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I'm commenting on the technical uselessness and impossibility of the "closed packages" idea, which is a mathematical fact, and has nothing do with my "attitude" towards mappers or content creators. If you choose to believe that such protection really is possible, if only the developers care enough about mappers to get off their lazy asses and implement it, you go ahead and believe it. I can't force you to change your mind. Perhaps you can actually find some developer somewhere who is actually interested in implementing such encryption just for the lolz, and you could work with them to release a fork of TDM which would include this feature. But if you're relying on such a trivially-defeated level of protection to allow you to comply with a license which says "nobody must be able to access these models", you're on very legally risky ground. Regarding textures which appear to be taken from other games, of course I agree entirely that such textures are being used unlawfully and should be removed from the mod immediately.

I would steer clear of such a license. It is too vague to know if your use is acceptable or not, because in its most extreme interpretation, it is simply unachievable. At best, you could contact the author to clarify and/or give you explicit permission for what you want to do. But otherwise, that's just a garbage statement, and that wouldn't change at all if we had any kind of package obfuscation/encryption.

No, we're talking minor change to a core mod mission that was included in the last TDM update. Person who made these changes preferred to ask other TDM team member, but not the mission author. So not that severe, but still another weird case, given the mission author is around. Thus the conclusion that there's no such thing here as community-wide agreement on things like: what's ownership, what constitutes decent conduct or respect towards original author, etc. What is weird or awful to me seems like a normal thing to others. In terms of encryption, I think we're talking extremes again. Obviously, even most sophisticated systems will be broken in a few days, if someone's good enough. And I'm pretty sure you'd easily find someone who'd do it just for fun. Let's be real here, this is to deter the 70-80% script kiddies out there, and to be able to comply with aforementioned licenses. By the way: That's standard license for platforms like Sketchfab. But yeah, the paradox of GPL license was pointed out to me on another discord as well

Thank you. I can't believe this thread is now two pages long and nobody until now has noticed that you cannot have DRM in an open source project. This has nothing to do with ideology, people "believing everything must be shared" or anything else. It is literally impossible. Yes, you could encrypt the PK4s if you like, but in order to play them, the game has to decrypt them, which means the decryption key has to be accessible from within the game source, which means that everyone who has access to the game source (which is everybody in the world, because it's GPL) is also able to decrypt those packages. So your encryption has achieved absolutely nothing except waste developer time and CPU time on the player's system. DRM doesn't work particularly well even in closed source software, but it cannot work at all in open-source software. This is why there will never be an officially-licensed open-source DVD or Blu-ray player for Linux (the players that exist have to bypass or crack the DRM), and why viewing DRM-encrypted video streams in open-source browsers requires you to download closed-source components like Widevine. The only way to implement such DRM in the mod would be to make it entirely closed source with a decryption key carefully hidden in the binary so that it is very difficult to extract without step-by-step assembler debugging, then constantly update that key if and when people do manage to extract it (which means you need a revocation mechanism, a way to update existing missions with new keys, and all other key management headaches). But none of this is an option, because you can't legally take GPL code and turn it into a closed-source project. By all means continue to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of DRM, the impact on the community, the social contract and implications regarding user trust, and everything else. But in my opinion such discussions are a waste of time when the underlying technical proposal is so completely infeasible that it can never happen even if the entire community were 100% agreed that it would be a good thing. You might as well be discussing whether we should build a football stadium on the surface of the Sun.

It has pretty much always been handled as it was in the Thief Modding community. Ask for permission to use and if permission is given, list your sources. The issue here is really an edge case and not the norm. It really doesn't make sense to enact such protections in such a small community. We operate in good faith here. It feels like a big ask to develop and incorporate such encryption into the mod as an option and to remove a very helpful export feature from Dark Radiant. I don't mean to dismiss the concerns but given the small size and generally considerate conduct of this community, I don't think it's warranted.

If the incident from Discord is what I think it is, that issue involved someone repeatedly making unapproved artistic and gameplay changes to other users WIP maps when they had only been given permission to do some performance optimization. We're talking major gameplay and map design changes and when those major changes weren't embraced, that user would become angry that their efforts, unwanted as they were, might not be embraced. If this is more if an aesthetic thing, I would say just ask people not to use the high quality assets from you FM. Heck, add a Pop up screen after the TDM logo on mission launch telling people not to use these assets as they do not meld well due to their higher quality. Then release the lower quality versions. The majority of the community is respectful and it's small. Thinking in terms of numbers here....we don't have hundreds of mappers. This tiny community has lasted 20 years for a reason. Trust and mutual respect. If you don't want your assets folded into the core mod for distribution, that's fine too but I stand by my earlier post. Encryption doesn't fit our model... outdated as openly sharing may be...it is the heart of our community. Ask and the majority will respect your wishes.

Perhaps I'm just seeing this from the viewpoint of a player and not a content creator. I wasn't going to speculate on what artists think of contributing to an open-source project, but it seems like projects such as TDM have done pretty well so far for what is a niche game to begin win. Is there any evidence that someone has wanted to contribute assets to TDM but stopped short because of the lack of encryption? It appears this is all in relation to a Discord discussion which I haven't been following so I'm probably missing some context, but still.

That's repeating the old-school argument that for open-source project you have to go full or go home; there's only extremes and no middle options. I can guarantee you that very, very few artists (modellers, musicians, etc.) are prepared for such commitment. That doesn't pose a risk of TDM not surviving, more like being stuck in certain era. If you want to go beyond certain level of quality with assets, you simply won't find people that are willing to make a sacrifice this big. The effort that comes with creation is simply too big. Again, I'm thinking about optional package encryption. Maybe something similar to DoomBFG or RBDoom, or Thief 3 actually, where you launch a map with special console command that puts it all in one file. That's really good example, thanks. Performance reasons are always good ones, although, on a tangent, it begs the question: why semi-modern engine like this still has such low entity limit (8192, IIRC)? Even the good old Thief 3 had 16536, and that was in 2004. Quite some time ago Snobel managed to raise that limit to bloody 1 million, just to never to deal with it again. Ultimately it's mappers who have to take responsibility for their maps being optimized, and no artificial constrain like that will help, if they don't want to Oh, and in terms of entity count, paradoxically, making stuff from brushes could help here, since brushes are treated as one entity, so-called entity0 IIRC.

Sure, if someone is a real bastard, they'll find a way to rip anything, but that's not the point. The point is, some basic protection / encryption that asset packages provide has been a standard thing in other engines for ages now. The demand that models be fully opened and ready for infinite modification is what is rather outdated and entitled attitude, not the other way around.

When I tried your .exe, I got this: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21477-water-effects-not-rendered-through-warp-glass/&do=findComment&comment=475732 You also suggested trying the 'latest development build'. I asked if that can be obtained using tdm_installer, and you said 'yes'. That's what I reported here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21477-water-effects-not-rendered-through-warp-glass/&do=findComment&comment=475856 So - I am probably doing something wrong but not sure what

Above 3 items are released now, on the "Barks" thread: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21740-english-subtitles-for-ai-barks/&do=findComment&comment=483331

Instead of that, you could, in that time period, start learning your own missions and in doing so become more active on the forums, learning from others. It's also great to understand how things work in the engine, when you play. It might spoil some immersion though.. Or learn to build games with other engines, like Godot for example.

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake? And thank god they got rid of unity, that engine is total trash garbage on anything over 60 fps. Just spend 5 minutes on steam forums for Unity project games, and there's just thousands of people complaining about poor performance, stuttering etc.

Made 2.09b the default version. I hope at least a few people have installed and played it I'll finish the release process tomorrow (tags, source, pdb, etc.)

@Dragofer, I'm wondering what template tags to give to this page, besides the usual "Editing". I'm tempted to add "Physics", but are force fields really considered part of the physics engine?

Probably the .script file that's needed, but unfortunately can't be included with a prefab. Maybe there's a comment somewhere in the prefab (or in the wiki or forums) that says what script it needs and where to find it. (The similar combination setup I used earlier doesn't involve "slot", so clearly uses a different script that I what I have.)

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!

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