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Announcing the Release of 'Requiem' for The Dark Mod! Download Download the latest version of the Dark Mod here: http://www.thedarkmo...wnload-the-mod/ Download the mission here: Mediafire: http://www.mediafire...u89/requiem.pk4 Southquarter: http://www.southquar...ons/requiem.pk4 Fidcal.com: http://www.fidcal.co...ons/requiem.pk4 Create a folder in your Dark Mod install with the path "darkmod/fms/requiem" and place the downloaded .pk4 file inside. When you load up The Dark Mod, the mission will appear on the "New Mission" page. Requiem can also be found directly using the in-game loader. Gameplay Notes While this mission is playable in TDM 1.8, for an optimal experience please download and play in TDM 2.0 (or higher). Most inventory items in the game can be dropped, so no need to carry them around after they are no longer of any use. Note that If you use noclip or other console commands while playing, there is a good chance that you will break the intended flow of gameplay. Credits Mapping and Readables: Gelo R. Fleisher Voice Acting: Goldwell Additional scripting: Obsttorte Additional textures and assets: Flanders, Sotha, Grayman, Springheel, Bikerdude, Obsttorte Additional map optimizations: Bikerdude Testers: Bikerdude, Obsttorte, Gnartsch, AluminumHaste, Baal, nbohr1more, PPoe Custom Soundtrack: Leonardo Badinella - http://leonardobadinella.com/ Additional Music: Lee Rosevere - http://freemusicarch...c/Lee_Rosevere/ Marianne Lihannah - http://www.funeralsinger.net/ Vox Vulgaris - http://www.last.fm/music/Vox+Vulgaris/ A note from the author Hi all. While I've been involved in indie game development for a while now, I'm first and foremost a writer. My most recent project has been a novella that tries to capture the visual feel and tone of the Thief series (you can find the link below). As I was writing, I found myself playing a lot of Thief and Dark Mod fan missions, and got to thinking that maybe I wanted to make one myself, as a companion piece to the book. When I finished up writing, I had a bit of down time and decided to take the plunge. Having never done any serious mapping before, my plan was to make a small mission that I could bang out in a month or two and call it a day. Well, as sometimes happens, the project got a little bit bigger than I had planned. Ten months, and lots of elbow grease later, Requiem is finally ready for you to play. I'd like to thank everyone who helped pitch in to help make Requiem come alive, from those who took the time to answer my many questions on the forums to those who actively contributed to the FM. I especially want to thank Bikerdude who served as my mapping mentor, and Obsttorte whose clever scripts really turned what was in my head into the game that you are playing. Above all, I want to thank you for downloading and playing Requiem; I hope you enjoy it. Links of Interest Author's Blog: http://gfleisher.blogspot.com/ Companion Novella (Amazon): http://www.amazon.co...k/dp/B00BYEW02M Companion Novella (Smashwords): http://www.smashword...oks/view/298956

DarkRadiant 3.5.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: More customisable layout, all windows and panes can be dragged and arranged Layouts like Embedded, Regular and Splitpane are superseded and have been removed Tweak: The LayerControlPanel's tooltip popup is now less annoying Tweak: Clarify distinction between Shadow render mode and other render modes Fixed: Show/hide Light Volumes for combined entities inconsistent Fixed: Currently applied particleDef not selected in Particle Selector Fixed: Layer visibility checkbox not reacting to double-clicks Fixed: Cannot toggle visibility of layers in Linux Fixed: Drag-and-dropping layers is not working in Linux Feature: Customisable Layout (click to see the videos) Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.5.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

It wasn't a "sacrifice", it was a deliberate decision. People wanted the game to be as close as possible to the original, including pixelated graphics. If you ask me, the former version based on the Unity engine looked and felt better. But, hey... I guess I'm not the right person to judge that, as I never played the original, and always found that the art style of System Shock 2 is much better anyway. This also illustrates the issue with community funded games: Too many cooks spoil the broth. In game design, you need freedom, not thousands of people who want you to do this and this and that. Just take a look at the Steam forums and see how all those wimps complain again about everything. Hopeless.

@stgatilov, you said, RE string comparisons: I'm unclear if you are referring just to changes you made in 2.11. I think equality testing of two strings (one of which is "text") was working and is a good and expected capability, and should be supported. Including against an empty string. I noticed in your bug activities that you did remove some comparisons with ... == "". I see you also removed string concatenation with "\". No problem, but does that mean multiline macros are no longer a thing? (If so, I'll need to change some examples) BTW, the series so far hasn't really tried to cover the 2.11 changes, since I figured it's a work in progress. But since you did a great deal of GUI work in July, perhaps it's stable enough to try to consider it. I see the logs listed in bugtracker, but don't have access to the private forum threads mentioned there: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20526-gui-refactoring/&do=findComment&comment=477179 https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21535-order-of-evaluation-in-expressions-materials-and-gui/ (Nor do I have SVN currently set up on my newer machine, for changelogs from there.) Any place else I should look?

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152224 There is a new mapping contest over on TTLG for the Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary and the organizers were kind enough to include The Dark Mod along with all of the Thief games as an options for making a mission to submit as an entry. The deadline is a year from yesterday and the rules are pretty open. I recommend going to the original thread for the details but I will summarize here: Rules: - The mission(s) can be for Thief 1, Thief 2, Deadly Shadows or The Dark Mod. - Collaborations are allowed. - Contestants can use any custom resource they want, though TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack. - Contestants can submit more than one mission. - Contestants can enter anonymously. - The mission(s) can be of any size. Using prefabs is allowed but the idea is this is a new mission and starting from an abandoned map or importing large areas from other maps is not allowed. Naturally this is on the honor system as we have no way of validating. Mission themes and contents: There is no requirement from a theme or story viewpoint, however contestants might consider that many players may expect or prefer missions to be celebratory of Thief: Deadly Shadows in this respect: castles, manors, museums, ruins inhabited by Pagans and the like, with a balance of magic versus technology. This is entirely up to the authors, though, to follow or not - it is just mentioned here as an FYI and, while individual voters may of course choose to vote higher or lower based on this on their own, it will not be a criteria used explicitly in voting or scoring. Deadline: May 25th, 2024 at 23:59 Pacific Time. See the TTLG thread for details on submissions and the voting process. Provided I can make the deadline I hope to participate. It would be nice to see the entire community do something together, and expressing our complicated relationship with this divisive game seems as good a pretext as any.

What I understood is that the idea of TDM was born from that it was unclear if T3 would get a level editor at the time. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20050218173856/http://evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=268

Hi, I'm modeling my own interpretation of a certain humanoid creature from one of the Thief games, and I'm attempting to make it so that the polycount and topology are game engine friendly. It's going to have normal and specular maps, and I was just thinking that if someone could give me just the basic humanoid skeleton that the animations in TDM use, I could bind the model to that so that whoever wants to develop the creature for the mod would be able to do so. Any basic model format is okay. dae, obj, fbx, etc. Also, what's the acceptable polycount for character/monster meshes in the game? And does there need to be things like separate shadow meshes and LOD meshes?

This one is really essential: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 Should work fine with the GOG version.

Another utility program, "findToolLongSubtitles", is now available, which scans a directory for .subs and .srt files, and checks the length in characters of each subtitle line against a maximum fieldwidth expressed in characters: Win executable C++ source code file It is more fully described in the latter as: findTooLongSubtitles.cpp By Geep, March, 2023, for The Dark Mod, under the terms of its open-source license. Purpose: Given a particular subtitle maximum fieldwidth, evaluates TDM subtitles - contained in .subs and .srt files - and reports those that don't fit. Assumes a maximum 2-line subtitle field. If a subtitle doesn't currently fit (or suboptimally relies on auto-word-wrap to fit), but could be made good by inserting or adjusting a linebreak, locations where that break could be positioned are shown. This program only examines a single folder at a time for contained .subs and .srt files. If your FM has these files in multiple places, run this program more than once. For an "inline" subtitle, a string-embedded "\n" causes a manual linebreak. When shown in this program's output, that subtitle has 2 lines, as in the game. This allows use of a common output routine for inline & srt subtitles. Console program invocation: findTooLongSubtitles -m maxSubtitleCharsPerLine [default is 42] -d dirWithSoundFiles [default is current dir] -o output file [default is stdout] Build: Requires C++ 17 or later For example outputs, evaluating subtitles found in the 2.11 releases of FMs New Job and St. Lucia against a proposed 42-character fieldwidth, see here.

@datiswous, the centering of the subtitles was the stock tdm_subtitles_common default, so I left it that way with my The Lord customization. I'm not sure centering (versus, say, left justification) is really the issue with respect to subtitles fitting in the box. To that point, as a demonstration with testSubtitlesLord, I used rather aggressive side margins of 170 (so a field width of 300), which can just-barely accommodate 42 characters/line. But that means, depending on word breaks, some lines with 42 or 41 characters will force an autobreak, as it sounds like you observed. While margins of 170 is the minimum required to avoid overlap with fully-enlarged inventory icons, I think such overlap is less critical than avoiding unwanted word-wrap. So going with margins of 160 & field width of 320 is better going forward, while still avoiding the egregious overlap of the stock tdm_subtitles_common. Can you live with a character-length restriction of 42 characters/line? I think (given 2 lines) that should be adequate for almost all srt phrases that are limited to about 6 seconds. Another approach to strike a balance between margin overlap and word-wrap would be to reduce the font scale slightly. And in the long run, it would probably be desirable to have a CVar that the user could use to scale both font size and corresponding field height & width (and probably interfield vertical spacing). This could be shown as part of the HUD Settings special screen, even if internally it is a separate layer. Then the user could find their own compromise. EDIT: I'll copy this to the "futures" thread, given the "long run" ideas.

Okay, I'd like to throw in one idea. Open the spoilers for several disclaimers. Imagine 1. a real-time, online Multiplayer for Dark Mod (or similar 3D-first-person-medieval-theft-style game inspired by thief) 2. every real person has an account with a virtual money balance as acquired by playing the game 3 however, if one's virtual character dies, so does the account, and then the money is gone. One can decide to start fresh with a new account though. 4. top players and their accounts are listed somewhere on the games central website, bla bla bla, so there is motivation to have a long-lived character with a lot of money So far so good (?). Now for some gameplay specifics: 5. there are maps, of course. Everyone is free to design Maps. (since availability of maps is certainly one of the bigger bottlenecks, the initiative for someone to submit a map should be rewarded, or at least not made difficult). 6. There is an official entrance for the map, where the guards enter. And then there is a (or several?) inoffical entrance(s). There thieves might enter. The map creator is responsible for making sure both types of entrances (official and inoffical) exist. (As with single-player maps, the map creator should make sure there are official and inofficial routes throughout - in other words, an interesting, explorable, thief-style map). 7. The map creator is also responsible for making some riddles, which potential thiefs must solve in order to get into the map. Riddles should be hard (only solvable with a "hacker-mentality" - think of the cognitive tasks thieves face when trying to get entrance to a complicated system) (or, metaphorically speaking - the thieves play out their own version of a cutscene before a heist - of course only in their mind, not with a video ) 8. The goal of the guards is to, well, guard a specific object (or keep thieves from achieving a certain objective) for a certain amount of time. If they succeed, they will be paid accordingly (or rather the player's accounts)). 9. Per map, there is a maximum number of guards. This number is defined by the map creator. Also, the map creator equips each guard. Before a map starts, each guard position must be filled. If more people are interested than open positions exist, there will be a competitive selection procedure (maybe one-on-one fights in a "sandbox" mode against contestants? Or a quiz how well they are familiar with the map they want to guard?) 10. Importantly, the map creator CANNOT specify routes of guards. This is up to the players playing the guards. 11. Even more importantly - the group of guards do not know when of even if thieves will appear. This should encourage patrolling-style behaviors automatically. 12. The entrance riddle of thieves should be difficult. This is the main trade-off for the lucrative prize, together with the high guards:thieves ratio. 13. Within the map, there is no chat. People (guards and thieves) should only be allowed to cooperate via game-play elements. Therefore, guards writing letters should be possible, but thieves might steal this information within the map. (maybe talking is also possible, but this should be audible in a realistic way - thieves should be careful to not raise their voices and were they want to speak) 14. When the set time for a map is done, the players may decide each time if they want to play for the guards or the thieves next time. All in all, I believe this gameplay style would offer trade-offs for each party (guards, thieves) to make it difficult for both but balanced. Going back to the disclaimer: I'm aware that the online, real-time nature of my suggestion is difficult to implement at best, impossible at worst. But then, why these specific ideas? I believe such an approach could circumvent several dangers Dark Mod is facing: - rather unrealistic/easy AI --> not an issue here, because there is no AI, only natural human intelligence. - small ratio between map playing time : map creation time (not so much an issue as maps may be reused, but the feel for the mission is kinda new each time) - this might inspire some opening up of the community to new players, or encourage people to hand in maps, with the prospect that they might be used in a real-time, MP, higher-stakes scenario. So! I think I'm ready now being torn apart by you guys

I have returned to TheDarkMod after a few years (I played it a lot around 2015-16, even tried making a map, it did not go anywhere so I donated those few assets). The missions are great. In this one in particular, the navigation is awesome. The city is very good. I have noticed a trend though: the puzzles are more complicated; a lever may open something *somewhere*. Do you think that large TDM missions are suffering from "puzzle creep", that the veteran and in-community players do not notice? [/spoiler] So you have to go *all the way back* to use the crystal key on the teleporter thingy? And I don't know how to deal with the burning crystals either. I ended up killing nearly all enemies in the mages' place, with sword and holy water, because, yeah, I need to figure things out and I can't be bothered to stealth from one place to another anymore, lol. I will try checking the readables and environment with a bit more patience and see. [spoiler] The old format for spoiler tags does not work, not does changing the '/'. Wow, what a way to advertise "I am dumb" XD IMO the best way is to place gradual spoilers in the forum thread. I know it's a bit of a burden on the authors but answering 20 questions disjointly from different users is one as well.

Personally I think Moonbo's Requiem FM is about as good as one could wish for in terms of a spiritual successor to the Thief trilogy. The story hits all the important notes, and the level design is uniformly top notch across all the expected axes of stealth gameplay. And there is even a sequel that trailblazes entirely new territory from its predecessor in gameplay, story, and tone. That's just icing on the cake. Indeed there several FMs for TDM that I believe equal or even surpass the quality of the original games' levels. The trouble is how do you discover them in that giant downloader list? Are there other great missions in there that I have yet to find? That is undoubtedly the greatest current weakness of this project. The ability to sort FMs in the game client (i.e. both the downloader and the mission launcher) by date, size, and author would be a great help. Search by keywords or tags and support for grouping missions into collections would also be very useful.

OK, I'll try to rearrange to that directory layout. I'll have to lookup how to do that without screwing up Tortoise. I'm not on that machine at the moment, so I can't check your BTW. I don't remember about "branches", but I do remember a local "tags" directory... don't know if it was populated.

Ideally, you should have checked out "trunk" directory only, so that its contents get into "tdm11dev/darkmod_src" instead of "tdm11dev/darkmod_src/trunk". Do you BTW have all the "branches" and "tags" directories near "trunk" ? Maybe not, because they are still closed for public for some weird reason...

Fun for me that you should mention Enderal, as that is next on my rotation of things to play. I started it a few years ago with some mods and self imposed rules that satisfied my hunger for sneaky, tricksy, fantasy roleplaying really well. But then I hit a difficulty spike (at the part where you take an undead infested subway to an island) and lost my taste for it. Currently I'm dipping my toes back into Skyrim first, with a bunch of difficulty/survival mods and house rules. I'd like to finish the main quest line in that, which I was only 1 or 2 quests from completing on my main save when I last set it down. Then I want to play the Forgotten City mod with that character, which I tried once before when my guy was like level 10-20 and couldn't do a lot of stuff. But right now I'm actually having more fun running around with a few new characters doing random minor quests and survival challenges with very limited resources. And just last week I finished an epic 18 month first full playthrough of The Witcher 3 and DLCs, with extensively tweaked W3EE and Lazarus mods installed. It was very hard, but damn I felt like I earned that vineyard at the end. (Plus it was something that I started with my dad during the pandemic, and in the end we completed all the 3 main questlines together.) This is what I love about PC gaming. Epic fantasy, open world, story driven, immersive survival sim is a genre that I don't think has ever existed in a single commercial product, but with a small amount of elbow grease on my part there it is for me to play.

Man, that was WAY bigger than I expected it to be. Huge, even. Overall I liked it and it had lots of character, which I appreciate more than perfect polish. It's great when authors try something new. I liked the pagans. The pagans are great. I would like to see more pagans. The "parallel worlds" created by pagan shortcuts vs the rest of the city were great as well. Story was really nice. The keys were a solid idea. I wouldn't want all (or most) missions to be like that, but once in a while, why not, it provides a different experience, which is good. The only issue I have with it is that I think you may have underestimated how trivial it is to overlook a key even if it's not hidden in any way, and I think people have biases about where and when to seek keys from other missions. I think that from past experience (especially in various city missions) I'm not used to looking for relatively crucial items in areas that are not necessary for finishing a quest objective. Don't know if this is really your fault, but I'd say I'm not the only one this happened to. For example I missed the gate key completely because I simply forgot to look around in that particular small piece of the mission, I just discovered a different crucial key (that let me leave the area) pretty much right next to it and I didn't see any mission context that would suggest "this is the area where the map finally opens up and you should find the gate key". The key is not necessary to finish, but not having it makes the final part a lot less fun. I liked that some things that happened were pretty unique. Raiding the chief builder's quarters by just running through everything was an absolute carnage and funny as hell: Now some criticism: First one is really superficial, but I didn't look at your mission for a while because you chose one of the most generic names possible and I think I subconsciously assumed the mission itself is not going to be a great effort either (in hindsight: LOL!). If I had to say one single thing I actually dislike about the mission, it's the name. Some details here and there, like a door in the Ox 2nd floor (I think? across the street from the hypos) completely missing and only showing a wall and a levitating doorknob in the doorframe, some levitating vegetable garden on the farm or misaligned branches here and there, nothing important. It was also possible to look out of bounds in several places, but the only one where I think it was an issue was in the square where the pub is, next to the Builder's building - there's a scaffolding that you climb on, you can look through a semi-open window and there's a ledge nearby that you can climb on. For me the place screamed "climb onto this and see where it goes", only to show me an out of bounds view and a z-fighting texture. It was a tad too long and the pacing around the end was not great. Length itself would not be an issue I think, but after finishing the main mission it took me another hour to complete the medium loot objective. I approached the grand finale, fulfilled the main objective, and instead of victoriously arriving with the cure I had to roam around for an hour looking for places that I missed. And I did miss some, obviously, but that's simply often going to happen with a mission like this. That was more tiring than pleasant. The biggest problem for me: Lighting. Seems like there was light shining through walls everywhere. Light gem was shining in a few places that seemed dark. Places that should have been dark (no windows or other light sources) weren't and instead seemingly contained invisible light sources that didn't make sense (the room on the ground floor of the bleak house was like this I believe). I noticed that some light fixtures continued to emit a little bit of light even after being extinguished, which is not an issue, I'm talking about places where I could not find such rationale for the light. I'm surprised that nobody complained about this yet, almost makes me wonder if there's something wrong with my installation, so I took a few screenshots to show what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/JuO9sF5 If this is really how it's supposed to be, then this is the one thing I'd personally focus on improving in your next mission, which I'm sure is going to be great.

No later than Tuesday, I'll be releasing the following - - A spreadsheet with all The Lord subtitles. The spreadsheet calculates metrics, that help decide which subtitles benefit from extension and what those extensions individually should be. Plenty of examples there. - A companion Word doc explaining the spreadsheet and the workflow generally. The spreadsheet is relatively complicated and so benefits from a column-by-column explanation. - The testSubtitlesLord FM with the resulting polished subtitles embedded in it. This FM is slightly different than its Thug predecessor; the Word doc has the differences. To come in March/April - - My personal Style Guide for these barks - A cleaned-up C++ program to gather sound clip durations to import into the spreadsheet. (Current version works but is a bit too smelly to release.) - Possibly the spreadsheet in template form - And another AI character's utterances.

I think without clear character development, the player avatar defaults to almost a pure ludic abstraction. They are a sort of experienced, hyper-competent, obsessive-compulsive, entirely amoral kleptomaniac. They exist to flawlessly execute whatever plan is set out for them by the objectives, steal ever single piece of loot that has the slightest value, and to see or interact with every unique set-piece and interactable the mission maker went to the trouble of including. They have no real wants of their own besides accomplishing their objectives and not getting detected. The real danger though for the mission-maker is that if their character writing is not interesting and self-consistent enough to overcome this bias towards ludic abstraction then players will default to just ignore the story entirely: supposing that it is meaningless set dressing. For some missions this works. E.g. In Volta and the Stone, we do not care why the thief wants to steal the stone, or how the course of his career brought him to that point. (We don't actually care about who the Voltas are either for that matter.) It is all just an excuse to explore a cool manor as a half-invisible cat-burglar-man. For missions though where the characters and story is supposed to be one of the draws this means there are a lot of stakes for the effectiveness of the mission resting on the strength of the narrative hook. There needs to be a clear and ever-present narrative arc from moment one, to draw the player into the role playing experience and keep them in that frame of mind. Every event needs to logically connect to the next. For your missions described so far, to do that successfully, here's how the essential flow that I see: Mission 1: the PC is an inexperienced pretender at being a gentleman thief, (he probably has never actually stolen anything of value before,) who in his eagerness to prove himself plans a dangerous and unprofitable heist. The job goes badly wrong, and it is only by a lot of luck and a little bit of natural talent that he escapes with his life and barely enough loot to afford to make another expedition. However being a natural thrill seeker he is undeterred, and considers the adventure a great success. Mission 2: using the lessons learned in mission 1, the PC plans a more sensible second job and takes away a tidy haul. However being sobered by success (and perhaps, being less overcome by adrenaline and having paid more attention to the somber circumstances of his surrounding this time), he decides that it's time to quit while he is ahead and return home with his fortune. Mission 3: with home in danger, the PC must now use his skills not for his own naïve dreams of adventure but in defense of family. (He has truly grown as a person.) and maybe Mission 4-5: the PC recognizes that he cannot return to the farming life just yet. There is other business he must handle before it will be safe to return to his old way of living... and perhaps in the process he recognizes that his skills as a sneak are more valuable to himself, and the life he imagines returning to, than is the purer calling of being a simple farm hand.

DarkRadiant 3.3.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Remove menu options which are not applicable to current game Feature: Grey-out menu entries that are not applicable Feature: FX Declaration Parsing Support Feature: FX Chooser Feature: Renderer now takes "translucent" keyword into account Fixed: Lighting Mode Renderer draws hidden lights Fixed: Loading map results in "Real Hard DarkRadiant Failure" exception Fixed: Crash when trying to set default mouse or keyboard bindings Fixed: Unit Tests intermittently get stuck on Github runner Fixed: xmlutil thread safety problems Fixed: Some materials aren't displayed correctly Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.3.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

Let me elaborate on this tactic: 1) Postulate some crazy concepts about historical events until one gains a little traction either by morons or people who find it to be an amusing meme 2) Test the waters in different forums and social media spaces to see how folks react to this 3) If the forum crowd is determined to be largely left-wing and rationale, overamplify how "idiotic" people are for believing XYZ and then slowly begin associating these "idiots" with anyone they consider their social or political adversaries until you get large numbers of forum members to rant about right-wing "Trump-tards" (etc) and foam at the mouth about all their political grievances 4) Pretend to be a right leaning person, act like a jerk, and get your posts censored 5) Go to right leaning forums and show them that this "theory" is being censored and see if you can get them to integrate it into the larger narrative of "true things that the left is censoring". ( Eg, add it to the pile of Qanon nonsense ). 6) Return to the left leaning forums to mock the right leaning folks for doing step 5. Mission accomplished, you've entrenched more poorly educated people into an absurd belief system and you've ignited a bunch of left-wing derision against them. This type of agitated polarization works well whether you are Putin, the Republican Party, Democrats, etc. Divide and conquer. Here's a tip: Nobody needs to grouse around about what "idiotic" things people believe. If you don't like people believing dumb things, then create a blog, youtube video, or podcast explaining the topic in easy ( and friendly ) terms to those you wish to evangelize into the world of being "not idiotic". The language of referring to people as "those idiots who believe" is a cancer that we suffer too much of these days with political propaganda organizations such as "Media Matters for America" (MMFA) who basically write a single set of political jokes about a daily topic and feed them to all the Late Night television hosts so that if you don't hear them say "republican person X did \ said this dumb thing" from one late night personality, you surely will hear it from another one and the version of what is told omits any nuance or rational counterpoint. In some cases, the words are out-right fabricated from out-of-context statements or things that MMFA thinks people will believe. Here's a perfect example: To this day, late night comedians treat the incriminating emails on Hunter Biden's laptop as "fake Russian slander" even though the New York Times has corroborated their authenticity and they are DKIM signed. They use the laptop story as a talking point about how Republican's are "pro Russian idiots" even though nobody of either political party would be happy to have the son of a vice president using his father's position to arrange financial scams and deals with geopolitical enemies ( China ). Because the latter information is largely invisible to over 50% of the US populace, it serves as a perfect place for political divide and conquer. If the entirety of mainstream entertainment and news are gonna bury or distort legitimate news stories about their allies, what are the chances that anyone will vote for a moderate "middle" candidate? The left will see right-leaning voters who discuss the laptop story as Russian traitors and the Right will see the left as "idiots" who get all their news from television comedians and insane "woke" SJW blue hairs. Perfectly divisive. People need to stop looking at the proles on the ground and start thinking about all the groups that are trying to pull the strings. So I state again, this is no place for astro-turfers, propagandists, and non-linear warfare. Nobody here really cares about what dumb things are floating through the brains of a small group of internet denizens. If these "idiots" grow in numbers, calling them idiots "louder" will not "cure" them or shrink their numbers. The only thing you will achieve is more entrenchment and polarization.

Considering only barks, not conversations... For most barks where the audio is more than 1 second, subtitle display extension is neither needed nor desirable. When it's reasonable to limit the subtitle duration to just the audio duration, that's what the captioning community seems to recommend. However, if a comparison of clip length to reading time (estimated by character and/or word count) shows that there's not enough time to read the caption (given a maximum reading rate chosen as policy), then the solutions are - shorten the subtitles (i.e., make it non-verbatim) slightly extend the subtitle display time So, in order to minimize the need for (1), the ability to do (2) is desirable. The amount of extension should be done on a per-subtitle basis, not by a global parameter. Hence the optional parameter.