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Ok! Your intentions become clearer. That is not the direction I thought this story might take, but I still like it; better even than the more cynical or ribald interpretations I was imagining. There is an element of Stoic wisdom (in the sense of the formal philosophy of antiquity) in the character fully dedicating himself to something he know is dangerous and unproductive because it expands and gratifies his spirit. (The Big Lebowski is a popular film that explores similar territory, although maybe you intend a less cynical resolution for your protagonist than befell The Dude.) That being the case, I think it is even more important to strongly set up that theme in the first level. As you can see, I missed some of the hints in your write up that pointed in that direction. The key to making this work is setting up a clear cycle of the protagonist's grandiose expectations, those expectations being crushed, and then the character adapting and coming out (slightly) ahead anyway. E.g. in your mission 1, Eric descends into "the underworld" only to become trapped, and then discovering the place has already been looted of anything majorly valuable, but never-the-less managing to meet his very modest loot goal off the scraps alone, before escaping. That I think should be the real core of that level's narrative, more-so than overworld capers that may proceed it. I think my comments above reveal where my sympathies reside concerning that matter. Ultimately all the evidence of our works in this world will be utterly erased by the inexorable march of time, down to the very last atom. That is the nature of being alive. If there is any value for us to find during this farce, then it is in enjoying the journey. Time spent in a pursuit that gives you fulfillment is never wasted. If anything I commend you for having the courage to share the products of your imagination out here where we can all nit-pick them!

Thanks for playing and the kind feedback re: the bugs: the brew tank is a new one - thanks for that. Will add it to the list for any future update. the bow: I think that's a TDM bug. I experienced it as well, but only the early days of developing the mission so I thought it had gone away, but I guess not: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21345-210-crashes-may-be-bow-frontend-acceleration-related/ the keys on the guard: never did get to the bottom of that one as I could never reproduce it.

I'm wondering if anyone ever checks new posts in the Fan Missions Forums? I've posted 4 questions asking for help for 4 different missions that I can't finish because I"m stuck, and I don't get any help. I posted a question this morning so I don't expect an answer right away for that one. Its frustrating because I would like to finish them. I've read through the posts for each mission and I'm not getting anything from them. If there's someone who could help me I'd really appreciate it. Thanks I guess I'm spoiled from the TTLG forums.

This one I got off Turbosquid (just the model - it wasn't rigged or textured): This one I did the concept myself: I'm going for a clean/simplistic aesthetic. Each species is going to have a color theme to help differentiate which kind of ship you are aboard. The top one is yellow/orange/brown/black. The bottom one is green/green-yellow/black - and their ships will have a good amount of grey I think as well (I must have been inspired by the Cardassians/Romulans for this one). http://www.midwestvideogames.com/

The i18n info on the wiki is mum on the subject, so I think there's no real support. However, speculatively, you could enter Latin-1 (i.e., ISO 8859-1) characters directly into your .xd file. This would probably work OK for players with English and some Western-European language locales. Others would presumably see mistranslated characters in those character locations. No hope for Asian or emojis with current system.

Thanks! Hint for the safe code here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=485264 Actually, it's probably time I added these hints to the original post....

Hi all, me again Now that I've learned how to take screenies on DM (thanks to Aluminumhaste) I wanted to post one that I took but I got an error saying that the image ext that I used was not allowed in these forums, It was .jpg so I changed it to .png and I got the same error again. They're on Photobucket.

Been getting into this stuff lately and thought I'd chime in. Blender can bake any animations and attach bones automatically. It can even assign bones to each vertex for very complex and detailed morphing that uses rigged armatures (MD5) instead of embedded vertex animations. It's all possible, but the problem is that it's very expensive, so you need to manually optimise everything and think carefully about the actual end use-case. For example, you might get away with having 1 object doing a very complex morph in a cutscene, alone in a room with a fully curated environment, but not a warehouse full of hundreds of them all dynamically animating and interacting with the player. I believe the MD5 format can probably handle a lot, but still have some hard limits in terms of number of joints and vertex assignments per bone, so that needs to be determined. Ogre has a limit of 256 bones per object and 4 bones per vertex, which is normally more than enough but quickly gets challenged doing this kind of baking. A very low-tech solution is to decrease the "resolution" of the keys along the timeline. Default is 24 fps so baking will add a key to each one of those frames. Simply scaling everything in the Graph Editor 0.25, then again at 4, then optimise ("Clean Keyframes/Interpolation Mode") can quickly lower the density of the keyframing and save a lot of memory. When baking physics to animation, you want to keep a higher density at the moments of impact and lower density when the objects are falling/flying and coming to a rest at the end of its timeline. Different optimisations with different properties (even axes) can be done to minimise the keyframes without sacrificing the finer details of animation too much, with a little more effort. You can easily reach a point where it becomes quite useable by today's standards, if you're willing to put in the effort. I didn't even get into addons and scripts yet. In terms of having a character, like a werewolf, that would do a full morph in a particular sequence - it sounds like you want 2 entirely discrete characters with a 3rd morph-sequence-entity that only occurs during a self-contained scripted transition, basically so that the character itself isn't lugging around 100s of bones and MBs of keyframes. Anything more complicated would require a more robust animation system engine-side, like ability to blend animations of specified bones while allowing the influence of others - animation-blending. IdTech4 doesn't have it. Doesn't mean you can't be clever and invent some workarounds, though. (500+ bones, already too much for my comfort. Working on ideas to solve that...) https://www.blendersecrets.org/secrets/copy-animation-from-one-object-to-another https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/68907/add-a-bone-at-each-vertex-location https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/168241/setup-bones-on-cloth-sim-so-that-you-can-transfer-it-to-unity-via-fbx-export

The Transaction is a small/medium sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter delivers the cryptic book, 'De Vermis Mysteriis' to a bookstore owner named Victor de Grenefeld. It is the fourth mission in the Thomas Porter series, continuing from where The Glenham Tower ended. The mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank BrokenArts, Melan and Ocn for playtesting and Bikerdude, BrokenArts and Ocn for voiceacting. An enormous thanks goes also to the fine people who created TDM and are still working hard, bringing it ever closer to perfection. Thanks also to the community for helping with my mapping efforts. Extra thanks to freesound.org -contributors who make excellent quality sound effects available for free. Trailer (thanks to ocn!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBdEsKoqWl4 Briefing: Ah, the town of Glenham. I never really thought I would be happy to see its shabby wooden miner dwellings, but after the nightmares of the Glenham Tower I'm happy to see any kind of civilization. During my return trip from the tower the ghostly mist veil transformed into an intense thunderstorm and heavy rain. My clothes are soaked and I'm dreadfully tired of the harsh tribulations of the past few days. My task for tonight is simple. All I have to do is to get the strange and incomprehensible book I obtained from the tower, 'De Vermis Mysteriis,' to the bookstore owner Victor de Grenefeld. And more importantly collect the hefty sum the bookstore owner promised to pay me. With that kind of sum I can sit back and relax for a while. I'd better stay in good terms with my customer and not steal from him. I have the hunch that de Grenefeld is a well connected man so staying on his good side might be beneficial for me in the future: maybe they'll need a skilled adventurer like me and I could turn legitimate. I could earn my keep and I wouldn't need to constantly hide from the city watch. At any rate, I've got it all planned out for the remainder of the night. I'll visit the bookstore, drop the book to de Grenefeld and collect my fee. After that I'd better hide in the basement of an abandoned building I've spotted near the town north gate and get some well deserved rest. I don't think the city watch would think a cloaked and armed person like me would be on honorable business in a stormy weather like this so it would be wise to avoid all confrontation with the guards. I do not need any misunderstadings with the city watch right now. The undead horrors in the Tower forced me to expend most of my tools and I desperately need more equipment if I intend to continue my budding adventuring career. I should get some extra gold for new gear and maybe a few holy water potions just in case. There is a Builder church nearby where I might be able to find some. I suspect those fanatics might have gold hidden there as well.. It is time to move in the town and get the things done quickly. Somehow I have a bad feeling about all this. It's probably nothing, probably I am just jumpy because of the horrors in the Tower and sleep deprivation. Tomorrow I'll sleep long, relax and eat well. UPDATED LINK: Use the ingame downloader to get it. Bikerdude was added in the author, I forgot him. No other chages. Could The Powers That Be make sure that this version ends up in the ingame downloader? Thanks! Known bugs: One betatester experienced an error ("ERROR: Failed to spawn player as 'atdm:player_thief'"), which drops the player back to main menu upon map load. If you experience this scenario, please turn EAX off in the options menu. That cleared the problem for the tester. Warning! There is ALWAYS someone who fails to use spoiler tags appropriately. I recommend you read this thread further only after playing the mission! Avoid spoilers.

Regarding Excel, I likewise used its integer incrementing feature. My spreadsheet was more complicated - ultimately multiple worksheets. That's because I was using it to include the draft subtitles, from which were auto-calculated character and word counts, as well as CPS and WPM, which were then color-coded against specific thresholds Those latter calculation required the sound file durations. I originally used Windows Powershell to gather those, but Windows only exposes duration to the nearest second, which proved inadequate. I then installed the Windows version of ffmpeg. That includes ffprobe, which reports duration in seconds to 2 digits after the decimal point. Regrettably, the output format from ffprobe is a problem, and Powershell was a big fight for several reasons (among them I'm a Powershell novice). The results were usable but barely. So I'm not going to write up my method as the hodge-podge it currently is. Maybe one or more specialized C++ or C# formatting programs would be the way to go next for me. Sadly, the extraction and import of first-draft subtitles from the existing wiki AI vocal scripts will probably continue to be a manual process. Because the .ogg file names have changed from when the old vocal scripts were written, so auto-matching can't easily be done. (This is a problem FM subtitle authors don't have.)

The subtitles for The Thug vocals have been posted to the bugtracker #6240 for review & eventual incorporation into 2.12dev. They are in FM form, embedded into QA-program testSubtitlesThug. The .pk4 is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VNP2fNge-2Ff3RkdUvCLagRENUESVW40/view?usp=sharing Easy instructions on using this FM can be found in both the Notes and Briefing. That info also sketches how the test program can be adapted by FM authors to present & test sets of their own custom subtitles. (I'm not claiming getting your data into this FM is real easy.) As I refined these subtitles, a particular style evolved, and particular tools/methods were used. I'm working on documenting this, but it won't be ready to release for a while. And things may mutate further as I tackle the next AI's subtitle. I'm thinking I need to do a character with longer speeches next, e.g., a noble.

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?

DarkRadiant 3.2.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Show entityDefs related to selected models in Model Chooser Feature: Support for rendering blend lights Feature: Implement sorting of Interaction Stages Feature: Recognise type of "set x on y" spawnargs Feature: OBJ files: loader supports usemtl keywords directly referencing material names (without .mtl file) Fixed: Material editor: additional preview object in textures/glass/ materials Fixed: Every attempt to load a texture will trigger a SIGSEGV signal caught: 11 Improvement: Update to wxWidgets 3.2.0 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.2.0 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!

You might find exactly that sort of thing (complete with the badly-voiced melodramatic cutscene) in a modern Doom mod, because hobbyists have mad ambition and no restraint. Your average AAA would be more like: First you cut to a way too long melodramatic cut scene because the main character is also in a soap opera. Then you're dumped into a random arena (that's really just a single room with one staircase and some boxes in it) with 500 10 alien robots are firing machine guns from every direction (because the one guy who somehow made the 500 aliens work in the demo quit after management verbally harassed him), also everything explodes every 5 seconds and everything’s on fire and the MC can fly in midair Matrix style (in certain contextual locations and in the cutscene that plays in the middle of the fight) and runs and bounces round at 200mph 15mph (because someone in the focus group said the fast movement made them feel disoriented and they got lost in the identical linear corridors--and the movement was was obviously the only reason) and has more weaponry 3 (console friendly but also somehow egregiously unbalanced) loot-box unlocked weapons with more ammo than an entire army and sprays the walls with bullets as 94 5 monster trucks one of your co-op player unlocked in a loot-box back flips and explode and if you die you have to start all over again before the first cutscene because you can’t save where you want because reasons the pre-teen-male console demographic aren't used to manual saving. Then you cut to a melodramatic cut scene because the main character is also in a soap opera... and the game ends there because the developers could not meet management's holiday launch deadline. But don't worry they will sell you the real ending (96% of which was already in the game files on release day) as paid DLC 6 months from now.

rotr plays like a cheap copy of uncharted and lara seems like a clueless mercenary that is fumbling and whining her way through the story. Core TR has a feeling of exploration and mystery and core Lara is a genius action hero with supermodel looks that is always cool and in control. core Lara chooses to be there and has fun doing what she does and always tries to get ahead in the race nu lara doesn't have fun she is crying and whining only makes it through the ordeal battered and bruised Core TR is exploration and mystery with a fun capable character TR reboot is fighting goons with a whiny clueless character

For the Thug, all the subtitles I've done so far have been rather short and so have lent themselves to the simple "inline" approach. I agree that a different character that has more long monologues, and so needs "srt", would benefit from a video editor (even if there's no real video, just audio) as you described earlier. I may need to call on your srt expertise later. I've been creating the subtitles with 3 windows open - 1- to select and play each .ogg with a minimal Windows player. 2- A view of the AI vocal script (e.g., source view of the Thug wiki entry), to use as a copy/paste starting point. 3 - The .subs file being built in a text editor. So, the FM I described is not used in the first place to create subtitles, but rather to do a second-pass review (e.g. by me) or third-pass review (as part of quality control during incorporation into TDM).

This was an excellent mission for me to start out my adventures in TDM v2.10. You did a great job of showcasing new features from the update and of your own creation. I enjoyed the new looting animations and sound. I found them pleasantly immersive but never intrusive. I wouldn’t mind seeing them again in other missions. I also enjoyed collecting the generic food, and I didn’t think the mission suffered at all for only having one lock pick (which surprised me). The big show stopper though was your new protagonist! I loved her peppy character--such a contrast from the classic sarcastic thief. But I never felt she was too flippant or overly saccharine (and you guys walked that edge). She read to me as someone who is relative newcomer to the TDM life and has already learned the tropes of her own game second hand. Now she is bemused to be encountering them in person. I hope we will get to play her or meet her again in future FMs. Having another very different PC perspective like that really enriches the setting. Overall I had a great experience, and my dad who watched over my shoulder while I was visiting him liked it too! There were a few things that confused me or caused me problems though. For your consideration: 1. key hunts 2. bonus objectives 3. characters I find my self wondering whether the bird-mask boat driver guy is supposed to be an established character in the TDM lore. By his few voice lines, I assumed he and Clara are an allusion to Garret and that girl at the end of Thief 3 (you know, the one who never featured again in any other thief games); but maybe you had another PC in mind as bird-mask? I hope we might get to see more of them and their relationship in the future. A thief partners duo, done well, and maybe helping each other out of jams in the course of a mission would be cool. 4. setting 5. canonicity and diegesis

Hm. If encumbered rope climbing is not only in the game already but is used in some popular FMs, I may have to change my opinion. It doesn't make any sense for the player character to be able to climb around on a rope with a body slung on his shoulder, but not be able to jump or mantle at all while under the same burden. That's just silly. The rarity argument cuts both ways. A situation that hardly ever comes into play is unlikely to break many missions.

For dropping a body while climbing, wouldn't the character just dip their shoulder to let the body slide off onto the ground? Seems plausible to me and should stay. Why make it more cumbersome? I've tried to address that code feedback in the newest version of that patch. I'll need a new code review.

If anything, it's reasonable not to change the player character move set, because it has been nailed down years ago, and people have been building maps around it. Unless you plan to meticulously replay all the maps in all possible playstyles, to make sure everything is ok, that's a poor idea. Having it as a mod and letting people try it out might be a better option.

The problem with a "theme" system (I think) is that it's forcing the assets into categories they may not fit well into or that don't make sense; or I mean it's forcing the mapper to think in terms of discrete "categories" at all, when that may not be most effective. Whereas a tagging system doesn't impose any "system"... Tags are completely open-ended, and could be at any level of scale or heirarchy -- you could have: bathroom-furniture, made-of-wood, Victorian, X-author's set, good for triggers, items for a bookshelf, architectural, magic, etc, etc... as tags, but not all of those categories make sense as discrete themes with other co-themes at the same level. I guess this is a longwinded say tagging more intuitively lets you target what you want without imposing a structure you have to wedge it into ... just a totally open field of tags from any walk of life. Edit: This is not to say tags should be arbitrarily specific. There should be tags of general categories too of course; even these will be the backbone of the system. But the whole point is tagging allows multiple layers, so you can use the general category tags to start your search, then ween it down with increasingly specific tag sets, whatever is best for the asset set. Some asset sets, or especially combinations, will categorize differently than others, and tagging is ok with that. Edit2: The image I have in my mind anyway is like a photo-collection tagged collection. There's an opening page with a tag cloud with the most common basic tags (general category) the largest in size and minor ones smaller, which you click on and then you get a browser with that set of textures. Then on the left hand bar will be all the tag-combinations within that set (other tags textures in the set are carrying; then in parentheses maybe the number of AND-textures it'd filter down to / OR-new textures they'd bring in), the major tags again larger or highlighted somehow, which if you click one of those new tags, it'd filter the browser to show the AND set. And maybe there's also an option so you could have an OR set and get both (or even select a new OR set from the full tag cloud), which adds new textures into the browser window, and also new sets of tags in the left-bar (the new tags carried by one or more textures in the new set). Also there's a place you could back out of a tag to cut that subset out. So you could open up & winnow down the set as you desire. It ends up a kind of way to browse through the whole collection by navigating through tag AND/OR combinations. Also there's a search bar where you could type in a tag at any time also.

Even if you take a few factors out of the equation (making a change for literally one FM author and possibly "some players"), you implemented a change in player character movement model / added new gameplay rule – and you're surprised it wasn't implemented during public beta testing of new release... Not to mention that situations like that (with the code) happen all the time, in both amateur and professional setting. E.g. Lately I was working on a solution for one of our modules not working correctly on Mac. I spent the whole day researching the topic, finding and testing the workaround, but ultimately my PR was declined. We found out that the actual problem was with borked installation process for one of our dependencies. Well... I could have spent that day on something else