Search the Community

Congrats on the release! Thanks for the great mission, I had a lot of fun. I played the mission with Linux and had no problems

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

And those pics that Daft Mugi posted do show the problem with TDM maps, but I also have to say, that is a problem with TDM shadow maps, not with maps in general, I never seen such ugly issues in Stalker for example or Call of Juarez and many other games. Perhaps those shadow maps issues arise from people not thinking of shadow maps at all, when creating their lights, shadow maps do require a little more tweaking to look good, specially at grazing angles, because they are literally textures, so perhaps moving the lights a little solves those problems or even increasing the shadow map res. Just think about this, if shadow maps where that ugly, the gaming industry would never deprecate stencil shadows and we would still be seeing a ton of games using them, but is totally the contrary, games with stencil shadows, are the minority, even idSoftware removed them, I think since Rage (i'm not totally sure about Rage...) and up (besides obviously Doom 3 BFG). For example: Wolfenstein II Dishonored 2 Evil within 2 (this particular shot is impossible with stencil shadows, because of the blood that is a particle effect with alpha) etc. For obvious reasons TDM fans have a good opinion of stencil shadows and I comprehend that, they do look very good, TDM and Wolfenstein 2009 are the games with the best soft stencil shadows that I haver seen, but maps can also look good, if given the chance and used to their full potencial. another game with good stencil soft shadows Thou tree shadows on this game seem to use something else or literally stencil shadows because sometimes they look like a blob on the floor instead of seeing the individual leaf.

Open questions for all. As a mere player, have you ever modified other games? Have you installed unofficial fixes, patches, updates, upgrades, expansions, mods? Were you happy it all was well documented? Were you happy that you could control what was being installed? Were you happy that it worked? Were you happy that you could install other stuff alongside without problems? Were you happy that you could uninstall it? Did you care about the authors or flame wars going on in obscure places of the internet? Players download stuff, sometimes read the instructions, install it and judge it. ---------------------------------- My friend Wesp5, Listen to the feedback. As a start, I would like to see the patch, or parts of it, in pk4 format. If you were to split your patch into standalone mods, which mods would you produce?

I'm trying to compile TDM from source, to explore the engine for total conversion projects. But my hardware is a bit old, and the versions 2.08+ run into this black-menu issue (my gfx card is an ATI Radeon HD 4870, and the proposed solutions don't work), so I have to stick with older versions. So I tried compiling version 2.07, but it failed to compile. I'm not experienced with Visual Studio, so I'm not sure what to do. I get errors like this one: I tried right-clicking the solution and selecting "retarget solution", but it didn't fix it. I'm still getting the same errors. I'm not sure how to install the build tools says it requires. I'm on Windows 7 (x64), using VS 2017, so I'm not even sure I could use these build tools. Version 2.10 compiles fine, though, but I don't suppose there's something in the code I could easily switch off to make it run on my hardware.

I spend 90% of my time on Linux Mint. I occasionally pop over to Windows 10 to check a few things or run some updates but Linux Mint is my home. TDM runs better under Mint than Windows for me but your mileage may vary. When running TDM in Linux, you must set FPS to "Uncapped Mode" in the Advanced settings, the old capped mode has terrible stuttering and performance under Linux ( even native Doom 3 has this issue ). You can set Max FPS to 60 if you are worried about any inconsistencies with game timing ( the only known issues are rare problems with audio behavior at really high FPS). Just don't use the native 60FPS capped mode, use Uncapped mode with a Max FPS value.

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

Excellent. This will take up my whole upcoming week, I'll take all my time off to good use testing the latest release candidate and suggest if there's really any problems. The devs are right that the beta sounds like its no longer regressed between introduced features. This is going to make my week!

I did a little testing of SVN 10610 and 10611 and haven't seen any light \ shadow problems thus far. I mostly play in shadow-map mode but I think the problems mostly impact stencil? ( haven't seen any issues in stencil mode either ). I think the reverted Doom 3 style frustum may have cured the light leaks above some shielded electric street lamps too. It also may have improved the appearance to lighting in the mission "Behind Closed Doors" ( noticed more shading variation on the walls of the large stairway at the start of the mission ). Could be placebo, gotta compare screenshots.

Could it be anything to do with the shape of the geometry? Is a curved staircase looking at the images. Or the thickness? Thou by that image those stairs are anything but thin. Is just that I have seen thin walls leak light, while ticker ones do not and I have seen this, in more than one engine even in lightmapped ones. Also is that brush geometry or a imported triangle mesh? You will correct me if wrong but afaik the engine treats triangle mesh's, a tad differently from brush geometry, like it doesn't automatically inline the triangle mesh geometry, into the overall baked brush geometry (unless your force it), so it leaves a invisible "gap" there where the mesh connects with the brush wall? Could be floating point accuracy problems, like you recently talked about?

Oops, in that last release, I accidentally didn't check character spacing in the codepoint range 128-159. And sure enough, there were problems with character 131 & 132, which needed 4 more pixels of horizontal box shifting than the 3 pixels they got earlier. So here's a better version: fontimage_24.dat of Feb 24

The devs didn't title this thread, and @datiswous said they're attempting to mislead people by using Russell's name and a retro style to make it resemble Thief, which is cynical. I grew up on forums like I'm sure anyone who likes a game from '98 did. I actually left the Discord immediately after joining it because it was more off-topic doom-posting than anything relevant to the mod. I thought the forums might be better, but it's mostly just grown men yelling at clouds and telling strangers how mature they are, and a few brave souls actually developing anything. Depressing place, I'll just stick to enjoying new missions every 6 months without an account.

True, but, 1. this thread is called "Western stealth FPS with Stephen Russell", and, 2. nothing you said changes anything for me. The gameplay still doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. And, if you really think this forum is cynical, then you don't visit forums much. Actually, the majority of the users are are pretty mature, unlike in other forums.

We didn't make the holidays (such a busy time of year) so here's a New Year's gift, an unusual little mission. Window of Opportunity Recover an item for a regretful trader out in a wilderness setting, and discover more! Available within the in-game mission downloader or: Download: http://www.thedarkmo...ndetails/?id=79 Alternative: https://drive.google...WTMzQXZtMVFBSG8 Some unorthodox gameplay on regular/ghost difficulties. (Arachnophobes might prefer short mode...) Please expect to need your lantern in regular and ghost modes! Short ("easy") mode is a smaller map, so if you are looking for areas others reference below, or 100% of the loot, you'll need to play on another mode. I wanted to create my first mission before I became influenced by too many others' ideas, and limited myself to what has been done before. As such, this mission is not set in a city/town, and has some features that are likely to be provocative. There's a section some really like, which others don't, either way I kept it short to not last too long. That being said, I hope you do find it fun! :-) Special thanks to those who provided valuable testing and feedback: Goldwell, Kyyrma, plotzzz, 161803398874989, PPoe & Bikerdude (who also contributed a sound). (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] If you are having trouble finding the main objective, here's what to pay attention to in the mission for hints: There is a spot it's possible to get stuck on the ground in the corner by the cliff/rockfall where there's a rope laying on the ground, please take care if you poke around there!

What do you mean by moving them around? You move them from the models folder into another folder? Models must be placed in the models folder. Otherwise, DM/DR cannot find them anymore causing the problems you mentioned in your post.

Hi, I'm messing around with patches to see what can be done with them, and I have a couple of questions. None are critical issues, as a matter of fact, I doubt I'd notice them or cared if I were playing someone else's map, but as I'm learning, knowing what can't be done is sometimes as important as what can be done. Here's the thing: is it possible to bevel a surface not parallel to one of the orthogonal axes, in other words, a slanted bevel? To be more specific: I'm having problems with snapping it to the grid; it doesn't want to. I mean, I have done the bevel, and it looks nice from a distance, but the slanted surface refuses to snap to the grid, which causes a visible, although small, seam (or at least I assume that's the reason.) And projecting the texture is also a bit of pain. Let's see if I can attach a picture... OK... [a few/lots of minutes later] messing around with it one side now looks much better (almost imperceptible seam, tbh,) but the other side still looks off. I still can't snap to the grid the four corners (interestingly, it's the main brush, the frustum, the one that refuses, not the bevel, which is perfectly snapped). I can snap three of the four corners, but there is always one that shifts on its own will, even when using the smallest grid. See the next two pictures, where I have the main brush and the patch selected; the dots overlap except that one. And if I snap that one, another will shift (clockwise? I think.) I mean, that's like... what, 1/3 of 1/8 of a Doom Unit? 1mm? Not game-breaking, really, and nothing that can't be hidden with some trim or just in shadows, but I wonder if there's a technique for this or what I did wrong. [Hmmm, after some thinking, I wonder if my issue was creating the original cube on grid X and then cutting the triangular corner for the bevel on a different grid size so the corners were weirdly placed... I'd have to test that out] And speaking of seams, is it possible to make a smooth texture transition from the surface of a cylinder (or ring or whatever) to its cap? See the third picture, which is the rounded base of a column. If it's not (or it takes a lot of effort or editing), then it's no big deal, as there are more important things to worry about. But if there's a quick & easy way (natural projection hasn't worked for me in this instance), it would be good to know. Thanks!

Someone just reported in the TBM thread, that TBM would be included with the basic Mod installation. I cannot verify this, however I found some other confusing things. When I remove all installed missions from my fms folder and try to download missions again from the downloader, two things happen: 1. The downloader only shows a very short missions list - including some 25 missions. 2. For these available missions, wrong missions descriptions and wrong pictures are shown (I checked Volta series, AGN and HH series and all of them include wrong pictures and descriptions through the "More" button). Can somebody please check as well, or is it a problem on my end?

Here is another update to the English Stone font's DAT file used for subtitles and some readables: fontImage_24.dat This supercedes the Jan 30th update. As agreed, now all character spacings - as given by xSkip - are preserved (from this file in TDM 2.11). Exception: the Jan 30th repair of garbage metadata for "<" and ">" remains, including xSkip repair. ASCII Characters (lower 128). The earlier Jan 30th post summaries those ASCII characters that needed metadata changes to avoid adjoining stray marks. (The detail report below updates newer reversions and minor revisions.) ANSI Characters (upper 128). An analysis was also made of the status of the Stone 28 pt font's characters in the upper codepoint range of 128-255. This could be of interest if the subtitle system was some day expanded to include European languages, and continues to use the historic codepage method. The analysis also prompted some additional DAT tweaks now. Broadly, implementation of the upper-range characters (standard or TDM-specific, as defined in the TDM wiki's I18N - Character mapping I18N) is incomplete for Stone 24 pt. The status is: 43% (55 chars) Good as is. 9% (12 chars) Good enough after DAT tweak included in this update. 6% (7 chars) Missing and shown as hollow box. 30% (38 chars) Missing accent/diacritic. 7% (9 chars) Otherwise weird. But often suggestive of glyph work started but not completed. In addition, 7 chars within categories (3-5) were "improved", but are still not good. To really solve categories (3-5) requires DSS bitmap surgery (and corresponding DAT adjustments), which is beyond the scope of planned work. DAT tweaks of ANSI characters (like with ASCII) were careful to avoid changes to xSkip. Tweaks can be further grouped by problem solved.... In category (2): - (4 chars) Char is clipped, with stray mark from adjoining character on other side. - (7 chars) Stray mark, without char clipping. As improvements in categories (3-5): - (3 chars) Stray mark, without char clipping - (4 chars) Out of valid range on top edge A categorized itemization about treatment of specific problems and characters, with further details, is here: Information about methods, including new tools, to conduct this analysis and tweaking will be forthcoming, mostly after the 2.12 release.

Beta 11 Fix finished-on state auto-update was unreliable Slighty improve scanner title/author detect Tags are now named some whatever regular-version-looking thing to force GitHub to put the newest at the top

New script for mappers: my flavour of a fog density fading script. To add this to your FM, add the line "thread FogIntensityLoop();" to your map's void main() function (see the example in fogfade.script) and set "fog_fade" "1" on each foglight to enable script control of it. Set "fog_intensity_multiplier" on each info_location entity to change how thick the fog is in that location (practically speaking it's a multiplier for visibility distance). Lastly, "fog_fade_speed" on each foglight determines how quickly it will change its density. The speed scales with the current value of shaderParm3, using shaderParm3 = 1000 as a baseline. So i.e. if shaderParm is currently at 1/10th of 1000, then fade speed will be 1/10th as fast. Differences to Obsttorte's script: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/&do=findComment&comment=310436 my script uses fog lights you created, rather than creating one for you. Obsttorte's script will delete the foglight if entering a fogfree zone and recreate it later more than one fog light can be controlled (however, no per-fog-light level of control) adding this to the map requires adding a line to your void main() script, rather than adding an info_locations_settings entity with a custom scriptobject spawnarg in my script, mappers set a multiplier of fog visibility distance (shaderParm3), while in Obsttorte's script a "fog_density" spawnarg is used as an alternative to shaderParm3 smaller and less compactly written script fogfade.scriptfogfade.map

in case you wonder my beard was white when i hit 25 only started getting some grey streaks in my hair in the last two years hehe. and for those younger here enjoy your youth while you have it at around 40 the problems start (just look at those receeding hairlines atrocious!!!), well if the hair was my only problem i could live with it hehe i also got gall stones kidney stones and a nasty fall which broke my back in two places at around that time. So enjoy it while you can or stay away from ladders

If the "mission fails as soon as stealth score turns non-zero," that would not be good for ghost players. They might need to find out "how" they failed and experiment to avoid alerting guards. They might need to take those score points as a "bust". They might need to take those score points to complete an objective. Then, mission authors would need to encode exceptions into their missions, which would be a lot of work (if they decide to do it at all). However, part of what makes ghosting challenging and fun is when mission authors do not create their missions with ghosting in mind. Please see: Official Ghosting Rules: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148523 Writing code for these rules would be a huge undertaking. Ghost Rules Discussion: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148487 Creating an official mode could alienate these dedicated ghost players, because it would clash with what is considered ghosting in the community. Including the Stealth Stat Tool mod in the official release would be more useful. Or, making the audible alert states of guards quick and easy to recognize could help as well. For these reasons, I don't agree with an official "Ghost" mode. If the dev team were to do it, we should consult with @Klatremus so we get it 100% correct or not pursue it at all. (This ghosting bit should probably be in its own thread.)