Search the Community

I think that the existence of a dedicated bug tracker for this engine proves that I should somehow make it known when it crashes. I just figured that the tracker was an internal thing between developers, and that it was okay to instead report the bugs here, especially since I desperately needed help with it, and since you have two sub-forums mentioning that they're intended for reporting bugs. ...so why, when I report a bug, am I getting shamed for it? Why was the guy in the thread you linked getting shamed for not backing up his project, instead of the main dev acknowledging that there is a very deceptive button in the engine, that can remove fan mission folders when you press it? Blaming the reporter for not backing up his work, is certainly not how I would personally handle reports of entire projects disappearing, but I guess now I'm warned about how he sees these things, to the point where I'm wondering if it's a good idea to report any bugs I find in the future, at all, if I'm just going to be considered a bad person for it. "Hm, to my experience, crashes in free software is a regular thing. Try "Natron" and you will understand what I mean." I don't understand your point. If crashes happen frequently enough, should we treat them like Covid and just "try to live with it"? I'm pretty sure that the bind bug is easy to fix, but it's like you're saying that bugs have a right to exist too. "Lots of longtime DR mappers ask questions in the Newbie thread (myself included). Nothing to be ashamed of and by DR/DM standards you are a newbie (and you have not to be ashamed of that as well! )" So if I've programmed for 30 years, mapped for Dromed for countless years (since roughly the turn of the millenia), mapped for the Dark Mod for 1 year, but joined these forums just a few weeks ago, I'm a newbie. I think that by that definition, the word "newbie" has lost all meaning. Besides, reporting crashes are not the same as just asking questions. Anyone can reply to a question. It takes a developer to fix a crash issue. ...and it's like you don't expect the developers to even fix crashes, and I really hope that you're wrong about that. For example, since I updated to this year's version, Dark Radiant itself, hasn't even crashed once, and it used to crash all the time, and so I take that as evidence that development involves fixing crashes. "If you want to report a bug, then please use the Bug Tracker." Will do. I was just fooled by the subforum descriptions actually telling me to report bugs in them. "You wouldn't believe how many mappers lost WIPs because of defective hardware" Again: I don't see your point here, where you argue for not fixing defective hardware. When I'm told about a bug in my program, I just go "Thank you. I'll fix that.". I don't go "Well, weren't you a sucker for using my program.". That's not how I was brought up at all. "for somebody who expects Armageddon in the near future (and there are really good reasons for that), you have a pronounced need for communication. I think that does not fit, because: Why go on with communication when all hell will break lose the day after tomorrow?" Well, why not? Yes, I am so interested in mapping, that it's actually cutting into my apocalypse survival routines a bit, but that's just human nature, and a month's vacation from prepping, won't make that much of a difference. "I hope that you - despite of your own assessment - will finish your WIP and we all can enjoy a cool new mission in the future with your name in the credits." Well, for me, mapping is about pleasing myself - not others. Play The Beginner's Guide, and you'll see what I mean.

Oh! I didn't knew that! Thanks for the correction. Is what happens when I take knowhow from the original Doom 3 engine (and Dewm 3 engine) as a starting point. :S

Since it already has been mentioned in the forums, I'd like to announce a small project of mine. A few weeks ago I was playing Legend of Grimrock and it struck me that their level design is extremely simple and modular, and yet, the player can spend quite a lot of time in the game. And it looks pretty, too! So I wondered if it wouldn't be possible to create a modern "Dungeon Crawler" (solve puzzles, fight monsters, collect loot, progress your character, upgrade your equipment) type of game inside the TDM engine. The engine already supports a lot of things one needs for this, and the overal structure and assets work, too. And with prefabs, one might get the level layout done quickly. However, building a few test prefabs in DR is easy, but creating a full mission out of them is quite painful. Not only needs it a lot of planning, but you can also spend a lot of time "upgrading" things later on. For instance if you later want to add a grime decal to the walls, you have to revisit the entire map. Even worse is if you find out later that your block size must be bigger or smaller. So the idea was born to create a sort of framework that can assemble missions from prefabs. Preferable while getting the description of the mission from a text file. So far, this has been a lot easier than I thought. Here is what I got working so far: Overview: You can describe your mission in a (Unicode) text file. This contains overall options, different locations (each location can have its own ambient light, music,name, fog), and the connections between the locations. Each location can have multiple "floor levels", these are stacked on top of each other. The config file also specifies which symbol means "use this prefab". It is also possible to specify links (per location), which means you can say "this lever with the symbol A opens the door with the symbol D". The framework reads the prefabs, and then positiones them in the map. It also glues all the locations together, adds location_info entities, a player start, an exit, and an objective to reach the exit. The resulting map is then enhanced with script objects (all nec. assets are bundled together), and automatically dmapped via TDM. Everything then is packaged together into a working .PK4 file. My demo map takes about 20 seconds, where 15 are dmap. In addition to the "basic" stuff I also managed to get a few things working, like a pressure plate, portcullies, and also made some puzzles. Oh, and per location fog (fading from location to location). Different difficulty levels are also supported, one can specify "this prefab appears only on easy" etc. You can find more info and screenshots and demo here: http://bloodgate.com/swift/ There is also a developer diary where I will be posting interesting entries from time to time. Here is an DR shot of a sample level, consisting of small modular prefabs and one large (the large hall on the lower left): The next steps will be to add more randomness (either static at map generation, or at runtime, so the map is slightly different each time you replay it). Also, while it is already possible to "overlay" prefabs (e.g. "for this location, look first here before falling back to the default"), it is not yet possible to "reskin" prefabs. This would be something which is impossible in DR (you cannot really reskin worldspawn brushes, unless you live with the fact that it is all manual For now I'm quite excited!

When a light interacts with a surface, Doom 3 engine goes through all triangles of the surface in order to detect which ones are within light volume and front-facing. If the light constantly moves, then this processing has to done every frame. If stencil shadows are used, then engine has to look through triangles once again in order to build shadow volume. This implementation detail means that large static meshes with small dynamic lights nearby can be surprisingly slow. I think this issue happened several times recently: Black Mage: the lava cave Moving Day: rocks in the starting area The workaround was usually to split large mesh into several pieces. The latest dev build dev16574-10036 includes BVH-assisted filtering algorithm, which is enabled by default. It does the same job faster, without the need of touching clearly out-of-volume triangles. As far as I know, it totally solves the original problem, so you no longer need to be wary of how large your terrain mesh is. The new algorithm is enabled by two cvars, which can be changed at runtime: r_modelBvhLightTris r_modelBvhShadows Default values 3 and 1 mean precise filtering with BVH (default), zero values mean precise filtering using Doom 3 code. Note that the new algorithm reorders triangles in static meshes, so it has some influence even if you disable the above two cvars. The total kill switch which disables all BVH code is cvar r_modelBvhBuild, which must be set before starting mission. Here is a test map to show results (Bikerdude stripped for me from NHAT forest). All the terrain and stones are a single LWO mesh: 28 MB size, 127K vertices and 212 K triangles. P.S.: There is no performance difference on most existing missions. You can notice the difference only in critical cases.

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

First quake 4 gui scripting has some important diferences from Dhewm 3 gui scripting, the later is based on original Doom 3 system, so don't be surprised if Quake 4 gui tutorials don't work. For example, in quake 4 you can call onNamedEvents directly in the gui using comand "namedEvent", wheres on doom 3 gui's you can't, only through c++ (but is not hard to change the gui source code for that to happen I did it, will post the c++ code if someone wants), but that is not the only diference, for example in quake 4 you can access individual values from a vector, using the same way you do in doom script, using suffix _x _y _z , you cannot do that in original Doom 3 gui scripting, at lest I tried it and it caused a gui error. Another thing only exclusive to Quake 4 gui scripting, is that you can transition floats, wheres Doom 3 you can only to that to vectors. About your gui code, afaik the command OnActivate is a global command, meaning it should be put exclusively inside the main desktop window, like the OnNamedEvent's, not any other window children, if you want a child window to start a commd use, OnEnter (when the user presses enter key), OnAction (when the user clicks the action key, mouse 1 normaly) or OnMouseEnter when the player mouses over the child window, I may be forgetting something but afaik that's the gist of it. ps: You can also use onTime events, to start a map automatically that is how Doom 3 main menu does it. for example: onTime 12000 // after 12 seconds { set "cmd" "startgame test.map"; }

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.

Oh so this is like a Doom 3 style lantern that you use instead of a weapon?

DOWNLOAD THE UPDATED FILE WITH TEXTURE SETS AND EXAMPLE PROJECTS INCLUDING LOTS OF EXTRA'S HERE: http://www.moddb.com/mods/grimm-quest-for-the-gatherers-key (As soon as it's Authed by Moddb). Or alternatively, grab the attachment on this post (and rename it to a ZIP file). REMARKS: - I will take bug fix requests and I will take feature requests. Bugs should be fixed quickly, but features might take a while (several weeks). - Just remember this is a BETA but it has a lot more features than the old D3 Map Builder. Remember to save often, but otherwise it's pretty stable. You can now load/save your projects, you can now set manual lighting. Let me know if there are errors. You can now even place random monsters. Almost getting to the point where it's more than just a mapbuilder, but also a random mission generator. The map builder in action in this example video showing the entire process from start to finish: I'm happy with any remarks or questions!Release.zip.txt

Some years ago i succesfully downloaded the wiki with wget, for TDM dvd. I dont know if this method wikl work now. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19998-tdm-collection-dvd/#comment-437887

Nice, now you can play DOOM III right now in the browser for free https://gamaverse.com/doom-3-game/

I guess the best image-to-normal conversions I've seen here in the forums are via njob. I am curious about this AI thing though: https://github.com/HugoTini/DeepBump has to be installed into Blender as a plugin?

This is a DOOM mod that I came across, I don't find it offensive, but lots of people consider it offensive. It does introduce some blasphemous concepts, and it's also a total gibbing festival, with tons of blood and gore. The story is basically that you are a bad, bad person. You kill police, innocent people, old ladies, Christians, Super Mario, Barney, pop culture icons, pigs, sheep, chickens, doctors, priests, and many more. The player then ends up going to Heaven, killing St. Peter along with slaughtering Heaven's population, being confronted by God, which the character also then fights and kills God. Then the player gets sent to Hell, fights demons, Nazi's, sinners, and that's about as far as I got with it. It feels as if there are endless amounts of weapons, you smoke weed and drink beer, they act as power ups and give your character super jumping, agility and endurance skills for a limited amount of time. The arsenal, textures + enemies are a borrowed combo from Doom, Blood, Age of Empires, Duke Nukem 3d, Shadow Warrior, Heretic, Hexen, some other games I couldn't recognize, as well as hosts of original content. The mod is from Italy, and is in Italian, but there is English translation version available for texts (but not audio). It's not really an intelligent game per se, but it's appealing to me as a violent, old school gamer styled game with some basic but fun level design. I've been playing it, and figured I'd share with you guys, since TDM is a gaming community, and most of us here probably love Doom for just the same reasons, i.e. when it came out it was considered the most violent, gory, blasphemous and offensive game to reach a large audience and stir the pot. http://youtu.be/asCGbVx5XJk

So I had an idea of player boarding a carriage that is basically a func_static, and is attached to a mover. Well, in my test I attached it to a vehicle via bindToBone, but technically it makes no difference I think. So when vehicle began moving, carriage was dragged along, but player would not move with it. Carriage basically slid out from under the player. So my question is if player can ride on top of movers, and if it can, how do I make it to ride my carriage attachment ? Thanks.

No, not really, have only seen him on the forums many years ago. He deserves a lot of credit for providing the SVN infrastructure in the beginnings of the project, it's been only later when we transferred this to a hosted server. Memory is blurry, but I think my time working on TDM and his don't overlap that much - I had been getting more active, and he pulled back a bit. He bootstrapped quite a few important systems, IIRC he's been working on light gem and the first Stim/Response and Inventory implementations. From what I recall, he gave the project an organisational backbone in the technical department which is crucial to keep things together. Folks like Spring and NH who have joined long before me could give more insights, I guess. (Looking at my join date makes me feel old either way. From TDM's current view point, the year 2006 seems like right at the beginning, but actually the mod had already been existing for two years by that time I joined. With the first release in 2009, 2006 is rather in the middle. Heck, I haven't touched the mod code for at least 10 years - and I can still remember a few things, which is a testament of how much it occupied my thoughts back then).

There are other complications though. How much fall damage should player take, if they decide to jump off a rope with the body? Should the player let go of the body or not? Also, right now it's much harder to jump off the rope with the body than without it. Why? And last but not least, how would you teach players these things, possibly without much hand-holding and text prompts explaining the rules? I guess I'm with @STiFUon this one, if you restrict dropping the body, you'll save yourself (and mappers) a lot of headaches. But even that doesn't solve all the problems, I know I'm in the minority in these forums, but as a player, I really appreciate the beauty and efficiency in simplicity of the design. Not overthinking everything and adding more and more rules for the sake of realism (or anything else).

Had a problem with the web server yesterday that led to a crashed table in the forum database. This has now been repaired and things seems to work again. I was on travel so it took a while before I was able to fix it. Merry Christmas!

I can get on the main forum now but still get an error when trying to load posts. Anyone else?