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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.

Thanks, I can also recommend gog galaxy. The idea of the custom tags is really nice, I'll have to try this out too!

I'm quite willing to play! I'll be grateful for you help in investigating. I've played most TDM missions. My hardware is pretty old, but I'm not planning to upgrade until the current component availability crisis has passed: I'd like to upgrade to a high end AMD GPU, think am going to have to wait another year for that given the current supply chain for everything electronics these days. My hardware and software stack is, as posted over here: The key points are: 1/ a 10 year old Radeon HD 6950 card (with 2GB RAM); 2/ 16GB system RAM; 3/ up to date Fedora installation (now Fedora 33); 4/ 1920x1200 display. Since the 2.09 beta test and upgrade I've been basing my configuration on the following settings (which I apply after deleting Darkmod.cfg): seta tdm_door_auto_open_on_unlock "0" seta tdm_mainmenu_confirmquit "0" seta tdm_wideScreenMode "4" seta r_fullscreen "2" seta r_aspectRatio "2" seta r_customHeight "1200" seta r_customWidth "1920" seta r_fboColorBits "32" seta s_useEAXReverb "0" seta com_showFPS "1" seta r_usePersistentMapping "0" After that I can play with the advanced graphics settings. I'd like to turn on anti-ailiasing, but it tanks my FPS. The only other option that seems to make a visible difference for me is soft shadows, so I do like to turn those up, and normally it has no impact on FPS.

Not hardware related, but I upgraded to Debian 12 and I swear the system feels faster and more responsive now. Quite a bit, actually. I know for sure that the AMD drivers were improved between Linux 5.10 and 6.1. But it really feels like other optimizations and improvements were made as well. And it's not a fresh install, it's an upgrade, so there's none of that "you started with a clean slate so of course it's faster" that you get when you first install Windows and the registry hasn't gotten filled with crap yet. It's just too bad that Linux 6.2 did not make it into Debian 12 as standard, because I think that's what you need for good Intel Arc support. I was this close to buying an A770 last week, but then the price went up overnight from $329 to $400. I guess Intel saw the announcements just like we did. But I think I'm gonna just sit on current graphics hardware for as long as possible to teach the industry a lesson. EDIT to be clear the desktop is faster and more snappy not just with AMD graphics, but also NVidia as well. Also the web browser too. They must have done something to improve scheduling in the kernel. Now that more consumer devices, e.g. Steamdeck are running Linux, and not just servers, one should probably expect more improvements of this nature.

YOU TAFFERS! Happy new year! Deadeye is a small/tiny assassination mission recommended for TDM newcomers and veterans alike. Briefing: Download link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JWslTAC3Ai9kkl1VCvJb14ZlVxWMmkUj/view?usp=sharing Enjoy! EDIT: I promised to someone to write something about the design of the map. This is in spoiler tags below. Possibly useful to new mappers or players interested in developer commentary.

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.

What makes it mod unfriendly? Edit I see there's also an editor patch: Sneaky Upgrade Editor Edition

Me neither... I recently (few months ago) played through TDS again (I think for the fourth time in total). Still great. Especially with the Sneaky Upgrade.

Bit worried about Firmament because I'm a big Myst fan, but the Steam reviews are currently "mixed" due to bugs and jank and Cyan don't seem to have worked out how to get into a groove for a while. Even their last game Obduction showed promise but didn't hit the mark compare to older Myst games. I dunno - then again there aren't many devs making these types of games anymore so maybe I should be more forgiving. On the other hand, the state of the modern gaming industry makes it really, really easy to hold onto older hardware and not worry about upgrading until it's absolutely necessary. I play a ton of older games anyway so whatever, if I upgrade at some point the game will hopefully be patched and improved by then anyway.

Better downgrade your Netfux subscription to the 1080p one. Better yet, upgrade to p*racy.

@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.

Just curious, based on this discussion: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19239-soft-r-gamma/?p=427350

I see today that google's advanced image search has been upgraded. As well as a lot of other new options like minimum size I see it now has licence filtering so you could exclude copyright stuff. http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search

Ever since I worked on "Chalice of Kings" with Bikerdude, I have wanted to get flame particles with new particle glares into the core mod. My reasoning was that the candles have glares and the un-glared torches look mismatched. This proposal was met with mixed reactions, so (knowing the history of TDM feature proposals...) I have created a technical demo. You may download it here: zzz_flameglare.pk4.txt (fixed) Just rename without the .txt extension at the end and place it in your Darkmod directory. Here are some screens. Using particles for this is probably the wrong way to go now that Duzenko has an emissive light feature in his branch: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19659-feature-request-emissive-materialsvolumetric-lights/