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Desired Results File with All Languages What is want to end up with from our AI (with any iterative fixup and manual integration) is an FM-only version of TDM’s UTF-8 all.lang. That file has 17 language sections in a particular order, which we will adopt too (in the prompt further below), although, other than English being first, it doesn’t really matter. Once we have our FM all.lang, we can easily generate all the required ISO-encoded *.lang files, e.g., french.lang. Strategy of Feeding the AI One approach would be to just feed the entire #str list in one gulp, with prompt engineering that covers all aspects. This would minimize the post-translate integration time. But the concern is that prompt engineering becomes more difficult. The AI might get confused about what restrictions and hints apply to which strings. While sometimes shared context across strings can be helpful, too much shared context could lead to overly-creative translations (e.g., hallucinations). [BTW, if accessing the AI through an API, there’s often a "temperature" value you can specify, from 0.0 to 1.0, from most-predictable to most-creative. We can use a few words in the prompt to approximately achieve similar ends.] So, to maintain more control, I’m going to batch-feed. The assumption is that translating #str_ in batches of related input groups will allow more focused guidance from prompt engineering, leading to better results. I’ll start with inventory items, that have the shortest strings and most dictionary-like lookup. An alternative/additional batching (particularly needed with large FMs) would be by "scene". In the case of Air Pocket, it could be thought of broadly as 4 scenes, based on timeline and location. The story, as driven by objectives, is fairly linear; larger FMs would typically have some randomization in scene order. Would batching by scene be useful (i.e., give better AI results) for some of Air Pocket’s #str_ s? Thinking this over. But for now, treat inventory items independent of scene. Prompt Engineering for Inventory Items A stab at a reusable template follows in blue. It describes the overall translation task, the desired tone, and input and output formats. Text specific to inventory items is shown in bold. Text that is specific to this FM, to clarify the context and the meaning of particular words, is in italics, with spoilers hidden. You are an expert translator between English and other European languages, including Russian. You wish to translate a list of inventory items, all inanimate objects, from English to these other languages. Each line of the list begins with a tab, then a word beginning with #str_ within double quotes, then another tab, then a phrase within double quotes. When you translate a line, in the output keep the tabs and the #str_ word unchanged, and only change the phrase to the other target language in UTF-8, keeping it in double quotes. Make the translated phrase reasonably short while preserving the formal meaning. Avoid modern slang. Old-fashioned wording is fine. At the end of each line, add another tab, and then add a back-translation of the previous phrase into English again. When back-translating, ignore the original English phrase. Most of the inventory items are keys, and the associated phrases describe locked doors to particular locations aboard a ship, or locked trunks or safes on a ship. The "Master Key" opens all locks. Following the input list of inventory items, append output lists in these target languages: 1. German 2. French 3. Polish 4. Italian 5. Spanish 6. Portuguese 7. Russian 8. Czech 9. Hungarian 10. Dutch 11. Slovak 12. Danish 13. Swedish 14. Romanian 15. Turkish 16. Catalan. List of inventory items: [... skipping 1 potential spoiler] "#str_fm_map_inv_key_captains_cabin" "Captain's Cabin" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_captains_safe" "Captain's Safe" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_galley" "Galley" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_master_key" "Master Key" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_mess" "Mess" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_sea_trunk" "Sea Trunk" Using ChatGPT As discussed at the outset, you can use this without signing in (it will nag you). Also, if you’d like it not to retain your input for training purposes, click on the circled question mark and change it under "Settings". As of this post, of you ask ChatGPT what model it’s using, it responds "You're currently chatting with GPT-4o, the latest model from OpenAI as of 2025. The "o" stands for "omni" — it's designed to handle text, images, and more, all in one model." Following up by enquiring about usage limitations, it says "Free users can access GPT‑4o, but with strict usage caps, which vary based on demand and time of day". More specifically, "usage falls in the range of 5–16 messages per 3–5 hours, after which you'll be limited or switched to GPT‑4o‑mini." The latter is a faster but lower-accuracy model. "We’ll notify you once you’ve reached the limit and invite you to continue your conversation using GPT-4o mini or to upgrade to [paid] ChatGPT Plus." Because I’m doing this at a leisurely rate (and reporting it to you in posts), the usage restrictions should not bite. About Input and Output Formats As you can see above, the input is the AI prompt, appended with content from english.lang, namely, the lines between the "{" and "}" brackets. For those lines, no change to tab-separation is done. The output is the same format, but with an added English back-translation added to each line. When ChatGPT generates the response, each requested language is enclosed in its own HTML response frame, with a separate "copy" link. So you have to copy each link separately, pasting them successively into your FM-specific all.lang file while adding headers, e.g., [French]. Also, the frame margin contains the word "vbnet". When I asked, ChatGPT indicates that’s the style of syntax highlighting applied to the results, based on source material, but it may be inappropriate and so ignorable. Which explains why the word "key" was always colored green. In the next post, I’ll discuss the specific results.

That's correct but many people just use the in-game mission downloader to check for new stuff without even looking at the forums, which is what I did. In the past a lot of missions that required a newer version of the game executable and assets would tell you this when you tried to start them up. I was just reporting on this and that you don't need to reinstall, just update via tdm_updater if you find this issue.

Hrm I wasn't able to type on *after* the spoiler and accidentally already submitted the reply.. (Does this forum somewhere have a raw mode where you type text with tags around them or something instead of this broken WYSIWYG editor?) Anyway, what I was gonna add: This was a great mission and I already played Away1 - I'm really looking forward to Away2, want to see how the story goes on

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You're free to distribute TDM yourself, in accordance with its license, along with a mission if desired (although I can't really see what you gain from doing so). But I think getting it onto a platform like GoG is going to face the same problem that Steam did: they want a legal entity who can sign off on the license status and take legal responsibility for the distribution (in other words, an entity who can get sued instead of GoG themselves if there is a copyright dispute).

There's an interesting question with this, which if I'm not mistaken I approached in another thread long ago. I've considered making a big special project in TDM, which if I did I'd have wanted the option to distribute it as standalone: The idea was that the mission would be in the FM list like any other, but also packaged with a copy of TDM containing only the base pk4's the map uses. If this secondary distribution system were considered, I'm curious if there's be any issues with putting it in places like Itch or GoG or similar. Free of charge to respect the non-commercial licensing and wishes of the team in that regard, but I wonder if there's anything in the licensing that goes against posting your mission embedded in a copy of TDM.

So the readme is displayed when you click the 'notes' in the mission description while in-game. All I meant was I usually have a token replace here as well with the build version and timestamp. See here from Lieutenant 3: https://github.com/FrostSalamander/lt3/blob/5517148beab710eee054d4626d55deb74025a95d/readme.txt#L5 Any token replace shouldn't be file-specific though - maybe just confine the operation to certain folders (or just the root folder but not subfolders). And yes, naming the .pk4 with the version number would be useful as well, especially when you have loads of beta versions flying around during testing (although I suspect the dev team would maybe rename it when putting it into SVN). I hope you continue supporting this, as it's now my preferred way to pack the missions. I love the 'test' functionality too - I did this manually with every build previously and it was tedious - this make it hassle-free!

Might this not be better suited to https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/58-tdm-tech-support/ or failing that make the text collapsable.

This seems like a futile process to me. We all love TheDarkMod and tremendous work has been done on the engine, but I suspect that when developing a new project, especially commercial, almost everyone would rather go for a more modern engine because the reality is that stealth games are a relatively small niche and you need everything you can get to make people notice and buy your thing. TDM with its historical limits on polycounts (unless switching to lightmaps removed that?) and other features that we're used to and have no problem with but that are not exactly state of the art in my opinion just isn't "it", and it's only going to be less and less "it" over time, despite being a brilliant game on its own. And making the game fully libre just so it can be included in certain distributions' free repos, while stripping out almost everything that makes TDM what it is, the community content, doesn't make sense to me either. If anything that could hurt its reputation because people who tried that wouldn't experience the actual game. I only skimmed parts of the thread, have I missed a good reason to do this? Also, another big issue that I think wasn't spelled out explicitly enough: I too thought that it would be awesome to have TDM on Steam. After looking into it, being educated by others and doing some searching I found out that TDM very likely contains a nontrivial amount of old content that may be seemingly re-licensed as CC-BY-NC, but legally cannot be, as its original license does not allow it. I'm talking specifically about old textures.com content - it uses its own asset license that explicitly disallows being released as CC (because CC allows redistribution anywhere and textures.com license explicitly prohibits that). Yet some of those assets are a part of TDM, and it's likely that nobody knows for sure which ones and how many there are. Textures.com was at one point even recommended as a source to create assets on the wiki. So you may get permission from some old mission author who doesn't even remember that he did this, but his content can still be non-free and in fact infringing on its original license. Realistically nobody cares because there's no damage to textures.com being done (the textures are not being redistributed anywhere, they're "just" being incorrectly rebranded with a license that would allow it), but it makes the whole libre thing even more difficult.

Uh... A suffering protagonist is kind of core to the whole Thief narrative formula. Observe: Garrett starts as a starving street urchin, then graduates to professional freelance burglar struggling to pay his rent while every guard, warden, guild thief, and hammerite in the city is gunning for him. It finally looks like he is going to catch his big break if he can just complete a series of harrowing, supernaturally charged heists. Then surprise! His patrons transform into a couple of eldritch demons and rip his eye out of his head! Congratulations, guy who just wanted to get rich and retire, despite your severe injury, you get to go into literal hell and save the world pro bono. Aren't you having fun yet? (And yes for the slow people in the audience, you are having lots of fun, but the character isn't. And the fact this hyper-competent character is clearly struggling in this situation is part of what makes you feel like such a badass roleplaying him.) Shall we continue to games two and three? And for the record, in this case it is not even about being a Mary Sue; because Garrett IS a huge Mary Sue. It's about having a story with character motivations and conflicts. Changing the sex of the protagonist doesn't change the fundamentals of good narrative. Honestly I feel like the real misogyny is that as soon as a woman is put in a life threatening situation and doesn't act like it's a lovely walk in the park, some people get a reflexive ick reaction. But what do I know? It's not like I've been spending the last several years of my free time writing a mythological fantasy novel starring a (completely non-eroticized) young female protagonist, and agonizing over how to calibrate the amount of danger she is exposed to and her reactions to it. That would be crazy.

Double topic. See also topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22754-thief-vr-legacy-of-shadow-announcement/

I think what is actually the case is that Epic Games (like they did in the past) paid Bethesda, so that they can offer Deathloop for free, trying to get a bigger market share. That's what they've done in the past, and, I'm sure they still do it. I got Deathloop there earlier. I never bothered to buy it, as I wasn't that interested, but, for free, I take it. The start of the game already turned me off a bit. I hate it when the main character babbles nonstop about things which happen in the game where I'd rather make up my own mind on how I react to it. It's that braindead gen Z thing "I need everything spoon fed, even the emotions I should have". Horrible. Arkane never really were the same after Dishonored and Prey, were they? Redfall is a bowl of crap as well.

i am having a hard time searching for specific keyword in bug tracker so i decided to wade into google search and found similar thread with similar issue : https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/13723-key-drop-melee-animation-glitch/

Deathloop actually did quite well financially. It's also been out 4 years, so it's no surprising at all that it's free on Epic by now. I absolutely adored Deathloop for its unique style of multiplayer. If you don't enjoy multiplayer, then this game is not for you.

Luckily, TDM is one of the few games I bother to play. So I ask here, in 2025, how much VRAM do TDM missions need at highest settings? I guess there could be some large variance since mappers are free to use custom models and textures, and pack more stuff into scenes.

I don't know if this was ever looked into but there's a "Software in Public Interest" Non-profit that helps sponsor free open source projects, including to handle legal entity issues. The 0 A.D. video game is part of it. https://www.spi-inc.org/

Just to complicate your life, there are 3 additional aspects to consider about the circa-2014 Mason files, and subsequent circa-2017 improvements to the 'english' version perhaps applicable to your work. (These issues are covered in the wiki "Mason Font" article, with a bit more in my "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts", https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/. The 2017 changes can be seen in the *current* 2.13 TDM English Mason files.) 1) Need for custom DAT-scaling on certain Mason characters The source TTF had upper-case and lower-case characters that were early-on considered too similar to size. So (before 2014) in the DAT, selective per-character scaling was used to differentiate them. See https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Font_Metrics_%26_DAT_File_Format#Per-Character_Font_Scaling for details. As you add new characters, you should do likewise (relatively easy with refont). 2) Creating the "glow" of mason_glow How Tels created the glow (for 'english' carleton & mason) is discussed in reasonable detail here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/5/#findComment-262661 That could be done for Russian too, which I recall currently fakes a glow, and possibly would require a minor GUI or engine code change to use. Note: To best accommodate glow and retain GIMP-visualization-alignment between base and glow characters, Tels moved some base characters within their bitmap, to keep their glyphs 2-3 pixels away from any bitmap edge. You should consider this when placing new base glyphs. Note: For the 3 mason bitmaps doubled in size circa-2017 as discussed next, the mason_glow bitmaps were also doubled. 3) Extensive bitmap editing to solve main menu character jaggedness. On Oct. 5, 2017, @Springheel in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19129-menu-update/#findComment-412921 said: "Looking at the Mason fonts, it looks like they were super low res to begin with, and were then just resized [presumably referring to per-character scaling], making them even worse. I'll see what I can do." [Further on, referring to fonts in the TDM menu system:] "It appears that resizing the dds file to make it higher res is possible, so I'll proceed." Later, on Oct 13, 2017, he concluded within a "More detailed list of changes: "Updated the menu fonts, which were surprisingly bad before" Unfortunately, I couldn't find details on how this work was actually done. I assume the bitmap editing was all done in GIMP. It started with doubling the size of certain bitmaps from 256x256 to 512x512. This was done for the first 3 bitmaps (i.e., those with ASCII, some Latin-1). Then characters were made more crisp and smooth-edged. How? Dunno. Also, some odd but harmless artifacts happened within GIMP (noted in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/page/3/#findComment-499660)

May I ask why a libre version is necessary in the first place? Right now TDM already is a free standalone game. According to the first post the advantage would only be to add it to some repositories that I never even heard before. Would this be worth the effort?

Or, just get in contact with the owners of the IP and ask them since just because an IP lawyer in one jurisdiction says it would be okay, doesn't mean it would be okay globally. There are several packs out there of scripts/definition files which are licenced under free licences (CC0 and WTFPL mostly) and claim their freedom by recreating them using "clean-room way". In fact, I used them in getting TDM running with mostly free licenced files by selectively choosing which had clearly been written from scratch albeit with reference to the originals, and which were just direct copy and paste with claimed free licences (I didn't use them). Then it was a case of finding/replacing the core engine textures, sounds, etc. the engine required to launch with free alternatives (again checking the packs since some were just copied direct from the game files and claiming to be free). In the end, the only non-free licenced files that were still required were those from TDM itself. The result of this TDM version is the screenshot I posted some posts ago here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/page/3/#findComment-500642 However, you will notice the giant cursor on the screen in the screenshot, why? because the only reference to hiding the cursor is within the UI files which come under the game eula, so I didn't add in the command to hide it in game. In the case of the script/def files, this "clean-room" approach has stood up in a court of law when I looked online, however you wouldn't really want to end up being in the position of ending up in court defending yourself in the first place. The flaw in the def/scripts that were recreated are that they all wrote their files using the originals as reference. So if the originals are under the game eula, and if the information contained is in some way protected, then all these "clean-room" files revert to the original game eula, as the authors didn't have the right to change the licence. I believe (with a pinch of salt )that if the core scripts/files were made GPL by idSoftware/Microsoft then as files based off of or using them as parents (basically all TDM scripts/defs as far as I can make out) then all of the TDM scripts and def files would automatically become GPL as their authors could also not claim their work was NC-BY since it was then based on GPL work.

Regarding the existing Russian version of TDM's MasonAlternative font, this had a different origin than those Russian fonts processed by Riff_Keeper. Tels created this in 2012. He started from bitmaps of an ASCII Mason font, then used his Perl patch program to copy selected ASCII glyphs (that resemble in some way Cyrillic) to new font "MasonAlternative". See https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274617 In GIMP, he flipped or otherwise hand-edited to make them Cyrillic. He said, "There are still a few dozen missing, but this is enough to render the two headlines we have (New Mission and Setting)" https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274623 This accounts for the incomplete coverage. Speculatively, he took this approach because it couldn't find a Mason-style TTF font with both Russian characters and an acceptable license (e.g., public domain, or at the least freely redistributable for non-commercial use). @kalinovka,I wonder what the licensing is for your masonchronicles3.ttf.

Evidently a significant portion of the Cyrillic work was done by Keeper_Riff (in conjunction with Tels) back in 2011. These folks are not active in TDM these days. Keeper_Riff outlined a workflow, starting with FontLab to edit TTF files... https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/12/#findComment-271548 Specifically Carleton: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/4/#findComment-262135

Epic Games Store is releasing multiple free games a week starting yesterday. Must be some summer event. This week's 3 are: Deliver At All Costs Gigapocalypse Sifu (previous giveaway) https://www.notebookcheck.net/Epic-Games-Store-fans-decipher-cryptic-Mystery-Game-giveaway-clues-ahead-of-time.1023167.0.html

As I wrote, if I remember correctly somebody complained about this and I fixed it. But indeed I'd rather remove this small detail than split the patch into multiple versions! Maybe somebody with access and knowledge about AI picture creation could make a "real" TDM world map in Middle Earth style where all the locations that are ever mentioned in missions are visible without it looking like somebody just took a free stock picture and slapped Bridgeport on it?

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Alright, I've done it. And then probably went overboard. I was able to disconnect all of the volta-named bits from the entities and rename or repoint everything to assets that ship with TDM. The results don't look quite as cool, but I still was able to make a destructable crate with flindery bits, particle effects, and smashing sounds. Hooray! I then discovered that changing the model required whatever new model I chose to also have a clip model. So there was no way to get around making clip models in darkRadiant for whatever things I wanted to be smashable. I went ahead and made really basic (cubes or 6-sided prism) clip models for all the junky broken down wooden objects I could find in the TDM assets, most of which were missing, and used those to create breakable versions of those models. Funny enough, this approach worked for everything except the original door that I wanted to make breakable in the first screenshot of this post! There is something funny about the collision geometry of models/darkmod/architecture/doors/oversized/old_door_02.lwo . If I used it as an entity model, the map complained about not having a collision model. But if I added a simple box as a collision model, the box didn't get used! I was able to shoot arrows and walk straight through this broken down "door". So my original chain-of-random-entities solution that doesn't make flinders is probably as good as we'll be able to get from the door. I also used this solution to try to recreate breakable banners from TG and T2, and they work pretty well. They should probably have a "torn" version that hangs from the banner rod instead of the whole banner and rod disappearing entirely, but they will serve the gameplay purpose of being able to hide safes/secret passages behind banners well enough for me. Coming back to flinderable entities, I realized I could probably tweak the entity definition to also make breakable ceramic pots, so I made some of those too. I ended up with ~25 prefab objects that you can smash with the sword or detonate with fire arrows - some are small enough to be picked up, but the bigger ones can only be pushed or are completely stationary. I tried to pick reasonable health values for them based on their size and apparent sturdiness. All of these can be used as obstacles to block doors or secrets. I've uploaded a .pk4 that contains a simple test map, the entity definitions, and the prefabs. Feel free to download, rip 'em out, and use 'em! If there are any good candidates for smashable-looking crap that I missed or any feedback on how I could make these better, let me know. If @kingsalis cool with it (...because I basically copied his homework for the scripting), I would also support making these entity definitions, collision models, and prefabs part of TDM's core, and would be willing to make whatever tweaks we think are good to help make that happen. breakable_prefabs.pk4