Search the Community

I'm not saying that there should be a soundtrack permanently, I'm just saying that it's a necessary art of choosing scenes and situations with the right music. For this it is necessary to have where to choose the corresponding music and have a sufficient repository. Always using the same music in every game is somewhat tiring. I remember very well one of my favorite missions, Requiem, with a sublime version of Beata Viscera by Perotin, which invited you to stay in the cathedral until it was over.

Ambient music is an important part of games and movies, it can change and improve the content in a dramatic manner. Not the same a scene in a catacomb with zombies and skeleton guards with liftmusic or one from a Buster Keaton movie. I think that it is less aquestion of personal tastes, than a cuestion to adapt sounds and music to the correpondin content. Because of this I mencioned the source, because it isn't so easy to find good music without copyright and usable without costs, important for a free game like TDM.

I don't recommend changing the volume of ambient music in a specific mission, because this is something that is supposed to be under the player's control (as chosen by the volume slider in preferences). If you change the volume in the map itself, all it means is that the player will adjust their own volume slider to compensate, so you're just annoying the player without really obtaining any "artistic freedom" for the effort. Ideally all ambients would have a carefully matched volume level, so players would know exactly how loud the music is going to be based on their volume control setting. However we are a long way from that ideal. It is very easy to add a custom ambient and make it far too loud, particularly if it's music you like and/or your own in-game ambient volume is set to a lower level than default.

Thank you for always being so helpful. However, as I said at the beginning of this thread, I don't actually expect to finish any missions. It's sad but true. For me, finishing a mission would take years of work, and usually I break down before that. It's the progress that's a delight for me, and the music I use, is the normal ambience music, which I actually turn down to 5 ("-55") decibels, so that I won't get bored with it. If I'd ever release a mission, I'd probably keep the old music, but play it at maybe 15 ("-45") decibels. It's enough to just barely tickle the recognition of the tracks, for the players, in a subliminal way, but not loud enough for them to groan and roll their eyes over it.

A good soundtrack also is important. Remember that Pixabay has a huge catalogue of royalty free music (every genre), which you can download compleetly free and use even in commercial projects (CC licenses and public domain) https://pixabay.com/music/ Adding Pixabay in your search engine list of your browser https://pixabay.com/images/search/?q=%s (Images by default,but also illustrations, vectors, music, sound effects and videos)

I have seen several music experts say that if you don't like the music on the first listen then that first impression is correct. And that further listening sessions just makes you familiar to the music, which can make it comforting when you hear it, especially on the radio, since it's something you recognize, it's comforting. Not that the music is good. I really don't like this POV, as often, I'll hear new things in a song that I never heard before on the first few listens. A sub harmony, or the way the singer sings a chorus/word etc. Especially with Classical music, and even more so with Orchestral pieces. There can be so much going on that you don't always hear everything on the first few listening sessions.

Hidden Hands: Vitalic Fever Filename : hhvf.pk4 Date of release: 20/07/2019 Latest Version: 3 (17/02/2021) Download via the in-game downloader or here: http://www.southquarter.com/tdm/fms/hhvf.pk4 http://darkmod.taaaki.za.net/fms/hhvf.pk4 http://www.fidcal.com/darkuser/missions/hhvf.pk4 Known bugs: - stencil shadows do not work correctly (version 1) - sometimes, the character "Applefinger" cannot be knocked out when sitting on the chair without failing the mission. (version 1) Hidden Hands Series: I. Initation - II. Vitalic Fever Jack Farmer: mapping & drafts Amadeus: alpha testing, geometry fixes, performance checks, drafts for gameplay and objectives, revision of all readables, dialogues & narrator texts Grayman: AI fixes, gameplay fixes, trap fixes Duzenko: alpha testing, performance checks and improvement tips Beta Testers: - Joebarnin - Cambridge Spy - Boiler's Hiss (aka "The architect's darling") - Jedi_Wannabe (aka "The man of many voices") - Amadeus (aka "The Writer") Voice actors: Malasdair Narrator Jedi_Wannabe All four guards chatting about the guests, chickens, inventions and unusual job interviews New Horizon The educated Builder Goldchocobo The naive Builder Special thanks to: - Springheel, Sotha, and Fidcal for the tutorials. - VanishedOne, Stumpy, Destined, Grayman, Joebarnin and ERH+ for patiently answering my questions solving all the in-game problems. - PsymH (aka "Stringer Bell") for connecting me with the right guys on TTLG for additional voice acting. - Goldwell for teaching me how to integrate a custom video in a fms and helping me with troubleshooting during the integration of one of the Builder's voices. - all voice actors & beta testers for their great support. - all others not mentioned here who answered my questions in the Newbie thread or via PM. Contributors from the Inventor's Guild: - Destined wrote a new definition for the "spidsey-babsies", enabling those beasts to move through tunnels. - Grayman wrote a script enabling Halfrid to hold the quill only when it is needed. He also fixed several other AI problems with respect to path finding, damages and interaction with light switches. Pilfered items: - Portal sky with hills and trees originally developed and arranged by Sotha for "Thomas Porter: The Transaction". - Frobbox booster re-created from a map originally developed by Grayman All new ambient music and sound effects written, performed and mixed by Jack Farmer. Briefing video by SirSmokeAlot Pictures

id Studio did a poor job in defining its categorization of variable nomenclature, so in subsequent documentation and discussions there are divergent views (or just slop). In my series, I had to choose something, and went with what I thought would be clearest for the GUI programmer: Properties, which are either Registers (like true variables) Non-registers (like tags) User Variables (also true variables) I see that your view is more along these lines (which perhaps reflects C++ internals?): Flags (like my non-registers) Properties, which are either Built-in (like my registers) Custom (like user Variables) Also, elsewhere, you refer to "registers" as temporaries. I am willing to consider that there could be temporary registers during expression evaluation, but by my interpretation those would be in addition to named property registers. I'm not sure where to go next with this particular aspect, but at least can state it.

Its a matter of time and willingness. Doom can run several devices. Music theme on old floppy drivers and printers.

The *DOOM3* shaders are ARB2 ('cause of old GeForce support) carmack plan + arb2 - OpenGL / OpenGL: Advanced Coding - Khronos Forums

I learned that the best music is some soundtrack playlist. Ideally with timestamps. Clear, loud lyrics also carry the danger of distracting when you start singing along. Unfortunately I needed music all the time to block out undesirable sounds and focus on the task. The nr. 1 rule is that music doesn't become another thing that procrastinates work. Need to get stuff done. Get a draft with at least half the content ready as it is. Then focus on perfectionism when it's almost ready. So it can be any music. Good music does not have a genre.

Sturgeon's Law: 90-odd% of everything is crap. 90-odd% of software is crap, 90-odd% of movies are crap, 90-odd% of books are crap, 90-odd% of music is crap, 90-odd% of games are crap, 90-odd% of tv recorders are crap, 90-odd% of Amazon is crap, 90-odd% of all products and services are crap, 90-odd% of sports commentary is crap, 90-odd% of tv is crap, and as you get older 90-odd% of having a crap is crap.

If you still improving the game, please consider these: -Turning off music during the menu. There is an option to turn it off but it only works on the main menu. When I press escape, that menu still has music. When I hit escape, I want to do something, an IRL thing for example, and I need to mute the speakers separately. Such a little QoL thing would make the game experience better. The music is loud, thus disturbing. When I just open my browser to see a video of my current campaign I don't hear its sounds. So I need to mute the game, see the video, unmute the game. It's annoying. -When guards or locals meet spiders and they kill them they start searching me. Maybe it even adds to my stealth score, I don't know. It would be long and boring to test it. So I think even if they are alerted, they should revert to their normal behavior after a while, sheathing their weapons. And this definitely shouldn't raise the stealth score. You might even record separate voice lines regarding to the animal attack. -Working pistols. 18th or 19th century ones. They would fit many stories better than bows. Maybe only for NPCs, maybe for the player, too. -The starting page of the site doesn't tell anything what is this game about. The quote from PC Gamer doesn't help new players who never heard about the Thief series. Thank you for this cool game.

Thanks, I can also recommend gog galaxy. The idea of the custom tags is really nice, I'll have to try this out too!

Looking back, I like this game better out of the two. I mean I can see why some people wouldn't like it; that shadow ninja can quickly end your game in a second even if you have 200HP with his one special move, at least on the harder difficulties. But I like the weapons, environment, sound and music more in this game than that of Duke3d. This game was short, but then they gave us two (high quality!) extra free episodes, so that is more than forgiven. Also, Shadow Warrior as a franchise was not ran into the ground like it's peer, and frankly, so many other classic games have been. I'm impressed that they're still making Shadow Warrior games, because I don't think this original game was a big seller. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Shadow Warrior's peer outsold it by two or three times. Duke3d was so popular and successful that it got the "port this to everything" treatment, like Doom did. It's fascinating how Shadow Warrior, a more obscure game, managed to turn around and become more successful as a franchise later.

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.

YOU TAFFERS! Happy new year! Deadeye is a small/tiny assassination mission recommended for TDM newcomers and veterans alike. Briefing: Download link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JWslTAC3Ai9kkl1VCvJb14ZlVxWMmkUj/view?usp=sharing Enjoy! EDIT: I promised to someone to write something about the design of the map. This is in spoiler tags below. Possibly useful to new mappers or players interested in developer commentary.

Thanks for confirming. With s_global it might make sense, I think that means a sound is non-directional like music so reverb would be strange... for globals you may want the sound to absorb it from all areas on the map if anything, a separate spawnarg switch sounds ideal. Most obvious issue is sounds not accounting their trajectory through rooms at all just the position of the camera. The real solution seems like using visportal tracing to absorb the effect from each room the sound passes through: The base calculation is already done to dampen audio based on doors, no idea how easy it would be to extract EFX info during the process then add a bit of each area's effect to a sound based on how many rooms it bounced through.

Again, no disagreement from me here on the quote, this is something I realized as a kid, when I compiled my map draft in first Unreal editor. But that doesn't exclude anything I said above either. Making that stuff is hard, and making levels for stealth games is especially hard, as opposed to e.g. shooters. You can read more on that in pdf presentations from LGS folks in the Level design thread. Exactly, and finding a way to do it is very important aspect too. In your example, you're introducing a huge potential point of failure between you and making music. This will be time-consuming as well, and it's a time you could spend on just making music or learning how to do it better. If your music is great, and the map turns out not so, it will distract people from the former. Not to mention that there are more efficient ways to learn how to write score for video games. You can team up with a mapper and create music for their work. You can record a play-through of your favorite game with bg music off and try to score it. Or you can just take a playthrough from YT and mute it, if you can't be bothered with recording that stuff yourself. That reminds me I had a similar idea for my body of work in photography, to create a "walking simulator gallery" that would showcase my work, at the same time it was supposed to be a space that connects all of them thematically and tells a certain story. Kind of like walking inside a sculpture that tries to be an artwork itself, with photos plastered all over it Yeah, it sounded great in my head, otherwise it was super time-consuming, never worked out as I intended, and I did better off by creating a portfolio website In retrospect, I think I did this as a pleasant distraction, something to delay the process of getting down to actual work and selecting the most significant photos from a 5-year period of my work, which turned out pretty hard as well.

Story Tease On the run from her husband, me and my girl. With a bribe to a ship's captain, we're away. What could go wrong now? Oh, dammit. Links "Away 1 - Air Pocket" Version 1.0 is available from the in-game downloader and its mirrors. As well as here. There are two extra documents contained in your installed .pk4 and also conveniently available here - For gamers needing hints, this Q&A uses "invisible ink" to selectively hide the answers: Air Pocket - Hints and Spoilers [Jan. 29, 2020].docx For understanding what's under the hood: Maintenance Guide to Away 1 - Air Pocket [Jan 29, 2020].docx For more about the innards and interations, see this FM's Beta Testing thread. Author's Note This is my first substantive TDM FM, a nautical adventure, and what I hope will be part of a longer story arc. Enjoy. Gallery Credits & Acknowledgements Thanks to TDM community members for encouragement - and assistance with newbie questions - while building this, my first FM (not counting an earlier nanoMission). Kudos in particular to Dragofer for the wonderful ship models (modified here), newly-created ship davits, and assets like kelp models from 'Down by the Riverside'. Also a custom cannon-ball hole through the hull, and much helpful guidance. The skybox is adapted from 'lagoon' by Hazel Whorley (CC BY-NC; hw_lagoon.zip at www.custommapmakers.org/skyboxes). Finally, my deep appreciation to all who tested or assisted during the beta: Biene, Cambridge Spy, Dragofer, duzenko, peter_spy, and stgatilov

"The job in question was simple enough. All I had to do was break into some guy’s house and steal a ledger and then get out without being spotted. But that’s where my problems started, the house was owned by one Einrich Friedt. And unbeknownst to me at the time, was a usurer under the protection of the local thieves' guild. When word spread that it was me who pulled off the job, the guild leader who goes by the name of Lazarova gave the order to have my head on a spike. Naturally two leg breakers were dispatched, which meant I had to make myself scarce and lay low for a while. After things had died down a bit I got in contact with an old fence of mine. He informed me that Lazarova is a wealthy and successful figure in undermarket circles. But what was unusual is that Lazarova is a woman, which belies her brutal and ruthless reputation. it’s likely she got where she is through wealth, meaning its possible she is of noble blood. My fence did a check of the Bridgeport registers and there is no noble family going by the name of Lazarova. So using an alias means she is someone who at the very least doesn’t want to see her dirty laundry aired in public. The Thief’s guild hideout is rumoured to be located near the Old Mill somewhere in Langmillers Ward, Geoffrey's Wall separates the slums of Langmillers and Mirkway from the more wealthy parts of Becksgate. I will make my way there and see what I can uncover, but I will have to be careful. The City Watch don't venture much into the Tanners, and the Tagwell boy’s aren’t known for being as polite as the watch. Locating some information regarding Lazarova's whearabouts is my first task and with some luck I should find some incriminating evidence to use as leverage. Becksgate is like a rat’s nest, so there's bound to be a hidden stash or two to make tonight's endeavours worth my trouble.." Build Time: - About 2 years Credits: Bikerdude - Allodric/Balakin manors, Canal walk, Builder warehouse, various apartments and brought all of this into a working mission.Melan - The Great Stairs, Geoffrys wall, Rattlesbones way, street signes, readables and main story!Noelker - the voice of Hadley - Saturnine (Rose Cottage) said Noel was the perfect 'Garrett'Grayman - Fingrim & Cull st, Balakin manor, readables.nbohr1more - alpha/beta testing, readables, and main story!Flanders - Canal Walk, textures and objectsObsttorte - Briefing video, Automap and various scriptsSkacky - Shingles Plaza, readables.Serious Toni - loading screen & misc.Tels - The Oldmill (base spec)Fidcal - HordersSpringheel - modelsNecrobob - texturesDragofer - modelsBaddcog - miscMortem Desino - miscIf I missed anyone or have forgotten what you did, please remind me so I can update the above list! Thanks:- - Beta testers: Oldjim, Deadlove (Uber testers), and above, also anyone else who I missed off the list. Download:- - An updated version is now available via the in-game downloader - v1.3 Info: This is the prologue mission to the Crucible of Omens, work on the next mission in the series will start in the new year.This map is challenging by design, but is more forgiving on lower difficulties.The mission is fully l10n ready.TDM 2.03 is required.Known issues: This mission will have less than optimal fps at some locations.For very low end PCs I recommend the following settings: V-sync is off, AA is off, Aniso is 4x or lower, advanced settings are simple/default & Post processing of disabled.A few people with very low end machines have had an issue with loading the mission, so we suggest the following -" try backing up your TheDarkMod.exe, gamex86.dll, and Darkmod.cfg then delete them and run your tdm_updater to replace them. "Try these image downsize changes to reduce the GPU impact - seta image_downSize "1" seta image_downSizeLimit "1024" seta image_downSizeBump "1" seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "256"