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The Builder's Blocks The time has come for my unusual gameplay fm to be released! Important! Please read this before you play the map. You will be playing a mini-game in this map. This mini-game alters the mouse sensitivity setting when you start it, so be sure to click on the 'leave' button in-map before exiting the game. Failure to do so means that you must reset the mouse setting manually and then restart the map. Since this is a map for the unusual gameplay contest the gameplay is unusual (not surprisingly). Do not expect a normal Dark Mod mission. Link(s) (post mirrors, and I will add them here): https://www.dropbox....ders_blocks.pk4 Screenshot of someone playing with a prototype of the game: A big thanks to my beta testers (in alphabetical order): jaxa nborh1more Obsttorte PPoe without whom many features would never have seen the light of day.

Builder Compound Pack will help you create better environments for your Builder-themed map sections! The aim of this experimental package is to provide high-quality models, materials, and other assets that don't put a big strain on the idtech4 engine. This early version is slightly more bare-bones than I wished for, as some modular sets (e.g. the roof) proved to be too complex and unfit for general use. Don't worry though, the set will be updated and expanded in future releases. Tweaks – Arch door and arch with hinges models have been removed. They were just static models, not actual door entities, and they weren't super useful, e.g. hey couldn't act as visportal closing entity due to gaps and transparent parts. – Detail texture stage added to selected materials (mostly those you can get very close to). As you approach a surface, you should see a slightly grainy layer that enhances the details. New content – Door01 and door01_frame have been added to both models and entities. This is a basic door for this corridor section. By default, it's locked (with easy lock) and AI will notice if it's left ajar. You may want to disable the latter (set ShouldBeClosed to 0) if you have a section with many AIs and doors, as it will probably disrupt AI patrolling too much. The frame will work with walls that are 16 units thick. Both door and the frame will work with grid of 8 and smaller. You can use the grid of 4 to change the door position within the frame. Look for grooves in the frame model. First of all, launch the map to see a simple section that was made with these assets. Use the menu or type map bc in the console to start the map. Noclip though the north wall, if you want to get to the staging area and see all pieces used to make this section. General info and tips: Make sure you have Rotate func_* entities around origin (Ctrl+R) enabled (Dark Radiant top icons) to use models efficiently. All models have custom pivot / origin point placement to make them snap to grid and geometry really fast. If you have keyboard shortcuts configured for RotateSelectionX/Y/Z and FloorSelection, placing these models around the map will be a breeze. I also recommend having shortcuts for SelectNudgeUp/Down/Left/Right, so you can move models in ortho views without using a mouse. DR detects models in a weird way, e.g. if your model is one-sided, or has some faces turned back to the camera in ortho view, selecting and moving it around will be difficult. Using keyboard is often more seamless and precise. You can select a model in perspective view, and then move it around in X/Y/Z plane using keyboard. Optimal scale for tileable materials is 0.125. This provides good pixel density vs repetition. Materials are optimized to be used both with and without post-processing, and the default gamma of 1.2. In some cases, specular hotspot might look slightly overblown with post-processing enabled. Correct look without post-processing was the first priority. Same principles apply to using lamp. The main idea behind this set is that you can use simple brushes for walls and floors, and wall panels have proper offset, so you don't need to use special surrounding BSP behind them. You can place panels right where your walls are, and there will be no z-fighting or clipping. Assumed basic measure for a corridor is 192 x 192 (length / width), but you can go lower if you don't plan to use arches and metal doors. The smallest wall panel piece is 24 units long. Use brushes to create basic space, then adjust it to what you can make with wall panels (combinations of 24, 48, 96, 192 etc.). DR's measurement tool is your friend. Default grid for placing most pieces is 8, but it goes down with smaller / more complex models and setups. One special case is matching metal doors to arch with hinges, this needs grid of 2. That's a mistake on my part. I didn't think of better pivot placement until it was too late. The example map contains a "staging area" where you'll find grouped arch, hinges, and doors, so you can use that as a template. As per The Dark Mod license, you may modify this pack's contents, although I'd advise against it. Most textures are compressed in lossy DDS format and compressing them again will result in loss of image quality. If you want to make changes, need alternative versions of a model or material contact me first. I'll see what I can do. Last but not least, I hope you'll find this pack useful and fun to work with, as I had plenty of fun while making it I already have a long list of models and features to include in subsequent releases, but I'm always open to feedback and suggestions. Thanks! Credits: Springheel, Obsttorte, Spooks, nbohr1more, STiFU, Destined and other TDM Forum members: guidance, encouragement, and fruitful discussions Epifire: asset feedback and critique The Black Arrow: inscription texts Plans for upcoming releases: Corridor: - Fixing the wall panel collision model, so strafing along it isn't wobbly Done. - Roof modular set Done. - Making metal door an entity with proper sounds and open/close times. Done, made proper door instead. - Floor switch model/entity for metal doors - Window set Done. Roadmap: All work is on hold for now. I'm working on a small FM that will use some of these assets plus many more. Some of existing assets will get reworked too. All links are taken down, and I have no release date yet, sorry.

The Builder Roads A Fan Mission by Obsttorte Betatested by Melan and Grayman I'm quite happy to present my second Fan Mission for The Dark Mod. You're slipping into the role of Trevor deClarc, a trader and smuggler, thief and spy, who currently stays in a tavern at a Builder outpost that was formerly used for mining. It had come to your attention that a valuable tome is hidden somewhere at this place. So come on and get it. I'd like to thank the Dark Mod community for creating this mod and everyone on this forum who helped my with hints, answers and advices. Special thanks goes to my betatesters Melan and Grayman. This is only a small mission I've built in roughly two weeks and it is designed for a ghost-like approach. I hope you're going to enjoy this one. LINK: http://www.mediafire...2dg4tbf4q90wz7f

Announcing the release of a new TDM mission--The Builder's Influence. Mapping by Railgun. Story and readables by Springheel. This mission continues the story of Corbin, the former smuggler first introduced in "The Thieves". Download it here: http://www.bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/pub/pk4/fms/builders_influence.pk4 http://www.fidcal.com/darkuser/missions/builders_influence.pk4 Briefing: "Whenever I attract a little too much attention in Bridgeport, I use some friendly smuggling lines to head north to Braeden. It's smaller than Bridgeport but still large enough that a visitor like me can go unnoticed. I've always been on good terms with the Cratchit Gang here, and for a small cut they set me up with a place to stay and some information on jobs in the area. Braeden is a great getaway for someone in my line of work; the watch is stretched thin and will usually look the other way for a small fee. With the constant threat of barbarian invasions on the minds of the people, a little domestic burglary tends to be overlooked. " "Things have soured over the past few months, however. The Inquisition has come to Braeden. Suddenly there are armoured Builder guards everywhere, even on street patrol. A lot of the underground closed up and fled for greener pastures, and jobs have been drying up. I've decided it's time to head home to Bridgeport, but the Cratchit boys have asked me for a favour first. " "There's a city Councillor by the name of Gerrard who is payed handsomely by the gang to overlook their smuggling activities. He writes forged tax registers and toll records for them among other things. Apparently the Inquisition has been paying a lot of attention to the city Councillors recently, and they've arrested Gerrard on suspicion of heresy. The Cratchit Gang is worried that they'll get ahold of Gerrard's forged records during the investigation; that would put their entire operation at risk. They need someone to break into City Hall after hours and get the tax records from Gerrard's office before they fall into the wrong hands. The gang is good at what they do, but they're smugglers. Breaking into City Hall is beyond them. " "That's where I come in. " "They've given me a map with Gerrard's office on it, so finding the tax records should be easy enough. I have a hunch that the city archives are worth a visit too; there might be some useful maps there. Of course, I'll help myself to some valuables along the way--enough to enjoy myself for a while when I get back to Bridgeport. I hear that Builders are patrolling the City Council halls now, so I'll need to be sharp. Night is falling...better get ready to go. " Screenshots: Full Size Full Size Full Size Note that although this mission requires TDM 1.01 to play, don't expect it to showcase all of 1.01's new features. 98% of the map was completed before the release features were available.

I managed to create this during the past 5 days, which is the only thing I find scarier than the fact I managed to make it at all. I'll start with a little background on what I wanted to do and why. I felt that TDM was in need of some kind of playable minigame. Not just because its beautifully flexible scripting and gui system makes it so inviting to code one, but I feel it makes missions more pleasant to go through. A lot of AAA games add complexity in little details to make them enjoyable. During a normal mission in the 3D world, players find brief minigames or side activities to distract themselves and take their mind off the main objectives, after which they resume playing the normal match; This gives the world a nice effect and makes it feel more wholesome overall. I'm presently working on a FM that will feature interactive city hubs, this is one of the things I wanted to have to make each city feel more alive. Onto how it works: This is a pk4 mod you can download and drop in your FM to enable the minigame. The prefab mechanical/game_blocks.pfb contains a functional arcade machine, the entity itself is static/mechanical/atdm:game_blocks. Once you've placed an arcade in the world and compiled your map, simply approach it and frob the screen to bring up the overlay and start playing. It's an item matching game with simple rules: When 3 or more items form a lump their group is cleared and the player gains score, the more score you gain the more items you unlock, however the game gets faster and more difficult. You use the movement keys as follows: Forward to disconnect from the device (un-frob and regain control of the player), backwards to project the active item to the ground when you don't want to wait for it to fall, left and right to move the active item. From here I'll list the important highlights individually: One advantage is that in its current form, the game uses no custom assets (images or sounds): Everything is achieved using the vanilla graphics and audio exclusively. The only three files are a def, a script, and a gui... the prefabs for the default in-world device is also included. Hence why for all the complex functionality it achieves, the pk4 is just a ridiculous 17.0 Kilobytes! The game is highly configurable using spawnargs. From the game rules to the items and background, most aspects can be customized per-entity. This means arcade on the map can have its own rules for items, scoring, leveling, not to mention its unique appearance! See the def and the editor descriptions for info on each spawnarg. The game is meant to interact with the world via targets. You can use multiple trigger_on_* variables to activate objects in various circumstances. This includes starting or ending a game, leveling up, reaching a specific level, or beating the default high score. The later can be used to open a door that's only accessible if you beat the game. I made full use of the gui system. The game is normally played on an overlay, however the entity represents a screen (textures/darkmod/decals/signs/decal_gui plane) which mirrors the same interface. This lets you see your paused game in-world when you disengage the device, even watch the items fall at the edges of the screen if you're facing the right way. There's even a spawnarg to disable the overlay and play only on the world surface, though turning off the overlay isn't recommended as it's much harder to see detail on the surface. Other than the script and entity which you can use with your own geometry, I also created a prefab containing a fully functional arcade game ready to place on the map. I tried making it interactive and operable by adding other in-world entities in the mix: You have a side door which can be lockpicked to give you access to the power button, which lets you turn off the device or reset an active game. When beating the high score, the other utility door will open and give you access to some loot. It also contains details like spinning machine gears, refractive glass screen, even a short-range projector for light emanating from the screen... all are toggled on and off with the device. Despite arcade games being a little questionable for a steampunk world, I stylized it so it looks fitting for the environment. Lastly there's a broken (unplayable) version of the prefab which you can add as an accompanying decoration. I'm eager to hear your thoughts and what you think. If you like this minigame, the best way to support the work I put into it is to include it in your FM and use it, I would enjoy that the most. I'd be happy if it could be included in vanilla TDM in some form... not just because I'd be humbled to have contributed my own creation, but I feel it would benefit the default game to have this accessible to mappers. I'm happy with the base entity and functionality which I think is as good as it gets... beyond that it might need a better model than prefab, perhaps someone could help with creating one? Feel free to look at script too and let me know if you feel it's coded right, if it's something easy I might further improve it. Important: When placing the pk4 in your FM directory, be aware that any existing tdm_custom_scripts.script will either override or be overriden by the game's and break stuff! If you're already using that file, edit the pk4 to delete it from there, then manually add the following line to your existing FM's: #include "script/tdm_game_blocks.script" And here's the pk4 of the initial release as of today, as well as some screenshots of how this all looks so far. Wish TDM had a builtin recorder so I could share a video as well. game_blocks_1.1.pk4

praise to the map builders out there. thank you

So I started a game of the Builder's blocks, and had a few hearty minutes playing tetris. However, my stupid-ass decided to exit the mission without leaving the game first. If you do this, your will no longer be able to look around with your mouse. Hopefully this will help others in the future.

Not so long ago I found what could make a pretty good profile picture and decided to try it out on these new forums. But I couldn't find a button anywhere that would let me change it. I asked on Discord and it seems Spooks also couldn't find anything anywhere. So I logged into an old alternative account and, lo and behold, that account has a button. This is on the first screen I get when I: 1) click on my account name in the top-right of the browser -> 2) click on 'profile'. Compared to my actual account: Are you also missing this button on your account? It'd be very much appreciated if that functionality could be restored to any of the affected accounts.

Hi, I need to know what the code is to use Spoiler Tags. I am using my tablet and I don't have the options to use anything, like spoiler tags, quote tags, text changes etc. Thanks

Hi guys, through the "cheats" topic I got the idea, that it would be quite useful, if there were tags for missions (the post was about removing the killing restriction in some missions to suit the prefered play style). I don't know how easy or difficult this is, but with them, it would be quite convenient to pick missions with playstyles, environment, etc one does want to use. This could also be expanded to other mission properties. I remember a discussion about climbable drains, handles on doors, that cannot be picked and other things the map author chooses for himself. That way these things would be clearer and as I said before, it is easier to choose missions with playstyles that suit oneself. What do think?