first reason why I want to use TDM as a basis is that it already has every crucial mechanic I need, in terms of AI and interaction and world programming. It does of course lack a lot of the features I ultimately hope to include, although most are optional and I could attempt scripting them at a later stage... for now little to no game code chances would be required. The most significant features are the AI (very advanced and intelligent), carefully balanced gameplay plus other common ideas, as well as the mapping system with its intelligent area portals. It should also be considered that while I'm usually a competent contributor, I'm terrible when it comes to programming something from the ground up, so there's no other way this could happen as a FOSS project unless I hire an entire team. The project aims to be a stealth game that works the same way after all, so why not? To exemplify what I mean: You can open DarkRadiant and build a medieval town with a tavern, then add a guard patrolling the tavern with a bow and a sword. In the conversion, you'll be able to build a futuristic city with a club, and have a guard patrol that club with a knife and a rifle. In both cases, the AI will do exactly the same things with equally correct results: The guards take the same patrol routes, chase after the player the same way, vocally alert one another in the same fashion, and search rooms and hiding spots as efficiently once the player disappears from view. There is no "medieval patrol style" versus "futuristic patrol style", the choices and decisions are exactly the same! The only considerable difference will be the assets and animations and settings. The second reason is that I'm a fan of the idTech engines as well as gtkRadiant based editors. idTech 4 is in fact one of my favorite engines in the line, due to how intuitively it was designed at its core and how much it pulled off during its day. Its only problem is that it hasn't had as many developers forking and modernizing it, unlike idTech 3 with say Daemon engine (for Unvanquished)... that is of course not its fault, and in part due to being open-sourced much more recently in comparison. How exactly would the mod work? Are you thinking of creating your own TDM fork?I don't plan to create an actual fork of TDM, which would be impossible to maintain on my own and only divide the community and its efforts. My plan is to create a mod that will run on top of vanilla TDM, adding new content without affecting any of the existing functionality. The mod would be distributed as one or many pk4 files, which are simply dropped into the main directory next to the stock pk4's! Its assets will be grouped under the mod's own name, so that they're always distinguishable from the normal ones... just like every default component is listed in a "thedarkmod" directory inside DarkRadiant, they would be listed in a "howeverthiswillbecalled" group. Once you have the pk4(s) of the mod inside your TDM installation, normally download any mission using them it in order to play it! So missions will be able to use entities and assets from both stock TDM and this mod?My plan is to allow that, and nothing should prevent maps with mixed assets. Keep in mind however that I ultimately want the mod to be independent, and encourage relevant missions to only use textures and entities included with it rather than a mix! If you take out every single stock TDM asset (excluding md5anim's which will be reused) the mod will be expected to work on its own. Will the new assets also be non-commercial?Unlike vanilla TDM, I don't wish to include any CC-*-NC and CC-*-ND assets with the mod. That's primarily because I find them limiting, and feel that they ruin the openness of the project. Is there a name for the mod yet?I've been thinking about it but haven't fully decided so far. I want it to be something familiar and related to TDM; Initially I wanted to call it The Dark Modern, but that sounds rather silly. The name I'm considering now is The Dark Machina, which retains familiarity with TDM and is also more theme relevant... further suggestions are appreciated. What is the benefit for the community? Why should anyone put any effort into this?The project is targeted to everyone in the TDM community who alongside a steampunk stealth game, would enjoy a cyberpunk stealth game of equal or greater visual fidelity... with exactly the same base gameplay and core functionality, but an entirely different world and atmosphere. The project will be publicly available on a Git repository of its own (most likely Gitlab), and anyone will be able to easily install it on top of vanilla TDM. Simply put: If you help and things go according to plan, you'll have a triple-A scifi game inspired by the look and feel of the DeusEx series, just as you currently have a triple-A game victorian game inspired by the look and feel of Thief. What do you need help with exactly? What would others have to do?Obviously I'm not asking others to do the work for me. But at the same time, it's not something I can just go ahead and do on my own either! For this reason I've come up with a plan, which would allow contributions to happen gradually whenever someone willing to dedicate their time to helping adds something new. This is mainly a call to existing TDM developers, who know best how to export and define new assets. If the project takes off, based on the answers I get in this thread, the starter plan is as follows: I will be creating two Git repositories. One will be the official repository of the mod, which will contain assets in working format and condition... the other will contain images, sounds, blend files, and other resources in their native format. This will include freely licensed assets I find on the internet, which I will hand pick and tweak to make sure they're in the readiest state possible, then sort them in a way that's easy to work with. Most will be taken from http://opengameart.org and http://www.blendswap.com and I'll likely use a few things from Xonotic altogether! The assets included in this repository are to be exported and / or converted to TDM compatible formats, then included in the real mod repository. A list will be maintained in order to keep track of which assets have already been ported. Every ported asset can be issued as a pull request, or sent to me personally in case the contributor doesn't have access to the Git service that will be used. The rigging, exporting, and conversion processes are what I require the community's help with! As far as models textures and sounds go, no new content will need to be created... I plan to use freely licensed resources which are already available and plenty, enough to create a full mod out of. Obviously I'll be doing some of the exporting and definition writing myself, but since there will be so much new content I can't do it all on my own... unless I dedicate every waking hour of my life to it for over an year, which would be more than I can handle TLDR: I'll be compiling a repository of game-ready assets, such as textures and models and sounds. Anyone who wishes to help is only asked to pick them up, adjust the TDM specific necessities (exporting to md5, creating material definitions, etc) and publicize the results for inclusion. So no new content is going to be needed?For the most part, no. There is only one exception to this rule: Voices. As they're something TDM specific, they have to be created to match the world and what's happening in it. They are however not a priority, and can happen at a later stage in the project. Until then we can live with a few cyborg troops saying things like "in the name of the Lord Builder, you shall go to the gallows, you heretic" Other than that, I will eventually want to add new functionality. Including a Minecraft type inventory system, computer chips the player can install into their suit or body in order to gain enhancements (modules / augmentations / whatever), and most importantly a re-implementation of the interactive touchscreens in Doom 3. Those are however even more distant needs in comparison, and not what this thread will focus on at this point... I plan to look into such once I'm sure there are enough contributors to be certain this is happening altogether. What do you need done for each type of asset explicitly?Here is a list of every new asset type the mod is going to introduce, and the steps I estimate to be required for each: Characters: I will be offering the blend files of all characters scheduled for inclusion. They will contain the mesh, textures, as well as the rig that the character comes with (if available). Steps to be taken include: Rigging the character to the TDM animation skeleton after using the original rig for initial posing (including face rigging), generating the shadow mesh, making sure polygon count is within acceptable limits, and finally exporting to md5. Lastly, generating and tweaking the character definitions (stats, team, social status, voice, etc) and the material definitions for the character's textures, which should be all that's needed for the model to become a working character. Notice: I'll be preparing a blend file containing the simplified / optimized TDM rig in order to ease the process, including the face rig which I remember had to be extracted from existing characters. Models: A similar process would be needed with static models and simple entities: They will be distributed as blend files which include the model and texture, and need to be exported to ase / lwo, with entity and material definitions in place. Textures: Most will likely be distributed as jpg and png, and will need to be converted to dds and tga. The material definitions will need to be created as usual. Sounds: Will be distributed as wav or ogg, which normally don't need to be converted. Sound definitions need to be created however.As far as specific TDM functions go, this is how I intend the modifications to work per component: Weapons: The plan is to keep each weapon the same in terms of purpose and functionality, and mainly modify the models animations and sounds. The same core code will therefore be used by each, but new entity definitions should be made in order to not affect maps using the existing items while the mod is installed. Menu: When a mission intended for the mod is installed, the main menu will use different textures and a different background song... no modifications to the entries or functionality will be made otherwise. I'm uncertain as to how this can be achieved, although it is lower on the priority list.What will be the modern equivalent of existing TDM items, as well as new content?Like I said, I plan to keep the functionality and purpose roughly the same, at least for a while. Therefore items will serve the same goals, and work almost exactly like the existing ones in TDM... it will be basically the names and appearances that change. The important replacements I currently have planned include: Weapons: Blackjack becomes Police Baton or Taser. Sword becomes Knife. Bow becomes Crossbow or Sniper (arrow types and behaviors unchanged). Items: Lantern becomes Flashlight or Keychain Light. Telescope becomes Binoculars. Compass remains Compass. Snake and Triangle lockpicks become Physical and Electronic lockpick (mechanical doors are unlocked with the first, electronic doors with the later). Potions become Medkits, Syringes, or special types of enhancements.As far as completely new content goes in regard to items and entities, here is a rough list so far: Books & Notes: Alongside the existing books and notes, laptops / smartphones / tablets will be added. They are unrelated to future plans for interactive screens, and simply refer to new types of visuals for readable items found throughout the world. Lighting: The replacement to existing candles and torches will mostly consist of desk lamps, particularly neon and LED based ones. Characters: A similar structure of factions will be followed, compared to the existing guards + thieves + civilians + beggars + nobles. In this case the main categories will be: Police (ideally different suits for various units), gang members (once again different clothing for each gang), with modern looking civilians of various classes. There will also be entirely new outfits covering jobs existent in modern times, such as scientists or industrial workers. Robots: The existing code behind the Steambot will be used to implement multiple kinds of security drones patrolling an area. Especially in early stages before new scripts are considered, they can have the same function of only sounding an alarm when the enemy is spotted. Props: There will be various modern props added throughout the world, depending on what content I find. This will include: Flaming barrels for poorer areas, futuristic cars and bikes parked on the sidewalks, televisions that play videos (in case itTech 4 allows video textures), and the list goes on.Closing thoughts:First of all, thank you for reading this enormous post, regardless of whether you wish to support the project or not. This is something I've dreamed of creating for a while now, and I really hope at least a few artists out there are willing to support it! Please leave your thoughts if you want, as well as voting on the pool so I can more easily estimate the help I may expect.

Any of them free for use? I'm bound to burn out on this project at some point. edit: stumbled on these to answer my own question. Here's a free medieval set that looks quite decent on first glance...can anyone take a look and see what format they're in? Do you have to have the unity editor to use them? I see a list of .dae files, which supposedly can be opened by Blender. Also what the license is. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/3592

I was thinking about how I've been a bit of a pessimist whenever I post stuff in the off-topic section of The Dark Mod Forums, and whilst I do stand by the fact that it's healthy to face unhappy realities of the world in order to provide discussion so that people will spread that discussion and the problems are eventually gained notice of and fixed, I also realize that it's kind of depressing, talking about war and strife. So, I decided to talk about a topic of how we can make the lives of people who are sick and dying happier, and help them experience things they wouldn't be able to otherwise due to their conditions, such as elderly in retirement homes or cancer patient children undergoing chemotherapy or other people who can't go out and travel much. I was thinking about how I haven't gone to the Zoo, Aquarium, or Museum for over a decade, and how I haven't gone to an amusement park, water park, or the beach in summer since covid started. Then I thinks to myself, at least you've done that in your life, some people aren't as lucky or well-off as you've been in life; some people never got around to doing that sort of stuff in their life and now they're stuck in a nursing home, or some are still young but stuck sick in the hospital, and may not live long enough to do that stuff. So I got to thinking, I've seen people on The Dark Mod Forums who've discussed making a VR version of The Dark Mod. And I wonder to myself, hey, you don't know how to program any of this for the less fortunate, but you like to suggest stuff to people, plant seeds in their ears like, so I decided to suggest this to you guys: What about making VIrtual Reality Experiences for the less fortunate? Zoos, Aquariums, Amusement Parks, Carnivals, Circuses, Fairs of the normal and medieval variety, Museums, that sort of thing. And they don't just have to be based on reality, with V.R. you could create a zoo full of unicorns, dragons, zombie animals, aliens, demons, and other fantastical beasts, or make Amusement Park rides that aren't feasibly safe with modern technology, like a roller coaster that reaches up into outer space and through an asteroid belt! I know this comes out of nowhere, but the idea hit me and I'd feel guilty if I didn't share it.

As I understand it, Bridgeport is on the southern coast of a high latitude continent on the western edge closeish to a Spain / Anatolia-like mixed Ghazi-Builder region, Menoa, Ghazi being the Islam-counterpart. To the direct south is moorish territory, which can be like traditional Ghazi territory (Iraq), and the Baghdad equivalent should be down there, or more like North Africa and the Ghazi center is much further ... east? Edit: Probably west makes more sense. The role of Bridgeport is roughly equivalent to Constantinople (because of the proximity to Menoa), but it has some London flavor. It's still Builder, but a more orthodox brand and it's inflected with the Asiatic-equivalent influence compared to Catholic-like Builderism. To the far east also on the coast is the capital of the Empire, both the political and religious center, Sancta Civitas. There should be a political and theological tension between Bridgeport and S.C., and it's moving towards a break, but currently it's still one unified Empire. Bridgeport is still very much a commercial hub of the Empire. To the north are the Germanic/Baltic-like pagan tribes that are on a spectrum of less Empire influenced as you move north. Edit: I think of the empire more like the Carolingians than anything else, a few major urban centers claiming control over a the whole eastern side of the continent, but really diffuse and fragmented, less than what the HRE was, but more than whatever Germany was after 1600. XD In my reading, the world takes flavors from medieval European and Middle Eastern / North African history, but it mixes them up a bit.

Instancing may not be necessary for TDM dark and relative small spaces, but afaik, before UE5 nanite tech, was the only way using conventional polygon rasterization, to be able to render large open scenes. Scenes filled with large amounts of vegetation and other stuff, ala Crysis and others, those games are filled with cloned/instanced geometry all over the place and personally, I don't remember people strongly complaining about them felling very repetitive. That's because there's ways to break the repetition and make the scene feel more unique/varied, even if they are just rendering hundreds or millions of the same geometry/model. Just look at this IMO fantastic in-game forests scenes, in the medieval simulator game, Kingdom Come Deliverance. These are made in Cryengine 3.x, using instanced geometry and Imposters.

TTLG? That's Through the Looking Glass Forums. A looking glass fan community. Has been around for a long, long time. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/

Update 23.01.2014 (new trailer and kickstarter) http://www.kickstart...ome-deliverance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D48PCFshHg This is short but damn it looks amazing! Comes out 2015, can't wait! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_T9QeMbY2k

I just read@motorsep Discovered that you are able to create a brush, then select it and right click "create light". Now you have a light that ha the radius of the former brush. Just read it on discord and thought it may be of use for some people in the forums here too.

https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/tags <- directx 12 wrapper for dxvk https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/tags <- directx to vulkan wrappers D3D 9 to 11 eg. dxvk if you want to try it with horizon zero dawn you need to copy out dxcompiler.dll from Tools\ShaderCompiler\PC\1.0.2595\x64 and bink2w64.dll from Tools\bin and place them next to HorizonZeroDawn.exe. then copy over dxgi.dll from dxvk and d3d12.dll from vkd3d and place them next to it to. now fire up the game and let the shaders recompile -> profit.

I think the reason the dev forums exist is to provide a place where the implementation of features can be discussed without getting mixed up with other debates when someone believes what the devs are doing is wrong. We often post public discussion threads for features with subjective elements like the frob outline, because community feedback is very important. But there will always be vocal defenders with strong views for or against certain features, or how exactly it should be implemented in their opinion. At some point a decision has to be made and be carried through, which is what the dev forums are for. Almost all of the threads are very technical, basically explaining and discussing recent or potential code changes with other devs. Its hard to say. Its a hobby the devs do in their spare time, so people come and go when they're in the mood and when they have the time. The team page is mostly accurate except for some relatively newer additions like myself.

I just found this thread on ttlg listing Immersive Sims: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151176

I still have plans to record a vocal set that would serve as the voice for a male Pagan tribe member, whose still living out in the wilderness in some camp or hamlet, and wandered into a local town or city. The sort that keeps to himself, but does trade with the more civilised folk whenever he needs some specialist goods (isolated tribes tend to be pragmatic about new tech and goods, even when they prefer a more traditional lifestyle). Another vocal set idea I had was for a foreign or semi-foreign trader, from another "European" state outside of the Empire, or some further region of the Empire, where people have different accents than in Bridgeport et al. I don't have an anglophone accent when I speak in English, so my accent could pass for either a person from a more distant region of the Empire (some citizen/trader) or for a stereotypical "barbarian" tribe member that thematically falls under the Pagans (as a faction). Unlike Thief's Pagans, our versions are meant to represent pre-Romanised or pre-Christianised Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic and other tribes and nationalities, so having one or two "foreign-accented" vocal sets for the Pagan males (at least) would be useful. For my vocal set, I certainly won't be saying everything in diminutives like Thief's Pagan faction members used to do. That would just be super-silly, given the different, more historically plausible tone we're going for with TDM's version. Well, that's the general idea. It's like a low-fantasy alternate Earth, with some history paralleling some of our developments, and some of it quite divergent. It's a fantastical alternate Earth, since we not only have an earlier industrial revolution, but also some functional magic, monsters, etc. To slightly paraphrase Reg Pikedevant, "Historical fantasy is a good explanation / Blend antique reality with imagination.". The article on the historical fantasy subgenre I link to even notes that common settings for the subgenre include "fantasy steampunk", "medieval fantasy" and "gunpowder fantasy". We might not openly show any gunpowder in TDM, but a gunpowder fantasy setting usually implies an equivalent of the early modern era, and we have a lot of stylistically Renaissance and Barocque stuff in the game, in addition to late-medieval and Gothic things.

Recently revisiting the forums after a longer period of time I wanted to check the unread content. I don't know if I am doing this wrong since.. ever... but on mobile (visiting the unread content page on my smartphone) you have to click on that tiny speech bubble to go to the most recent post in a thread. If you don't click correctly you'll hit the headline and end up at post 1 in the beginning of the thread. It's terrible on mobile, since not only the speech bubble is really small and was to miss. But also the thread headline is just millimeters away from it so you go right to the first post that was ever made instead of the most recent ones. Am I doing it wrong? I just want to go through u read content a d the to the newest post from that topic.

A@datiswous Ah yeah, well sorry, I was quiet busy and only visiting discord. First time here on the forums since months now I think.. Thank you for the subtitles. I encourage everyone who is interested in using them to download it from here as I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them myself into the mission. Again, thank you for your work.