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

I still need a second NPC voice actor for my upcoming mission. It's about a person who is stuck in the level and will have all sorts of things to report over a loudspeaker system and who is between scared, desperate and hysterical but all with a funny undertone. So things like: "How could that have happened to me? Now, of all times, when I only have to fulfill another 35 months of my three-year contract! Any new or old volunteers here? Andros (Jonus Thorunsson, an Inventor) and Malasdair (The Thief) are already on board.

Several days ago I was thrilled to hear that TDM 2.08 contains several new characters along with other fantastic improvements. Seeing how much work had been done on this release gave me a motivational boost to try contributing something myself, especially having worked on porting human(oid) characters to TDM in the past... this time I wanted to submit something that can hopefully be included in vanilla TDM perhaps with 2.09. As I was testing the new release I remembered an old submission on Blendswap called BGE Dragon, featuring a polished quality dragon for the now defunct Blender Game Engine, notable for the fact that it comes with animations for walking / running which makes working with it easier as you don't have to make those yourself. I always felt dragons would fit the theme of TDM wonderfully and allow for some amazing missions, to be fair suggesting them had long been on my mind... remembering how easy it was to work with this one, I figured I'd do the groundwork and instead submit a blend that contains everything needed to port it to The Dark Mod. I'm happy to announce I now have such a blend available! The first thing was the polygon count; The original mesh is pretty high poly, clocking at about 30,000 polys which may be too much for TDM on most people's devices. I played with mesh decimation then did some manual corrections, managing to retain acceptable quality while generating models with okay polygon counts: lod0 = 9.306, lod1 = 6.009, lod2 = 3.218, shadow = 2.265. The original quality mesh is still included in the blend file, so if we need to re-generate any LOD version this can be easily done at any time. Next I worked on separating the armature into two objects, based on the example for the human model I built my previous characters upon: The real armature that deforms the model and is used to export animations, with a control armature driving its bones that's only used to design said animations inside Blender. As the control armature uses a complex IK setup for bones this took some toying with, but in the end I could generate a simple armature which will hopefully work in exporting the md5anim set. Speaking of animations I made sure those are also covered. For the endlessly looping walk and run animations I added markers that identify the frames between which they must be exported to get a seamless loop. I next turned the idle animation into a randomly occurring gesture, then proceeded to animate everything else from scratch to obtain: Walk Run Idle (with two random gestures, stretching / pacing and looking around) Sit (with "lay down", "stand up", "idle" animations) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Sleep (with "lay down", "stand up", "idle" animations) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Attack (two types, bite and slash) (seamlessly connects to "idle") Die (brief animation at the end of which the ragdoll system is supposed to take over) An example gif of the idle gesture from the Blendswap submission, converted to and intended as a random occurrence in-game: From here on I need your help and am calling on the artists who helped create the new monsters (eg: Manbeast) to aid in making this come true as well! I've done most of the work as far as the model goes, putting aside any tweaks that might be needed (eg: model scale and animation length). I'm also going to work on the texture next to produce the proper maps... my target is to have 4 different skins / colors in total. I also believe I can produce the sounds having already found promising submissions to start from on OpenGameArt. But before putting more work into this, I wish to be sure someone can help with the remaining steps so we can get the model in the game. What I need from fellow developers should be: A new AI type for the dragon. Note that it's not intended to fly, especially not in its initial implementation; Later on we may add a fly animation and data to the AI for knowing how to use it... for now I only care to have it work like the spider, wandering around and attacking if it sees a hostile entity. This should thus be easy if we can copy another monster's code. Exporting the assets from Blender to TDM, particularly the model and animations. As I don't have an AI nor a test case handy nor ever worked with exporting TDM animations or models for non-human characters, I need someone else to generate and test the mesh files. First the md5 mesh for each LOD, everything is included in the blend even the low-poly shadow mesh... afterward the armature actions for it need to be exported to md5anim files. Lastly the defs need to be written, along with any other step I may have missed to make the character actually work. I should be able to do the material based on my previous examples once I finish the textures, so don't worry about that part... please just make sure the materials in the exported md5mesh have the same name as the material names in Blender. Download blend version 0.5 I look forward to hearing your thoughts! If any developers or experienced contributors confirm they can take care of the integration, I can get started on the remaining assets soon

Not so long ago I found what could make a pretty good profile picture and decided to try it out on these new forums. But I couldn't find a button anywhere that would let me change it. I asked on Discord and it seems Spooks also couldn't find anything anywhere. So I logged into an old alternative account and, lo and behold, that account has a button. This is on the first screen I get when I: 1) click on my account name in the top-right of the browser -> 2) click on 'profile'. Compared to my actual account: Are you also missing this button on your account? It'd be very much appreciated if that functionality could be restored to any of the affected accounts.

Quite the challenge in the title, right ? Well, as long as it is not difficult to implement into the base game, I think we should finally resolve this particular collection of missing assets. In recent years, I've come across several FM makers clamouring for being able to make an FM with a female thief protagonist for a change. If we find someone willing to do the female player vocal set, I think it should be someone who can affect a voice that sounds neither too youthful or too old. That's, IMHO, key. The player character's male vocal set already sounds like it could belong to any deeper-voiced guy between 20 and 50. I have started this new thread in order to finally organise an effort to create a female vocal set. That's one of the few stumbling blocks left for more original protag creation, IMHO. Some three, maybe even four years ago, Lavender took a brave stab at this - if memory serves me right, she actually finished her recordings for the entire PC vocal set, they just weren't processed and suitable yet for publication. However, as Lavender has left the forums, we're basically back to square one. I think we should look into contacting the female voice actors we already have here on the forums and doing an assessment of their voice acting samples. There's got to be at least two ladies with an appropriate voice range for the female vocal set. I think women voice actors in their 30s, with a wide enough voice range, would definitely suffice for what is needed in that vocal set. Bear in mind that the entire vocal set is actually non-verbal, so there is no need to articulate anything. The whole set consists of a voice doing sighs, or noises during physical exertion (e.g. climbing, lifting), and so on and so forth. Though there are dozens of these purely vocal "lines", it's not that long a list, so the vocal set can be completed in a fairly short amount of time. The selected voice actor could do the whole thing in a day or two (or several days), we could then filter through the various takes, select the best ones, have our sound guys help with cleaning up any audio issues, and we could then work on implementing the whole thing as an alternate vocal set. It would be a really nice (if relatively minor) addition for 2.08. Particularly for mission builders. I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on how we should proceed, who can provide oversight for the effort, and so on. Wikilink to our voice actor article: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Voice_actors Wikilink to our article on the script for the player vocal set: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Vocal_script:_Player

I was playing The Bakery last night and at the beginning when the wench comes out and stands by the well, she yawns but it's a man's voice. This happens in 2.05 as well, so it's been around for a while. It's not the map either, I checked another level with the wench AI and she does the same thing when yawning. All the other voiced barks are a woman's voice.

Hey, I have something in mind, and I find myself wanting an AI character that is dark, supernatural (magish in power), who could be an evil influence in the empire. We don't really have any character like that in the game, and I think it'd add an interesting twist to story telling. So I was wondering if anyone has fleshed one out that's available?

I'm planning to work on a few models, not only for TDM but also id Tech 4 in general. I'm not sure how a rig for player or character model should look like, what differences there'd be between them and if model bones would require a specific name (e.g. for IK). I know that there is a series of videos on how to make such a model from scratch, but I prefer "traditional" tutorials over videos (and don't really have enough time to watch them). I also know about Arcturus' excellent rigs, but I'm interested in creating my own for any future project for TDM/Doom 3 engine. Can anyone provide me with vague information how to set up my own rig? A short explanation and a few screenshots will be greatly appreciated!