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This mission got some insane visuals. Also it captures the Dark Project feeling in some areas successfully. Congratuations to the author and anyone involved.

Dark mod mission is more important than guests.

well yes and no, but for a pacemaker user the answer will most likely be a big NO . And who knows how some of the worlds leaders might react to such an attack ?. The variable we cant anticipate is human reaction, not that we have done such a swell job in that regard in past ventures. We dont need to look further back than the wars fought in recent years against an enemy whose feudal system gives them the god given right (dark ages stuff) to repress the female part of the culture and now even goes as far as wanting to decide which clothe beard etc. the population has to have. They would rather die in the tens of thousands than give up those "rights" as long as they take some of us with them. How do we fight against that ? well we cant unless we suddenly decide to decimate the entire populace, but that might not be palatable. Not that it is likely they will do more than the occasional terrorism attack eh. burn the heretics stuff. Truth be told if i were in that part of the world id likely get out before the sand really got my feet burning hehe. To many unknowns.

First time I saw a snail in dark mod mission.

Hi all, so I've been playing around with doing daytime lighting in a global fashion (ie. not carefully placing/sizing new lights for each outdoor space). The ambient light will be unusually bright, so I figure I should be picky about it to make shadows look as nice as possible. However, the existing light textures look a bit off here and I have no idea if/how it can be improved. When I use the "ambientlightnfo" texture for my ambient_world light, my sunlight test map looks like this: The walls in the dark indoor room look perfect, they seem to be lit from above which gives the bricks depth. But the floor is way brighter than the other surfaces, and both the floor and ceiling have quite flat lighting. The long shadow in the center of the outdoor image looks oddly darker on the wall than on the floor, due to the brightness difference. Even in directly lit areas the floor is noticeably more blue than the wall (since the ambient light is bluish). The main other texture I found that worked independent of the light's position was "zol_nofalloff". This one doesn't have the floor/wall difference but it's totally flat and "fullbright" so it looks quite bad at this brightness: Would it be possible to tweak the ambient light to make most/all surfaces look nicely lit like the walls do when using the "ambientlightnfo" texture, with fewer inconsistencies between surface angles? Or perhaps this breaks the laws of physics and I should pursue other options? (Side note: I did find this great Doom 3 outdoor lighting article through a link on the TDM wiki. However, I want to see if I can get by with just the sun and an ambient_world light, for simpler setup and hopefully better framerate than that solution.)

Hello! I am a huge fan of your work and have been binging your missions on the Dark Mod. However, when I try to play this mission, I get through the briefing and difficulty select and press start mission. I am then presented with a game error where it mentions not having found a "TDM Secret" or something.

I have write a game review in Steam, so I won't put everything here. I like that Dark Messiah protagonist is very agile like Garret in Thief, but the stealth system is not as polished like in Thief games. Enemies spot you immediately even far away and the stealth indicator is not always so reliable. Despite the linearity and some forced fight scenes, the levels mostly have enough room and verticality for stealth tactics using both daggers and bow.

Would you be able to decrease the intensity of the objectives + readables screen? Opening objectives in a dark area is like shining a bright torch directly into your eyes and causes headaches after a while. Can you make the paper background darker or more subdued?

Texturing has to be redone from scratch, if you want to make anything 'PBR' out of PBR. For starters, diffuse maps are base color textures in PBR, need to use certain range and have no AO information in them. Color range is like 50 to 240. Edit: I see in the sketchfab model inspector, that you brightened the color map there. It looks pretty dark in the screenshots though, and as a final result too. Maybe using other some generic PBR materials would help instead? Working with existing TDM textures seem like a very wobbly foundation for any effort like this.

One possible path would be to invert all the specularmaps, change them to greyscale (some are in color), and crank the levels almost to the maximum: This way you end up with roughness levels closer to what you would expect. With the inversion of those maps connected to metalness sockets: Skin has a specularmap so it ends up being slightly metallic. There are material parameters in Darkmod like "skin" that perhaps could be excluded. Another problem is as I said that color of metals in diffusemaps is a bit too dark.

@nbohr1more@STiFU In real world the difference in appearance comes from the difference in electric conductivity. Polished metals are mirrors: Modern mirrors are made by coating glass surface with aluminum or silver. James Webb space telescope uses gold. Whereas if you set metalness to zero you get a ceramic looking material: In principle specularmaps in Dark Mod should be equivalent to inverted roughness. The more white the spularmap values are the less rough the surface should be. In practice the specular effect in Darkmod was considered so strong, that most specularmaps were kept in the 0-0.5 range. Typically it's mostly metals that have specularmaps in Darkmod, but there are exeptions like the skin of NPCs. In the priesttop_s.dds for example, only metal parts have specularity, leather belt is black. All values are kept from zero to about 33% of white. Demonstration with a different lighting that shows the difference better. All materials with roughness 0: With specularmaps connected to roughness it looks practically the same: With inverted (in GIMP) specularmaps it's very rough looking: And with all materials set to 0.7:

No idea about the plot but the mechanics. Pretty much the same gameplay like in the first two Thief games but with non-linearity of Thief 3. Wide open sandbox areas, not those smaller areas divided to tiny sections with loading screens like in Thief 3. And of course very interactive game world. I really don’t like having Dishonored powers in Thief or such. I prefer agile character having good climbing and platforming ability in first person view. Like in Mirror’s Edge games. Beam walking, swinging poles, rope and ledge climbing, wall running, and or course swimming and diving ability too. I also don’t like Focus ability of Thief 4 or any other “vision modes”. Just standing still for a few secs would give a subtle visual hints about guard whereabouts. Something like the Alertness skill in Dark Messiah. No health potions, but some sort of bandages giving slow healing over time. So combat would be more risky when having no instant healing method. And when wounded, the player character could leave some blood stains to give away his location to guards. Many equipments and lots of upgrades to buy with the loot. Blunt arrows bouncing off walls and working like the blackjack, but guards wearing helmets would be immune to both. No moss arrows but an upgrade to muffle footsteps. And of course the same rope arrows back like in Thief 1. And shooting a rope arrow at enemy would ensnare him like that fibercord the Mandalorian is using.

@STiFUFully automatic conversion won't be possible. Closest you can get are the generic, tiling sets like the textures/darkmod/stone or wood. And that's because roughness and metalness in those cases can be defined by a single number. Just slap a metalness as a zero and roughness as something like 0.7 and it will be good enough. Later if you want to be fancy you can think about tweaking it further. Bigger problem are textures that combine different types of materials, e.g. metals with non metals, like many of the prop and character textures do. Using existing specularmaps might be helpful, but not always. I was for example able to utilize the priestbottom_s.dds specularmap: But I had to crank up the contrast in order to make the metalness and roughness maps: In the case of priesttop_s.dds specularmap however, the original texture has this noise that makes it difficult to use: That's why some manual work was involved in order to make the metalness nad roughness maps: That's why I wonder if there are original PSD files in the repository somewhere. Colors in general will need to be tweaked but metals especially. In Darkmod metals are generally dark with a bright specularmap added on top. Here's original diffusemap (I'm compressing to .jpg for the forum, btw): Here's the map in my demo. Gold is much brighter and more saturated: Parts of those textures are missing in my version, because different character models share some of the textures and here you see only parts used by the priest model. We probably should take a look how the big boys in the industry are doing it. Some basic palette can be created as reference for things like shiny steel, gold, cast iron, copper, skin. Modern engines still use normalmaps. You would need heightmaps if you wanted to implement displacement or parallax occlusion mapping, but those are nice to have not mandatory. Sketchfab has 'model inspector' where all the textures can be seen:

No matter how dark the area, I'm immediately seen by everybody looking my way, and my lightgem is always beaming bright white. I'm running TDM on idTech4a++ on an S10, it works flawlessly besides this bug!

Maybe you can do something with the animated grass demo: Topic https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12985-animated-grass-test-map/ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRCzWOeYxd0

Have you looked in this topic? https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21549-fan-mission-in-plain-sight-by-frost_salamander-20220807

Various lights in the dark mod has a flicker effect that is fairly constant "ramp down some, ramp up some, repeat." When several lights does this in unison, it does not look very real and look very animated. Would it be possible to consider adding some randomness to each light so they each flicker individually? I really think this would really help with realism and it ....here goes... sounds like a simple fix.

I've also eg. the Tomb Raider from 2013, which certainly can compite in graphics with current games and it works smooth even in 4GB RAM, Dark Messiah the same and a lot more. No need of an NASA PC to play good games, but good devs to develop good optimized games. Do you know .kkrieger, an FPS (well, short, 1 level) which occupied only 96 KB ? Even some avatars in the forum are bigger. That is what I called optimized level Chuck Norris.

well it seems to be a problem for many amd users i see from skimming unity forums, everything from outright crashes to awfull framerates ouch . one user found that running unity in a window made it run flawlessly while fullscreen made it run like alan wake2 on a 1050 gtx

Thank you for playing, I'm glad you had fun with it at the very least. This was a first outing with DarkRadiant, and I kept the focus very narrowly on the theater building because I wanted to keep it short and get it out the door in a reasonable time frame. You're not the first person to want to poke around in other buildings, and I can understand the feeling... my favorite Dark Project/Dark Mod maps are things like "Endless Rain", "The Sound of a Burrick in a Room", and "The Painter's Wife"... huge, free-roaming city maps that fold in on themselves and have hidden nooks and crannies everywhere. The experience making Threepenny gave me enough confidence to keep working, and I'm in the process of making a much more ambitious map right now, one that emulates the exploration heavy free-roam city environments I always love playing. If I can ever get it done, hopefully it'll give players more to scratch the exploration itch. Detailing environments is a weak point, I'll admit... the desire to say "eh, good enough" is always there when there's another area to work on, and I also worry about overdoing things and cluttering up the map too much. If there's any areas in Threepenny in particular that you think are better or worse than others, let me know. It'd help me calibrate my own sense of how much is enough. This might be how I personally see it, but I always viewed the highest difficulty level as "the master thief who challenges himself above and beyond what's needed". In that sense, no knock-outs is like a self-imposed challenge to ghost through the level without anyone even knowing he was there. I did want to keep this map as quick and simple as possible, but I also fall into the trap of being too logical with loot placement. "Of course all the valuables go in the safe, with an expensive bottle of wine or two in the wine cellar... where else would the valuable things be?" I like Immersive Sim best when it builds an environment that reflects the reality of the characters and the environment they live in... but with that said, tucking a few surprises away in unexpected corners should be part of the fun too. I'm trying to keep this in mind with the new map I'm working on, and throw a few more curveballs with loot placement. Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

Google translated: https://rutracker-org.translate.goog/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6419292&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=nl&_x_tr_pto=wapp === There are lots of topics about black screens during the main menu. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/search/&q=Black screen&type=forums_topic&nodes=58&search_and_or=and

The Dark Mode Fan Build Torrent

@nbohr1more@duzenko@cabalistic ------------- Warnings --------------- during The Dark Mod initialization... WARNING:Compiling shader file interactionMultiLight.fs failed: Fragment shader failed to compile with the following errors: ERROR: 0:15: error(#106) Version number not supported by GL2 ERROR: 0:85: error(#202) No matching overloaded function found textureGather WARNING: 0:85: warning(#402) Implicit truncation of vector from size 1 to size 4. ERROR: error(#273) 2 compilation errors. No code generated File indexes: 0 - interactionMultiLight.fs 1 - tdm_shadowmaps.glsl 2 - tdm_utils.glsl 3 - tdm_poissondisk.glsl WARNING:Failed to attach shader interactionMultiLight.fs to program interactionMultiLight. Might be the reason, have to wait for dev to take a look

Open darkmod.cfg. At the bottom type bind F8 "condump blackscreen.txt" Go into the game, then press F8. You MIGHT get text file in the Dark Mod directory called blackscreen.txt. If you do, post it here.

Hello, I have a problem installing the mod "skill upgrade (adept)". It simply makes the game to crash on boot. The error window displays this : Btw I noticed something strange : if I disable all mods, the version line on the bottom left of the screen still reads "TDM modpack 4.0" (not 4.5), when it should revert to the dark mod version right ? I indeed installed Modpack 4.0 before, is there something that it left behind ? Something that maybe conflicts with version 4.5 and provokes the error above.