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The gamepad implementation allows for a great degree of flexibility to personalize settings, aside from a few minor issues that I mentioned here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22337-gamepad-bindings/ I would say that playing TDM with a gamepad works very well, especially considering that it was implemented as experimental and hasn't been changed since then. If I could, I'd go back to 2021-you and congratulate you on buying that gamepad. I notice that your DarkmodPadbinds.cfg looks very different from mine...

It seems like more and more "thief" and "thief players" is becoming a short hand to dismiss community members earnest desire to improve the game - which happens to be a barely legally distinct "thief style" game which was made by thief fans for thief fans and is "designed to simulate the stealth gameplay of Thief". Who is the predominant player base of the game supposed to be beyond fans of the thief games? Is there some better avenue to find feedback for the game beyond this forum? FOSS and linux forums? I have seen maybe half a dozen posts from that segment. I am a thief fan, I play thief fms, my association with those games is what drives me to play and make things for this game. Are we supposed to pretend the original games are not a huge reason why most of us are here at all? TL;DR version:

I reviewed the Stone font spacing vis a vis padding: Worst-case spacing for Stone 24pt for ASCII lower-case characters = 20 (and "A" is less than this) Scale by 50% to 12 pt = 10 Compress-width of font by 0.75 = 7.5 So I'm thinking a reduced right padding, now 7.5 px, plus a new left padding of 7.5 px to improve centering.

I wonder if you could test 9x versus 4x-diagonals and 4x-non-diagonals? Maybe the extra 5 renders don't add much. There probably is some minor performance effect. I think you're still showing the widget too high, so it seems to be associated with the wrong subtitle. I prefer @stgatilov's original vertical positioning, even though it pushes the widget's lower edge against the top of the caption lettering. I wasn't sure what you where trying to point out as a problem... was it the word wrap? Yeah, the automatic word wrap with centered text can look ugly at times. An FM author can choose to insert a manual line break in that case. I do that routinely all the time for barks. Since padding is part of the background box, sure. It occurs to me now that maybe, to improve the appearance of text centering, the background box should also have equal-size padding on the left. That is, the location and size of the inner box is unchanged, but the outer box is wider and its origin shifted left, so the inner box is centered horizontally within. The padding can certainly be made smaller. I imagine the seed value of 17px was for a worse-case character like "W", that was then rounded up to 20. We could shrink it by: - choosing the seed character as the widest that might actually be at the end of a line followed by space to cause word wrap. Probably "w" or "A". - not rounding up - scaling by the compression aspect ratio I'll try to come up with a new number. No problem here with having the background by default. But recognize there's a compromise between world visibility and text readability. Can't we make it possible to turn the background off for people who hate it so much that they avoid using subtitles because of it? "...visible in all circumstances" may be too high a bar. The simple implementation would be a single CVar that toggles the background on/off and possibly, conversely toggles fake drop shadows off/on.

It is possible that this is a setting that needs to be activated to work: https://mantisbt.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23221

in case you wonder my beard was white when i hit 25 only started getting some grey streaks in my hair in the last two years hehe. and for those younger here enjoy your youth while you have it at around 40 the problems start (just look at those receeding hairlines atrocious!!!), well if the hair was my only problem i could live with it hehe i also got gall stones kidney stones and a nasty fall which broke my back in two places at around that time. So enjoy it while you can or stay away from ladders

I am going to sort-of reveal that this is loosely like the nature of my upcoming mission. I noted it here when JackFarmer asked about things that are coming along in this post: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/37993-jackfarmer/&status=3943&type=status It too is a builder church. The player is requested by a hopefully famous character in another mission to handle some business that is affecting the congregation. I am looking to invoke some info and history laid down in other missions as a hook story.

I created the page: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Lightgem In the source I placed the following text: <!-- Page text made by forum user Fiver: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22327-how-can-i-create-an-account-on-the-tdm-wiki/&do=findComment&comment=491145 --> Personally I think the page isn't really necessary because the info is already present under HUD.

I've been meaning to suggest this for months, but the previous improvements have already made Layers so nice to work with that I just got lazy about this. But there's a few things I think could still be improved. And personally, I would prioritize the first one below, if I had to pick one. I haven't been following DR's development, so I don't know if any of this is already done and ready for the next release. But in case it's not, here goes. 1- it would be nice to be able to right-click a layer in the Layers panel, and have all the options to add to layer and move to layer and remove from layer, right there. This would make it much easier and quicker to manage layers. And, I personally keep adding prefixes to layer names, so that they're sorted in the list below, so I can find them easier, because the list gets big and confusing. This improvement would remove the need to do that. It would even remove the need for using this list, I think. 2- It would also be nice to add a new layer directly as child of another layer, just by right-clicking the intended parent layer. Currently, you have to click the New button at the bottom, and then manually drag the layer to its intended parent. Or when clicking New, the new layer could be created as child of the selected one. 3- I've suggested this one before, but I don't know if it's doable or not. It's harder to explain and I think the benefits aren't very obvious. It would be nice to override the visibility of objects that are contained in multiple layers, by toggling one of those layers on/off. So the layer you toggle, overrides their visibility. So regardless of whether its objects are visible or not, hiding this layer, would hide all of its objects, and vice versa. This can be useful when you have certain objects in their respective layers, but then you'd like to have also have a way to toggle all of them on/off at a single click. And with this improvement you could add them to a separate layer, and then just use that layer to override their visibility whenever you needed. For example, to get the ceilings of a whole bunch of rooms out of the way all at once, so you could have a clear view of the rooms while you put in furniture or path nodes or something. Currently, objects are always visible if any of the layers that contain them is visible, so this kind of thing can't be done. (And to be honest, because of that, currently it seems to me that there's no point having objects in multiple layers.) This is also useful for grouping things for easy group-selections. Arguably, you can also use selection sets for that, but the way you create and delete them makes them more suitable for quick and dirty one-time grouping, rather than something a little more indefinite. The two approaches have different levels of control, which makes them appropriate for different use cases.

Yes it's this way by default: I noticed it a FM I'm working on (not published yet) where I simply added the rat ragdoll with no extra spawnargs. I think rats and the small spider (not large ones) should disable it, unless any FM is known that relies on it and could break if we don't do this in which case I don't mind just making sure it's truly intentional. Actually there would be an even better solution, though I'm not sure if by default it would be acceptable: Turn small creatures into an item including living ones! Frob them to pick up then drop them like you would any dropable inventory item, dead or alive they would proceed from there Only obvious problem I can see is if someone made a rat or small spider patrol using path_corner checkpoints, in which case dropping them far away would make them unable to find their patrol routes any longer... though in this case they'd just endlessly stand there and not upset anyone I guess? Then again even fruit can't be picked up as items, you can only eat stuff like apples on the spot: That would need to be changed first, and like everything else it can be argued that it breaks existing expected behavior so likely won't happen.

I think I found another case of bug 6480 and post in Talbot 2: Return to the City. 274.26 -1039.08 184.71 -15.8 24.9 0.0

It's hard. I see what you are thinking about is a "bullet point" pattern, with or without a bullet point character. For that case, I suppose what we are trying to detect is: - the line starts with the bullet point pattern - a "J" character (say) with a shortened spacing, is somewhere in the line. - the line itself in the xd file is long enough to force a word wrap (let's just think about a single wrapping here) - the author assumed a particular word wrap point, and put in extra spaces in mid-line, immediately at the wrap point, so as to indent the latter part of the line, aligning with the indent of the first part. - the shortened-spacing J screws up the resulting alignment. Probably would need a script/program to winnow this down... ideally, that algorithm could also restrict attention to just Stone font. I'm OK with putting such an effort off for now, maybe revisiting it for 2.13.

In the first post of the other topic Geep proposed: Then Stgatilov's answer: But I think applying subtitles in different languages shouldn't be too hard I would think, but I don't know how the current translation system works. The engine should apply the correct subtitles based on the applied language setting, this doesn't need a whole new language system I think. Not sure who's going to write those subtitles though. I can only do Dutch and English and nobody needs Dutch I think. I suggest further discussion of this to take place in topic https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21741-subtitles-possibilities-beyond-211/

I'm on dev16829-10455: With a new map I'm working on I keep noticing lights leaking through walls. The walls are thin caulk brushes (8 units thick) as I'm using the building modules. Sometimes a lamp on the other side will shine straight through the wall over the floor or ceiling. In one case I noticed this happen even if the room where that lamp is located was behind a closed door / portal, meaning the engine should know the light doesn't reach you and should be disabled entirely yet it still worked. I've reworked my map since so I no longer have it. But in this screenshot I took, the brightness you see on the ceiling in the middle is from a gas lamp mounted on the wall on the other side. In this case closing the door to the right while standing in the same spot makes the glow go away once the door is shut, but like I said there was another case where the light shined through a caulk room even when its door was closed and I was standing outside.

It turns out we have many people who enjoy discussing code My complaint about that code is that all floating point numbers are snapped to integers with same tolerance. The .proc file contains a lot of different data: models, shadow models, BSP tree, visportals. They contain in different combinations: positions, texcoords, normals, distances. Snapping or comparing all of these quantities with same tolerance is a really bad idea. Some data is more sensitive to changes than other. They even have different measurement units, i.e. you position is measures in something like meter-units, while texcoords are usually measured in something like tex-units, and they are as incomparable as meters and seconds. Some data should not be snapped at all because that could break its internal invariants. If you snap coordinates of normal vector, it is no longer normalized, and the receiver has all the fun of dealing with extremely rare cases which normally should not happen. As for Hungarian notation... I do some mesh processing with halfedge data structures. When you have 10 local variables being halfedge handles, 5 local variables being face handles, and 5 local variables being vertex handles, it becomes much easier to understand what's going on if they start with "he" / "f" / "v" respectively. But this is very situational of course. Just starting pointers with 'p' and array-like stuff with 'a' is usually unnecessary, unless you have 3-4 levels (triple pointer or triple arrays), although in that case the code is smelly regardless or how you name variables

@grodenglaive I think random head turning might be plausible for specific characters, if they're supposed to be paranoid for some reason. But you should let the player know in advance that they're always looking over their shoulders. I don't know if Elsevier has any reasons to be paranoid, but it could be plausible in his case. It could even be one of the reasons why Astrid had a hard time seeing him insert the safe code. The doors thing, at least some interior doors were auto-closing too. I was specifically thinking of the dinning room doors when I wrote that. I think there were more auto-closing interior doors, though. Personally, my potato doesn't have any real issues with performance in this mission. Only on the outside the frame rates drop below 60 sometimes, but never enough to make any noticeable difference to the gameplay. That said, I wonder if you could use double visportals on the outside doors. That might help, as the inner portal should close more often, without needing to close the doors. I use double portals sometimes because of that. But it needs testing to know for sure whether it helps or not. (It also requires adjusting info_locationSeparators, as they can only touch one portal). Also, the big visportal in the water that separates the front yard from the spider area seems to be always open. I wonder if having two visportals in a V shape (from the top view) instead of that one, would help closing it. Or some similar configuration that doesn't interfere with the view from the watchtower.

That's because all those guides apparently did not reach the age of web-page-based Code-Reviews via Github, Azure Devops, and the likes... All the people arguing against Hungarian say that you simply don't need it anymore, because your compiler / IDE will tell you what type a variable has (your Pull-Request web-gui will not show you that information) and that Hungarian only makes it harder to read variables (which is not really accurate, as our brain is perfectly capable to read any camel-case variable or function, so why shouldn't it be able to parse the prefix?).

In that case they seem to go in the right direction and attack accordingly. What you could have expected to see for instance: If you only activated the lantern for a few seconds as to make the AI lose you, it's possible the guard may have instantly went searching in the opposite direction as if having no recollection of what (or rather where) caused it to become alert.

New fresnel mod: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-212-beta-3 Probably not needed. I don't think anything in the previous base pk4 changed but I built it just in case.

I guess I want to be sure I understand the context of entity "death" - both purchasing the glasses and picking them up adds a atdm:xray_glasses item to the players inventory. You mentioned basically the inventory slot which should be the be pointing at atdm:xray_glasses is pointing at nothing So it probably got "killed": -In the process of being added to inventory (in this case it was a purchase) -Upon the first attempt at using it (it sounds like it immediately did not work) -Or in the very small window in between Unless the entity in an inventory slot can be "dead" prior to it ever being added?

The "peculiar lenses" don't work for me. Neither the ones I bought, nor the second ones I found in some tower. Every CInventoryItem (C++ object) stores pointer to entity in m_Item. In my case, this pointer is dead, i.e. it points to an entity which was removed some time ago. I guess for the glasses to work, it should point to the "atdm:xray_glasses" entity. The reason why it works for some people is either because the glasses don't die for them, or because they die but not completely and no other entity created afterwards takes its entity number. So the main question is: who kills the glasses entity and why? UPDATE: Just to add some more detail. I think I'm playing clean latest version with latest TDM beta. I got lost pretty quickly, so I completed all the objectives and explored most of the map first. Then I returned to the starting area and went to buy a sword. There I noticed the glasses, bought them and tried to use them instantly: they did not work. Then I explored some more and found second glasses in the tower + a piece of advice to use them. Now I have two items, but they don't work anyway.

Creating a new thread for this as it was being discussed in an old beta-testing thread starting here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/&do=findComment&comment=490751 I suppose the main questions are: when should this spawnarg be used, if at all? why was it introduced in the first place? Can we get it documented properly on the Wiki so misuse isn't propagated? @stgatilov @Dragofer

Bikerdude has made a few updates to this mission so we are looking for a few testers to make sure nothing was broken or overlooked. As far as I can tell this is ready for release but it's always good to ensure nobody encounters unforeseen issues. Lowend players are probably the best target just in case there are any performance regressions too. Mini beta:

This is an intereting discussion. So, could one of the mods please move this to a separate thread as to not derail the beta testing thread. As a developer, you spend about 80% of your time just reading code. So, optimizing for readability is very important. The more information you can gather just by reading without cluttering up the code (by needless comments) the better. Hungarian notation helps immensely to quickly prase the displayed code in your brain. Yes, your IDE will show the desired information as well, but a mechanical interaction with the code is required to show it (mouse over or similar). Also, often you are tasked to do code review on webpages that don't offer these nice crossreferencing features of your IDE. Some things are objectively bad, 'though, so the respective rules preventing those things should universally be followed. For instance, much legacy code is nested extremely because at some point in time, it must have been a rule that you only have one return-point in your function (probably a c-residual). Such code is exhausting to read ("what was the else-if-condition some 1000 lines ago leading to this else-case again?") and very likely contains tons of code duplication. Today, we have the rule to only use little nesting and short if-else-clauses, to make the code easy to read and debug. If I come accross such a nested legacy function, I refactor the shit out of that function while trying to understand it, just so the next person after me doesn't have to deal with that horrible mess again.

I've very rarely seen setter methods which return values (unlike getters which obviously need to return the value they are "getting"). What value should a setter return? The same value it was given as a parameter? That's entirely pointless because the calling code already has that value. It could return the previous value, but such a value isn't necessarily defined (and doesn't appear to be relevant in the case of writing something to a file). Sometimes setters return the object itself, so you can call them in a chain, e.g. myObject.setWidth(60).setHeight(20).setColour(RED); but it's not clear how that would work with writeFloat which isn't an object method to begin with. That's certainly common (and is a convention I use), but not universal. The C++ standard library doesn't use it, for example — to check if a vector is empty you call std::vector<T>::empty(), not isEmpty().