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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

I prefer the forum because it's more permanent. If I get an answer to a mapping question here I can still refer to it in six months or three years when whatever issue I had comes up again. On Discord it vanishes pretty quick.

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.

It's just my opinion but that just doesn't happen in TDM spaces. I used to love the TDM discord - it was kind of quiet but it was mappers talking about mapping and players talking about playing. But the fact it is clearly a unmoderated space with basically no rules where itinerant weirdos can roll in and post transphobic slurs and then respond to mild pushback with a torrent of abuse in messages they then edit and delete, or post reams and reams of text in any channel that are completely off topic that all reads like it's been transcribed from the walls of a padded cell, or where the limited discussion about the game itself seems often to be about how it is bad (with some users posting over and over again about how they don't even play it), or as @Dragofer points out users who just want to relentlessly discourage and criticize anyone who is not a small handful of authors to the point they try and make issue not even with the work itself but the motives of doing the work, just makes the whole thing feel like a chore at this point to me. It also makes it feel kind of like this forum. Which means if you are going to have to be in one in order to feel like you contribute why not just settle in here. So yeah, I left.

Oh yeah, I remember the screenshots you posted for Vertigo; those were really good. Time can certainly get the better of us when it comes to mapping time and relearning DR. Best advice is to just keep Vertigo small, and you can use that experience as a springboard for making the larger Life of the Party FM. Thats how I went from A Good Neighbor to Written in Stone (and both of these still turned out wayyyy larger than their intended scope and co-authored by two other authors)

Sorry for the off topic but nice out of the box thinking thebigh. But IMO doing that light from behind effect, would be best done through the window material using a blend add stage. Or I would use a cheap blend light instead of a real parallel light. (just put the global material keyword 'blendLight' in the light material and do a blend add) Blend lights don't support specular and normal mapping, but for such effect I don't think that matters anyway, but I could be wrong. Plus you can project a texture with blend lights as well and so you could create a blend add (black&white) mask texture that would light the glass parts and not the wood parts of the window, where on real life, light wouldn't never show though.

Yep. Both checked. Tried it on round door with only rotate and only translate as well as both (my goal). In all cases the door was visually there but NON solid and NON frobable. Guess some change in base code over past 4 years. No biggie as I did a work-around. But acouple of hours testing - was it the water against the door? no. Something screwy with the brush door? No, deleted recreated, converted to model, still NG. Created regular sliding and rotating doors in water and out, with round model replacing normal one. Still NG. Was there any test I missed? On with the mapping, tally forth once more into the breaches. Mwah ha ha ha

First of all, ChatGPT , independent of the version, is a language model to be able to interact with the user, imitating being intelligent. It has a knowledge base that dates back to 2021 and adds what users contribute in their chats. This means, first of all, that it is not valid if you are looking for correct answers, since if it does not find the answer in its base, it has a tendency to invent it with approximations or directly with false or obsolete answers. With this, the future will not change, it will occur with AI of a different nature, on the one hand with search engines with AI, since they have access to information in real time, without needing such complex language models and for this reason, they will gradually search engines are going to add AI, not only Bing or Google, but before these there was Andisearch, like the first of all, Perplexity.ai, Phind.com and You.com. Soon there will also be DuckDuckGoAI. On the other hand, generative AI to create images videos and even aplications, music and other, like game assets or 3D models., The risk with AI came up with Auto GPT, initially a tool that seemed useful, but it can be highly dangerous, since on the one hand it has full access to the network and on the other hand it is capable of learning on its own initiative to carry out tasks that are introduced as if it were a Text2Image app out there, what was demonstrated with ChaosGPT, the result of an order introduced in Auto GPT to destroy humanity, which it immediately began to develop with extraordinary efficiency, first trying to access the missile silos nuclear weapons and to fail, luckily, trying to get followers on Twitter with a fake account that he created and where he got more than 6000 followers, hiding later, realizing the danger that can be blocked or deactivated on the network. Currently nothing is known about it, but it is still a danger not exactly to be ruled out, it can really become Skynet. AI is going to change the future, but not ChatGPT which isnt more than a nice toy.

I know what you mean. The things the algorithm can do once it's warmed up are astounding, and the endless list of applications to try out is mesmeric. I overdid it early on and actually gave myself a bit of tendonitis from spending every spare waking moment experimenting with it. I'm trying to pace myself better now. But I'm right there with you as regards the philosophical implications. GPT-4 has some legit weaknesses as a logic engine, but its abilities of inference and deduction are no joke, even when you strip away its overwhelming advantage of knowing everything humanity has ever uploaded to the internet pre-September 2021. It can see conceptual connections that most people would not pick up on, and it can act on them. That sounds to me like general intelligence; and it's already near or exceeding typical human level! Without trying to sound alarmist, this is not something this type of model should be able to do based on the training data available to it. There are no examples for these sorts of highly specific original deductions for it to regurgitate. The general intelligence is some sort of new emergent phenomenon, and it's got quite a lot of people in the machine learning research community equal parts excited and spooked. I don't see any new comments on either the public link or my private copy of the conversation. Maybe continuing just makes a new instance for that user?

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

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.

aye quite a load of scrapped mods over the years, most mappers dont seem comfortable in the editors avaliable for the quake engine and either choose something well known like unreal or drop it. The darkplaces engine itself is more than fine for making quality games but the mapping tools are sometimes a bit lackluster.

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.

So I created a new bigbox (map) and put all my layers into that, including the "bad area model" one and everything is JUST FINE. No errors, no leaks, no missing bits, in both DR and DM! YAY twice over!! Can now continue working on it (and learning DR - so MUCH to learn). Back to building my faux Dodge.

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.

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....

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.