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TDM Latch Pack (Beta) By Frost_Salamander and wellingtoncrab with special thanks to Dragofer Tired of picking another lock or hunting for that missing key? Imagine The City is itself an elaborate lock, and you are the key. Embrace progression through careful exploration and navigation of the environment. Embrace the latch pill: Included is a new entity type and scripting for a door mounted toggle lock, or "latch", as well as new CC0 assets and prefabs. https://github.com/thedarkmodcommunity/test-latch/wiki Example Video Asset Pictures All models and textures in this pack are released under CC0 license and may be used freely without need of attribution. We waive copyright to the extent that possible, but aren’t lawyers. Latch Lock Features Supports single and double doors across all cardinal directions, as well as trap doors Uses the location system to handle context sensitive frob highlighting of the latch and the doors Automatically determines the correct latch state on map start based on the targeted door's "locked" spawnarg Options for rotate, translate, or both with unique sound slots for each Supports any model or func_static To get started head over and grab the latest release (available with or without demo content) and read the getting started guide. This is a beta release - so your feedback is appreciated!

The latch is just like any any other entity - you can use any model or func_static you like as long as the mechanism translates or rotates (or both).

I think I have a way to do this without scripting. The idea of the Key entity and key targets seemed to pan out. What do you all think? ---------- 1) the inventory object to pick up in the map is an atdm:key_base with the model and inv_model overridden. So, this looks like a custom inventory item. 2) the target objects to use this are atdm:froblock entities with their used_by as the entity #1, trigger_targets enabled, sounds customized, etc. In my case, make a sound, emit a puff of smoke, then simply remove the target item, all things that can be done with relays and targets. So far, this seems to do what I intend. Does this seem sound? Now that I look back on this convo, I didn't explain what I intended well enough. I bet some experienced mapper could have suggested this. So, my apologies.

Yeah, that is the intent. After stepping away, maybe this could be USE or FROB: 1) Select item in inventory, then highlight the target entity and FROB (right click). Or... 2) Select item in inventory, then highlight the target entity and and USE item (enter key). I would prefer not scripting at this time, if possible. I was looking for examples of this type of action in existing maps to see what techniques could be used or copied.

One clearly defined entity that can only be used with frob on another clearly defined entity?

why not go al the way up and give the ambient light a screen space reflection term, so the fresnel affected pixels would reflect what is behind them (at grazing angles) instead of a static term? this means that if what is behind them is way darker then the fresnel won't reflect anything, and if what is behind is is way lighter then the fresenel would take a portion of that reflected light, i guess you could use the specularity term of every texture to derive how much those fresnel effects do gather from the SSR term.

It's another aspect of, over time, tailoring the degree of subtitles shown to reflect the needs and preferences of the individual player. I think some low-hearing/audio-off players might appreciate brief soundscape descriptions, including weapon sounds; others would find it clutter. I understand that distinction is not personally of interest to you. For now, a fourth category is just theoretical, not a 2.12 item. I'm just asking for a different description of the existing category, other than "effects", that we can both live with. Something that sounds more human. How about "expressions"? If we can agree on a term, then I will revise the appropriate barks to use it.

I have an idea. From time to time, these kind of guard create a penis during animation. This penis creates a thread during spawn, but it starts it as DelayedStart(0 ms). Instead of running the script immediately, it stores its entityNumber onto the callstack of the script thread. Let's suppose that for some reason penis gets destroyed immediately, and bow attachment gets spawned at this exact moment: then the bow attachment reuses entityNumber of the penis. At some moment suicide thread wakes up, reads entityNumber from stack, and kills the entity with this index --- but now it is bow attachment instead of penis. That's a simple explanation why dangling pointers are dangerous! However, if this really works like this, the whole scripting should be completely broken, since scripts in general often wait long time, and all the entities they reference might die during waiting. I can hardly believe this situation is always handled that bad. I'd like to ask people who have used scripting a lot. What happens if you have a local variable X of type "entity", then you do "sys.wait(1.0);", and then try to use X but it has died during waiting?

I've run into a sound issue while assembling a little dresser prefab. There's a great sound for closing a drawer (an "atdm:mover_door_sliding" entity), but it's the sound of a drawer BEING closed, and should therefor be played during "snd_move", and not "snd_close" (at the beginning of the translation, and not once it has finished). If I have no custom "snd_close" property, this value defaults back to a clunky default sound, and if I instead have a "snd_close" and give it either the value "nosound", "0" or "-", the closing sound cuts out, since now the sound of "nosound" is playing instead. Is there some way to uninherit an inherited property (like for example the "snd_close" property)?

No warnings during dmap re: the patch, how do I check if a patch has a "[0..1] non-overlapping texcoords"? Is it correct in interpreting that to mean the texture has been fit to the patch? If so then yes. This is the patch copied from DR if that helps: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <map version="1" format="portable"> <layers> <layer id="0" name="Default" parentId="-1" active="true" hidden="false"/> </layers> <selectionGroups> <selectionGroup id="415" name=""/> <selectionGroup id="416" name=""/> <selectionGroup id="417" name=""/> <selectionGroup id="418" name=""/> <selectionGroup id="420" name=""/> <selectionGroup id="421" name=""/> <selectionGroup id="423" name=""/> <selectionGroup id="424" name=""/> </selectionGroups> <selectionSets/> <properties> <property key="EditTimeInSeconds" value="20837"/> <property key="LastCameraAngle" value="69 332.186 0"/> <property key="LastCameraPosition" value="20.0088 1653.64 531.677"/> <property key="LastShaderClipboardMaterial" value="textures/darkmod/nature/snow/snow_rough01"/> </properties> <entity number="0"> <primitives> <patch number="0" width="3" height="3" fixedSubdivisions="false"> <material name="textures/darkmod/weather/rain2_heavy2024mtr"/> <controlVertices> <controlVertex row="0" column="0" x="-448.000000" y="1712.000000" z="720.000000" u="0" v="0"/> <controlVertex row="1" column="0" x="-448.000000" y="1568.000000" z="720.000000" u="0" v="0.500000"/> <controlVertex row="2" column="0" x="-448.000000" y="1424.000000" z="720.000000" u="0" v="1.000000"/> <controlVertex row="0" column="1" x="-76.000000" y="1712.000000" z="720.000000" u="0.500000" v="0"/> <controlVertex row="1" column="1" x="-76.000000" y="1568.000000" z="720.000000" u="0.500000" v="0.500000"/> <controlVertex row="2" column="1" x="-76.000000" y="1424.000000" z="720.000000" u="0.500000" v="1.000000"/> <controlVertex row="0" column="2" x="296.000000" y="1712.000000" z="720.000000" u="1.000000" v="0"/> <controlVertex row="1" column="2" x="296.000000" y="1568.000000" z="720.000000" u="1.000000" v="0.500000"/> <controlVertex row="2" column="2" x="296.000000" y="1424.000000" z="720.000000" u="1.000000" v="1.000000"/> </controlVertices> <layers> <layer id="0"/> </layers> <selectionGroups/> <selectionSets/> </patch> </primitives> <keyValues> <keyValue key="classname" value="worldspawn"/> <keyValue key="difficulty0Name" value="easy"/> <keyValue key="difficulty1Name" value="medium"/> <keyValue key="difficulty2Name" value="hard"/> <keyValue key="shop_skip" value="1"/> </keyValues> <layers> <layer id="0"/> </layers> <selectionGroups/> <selectionSets/> </entity> </map>

The recent changes removed a lot of constraints on the entity limit, and now it is free to be raised up. Technically speaking, it is not removed, but it can be raised so high that it won't bother you anymore. On the screenshot, you can see the game working fine with 120022 entities (almost all of them func_static): These changes are included in the latest dev build, which can be freely obtained via tdm_installer. In the end, I set the limit to 65536 entities. I hope you won't need more The main point that I'd like to make here is: optimizations against entity limit should not be used any more! You don't need to worry that something would occupy an entity slot. You should never inline entities --- that's a very bad idea! Of course, many of known optimization techniques have other benefits. For instance, combining several models into one manually or via SEED reduces rendering overhead and should make the game faster. Just make sure that the merged objects are very close to each other. Good news is that now you are not forced to do so, and can postpone it indefinitely.

Since you're working on this, have you tried restoring the original functionality, i.e. ability to set up a resolution for these? That might help with performance. Also, when I was working with mirrors, I noticed that they disable normalmaps in the material. See how a cubemap version has those damaged surface details on the mirror surface, while real-time mirror bypasses all that. Last but not least, have you tried making mirrors work on convex or concave surfaces, not just straight flat polygons? That would open up possibilities for very nice material effects (if used with moderation ).

Mandrasola is a small sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter steals some herbal products from a smuggler. The mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank Bikerdude, BrokenArts and Ocn for playtesting and voice acting. Thanks goes naturally to everyone contributing and making TDM possible. This mission occurs chronologically before the Knighton's Manor, making it the first mission in the Thomas Porter series. Events in chronological order are: Mandrasola, The Knighton's Manor, The Beleaguered Fence, The Glenham Tower and The Transaction. The winter came early and suddenly this year. Weeks of strong blizzards and extremely harsh cold weather hit Bridgeport hard. With the seas completely frozen, a rare occurence indeed, most of the City harbor commerce has stopped completely. Vessels are stuck in the ice and no ship can leave or enter the City, resulting in the availability imported goods declining and their prices skyrocketing. One of these imported items is Mandrasola, a rare herbal product, which is imported overseas from the far southern continents. Mandrasola has its uses in alchemical cures and poisons, but mostly this substance is used for its narcotic qualities by commoners and even the nobility. The problem with Mandrasola is that excessive use is extremely addicting and the withdrawal effects are most grievious. Many are utterly incapable of stopping using Mandrasola and are transformed into quivering human ruins if they do no get their daily dose. And now this expensive and rare substance is running out from the whole City. Me and my fence, Lark Butternose, would love to grab this monopoly to ourselves: selling the last few doses in the City would probably be worth a fortune. According to Lark's sources, there remains only one smuggling lord who still has Mandrasola in stock. The problem is that this individual maintains an exclusive clandestine operation and only supplies a few nobles. Despite our best information gathering efforts we couldn't learn who the smuggler is and where he or she operates. Luckily we have an alternate plan. While searching for Mandrasola related information, we learned that a noblewoman called Lady Ludmilla is addicted to the substance and has paid high prices for small amounts of it. We also know that she has visited frequently someone in the Tanner's Ward waterfront, and since she goes to the area personally we believe she is visiting the smuggler. The plan is simple: I must monitor Ludmilla's most likely entryway to the Waterfront and then follow her to the smugglers hideout. I'd better be very careful around Ludmilla. She must not realise I'm following her or she probably won't lead me to her dealer. Hurting her is also out of the question. After she leads me to the smuggler's hideout, I can take my time to break in carefully and steal all the Mandrasola I can find. While I'm there it wouldn't be a bad idea to grab some loose valuables as well. I've now waited in the blistering cold for a few hours already. Looks like there are a few city watch patrols in the area to complicate matters... I think I heard a womans voice beyond the north gate. That must be lady Ludmilla, I haven't seen many ladies in these parts. I'd better get ready.. Links: Use the ingame downloader to get it. WARNING! Someone always fails to use spoiler tags. I do not recommend reading any further until you've played the mission.

Not with the current scripting, right now frobbing causes the door to open and close a little bit to simulate Skyrim-style opening of a closed door to another map section. This would conflict with the stock door opening effects. Apart from that I don't see a technical issue with adding new script effects to an existing door. Conceptually, the teledoor script is designed for permanently closed doors. If the door can be used normally by AI you might find it fully opened. It would be odd if AIs and the player can walk through at will but if the player frobs it he gets teleported somewhere else.

This is what I personally know about it: No diffuse means "skip the diffuse path code for this light" essentially means don't add/mix this light color/texture color info unto the surface, only use it as a simple b&w light. No specular is essentially the same but for specular textures, it skips the specular component/code/calculation and makes the light less heavy by removing the specular effect. About performance impact, for today GPU's, I don't think is as important as it was in 2004, but still, I'm sure it does have a small impact on performance, for the better of course, specially if done for many lights, but will also make them way more unrealistic. Btw lights with both no diffuse and nospecular, were used for the "projected shadows" or lights used to project fake "shadows" unto surfaces, this was used in Doom 3 to simulate basic, shadow mapping, for rotating fans and grid materials that use alpha textures, all because stencil shadows ignore those. Now that TDM has real shadow mapping, IMO such lights are less necessary and I wouldn't recommend their use for such effect. Thou lights with no specular and no normal mapping, are still useful for some effects, like simulating casting colored light from painted glass, like something bellow, and they are faster then normal lights:

Hi, is there a possibility to change the players z-coordinate instantly by using some trigger? I'd like to implement something like 'A crack in the slab' in Dishonored 2, where they just changed the z-value to 'teleport' between two houses exactly over another and so changed to a different 'state' of the house. Thanks Axel

I've got myself a 32:9 monitor and because of how text-heavy these games are it was almost unplayable to go on reading text all the way from my left to my right. I'm an engine programmer by trade so I set out to fix this and wanted to share my results. This fix will center the UI for any resolution wider than 16:9. For resolution that are more square i.e. 4:3 and 5:4 the UI will be anchored to the bottom instead as having the bottom elements floating in the middle looks strange. I also had to employ a trick to make some fullscreen effects stay fullscreen instead of becoming letterboxed, such as the transparent black backgrounds when reading books. Any rect that is 0,0,640,480 or larger will be considered fullscreen and stretch as normal. Of course some are note supposed to stretch like the custom main menu backgrounds so I added a bool variable for windowDefs called aspectAware that can be set to override this behavior. I experimented doing the opposite but could never find out how to make the book backgrounds stretch so I went with this. Still haven't figured out how to position the compass correctly but it looks decent enough.

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.

I was wondering if there was a way to prevent an entity type from appearing in the Create Entity list. For example: I'd like to not show the damage_* definitions, as they're not placed in maps and sometimes muddle my search results. Is there some sort of .def keyvalue like: "editor_hidden" "1" (the assets.lst feature to hide deprecated materials/models is very similar to what I'm looking for)

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.

I just recently became aware of this feature: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Particle_collisions_and_cutoff Unfortunately I completely missed it, as when I went to create weather effects in my FMs I just followed this (which doesn't mention it): https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Page_3#Rain_and_Snow The point of this thread is to a) make people aware of it and b) gather feedback from any mappers that have used it so we can get some mapper-focused documentation in the Wiki. The page above is great for background information about how it works, but as a mapper I really just want to know: What are the limitations of this (i.e. when should it be used and when shouldn't it be used)? Why isn't it the default behaviour? Why all this work to get it into the map? What built-in support for it exists (particle definitions, materials, etc). Do I need to create all this stuff myself? Texture layout vs. Linear layout: what's the difference in the end, pros/cons, why would I use one over the other... Why does it need a separate command (runParticle)? Can this just not be bundled in with dmap? A clear, step-by-step instruction on how to implement it in a map from beginning to end using a simple use case. Tagging some users who have relevant experience with this: @stgatilov @Goldwell @Amadeus

Summary Greetings dear friends! To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the release of my FM, I have published a (hopefully) worthy update to it. Version 2 of my FM called "Sneak & Destroy" uses many new features that have been added to TDM over the years, fixes numerous bugs that were overlooked at the time, but the FM still remains true to the original one. So if you had problems playing this FM lately, if you never played this FM or if you wish to revisit a tiny but lovely part of the TDM history, this update is for you! Download the latest version via the in-game downloader and celebrate the past 10 years with me together! Improvements Visual improvements to city area and interior rooms Enriched the scenes with additional audio Fixed critical bugs that were introduced as TDM was updated Added triggered Conversations for NPCs Added EFX support to all areas Changed multiple aspects of the map in terms of better gameplay and progression Corrected and inserted new writings in books and notes Reduced amount of loot necessary to end mission Added lantern and looking glass to inventory Made use of new particle effects to enhance visual quality Screenshots Credits Thanks go to: bikerdude for being on call to bugfix and improve the map with me Dragofer for pushing ideas for scripting things jysk, Baal & datiswous for finding even the tiniest bugs Springheel for reintroducing me to DR after almost 10 years with his tutorials Greebo for working on the newest tools to update my rusty FM Grayman – I hope I made you a little bit proud Have fun! SeriousToni - 12.04.2012 - 17.11.2022

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!

@stgatilov, thanks for sharing your thoughts about the original ideas behind the 3 levels, which I had not previously seen put so well. I was surprised that you considered that some of an individual AI's barks might go under "effects" instead of "speech". @snatcher likewise thought that, in effect, an AI's barks should be divided, though draws the dividing line elsewhere. I agree with you about the primary existing TDM audience for subtitles: those players appreciating help with spoken English, specially in dialects. I think partially-impaired-hearing individuals will also benefit. But, given subtitles in TDM and our newly prototyped method of indicating speaker sound source, I think we have an opportunity to enlarge the potential TDM community to include deaf players, or those who like to play games with sound off. This does involve sound categorization and visual cues, beyond just toggling story/speech/effects. Such cues could be universal (seen the same by everyone), or controlled by new options, to accommodate personal interest (or lack thereof). Let me be more specific. Consider the 2-level visual cues that snatcher preferred (while leaving open where to draw the line between the 2, or whether 2 is really too few). Examples of universal+fixed, which for barks could be done by me in the .subs file, are: bracketed vs unbracketed white vs yellow font, done by string markup. (This has significant drawback and limitations). Alternatively, there is categorization performed engine-side and passed to the GUI as one or more variables. The results could be universal, or the passed value(s) could be affected by additional optional settings. Displayed results could be, for instance: white vs yellow font, done by text font color choice Stone vs Carleton font wide vs narrow font wide vs narrow background field two different background tints or opacities colored border around backgrounds, with two different colors (Also, without involving new GUI variables, the engine could add brackets to selected strings) Turning to what additional optional settings might look like, at the basic level, you could just have an option that turns visual cues on or off. So, for example, if the visual cue was font choice, turning the visual cue option to off would cause all subtitles to use the same default font. More specificity is, of course, possible. (Maybe too, stgatilov, you could sneak in a related option to suppress "Just you wait!" audio and only play story clips!) If the barks were to be subdivided by the engine into (in this discussion) 2 categories, it could be done by a new per-line option in the .subs file, e.g, -cue 1. Or the categorization could be done entirely automatically on-the-fly by the engine, at the moment it's looking at the AI's current state & most recent state transition, in order to select a sound shader to play. It would probably use the standardized state-transition names as found in the AI .def files, e.g. "snd_foundDeadMale" rather than AI-specific sound shader names. So there would be a list of "snd_..." to determine when g_cue=1 instead of the default g_cue=0.