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Included in the beta for 2.12 is a new companion to security cameras familiar to Thief players: the automatic turret. It will become active as soon as an enemy is detected by a targeted security camera, firing projectiles to fend off the intruder. Similarly to the security camera and the camgoyle sentry, turrets are highly customisable in their behaviour and appearance. There are two main variants of turrets at the moment: the cannon and the flamethrower. Thanks to Goldwell for digging up custom sound effects and Bikerdude for creating the models. Both were originally written as scripts, and meanwhile the cannon has been converted to C++ and integrated into the core assets for 2.12-beta1. One of the aims of the 2.12 beta is to test the readiness of the turret for release, given that it's a brand new and complex entity. The question of whether it's released with 2.12 or pushed back 2.13 is decided based on feedback by testers, so plentiful testing is of the essence and can be posted here. At the time of the 2.12 beta, the flamethrower is available as a script-based downloadable addon [here]. Its mode of action is to fire a lance of fire at its target, a novelty in TDM. While the scripting engine is powerful, there are some significant potential benefits in a C++ version. The main one is access to array variables to store and process data about all emitted flames, which would allow the flamethrower to spray fire in an arc instead of firing a single stream at x position. For this reason the flamethrower isn't offered as a core asset yet. Another feature of 2.12 is the refurbishment of Doom-era code for guided projectiles, tricky for even the nimblest players to dodge. Switching to guided projectiles only requires changing a projectile's spawnclass from idProjectile to idGuidedProjectile, and more spawnargs can be found in the new entity base class for guided projectiles. A guided version of the cannon turret's projectile is available in 2.12-beta1. Work was also done on introducing Thief-style bouncing projectiles but, as a hybrid between projectiles and moveables, these aren't part of 2.12 because changes to existing code at a deeper level are needed.

I had a problem with not being able to sheathe weapons with the default tilde key after updating to 2.12 beta 6. Did anyone else run into anything like this?

This explains why were seeing different things. And for beta 7. Yeah, more power Well done. The most common characters are pretty clean now regardless of the textscale. I don't recall noticing artifacts in readables but then the text normally is dark and stray marks most likely blend in with the irregular backgrounds. The only letter I could detect where spacing is noticeable is: J ack J erk J iffy J oy J uice.

Excellent. This will take up my whole upcoming week, I'll take all my time off to good use testing the latest release candidate and suggest if there's really any problems. The devs are right that the beta sounds like its no longer regressed between introduced features. This is going to make my week!

OK, I poked around a little further. At the moment, beta5 is what I have installed. testSubtitlesANSI ships with an override of tdm_subtitles_message.gui, which allows easy adjustment of textscale. The shipped textscale is set to 0.24. With that, the stray marks left of G are not visible. If you change it to 0.25, they are visible; which is evidently what your custom gui is also using. If you setaside any custom tdm_subtitles_message.gui, then the core one goes into effect. Which, for beta 5, uses a textscale of 0.24 I don't know whether we will be going with 0.24 or 0.25 for the release. Nevertheless, now that I can see the stray marks, I'll see about fixing them. BTW, with your gui, the black outline shadows have the effect of enlarging the stray marks as black smudges. Helpful for diagnosis.

Tested on beta 5, still 17 FPS and 9 FPS.

Thanks! Looks like a map change rather than an engine issue. To verify further can you test beta 5 or newer with uncapped FPS set to max 300 in the advanced menu?

Can you double-check and see if the performance loss also impacts beta 5. I believe that a volumetric light was added to the skylight. You can also try setting r_volumetricEnable 0 and see if performance returns to normal.

We have entered beta already. Beta 3, which was a week ago.

The beta testing thread is up a bit early, lest I forget to make one:

Fresnel Mod has been updated: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-212-beta-3

Kingsal has graciously converted the highly map-specific animated grass from Arcturus' gorgeous "moonlit castle by a lake with grass plains blowing in the wind" demo map into something that can easily be used by mappers, now also featuring different varieties of grass, different sizes, 2 different wind speeds and LOD stages: I'd like to run a small beta of this asset here for mappers to try it out in their FMs, so feedback on it (i.e. animation, performance impact, looks) before it gets added to core assets would be very appreciated. I won't go too much into the details because the entity & spawnarg tooltips are part of the testing. You can grab the asset here and just drop the .pk4 in the folder of your FM, no need to unpack it. Look for the animated entities in the entity menu. Once the assets are in core you can just delete the .pk4.

Congrats for the Release --- yoouuu Grazy Bastard and thanks for this hint at the beginning ! That you´ve changed the LOOT ! at first sight I thought it´s a Bug --- but I got distrusted - and checked the beta ! ooohkay - you deleted one of the most difficult --- and you added some new (for Beta-Testers ) that´s why there are 430 Saves , I realy searched every impossible Place But this new one is sooooo grazy !!! (thankfully I love to climb - and couse of your tip i searched for every wooden material ) [ for your Tip : this time i sneaked him several times ] and here is my only displeasure - invisible Platforms Completed = grrrrrr so the only chance - is to do it like intended ! (but I´ll keep the Beta - your rocks are so beautifull to climb ) And to force others !!! Supreme Ghost is possible !!! (easier than on my BetaRun) 1. The Hint 2. Things to bring back 3. Booty at end of happening Thanks I was enjoying (nearly) every minute of it

About Errors Running Recently-Created testSubtitles... FMs under TDM 2.12 Beta 3 Console gui parsing errors now occur in the FM's custom version of tdm_subtitles_message.gui, because Beta 3 no longer defines SUBTITLES_TEXT_BORDERCOLOR. To correct this, in the testSubtitles.../guis/tdm_subtitles_message.gui, comment out the 2 lines that say: bordercolor SUBTITLES_TEXT_BORDERCOLOR Or replace with the so-fixed and updated version of this file from testSubtitlesCynic, to be released shortly. Early testSubtitles... FMs created during the first half of 2023 may need additional surgery to run without error.

I have been building my map using some models I've created. I noticed that moving the models around in the folders caused the models in-game to break. Are there any precautions I must take for when I want to upload the map for beta-testing/finalizing the upload?

This is being investigated. 2.12 has the needed save state features so the cause is still unclear. If the problem cannot be solved in a reasonable time-frame, we may need to revert to 2.11 turret features and suggest completing any needed additions via local changes to your mission (... pretty unlikely, as we are highly motivated to retain the 2.12 turret improvements). However this gets resolved, it is the last blocker issue for 2.12 to leave beta phase.

@nbohr1more Any updates here? Sorry for being a pain, but this is a critical problem preventing me from finishing my campaign beta preps.

i am using TDM 2.12 beta 5 running on windows 10...

'ello! As you may be aware I spent the first week of this month remaking La Banque Bienveillante, the first mission of my Quinn Co. campaign I started almost a decade ago. Well, with the help of a bunch of lovely beta testers over a month of feature creep, it's now done! I've made a new topic rather than necroing the old one, because I feel it's come along enough now that it is, essentially, a whole new mission made in the spirit of the original. The goal is to eventually make the existing missions obsolete and put this new campaign in its place, but when that happens I'll include a link to the old .pk4 in here for posterity, since I don't believe in deleting work entirely no matter how mediocre it was! To that end, can this please be entered into the mission downloader as a standalone mission? It can then replace the existing Quinn Co. once the second mission is out, thanks! This is a small, short and sweet bank heist that sets the stage for the larger--and much more difficult--campaign in the works. It's mechanically stripped back a little from the initial release, since I feel I got a bit carried away. It is, however, far prettier as well! Your objective is, of course, the vault, but you can take on extra jobs for people to make money on the side; while the vault gives you money to spend in the next mission's shop, it doesn't count towards your overall loot objective whereas optional jobs do, so it's up to you if you'd rather almost empty the place to make ends meet, or take on extra work if you're less inclined to go hunting for shinies! Screenshots Thanks Big thanks to all the lovely beta testers without whom the mission would probably fail to run! Acolytesix, Datiswous, jaxa, madtaffer, Shadow, thebigh, The Black Arrow, Wellingtoncrab & wesp5 And thanks to everyone who's continued to contribute to the project over the years - I've come back and there's so much more fantastic content to play with! And thanks to you! For playing! I'd love to hear what you think, and feel free to notify me of any issues - provided they're not game-breaking, they'll be fixed when Quinn Co 2 comes out soon! (tm) Download (.pk4)

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.

I have been quite careful to ensure that making the subtitles narrower for barks (but not story verbosity) is not potentially breaking. Examples of this treatment have been included in all my more recent testSubtitles... releases. Yes, this is "crucial" for me. Regarding the padding issue, to restate: TDM 2.11 and on through the 2.12 released beta version use a subtitle right text padding of 20 px. While some padding is necessary, this does a poor job of centering the text visually in the backing field. This is obvious with a short bark. My redo of this, with padding of 7.5px on both sides, fixes it, while I believe not causing any problems for word wrap of subtitles with the given compressed font & scale. I'm provided several versions above of this fix (code hidden as Spoiler). Most recently, this was with snatcher's suggested tabbed location ring and vertically-tighter backing field, here This version will also be incorporated into testSubtitlesDrunk, to be released tomorrow just released. I would urge you to incorporate this code (or a close variant) into the next beta release.

TDM 2.10 is ready for beta test This is how to get beta versions: Upgrade from any version (fast): 1 - Start tdm_installer in darkmod folder. 2 - On the first screen, check "Get custom version" and click "Next". Choose the first name in beta/2.10 list, should look like "beta210-NN". 3 - Click on "Refresh" button to ensure that it is not going to download too much stuff. 4 - Continue installing with "Next". Fresh install (slow): 1 - Create darkmod folder anywhere you like. 2 - Download the TDM Installer from downloads section of the website. Extract tdm_installer executable from the downloaded ZIP and place it into your darkmod folder. 3 - Start tdm_installer (in case of Linux, first edit file permissions to allow executing it). 4 - On the first screen, check "Get custom version" and click "Next". Choose the first name in beta/2.10 list, should look like "beta210-NN". 5 - Continue installing with "Next". In general, upgrade is recommended over fresh install. If you don't want to lose your current TDM installation, then you can copy the whole TDM directory and upgrade the copy. This way you can have both 2.10 beta and 2.09 at the same time. At the end of installation, tdm_installer resets your config by renaming darkmod.cfg to darkmod_{datatime}.cfg. This is a recommended procedure on upgrade, otherwise you are likely to have issues due to old config. If you need your old config for some reason, you can always find it in darkmod folder. 32-bit builds of TDM are deprecated, so they are not present in beta versions. They will be added at the very end of beta phase. Notes 1 - This effort is to find out if we broke anything in TDM with our 2.10 changes, if a new 2.10 feature isn't working correctly. We won't be trying to fix bugs that have been around for a long time. Instead, we will create an issue in bugtracker (if not yet present), to fix it after beta. 2 - If you find something wrong, it would be helpful if you report whether the issue happens in 2.09 too. By the way, you can easily get 2.09 version: just copy your darkmod folder and run tdm_installer on the copy, selecting "release209b" on the custom version screen. 3 - Please try to be specific when reporting a problem. What you were doing, where you were when the problem occurred, can you reproduce it, etc. This wiki article provides many suggestions for good bug reports. Thank you for testing !

I have created an efx version for the next mod release. I have also fixed several minor optical glitches and fixed several defective Visportals. It would be great to get one or two dedicated fans of the mission for testing. Please sign up here before I start a beta thread in the respective subfolder. Thank you.