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When I was a teen I used to play a game called Hitman: It was also a 3rd person stealth game focused on assassinations and disguises. Its main gimmick was the player stealing an enemy's clothing and dressing up as them to infiltrate, while disguised you avoid acting suspicious or your enemies would realize you're not one of them and your cover is blown. I've thought about attempting something similar in TDM in the past. Since it's impossible to customize the player model 1st person hands, I realized custom outfits are out of the question. Then it dawned on me that I could go for a simplified version, by implying the player only wears a helmet or large hat to disguise theirself, enough so it makes sense and throws the AI off. So I got to work and after 3 days of tweaking I'm ready to share my latest mod: Working disguises How it works: The player can pick up headwear and equip by using the item, making you a member of the target team when active. While worn a bar appears at the top of the screen indicating the status of your disguise: This bar slowly fills up over time... it will drain when a member or ally of the team you're disguised as sees you the closer you get, further draining if the AI is alert. When the strength reaches 0 the disguise deactivates, you must wait for it to reach 1 again for it to be active again. When the disguise is inactive the bar will be gray and the icon black, when active it's colored and the full icon shown to make that clear. By default only helmets for the Citywatch were included thus far, with the normal Citywatch helmet offering less cover whereas the Elite Citywatch disguise gives you a greater distance and time at the expense of a cumbersome overlay. It even changes the player's person type / gender / rank so AI salute you as one of them... unfortunately this doesn't seem to have an effect in practice, maybe it can be investigated why. Further more the item sets a custom head model and skin, so when the player sees theirself in a mirror the hat accurately reflects the associated head... sadly this functionality had to be disabled due to a crash that occurs if you try to modify the model of the player's head causing a -1 model index, I filed a bug report about it and hopefully it can be resolved soon. If enough people like this to motivate me to continue, my plan for the next release is to allow stealing the helmets off guards. This might be tricky as I need to make the head frobable and have it execute my script action, which must change the model of the AI's head to their non-helmet version: Unless the same crash as the player head risks occurring, this should be doable in theory... this would also allow it to be used as an universal mod (with any FM) as you no longer rely on the items being placed by the mapper. Below is the latest version: If you're a mapper maybe add this to your FM and let me know what you think! I'm eager to hear your thoughts and see a field use case, this was only tested in a simple box map not in a practical scenario. As usual copy everything in your FM except tdm_custom_scripts.script you'll need to mix the include line with your existing one. disguises_1.0.pk4

My new FM is in beta test, and some testers are using 2.12. They have discovered a hang/crash that only happens in 2.12 (crash doesn't happen in 2.11). I am able to recreate it in 2.12 now. I run TDM in the Visual Studio debugger (using dev16829-10455). After starting the mission, I just wait a minute or so and the screen freezes. Then, I wait another couple of minutes, and the debugger reports a failed assertion. The assertion is: WARNING:ASSERTION FAILED! E:\games\darkmod_source212\idlib\containers\List.h(394): 'newsize >= 0' The callstack is: TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!AssertFailed(const char * file, int line, const char * expression) Line 75 C++ > TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idList<idPlane>::Resize(int newsize) Line 394 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idList<idPlane>::AddGrow(idPlane obj) Line 765 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 351 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FloodLightThroughArea_r(idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortalsContext & context, int areaNum, const portalStack_s * ps) Line 385 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::FlowLightThroughPortals(idRenderLightLocal * light, idFlexList<int,128> * areaIds, lightPortalFlow_t * portalFlow) Line 495 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::AddLightToAreas(idRenderLightLocal * def) Line 2038 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!R_CreateLightRefs(idRenderLightLocal * light) Line 738 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idRenderWorldLocal::UpdateLightDef(int lightHandle, const renderLight_s * rlight) Line 423 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idLight::PresentLightDefChange() Line 1076 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idLight::Present() Line 1132 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idEntity::Think() Line 2318 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idLight::Think() Line 1274 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idGameLocal::RunFrame(const usercmd_t * clientCmds, int timestepMs, bool minorTic) Line 3366 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idSessionLocal::RunGameTic(int timestepMs, bool minorTic) Line 3063 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idSessionLocal::RunGameTics() Line 3109 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idSessionLocal::FrontendThreadFunction() Line 3159 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!idSessionLocal::StartFrontendThread::__l2::<lambda>(void * x) Line 3235 C++ TheDarkModx64_debug.exe!unsigned int <lambda>(void *)::<lambda_invoker_cdecl>(void * x) Line 3236 C++ [External Code] The code in question: ID_INLINE int idList<type>::AddGrow( type obj ) { if ( num == size ) { int newsize; if ( granularity == 0 ) { // this is a hack to fix our memset classes granularity = 16; } newsize = (size * 3) >> 1; // + 50% size newsize += granularity; // round up to granularity newsize -= newsize % granularity; // Resize( newsize ); } list[ num ] = obj; num++; return num - 1; } size = 968651120, so newsize is calculated as -694506944, which causes the assertion. Obviously something is running away and the code ends up trying to resize the list to a size that is so big that it wraps around to negative. Is my mod doing something wrong that is leads to this? How do I track this down? I can supply the FM package if that will help. Or, I can set some breakpoints if there's something I can look at here. Thanks. Edit: Here's the FM: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3fg2x3w4owmku1l4gifi7/altham_crash.pk4?rlkey=z0q1gaflz5b7mifeuayoqmlug&dl=1 To reproduce the problem, start the mission (Easy difficulty), then just stand there. The guard will walk close to you but he shouldn't see you (you can always set the "notarget" console command to ensure he doesn't see you). After a few minutes, the game freezes. A few minutes after that, it crashes. Sometimes it happens in just a minute or two; other times it takes several minutes. But so far, it always happens eventually.

Not to be a nag, but I was thinking about the columns problem. If you go to the view source tab in the wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod&action=edit The raw table data is accessible directly: |- !align=left|{{TDM-FM|written|Written in Stone}} |Bikerdude, Amadeus, Dragofer |{{Forumlink|https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21265-written-in-stone-beta-210-only-20220128/}} |2022-01-28 |338 |Yes |Yes |CCC 22, Elixir |City Missions |Undead, Horror Themes |- Each pipe character represents one of the columns.

@thebigh I am curious why you choosed to use a video briefing over a Timed Flowing Briefing . Looking at the briefing video, there does not seem a graphical benefit. Edit: Well apart from the first screen with the red animated background behind the text..

Utility program "calcStringWidth" calculates the display width of a single-line input string, in TDM logical pixels, when shown (e.g., as a subtitle) with TDM fonts Carleton and Stone with a 0.25 scale factor, and either uncompressed (as designed for a 4:3 screen) or width-compressed by 0.75 (for a 16:9 screen) calcStringWidth.exe - Windows executable calcStringWidth.cpp - C++ Source code Invoked in the console with: calcStringWidth -s <quoted input string> -o <output file> [default is stdout]

Terrific! The beta test thread is up: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22238-beta-testing-the-spider-and-the-finch/

I confess that with some missions I have had quite a few problems, with puzzles that were not very clear in the readables (also due to very small letters or handwritings, with my old eyes i sometimes leave traces of my nose in the screen), as happens for sure to others also whose native language is not English. It will be much harder for those to finish it. But I don't think this mission falls into this category, where the main challenges are a good level of stealth and not so much the puzzles.

Welcome to the Dark Mod forums MarsManon! Thank you very much for the kind words about SLL, it's always nice to hear We all worked real hard on bringing Grayman's map to life and I'm glad you enjoyed it

I was so enchanted by this FM, I had to sign up to the forums the same day I finished it to come thank the authors Genuinely, truly incredible work! I was so overwhelmed in places that I resorted to just shouting joy at my monitor two, three, maybe four entirely separate times while playing. Exploring, puzzling, finding something new, trying to use it, and finding it does a whole new, separate, wonderful thing! There aren't enough words inside me to describe the feeling. It was breathtaking. I don't have any specific feedback that hasn't come through this thread before Thanks so much for making this, for all the inspiration and ingenuity and effort it took. If I never play another level this good, in any other game, in my life, I'd be fine with that.

There's a group of players who have meticulously tested and adjusted ghosting rules for The Dark Mod. Please see: Official Ghosting Rules: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148523 Ghost Rules Discussion: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148487 Why alienate an established group of dedicated players?

The concern that newcomers and players that play the game occasionally don't know or cannot figure out some features looks like a recurring topic. Since we cannot rely on the training mission alone I propose a "global tip system". First, we need a setting: In-game tips: Yes/No This setting must be easily accessible and therefore it should be included in the main menu or stand out in the settings screen. Now, when the setting is enabled players will get tips in ANY and ALL missions when triggering a condition for the first time. Examples: Player frobs a (shoulderable) ragdoll for the first time: To shoulder a body frob it and press "Use". Drop the body by pressing "Use" again. Player frobs a moveable extinguishable light for the first time: You can extinguish a candle by pressing "Use" while holding it. Find fire sources to relight candles. Player frobs a moveable switchable lantern for the first time: Press "Use" while holding moveable lights to switch them on and off. Player unlocks a door (or object) with a key for the first time: You can lock it again by selecting the appropriate key and pressing "Use". Player shoots a water arrow for the first time: Did you know water can clear blood stains and make moss grow stronger? Player shoots a rope arrow for the first time: Press "Attack" while hanging on the rope to swing. ...

well ill probably invest in an rtx 2080 ti and call it a day both machines are running quite well now, the one in the older lian li got a bit hot on the VRM which i fixed with a small clip on cooler (normally used for cooling OC ram) and some elbow grease getting it fitted. ill drop the rtx in the newer lian li as it has better airflow. then ill see if i can get some dough for a new 4k screen.

The black mess under newspaper is the peter-panning of shadow maps. The non-aliased adge on top-right is probably due to some screen-space effect. Most of these effects work on non-multisampled framebuffer.

I like how Quake 1 does this, any message that appears on screen is also printed to the console. I often miss those messages when in the heat of a arena fight, but I can always open the console and read them again.

OK I think I've got to the bottom of this. I've created this forum thread (with bug report): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22221-bug-drowning-ai-in-shallow-water/ I can apply a workaround, although it won't be perfect and the bug itself needs fixing in the engine. There are a few other things that need fixing so will put an update together soonish.

If any mappers have encountered weirdness with kill objectives not working with drowning AI, I think I've found out why. I don't think it would be a particularly difficult one to fix either. I've raised this bug report: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6323 Some context here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=487316 I think this is a bug, but just raising here in case some people think otherwise.

I dom't use it, i found it here with the filter set to OpenSource. the TOS and PP isn't excluding for an OpenSource app, if they use ads mean that they also need to pay an server for this online service. OpenSource is not synonymous with free either, perhaps after the beta phase it is no longer free, so perhaps you can take advantage of the fact that it is still free to create a series of textures that can be used or search another one in Futuretools. AI generated textures and assets, by definition, don't have any copyright, so you can use them as you want. https://www.futuretools.io/?pricing-model=free|open-source&tags-n5zn=gaming

@stgatilov, attached is a screen shot of what I'm calling the "sound source cue" or "sound source oval" directional indicator. Unlike the previous Photoshopped mockup, this is implemented as a prototype in gui script. It shows a cropped screenshot of the 3 stacked subtitle slots, with a red dot indicating the direction, respectively (from the bottom slot) left of player, straight in front of player, and straight behind player. Those locations are simply hard-coded by local float variables dot0_x, dot0_y, dot1_x, dot1_y, dot2_x, dot2_y. I need the engine to supply those as gui globals instead. (You can change the names as you wish). Once I have a 2.12dev update with those variables (and please, the verbosity enumeration too, that we talked about), then I'll do another pass to optimize the art and tweak the dot positioning and size. That's better done when dynamic dot movement is available. For the next go around, it might be sufficient if the engine just provided the direction as a unit vector, in which case the engine-side assert is: square_root(dot_x^^2 + dot_y^^2) = 1.0 Later, we could play around and see about encoding distance too. In which case the "=" in that assertion would be replaced by "<=". Do you think that "sound source cue" should be something the user can turn on or off as an option? If so, that's another gui global to pass, probably a cvar.

how to disable tiny white dot that appears for a second on a center of the screen while picking/hovering over an object in TDM 2.11 ?

I get a black screen with the latest executable. Do we need the last release candidate for this to work? I am still on 2.11...

oh noes my 4k screen just burned out on the upside i now get around 120 fps in starfield though it did take a lot of the detail out of the game to run it at 1920x1080 . well guess the cheaper 4k models are just crap (3 years old).

I noticed the mixed response to the silent toggle change. I haven't had such a toggle on any of my Android phones. I don't want it silenced very often, and if I did I can spare the 2 seconds to look at the screen. I have noticed older folks will silence their phones on accident and then misplace them, wasting much more time. If someone is hiding in a closet and can't silence their phone fast enough and it alerts the nearby axe murderer, c'est la vie. While a physical interface was removed, technically another, different one was provided. I'm annoyed at buttons and ports being taken away in the pursuit of waterproofing, thinness, selling expensive accessories, etc. There were rumors of portless iPhones that have not come to pass (yet), and a real example of a portless laptop. People do take incremental performance and efficiency improvements for granted. There are not many areas of life where something would suddenly get 10.. 15... or 20% better, but that's what you tend to see with SoC improvements every 1-2 years, and they compound over time. Smartphone performance has reached a "good enough" level for many use cases, but additional silicon improvements can be used to extend battery life, and it looks like Apple is trying to make AAA gaming a thing on iPhone 15 Pro. Apple has always been stingy with RAM, while fanboys have insisted that iOS uses RAM more efficiently than Android. In reality, Apple may be slightly better at RAM management, but they are still cheaping out, and no amount of magic can stop you from running out if you open lots of large websites, apps, or whatever. On the Android side, there are gratuitous amounts of RAM thrown into phones for marketing purposes, especially in China which pushed some models up to 18 GB and now 24 GB, and there may be poor utilization of what there is. For example you get pages/apps reloading instead of using all of that extra RAM.

My core i5 6500 with SSD and dual channel 8gb RAM slapped on it barely hit above 80 fps on the dark mod(lowest setting, 768p resolution) , framerate is crazily high on loading screen, sometime it suffers dramatical fps drop on certain spot and freezes for a second and goes back to normal. I have tried playing with all non essential program shut down to minimize background process but to no avail. This applies not limited to the darkmod itself, strange lag spikes also occur when i play decade old games such as far cry 2, splinter cell double agent and SC: conviction, sleeping dogs, hitman absolution and Just cause 2 , all of which could be handled easily by modern intel integrated graphics. I know i have budget to upgrade but i am trying to push my pc to its limit. i borrowed my sister's pc yesterday and tried running latest dark mod on ryzen 3 3200g with 8gb ram and 1GB vram allocated to its IGP , the difference was night and day. Gonna purchase ryzen 5 5xxx with cheapest AMD/Nvidia GPU and this HP elitedesk 800 G3 would be repurposed as my next homelab

My wife got me my first iPhone around 2013 I believe ( old iPhone 4 classic ). At the time I had very mixed feelings as I really hated Apple's walled garden OS, lack of MicroSD slots, lack of replaceable battery, and proprietary charging \ data transfer port. That said I was still a little jealous of my old co-worker who had the first iPhone and showed off the wonders of the Lightsaber App and reading websites with pinch zoom so it was cool to finally have these capabilities on my own device. Since I am ostensibly a hermit and do not really "consume" digital goods like paid apps and music, I jailbroke the phone not long after owning it and gleefully installed a number of janky retro emulators on it. I kept that phone for a LOONG time. I believe it was about 1.5yrs ago when my phone provider was acquired \ merged and the new owners mandated that I could no longer use my ancient beast on their new network. My wife ( who is now thoroughly entrenched in the iPhone world ) insisted I get a newer iPhone as a replacement so I got a slightly aged iPhone 11 due to the supply shortages. At first I was thrilled at the increases in storage and processing power but then using phone began to sour my mood. They removed the headphone jack in iPhone 8 (?) I believe so obviously this was strike one against the device. I think the home button was removed in iPhone 10 so "strike two". Then the charging cable does not connect to a standard USB port on a PC or standard USB charger so I could no longer sync iTunes over a cable without buying some specialized adapter cable. Third strike. Since the whole world followed Apple's lead and no other phones offered these features either I was consigned to fume about the supposed "progress" of my new device. Flash Forward to 2023 and the iPhone 15 Pro launch and now we can see that they are removing the "Easy silent mode toggle switch" and are replacing it with a haptic multi-function button. Garbage. The point of having a silent toggle is that you can quickly silence your phone even if it's dark or in your pocket. Now you need to look at your phone to see that you actually succeeded in silencing it. How can they possibly think this was an improvement? I really am stumped here. Did someone at Apple think that forcing you to look at your phone to silence it will give advertisers more time to show you advertisements on lock-screen news-feed? Are the trying to make going to the movies more inconvenient so that you will stay home and watch Apple TV+ instead? Did the US Government tell Apple to change this so that law enforcement or intelligence agencies and explicitly tell when you are silencing your phone so that no clandestine recordings can be captured without an easily spotted visual of someone struggling to silence their phone? Is this just more "reduce the number of buttons" Apple insanity? It really boggles the mind. When they got rid of the Home Button, they seriously damaged the product brand in my opinion. The whole point of having a Home Button is that if you are stuck in some misbehaving App or Website and you need to get back to the starting GUI you can press a button to get safely home. Now if the bottom swipe is obscured by a misbehaving App your only choice is to power off the phone. The excuse for the removal of the Home Button as that it made the phone less water resilient. In that case, how did the buttons on the side of the phone continue to persist? If there is some absurd logic that can be put forth about why side buttons are more water resilient than a front button, then why not move the Home Button to the side? So I went around looking for iPhone 15 critique videos and to my utter dismay nobody was complaining about the removal of the Silence Toggle switch. Instead they bemoan that the iPhone 15 is "more of the same" even though the CPU, GPU, RAM, and Storage are all significantly upgraded. The common complaint is that Apple hasn't improved the physical aspects of the phone such as not having a folding or flip phone design. I find that to be a completely crazy take on things. The classic buttons worked fine. The form factor did not need to be substantially changed. The underlying CPU and GPU is where you should expect to see improvements for products like these. Beyond bringing back the Home Button and Headphone Jack ( and preventing the full removal of the Silent Mode toggle ), the only "form factor" change I would like to see is some sort of accessory that approximates a slider era cellphone keyboard so I can type out texts or phone numbers with real keys as feedback. Nakey Jakey sorta touched on a few of these issues in one of his newer videos:

I think first mission one and two were A pawn in the game and The art of revenge. Then the campaign was introduced (which is still 3 seperate missions), which includes the prequel The angel's tear and the original missions got renamed. But I think this isn't correctly updated in the mission database. So here is a screenshot of vfat1 in the mission downloader: And here is vfat2 listed in the mission selection screen (after downloaded): Clearly this is the same mission. In the mission listing the darkmod.txt is used, in the mission downloader something else is used. But you're right that vfat1 is "The angel's tear".