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

Great news, thanks! Do you know when this be available in a dev build?

Hm, the 2.12 dev build I use has much less options. Is this from the test builds only? Anyway, it seems there is one line left for SHOW FROB OUTLINE, so this shouldn't be a problem for me :)! I never understood why this was completely left out instead of added as an option. I really like the black version of it as it is less immersion breaking and does its job great.

@stgatilov When will the test build for hold frob be updated? Currently, players cannot fairly test the builds and choose one.

Same patch link as before: https://gist.github.com/daftmugi/41d0324107e8734f364bb3e50ff00794 Can it not replace the current test build name?

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.

Summary A new plague threatens Bridgeport. There are rumors of a cure - let's see if you can find it, and get it to the people who deserve it. Background This is my first released DarkMod mission. Four years ago I created an FM and got it into beta testing. Based on the feedback, I tried to expand it and clean it up at the same time, and it fell apart (I lost focus and got frustrated). So I put modding aside. This time I plan to stick with modding for several reasons, not the least of which is that I have much more free time (I'm recently retired). To ensure that I would actually finish this FM, I kept it short and straightforward. Don't expect anything ground-breaking. (How's that for a soft sell?) My next FM (already sketched out in my head) will be more ambitious. Download The mission is available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ymy4v38x7k286tx/warehouse.pk4?dl=1 (version 2, with a bug fix). Place the PK4 in your \fms folder. TDM will recognize it as a new mission. Build Time Six months running time. I have no idea how many actual hours I spent. I18n I have not yet done the work required for internationalization. Thanks Many thanks to the numerous beta testers, who really helped me get this mission into shape: Bikerdude, s.urfer, kingsal, Boiler's_hiss, Cambridge Spy, Abusimplea, Judith Bikerdude provided a window light projection texture, as well as instructions so that I (and others) can do it myself in the future. The video series by Springheel and Sotha were helpful and energizing. Thanks to the entire Dark Mod community for building an amazing project. Note This mission has only been tested on TDM 2.06. I have no idea if it works on older versions. Screenshots

Intro: "East of the Rahen Mountain, there is a swampy area, a backwater of river Rahna. Approximately twenty years ago the Inventors Guild began their effort to secure the rights to the land and presented the construction projects of water dams and locks in endeavour to create a water trails for flat-bottomed vessels. The prospect of increased economic exchange between the plains and the mountain settlements prevailed over the objections of displeased neighbours and just five years later the water level in ponds allowed for flow of barges. Good mood of the local lord diminished though, as more and more crops and farms disappeared under the water, wells began to stink, and dysentery started to collect a heavy toll. Guild excuses that thawing and hardship of communication with lock's staff was to blame didn't resolve the crisis. What did, was a compensation - a one-off shipment of nearly half a ton of rock crystals. This aroused comments among people not normally interested in the Inventors and their dealings. People like me. The trail leads to one of inaccessible facilities of the bulkhead oversight in the network of ponds, where, the crystals are mined, pre-processed and sorted out. Several months later... Crossing the flooded and deserted five furlongs in one-man boat was risky enough, but I took my chances and tried to take the boat through the lock, to be closer to the guardhouse. The bulkhead mechanism was too complicated for one person to operate though. Now I don't have the means to go back and water scattered my equipment all over the pond. And with no boat the only way back is a walk along the causeway towards the mountains, but for that I will need to get a good supply of food and water, so not to loose my strength carrying the loot." Description: Break in into castle infested by undead. Thanks: TDM Team for great tool and their dedication in improving it. Bikerdude for working out all bugs, optimisation, improving graphics and readables details. Caer (from Polish Thief forum) for translating. Testers: AluminumHaste, Baddcog, lowenz, nbohr1more, adriannn (PTF), Nivellen (PTF). Build time: Basic playable version 1,5 months, final release after 1 year. Update info: Unbelievable how long it was under construction, but I hope you will enjoy exploring this mission . Can't name all things added to previous version -just tons of them. Known issues: Low performance in few spots. Game sometimes freeze a bit in area around building.

@datiswous, made that correction fm_test.subs --> fm_conversations.subs @stgatilov, about srt naming and file location, would you be OK with the following edit? New/changed stuff in italics: srt command is followed by paths to a sound sample and its .srt file, typically with matching filenames. An .srt file is usually placed either with its sound file or in a "subtitles" folder. The .srt file format is described e.g. [1]. The file must be in engine-native encoding (internationalization is not supported yet anyway) and have no BOM mark. It contains a sequence of text messages to show during the sound sample, each with start and end timestamps within the sample's timeline. It is recommended to use common software to create .srt files for sound samples, instead of writing them manually. This way is more flexible but more complicated, and it is only necessary for long sounds, for instance sound sample of a briefing video. It's a simple enough standard that it can be shown as an short example, demonstrating that subtitle segments can have time gaps between them. And the example can show correct TDM usage, without requiring a trip off-site and picking through features that TDM doesn't support. Specifically, the example shows how to define two lines by direct entry, rather than using unsupported message location tags (X1, Y1, etc.). And skips other unavailable SRT font markups like italics, mentioned in the wikipedia description. The example would also show the TDM-specific path treatment. The example could be inserted before the sentence "It is recommended to use common software...."

Recently I have learnt about new cool toy for analyzing build time in Visual Studio: C++ Build Insights Basically, MSVC build tools now generate events for various things, which allows to see timelines, aggregated information, etc. The events are based on Event Tracing for Windows, which is a relatively known framework among some very cool guys. Since I was thinking about picking up the DarkRadiant side again, I decided to give it a run on DR projects. To make timings easier to understand, I limited parallelism to 1 project and 6 compiler threads at a time (I have 6 physical cores). I built vcperf from sources (the latest tag on GitHub), because stock VC2019 build does not include information about templates, and that's the main problem usually. I used VC2019 to build Debug x64 build. I think release build does not matter much, since developer usually work with Debug and have to wait for it all the time. I'll try to explain the findings. Here is the overview of stuff: it explains how much time each part of compiler takes: In most cases, I will only look at "Exclusive Direction". Inclusive stuff is too bad because it takes common stuff into account many times when we sum up the values. CPU Time is a better metric in general, but most of low-granularity timings don't provide it --- and that's what we want to analyze. Besides, I have specifically ensured that there is one thread per physical core so CPU time and duration should be more or less the same. So, the whole build takes 986s. Out of it, C1DLL takes 785s. That is the frontend part of compiler, which most likely contains parsing C++ code and doing template instantiations. At least, an image in this article says that template instantiation is part of frontend. And otherwise numbers simply don't match. The backend takes something like 175s --- most of the other time. Clearly, the 80% of the time is spent in frontend, so let's given it a closer look. First of all, let's look at C++ code parsing: The whole parsing takes 172s. By filtering items containing some substring, I learned that: Parsing Eigen takes 31.5s Parsing Wx takes 32.6s Parsing MSVC standard headers takes 34.5s Parsing Windows SDK headers takes 24s Parsing w32deps includes except Eigen and Wx takes 11.4s Parsing all the rest takes 38.5s The number for Wx is OK, since it is very important for DR. Standard includes are also understandable --- that's STL and windows.h. But isn't Eigen excessive here? Note that parsing time can be reduced almost to zero by using precompiled headers properly. According to the stats I see, windows.h is parsed 63 times, which gives 33s in total. If it is always in PCH, than it would be parsed at most 19 times.... Anyway, parsing takes about 17% of total build, so it is hardly a real problem. Now we come to template instantiations --- the root of evil for slow C++ builds I computed sum of all Durations in this list, and got 605s --- this approximately matches 785s - 172s (frontend - parsing). And that's 60% of whole build time. Quite obviously, Eigen is the king here: all the most expensive instantiations come from Eigen. Here is breakdown: Eigen::* takes 461s std::* takes 122s All the rest takes 22s Unless someone decides to use boost, STL is usually the most offensive part of template bloat. However, Eigen manages to top it in 4x times. So the conclusion is: adding Eigen slowed down build in at least two times. If it was wxWidgets, it would be OK, since GUI is the most important part of DarkRadiant. But such cost for 4D vectors and matrices? Seriously?! Does it even offer any added value in DR? UPDATE: Given that backend most of the time generates machine code for the template instantiations, I bet the real slowdown can be even 2.5-3 times. If someone remembers when Eigen was integrated, it can be checked directly.

Here's another instance found in "The Painter's Wife" at viewpos: 688.45 -205.07 -127.75 57.2 -124.4 0.0 The following video compares 2.11 and 2.12-r10451: The new optimizations are a good thing as they allow mappers to build more, so I think they should be kept. Also, I've heard that some missions are currently being built with the assumption that the optimizations will be available. Without knowing much about this, would two code paths be doable: one for old missions and one for new missions? Perhaps DarkRadiant can add a flag by default for the new optimizations when making a new mission? If that doesn't seem like a good strategy, what other solutions can be tried?

Regarding packaging. The easiest way is to take some existing build, then use zipsync patch to overwrite some of its files. Before that, you need to do zipsync normalize + zipsync analyze to create a small package from the files you want to overwrite. Regarding server. Yes, you need to make it available on any HTTP server. The HTTPS protocol requires an additional TLS library to make it work, and tdm_installer does not include one currently. To be honest, I don't understand what's the benefit of forcing HTTPS for statically hosting a bunch of files. HTTP 1.1 from 10 years ago works perfectly well today, while in HTTPS they release new version of TLS every so often, then declare the old one as insecure, then block all software from working with it, breaking tons of websites. Maybe I should just add TLS to tdm_installer and allow https:// kind of URLs. Although it can cause even more confusion because people will write https:// instead of http:// and be surprised that it does not work. Regarding installing it. Yes, the user needs to go to "Custom Version" screen, paste the URL of your build and select which stock TDM version it was based on. That's because stock versions have yet another manifest which describes all dependencies between them, but your custom version does not. Regarding shaders. I have been changing shaders extensively, including some changes after the most recent dev build. You need to combine engine with the shaders of the same version. So if you build executable from latest SVN but use glprogs from dev build, then they won't work together. You need to copy glprogs directory from you darkmod_src repo to your zipsync patch, so that your package includes them as replacement. That is rarely a problem today, but now is a particularly unlucky moment.

I wrote about it here: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5172#c16126 This is broken by my shadows optimization. Basically, this map breaks Doom 3 assumptions by replacing some parts of world geometry in the doorway with caulk. No idea how to fix it in engine (aside from disabling all the optimizations). UPDATE: We had a major performance issue with shadows. Imagine we have a small fully closed house with a light source inside it. The light has huge light radius, which covers a lot of stuff outdoors. Previously, all that stuff did cast shadows, despite everyone agrees it is not necessary. This is no longer the case: the latest dev build won't cast shadows for the entities outdoors. Now imagine that part of the wall of the house is replaced with caulk. The engine still thinks it is a solid wall because it's fully enclosed with opaque surfaces, so it drops shadows of outdoors entities. But outdoor objects might get lit. This map does the same.

Summary: This is the first part of a series of tutorials using Springheel's new architectural models - Using Springheel's new modulesSpringheel's 4hr build challengeThis tutorial is the process almost start to finish of the mission The Elixir, I hope these videos are helpfull for new and old mappers alike, enjoy. Videos: Part 1. Build Time Total: 40 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvzbz_-QVN8 Part 2. Build Time Total: 1hr 49mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbbGrPQoJx8 Part 3. Build Time Total: 33mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG5ahPs6VqA Part 4. Build Time Total: 34mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQaYTpTJPQs Part 5. Build Time Total: 1hr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNoiwYWssac Part 6. Build Time Total: 1hr 30 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpcAo48PYxg Part 7. Build Time Total: 30mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMJ616E8jHg Part 8. Build Time Total: 1hr 4 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfsXtyqTypo Part 9. Build Time Total: 2hrs - (video is only 30mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG3aqzqpkkQ Part 10. Build Time Total: 1hr 10 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWe9wQzkGu8 Part 11. Build Time Total: 40 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KETY43j8o30 Part 12. Build Time Total: 45 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSvY0cJEt7o Part 13. Build Time Total: 35 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk62qY_6Ldo Part 14. Build Time Total: 45 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGgZEWCF8vo Part 15. Build Time Total: 53 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a3Puxpr9Xw Part 16. Build time Total: 60mins - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75GpgKuL6tY Part 17. Build time Total: 43mins - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQah3WsRXro Part 18. Build time Total: 32mins - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRmBZZN_KNI Part 19. Build time Total: 61mins - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPgSlf8QiWk& bkd_modules.zip.txt

Announcing the release of the first William Steele mission! Summary In the North is a mansion heist that takes place outside the town of Braedon, north of Bridgeport. William Steele is an adventurer from Bridgeport who has been away several years, working as a soldier/guard for one Lord Bascombe at his castle in Braedon. Lord Harckoff, a nasty fellow who lives in a renovated Builder church nearby, sees Bascombe as a threat to his shady business, and has put a price on Bascombe's head. Steele decides to visit Harckoff one night to see what he can do to prevent Bascombe's death. The William Steele Missions In the North is the first of several Steele missions. Altogether they'll tell a story of corruption, greed, and revenge. At some point, I'll start packaging them as a campaign, in addition to the single missions. Download This Mission can be obtained using the in-game loader. Look for WS1: In the North. Mission Details and Download: http://www.thedarkmo...ndetails/?id=65 Build Time About one year. Thanks Thanks to the TDM team for creating a terrific platform for storytelling and stealth gaming. Thanks to Bikerdude, Springheel, and AluminumHaste for beta testing, especially at a time when we were all busy dealing with the final phase of TDM 1.08. The Translators (Smallman, Overmann, and Sengu) are hard at work on translations for various languages, so thanks go out to them as well. Localized versions will be available after they're completed and tested. And thanks to YOU for playing! Known Issues This is a large non-linear mission. To ease the burden on slower systems, consider shutting doors behind you as you go. If you experience low frame rates, please consult the Performance Tweaks page on the Wiki. Performance Tweaks For very low end PCs I recommend the following settings: V-sync is offAA is offAniso is 4x or lowerAdvanced settings are simple/defaultPost processing is disabledAnyone having performance issues with TDM missions can put the following cvars into their Darkmod.cfg file. This will improve the framerate and stutter/chop when in-game, but may increase loading times a little. image_usePrecompressedTextures "1" image_useNormalCompression "2" image_useAllFormats "1" image_useCompression "1" image_preload "1" Important This mission requires TDM 1.08 or later. Repeat after me: "Read and explore, Read and explore". Most Importantly, Enjoy! Screenshots WS2: Home Again Steele's story continues with Home Again, which you can find here.

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 just tested on the other system. v1.1 didn't seem to change much from v1.0 on the i5-6600T + HD 530 Graphics system, but I delved further into the mission. Interior portions obviously have much better performance. My performance target for this system is basically 720p 30 FPS. I tested the beginning on the 5700G + GTX 970 system for a minute just now and I can get it to hold at as low as 20 FPS at 1080p, e.g. on the starting boat looking out past where the rope is. Wild swings between 20-60 FPS (locked to 60) as I look around. I haven't made adjustments to other settings like AA yet, that could likely boost performance. I'm still on TDM 2.11. I don't want to upgrade to a dev build right now, but I'm interested to see what kind of performance boost 2.12 can bring.

Here is an alternative way to simplify extinguishing candles and shouldering bodies. Player can double-press / double-click frob button to do a mixed frob + use action. The test build is available in tdm_installer as "test-frob-stgatilov". Attached the source code patch too: FrobUse_By_DoubleClick.patch The original TDM controls are left unchanged. The difference starts only when double-click is registered (which unfortunately can happen accidentally). Also, the double-click action always continues the single-click action. So when you grab a body/candle, the single-click action happens immediately: there is no need to delay it. The maximum time between double-clicks is controlled by cvar in_doubleClickDelay, default is 200 ms. In principle, you can set it to zero to return to the old behavior: then double-clicks won't be registered. Here is how it works internally. There is an utility class which tracks held buttons (which are called "impulses" --- Doom 3 has too few "buttons"). I have extended it to also register double-click. So whenever player clicks frob and this is registered as double-click, then: If there is nothing grabbed, then do ordinary "frob" to grab item (this allows to double-click on already grabbed item). If there is nothing grabbed now, then fall back to normal single-click frob (this happens for ungrabable stuff like doors). If there is something grabbed, then "use" it (that's the main part: it shoulders/extinguished/eats the thing). Unless we have a body shouldered, release currently grabbed item (we want to ungrab extinguished candle). And there is also a special case: If there is something equipped at the moment of double-click, the just "use" it instead of anything else (this allows to unshoulder body by double-click).

How you can help depends a lot on what skills you have. I can Record Video Recording "Let's Play" videos or simple walkthroughs of existing missions and posting them to Youtube is great exposure for the mod (see example .) Be sure to let us know so we can link to them. If you have some editing ability, Video tutorials, where you explain how the mod works, or how to use specific tools, would also be great. Video trailers, showcasing interesting places and features, are also great for publicity. An example is . I can Write Writing reviews for missions are always nice, especially if they include good screenshots. Not only does it give us something to post on other forums, but it makes mappers feel good when their mission gets attention (especially if it's positive). We have a collective thread to post reviews in: http://forums.thedar...s-walkthroughs/ Writing reviews of the mod as a whole, targetted an an audience that doesn't know much about TDM, is also very useful. You could also try offering your services to mappers to create interesting readables, or to proofread for their mission. I can Act and Record Audio We are always on the lookout for good quality audio recordings for vocal sets. If interested, you can pick a few different lines from this script: http://wiki.thedarkm...t:_Average_Jack and send the recordings to Springheel, who then writes a script based on the type of voice you have. I can Translate We could always use translations of our menu/hud into more languages. Also, only a few FMs are aavailable in more than one language, so there is a lot of work there, see the I18N Translator's Guide in the Wiki. I can Model Great! Take a look at the model request thread:http://forums.thedar...-requests-here/ and pick something that interests you. Or just post a, "Hey, anybody want a model?" thread in this forum and I'm sure mappers will get back to you. I can Animate Fantastic. We can always use more good animations. Our current character rigs use a Maya skeleton. PM Springheel for more info. I know C++ Have a look at our coding section in the wiki, pick an issue or feature from the bugtracker of the mod or the leveleditor, download the recent sourcecode release (or better ask for an SVN checkout) and get cracking. Make sure nobody is already working on that specific issue and feel free to ask questions. I can Edit Images We can always use completely new textures and/or improved versions of older textures. How to get started and how to import them into the mod. I can Take Photos Good quality photos of useful textures (medieval-ish building facades, dirt, rocks, wood, etc) are always welcome. The fewer directional shadows and higher resolution, the better. I don't have any skills Even if you can't do any of the above, you can still help out. Talk about TDM in other forums; share your (preferably positive) experiences with other gamers you know. Last, but not least, compliment people when you like their work. Saying "thanks", to a developer or, "I really enjoyed your mission" to a mapper will make their day. -------------------- I'll update this further as more things occur to me.