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Also, related to font improvement, I've just released "ExportFontToDoom3All256", a reconstruction of an earlier but now lost tool variant. This is described and available in the wiki article ExportFontToDoom3 I tested that tool using one of the TDM FM fonts, Andrew Script, for which a TTF file is available. I generated a fresh set of bitmaps (newly including any available Latin-1 characters). I also mucked about with FontForge, to reconfigure that TTF to be ordered like the TDM custom codepage. However, Andrew Script is missing a fair number of Latin-1 glyphs, so it would take some work to make it good (whether by editing in FontForge or post-export as bitmaps). I'm putting that aside for now, since the jury is out on whether Western language support in FMs and their fonts will become viable (see Western language support in 2024?). Instead, I plan to turn my font-improvement-for-2.13 attention to Stone 24pt, which (because its used in HUD captions) is more clearly worthwhile to work on. Looks like I'll have to convert the Stone DDS to TGA as a prerequisite to bitmap editing.

Interesting idea. Not sure about my upcoming time availability to help. A couple of concerns here - - I assume the popup words uses the "Informative Texts" slot, e.g., where you might see "Acquired 80 in Jewels", so it likely wouldn't interfere with that or with already-higher subtitles. - There are indications that #str is becoming unviable in FMs; see my just-posted: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22434-western-language-support-in-2024/

In considering my possible upcoming TDM projects, such as upgrading some fonts to Latin-1 or "TDM Latin", I reviewed the current status of support for European Latin-based languages. Basically, for FMs, the translation system has fallen into disrepair and disuse (or perhaps kicked into the grave). Neither "converted" (i.e., #str using) FMs nor Language Packs are now being maintained and distributed by thedarkmod.com. As to other sites, for Cyrillic/Russian, DarkFate provides such resources. Are there any such sites in native Western European tongues, say, German, French, Italian, that likewise offer translated TDM FMs? So, turning back to thedarkmod.com, questions - - is Western Language support (outside the main menu system) officially dead? - if so, maybe it's time to stop pretending otherwise. - if not, should the converted #str system be revived, with better infrastructure? - or an alternative translation system be devised... if so, what? I'm just trying to identify work worth doing. (I started to draft a doc with a litany of problems with Western language support, and possible sub-projects to address them, but TL;DR. And really, not pertinent if support is considered dropped.) Thanks for your thoughts.

In post https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/254-orbweaver/&status=3994&type=status @nbohr1more found out what the Fixup Map functionality is for. But what does it actually do? Does it search for def references (to core?) that don't excist anymore and then link them to defs with the same name elswhere? Also I would recommend to change the name into something better understood what it is for. Fixup map could mean anything. And it should be documented in the wiki.

This last month, I've been exploring TDM's font situation, and improving the documentation as I go. In the wiki, "Font Conversion & Repair" was rewritten, with parts broken out and expanded as: Font Files Font Metrics & DAT File Format Font Bitmaps in DDS Files ExportFontToDoom3 Q3Font Refont As announced earlier, that last item is a new C++ console utility for revising font metrics in DAT files; essentially another alternative to Q3Font and Font Patcher. It now has additional functionality that provides font-coverage analysis. A summary of current results across all TDM fonts is reported in the forum thread "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts". Also, refont allows its human-readable outputs to be decorated with an annotation for each character (out of 256 codepoints). Associated with that, I've just created and released 4 annotation files: 1 Cyrillic version for TDM's russian map 3 variants for TDM's custom english/european char map. One of the variants was derived from another new mapping file that is now available from existing wiki article "I18N - Charset". Within that file is a list, in a standard format, of the 256 TDM bitmap codepoints mapped to the corresponding Unicode U+NNNN value and name. This may be useful in defining TDM's mapping to TTF font editing programs. For all these wiki pages mentioned, I imagine there will be additional cross-links and tweaks. But pretty much done.

Because DDS is a lossy format, every direct edit of a DDS file may reduce its quality slightly. So that means either: hunt down the corresponding TGA file with the same timestamp otherwise, edit the DDS as few times as possible. In the case of Stone, if the TGA can't be found and editing DDS is needed, I'd want to think about batching up all the bitmap edits needed for i18n... but that's a lot of work. I might add, there a third possibility in the case of the readable fonts that are currently ASCII only. If they were sourced from TTF, and you find the TTF (easy in a few cases), then see if it covers Latin-1 or more. You can (with some complications RE the conversion software) regenerate an improved TDM font from that.

Yes. Sure, I will change it, but I do mind. In addition to changing the forum title, I have also had the name of the pk4 changed in the mission downloader and the thiefguild.com site’s named changed. It's not just some "joke". The forum post and thread are intended to be a natural extension of the mission’s story, a concept that is already SUPER derivative of almost any haunted media story or most vaguely creepy things written on the internet in the past 10 or 15 years. Given your familiarity with myhouse.wad, you also can clearly engage with something like that on some conceptual level. Just not here on our forums? We can host several unhinged racist tirades in the off-topic section but can’t handle creepypasta without including an advisory the monsters aren’t actually under the bed? (Are they though?) I am also trying to keep an open mind, but I am not really feeling your implication that using a missing person as a framing of a work of fiction is somehow disrespectful to people who are actually gone. I have no idea as even a mediocre creative person what to say to that or why I need to be responsible for making sure nobody potentially believes some creative work I am involved in, or how that is even achievable in the first place. Anyway, apologies for the bummer. That part wasn’t intentional. I am still here. I will also clarify that while I love the game, I never got the biggest house in animal crossing either. In the end Tom Nook took even my last shiny coin.

I have updated my Refont program, to now have a function that can analyze a font DAT file for missing or problematic characters. As part of a broader inquiry, I've just applied that program, individually, to all current 'english' font DAT files. I'm reporting the overall results here. I'm sure this will not be a surprise to some of you, but may be to others. Background As you know, TDM fonts are based a bitmap system, derived from 256-character code pages, of which "English" and "Russian" are currently supported. "English" is actually Latin-1, with additional characters to cover more European languages in a single codepage. This is (in theory) quite good for major European languages, less so for less-prominent ones. For each font, bitmaps are distributed in 3 sizes (12, 24, 48 pt), with the engine doing interpolation scaling. Current Font Findings 12-pt Size for All Fonts Only ASCII (i.e., lower range 0-127) characters are provided, no European. For some fonts (stone, mason, mason_glow), the 12-pt DAT is not distributed, so the engine will substitute a larger size, which typically has better Latin-1 coverage. For Fonts Used in Main Menus, HUD, or Subtitles The numbers shown approximate the number of "characters needing work" Fontname Size-24 Size-48 carleton 20 16 carleton_condensed 20 35 mason -- 33 Since 24 pt is not distributed, engine uses 48 pt. stone 30 83 For Additional Fonts Used in FM Readables, Etc. Except for one font (treasure_map), all the remaining fonts are ASCII-only, i.e., no characters in the upper range. In the lower range, routinely the 24 and 48 pt sizes have equivalent coverage. Most of these fonts are fully or nearly complete, while some neglect certain punctuation symbols. The worst is "everette", with 24 "needing work" characters. Further details are here:

I've seen fun workarounds like that in other game modding as well. Years ago, maybe even a decade, some fella who was making a mod for Mount & Blade over at the Taleworlds forums revealed that he put invisible human NPCs on the backs of regular horse NPCs, then put the horse NPCs inside a horse corral he built for one of his mod's locations/scenes and then did some minor scripting, so the horses with invisible riders would wander around the corral. The end result was that it looked they're doing this of their own will, rather than an NPC rider being scripted to ride around the corral slowly. Necessity is the mother of invention. I don't know about the newest Mount & Blade game, but the first generation ones (2008-2022) apparently had some sort of hardcoded issue back in the earlier years, where if you left a horse NPC without a rider in its saddle, the horses would just stand around and wait and you couldn't get them to move around. Placing an invisible rider in their saddles suddenly made it viable again, at least for background scenes, of riderless horses wandering around, for added atmosphere. First generation M&B presumed you'd mostly be seeing horses in movement with riders, and the only horses-wandering-loosely animations and scripting were done for situations when the rider was knocked off their horse or dismounted in the middle of a battle. Hence the really odd workarounds. So, an invisible NPC trick might not be out of the question in TDM, even though you could probably still bump into it, despite its invisibility.

DarkRadiant 3.9.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Add "Show definition" button for the "inherit" spawnarg Improvement: Preserve patch tesselation fixed subdivisions when creating caps Improvement: Add Filters for Location Entities and Player Start Improvement: Support saving entity key/value pairs containing double quotes Improvement: Allow a way to easily see all properties of attached entities Fixed: "Show definition" doesn't work for inherited properties Fixed: Incorrect mouse movement in 3D / 2D views on Plasma Wayland Fixed: Objective Description flumoxed by double-quotes Fixed: Spinboxes in Background Image panel don't work correctly Fixed: Skins defined on modelDefs are ignored Fixed: Crash on activating lighting mode in the Model Chooser Fixed: Can't undo deletion of atdm_conversation_info entity via conversation editor Fixed: 2D views revert to original ortho layout each time running DR. Fixed: WX assertion failure when docking windows on top of the Properties panel on Linux Fixed: Empty rotation when cloning an entity using editor_rotatable and an angle key Fixed: Three-way merge produces duplicate primitives when a func_static is moved Fixed: Renderer crash during three-way map merge Internal: Replace libxml2 with pugixml Internal: Update wxWidgets to 3.2.4 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.9.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep creating Fan Missions! Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Keep on mapping!

Ah, pity I wasn't reading the forums back in February. I'm fond of that game, along with Bugbear's other early title, Rally Trophy. I was never too good at FlatOut, but it was always a hoot to play.

I can confirm that book_hand_jd_hand.gui is not represented correctly in the Readable Editor. There were a handful of fonts I tried that had very small discrepancies between the editor and in-game version, but jd_hand gave me the most trouble when adding readables to my FM.

@snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.

Congrats on the release! Remember to check ThiefGuild as well as the DarkFate forums (via Google Translate) for additional feedback.

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

"...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm Ansome, a long-time forums lurker, and I'm here to recruit beta testers for my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short (30-45 minute), story-driven FM with plenty of readables and a gloomy atmosphere. Do keep in mind that this is a more linear FM than you may be used to as it was deemed necessary for the purposes of the story's pacing. Regardless, the player does still have a degree of freedom in tackling challenges in the latter half of the FM. If this sounds interesting to you, please head over to the beta testing thread I will be posting shortly. Thank you!

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

I've just been reading through some old forum posts about correcting fonts. One of the points Tels makes is that, if correcting a font used in readables, you need to avoiding changing any character's spacing (I read this as xSkip value), to prevent changes in existing FM readables with that font. I suspect this advice is too conservative. You want to avoid enlarging an xSkip, because the resulting changes to wordwraps could potentially lead to line or paragraph truncation. Making an xSkip smaller could lead to wordwrap changes, but these IMHO would be unlikely to be harmful. In that regard, here's the situation with my changes to english Stone fontimage_24.dat (see a few posts previous as File Update for Improved Subtitle Font). Only a few characters got altered xSkips. Of those, the angle brackets were unlikely to be used in an existing readable, because they showed garbage glyphs. The "|" was xSkip-shortened, but also unlikely in readables. Only the badly centered and so xSkip-shortened "J" is thought to have potential to affect existing wordwraps. I have argued here that xSkip shortening is OK. However, I'm willing to revert spacing changes for "|" and "J" if people feel strongly otherwise.

Anyone have a working link (or can create a link) to the modified version of ExportFontToDoom3 executable? This 2009 version was created by Crispy, to handle 256 chars instead of just 128. It was released in this forum post: the dark mode readables ttf fonts The following links to it are now dead: - crispy's original release: http://www.inventivedingo.com/stuff/exportfonttodoom3_modified.zip This is what's listed at the bottom of Font Conversion & Repair as as "Fixed version of ExportFontToDoom". - Hyeron's 2009 upload: http://www.4shared.com/file/151870191/d47d0e16/exportfonttodoom3_modified.html - tels 2011 mirror: http://bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/pub/exportfonttodoom3_modified.zip. No luck with wayback machine, github, sourceforge, either .exe or source. (Source & exe for unmodified version from Grant Davies is in hand.)

Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.

With TDM 2.12, after the credits finished, the "Mission Complete" screen did not display. I found that the screen was black and I could hear my footsteps when I tried to move around. I think the reason for the mission not completing successfully was that the "Do not kill or harm allies" objective was never marked as "1 = STATE_COMPLETE" instead it was left as "0 = STATE_INCOMPLETE". Note, I didn't use noclip throughout the mission. Same as: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18054-fan-mission-the-accountant-2-new-in-town-by-goldwell-20160509/&do=findComment&comment=458491

How about using TDM automation framework (and maybe pcem/qemu)? More info see: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19828-automation-features-and-discussion/

File Update for Improved Subtitle Font As requested a while ago, to address the stray marks and other problems seen with current subtitle font, Stone, I am providing a short-term fix for characters in the printable ASCII range 32-126, using corrected metadata: fontimage_24.dat This is intended to replace tdm_fonts01.pk4\fonts\english\stone\fontimage_24.dat No change is needed in the related .dds files for this. Briefly, problems with stray marks found to the left of a character were due to picking up pixels from an adjoining character in the glyph bitmap dds files. Adjusting the location of the source box and related metrics fixed these. Affected were: % C E T W Y | The | character also got improved spacing, as did J Finally, the entirely screwed data for the angle brackets was corrected. This coming month I hope to work up a wiki page with diagrams to better explain what I learned about the mysteries of the idTech4 font .dat and .dds files. To see what the results look like with corrected fontimage_24.dat in place (as an override), here is my testing FM: testSubtitlesASCII.pk4 A longer-term fix (beyond 2.12 release) would also address ANSI and TDM-specific-mapped charaters in the range 128-255. To look at that, I have a similar experimental tester for ANSI (unripe to release). It shows substantial issues in that range. And then there's also consideration of fontimage_12.dat and fontimage_48.dat. And the russian-character variant.