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I just found this thread on ttlg listing Immersive Sims: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151176

Recently revisiting the forums after a longer period of time I wanted to check the unread content. I don't know if I am doing this wrong since.. ever... but on mobile (visiting the unread content page on my smartphone) you have to click on that tiny speech bubble to go to the most recent post in a thread. If you don't click correctly you'll hit the headline and end up at post 1 in the beginning of the thread. It's terrible on mobile, since not only the speech bubble is really small and was to miss. But also the thread headline is just millimeters away from it so you go right to the first post that was ever made instead of the most recent ones. Am I doing it wrong? I just want to go through u read content a d the to the newest post from that topic.

A@datiswous Ah yeah, well sorry, I was quiet busy and only visiting discord. First time here on the forums since months now I think.. Thank you for the subtitles. I encourage everyone who is interested in using them to download it from here as I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them myself into the mission. Again, thank you for your work.

Though this is related to PBR as a component in getting it done right (like reflection probes) I thought it's an improvement of its own that's worth discussing. I don't know if this is implemented or estimated in some form, but working with light entities in my own FM's I haven't seen any spawnargs for it so I presume it's not. At the moment lights in TDM act as zero-scale points, light sources have no actual radius. I know what you might be thinking: Of course lights have a radius, it's the box that decides how far a light shines and what it affects! What I'm referring to is not the range but the emission radius, representing the scale of the bulb itself: Think of it as a minimum radius... at the moment lights only have a maximum radius, the minimum is currently a point. In modern engines this affects both specularity and shadow softness as well as how the light is distributed. Like most engines we shouldn't need anything more than a float describing the size of the bulb, a simple sphere ought to be enough... given we already work with radius boxes, we could instead use a separate box which would give us better control with unevenly shaped bulbs. Every default light entity should of course be updated to use this: Torches / candles would set it to the average size of their flame particles, gas / electric lamps should have it represent the scale of the light bulb or the lamp head. If done right this can greatly improve our graphics and add more realism, but as with most things it's not going to be that simple. Also this would create changes to the lightgem in all FM's but very minuscule ones that shouldn't even be detectable. There's 3 different components I presume we have to tackle independently. Soft shadows: Shadowmap softness is probably the easiest, just add the average bulb radius to their value. Specularity: At the moment all lights seem to produce specular orbs of the same fuzziness on shiny surfaces. What we probably want is for lights that keep their min radius 0 to produce a fully sharp orb or dot, softness is added to each light's ball based on this radius. Light projection: The biggest aspect is changing how light is distributed, the projection texture / falloff material would emanate very differently. Everything inside the bulb would shine at the intensity of the center pixel and should start fading from the min radius toward the max, the projection texture would get slightly inflated like a balloon. The best solution (which also accounts for blur) seems like a 2D shader that copies the light texture onto itself at slightly different offsets to make it fuzzy: There's already a blur filter that does just that when you're underwater for example, we could to get away with doing the same thing to light textures using the min radius as the offset parameter. As lights typically don't change scale, this should be possible to do only once at map start rather than every frame including for moving lights like torches, this way we should have no performance loss.

Do you realize how little helpful you are? Especially when I quote someone who had the same issues in this mission with a specific type of enemy. But, suuuure, it's just a skill issue. That's why this topic came up so often over the years. Let's just end this now though. You will never be able to accept that there is an issue with the blackjack system. It's fine, and it doesn't matter. What matters if that people do have issues with the blackjacking. And, if you allow me one last personal thing: It was absolutely fkn annoying to have to quicksave and quickload every time I missed a blackjack again in this mission. The mission is one of my absolute favorites, but, the blackjacking really sucked the life out of me in this one. It's absolutely frustrating to again and again have to re-load, and it's the one thing which seriously frustrates me about this mod in general. Everything else is on par, or even an improvement over the original games, except the blackjacking. It's beyond horrible. Even with the blackjack indicator, which doesn't work reliable either, by the way. The indicator didn't indicate that I was in a position for a successful K.O. even if the K.O. was successful. I don't know WTH is wrong with the system. Much too sensitive, much too dependant on the range and point of impact. It doesn't make sense in a game where you can't judge the distance as if you would in virtual reality, or in real life. It should be much more forgiving, and less sensitive.

I think the new thread started from me posting about a sharp texture, I didn't understand what was causing it to be pixel-grainy, it was later clarified that lack of mipmaps can do that. I suspected it might be a common occurrence and combined that with the same happening to sharp edges. Hence me wondering if a solution to address all such artifacts can exist. Personally I think FXAA would be an improvement, but if the other devs feel it would look ugly I understand that. I don't agree the issue isn't noticeable due to darkness, I tend to notice it a lot and look for ways around it. I understand an easy solution isn't possible now, like I said the thread branched as I posted about a sharp texture error which I misunderstood as being related to (texture) AA in some form.

@MirceaKitsune I don't say this to be discouraging, but a developer has already responded that replacing the AA in the game is not arbitrary and has no ETA so not sure what else you are looking for? Even if the engine is overhauled to the point TAA is an option, there is still no perfect AA solution. The image quality of the most modern games often reveals shortcomings under scrutiny - there are always trade offs. So how helpful is your suggestion which paraphrased is basically: "we need a bespoke AA solution that cheaply provides perfect results" when it comes to actually solving this problem? In a game where the image is typically dark and there isn't much high frequency detail it does not take much AA to provide an acceptable image in 95% of circumstances imo. It is we mappers who ultimately control what you are seeing in a given mission, and these scenes in SLL are very brightly lit with large volumetric light volumes. This for example reveals a lot of limitations in the resolution of shadow maps for these lights and presents normal map interactions that are not typical for the game, all that were quite obvious in development. Ultimately we liked the overall effect, so we accepted the trade offs. While there will always be room for improvement and advancements (just look at the VL light quality improvements coming from 2.10 to 2.11) it is that overall presentation, including those compromises, that is what real time game art is all about.

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

Ignoring is somewhat inadequate as you still see other members engaging in a discussion with the problematic user, and as Wellingtoncrab says such discussions displace all other content within that channel. Moderation is also imperfect as being unpleasant to engage with is not in itself banworthy, so there is nothing more to do if such people return to their old behaviour after a moderator had a talk with them, except live with it or move away. I'd be more willing to deal with it if it felt like there were more on-topic discussion, i.e. thoughts about recently played fan missions or mappers showcasing their progress, rather than a stream of consciousness about a meta topic that may or not have to do with TDM. I guess the forums already serve the desired purpose, or they just compartmentalise discussions better.

The new update sounds very exciting! Already got it and will probably play a new FM again soon. I wasn't sure if lights make full use of portals in order to ditch even more calculations, awesome to hear that's now on the list too Reminds me of something I asked a while ago, don't think anyone knew the answer with certainty: When using a targeted light / spotlight, does it improve performance compared to omni lights? I wasn't sure if the engine knows to calculate only inside the cone they're pointing at, or if behind the curtains it still treats them as 360* projections and just visually makes them a cone. If there's an improvement I was wondering if hooded lights could be made like that by default. Visually there should be no difference: I experimented with the outdoor lamp once, by default it still shines in all directions... you don't see anything above anyway since the model self-shadows, we could likely get it looking almost identical with a wide cone. Just thought it might be a good idea to bring this up now that I remembered, for now a nice new optimization to enjoy

I'm seeing the improvement with shadow maps too, albeit I keep their quality at lowest. Indeed MSAA is still costly even so, I kept it disabled even now for that reason. Fingers crossed the next release may get shader-based Anti-Aliasing: From my tests in Tesseract / Redeclipse, FXAA / SSAA / TAA all tend to be cheaper, hope we get at least one someday.

I don't recall a system for noise masking. It sounds like it'd be a good idea, but when you get into the details you realize it'd be complicated to implement. It's not only noise that that goes into it, I think. E.g., a high register can cut through even a loud but low register rumble. And it's not like the .wav file even has data on the register of what it's playing. So either you have to add meta-data (which is insane), or you have to have a system to literally check pitch on the .wav data and paramaterize it in time to know when it's going to cut through what other parameters from other sounds. For that matter, it doesn't even have the data on the loudness either, so you'd have to get that off the file too and time the peaks with the "simultaneous" moment at arbitrary places in every other sound file correctly. And then position is going to matter independently for each AI. So it's not like you can have one computation that works the same for all AI. You'd have to compute the masking level for each one, and then you get into the expense you're mentioning. I know there was a long discussion about it in the internal forums, and probably on the public subforums too, but it's been so long ago now I can't even remember the gist of them. Anyway the main issue is I don't know if you'll find a champion that wants to work on it. But if you're really curious to see how it might work, you could always try your hand at coding & implementing it. Nothing beats a good demo to test an idea in action. And there's no better way to learn how to code than a little project like that. I always encourage people to try to implement an idea they have, whether or not it may be a good idea, just because it shows the power of an open source game. We fans can try anything we want and see if it works!

I'm using the version from kcghost. I just tested and I can't see any difference inside the inventory. On the stats itself it doesn't show the different loot types (still seen in the inventory), but instead gives more info on stealth score. Edit: I see Dragofer made an updated version of his script. I have to check that out. Edit2: That version works: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=21272&key=02755164a3bed10498683771fe9a0453

Occlusion culling is not as easy as it looks. For instance, if you simply check entity's bbox against individual brushes, then most of the entities behind walls would pass the check because no individual brush covers a whole entity completely. Also, there are dozens thousand brushes on large maps, you cannot iterate through them naively. On the other hand, this is close to the concept of "antiportals". That's when mapper puts an "antiportal", ensuring that everything behind it is occluded, and the engine takes it into account whenever it works with portals. But this requires work from mapper, and I don't think it would provide much help. To get serious benefits, you need to recognize the whole wall consisting of many brushes as a single inpenetrable surface, at which point you necessarily have something really complicated. I thought about doing Umbra-like occlusion culling on brushes (with automatic portals and conservative rasterization inside), but I realized it's ton of work. There is always something else to do. By the way, the recent change is not about what player does not see, it's about what light don't see/hit. Just rendering a surface is very cheap because of depth prepass, but light interactions are costly with all the textures, soft shadows, etc. Realizing that you don't need light interaction on something you see is quite beneficial. The problem with original Doom 3 engine is that it basically lights up all objects within light volume. With the exception of static shadow-casting lights, portals are just ignored! I have expanded usage of portals to dynamic lights. It might sound funny, but there is still some room for improvement in this area...

I looked but didn't see this video posted in these forums. It's pretty cool.

It wasn't a "sacrifice", it was a deliberate decision. People wanted the game to be as close as possible to the original, including pixelated graphics. If you ask me, the former version based on the Unity engine looked and felt better. But, hey... I guess I'm not the right person to judge that, as I never played the original, and always found that the art style of System Shock 2 is much better anyway. This also illustrates the issue with community funded games: Too many cooks spoil the broth. In game design, you need freedom, not thousands of people who want you to do this and this and that. Just take a look at the Steam forums and see how all those wimps complain again about everything. Hopeless.

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.

What I understood is that the idea of TDM was born from that it was unclear if T3 would get a level editor at the time. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20050218173856/http://evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=268

This one is really essential: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 Should work fine with the GOG version.

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152224 There is a new mapping contest over on TTLG for the Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary and the organizers were kind enough to include The Dark Mod along with all of the Thief games as an options for making a mission to submit as an entry. The deadline is a year from yesterday and the rules are pretty open. I recommend going to the original thread for the details but I will summarize here: Rules: - The mission(s) can be for Thief 1, Thief 2, Deadly Shadows or The Dark Mod. - Collaborations are allowed. - Contestants can use any custom resource they want, though TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack. - Contestants can submit more than one mission. - Contestants can enter anonymously. - The mission(s) can be of any size. Using prefabs is allowed but the idea is this is a new mission and starting from an abandoned map or importing large areas from other maps is not allowed. Naturally this is on the honor system as we have no way of validating. Mission themes and contents: There is no requirement from a theme or story viewpoint, however contestants might consider that many players may expect or prefer missions to be celebratory of Thief: Deadly Shadows in this respect: castles, manors, museums, ruins inhabited by Pagans and the like, with a balance of magic versus technology. This is entirely up to the authors, though, to follow or not - it is just mentioned here as an FYI and, while individual voters may of course choose to vote higher or lower based on this on their own, it will not be a criteria used explicitly in voting or scoring. Deadline: May 25th, 2024 at 23:59 Pacific Time. See the TTLG thread for details on submissions and the voting process. Provided I can make the deadline I hope to participate. It would be nice to see the entire community do something together, and expressing our complicated relationship with this divisive game seems as good a pretext as any.

EDIT - Please note this is Work In Progress and there are more versions available further down this thread ------------------------------------------------------- Hey, A post about a handheld lantern met my eye and sometime later @RedNoodles shared the source files. I don't know who created the lantern in the first place but as per the below post @Dragofer, @Amadeus and @Goldwell were involved. EDIT: @Obsttorte is to be credited BIG TIME, according to Amadeus: I have since been toying with the files and made further improvements: Term "Lantern" replaced with "Lamp" to distinguish it from the former. Comprehensive code clean-up. Removal of unnecessary files. Adjustments here and there. There still is room for more improvement: Better looking inventory icon Better sounds (it currently uses Blackjack sounds) Sounds improved thanks to @Goldwell The lamp clips through walls when up close (no idea how to fix this) The lamp still makes use of def/tdm_player_thief.def and script/tdm_user_addons.script and therefore it isn't compatible with all mission or other mods. I would like this lamp to be truly standalone and compatible with everything but I am not sure how to proceed from this point on. If you ask me, this neat lamp should be properly integrated in the game for mappers to make good use of it. You can find my version attached to this post. Place the *.pk4 in your TDM folder and access the lamp by scrolling through your weapons. Remember: the lamp isn't compatible with other mods. Cheers! z_handheld_lamp_v0.1.pk4

Thanks for playing and the kind feedback re: the bugs: the brew tank is a new one - thanks for that. Will add it to the list for any future update. the bow: I think that's a TDM bug. I experienced it as well, but only the early days of developing the mission so I thought it had gone away, but I guess not: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21345-210-crashes-may-be-bow-frontend-acceleration-related/ the keys on the guard: never did get to the bottom of that one as I could never reproduce it.

Thanks! Hint for the safe code here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=485264 Actually, it's probably time I added these hints to the original post....

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?

I don't have any professional equipment (just a jabra evolve 65 headset that I use for work) and haven't done this before and I'm also not a native speaker. If you do recognize an accent, it might be familiar to you . I just recorded a couple of lines to see how my headset performs and used the basic windows voice recording. Obviously the quality could be better, but there's surely room for improvement. How about you send me a couple of lines and the tone that you're looking for and I send you some samples. If you like it, we continue. If it doesn't meet you expectations the slightest, I will have clarity, that I'm in fact not voice acting material and still look forward to play that mission once it's out.