Search the Community

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.

I wouldn't focus the lidless eye on our comrades over in the thief community for really no reason - Xorax should do this if he wants to derive and distribute textures from the site. If you like the images you see in the pack I would just get them straight from the source where they are available for free at twice the resolution. The owner of site took most of the images himself, so you may even want to consider paying for some. If you like the color grading and grunge filters that have been added it's not difficult to replicate - but the higher resolution image will in my experience at a minimum be a help when making the derived normal and specular maps. I would still ask his permission directly when it comes to using them in a tdm mission given the core mod is open source and images are freely accessible from the .pk4 - this is also iffy with his license agreement. He remembers us and has been ok with his textures being used in people's missions, but he will often simultaneously reiterate things which are in his license agreement which gave me the overall impression it was not worth the risk going forward. He asked me to include this information in my readme "One or more textures bundled with this project have been created with images from Textures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default. Please visit www.textures.com for more information." At a minimum you could perhaps include that if you want to use Xorax's modified textures, but I can only speak personally it's very hard for me to know or even suspect someone does not want something done with their creative work and then consciously continue doing it or benefiting from it, so everyone has to make their own call there. You should look at the license agreements from the other sites that he mentions in the thread as most "free" sites have these clauses.

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

@The Black Arrow That's a good analysis. I don't disagree but we're referring to different time periods with different quality aims: In the early days of 3D and low-res CRT screens when we had 256x256 textures, detail textures were used to make surfaces appear as if they have 1024x1024 textures... today in the age of 1080p monitors such texture can appear blurry from up close, we want to make 1024x1024 textures appear of 4096x4096 quality. Back then the goal was to get at least a little bit of perceived sharpness, today the goal is to see those microscopic details on every surface as if everything is real... while the concept of detail textures is old it scales to cover both aims. As you correctly pointed out, the ideal solution would be upgrading the actual textures themselves. Sadly there are two big problems with this that will likely never be possible to overcome: Someone must create or find identical textures to replace existing ones, which have to retroactively fit every old FM. That would be a huge effort for so many images, and will not look exactly the same way so people would complain how "this wall used to be made of small red bricks which are now larger and yellower which isn't what I intended and no longer line up". An advanced upscaling filter may be able to bump the resolution with good results, this would be a lot less effort and retain the exact appearance of textures. The even greater issue is storage and memory use would go through the roof. Imagine all our textures (from surfaces to entity skins) being 4096x4096 which would be the aim for decent quality today: TDM could take over 100 GB of drive space, you'd need at least 16 GB of RAM to run it, and the loading time of a FM will be 5 minutes. Detail textures are a magic solution for both problems: They're overlayed in realtime on top of the standard textures without changing their base appearance. This means you see pixels several times the scale of the image without requiring any image to actually be at that resolution, no vRAM or loading time increase. And if detail layers are disabled with distance you also don't lose FPS in per-pixels calculations when distant lights update.

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

So, there is actually an SVN repo with these tga font images, they are 256x256. Is something like this what you are looking for:

I'm assuming we're talking about Stone 24pt font here, used in subscripts & elsewhere. Images of letters are arranged into a bitmap by a process that doesn't have to conform to a tidy alphabetic grid. See Figure 2 of my new article https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Font_Bitmaps_in_DDS_Files In the figure, you can see there's an accented "a" to the left of the W, whose foot is presumably within W's bounding box. I think I looked at this earlier & concluded that I couldn't shrink W's bounding box enough in the DAT file. So probably the pixels of the W need to be moved to the right... I haven't tried such surgery yet.

Yeah it's not an easy to go option, more like an inspiration. There's always lots of artifacts and inconsistencies which take so much time to fix that it is nearly the same time to create images as painting them by yourself if you have an eye for detail. I tried it for creating textures too and it worked pretty well (I think it was dalle 2 back in the day last year). Most difficult part was making it seamless. I think the time it took for rerolling prompts was nearly the same as searching for stock textures though. But the results were as least as good as stock textures. A thing I couldn't say about artwork. There's no coherent style or consistent features for story actors. I would say you didn't miss anything of value. We'll see what the future holds.

Well, it looks very good! I tried generating some textures with AI, and it look quite good but the free model(s) lost the option to generate images and I'm too cheap to pay for it : P

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.

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.