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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.

@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.

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.)

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

"...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm Ansome, a long-time forums lurker, and I'm here to recruit beta testers for my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short (30-45 minute), story-driven FM with plenty of readables and a gloomy atmosphere. Do keep in mind that this is a more linear FM than you may be used to as it was deemed necessary for the purposes of the story's pacing. Regardless, the player does still have a degree of freedom in tackling challenges in the latter half of the FM. If this sounds interesting to you, please head over to the beta testing thread I will be posting shortly. Thank you!

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

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.

Something I was thinking of: Even if some assets are non-commercial, are all assets at least accounted for to make sure they're credited accordingly and can be distributed? I ask following an issue in another great project I work with called Red Eclipse: They don't have NC assets but did have a few texture packages they had to remove because they later found out their clauses were incompatible with the project. If this hasn't happened in well over a decade it's very unlikely anyone would complain today and request removal for any reason, but if any resource had its license misunderstood that could destroy existing FM's unless perfect replacements were found. Obviously I presume the team never included any asset randomly found on the internet without verifying their explicit requirements in detail, but it doesn't hurt to check. I think the best that can be done otherwise would be to have a list of which assets are libre or have the NC clause: That way a map can choose to use those models and textures that are free if the author wants their FM to be fully libre, albeit this would handicap an author in what packages they can use. If core assets like character models or textures are also NC, the idea is likely pointless as you can't make a FM without those, at best you can skip a few texture packages... not sure about other things like core scripts or defs, since they're technically code I presume those are GPL?

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.

Indeed: there are already accuracy issues as soon as you use floats (especially single precision), and a hard-coded snap-to-integer behaviour seems to be reducing accuracy still further. That's actually a rare example of "App Hungarian notation" where the prefixes convey meaningful application-specific information, rather than just duplicating basic types like integer or float. It has been suggested that this was what HN was originally supposed to be, but everybody used it just to show primitive types which resulted in the whole convention becoming disliked. Exactly, and it breaks down completely once you start using more complex types than primitive numbers. Knowing that something is a pointer is useless without knowing what it points to, knowing that something is an "obj" or a "struct" is similarly unhelpful, and once you start trying to expand the convention so that the prefixes can convey information about the actual object type, you will end up with complex multi-character encoded prefixes that nobody else will be able to understand.

When I actually meant pseudographics, I did not mean some specific line/dots/crosses. I simply meant the cases when people add spaces until the text gets the exact alignment they want. You can't search for such cases, because the only offending character is space, which is present everywhere. The only way to proceed to just change spacing and listen for feedback afterwards. And it sounds like an OK solution for me in general, but definitely not a good idea for 2.12.

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

New script for mappers: my flavour of a fog density fading script. To add this to your FM, add the line "thread FogIntensityLoop();" to your map's void main() function (see the example in fogfade.script) and set "fog_fade" "1" on each foglight to enable script control of it. Set "fog_intensity_multiplier" on each info_location entity to change how thick the fog is in that location (practically speaking it's a multiplier for visibility distance). Lastly, "fog_fade_speed" on each foglight determines how quickly it will change its density. The speed scales with the current value of shaderParm3, using shaderParm3 = 1000 as a baseline. So i.e. if shaderParm is currently at 1/10th of 1000, then fade speed will be 1/10th as fast. Differences to Obsttorte's script: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/&do=findComment&comment=310436 my script uses fog lights you created, rather than creating one for you. Obsttorte's script will delete the foglight if entering a fogfree zone and recreate it later more than one fog light can be controlled (however, no per-fog-light level of control) adding this to the map requires adding a line to your void main() script, rather than adding an info_locations_settings entity with a custom scriptobject spawnarg in my script, mappers set a multiplier of fog visibility distance (shaderParm3), while in Obsttorte's script a "fog_density" spawnarg is used as an alternative to shaderParm3 smaller and less compactly written script fogfade.scriptfogfade.map

I've just been reading through some old forum posts about correcting fonts. One of the points Tels makes is that, if correcting a font used in readables, you need to avoiding changing any character's spacing (I read this as xSkip value), to prevent changes in existing FM readables with that font. I suspect this advice is too conservative. You want to avoid enlarging an xSkip, because the resulting changes to wordwraps could potentially lead to line or paragraph truncation. Making an xSkip smaller could lead to wordwrap changes, but these IMHO would be unlikely to be harmful. In that regard, here's the situation with my changes to english Stone fontimage_24.dat (see a few posts previous as File Update for Improved Subtitle Font). Only a few characters got altered xSkips. Of those, the angle brackets were unlikely to be used in an existing readable, because they showed garbage glyphs. The "|" was xSkip-shortened, but also unlikely in readables. Only the badly centered and so xSkip-shortened "J" is thought to have potential to affect existing wordwraps. I have argued here that xSkip shortening is OK. However, I'm willing to revert spacing changes for "|" and "J" if people feel strongly otherwise.

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.

With TDM 2.12, after the credits finished, the "Mission Complete" screen did not display. I found that the screen was black and I could hear my footsteps when I tried to move around. I think the reason for the mission not completing successfully was that the "Do not kill or harm allies" objective was never marked as "1 = STATE_COMPLETE" instead it was left as "0 = STATE_INCOMPLETE". Note, I didn't use noclip throughout the mission. Same as: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18054-fan-mission-the-accountant-2-new-in-town-by-goldwell-20160509/&do=findComment&comment=458491

How about using TDM automation framework (and maybe pcem/qemu)? More info see: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19828-automation-features-and-discussion/

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.

Related to looking into the stray marks associated with Stone font characters... I've noticed that the nominal 12 pt DDS (which as discussed above only kicks in under 8 pt) has only ASCII glyphs... nothing with code points above 127. Maybe that's why the corresponding 12 pt DAT file was not distributed, as a workaround to force the engine to use 24pt instead, because tels never got around to finishing the low-priority aspects of the project. The 24 pt DDS does have the ANSI glyphs. At a glance, most are fine; a few are a bit ragged. I didn't check compliance and completeness with TDM's character map as given on the wiki. I don't feel ANSI improvement is a 2.12 item. I've got a test FM to show all the characters. At some point, after refinement, I'll post a link.

To cater to both audiences. I mentioned LibreGameWiki as one example. nbohr1more mentioned other uses. Explicitly allowing reuse and spread will help TDM reach a wider audience and would hopefully attract more volunteers. More volunteers which can help improve both TDM versions. There are several benefits for a project of being in the Debian repo. One is that TDM Debian-users can report defects on any package directly to Debian (no need to register on separate forums). Debian may then fix the issue themselves (in their "TDM-libre" package) and will offer the patch upstream to TDM, who can then choose to accept or reject the patch. I envision "TDM-libre" to have the same capability of downloading any mission as regular TDM. The only difference is that "TDM-libre" would come packaged with the regular engine (which is GPL+BSD) and an included mission that has libre media/gamedata. When I play TDM by myself, I want the unlimited-play and can accept commercial restrictions. But if I were to promote it somewhere, or charge for a stream when playing online, or make a video, I would want a version without commercial restrictions (and can temporarily accept limited-play) to make sure I don't violate anyone's copyright. Perhaps. That's what I'm trying to find out.

I suggest you use the term "I", to make clear that it is something YOU want, and that you speak for yourself. But, as wesp5 mentioned, I don't really know what this is about, at all. And, I'm also wondering about all the newly registered people lately, who just arrived at this forum, and already want to revolutionize this mod. This is a thing I noticed 2 or 3 years ago, and which hasn't been present in the 15 years I play this mod and frequent these forums now. Really seems like a common thing these days, to not knock on the door, but kick it in, and stomp right in.

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/

TDM has tons of textures from "free" texture resources that do not allow redistribution and cannot be incorporated into a commercial project. Someone would need to create a huge replacement pack of textures that do not break the look of existing missions and do not infringe on the copyrighted textures. Also, many artists who contributed to this project do not want 3rd party entities to use their work in commercial projects. They intended the models, textures, sounds, animations to be exclusively used for Darkmod content. You would either have to replace ALL assets or contact every contributor and ask them to re-license their assets. Many contributors are no longer active with the project and haven't visited the forums in years so it would be no easy feat. I cannot speak to Debian policy but I think that they treat installers that add non-free content the same as non-free content itself. One could argue that Steam is such an installer but I guess Debian would counter that there are a few fully Libre games on Steam. I think Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint need to consider a repo that allows for games (etc) that include non-libre content but intentionally offer this content for free to the community with no stipulations other than "don't try to sell it as a product".