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Hi everyone, and thanks a lot for the quick answers, I really appreciate it, even if I don't quote you personally I'm thankful for every answer Oh and while I'm at it, thanks for the forum administrator among you that added a Dark Theme to this forum: I cannot stand bright light due to my handicap, usually my own web browser settings (black background + green fonts color) work but sometime it makes some pages unusable if contains white images used as icons for example, so I had to wear sunglasses for a few hours to browse the forum more or less comfortably before noticing that I could turn a Dark Theme on which makes reading much less painful for the eyes, thank your for adding that option Thanks for the information, HMart, I'll check that LDAsh, Demagogue and Stgatilov, thanks for your replies, about your interrogations regarding how would I manage to sell a game developed under a GPL licence, well I'll have to remain mysterious for now, but that's something I have thoroughly thought about I'll never use Steam to sell the game though, I was absolutely against Steam from the very beginning of its appearance and it's only because I'm forced to install it and to play games that I use it, so for me it has always been out of question to become dependent to Steam's system... not to mention that they've started to behave as political censors according to what I've heard not too long ago, so I'm not going to risk investing 5 years of work and expenses just to end up censored for being "problematic" or other vague and non-defined concepts at the whim of anyone from Steam. Anyway, thank you Nbohr1more and the other TDM developpers Now all I need to do is to contact someone where I live who's specialized in the legal and fiscal aspects of commerce to see if my idea is viable, but the way I thought it out, it should be. Actually the only thing that would make it non-viable is whether it would be Governmentally Approved by the State or not to create something and sell it without having to create a company and be registered as a seller/artist/editor first, that whole usual administrative bullshyte here requiring people to find by themselves which pigeonhole they can belong to and face the fiscal consequences if they make the sightliest mistake... Yeah, that's what I had planned from the beginning actually: to not use your assets since they belong to you all, and also because, as a matter of fact, well, my game's universe being contemporary, I don't need any of TDM's sounds, 3D models, musics, textures, objects etc For example, most of the locations of the game's story and universe are "modern day-ish" for lack of a better word: glass buildings, appartments, houses, warehouses, etc... about the music and sounds, that's something I've planned to create on my own anyway, I just need to "get back at it again" and find a GPL music editor or maybe, if I finally, definitively, decide to go for a 1970's style music, I'll simply contract Shawn Lee, his work on Bully/Canis Canem Edit's music is exceptionnal. So in a nutshell, I won't need to use any of TDM's assets, and for the couple of things "close from TDM's assets" such as old manors & antique objects and the related textures that will be needed since I've planned to have "old areas" in the ficticious city I've created as the main location of the game's story, I'll contract people to make that. Thanks a lot for the clarification OrbWeaver, I tended to confuse Dark Radiant and The Dark Mod source code until then And about your suggestion, you guessed exactly what I had in mind for the development of my game Well, the problem with Unity or Unreal is that they remain proprietary engines somehow, at least that's how I understand it, and I think this may cause problems notably with the After-Sales Service Support... since to modify Unity or Unreal one needs to pay a licence as far as I know, it means I'll be the only one, with the dedicated programmer I will hire or form a partnership with, to solve bugs: however, what if some bugs appearing after the game release are way beyond that programmer's capabilities ? My reasoning is that one of the interests of using a GPL engine such as Id Tech 4, and specifically this one as it's a quite well-known one, is that since anyone can work on it at anytime after the release, even the most complicated bugs to resolve could be solved by people much more competent than my programmer or than me -all I've did until now about coding is trying to write code in Turbo Pascal 7 when I was 12: most of the time it didn't work, and when it did, it actually worked not the way I wanted but I didn't dare to object. It may anger the Machine Spirit, you never know, so let Its Sacred Will decide of what It will do. Godot, that's an engine I've never heard about... thank you for the information, I'll do some searches on that, however since Datiswous said that their 3D engine may be less sophisticated than id Tech 4, I may not use Godot, but I'll see... for the moment I still tend to think that TDM is the best solution, notably since my game will include stealth gameplay mechanics and Thief-based stealth gameplay is the only viable stealth gameplay method ever made. One thing I wonder, though, is if Id Tech 4's damage system would work to translate my PnP RPG gameplay system... I will make tests in the coming weeks with Dark Radiant to see what I can do with projectile-based weapons, and study more how the .PAK files about weapons work: in TDM there's only a bow and it seems to be treated as a projectile-based weapon, I'm going to try to see how the whole thing works regarding accuracy, "magazine capacity", etc, by hoping there are comments left beside the code lines. If anyone has information on this subject, how the bow works technically in its .PAK file, I'm all ears Thanks for the suggestion, I've started reading about dhewm3 since yesterday, but apart a cleaner code, what more does it have than TDM ? No offense taken I'm not surprised that from time to time people pop up here, ask a few enthusiastic questions about a project they're starting and eventually never come back because the task is more difficult than they initially thought, personally I'm fully awayre that creating a FPS-RPG almost "by myself" is the kind of accomplishment that would be called miraculous, but I'm confident I can make it if I find a competent programmer, as I've been creating homebrew RPG systems since a long time and almost made it professionally if the team didn't blew up because of unresolved differences of vision and pent-up animosity between a few people that grew until it was too late, so after modding a few games to test my ideas I think that's doable. That failed project I just mentioned is actually the reason why I'm more inclined to not form a team of developers and instead to contract people anywhere I could find them: by "contracted", I mean paying people here or there to realize a single work, be it an animation, a 3D model, etc, the same way, say, a shop owner would contract a painter to create a painting for the shop's storefront. When you contract people that are outsiders to your project instead of having to juggle with the egos of a dedicated team, you limit the risk of failure I do have another potential project on the side, that said, totally unrelated to video games and that is so daring that I'd be the first surprised if I manage to set it in motion, so if suddently I disappear from The Dark Mod Forums after 6 months of activity, don't be surprised, even if I'll do my best to run both projects at the same time, given that this second one is pretty long-winded and can remain casually "tried on the side" while I work on that main video game project. Anyway, about the recurrent questions that are asked once or twice a year in similar topics such as "Why aren't you on Steam? When is the campaign coming? Can I use your stuff for my commercial project? Why aren't you doing a remake of Thief Gold?", maybe creating a FAQ and making it a sticky topic would work, personally I haven't found something like that in the various sections of the forum, maybe I've missed it that said.

Notice how both of those list a single person/company as a publisher on Steam. Battle for Wesnoth is published by Wesnoth, Inc — an incorporated company which has paid a lawyer to register their trademark. However it does appear to be a fully GPL game, which indicates that Steam does not have a blanket policy forbidding all GPL content. Red Eclipse 2 is published by a single person Quinton Reeves. This is not a GPL game; the code is Apache license and the assets are Creative Commons but importantly not NC-only (their EULA even calls out the fact that they won't accept NC-only contributions, presumably for the reasons I mentioned earlier). So the questions are: Is there somebody willing to be our "Quinton Reeves" and take individual personal responsibility as the publisher of TDM on Steam, or alternatively set up our own Dark Mod, Inc to be the publisher (which will cost money)? Does the presence of NC-only CC assets present an obstacle to publishing on Steam (this is up to Valve to decide, not us)? If it is a problem, then publishing on Steam is completely impossible for us unless we replaced all NC-only assets with our own assets under a more permissive license.

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

On the wiki, I'm working on a set of pages with the title-preface and broad theme "The Parts and Whole". This looks at the hows and whys of map objects being formed into collections. The hub of this is The Parts and Whole: Overview Within the hub, so far, the section "Techniques that Affect DR Only" is built out with comparison tables and child pages. This covers these techniques: Hide/Show, Region, Layer, Filter, Group, Selection Set. I'd appreciate any eyeballs on the work so far. Please suggest or edit-in improvements. In particular, are there links to videos or other wiki or forum pages that you think most apt and should be added, e.g., to the "See Also" section? "The Parts and Whole" effort is mostly intended for newbies and so is not afraid to state the obvious at times. In some cases, it covers ground also handled by the necessarily-concise DarkRadiant User Guide, but with more depth and context. In other cases, the info was only found buried in forums. Because I'm trying to cover a fair amount of ground, the pages are text-only. Some of the child pages could benefit from screenshots some day.

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.

Hey all! I haven't properly played the Dark Mod since 2.05 or maybe even 2.04 until now and I've noticed that whatever I do in game the center and LFE channels of my 5.1 sound system remain silent. In other words, the output is actually 4.0 (2 front + 2 rear speakers) rather than 5.1. Now, I am not sure exactly but I recall no problems previously - until the EFX update 2.06, I think. I even found my older post about extremely loud LFE channel here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18741-really-loud-music/&tab=comments#comment-405277 As I understand, it is often made that the center and LFE channels are reserved for special sounds and not used often as the front speakers. For example, in Witcher3 center is mostly used for voices in the dialogs and the best way to check LFE is to use the aard sign magic. Or, in Skyrim it is known that LFE plays only when the dragon hits the ground. The first question is: do I have an issue with sound or not? Because maybe the sound output is ok and I've simply met no specific conditions utilizing the center and LFE channels? Minding my previous paragraph, I don't think it's EFX related but maybe the sound shaders simply changed since 2.05? This all brings me to another question: is there a way to check somehow in the Dark Mod wether the game outputs the sound correctly? About my setup now. I output sound via HDMI to Pioneer receiver with 5.1 setup. Everything works fine in modern games that provide 5.1 output support like the Witcher3 or Mortal Kombat 10 and 11. The windows sound configuration in control panel allows me to check all the speakers and it's fine. I have win 7 64 bit, OpenAl installed. The Dark Mod allows me to set 5.1 sound in options with no warning (I know that in other cases it gives a message like "your system does not support this sound configuration"). Please, help me to find out if anything's wrong with my setup and why my center and LFE channels are silent. Hate to start new threads but I didn't find anything related to my problem. Moreover, I feel the lack of sound-related discussions considering our community's interests.

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

Of course, it is one of the reasons for the decline of online forums, since the advent of mobile phones. Forums on a mobile are a pain in the ass, but on the other hand, for certain things there are no real alternatives to forums, social networks cannot be with their sequential threads, where it is almost impossible to retrieve answers to a question that is asked. has done days ago. For devs for internal communication, the only thing offered is a collaborative app, such as System D (not to be confused with systemd). FOSS, free and anonymous registration, access further members only by invitation, full encrypted and private. https://www.system-d.org

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.

All hail id Software Download : ftp://ftp.idsoftware...-source-GPL.zip GIT : https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl

To clarify, you can sell code under a GPL license, but the license requires you to release all of the sourcecode in a form people can compile it, and it retains the license. So practically you can't stop people from just taking the sourcecode, possibly changing some things, compiling it, and independently releasing it for free. Also, outlets like Steam really don't like GPL licensed code because it puts them at risk. And they already mentioned that all of the game assets are strictly non-commercial. So idTech4 derived things aren't the best platform for a commercial game. That's separate from what our team thinks. I don't think you'll get much objection from us for trying. The whole point of GPL is to give people the most freedom to do what they want with the code under it without past devs standing in their way. Even that said, it probably wouldn't go over well if you just blatantly copied massive chunks of the game straight. One guy that had been on the team was doing something like that for a commercial project and got some pushback and grumbles. But that would have been different if he had been an outsider doing a completely different project with a very different look and feel and they just needed the base to build from. That would be more respected. But, again, that's aside from the issues above.

There are likely to be very few code changes that the Doom 3 community issues where I will comprehend the significance. That said, I am creating this thread for the purpose of folks who catch any good GPL fixes that they'd like included in TDM builds. This is a place to ask "Should I make a tracker for this Doom 3 GPL fix, I found or created?" I'll start. There have been variations of the Carmacks reverse code and I'm sure there will be more. Here is the current best example AFAIK. It basically lets the driver perform the Depth fail code via the "StencilOpSeparate" command thus deferring responsibility for violating the patents to ATI and Nvidia for implementing this driver feature... (Older hardware will not take advantage of this optimization though.) Here are the changes and a little commentary by the coders: http://git.iodoom.org/~raynorpat/iodoom3/raynorpats-glsl_iodoom3/commit/332fa0d46f68e4057a00275a75e09c1f3b1ab7c8#comment_24

So giving it none of those tags, but making the AI invisible, silent, non-solid, and on a team neutral to everyone would not work? Oh well, it was a horrible inelegant idea anyway.

Hey, Every time I've try to use the Full Editor when PM'ing someone, and every single time I get an error. Whoever is in charge of the forum, is it possible that this could be fixed? Thanks Neon