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After an nuclear attack, if we survive it, we don't have even any electric or electronic devices which we can use to connect to the Arpa- or any other net (EMP) and for sure worse problems.

Today I tried downloading 3 different Fan missions. I fired up tcpdump with the intention of capturing all download traffics and opening the saved .pcap/pcapng file in wireshark. These are the results I got: - Downloading hidden hands blood & metal for the first time : - Getting sneak & shouffle FM from official TDM server( previously downloaded but I tried to download again) : - Downloading Terrible Old man : I can attest that the URL mirror choices can be different. If we start from the first sequence of clicking the download mission menu and let TDM fetch the list of fan missions from the server, we will find an xml return result together with HTTP 200 OK status : Nothing appealing from this xml wall of texts. I had one question in mind: what caused the randomness of the URL mirror choices? For a moment, my eyes were drawn and laser focused to the "weight" attribute. Is it possible that the weight determines the randomness? Not long afterwards, I skim-read TDM source files in the official TDM's svn repo (honestly I'm not used to reading large codebases) and I found this interesting piece of codes in file called MissionManager.cpp: Could this code be a factor of randomness? *I also skim read directory /missions and /http where some http code is located. Warning : C++ isn't my strongest forte so take this with a grain of salt. Perhaps official TDM devs could weigh in into this discussion...

== Tips == Updating the application. download/install the apk from the github release page. Or install / update the app using f-droid. Change Advanced settings: To change settings hitting the button "Edit Darkmod.cfg" You can also use autoexec.cfg to overrule(?) lines in darkmod.cfg. (but you need to create a file in the darkmod for it) Performance tweaks https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks Lower the screenresolution, See DIII4a settings > graphics > screenresolution > Custom: 640 x 480 Or set in darkmod config or add following lines to autoexec. seta r_customHeight "640" seta r_customWidth "480" Problem: Application crashes during loading mission. No sollution found. Sometimes restarting the mission helps. Known problems: tdm 2.13 crashes during loading mission. tdm 2.12 doesnt. black textures > (solved in new version of DII4A) wobbly wall textures when moving > (solved in new version of DII4A) lights not active > (solved in new version of DII4A) lightgem never dims > set tdm_lg_weak "1" > (solved in new version of DII4A)

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

Oh it could be much worse we could try to teach them assembler or machine code but even experts today would be most likely break there skull if they tried that hehe. your idea is good though :). Another good point would be to make them understand limitations in said tech, much of the muscle in todays computers is geared towards techniques to allow raytracing and why is that many wonder. Well the honest truth is that raytracing takes so much computing power that no hardware today would be able to run it if we did not use certain tricks like DLSS FSR etc. And this wont change tomorrow or in the next maybe 20 to 30 years because we are at a point in history where moores law is actually starting to show the limitations on our current technology. For one we are at such small processing nodes in chips that they are starting to show all kinds of weird behaviour (quantum tunneling effect, heat problems due to stacking nodes, oh my...). new technologies are in the works but they are still pretty far of in the future. So keeping your (Older heh) hardware alive is actually a good thing even if you loose on bragging rights, and tbh many older components are actually still able to run your games or what ever maybe not with a gazillion fps on a 100" 8k 256 hz monitor (yeah you could not afford it anyway). Still you can get pretty far with knowledge of the inner workings of tech, like the guy who mounted 16 gb vram on his 3070 ti and got some rather nice numbers out of it in 4k (i did have a hunch that it might). Or resusing some old cabby because it looked nice and was sturdy. the Latest and greatest are not allways best in the long haul older sturdier components are even if they cant put out the numbers you see from the modern ones what matters is can they run it without it becomming a nuisance ? if yes then i rest my case.

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

Yeah, thats really hilarious. I use the Vivaldi browser, which by default include a nice sidescroller game, Vivaldia and also launched a 2º part , Vivaldia 2, which you find in Steam, but which you can play direct in the browser without the need of Steam. It works even in very old PC without problems and shows a quality much better than a lot of others.

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

Well, my laptop has 3 Years and I paid €350 for it. As said, far away from an high end gaming PC. It has even problems with some shabby Unity games from Steam respect FPS, because of this it's somewhat strange that TDM, with infinite better graphics run smooth on it.

for a comparison with mine see here -> https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-A9-9425-APU-2016-MSR-vs-AMD-A8-6500-APU/m496441vsm5272 as you can see the old A8 absolutely demolishes the A9 in CPU power, when it comes to gfx id say the A9 wins but it might have some problems due to the cpu not being all that fast (lower resolutions usually needs more cpu power yeah sounds bonkers but true non the less). the vega gfx should be able to handle 1440 resolutions though where cpu power means less.

yeah the more modern apu's sometimes fall short of hitting the mark despite being able to sometimes run newer content without problems. strangely despite being subpar for most modern stuff old gfx cards run pretty well with game engines that came from around the same era, apu's from back then are cough! not worth mentioning as they usually sucked. I have one of the older amd A8 APU's (medion PC) and the built in gfx while not to shabby does tend to balk at some titles. strangely some of the A8 models were hugely faster than the corresponding A9 models cpu wise but the newer models had better gfx go figure , the A8 5600K was around 83% faster than the 9425 despite the latter being somewhat newer, the built in gfx was pretty ok though (based on vega) while the A8 was based on the hd8500 series. my A8 (6500) is also a quad core while the 9425 is a dual core, i guess they had to cut down on cores to make room for the vega hardware ?, mine got outfitted with a gtx 1060 external gfx card because the built in card while ok for some older games was simply to slow for more modern titles and the psu was only 350 watt .

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

I really hate how large language models are being conflated with search, and especially the lack of transparency in how these new services get to the results they put on screen. If you think the problems with censorship, bias, and adversarial SEO are bad now, just wait. Imagine how bad it will be when every site is trying to overwrite the search LLM's instruction and context prompts with instructions to exclude the sites you are actually searching for.

Apologies for how ridiculously long I took to get to testing this. I was waiting for a short FM I could experiment with to try out demo recording. Now that I've come across Eye on the Prize I figured I'd see what a short demo behaves like. So what is the verdict? I'd say almost functional! Close but still far yet not as much as I imagined. There are some very obvious issues that currently make the system unusable in practice, but I was glad that it seems to work at the core basics. At least during a simple test where I went around picking up a body and some loot for about 10 seconds, a longer playthrough may reveal more. I'll proceed to list all problems I observed big and small: To get the mundane out of the way, I noticed that unlike screenshots demos are recorded in the FM directory rather than the root directory. While a screenshot is saved to "darkmod/screenshots" a demo is instead stored in "darkmod/fms/active_fm/demos". This is the least concern and easiest to solve, the real problems come next. Demo recording greatly reduces FPS, to the point where it isn't practical to leave it running. I went from 100 FPS to 30 FPS while it was running, constantly jittering as it would speed up a few frames then slow down again. The performance impact would need to be reduced for it to be usable during a normal run. The file size of the resulting demo is uncomfortably large, which isn't a bug per say but a blocker to practical usage. I got a 7.5 MB file for just 15 seconds on an extremely tiny FM: If someone were to record one hour on a large map with tons of AI and entities, I fear it would well surpass 10 GB if we're lucky. Playback, audio: Now for the playback issues, the first of which is lack of audio. The demo has no sound at all, neither world audio nor footsteps or the sounds for picking up loot. Playback, player model: While the camera appears to remain in 1st person, the 3rd person player model is still rendered on top. This causes you to see polygons from the player's head covering the screen. Playback, visual glitches: Lastly there is a strange issue with some parts of the world appearing grey or black. As you move around you'll see geometry become a dark color as if rendering is broken. Here's a screenshot of demo playback showing issues #4 and #5. The thing you see covering the view at the left is the player's head seen from the inside as it was bobbing around. In front is a normal structure which for some strange reason has its edge appearing black, the floor itself appears gray at some point which I didn't capture here. Which of those problems if any seem fixable? I presume whatever causes the player model to show and the world to glitch can be found then audio restored, but can performance and storage size be improved? Are the issues simple enough so that it's worth the effort trying to tackle them and see what we get working in the end?

I don't think the silicon scaling issues are at play here. We know there's other types of transistors, such as GAAFETs and QFETs, that could be less susceptible to quantum tunneling. They are being deployed or are on the roadmaps or in the lab. Carbon nanotube transistors or other advances will take over in 10 years or so. After we run out of obvious things to improve, there will be a complete shift to 3D scaling. The problem is the company culture at Intel, and the attitude that they must be #1 at any cost. They rushed Raptor Lake as a refresh product, and got burned by faulty microcode and other issues. They own fabs but have struggled to open them up to customers other than themselves. They are burning billions to get into discrete GPUs, after completely missing the peak of gaming GPU pricing, and may not establish good AI revenue before that bubble pops. All sorts of problems. BTW the class action is here: https://abingtonlaw.com/class-action/consumer-protection/Intel-Processor-Issues-class-action-lawsuit.html

Yes, it does work correctly in the very original Doom 3. Besides, the way how 5.1 sound outputs seems the same as in TDM 2.05 and earlier. I think that openal-soft stuff from Dhewm3 implemented in 2.06 actually breaks normal 5.1 output and turns it into 4.0 (I noticed that some ppl have the same issue with openal-soft in other games - no center and lfe channels). I've been researching and tackling all these sound wrappers for quite some time now (openal-soft, dsoal, indirectsound and so on) and noticed that though they restore eax-like stuff, there are some problems if the system is not stereo. Hence, my question: is there a way to make a legacy (pre-2.06) sound output on current TDM versions? Or maybe in future? P.S. I know, it's been a while since my last post but the issue is still there.

I also feel you. I used to be a regular here in the forums, but since my son was born in 2022, it basically grunded to halt, although I still get the mails on threads that I wrote in. Ironically, your post in June about not having time got me back here and got me motivated to try and use some of my precious spare time to get some progress on the map I started years ago. I still have not been able to finish a map and want to change that, as long long as the community here is still active

Time to talk about the elephant in the room. Intel Addresses Desktop Raptor Lake Instability Issues: Faults Excessive Voltage from Microcode, Fix Coming in August Intel finally announces a solution for CPU crashing and instability problems — claims elevated voltages are the root cause; patch coming by mid-August [Updated] Buggy microcode in 13th and 14th gen Raptor Lake desktop CPUs caused incorrect increases in voltage, which led to permanent and irreversible degradation of the chips. Now all of the impacted CPUs will be suspect on the used market.

You can start here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12558-useful-important-editing-links/ Specifically, I recommend Springheel's new mapper's workshop: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18945-tdm-new-mappers-workshop/

I've created a python script to make packing missions a bit more convenient. It zips everything into the pk4 for you, while auto-excluding unwanted files/folders that you list in a .pkignore file. You can also create the .pkignore using FM Packer, if you want. This script also allows checking for problems with files, and unused files and definitions. https://github.com/Skaruts/tdm_fm_packer/releases It's in an experimental state, so backup your mission before using it, and where possible double-check the results.

Thanks! I don't see config problems so I think this issue is mission specific. I advise discussing with the mission author @joebarnin

Oh what did I miss? I see there's a test map but what do I need to revisit? Are there any problems with my footstep sounds in this map?

Hi. I would welcome some help on how I get into I am running v1.0, but have not had problems with it.

@wesp5, please do add it to your patch in the meantime. Perhaps that would allow it to get a touch more of early testing. Anyone playing under a non-English European language may see fuller use of accents on the names of weapons and stock inventory items. But there could be existing or new problems there to be further addressed, as well as with any FM custom inventory item. Also, any readable or sign that uses Stone font merits inspection. This is true for text presented in English, or (if the player has gone through the considerable hassle of tracking down and installing a pertinent language pack) in other Latin-based languages. Expected problems with latter, requiring freshening of translation to fix, are still-missing accents or (worst conceivable case) changed word-wrap leading to confusing formatting or truncated end of text.

Stone 24pt Font Upgrade, June 20, 2024 Final Release With this third and (I hope) final update, Stone 24pt becomes TDM's only font+size that fully provides all 256 characters defined in the TDM custom character map. This last update concludes adding the more difficult characters, chiefly symbols, Icelandic, and remaining accented letters. Plus general overall tweaks to improve character rendering and spacing (as evaluated with testSubtitlesANSI), while preserving important metrics, e.g., xSkip of ASCII alphanumerics. Unwanted overlapping boundaries were eliminated, and things made more consistent. As one example, the metrics for the lower-case "e", and accented characters based on it, were adjusted a year ago to suppress stray marks, but at the expense of clipping the glyphs, making them less stylish. With the added insight now provided by datBounds visualization, it was possible to restore the style while keeping the stray marks away. In summary - 16 new glyphs were created. 64 existing characters got tweaks. These were mostly affecting the .dat, but some glyphs were moved in the bitmap (a little or a lot) to solve various problems. Download: 2024 June 20 Stone 24 Final Font Update.zip As with the prior interim releases, this download is made up of - .dat and 2 .dds files, for distribution/game inclusion .ref [with changes annotated] and .xcf [master source GIMP project, including datBounds layers] The hand-annotations in the .ref file are neither absolutely conclusive, nor necessary to preserve for future work. You may generate a fresh .ref without them from the .dat file by using refont. Enumeration of Changes: There will be some follow-on work, e.g., expressed earlier in this thread in a bugtracker entry.