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I changed blinking frequency to 0.015 now but I can't see a difference. I have another question though: is it possible to have the new tools or skills listed on the inventory page right after Unarmed? I have no idea how sorting is determined there and while changing their category to "weapons" works, it also creates duplicate entries on the inventory page...

If you want to keep the Whistle in "Tools" an alternative can be this: You just change the icon and the sounds and voilà, new exclusive mod

The project to round up viable orphaned translations is mostly complete now. https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4726 Since Darkfate has their own translations it took awhile to merge the older translations with the darkfate formatting since they generated new string numbers from scratch. A few missions are so radically changed that the old translations are practically worthless now ( and some Darkfate translations are also incompatible with the latest mission versions ) but most of the work was salvageable. I added a "Translation Pack" column to the Missions wiki: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod all entries marked with "Yes" are working translations that use Darkfate's translation design ( includes xdata, GUI and Map files if the author didn't perform localization changes in their own mission pack ). Sadly, these changes do not show in the mission downloader list. You will need to delete mission_l10n.pk4 files from the darkmod/fms/mission_name folders to acquire the new translation packs that "actually work". Not all mission packs contain all languages. Mostly you can count on Russian being in there, but a good percentage have German and Italian strings too. French, Polish, and a few other languages are represented but not very broadly. Hopefully now that the packs work other contributors will add more language strings. Mission administration details: Going forward, it would be courteous if the mission admins ( like myself ) would diff the map files when new mission updates are supplied and replace all the objectives, inv_name, pop-up messages, and shouldered names in a copy of the new map file with the previous string codes then copy that file to the map folder in the translation pack folder. Ideally, authors will be encouraged to run their missions through the converter so only new strings need be added to the packs but not everyone likes that workflow and how cumbersome it makes future edits to the mission.

A new "trick" to cover up a security camera using moss arrow and broadhead arrow : This is a huge leap forward from previous old tricks : - using rope arrow and pickable book bug: - the other random bug: But carrying all of these things throughout the mission will weigh down your time....

I need A New Job

Stone 24pt Font Upgrade, May 9 2024 Interim Release This first release just clears away some of the low-hanging fruit, while buffing the new datBounds program. In summary - stray mark next to W removed poor spacing of J and AE improved 6 characters got accents added. The download is made up of: .dat and 2 .dds files, for distribution/game inclusion .ref [with changes annotated] and .xcf [master source GIMP project, including datBounds layers] 2024 May 9 Stone 24 Interim font update.zip The changes were also doubled-checked using the testSubtitlesANSI FM. As this work continues, with an interim release approximately monthly, characters to be fixed will be chosen seemingly "at random", but actually due to layout considerations... you don't want to know. They'll all be done eventually. Details of Improvements:

Release of datBounds v 1.0 My new tool to visualize the font metrics in a .dat file is now available. For more, see https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=DatBounds I've been using this and testing it as I begin the long process of extending the Stone 24pt character set.

For free ambience tracks it's as Freky said: you look around on the internet for tracks with the appropriate license to be included in your FM. Fortunately, you likely don't even need to bother doing this as a beginner as there's an entire "Music & SFX" section of the forums full of good ambient tracks for you to use if the stock tracks do not meet your fancy. You might also be interested in Orbweaver's "Dark Ambients", which come with a sndshd file already written for you.

While I really like new things in TDM, I fear that as long as these ideas are not part of the core mod, only very mission authors will use them...

Hmmm. I still like my idea of shooting broadhead arrows at fragile lights to turn them off, but I like your idea as well! It's not like we couldn't use a new item, and it's something mappers would have control of by only placing it on levels where we want to have this behavior. But then we'll have to make all lights frobable by default so even this approach would be a little complicated.

I'm working in DarkRadiant on a new map, and I'm having something odd I've never experienced before. There's a fire in a stove model on the second floor of a building... walls, floor, ceiling, etc are all worldspawn brushes with appropriate textures, neither player nor AI have any trouble traversing the entire place, so I think it's assembled as it should be. However, if I douse the stove on the second floor with a water arrow, the water splash somehow drips through the floor brush and douses a torch in the same rough area down on the first floor. I tested it on various positions in the building, and it seems to happen everywhere, not just on that one light. Water arrows that impact on the second floor fall through the floor, and if a light is presence in the fall area it's extinguished. Is this expected behaviour? I would have through a solid brush would stop water from traveling any further once released.

A big thank you and congratulations for this mission I would rate 10/10. I can't find a better one in my memory. It's so big and varied, full of new assets. Just... wow ! Finding a way through the was hard for me, as well as being able to jump and go through a narrow hole in the I also gut stuck in this area just below the horizontal mesh hatch that opens with Oh, and my game use to crash when firing a fire arrow at a Thanks again, you are so good at this.

@WellingtoncrabThe download link is no longer functional: "This content is no longer available". Think you can shoot me a new download link for the asset pack?

i want to try darkradiant on linux. Not sure how heavy the software is. i don't want to abuse this poor thing Now i am in the process of researching new SSD replacement & GaN charger. i have found a primer on magnetic spinning disk & the underlying technology of solid state drive but i still found it hard to grok the magic behind this technologies cylinder, head and track number.. That's the last thing I heard when I was messing around with the solaris installer

For the FM? For beta 1 it's here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/H1QBB04GA0#oBZTb1CmVFQb I've already done around 100 fixes though, so you might want to wait for beta 2 which should be ready in a couple of days hopefully. All links are in the first post of the beta thread here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22439-the-lieutenant-3-foreign-affairs-beta-testing/

That's a very valid question. Personally, I'd say the key is to watch what the otherwise-disengaged fringes of the community are saying. If first time posters or long time lurkers start coming out of the woodwork about well made new missions, praising them for their geometry and story but saying that innovative parts of the gameplay felt frustrating or off, that's probably the first sign that the innovations are starting to get out of hand. For a more concrete example, re-read the comments on Hazard Pay. As much as I and many others love that mission, it's clearly a case where the author strayed further than many people were comfortable with. It also points to the likely endgame if authors do take their customization too far. After getting the negative feedback, kingsal made adjustments, and now the mission is much more friendly towards player preferences that don't match the author's original vision. You don't need to restrict the mapmakers' tools to stop them from straying too far from the traditional formula. When people start speaking up, the authors will rein themselves in on their own.

Just wanted to say thank you for this install script. Made life easier! I'm new to the dark mod (but not to thief) and have just set up my steam deck to try it whilst away for a few days. Looking forward to some portable sneaking!

I hope you didn't forget the (controversial) discussion about his implementation of a Resident Evil style save room in Hazard Pay. Or the change to the arrows, which one head shot zombies. These changes are anything but commonly accepted and wanted. Rather something he implemented, because he thought it was a good idea. Which is fair enough, but, it unfortunately leads to the lack of uniformity that I was talking about, when every FM author thinks he has to reinvent the wheel. Especially new players can't get used to how the game, weapons and enemies behave, if the behavior is different in every FM.

I think this is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because the ability to customize exists does not mean most mappers will use it. On the contrary, if one considers the customization that are already available, we see that the overwhelming majority of mappers stick to the defaults. The exceptions are interesting also. Kingsal's the only mapper that readily comes to mind who habitually deviates from presets seemingly just for the sake of being different. However everything they make is clearly in service of cohesive visions. Hazard Pay, no matter how you feel about it, unarguably loses a great deal of its survival horror character if you take away the napalm arrows or the punishing save system. The Voltas don't need to use Thief style elemental crystals in place of TDMs arrow model, but the fact that they are there makes a definite statement about the author's awareness of their inspiration for their work in TDM from the original games, which in turn draws attention to other, subtler creative choices. I think it's also telling that some of kingsal's modifications have been adopted by other authors. As OrbWeaver said, "If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed." However, how can the community come to a consensus unless there are maps to showcase the advantages of new innovations? Requesting, or worse requiring, players to go in and manually change settings in order to experience a new mechanic is never going to gain any traction. Certainly it is not worth the effort of creating an entire map built around a new paradigm.

As a player, one thing I'm also not too fond of is the lack of uniformity. I think mission authors should take into account that especially players new to the mod want to figure out how the weapons work, and, they will have a hard time doing so, if many missions tweak the weapons. Apart from the "WTF" moment, they will also not know what the default behavior of the weapon is. Also not a fan of some other things some missions introduce, like the different sounds for foot steps etc. Most of them don't improve anything over the default sounds, to be honest. They're rather worse, and irritate me every time I play a mission with custom sounds.

Some good news! Tels dug around further in his old computers and found some gold. Namely, a whole fonts directory that includes GIMP .xcf files. Tels says: "The XCF files esp. are what I used to manually draw the new characters (like adding dots to an u to convert it to ü etc.) They contain many layers with different characters, that are layout exactly in the place where they need to be for the patcher script." That is, for english stone 24 pt, one .xcf file contains two independent RGBA bitmap layers, that can be saved separately as two .dds files. A quick glance of that content appears to match the current distributed stone_0_24.dds and stone_1_24.dds. So I won't need to back-convert from DDS to TGA after all. @Amadeus, I think a copy of this should be added to the TDM assets repository. Could you do that? * http://bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/pub/scripts/tdm_font_source.7z

Do you disagree with the core defaults in general or is this a character-specific setup for your mission? Or is it a test or...? ---------------------------------------------- Sometimes we must take things to the extreme to see the whole picture. Let's pretend all these years mappers have been tweaking the player slightly and depending on the mission: You walk faster or slower. You jump very high or you barely get off the ground. You jump long or fall short. You can mantle high or low. You make more noise or less. The lightgem is more sensitive or less. You inflict or take more damage or less. ... Any thoughts from anyone about this scenario? I wonder how the playerbase would feel. My opinion is that the above tweaks are justified when a different universe is competently established. Or when a new, fully realized character is introduced. Otherwise we are tweaking simply because we can, nothing to do with the story.

I created discussion here and mentioned authors (maybe I missed someone though). Unlike the previous thread about main menu GUI overrides, I think the new one does not look aggressive . The main question there is why this was done, and how to adapt to avoid this problem now and in the future. Indeed, all the missions will be fixed by 2.13 even if some authors don't respond. Dev builds regularly break something, although usually it is done unintentionally. I added "known issues" point on the dev build, which happens pretty rarely. I apologize for the negative emotions this change has caused. Sometimes I am too rough in communications. Moreover, I am not a creative kind of person, I'm more a technical type of person. Thus I believe in interface boundaries, so in my mind the blame for breakage is always on the side that violates these boundaries. Anyway, I know I'll have to fix the breakage, probably myself if necessary.

I totally agree that players usually don't care whether some non-customizable constant like bow shoot time is same as in core or not, as long as the mission plays well. This is a problem only for TDM development. But I don't know a proper way of solving this: mappers usually want to customize something "right now", and waiting for new release is rarely an option. And often customizations are not implemented until someone really wants them (or right away uses them), so that's also the chicken-and-egg problem here.

Good question. Maybe because I don't feel myself too guilty breaking these missions? Maybe because I know that fixing them will be a long story. And I feel confident that we (or more likely I ) will be able to fix all of them by 2.13. You might have noticed that I have also enabled two behavior changes in the latest build (1 2). In these cases it is not even mappers' fault that behavior change is needed. I have a script which can update all missions at once so that they work properly both in 2.12 and dev builds. But somehow I feel I should wait for at least some feedback on the new behavior before doing a massive change to dozens of missions.