Search the Community

Call me foolish, but how exactly do I connect a path_corner, path_wait and other AI path nodes to a particular AI ? I can't seem to figure out how to assign a particular path node to a particular AI. For example, I have a commoner, want him to walk a few steps to the nearest "wait" node, then do his waiting there for a few seconds, then move onto another path_corner, etc. I understand you can likely use a particular path node for several characters with a similar or identical route, but I just want to be sure the AI character actually reacts to a path node. Is the Ctrl + K method sufficient ?

This post differentiates between "gratis" ("at no monetary cost") and "libre" ("with little or no restriction") per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre * A libre version of TDM could: ** Qualify TDM for an article on the LibreGameWiki *** TDM is currently listed as rejected https://libregamewiki.org/Libregamewiki:Rejected_games_list because "Media is non-commercial (under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0). The engine is free though (modified Doom 3) (2013-10-19)" ** Qualify for software repositories like Debian *** TDM is currently listed as unsuitable https://wiki.debian.org/Games/Unsuitable#The_Dark_Mod because 1) "The gamedata is very large (2.3 GB)", and 2) "The license of the gamedata (otherwise it must go into non-free with the engine into contrib)" and links to https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/LICENSE.txt Questions: 1) tdm_installer.linux64 is 4.2 MB (unzipped), which is far from the 2.3 GB which is said to be too large. Yes, the user can use it to download data that is non-libre, but so can any web browser too. If the installer itself is completely libre, does anyone know the reason why it cannot be accepted into the Debian repository? 2) If adding the installer to the repository is not a viable solution, would it be possible to package the engine with a small and beginner friendly mission built only from libre media/gamedata into a "TDM-libre" release, and add user friendly functionality to download the 2.3 GB media/gamedata using "TDM-libre" (similar to mission downloading)? 3) Would such a "TDM-libre" release be acceptable for the Debian repository? 4) Would such a "TDM-libre" release be acceptable for LibreGameWiki? 5) Would the work be worth it? * Pros: Exposure in channels covering libre software (e.g. the LibreGameWiki). Distribution in channels allowing only libre software (e.g. the Debian repository). * Cons: The work required for the modifictions and release of "TDM-libre". Possible maintenance of "TDM-libre". I'm thinking that the wider reach may attract more volunteers to work on TDM, which may eventually make up for this work and hopefully be net positive. 6) Are there any TDM missions that are libre already today? If not, would anyone be willing to work on one to fulfill this? I'll contribute in any way I can. 7) I found the following related topics on the forum: * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/16226-graphical-installers-for-tdm/ (installing only the updater) * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/16640-problems-i-had-with-tdm-installation-on-linux-w-solutions/ (problems with installation on Linux) * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17743-building-tdm-on-debian-8-steamos-tdm-203/ (Building TDM on Debian 8 / SteamOS) * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18592-debian-packaging/ (Dark Radiant) ... but if there are other related previous discussions, I'd appreciate any links to them. Any thoughts or comments?

I usually share other people's photos of historical and industrial architecture in this thread, but I've decided to finally share some of my own photos that I've accumulated over the years. Over the years, especially the last twenty or so years, I've wandered many of the old town quarters in cities and towns all around my country, taking snapshots. Wereas many of the main streets and major landmarks have long since had nice and beautiful restoration work done, many of the more obscure side streets, back alleys and occassional overlooked corners had interesting sights to behold. I've particularly been fond of old townhouses that show elements from different eras of history, as well as all the wear accumulated over the years and decades. As much as I like that many of these eventually also receive decent restoration work and look nice again, the sight of a well-worn, dilapidated or even ruined house or ocassional public building can prove really stimulating for the imagination. They've got a lot of proverbial "texture" (not just in the surface sense) and "character" that can hike one's imagination, especially with regards to lived-in environments with long histories.

Here is another update to the English Stone font's DAT file used for subtitles and some readables: fontImage_24.dat This supercedes the Jan 30th update. As agreed, now all character spacings - as given by xSkip - are preserved (from this file in TDM 2.11). Exception: the Jan 30th repair of garbage metadata for "<" and ">" remains, including xSkip repair. ASCII Characters (lower 128). The earlier Jan 30th post summaries those ASCII characters that needed metadata changes to avoid adjoining stray marks. (The detail report below updates newer reversions and minor revisions.) ANSI Characters (upper 128). An analysis was also made of the status of the Stone 28 pt font's characters in the upper codepoint range of 128-255. This could be of interest if the subtitle system was some day expanded to include European languages, and continues to use the historic codepage method. The analysis also prompted some additional DAT tweaks now. Broadly, implementation of the upper-range characters (standard or TDM-specific, as defined in the TDM wiki's I18N - Character mapping I18N) is incomplete for Stone 24 pt. The status is: 43% (55 chars) Good as is. 9% (12 chars) Good enough after DAT tweak included in this update. 6% (7 chars) Missing and shown as hollow box. 30% (38 chars) Missing accent/diacritic. 7% (9 chars) Otherwise weird. But often suggestive of glyph work started but not completed. In addition, 7 chars within categories (3-5) were "improved", but are still not good. To really solve categories (3-5) requires DSS bitmap surgery (and corresponding DAT adjustments), which is beyond the scope of planned work. DAT tweaks of ANSI characters (like with ASCII) were careful to avoid changes to xSkip. Tweaks can be further grouped by problem solved.... In category (2): - (4 chars) Char is clipped, with stray mark from adjoining character on other side. - (7 chars) Stray mark, without char clipping. As improvements in categories (3-5): - (3 chars) Stray mark, without char clipping - (4 chars) Out of valid range on top edge A categorized itemization about treatment of specific problems and characters, with further details, is here: Information about methods, including new tools, to conduct this analysis and tweaking will be forthcoming, mostly after the 2.12 release.

I've seen fun workarounds like that in other game modding as well. Years ago, maybe even a decade, some fella who was making a mod for Mount & Blade over at the Taleworlds forums revealed that he put invisible human NPCs on the backs of regular horse NPCs, then put the horse NPCs inside a horse corral he built for one of his mod's locations/scenes and then did some minor scripting, so the horses with invisible riders would wander around the corral. The end result was that it looked they're doing this of their own will, rather than an NPC rider being scripted to ride around the corral slowly. Necessity is the mother of invention. I don't know about the newest Mount & Blade game, but the first generation ones (2008-2022) apparently had some sort of hardcoded issue back in the earlier years, where if you left a horse NPC without a rider in its saddle, the horses would just stand around and wait and you couldn't get them to move around. Placing an invisible rider in their saddles suddenly made it viable again, at least for background scenes, of riderless horses wandering around, for added atmosphere. First generation M&B presumed you'd mostly be seeing horses in movement with riders, and the only horses-wandering-loosely animations and scripting were done for situations when the rider was knocked off their horse or dismounted in the middle of a battle. Hence the really odd workarounds. So, an invisible NPC trick might not be out of the question in TDM, even though you could probably still bump into it, despite its invisibility.

Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.

File Update for Improved Subtitle Font As requested a while ago, to address the stray marks and other problems seen with current subtitle font, Stone, I am providing a short-term fix for characters in the printable ASCII range 32-126, using corrected metadata: fontimage_24.dat This is intended to replace tdm_fonts01.pk4\fonts\english\stone\fontimage_24.dat No change is needed in the related .dds files for this. Briefly, problems with stray marks found to the left of a character were due to picking up pixels from an adjoining character in the glyph bitmap dds files. Adjusting the location of the source box and related metrics fixed these. Affected were: % C E T W Y | The | character also got improved spacing, as did J Finally, the entirely screwed data for the angle brackets was corrected. This coming month I hope to work up a wiki page with diagrams to better explain what I learned about the mysteries of the idTech4 font .dat and .dds files. To see what the results look like with corrected fontimage_24.dat in place (as an override), here is my testing FM: testSubtitlesASCII.pk4 A longer-term fix (beyond 2.12 release) would also address ANSI and TDM-specific-mapped charaters in the range 128-255. To look at that, I have a similar experimental tester for ANSI (unripe to release). It shows substantial issues in that range. And then there's also consideration of fontimage_12.dat and fontimage_48.dat. And the russian-character variant.

First-time poster, so apologies if this question has already been asked and answered. Since installing last month, I've noticed a bug both in the trainer and in my first FM, The Painter's Wife. At random intervals every few minutes, the character will draw a random weapon or will swap weapons if already armed. Pretty minor as far as bugs go, but I'm waiting for the moment when drawing a weapon will make me just visible enough at an inconvenient time. Not sure of my install ver., but I downloaded in Feb. of 2024. Any ideas? Thanks!

Inn Business It's business, at an inn, over three nights. Development screenshots: Download: https://drive.google...dit?usp=sharing Update 1.48 uploaded March 8th, 2014, one change: patches key rarely not being frobable in one of its possible spots Big thanks to my beta testers: Airship Ballet, Kyyrma and AluminumHaste! Development supporters of note: Sotha, Springheel and Obsttorte. Also thanks Sotha, for urinating in my mission. ;-) And thanks Kyyrma for the title screen! My appreciation to all forum/wiki contributors, without whom, this wouldn't exist. Thanks to positive commenters on my previous mission too, extra motivation helps! :-) Note this uses campaign features, what you use the first night, impacts subsequent nights. And to quote a tester, "...the level is maybe best experienced in more than one sitting". If you do pause between nights, please be sure to save, you can't begin partway through effectively. (If you accidentally start a night you already completed, just fail the kill objective to switch to another night.) If your frame rates are too low facing the cemetery, please reduce your "Object Details LOD" setting. It was designed with "AI Vision" set to "Forgiving", to be able to sneak through with minimal reactions, if you want more/less, adjust your settings accordingly. There are several random, conditional aspects, and ways of going about things, so others might have slightly different experiences. Post here if you discover hidden objectives for extra points! My condolences to loot completionists, I made a bit on the third night hard, you've got your challenge cut out for you! Speaking of which, there's a TDM bug that mission complete totals too high, here are the real amounts per night: 2026/970/202. Oh, there is something that in the U.S. would be rated PG, in case you play with kids in earshot. I hope you enjoy playing it, feel free to let me know you did, and I'm glad to respond to inquiries (like how stuff was done, nothing was scripted). (Note which night you are referring to if it's something specific.) (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] Developed for TDM 2.01. PS: Thiefette, good news, no spiders! Springheel, if you find an optional objective you can skip...you might find it immersion breaking. Others, no undead! There are a couple other interactive critters though. :-) Edit note: Some posts below were from users of an unreleased version of TDM 2.02 which broke several things, they do not reflect regular game-play.

Oops, in that last release, I accidentally didn't check character spacing in the codepoint range 128-159. And sure enough, there were problems with character 131 & 132, which needed 4 more pixels of horizontal box shifting than the 3 pixels they got earlier. So here's a better version: fontimage_24.dat of Feb 24

In principle I like the idea of community campaign building. But the official campaign itself never really captured my imagination, not to mention it'd be hard for people to have an idea of where it's going, much less making it cohere. I scripted a Dark Mod campaign meant to introduce the districts, factions, and lore that does capture my imagination. But I'm not in any real position to ask people to build for it, and also there's still the problem that people may have different visions for it that may not cohere well. As for the "connecting mission", that might be interesting... But I'd reframe it a little, not that it has to be connecting per se, but you know, a hero or even another character from some FM in an adjacent setting alongside (or before or after) an existing FM, kind of like what Rozencranz and Guildenstern did for Hamlet, if you know about that. I think it's better to have it more open ended how an author wants to build off an existing FM than only connecting two FMs per se. That might be a really interesting theme to see play out.

Ah, pity I wasn't reading the forums back in February. I'm fond of that game, along with Bugbear's other early title, Rally Trophy. I was never too good at FlatOut, but it was always a hoot to play.

Author Note: Thank you for downloading and playing the sequel to The Accountant 1: Thieves and Heirs this FM picks up right from where we left off in accountant 1. This is the second part in my three part series following Corbin on his journey to discover who and what the accountant is. This mission is a little different to what you may expect from a Thief mission but still has plenty of classic Thief moments as well. This is the largest mission I have ever built with an average play through lasting between 2 - 3 hours. A few aspects in game are different to what you may expect as well and those are: - Candles are pinchable (frob to put out instead of pickup) - Food has been hot fixed so now it heals you for 10 health points when eaten - Doors that are missing handles means you cannot enter that room/building - All secrets can be found before you enter the sewers As a little piece of fun trivia there is a small cameo in my mission from a very special guest. He is a longtime voice actor in the industry and you may know him from roles such as Deckard Cain in Diablo, Captain Price in Call of Duty, Elder Lyons in Fallout 3, or just about any Nordic character in Skyrim. In addition to all of the fantastic people who have helped me along the way I have personally spent a lot of time, effort and energy devoted to bringing this out to you all so I hope you can enjoy the fruits of my labor and have fun! File size: 358 mb

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.

When talking about a possible libre version of TDM (https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/) it seems we believe all media/gamedata included in TDM is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. I am not familiar with how the process of adding new media/gamedata works today; I have seen files uploaded to the bugtracker which developers then commit to SVN, but I don't know if there are other ways. It may be a good idea to implement a process that when new components (media/gamedata included in TDM) are added, the contributor is asked to be explicit about the license (a choice which may defaults to their previous preference, for usability). It won't fix the past, but it may help in the future. This will make it easy for contributors to add future data under a more permissive license if they choose. Libre media can be added and its license can be tracked, rather than assumed to be CC-BY-NC-SA. I suggest looking at how Wikimedia Commons has implemented this: the contributor state the source and license at the time the data is uploaded. This can be done either by providing urls or by saying "It's my work and I choose this licsense". The first step could be to add a way to keep track of each filepath in SVN, author, license, sources. Start by setting the value for each file's license to "(default/legacy CC-BY-NC-SA)". Possible implementations for a user interface for new additions are: * Use our own wiki, which runs Mediawiki (same as Wikimedia Commons). I see several benefits of this, but we also need a way to accept uploads of batches, not just single files. * Look at how other open source projects have solved this. There may be more appropriate solutions available. ... but I'll leave the implementation open. Suggestions are very welcome! If the author of each file already in SVN can be tracked, then it may be possible that the author is willing to give a blanket permission for all their past files in one statement, and all their files in SVN can be updated in one commit. A productive contributor willing to release some of their work under a more permissive license could make a big change. If Dark Radiant would support letting mappers search media/gamedata by license (does it already?), it would make it easier for mappers to create a completely libre mission, which would help facilitate a TDM-libre release. If I understand things correctly. This post does not address all details and it may contain misunderstandings or assumptions, but it's a start. Also relevant: * Is there a compiled and maintained list of recommended or deprecated resources for mappers to use? * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20311-external-art-assets-licensing/

Is this really a problem? Maybe we can figure that out before reverting the "J", which previously was so badly spaced it looked like it had a space character after it. It would be helpful to identify which missions have such pseudographics. I suspect it's a small number. And those using Stone font smaller still. In that regard, I did some preliminary experiments, limited to a cohort of 46 FMs on my machine with expanded FM .pk4s, that I can do full-text searches across files on, with TextPad. (@stgatilov, I imagine you are in a position to similarly and more conclusively search the entire english FM collection.) I searched with characters (or short strings) that would be likely to be found in pseudographics. For untranslated FMs, I searched in filenames of form *.xd . For translated FMs (those that had string "#str_" in their *.xd; there were 8 such FMs in my cohort) I searched in file english.lang Results Many search strings were useless due to too many false hits: "_" Widely used as part of internal xd name. Used on separate line as heading underscore. "/" Widely used as part of internal xd name. "\" (except "\\") Widely used \n or \" escape character "--" (assuming single dash is everywhere) Several in a row to bracket a heading, or as part of a letter's signature. Used on separate line, as heading underscore or as border between paragraphs These search strings were moderately useful, showing up in just a few FMs (tho none were pseudographics on examination): "=" Used on separate line as heading underscore (in penny3's erasing.xd) "+" Used as bullet points, or (several in a row) to bracket a heading (in penny3's erasing.xd; in bcd's english.lang) These search strings were most promising: "|" Only 1 hit, but it's a table-form pseudographic! (northdale1's snowedinn.xd) "\\" (i.e., escaped \) No hits found in my cohort Inspection of snowedinn.xd showed this: Note that it uses book_calig_mac_humaine.gui; so this pseudographic was not in Stone font

EDIT - You can find a working external script with instructions in this post ---------------------------------------------------------------- Hi! First post in this forum. Greetings to all. I am a long time fan of T1 & T2 and I recently stumbled upon The Dark Mod while looking for some T2 Fan Missions and I immediately fell in love with it. Here goes a heartfelt thanks to the developers for having created this masterpiece and my recognition and appreciation to the TDM content creators and artists. Thanks. Back on topic. A couple of weeks ago I started playing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. The game makes use of the mouse wheel to increase and decrease the speed of the character and while it took a couple of missions to get used to it, it felt natural from that point on. So much so that after beating the game and launching TDM again my first thought was: this game mechanic should be a must in the stealth genre. You can see it in action in the first minute of this video: I understand chances are this new mechanic cannot be implemented in TDM right away: we are currently limited by the 3 existing speeds / levels of sound (correct me if I am wrong) but regardless, if the development Team would allow us to use the mouse wheel to switch between creep, walk & run it would be a step forward in the right direction, in my humble opinion. Cheers!

@snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.

Congrats on the release! Remember to check ThiefGuild as well as the DarkFate forums (via Google Translate) for additional feedback.

Complaint From Players The player must pick up candles before extinguishing them, and then the player must remember to drop the candle. The player must drag a body before shouldering it (picking it up), and the player must remember to frob again to stop dragging the body. The player finds this annoying or easy to make mistakes. For players who ghost, some of them have the goal of returning objects back to their original positions. With the current "pick up, use item, and drop" system, the item might not return easily or at all to its original position. For example, a candlestick might bounce off its holder. (See player quotes at the bottom.) Bug Tracker https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6316 Problems to Solve How can the "pick up" step be eliminated so that the player can directly use or interact with the item where it is in the game world? How can so much key pressing and mouse clicking be eliminated when the player wants to directly use an item? How can candles be extinguished and lanterns toggled off/on without first picking them up? How can bodies be shouldered without first dragging them? Solution Design Goals Make TDM easier for new players while also improving it for longtime players. Reduce tedious steps for common frob interactions. Make it intuitive so that menu settings are unnecessary. Do not introduce bugs or break the game. Terms frob -- the frob button action happens instantly. hold frob -- the frob button is held for 200ms before the action happens. (This can be changed via cvar: 200ms by default.) Proposed Solution Note: Some issues have been struckthrough to show changes since the patch has been updated. Change how frobbing works for bodies, candles, and lanterns. For bodies: Frob to shoulder (pick up) a body. Second frob to drop shouldered body, while allowing frob on doors, switches, etc. Hold frob (key down) to start drag, continue to hold frob (key down) to drag body, and then release frob (key up) to stop dragging body. Also, a body can be dragged immediately by holding frob and moving the mouse. For candles/lanterns: Frob to extinguish candles and toggle off/on lanterns. Hold frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Hold frob to extinguish candles and toggle off/on lanterns. For food: Frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Hold frob to eat food. For other items: No change. New cvar "tdm_frobhold_delay", default:"200" The frob hold delay (in ms) before drag or extinguish. Set to 0 for TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Solution Benefits Bodies: New players will have less to learn to get started moving knocked out guards. With TDM v2.11 and earlier, some players have played several missions before realizing that they could shoulder a body instead of dragging it long distances. Frob to shoulder body matches Thief, so longtime Thief players will find it familiar. Second frob drops a shouldered body. Players still have the ability to both shoulder and drag bodies. Compatible with the new auto-search bodies feature. Dragging feels more natural -- just grab, hold, and drop with a single button press. There is no longer the need to press the button twice. Also, it's no longer possible to walk away from a body while unintentionally dragging it. Set "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar to delay of 0 to restore TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Candles: New players will have less to learn to get started extinguishing candles. With TDM v2.11 and earlier, some players didn't know they could extinguish candles by picking them up and using them. Instead, they resorted to throwing them to extinguish them or hiding them. Hold frob to extinguish a candle feels like "pinching" it out. Once a candle is picked up, players still have the ability to manipulate and use them the same way they are used to in TDM v2.11 and earlier. For players who ghost and have the goal of putting objects back to their original positions, they'll have an easier time and not have to deal with candles popping off their holders when trying to place them back carefully. Set "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar to delay of 0 to restore TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Solution Issues Bodies: Frob does not drop a shouldered body, so that might be unexpected for new players. This is also different than Thief where a second frob will drop a body. "Use Inv. Item" or "Drop Inv. Item" drops the body. This is the same as TDM v2.11 and earlier. This is the price to pay for being able to frob (open/close) doors while shouldering a body. Patch was updated to drop body on second frob, while allowing frob on doors, switches, etc. Candles: Picking up a candle or lantern requires a slight delay, because the player must hold the frob button. The player might unintentionally extinguish a candle while moving it if they hold down frob. The player will need to learn that holding frob will extinguish the candle. The player can change the delay period via the "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar. Also, when the cvar is set to a delay of 0, the behavior matches TDM v2.11 and earlier, meaning the player would have to first "Frob/Interact" to pick up the candle and then press "Use Inv. Item" to extinguish it. Some players might unintentionally extinguish a candle when they are trying to move it or pick it up. They need to make sure to hold frob to initiate moving the candle. When a candle is unlit, it will highlight but do nothing on frob. That might confuse players. However, the player will likely learn after extinguishing several candles that an unlit candle still highlights. It makes sense that an already-extinguished candle cannot be extinguished on frob. The official "Training Mission" might need to have its instructions updated to correctly guide the player through candle manipulation training. Updating the training mission to include the hold frob to extinguish would probably be helpful. Similar Solutions In Fallout 4, frob uses an item and long-press frob picks it up. Goldwell's mission, "Accountant 2: New In Town", has candles that extinguish on frob without the need of picking them up first. Snatcher's TDM Modpack includes a "Blow / Ignite" item that allows the player to blow out candles Wesp5's Unofficial Patch provides a way to directly extinguish movable candles by frobbing. Demonstration Videos Note: The last two videos don't quite demonstrate the latest patch anymore. But the gist is the same. This feature proposal is best experienced in game, but some demonstration videos are better than nothing. The following videos show either a clear improvement or that the player is not slowed down with the change in controls. For example, "long-press" sounds long, but it really isn't. Video: Body Shouldering and Dragging The purpose of this video is to show that frob to shoulder a body is fast and long-press frob to drag a body is fast enough and accurate. Video: Long-Press Frob to Pick Up Candle The purpose of this video is to show how the long-press frob to pick up a candle isn't really much slower than regular frob. Video: Frob to Extinguish The purpose of this video -- if a bit contrived -- is to show the efficiency and precision of this proposed feature. The task in the video was for the player to as quickly and accurately as possible extinguish candles and put them back in their original positions. On the left, TDM v2.11 is shown. The player has to highlight each candle, press "Frob/Interact" to pick up, press "Use Inv. Item" to extinguish, make sure the candle is back in place, and finally press "Frob/Interact" to drop the candle. The result shows mistakes and candles getting misplaced. On the right, the proposed feature is shown. The player frobs to extinguish the candles. The result shows no mistakes and candles are kept in their original positions. Special Thanks @Wellingtoncrab was instrumental in improving this feature during its early stages. We had many discussions covering varying scenarios, pros, and cons, and how it would affect the gameplay and player experience. Originally, I had a completely different solution that added a special "use modifier" keybinding. He suggested the frob to use and long-press frob to pick up mechanics. I coded it up, gave it a try, and found it to be too good. Without his feedback and patience, this feature wouldn't be as good as it is. Thank you, @Wellingtoncrab! And, of note, @Wellingtoncrab hasn't been able to try it in game yet, because I'm using Linux and can't compile a Windows build for him. So, if this feature isn't good, that's my fault. Code Patch I'll post the code patch in another post below this one so that folks who compile TDM themselves can give this proposal a try in game. And, if you do, I look forward to your feedback! Player Complaints TTLG (2023-01-10) Player 1: TDM Forums (2021-03-13) Player 2: Player 3: TDM Forums (2023-06-17) Player 4: TDM Discord (2021-05-18) Player 5: TDM Discord (2023-02-14) Player 6: Player 7: Player 8:

Just curious, based on this discussion: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19239-soft-r-gamma/?p=427350

Should first mention this isn't a request as the change is something I should be fully capable of doing on my own: The engine fully supports it and I already used this setup when I imported a bunch of custom models, it just needs to be done for the vanilla ones... something similar was recently implemented to allow torches to have colored flames, this is kinda the same thing but for characters instead. I wanted a discussion thread first so I know if other mappers and players want this and will use it, also if the devs would accept it if I was to do the work. TDM allows all model entities to contain a grayscale texture which can be set to any color via the "_color" spawnarg of the entity. The only requirement is having the appropriate textures then simply adding your paint image to the material with the "colored" keyword: // Shirt { blend diffusemap map models/md5/chars/guard/body_shirt colored } I'd like some of the AI characters to support this for setting custom colors on clothes. Imagine you make a city where you want the city watch to be red instead of the default blue as it would fit your theme better, you'd just set "_color 0.5 0 0" on your guard and you have them representing your faction of choice! It would be just as useful on civilians to easily obtain more unique characters without needing extra assets for each... what if you want the nobleman with the green tunic to have a purple tunic, or the noblewoman with the blue dress to have a red dress? Obviously this requires editing the character textures... I've done this sort of thing many times in Gimp fortunately, might even be able to generate them with a bash script using ImageMagick; The color just needs to be extracted from the base diffuse texture, desaturated, then put in a separate image as an intensity map. By saving it as grayscale with no alpha channel it should take up little extra space, granted the engine doesn't have issues with grayscale tga / dds compressed images (all specular maps should also be using that). Obviously each affected character would have a default "_color" spawnarg matching the default color so existing FM's won't see any changes. There's only one issue here: Due to the colorization technique being different, there's likely no way it can be made to look the exact same way... the clothes may appear just a little more or less bright or saturated, not by a lot just that it likely won't be perfectly the same. Is that considered too breaking to be accepted, or are there other reasons why anyone believes I shouldn't spend time on this?

Ever since I worked on "Chalice of Kings" with Bikerdude, I have wanted to get flame particles with new particle glares into the core mod. My reasoning was that the candles have glares and the un-glared torches look mismatched. This proposal was met with mixed reactions, so (knowing the history of TDM feature proposals...) I have created a technical demo. You may download it here: zzz_flameglare.pk4.txt (fixed) Just rename without the .txt extension at the end and place it in your Darkmod directory. Here are some screens. Using particles for this is probably the wrong way to go now that Duzenko has an emissive light feature in his branch: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19659-feature-request-emissive-materialsvolumetric-lights/

Here is the release of testSubtitlesANSI , one of my tools to test and improve the Stone 24 pt font that is used in all the English subtitles. testSubtitlesANSI.pk4 of Feb 25, 2024 As the screenshot below reveals, this testing tool is an FM that's a variant of that used to develop subtitles for individual AIs. Here, the subtitles are just alphabetic lists. There are 7 subtitles that cover all the TDM 8-bit codepoints (e.g., 0-255), including those representing European languages. The first two subtitles (i.e., codepoint sub-ranges) are shown in this screen shot. The tool allows inspection for stray marks and inter-character spacing; black walls & floor facilitate that. This release includes the most recent improvement to these attributes, provided in yesterday's update of the fontimage_24.dat file. (The changing of those attributes was done with a different tool, used iteratively with this one.)