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The Transaction is a small/medium sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter delivers the cryptic book, 'De Vermis Mysteriis' to a bookstore owner named Victor de Grenefeld. It is the fourth mission in the Thomas Porter series, continuing from where The Glenham Tower ended. The mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank BrokenArts, Melan and Ocn for playtesting and Bikerdude, BrokenArts and Ocn for voiceacting. An enormous thanks goes also to the fine people who created TDM and are still working hard, bringing it ever closer to perfection. Thanks also to the community for helping with my mapping efforts. Extra thanks to freesound.org -contributors who make excellent quality sound effects available for free. Trailer (thanks to ocn!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBdEsKoqWl4 Briefing: Ah, the town of Glenham. I never really thought I would be happy to see its shabby wooden miner dwellings, but after the nightmares of the Glenham Tower I'm happy to see any kind of civilization. During my return trip from the tower the ghostly mist veil transformed into an intense thunderstorm and heavy rain. My clothes are soaked and I'm dreadfully tired of the harsh tribulations of the past few days. My task for tonight is simple. All I have to do is to get the strange and incomprehensible book I obtained from the tower, 'De Vermis Mysteriis,' to the bookstore owner Victor de Grenefeld. And more importantly collect the hefty sum the bookstore owner promised to pay me. With that kind of sum I can sit back and relax for a while. I'd better stay in good terms with my customer and not steal from him. I have the hunch that de Grenefeld is a well connected man so staying on his good side might be beneficial for me in the future: maybe they'll need a skilled adventurer like me and I could turn legitimate. I could earn my keep and I wouldn't need to constantly hide from the city watch. At any rate, I've got it all planned out for the remainder of the night. I'll visit the bookstore, drop the book to de Grenefeld and collect my fee. After that I'd better hide in the basement of an abandoned building I've spotted near the town north gate and get some well deserved rest. I don't think the city watch would think a cloaked and armed person like me would be on honorable business in a stormy weather like this so it would be wise to avoid all confrontation with the guards. I do not need any misunderstadings with the city watch right now. The undead horrors in the Tower forced me to expend most of my tools and I desperately need more equipment if I intend to continue my budding adventuring career. I should get some extra gold for new gear and maybe a few holy water potions just in case. There is a Builder church nearby where I might be able to find some. I suspect those fanatics might have gold hidden there as well.. It is time to move in the town and get the things done quickly. Somehow I have a bad feeling about all this. It's probably nothing, probably I am just jumpy because of the horrors in the Tower and sleep deprivation. Tomorrow I'll sleep long, relax and eat well. UPDATED LINK: Use the ingame downloader to get it. Bikerdude was added in the author, I forgot him. No other chages. Could The Powers That Be make sure that this version ends up in the ingame downloader? Thanks! Known bugs: One betatester experienced an error ("ERROR: Failed to spawn player as 'atdm:player_thief'"), which drops the player back to main menu upon map load. If you experience this scenario, please turn EAX off in the options menu. That cleared the problem for the tester. Warning! There is ALWAYS someone who fails to use spoiler tags appropriately. I recommend you read this thread further only after playing the mission! Avoid spoilers.

Today I am happy to announce the release of my first FM for The Dark Mod. After 6 years of using this lovely game creation engine, I'm finally able to contribute my own project for it! It took roughly two weeks of non-stop work to do everything from start to end... there's always some little detail to come back to when mapping, thus there were a few little things left out to prioritize others, but at the end of the day this came out almost exactly as I envisioned it. In this mission you play as the typical professional thief. You've been hired to retrieve a scroll containing forbidden knowledge from the mansion of a wealthy noble, put there by the builder church who is close to its owner and found it a more suitable spot. A banquet is being thrown by the lord who owns the mansion which is the perfect opportunity to make your move. Nothing out of the ordinary: You're to retrieve this scroll and get paid for your work... simple, right? Notice: Performance in some areas may be poor. I optimized the lighting setup as much as possible, trying to use as few long range light sources as I could. To achieve the desired theme however I had to leave parts of them map relatively open. Hopefully this won't be a hindrance to anyone... if it is you may need to lower some graphical settings. For people who don't like surprises and may be sensitive to certain themes, read the spoiler below. If you're okay with anything don't as it will ruin the experience! For people who are stuck and don't know how to proceed, instructions are provided in the spoiler below. Only read them if necessary. A tip that needs no spoilers: The key in this FM is exploration and reading everything carefully. There are secrets to be found: Always look everywhere and closely at everyone! I'm eager to hear what your experience with this FM is. Use spoilers when referring to specifics, but do let me know what your thoughts are! Especially with this being my first FM I could use tips, including technical ones if you look at the map in DarkRadiant. Here are a few screenshots of the main areas (intended for the installer): And finally the download links. Unzip and place the main directory inside your fms folder, this should get it to show up in the mission list. Mirror 1 Mirror 2

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

I comprehend but you do lose volumetric effects with stencil but only the really recent missions have volumetric lights. Btw In reality there's a big difference between what shadow maps are capable off and stencil maps are capable off, unfortunately because of backwards compatibility with old missions and the fact that for a long time, only stencil was available, TDM team add to limit shadow mapping capabilities mostly to what stencil can do.

Leaky geometry, particularly portal leaks, happen all the time to everyone. Annoying and time-consuming as they are, they're absolutely not a sign of being bad at mapping. I'm looking forward to seeing your mission- I don't think we have any with a Wild West feel yet.

While I'm currently taking a break from TDM mapping and not requiring this yet, it's an option I was thinking of using and would like to know whether it's possible. I was wondering if there's a way to have an AI which another AI that's an enemy to it would be too scared to attack, meaning the weaker AI flees even if armed but only from specific enemies: Can AI have a "scary" value that prevents weaker characters from picking a battle? A simple example: Let's say you have a city watch guard, a thief, and a skeleton... all set as enemies to each other. If the guard and thief see each other, they will start fighting. If however they see the skeleton, they will be so scared they flee as if unarmed instead of attempting any fights at that time.

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.

The truth is that this pacage of vegetation is more complex to implement in game and it will need some sort of reduction to work. I would dare to say it needs animation, collision sounds and maybe casting alpha shadows. I imagine every vegetation model acompanied with a variety of sounds like birds, leaves moving during animated gusts of wind and cicada sounds, making it a whole ecosystem that spreads out occuping a large amount of gamers perception with very small amount of mapping around it.

Thank you so much for playing! The blunt direction of “get in, grab stuff, and get out” was half my direct approach to objectives and half learning the ropes of DR. I’m glad your playstyle benefited from my mapping style. The sword in the display case in the lounge is definitely lootable, as well as that servant with the coin purse that wanders into the dining room. Play around with windows of opportunity in the patrols, and maybe a gas arrow or two might help. Few have found the loot in the foyer contained in the painting(s) and chandelier; good eye! Again, thanks for playing, it really means a lot! While I’ve begun work on the next chapter, progress is admittedly slow; my dang S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly addiction is getting out of hand.

So I'm getting into mapping, and naturally I gravitated right towards a couple Youtube people. I firstly watched the tutorials from Nico Autia cause those were the first I found, and those ended up teaching me some of the more basic useful controls in advance. But I encountered a problem, and went to look for other tutorials to check their approach, and I was gradually lead to Springheel's much more indepth workshop series. Springheel starting with modules and prefabs for his rooms has definitely been useful for teaching me how to USE those features - I have a tester map I've been using his stuff in - but for actual map-making, I don't rather like the prefab and modules approach to start with. On my actual first map I'm trying to work with, I've been using the idea of VERY roughly outlining the level layout with sloppy brushwork, to get a feel for where everything should go and how the place should flow. Ideally, I've set myself up with very primitive versions of what the level should look like, when I begin decorating it and making it LOOK nice and functional later. But really, I'm a new guy. So I just want to actually ask since I'm going kind of against the primo tutorial: Is this a good way to be mapping? Pictures in link. https://imgur.com/a/9DC5u8H

Is objective_ent set to 1? Search it out on Objectives in the wiki for best info. If you have multiple "things" that need to be in the same location, you need separateinfo_tdm_objective_location brushes for each one. I fell into that trap trying to get started mapping.

Well there is also godot which is both a game engine/editor not sure how good there mapping tools are compared to blender though.

Couldn't disagree with this more, except for this part: "If you wrap the whole git into simple commands, then it has some chance.", and that's exactly what modern IDEs (e.g. VS Code, Github Desktop) and the Github/Gitlab UI do for us. Using something like Github on top of Git makes things a lot more n00b-friendly and it's important to note that. If a mapper can learn DarkRadiant and TDM, then learning the basics of Git should be a piece of cake. I would also suggest if people understand the problems it solves they would be a lot more open to it, but perhaps most mappers don't really see an issue because they are working alone and Google Drive/Dropbox does the trick for them? Anyways, working alone or not, I wouldn't be caught dead not using a VCS. I think @greebo and @OrbWeaver are right in that a tutorial would be a great help in showing what it can do and how to use it. I would be happy to do that if someone could give me a Wiki account. If I did it, it would be for Git/Github and not SVN however. I have wanted to do a tutorial anyways, and the reason I haven't is because every time I mention Git I get one or more of the following responses: crickets it's not good for binaries it's overkill I suspect 1) is due to either 'preaching to the choir' (those who use it already understand the benefits) or something around what @stgatilov is saying in that people might think it's too complex, or don't see the benefits. 2) Just not true, except if you have very large files (and a lot of them), so doesn't really apply to maps. Large videos are an issue if over 100 MB (with Github anyways). Yes, you can't 'merge' or diff binaries, but frankly who cares? I'll just take the latest version, please. You committed it by mistake? Just re-add the old version after you rescue it from your history. 3) Learning about few basic features (not even about Git, but VCS in general) and the benefits it provides make it a worthwhile investment. Nobody needs to become a 'Git Ninja' (I am certainly not one). Regarding using Git for mapping: As others have mentioned, it's great and I love it, but yes, what to do about the map-editing problem. I don't know what to suggest here because I haven't delved into how how DR and doom maps work. Without even trying it, I would guess that one issue would be with entity/primitive naming? For example if I was working on the 'main' branch, and and someone else created a new branch off that and we both added a new (but different) entity, it would have the same entity number in both maps (and merge conflict?). What are the other potential issues? As I said, I've just avoid the entire scenario because I guessed it would be problematic. We've just been using the following workflow: Protect 'main' branch in Github so no direct pushes can be done against it I will work on the map on my own branch. I can/will modify any file in the FM. Merge stuff into main periodically via pull-request (because main is protected). Kerry000 would periodically pull the latest from main, then create his own branch (I haven't bothered to show him about 'rebase' - maybe later ) Kerry000 would work on his branch and edit anything except the map file (xdata, textures, models, etc), and raise a PR when finished merge Kerry000's branch into main. We had a pretty clear separation of duties on Hare in the Snare part 1, so that made it pretty easy. However for part 2 he's getting into mapping a bit, so we will need to go down the 'import prefab' route I think going forward.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I cannot reproduce the crash. The bad news is that I cannot reproduce the crash. It's odd. The crash used to happen frequently when I was learning combat skills on the Training Mission using 2.10. Today, I spent more than an hour trying 2.10 with and without a debugger and 2.11 beta 5 with a debugger. No crash yet. I also had a recent crash in the flooded section of "A Good Neighbor" during combat a few weeks ago. This crash hasn't bothered me too much, because I usually ghost or iron-ghost missions. So, my playstyle is not to engage in combat ever. But I do engage in combat sometimes before reloading just for the experience. I mainly hoped it could be fixed for others who enjoy combat or iron mode, though. I'll keep an eye on this. I hope it never occurs again, or I can get a backtrace of the crash someday. (I am now better at combat than I intended to be. )

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.

Yes, it does. Which makes it interesting that you yourself explicitly said that it's interesting nobody had complained here on the official forums: I did, which is why it stood out to me so much that even though you yourself had personally been involved you would reply claiming nobody had complained here on the official forums. I'm not colorblind at all. Does that make people pointing out that almost no modern games have proper colorblindness support hyperbole? Just because it doesn't affect you, or you choose not to pay attention to the discussion of something, doesn't make it hyperbole. Pick pretty much any modern FPS and you will find plenty of discussion about the near universal disregard for FOV and camera movement as accessibility issues. Denigrating those as hyperbole because you personally don't feel the affects is as bad of a look as demeaning people who bring up the importance of valid allergen warnings like gluten or colorblindness and deafness support.