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The thinking behind the current design is as follows: Quick-press frob Pick up body and shoulder it (carry it) Pick up candle/lantern and carry it Pick up an item and carry it Long-press frob (for special action) Drag body or body limbs Pinch out candle Toggle lantern off/on If you are dragging a body, you cannot run off with it. It'll automatically get dropped at some point. So, shouldering a body and carrying a candle are almost the same. Dragging a body, pinching out a candle, and toggling a lantern off/on are all special actions specific to each of them. The timing and animation are identical to TDM 2.11, especially since my patch does not touch that code at all. The only difference is that it is less cumbersome to perform the shoulder action with a single key press rather than two key presses. Yes, it is quicker for the player to perform the action, but the game itself is not acting any quicker. The goal of this proposal and patch is to make these actions less cumbersome for the player to perform. Perhaps play the game a bit more to give your brain some time to rewire itself to the new controls. If you're still not satisfied, you can set the cvar to use TDM 2.11 behavior. tdm_frobhold_delay 0

OK I think I've got to the bottom of this. I've created this forum thread (with bug report): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22221-bug-drowning-ai-in-shallow-water/ I can apply a workaround, although it won't be perfect and the bug itself needs fixing in the engine. There are a few other things that need fixing so will put an update together soonish.

If any mappers have encountered weirdness with kill objectives not working with drowning AI, I think I've found out why. I don't think it would be a particularly difficult one to fix either. I've raised this bug report: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6323 Some context here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=487316 I think this is a bug, but just raising here in case some people think otherwise.

Just finished. Wow this is a fantastic mission. The setting is so cool with an awesome sense of style, scale and atmosphere. Great design to with many avenues of approach and a great sense of interconnectedness and sense of humor. You did a great job.

I dom't use it, i found it here with the filter set to OpenSource. the TOS and PP isn't excluding for an OpenSource app, if they use ads mean that they also need to pay an server for this online service. OpenSource is not synonymous with free either, perhaps after the beta phase it is no longer free, so perhaps you can take advantage of the fact that it is still free to create a series of textures that can be used or search another one in Futuretools. AI generated textures and assets, by definition, don't have any copyright, so you can use them as you want. https://www.futuretools.io/?pricing-model=free|open-source&tags-n5zn=gaming

No objections here. I can only suggest that perhaps TDM's lean is designed to look different than Thief's to avoid some sort of legal issue with such a closely matched design?

I'll repeat some things from my original post. To drop a body, there are two keybindings "Use Inv. Item" or "Drop Inv. Item". Flash bombs are thrown with the "Use Inv. Item" key. These keybindings are TDM consistent. But I agree it would feel better if it were frob to drop. While shouldering a body, it is possible to frob a door to open/close it. So, frobbing cannot also be used to drop the body. (Perhaps the code can be changed to check if a door is not highlighted and then drop the body, but I'm not sure how much of a rabbit hole that will be or if it will not be buggy yet.) The "hold" to drag and "let go" to drop limb was a design decision. Personally, I've accidentally walked away from a body while unintentionally dragging it too many times, so I made that highly unlikely now. It also feels better to me, like I'm actually moving something and letting go. It can be easily changed back, but I find click to drag and click again to drop to be cumbersome and found that frustrating when I was a new player.

I admit that I was skeptical myself at first, but once I tried it in game, I changed my mind. So, I recommend applying the patch to a local build and give it a go in game. It's definitely better experienced than thought about. Regarding the candle puzzle in "Seeking Lady Leicester" (SLL), I agree that this proposed change will make that a bit more difficult, but I disagree on the reason why. The released version of SLL has a flint in the inventory to ignite them, so accidentally extinguishing candles shouldn't be much of a problem. Instead, I think the reason for player frustration would be that the unlit candles highlight, showing they can be frobbed, but when the player does frob, nothing would happen. They might not realize the candles can be picked up with a long-press frob. @Wellingtoncrab and I had a discussion about that exact puzzle during the design of this feature. So, what convinced me that it wasn't really a problem? I tried it in game. Players will learn how unlit candles look and behave when frobbed. Like @ChronA said above: "When most players click a candle 99.8% of the time they don't want to move it, they want to put it out." I decided it was better to optimize for what players expect most often and do most often rather than optimize for rare cases. Players already rage in frustration that they have trouble extinguishing candles or don't realize that they can. Another quote from a player on Discord: "I'd even say the "some players didn't know you could extinguish candles by using them" thing is "almost any new player and a lot of old ones too", since I once had an extended conversation about exactly how immersion breaking and weird it was to have to extinguish candles by dropping them, and literally not a single person brought up the fact that [extinguish candles by using them] was possible." During beta testing, the struggle that some beta testers had with the candle puzzle was not knowing about object manipulation. They didn't know about the "Parry/Manipulate" keybinding, or they forgot about object manipulation because they did the training mission roughly 5 years ago and had not needed to do it in a mission afterwards. So, "long-press frob to pick up" is in the same class of player interaction as object manipulation. In other words, the same problem already exists in TDM v2.11. I couldn't find the original screenshot from one of the SLL beta testers, but here's one similar, showing that the player didn't know about object manipulation: If this is truly in a released mission, I'd like to know about it. We can problem solve for that case if it does in fact exist. I don't think we should concern ourselves with something hypothetical, though. And, I disagree that we should make or keep controls cumbersome for the player in order to add challenge. I agree with @ChronA here. I don't think players are playing TDM for that type of challenge. The patch includes the following cvar: "tdm_frobhold_delay", default:"300" The frob hold delay (in ms) before drag or pick up. Set to 0 for TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. When "tdm_frobhold_delay" is set to 0, candles and bodies have the same behavior as TDM v2.11. As of a few moments ago, bodies didn't quite have the same behavior. But based on your feedback, I updated the patch (linked above) to make bodies behave that way. Thank you for your feedback.

That would be a completely valid response if not for: 1) The Android phone manufacturers proclivity for following Apples design choices 2) My wife's addiction to the Apple ecosystem I just wish someone in the tech journalism sphere would call out these glaring downgrades and get folks to focus on the correct things. Remove useful physical interfaces == Terrible Upgrade computing power and efficiency == Should be "celebrated" instead of being yawned at Its an overall sign of intellectual decadence that the tech press are ignoring the most critical and difficult technical advancements and concerning themselves only with form factor and aesthetics.

I promise I'm not trying to be "that guy", but I feel like this is one of those cases where the answer is staring you right in the face - Android. Not that Android doesn't have its own issues of course, but it does have the value of a huge variety of models and by extension an increased chance in finding one that suits your needs better. Apple likes to keep things simple by having total control over the design of its hardware and software, which is great... if your needs and wants align with theirs. I guess what I'm trying work out is if this is a rant and then back to business, or a rant and then an opportunity to try something different.

My wife got me my first iPhone around 2013 I believe ( old iPhone 4 classic ). At the time I had very mixed feelings as I really hated Apple's walled garden OS, lack of MicroSD slots, lack of replaceable battery, and proprietary charging \ data transfer port. That said I was still a little jealous of my old co-worker who had the first iPhone and showed off the wonders of the Lightsaber App and reading websites with pinch zoom so it was cool to finally have these capabilities on my own device. Since I am ostensibly a hermit and do not really "consume" digital goods like paid apps and music, I jailbroke the phone not long after owning it and gleefully installed a number of janky retro emulators on it. I kept that phone for a LOONG time. I believe it was about 1.5yrs ago when my phone provider was acquired \ merged and the new owners mandated that I could no longer use my ancient beast on their new network. My wife ( who is now thoroughly entrenched in the iPhone world ) insisted I get a newer iPhone as a replacement so I got a slightly aged iPhone 11 due to the supply shortages. At first I was thrilled at the increases in storage and processing power but then using phone began to sour my mood. They removed the headphone jack in iPhone 8 (?) I believe so obviously this was strike one against the device. I think the home button was removed in iPhone 10 so "strike two". Then the charging cable does not connect to a standard USB port on a PC or standard USB charger so I could no longer sync iTunes over a cable without buying some specialized adapter cable. Third strike. Since the whole world followed Apple's lead and no other phones offered these features either I was consigned to fume about the supposed "progress" of my new device. Flash Forward to 2023 and the iPhone 15 Pro launch and now we can see that they are removing the "Easy silent mode toggle switch" and are replacing it with a haptic multi-function button. Garbage. The point of having a silent toggle is that you can quickly silence your phone even if it's dark or in your pocket. Now you need to look at your phone to see that you actually succeeded in silencing it. How can they possibly think this was an improvement? I really am stumped here. Did someone at Apple think that forcing you to look at your phone to silence it will give advertisers more time to show you advertisements on lock-screen news-feed? Are the trying to make going to the movies more inconvenient so that you will stay home and watch Apple TV+ instead? Did the US Government tell Apple to change this so that law enforcement or intelligence agencies and explicitly tell when you are silencing your phone so that no clandestine recordings can be captured without an easily spotted visual of someone struggling to silence their phone? Is this just more "reduce the number of buttons" Apple insanity? It really boggles the mind. When they got rid of the Home Button, they seriously damaged the product brand in my opinion. The whole point of having a Home Button is that if you are stuck in some misbehaving App or Website and you need to get back to the starting GUI you can press a button to get safely home. Now if the bottom swipe is obscured by a misbehaving App your only choice is to power off the phone. The excuse for the removal of the Home Button as that it made the phone less water resilient. In that case, how did the buttons on the side of the phone continue to persist? If there is some absurd logic that can be put forth about why side buttons are more water resilient than a front button, then why not move the Home Button to the side? So I went around looking for iPhone 15 critique videos and to my utter dismay nobody was complaining about the removal of the Silence Toggle switch. Instead they bemoan that the iPhone 15 is "more of the same" even though the CPU, GPU, RAM, and Storage are all significantly upgraded. The common complaint is that Apple hasn't improved the physical aspects of the phone such as not having a folding or flip phone design. I find that to be a completely crazy take on things. The classic buttons worked fine. The form factor did not need to be substantially changed. The underlying CPU and GPU is where you should expect to see improvements for products like these. Beyond bringing back the Home Button and Headphone Jack ( and preventing the full removal of the Silent Mode toggle ), the only "form factor" change I would like to see is some sort of accessory that approximates a slider era cellphone keyboard so I can type out texts or phone numbers with real keys as feedback. Nakey Jakey sorta touched on a few of these issues in one of his newer videos:

This is a 10/10 mission for me, I love exploring large mansions in Darkmod and honestly, not having ten maids wandering around while constantly muttering to themselves was a nice change of pace. The creepy atmosphere ensured that it was still a very tense experience. Great level design and well written lore.

Hello TDM-ers. I am encountering an issue where textures seem to partially disappear. I tried searching the forums, but, I don't know what to search for. The missing textures are a worldspawn brush acting as a roof with {for now} flat iron texture. There are other worldspawn brushes right below to create an attic ceiling with roof framework board texture. These gaps appeared a few edits ago. I can't "undo" to get back before whatever edit did this. The gaps are only visible during play and are not visible during editing. Closing and reopening DR and TDM do not fix anything. Some of the brushes overlap in areas behind the play area but I have never seen an issue doing that. The attached image has the effect I am now seeing. Ideas on where to start debugging this? Very much appreciated. Clint

Awesome! Post is up! https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22200-beta-testing-the-house-of-delisle/#comment-487365 Thanks!

Complaint From Players The player must pick up candles before extinguishing them, and then the player must remember to drop the candle. The player must drag a body before shouldering it (picking it up), and the player must remember to frob again to stop dragging the body. The player finds this annoying or easy to make mistakes. For players who ghost, some of them have the goal of returning objects back to their original positions. With the current "pick up, use item, and drop" system, the item might not return easily or at all to its original position. For example, a candlestick might bounce off its holder. (See player quotes at the bottom.) Bug Tracker https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6316 Problems to Solve How can the "pick up" step be eliminated so that the player can directly use or interact with the item where it is in the game world? How can so much key pressing and mouse clicking be eliminated when the player wants to directly use an item? How can candles be extinguished and lanterns toggled off/on without first picking them up? How can bodies be shouldered without first dragging them? Solution Design Goals Make TDM easier for new players while also improving it for longtime players. Reduce tedious steps for common frob interactions. Make it intuitive so that menu settings are unnecessary. Do not introduce bugs or break the game. Terms frob -- the frob button action happens instantly. hold frob -- the frob button is held for 200ms before the action happens. (This can be changed via cvar: 200ms by default.) Proposed Solution Note: Some issues have been struckthrough to show changes since the patch has been updated. Change how frobbing works for bodies, candles, and lanterns. For bodies: Frob to shoulder (pick up) a body. Second frob to drop shouldered body, while allowing frob on doors, switches, etc. Hold frob (key down) to start drag, continue to hold frob (key down) to drag body, and then release frob (key up) to stop dragging body. Also, a body can be dragged immediately by holding frob and moving the mouse. For candles/lanterns: Frob to extinguish candles and toggle off/on lanterns. Hold frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Hold frob to extinguish candles and toggle off/on lanterns. For food: Frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Hold frob to eat food. For other items: No change. New cvar "tdm_frobhold_delay", default:"200" The frob hold delay (in ms) before drag or extinguish. Set to 0 for TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Solution Benefits Bodies: New players will have less to learn to get started moving knocked out guards. With TDM v2.11 and earlier, some players have played several missions before realizing that they could shoulder a body instead of dragging it long distances. Frob to shoulder body matches Thief, so longtime Thief players will find it familiar. Second frob drops a shouldered body. Players still have the ability to both shoulder and drag bodies. Compatible with the new auto-search bodies feature. Dragging feels more natural -- just grab, hold, and drop with a single button press. There is no longer the need to press the button twice. Also, it's no longer possible to walk away from a body while unintentionally dragging it. Set "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar to delay of 0 to restore TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Candles: New players will have less to learn to get started extinguishing candles. With TDM v2.11 and earlier, some players didn't know they could extinguish candles by picking them up and using them. Instead, they resorted to throwing them to extinguish them or hiding them. Hold frob to extinguish a candle feels like "pinching" it out. Once a candle is picked up, players still have the ability to manipulate and use them the same way they are used to in TDM v2.11 and earlier. For players who ghost and have the goal of putting objects back to their original positions, they'll have an easier time and not have to deal with candles popping off their holders when trying to place them back carefully. Set "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar to delay of 0 to restore TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Solution Issues Bodies: Frob does not drop a shouldered body, so that might be unexpected for new players. This is also different than Thief where a second frob will drop a body. "Use Inv. Item" or "Drop Inv. Item" drops the body. This is the same as TDM v2.11 and earlier. This is the price to pay for being able to frob (open/close) doors while shouldering a body. Patch was updated to drop body on second frob, while allowing frob on doors, switches, etc. Candles: Picking up a candle or lantern requires a slight delay, because the player must hold the frob button. The player might unintentionally extinguish a candle while moving it if they hold down frob. The player will need to learn that holding frob will extinguish the candle. The player can change the delay period via the "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar. Also, when the cvar is set to a delay of 0, the behavior matches TDM v2.11 and earlier, meaning the player would have to first "Frob/Interact" to pick up the candle and then press "Use Inv. Item" to extinguish it. Some players might unintentionally extinguish a candle when they are trying to move it or pick it up. They need to make sure to hold frob to initiate moving the candle. When a candle is unlit, it will highlight but do nothing on frob. That might confuse players. However, the player will likely learn after extinguishing several candles that an unlit candle still highlights. It makes sense that an already-extinguished candle cannot be extinguished on frob. The official "Training Mission" might need to have its instructions updated to correctly guide the player through candle manipulation training. Updating the training mission to include the hold frob to extinguish would probably be helpful. Similar Solutions In Fallout 4, frob uses an item and long-press frob picks it up. Goldwell's mission, "Accountant 2: New In Town", has candles that extinguish on frob without the need of picking them up first. Snatcher's TDM Modpack includes a "Blow / Ignite" item that allows the player to blow out candles Wesp5's Unofficial Patch provides a way to directly extinguish movable candles by frobbing. Demonstration Videos Note: The last two videos don't quite demonstrate the latest patch anymore. But the gist is the same. This feature proposal is best experienced in game, but some demonstration videos are better than nothing. The following videos show either a clear improvement or that the player is not slowed down with the change in controls. For example, "long-press" sounds long, but it really isn't. Video: Body Shouldering and Dragging The purpose of this video is to show that frob to shoulder a body is fast and long-press frob to drag a body is fast enough and accurate. Video: Long-Press Frob to Pick Up Candle The purpose of this video is to show how the long-press frob to pick up a candle isn't really much slower than regular frob. Video: Frob to Extinguish The purpose of this video -- if a bit contrived -- is to show the efficiency and precision of this proposed feature. The task in the video was for the player to as quickly and accurately as possible extinguish candles and put them back in their original positions. On the left, TDM v2.11 is shown. The player has to highlight each candle, press "Frob/Interact" to pick up, press "Use Inv. Item" to extinguish, make sure the candle is back in place, and finally press "Frob/Interact" to drop the candle. The result shows mistakes and candles getting misplaced. On the right, the proposed feature is shown. The player frobs to extinguish the candles. The result shows no mistakes and candles are kept in their original positions. Special Thanks @Wellingtoncrab was instrumental in improving this feature during its early stages. We had many discussions covering varying scenarios, pros, and cons, and how it would affect the gameplay and player experience. Originally, I had a completely different solution that added a special "use modifier" keybinding. He suggested the frob to use and long-press frob to pick up mechanics. I coded it up, gave it a try, and found it to be too good. Without his feedback and patience, this feature wouldn't be as good as it is. Thank you, @Wellingtoncrab! And, of note, @Wellingtoncrab hasn't been able to try it in game yet, because I'm using Linux and can't compile a Windows build for him. So, if this feature isn't good, that's my fault. Code Patch I'll post the code patch in another post below this one so that folks who compile TDM themselves can give this proposal a try in game. And, if you do, I look forward to your feedback! Player Complaints TTLG (2023-01-10) Player 1: TDM Forums (2021-03-13) Player 2: Player 3: TDM Forums (2023-06-17) Player 4: TDM Discord (2021-05-18) Player 5: TDM Discord (2023-02-14) Player 6: Player 7: Player 8:

It is available in dev builds as engine feature (6283), but it is not used in any GUI scripts. I was hoping that someone would volunteer to propose, tweak, and test the change of font size and rectangle of subtitles. Perhaps I should just do rough approximation myself and commit changes I feel that feature of showing location is pretty desolated too. Indeed, I implemented it and it works, but it fells horrible. People are asking what the hell this moving white bars are, which totally confirms the idea that current design does not work. Yes, this is indeed possible, not really hard to do in C++. To you want to color the text?

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

Seems to confirm: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5718 does it happen in the latest dev build: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20824-public-access-to-development-versions/

I just read@motorsep Discovered that you are able to create a brush, then select it and right click "create light". Now you have a light that ha the radius of the former brush. Just read it on discord and thought it may be of use for some people in the forums here too.

I just found this thread on ttlg listing Immersive Sims: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151176

Well I can see a situation in which a mission can have a general mission objective, but then do the different difficulties in a different way. But I guess it's a corner case and you could put the objectives in the mission (text or video) briefing (where you have control over it's design) and then skip the objective screen.

Recently revisiting the forums after a longer period of time I wanted to check the unread content. I don't know if I am doing this wrong since.. ever... but on mobile (visiting the unread content page on my smartphone) you have to click on that tiny speech bubble to go to the most recent post in a thread. If you don't click correctly you'll hit the headline and end up at post 1 in the beginning of the thread. It's terrible on mobile, since not only the speech bubble is really small and was to miss. But also the thread headline is just millimeters away from it so you go right to the first post that was ever made instead of the most recent ones. Am I doing it wrong? I just want to go through u read content a d the to the newest post from that topic.

A@datiswous Ah yeah, well sorry, I was quiet busy and only visiting discord. First time here on the forums since months now I think.. Thank you for the subtitles. I encourage everyone who is interested in using them to download it from here as I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them myself into the mission. Again, thank you for your work.

Mabey they have. I've yet to see ANY Guild themed facilities - at all, in any mission for TDM. Case on point, Many-a-map is themed around; Ancient Multi-Hundred year old Castles - (no plumbing evident of ANY kind). brick Industrial Warehouses, City back-alleyways... rediscovered Ruins, often below a Church/Temple/Mausoleum/Graveyard... huge old Mansions - rarely even updated to TOWN-GAS Lamp lighting, let alone 'modern' plumbing... This does leave out; Civil Service offices Watch Stations / Prisons High-class Merchant shops & stores Multi-Tenant Apartment / Hospital / Hotel (ect...) Factory / Office buildings The 'modern' design we are all familiar with was only perfected by 1877. Yet the 1st version was patented in 1778~ (ish). So here's a old plumbing catalogue page from 1884. Will anyone model & skin a Water-closet I wonder?

Of course, it is one of the reasons for the decline of online forums, since the advent of mobile phones. Forums on a mobile are a pain in the ass, but on the other hand, for certain things there are no real alternatives to forums, social networks cannot be with their sequential threads, where it is almost impossible to retrieve answers to a question that is asked. has done days ago. For devs for internal communication, the only thing offered is a collaborative app, such as System D (not to be confused with systemd). FOSS, free and anonymous registration, access further members only by invitation, full encrypted and private. https://www.system-d.org