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Okay, I had no idea, I have googled it up now and you are right, to my own surprise. Done, I´ve put some paragraphs which were previously not in spoiler tags into spoilers.

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

We will look at some of this stuff, but SPOILER tags, please!!!

This may make sense in that the performance impact of the volumetric effect can scale with how much of the effect is filling the screen. We shipped with a “performance mode” but had to setup the entities by hand to do it (so it’s not perfect). If you change the LOD detail settings to “Low” or “Lowest” this will disable certain lights, particles and such that can be very heavy to render. You can try these settings and see if you notice an improvement. If not sending us some pictures of heavy areas (with spoiler tags please) will be helpful with tuning these “performance modes” in subsequent patches. Thanks for playing!

Interesting, although I'm not sure what to make of that. One of my favorite games (The Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena) was published by Atari, and, they don't even seem to care to keep the activation servers running much. Or remove/change the copy protection, which doesn't work at all on Windows 11. I really hope that Nightdive delivers at the end of May... I'm not one of the shit storm crowd (it's absolutely horrible on the Steam forums...), but, 7 years of development is a long time, and delaying the release obviously has become a bit of a habit, to say the least.

(I apologize for the odd poll question layout. I wasn't able to add five yes-no questions, because polls are limited to three questions.) Hi everyone, I've recently been working on some patches for issues that I've read about from players on the TDM and TTLG forums — and Discord. My goal is to make it as easy as possible for players, especially new players and those who need usability/accessibility options, to find what they need in order to have a better TDM experience. I've already written the GUI and game engine code for these settings, which I've been using in my personal build. The reason for this poll and discussion is to both guide the finalization of my work and collect data to help inform the dev team. Which patches I submit depend on the outcome of this poll, discussion, and what the dev team agrees to accept. Once decided, I can coordinate with the dev team. I've attached screenshots of what the new settings menu would look like if all of the settings are accepted. Below, I have detailed each menu setting, so you can have an easier time understanding each one. Very important to keep in mind: None of these settings change TDM default behavior. They are all opt-in. If you are already happy with the behavior of 2.10, 2.11, etc. and these menu settings are accepted, nothing will change for you. Rename "Always Run" to "Run Mode" with options "None, Always, Toggle" After 2.11 was released, @i30817 requested that "toggle run" be added to the settings menu. Its cvar is already in TDM as "in_toggleRun" (same as Doom 3). I propose renaming the "Always Run" setting to "Run Mode" with options: "None", "Always", and "Toggle". None = in_alwaysRun 0; in_toggleRun 0 Always = in_alwaysRun 1; in_toggleRun 0 Toggle = in_alwaysRun 0; in_toggleRun 1 Show Blackjack Helper @Wellingtoncrab suggested that the new blackjack helper be added to the settings menu. Its cvar was added to 2.11 as "tdm_blackjack_indicate". More info: It's the new blackjack helper added to 2.11. When the game detects that the blackjack can be used for a successful hit or KO, the blackjack will rise slightly. I propose a "Yes/No" setting for this. Slider for "View: Head Bob" @ChronA requested a way to disable head bobbing, because a viewer watching him play was having severe motion sickness. Also, there was a bug in TDM that made setting the head bob in the console not stick after loading a saved game. (Even with 2.11, if a mission overrides the "tdm_player_thief.def" file and sets "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", "pm_bobup", and other cvars, it will override player preferences.) As far back as 2008, players have had trouble setting head bob. Another one from 2018. At the end of 2022, @Shadowex3 registered just to voice the need for a way to control head bob. I propose that a slider be added to adjust the amount of head bob. This would use a new "pm_headbob_mod" cvar with a value between 0.0 and 1.0 (default 1.0, no change). The "pm_headbob_mod" would be a multiplier for "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", and "pm_bobup". The advantage to this approach is that missions like Volta 2 and Hazard Pay would not need to adjust their "tdm_player_thief.def" files for head bob to work properly. And, the player can still adjust "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", and "pm_bobup" as they like. Slider for "View: Mantle Roll" This is similar to head bob for those who are sensitive to motion. Its cvar was added to 2.11 as "pm_mantle_roll_mod". A Thief player on Discord said, "2.11 will have a cvar to tune down the mantling animation at last." I propose that a slider be added for "pm_mantle_roll_mod". Auto-Search Bodies @Zaratul requested the "auto-search bodies" feature from Thief 1 & 2. Its cvar was added to 2.12 dev16783-10307 as "tdm_autosearch_bodies". I did a poll on the a Thief Discord server and roughly 20% of players there use the Thief auto-search bodies feature. I propose a menu setting for this, so that players coming from Thief 1 & 2 can easily find it.

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.

I'd like to follow up on an earlier post, that keeps with the simple approach of retaining a fixed subtitle fieldwidth. Regarding about how one might test that a subtitle fieldwidth is "just right" for a given subtitle-line character limit (e.g., 42/line), font, and font scale, here's what I would suggest. Using dummy sound files, create a set of about 100 "worst likely case" subtitles that are exactly the length of the character limit. These are directly derived from the corpus of existing "story" and "speech" subtitles. Turn this set into 100 sound shaders for another version of my testSubtitles... program (with the desired fieldwidth, font, and font scale under test), and step through them. What you are looking to achieve is NO auto-wrap from the first to second line. If you get auto-wrap, then adjust the font scale and/or fieldwidth and iterate until good. This gives assurance about "worst likely cases", not "worst possible case", e.g, 42 W's in a row. Details: Suppose you have a function that takes a subtitle string and a font, and returns the "draw length" of that string in internal scale-independent font units, that is, pre-scaling/rendering. It's just a summation of lookups into the appropriate static character-width table (assuming kerning is not an issue). Because we will be using the calculated value just to rank the strings for "worse-ness", the "font unit" is arbitrary. [ @stgatilov, maybe you could provide me with such a function in C++? Then I could do what follows. ] OK, so that is embedded into a program that is turned loose on the existing subtitles, to: look for 2-line subtitles (in inline or srt form) where the lines together exceed the character limit convert those to a single string by replacing the linebreak with a space truncate them to the character limit calculate the "draw length" of each export the strings and their draw lengths into a csv (along with a field indicating the source) Do that for each available subtitle source (FM or stock barks), and import all the .csv files as sets of rows in a spreadsheet. Then sort the rows by draw length and deduplicate (ignoring source). Take the 100 "worst likely case" rows, export them, and turn them (using techniques already developed) into sound shaders for the testSubtitles... program. So, a bit of work, but you get assurance that you've optimized things to minimize future problems.

I wasn't proposing ever changing the font itself from Carleton, which I agree would be problematic. With respect to scaling the fontsize, if the adjustment process also carefully scales the field dimensions to match, it should not affect (or at least affect little) where auto-wraps occur. And this would further help with low-vision, which seems to me the whole point of the similar size adjustments in the HUD. So "fixed forever"... nah. But "fixed for the next bunch of official releases"... sure. For now, what I very much want is a policy on the maximum number of characters on a subtitle line. Then, a fontsize and fieldwidth can be determined that support that nicely, while minimizing corner overlap. As a first draft, I proposed: 42 characters max current fontsize: SUBTITLES_TEXT_SCALE 0.25 fieldwidth of 320 This would need more fulsome testing. It may be a slightly smaller fontsize or slightly larger fieldwidth is needed. As to the maximum character limit, if you google "subtitle character limit", you'll see that "about 42" seems most popular, with a range from 37 to 47. It would not be hard to write a program that, for a given FM, looked at all the subtitle lines in the .sub and .srt files and reported any that exceed any maximum number of characters. The FM author could then adjust those strings accordingly. Sure, it's more work, but kinda trivial in the big scheme of getting an FM out. And it is a one-time fix. I'm willing to write such a program, if I knew it would be used. (My Excel template provides the similar functionality that I use at the moment.)

(Following is copied from "AI Barks" thread, regarding: - what the subtitle field margins should be - what the character limits should be - making the subtitle fontsize and field size adjustable.) @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.

@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.

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.

Above 3 items are released now, on the "Barks" thread: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21740-english-subtitles-for-ai-barks/&do=findComment&comment=483331

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.

Instead of that, you could, in that time period, start learning your own missions and in doing so become more active on the forums, learning from others. It's also great to understand how things work in the engine, when you play. It might spoil some immersion though.. Or learn to build games with other engines, like Godot for example.

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.

Keep in mind also that mission size, and complexity have increased dramatically since the beginning. For a lot of veteran mappers, it can take over a year to get a map made and released. The last dozen missions have for the most part been pretty massive, with new textures, sounds, scripts, models etc. We seem to be long past the point of people loading up the tools, and banging out a mission in a few weeks that's very barebones. We still do see some of those, but I noticed in the beta mapper forums and on Discord, that mappers seem to make these maps, but don't release them, and instead use the knowledge gained to make something even better. Could just be bias on my part scrolling through the forums and discord server though.

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake? And thank god they got rid of unity, that engine is total trash garbage on anything over 60 fps. Just spend 5 minutes on steam forums for Unity project games, and there's just thousands of people complaining about poor performance, stuttering etc.

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.

Probably the .script file that's needed, but unfortunately can't be included with a prefab. Maybe there's a comment somewhere in the prefab (or in the wiki or forums) that says what script it needs and where to find it. (The similar combination setup I used earlier doesn't involve "slot", so clearly uses a different script that I what I have.)

Thank you for a great puzzle fm! I'm having real trouble with the TDM v 2.10-64bit on Linux Mint 21.1 Link to the guide supplied by V-Man339 https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/15844-fan-mission-the-gatehouse-by-bikerdude-goldchocobo-updated-02112014/page/7/#comment-429405

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.)

I agree. I'm copying this idea over to the https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21741-subtitles-possibilities-beyond-211/ thread. Related: I'll probably do some more experiments with the current TDM font & size, to understand max char count versus field width.

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.