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AIs are complex entities with many spawnargs - this is why you should change the entity class as a whole (which is simply a preset of spawnargs) rather than changing individual spawnargs when changing AIs. No one said to ignore warnings, and we have an internal thread that deals with reducing console warnings. My previous post was about using the bugtracker to properly keep track of all the bugs you come up with, so when a dev a few months from now has the time to squash your bugs he can actually find them in an organised database rather than somewhere in the forums.

It'd be best to report bugs in the bug tracker, bugs.thedarkmod.com, so they don't get buried in the forums. Maybe some of them warrant discussion on the forum if there's something unclear about them. The DR Wishlist thread is intended for requesting new features or improvements to DR.

Yes, I saw that, but online tools are usually about getting a crappy result, and then being told that you have to pay if you can an actually good result, so figured that Gimp, and the forums, would be more reliable. ...but apparently you'd much rather like to recommend software to me, than do basic stuff. It's weird.

If you don't have access to assets svn then I'd put it into the bug tracker and post link to it on the forums But if it's mission-specific then it should go to that FM thread or PM with mapper

I'm trying to fix the warnings on my end, but remodelling the models is out of my league, so you're going to have to fix the stairs model on your end: "WARNING:ConvertLWOToModelSurfaces: model 'models/darkmod/architecture/stairs/set01_stairs.lwo' has 17/8108 nontriangular polygons. Make sure you triplet it down" Edit Also there's this model, which is probably a modelling issue as well: "WARNING:ConvertLWOToModelSurfaces: model 'models/darkmod/misc/clipmodels/pickaxe_cm.lwo' has bad or missing uv data" I still have hopes for script-hotfixing the following warnings: "WARNING:Couldn't load image: tdm_tongue [map entity: atdm_ai_townsfolk_female_1] [decl: atdm:ai_head_female02_base_brunette in def/tdm_ai_heads_springheel.def] [decl: female_head02 in def/tdm_ai_heads_springheel.def] [model: models/md5/chars/heads/npcs/female_head02.md5mesh] [decl: tdm_tongue in <implicit file>] [image: tdm_tongue]” (Edit: I hotfixed this issue and attached the hotfix in the tech support forums. The "tdm_tongue" shader should simply be renamed to "tdm_character_tongue".) “WARNING:Couldn't load image: models/darkmod/wood/boards/wood_brown_dull01 [map entity: func_static_53] [decl: old_plaster in skins/tdm_models_architecture_modules.skin] [decl: models/darkmod/wood/boards/wood_brown_dull01 in <implicit file>] [image: models/darkmod/wood/boards/wood_brown_dull01]" (Edit: I hotfixed this issue as well - see the tech support forums - but I think you should still go over this file, because there are a lot of other suspect textures in there as well.)

Hey, thank you very much for the kind words I'm happy you enjoyed the mission. I am a bit busy with RL things this summer and haven't been nearly as responsive on the forums as I should be, lol, but I am hoping to start work on another FM after that. As for the glitch, I'm not sure I have experienced that. I'll take a look this weekend and see what's what. Also, Dragofer, Biker and I worked on a newly released FM for the recent contest called "Written in Stone" so feel free to give that a whirl if you want

I think that the existence of a dedicated bug tracker for this engine proves that I should somehow make it known when it crashes. I just figured that the tracker was an internal thing between developers, and that it was okay to instead report the bugs here, especially since I desperately needed help with it, and since you have two sub-forums mentioning that they're intended for reporting bugs. ...so why, when I report a bug, am I getting shamed for it? Why was the guy in the thread you linked getting shamed for not backing up his project, instead of the main dev acknowledging that there is a very deceptive button in the engine, that can remove fan mission folders when you press it? Blaming the reporter for not backing up his work, is certainly not how I would personally handle reports of entire projects disappearing, but I guess now I'm warned about how he sees these things, to the point where I'm wondering if it's a good idea to report any bugs I find in the future, at all, if I'm just going to be considered a bad person for it. "Hm, to my experience, crashes in free software is a regular thing. Try "Natron" and you will understand what I mean." I don't understand your point. If crashes happen frequently enough, should we treat them like Covid and just "try to live with it"? I'm pretty sure that the bind bug is easy to fix, but it's like you're saying that bugs have a right to exist too. "Lots of longtime DR mappers ask questions in the Newbie thread (myself included). Nothing to be ashamed of and by DR/DM standards you are a newbie (and you have not to be ashamed of that as well! )" So if I've programmed for 30 years, mapped for Dromed for countless years (since roughly the turn of the millenia), mapped for the Dark Mod for 1 year, but joined these forums just a few weeks ago, I'm a newbie. I think that by that definition, the word "newbie" has lost all meaning. Besides, reporting crashes are not the same as just asking questions. Anyone can reply to a question. It takes a developer to fix a crash issue. ...and it's like you don't expect the developers to even fix crashes, and I really hope that you're wrong about that. For example, since I updated to this year's version, Dark Radiant itself, hasn't even crashed once, and it used to crash all the time, and so I take that as evidence that development involves fixing crashes. "If you want to report a bug, then please use the Bug Tracker." Will do. I was just fooled by the subforum descriptions actually telling me to report bugs in them. "You wouldn't believe how many mappers lost WIPs because of defective hardware" Again: I don't see your point here, where you argue for not fixing defective hardware. When I'm told about a bug in my program, I just go "Thank you. I'll fix that.". I don't go "Well, weren't you a sucker for using my program.". That's not how I was brought up at all. "for somebody who expects Armageddon in the near future (and there are really good reasons for that), you have a pronounced need for communication. I think that does not fit, because: Why go on with communication when all hell will break lose the day after tomorrow?" Well, why not? Yes, I am so interested in mapping, that it's actually cutting into my apocalypse survival routines a bit, but that's just human nature, and a month's vacation from prepping, won't make that much of a difference. "I hope that you - despite of your own assessment - will finish your WIP and we all can enjoy a cool new mission in the future with your name in the credits." Well, for me, mapping is about pleasing myself - not others. Play The Beginner's Guide, and you'll see what I mean.

First FreeTube is a known OpenSource desktop client for YouTube, there isn't a security risk (false positive from your AV). Maybe this and also cloudtube and other like yewtube are also OpenSource and forks from Invidious give alerts from certain companies, because permits to download YT vids. In Piped there isn't such option, it use it's own engine to stream YT vids, without using the googlevideoAPI, like the others, this permits it to control better the content and block ads and trackers from Google, also jump the invideo sponsor blocks and intros. It has a very impresive settings page in this sense. You can create an account (nick, mail) which permits to subscribe your prefered channels and shows new videos of these (Feed). Well, certainly there are a lot of more search engines as only Google, Bing, and Yahoo out there. The AI search engine you mencioned is Andi, privacy oriented and don't show a lot of results, it is different, Andi is an AI who understand the concept of your search and shows the most relevant results respect of your search, you can really chat with it. Something like Alexa, but without trackers, loggings and ads, 100% private. I use Andi for my first searches, before I use the others I use. To add Andi to your search engines in your browser to permit to search with your search or adress bar, use this code to put it as search engine in the list of your browser https://andisearch.com/?query=%s You'll find a very complete list of search engines in a post from oen of the user in the Vivaldi Forum, including the codes to use them in the browser from the adress or search bar https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/46609/guide-vivaldi-search-engines-collection

Agree with this, it's risky for the forum to publish downloadable content with copyright, because the person in charge is the owner/admin of the forum who allows it, not the user who put the link. but there the regulations of each country are valid in this regard, extrem use it in German forums according to their own experiences, which do not even allow images without these being checked before if they have copyright or not, if they are not their own images. I certainly find this somewhat exaggerated. Anyway, in any case it is a good habit to put the sources of content that is posted. Nor should anything happen if someone puts a link to a page, for example one dedicated to downloading games, if it can be verified that the downloads are virus-free, the user does not have to know if the game is legal or not. The responsibility of the Forum in this case can only be limited to checking the security, not any rights that the games on the list may have. It is also necessary to differentiate between a download for private use, practically always legitimate, or for commercial use, very different and where copyright becomes relevant. Although there are also nuances there that are sometimes somewhat absurd, such as the Eiffel Tower, without problems to photograph it during the day, but with lighting at night it is illegal to take a photo, because the lighting is copyrighted, it can be considered this problems when posting a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night.

Way too far fetched. I only saw strict rules against promoting, justifying piracy on old Steam forums. Probably also valid for the new discussions thing. But they are a store and a game company. Steam is also DRM in an of itself. So I guess that explains the reasons. Not sufficiently user friendly due to their monopoly as well. Yeah author's rights matter morally, but copyright doesn't mean that one should be a copyrast (pederast) for profit. And that's what copyright became.

I have returned to TheDarkMod after a few years (I played it a lot around 2015-16, even tried making a map, it did not go anywhere so I donated those few assets). The missions are great. In this one in particular, the navigation is awesome. The city is very good. I have noticed a trend though: the puzzles are more complicated; a lever may open something *somewhere*. Do you think that large TDM missions are suffering from "puzzle creep", that the veteran and in-community players do not notice? [/spoiler] So you have to go *all the way back* to use the crystal key on the teleporter thingy? And I don't know how to deal with the burning crystals either. I ended up killing nearly all enemies in the mages' place, with sword and holy water, because, yeah, I need to figure things out and I can't be bothered to stealth from one place to another anymore, lol. I will try checking the readables and environment with a bit more patience and see. [spoiler] The old format for spoiler tags does not work, not does changing the '/'. Wow, what a way to advertise "I am dumb" XD IMO the best way is to place gradual spoilers in the forum thread. I know it's a bit of a burden on the authors but answering 20 questions disjointly from different users is one as well.

Personally I think Moonbo's Requiem FM is about as good as one could wish for in terms of a spiritual successor to the Thief trilogy. The story hits all the important notes, and the level design is uniformly top notch across all the expected axes of stealth gameplay. And there is even a sequel that trailblazes entirely new territory from its predecessor in gameplay, story, and tone. That's just icing on the cake. Indeed there several FMs for TDM that I believe equal or even surpass the quality of the original games' levels. The trouble is how do you discover them in that giant downloader list? Are there other great missions in there that I have yet to find? That is undoubtedly the greatest current weakness of this project. The ability to sort FMs in the game client (i.e. both the downloader and the mission launcher) by date, size, and author would be a great help. Search by keywords or tags and support for grouping missions into collections would also be very useful.

My first map (way back as a wad file for original Doom 3) was of my basement. I had a demon popping out of my refrig. So yeah, there's a tradition to map what's close at hand. Vids are great, but it's hard to use them as a reference, to try to remember where you saw a particular problem solved. A general Google vid search (relying on YouTube's automatic speech to text transcripts) I don't find too effective. For written content about DR mapping, some reasonable starting points are the Dark Radiant user manual and Fidcal's A to Z Beginners Guide, https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here!. I'm doing my 2-cents here and there on the wiki too. The writing continues!

OK, I'll try to rearrange to that directory layout. I'll have to lookup how to do that without screwing up Tortoise. I'm not on that machine at the moment, so I can't check your BTW. I don't remember about "branches", but I do remember a local "tags" directory... don't know if it was populated.

About ways to share a patch. If you have SVN working copy, you can simply create SVN patch and attach it to forums post. Better mention which SVN revision your patch is based on. If you don't have SVN working copy (e.g. downloaded source code archive), then I guess you have to use some diff tool between directories. To be honest, I don't remember doing it myself. WinMerge is good for directory diff, but I don't know if it can actually save the changes as some patch... I'm currently travelling and don't have access to TDM development, so I'll trust the decision of "how should it work in various situations" and testing to the other members of TDM team. But I'd be happy to read a source code patch anyway.

Ideally, you should have checked out "trunk" directory only, so that its contents get into "tdm11dev/darkmod_src" instead of "tdm11dev/darkmod_src/trunk". Do you BTW have all the "branches" and "tags" directories near "trunk" ? Maybe not, because they are still closed for public for some weird reason...

They're in a dilemma. People expect super high definition graphics and AAA tech even from games with a small budget, when they come from a bigger publisher. I really see only one way for projects with ideas which stray from the mainstream: Go Indie and crowdfunding. Some nice games are done that way. But, even if you do that, people have totally overblown expectations. See the System Shock remake. I hold my head in shame every time I visit the Steam forums for that game. Gazillions of "When is this being released pleeeease... " threads. Well... it will be released when it's done. I guess. Not to mention they had to start all over again, of course, because people didn't like what they saw, and they had to change everything to make it closer to the original. Well... I guess crowdfunding has its very bad sides as well. Again due to expectations though.

The build succeeds now with the latest. Yea! However, evidently the directory structure is not quite right for debug to work. I followed what the compile guide said (I think), with these 2 directories: ...Games/tdm11dev/darkmod_src/trunk/TheDarkMod.sln (etc.) [using TortoiseSVN] ...Games/tdm11dev/darkmod/TheDarkModx64.exe (& all the .pk4s, etc) [using tdm_installer] It appears that the build process puts the results in ...Games/tdm11dev/darkmod_src/darkmod/ I tried changing adding a "." to the project output location to move the directory up one, i.e., DarkModTools property sheet, for the debug x64 configuration: Configuration Properties; General; Output Directory [changed from] $(SolutionDir)..\darkmod\ [to] $(SolutionDir)...\darkmod\ But that seemed to generate build errors subsequently, so reverted. I can probably munge this up so it works, but thought I'd ask your suggestions first.

People who use Blender for object editing sometimes run into a problem with material names. It has a character limit of 63. That's usually fine but some existing TDM materials have names which are longer than that, so it becomes impossible to use them. An FM author can make a copy of the material with a shorter name, but that might be adding unnecesary complexity for people who are just making standalone objects to share. I've been mounting a valiant campain on various Blender forums, and some of their LinkedIn posts, to get them to increase the limit, but to no avail. So it's time to take a different approach. Would it be feasible for TDM to rename long materials? The rendering system would have to intercept and replace calls to the original names, or something like that. I'm not sure if that would be an easy thing to implement or if it would set off a chain of complex events or coding etc. Another possible approach could be a material ID sytem, so in Blender the material name could be WoodPlanks_4ACFB987B, which would correspond to something like TDM\long\path\to\material\WoodPlanks That might even be beneficial for shorter material names, as even they are not user friendly to look at in some interfaces.

Since due to the nature of this forum, file/image sharing is used quite frequently, I thought to present some alternatives to the widely used Gdrive, which I don't like so much, especially since the last TOS change. File Sharing To share large files there are several options that also do not require registration. The first is File Hosting Online, which supports files up to 25 Gb, encrypted and also includes a Virus Scan that ensures safe use Another good option is Gofile, free to use, privacy focused and unlimited Bandwith. No refistry needed. While the files are accesed or downloaded at least one time a week, they are never deleted, otherwise inactive files are deleted after 10 days. If you prefer to use P2P, that means to share files directly from PC to other, without a hoster in the middle, there are also very good options, which permits to share files and folders without limites of type and size. The most easy to use is O&O File Direct, a small Desktop app (sadly only Windows), very easy to use 1 Open the app and drag the files/folders you like to share in its window 2 Optional adjust the days and amount of permited downloads and if you want a password 3 Share the link which apears in the app Done The only limits are, that the receptor only can download your files, when your PC is online, on the other hand this permits that you can stop the download in any moment, going offline or shutting down the PC. The other limit is, that the files to share can't be in a protected folder. Her are an Example with a list of Search Enines (Html file 423,56 Kb). While I am online, you can download it https://file.direct/f/pmjVFnjfkjFTKTt5 Videos One of the best options is Streamable (need a free account, inactive videos are deleted after 90 days in the free version) Alternatively you can use Streamja, a simple Video sharer with good privacy, free account optional (nick, mail) Images Ok, there are a lot of Image sharer, most used the known Imgur, because of this I add only one which offers some advantages over Imgur. ImgBox (free account) is a reliable platform to share and host images like Imgur, but it make it very easy to upload and post dozend of images simultaneous, selecting all the images you want and drag them on the window, offering coresponding bulk codes from the selected images to post them with one click for forums (BBcode), Html and others, fullsize or thumbnails. More since Imgur used since some time the hated webm formats for gif images, hardly accepted in most forums.

OK, I've updated parts of Page 1 (and a bit of Page 5) of the A - Z Beginners Guide, to cover a choice of using project and non-project file structures. That part's hopefully clearer and certainly longer, but I shortened the intro. No plans to revisit rest of that guide. That would be Labors of Hercules.

Your post helped me understand the darkmod/maps use case (evidently called the "non-project" method), which my tiny, tidy brain [] couldn't quite grasp before. That will help inform my rewrite of the beginning part of A to Z Beginners Guide Page 1 that probably led you astray. Given the confusing shortcomings of non-project for non-trivial FMs, I'm going to steer the reader towards the "project" method (i.e., darkmod/fms/<FM>/maps) instead... what Destined may have intended with his "File Structure" section.

It's hard to imagine a more newb question than this, but I don't believe I can't make any progress mapping anything beyond a few rooms if I don't understand this (and reading the wiki doesn't make it clear to me): what's the correct folder structure for a darkmod mission I'm making, and for possible custom assets? I mean, looking at Youtube tutorials, I see almost everyone has the .map inside the main darkmod/maps/whatever.map, and that's what I use, because it works when dmapping, although I think NeonsStyle has the one he shows in his tutorial inside the fms folder, eg.: darkmod/fms/mymission/mymap.map. But if I do that, I can't even dmap. Now, reading the A-Z guide, if I understand it correctly, you use the fms folder to store your custom assets not present in the main darkmod root folder? Is that what the Game/Project Setup is for? That doesn't seem to work for me, though (see below.) In practice, I don't care much about that because I can test the mission just fine and I'm probably going to use default assets anyway, but I model from time to time so I tried using custom models (just a simple cube with a custom texture as a test) and I can't make it work. The cube appears in DR, even in the same scale and dimensions (which susprised me), but it's just nodraw (not "black" as I read in some tutorials.) This is what I did: I found a Blender plug-in to convert models into .ase and I can get that to work, but then the cube shows with no material or texture (inside the game, it simply isn't rendered.) I know I need to change the bitmap line, but I have no idea what to write in there because, quite honestly, I don't understand the folder system or where I need to put things in the first place. I thought I could put my custom .ase file inside the fms/mymission/models folder but then the .ase doesn't load in the Models Viewer in the DR, so I had to save it, like my .map, inside the main TDM folder (e.g., darkmod/models/custom.ase). Then it does show but, well, no texture... (see attachment) By the way, that's in a new, clean TDM and DR install. So, where do I need to put the .dds, .tga, and .ase files then? And how should I change the *bitmap line? I have tried looking inside various pk4 files for TDM models and their .ase files but that didn't help much. (Being a custom model and material, I assume I would also need to write a .def for the cubes properties? But for now, I'd like to at least be able to see the textured cube in the editor.) Here's how the .ase bitmap part looks like when exported and stored inside darkmod/models: Obviously, that won't work at all (in fact, I don't know why that's so long or why it points to the Desktop, that's where I saved the .blend file, not the .dds.) But, anyway, what should I write in there? The tutorials in the wiki seem a bit old and makes references to D3 and a folder structure and textures from that game, so I'm confused. Thank you. I know there are many questions here, but I have read and watched almost every tutorial, and I still don't get it.

@Acolytesixthe party's over here! https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21384-beta-test-for-eastbound/ You can take a look now, or wait and be a fresh set of eyes on Beta 2 sometime next week.

The beta thread is up, head on over there for a download link: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21384-beta-test-for-eastbound/ Looking forward to hearing feedback from my alpha testers on the adjustments I made as well as more fresh perspectives!