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I am considering to replace the fake moon beams in Sir Talbots Collateral with volumetric lights. But I need information on some issues: Do you they work well enough now? Are there issues with stencil shadows? I remember early posts mentioning that. What performance/quality options are there? I use a weak notebook a lot, and want to keep the mission running on it. Can I turn of volumetric rendering without disabling lights? Any other things I need to be aware of?

Snatcher and myself argued for ages to make shouldering long frob, but as this was completely blocked and the issue for me at least is consistency, I now would like to have the other special actions fit to the shouldering scheme. As you said, from the new perspective of a new default, short frob should extinguish any lights and eat any food. - Bodies: short > shoulder, long > move - Lights: short > extinugish, long > move - Consumables: short > eat, long > move - Loot and items: short > take, long > multi take (this was always different to the others) This leaves all other physical items for which short frob means moving, which could also be helpful in the sense that if you short frob something and it is moved, it has no special action.

No, I remembered the old system, but I also was using my patch so I suspected at first I messed something up before I remembered that the handling of bodies and lights are so counter intuitive right now. I could easily add my own patch solution to make extinguishing lights short frob again, but I would rather see a consistent version of it in the core game! To provide some background information, I had just finished both the Cyberpunk DLC and The Outer Worlds DLCs, both of which use short-use and long-use systems too so my mindset somehow was expecting something more consistent ;).

I just played the new beta mission and wondered why I couldn't extinguish moveable lights as I had already forgotten that I need to use hold-frob in 2.12. This is completely counterintuitive to shouldering bodies and there is no global information about this, so please make it so that hold-frobing takes a moveable light and short frobing extinguishes it! This would also be more consistent to the static lights. The same should be done for consumables too: short frob eat, long frob pick up...

EDIT: This mod is now part of the TDM Modpack. --------------------------------------------------------------------- OLD EDIT: You can find a demo in this post (v0.7) ---------------------------------------------------------- Welcome. Feel free to participate but I ask you to restrain from discussing whether we should or should not do it. We are going for it in this topic. For the practical or philosophical debate please head to: Should small static oil lamps be extinguishable up close? ---------------------------------------------------------- THE IDEA: To have the ability to extinguish small lights with a swift but quiet blow. THE VISION: When no item is selected in the inventory, and upon pressing the use key, Corvan performs a swift but quiet blow that can extinguish small lights located within the radius of the blow. EDIT - Potential side issues to take into account in the future It shouldn't work under water It shouldn't work when carrying a body It shouldn't work when holding any object ---------------------------------------------------------- OIL LAMPS: When I started playing TDM I was frustrated to find out I could not extinguish small oils lamps located right in front of my face. What the? Candles yes but oil lamps no? It turned oil lamps where created during a time the development of the game had a big momentum and oil lamps where offered to mappers without a second thought. Mappers started using oil lamps - under the assumption that only water arrows can extinguish them - and by the time people started wondering why oil lamps could not be extinguished with the fingertips or with a blow the matter was deemed "too late" for any change. I believe that having the ability to easily extinguish ANY small light can improve the experience in the long run and I am set out to change course in this regard, regardless of how some members of this community feel about it. Wesp5's Unofficial Patch offers a workaround that I am not fan of because the moment you put a light out the oil lamp remains frobable thus making the implementation inconsistent. Besides, oil lamps could perfectly trigger an action (ie: unveil a hidden secret) but since all oil lamps are frobable players don't get the required feedback. THE FLINT: When I started playing TDM I was impressed by AI. I clearly remember the moment I put a candle out but moments later I found it was lit. What the? I put the candle out again and waited in the shadows. A builder comes in, puts a flint out a relights it. I was amazed. I need to get one of those flints, I thought. A few missions later I finally got to have one. The flint was the key: I started toying with the flint and I realized at its core the flint basically is a stim of fire. I changed the stim of fire for a stim of water and voila, I could extinguish lights with the modded flint. The problem now is that the modded flint extinguishes all lights and fires, large and small but hey, things are heading in the right direction. I am not yet ready to publish any files but I already need a lot of help from experienced modders and developers. Here is my main concern at this point: Do you think it would be possible to detect if a stim is colliding with large lights? Or Do you think the impact of a stim can be limited to certain entities? Or Any other ideas to limit the impact of a water stim to small lights only? Cheers!

@JackFarmer I just double checked - the lightning still works for me. Did you copy the entire lights.mtr and just insert "ai_see 0" under lights/biground1? btw, to test it I just used a func_fx for the lightning entity that the player triggers.

From what I understood last time, lights now use portal culling and solid walls to dump unreachable entities, correct? So if a torch is located in a room and its radius box covers entities in a neighboring room but the light doesn't also touch any portals through which it can reach that room, those entities are ignored. I'm curious if lights also use a projection check like the player view. So even if a room is opened by portals from the perspective of the light, an entity is still ignored if the light's origin can't shine over the bounding box of the entity through any open portals leading to it. Hopefully this is the case by now, hope it's planned if not as it sounds optimal. Last time I asked, it couldn't be determined if spotlights still calculate entities in an omnidirectional 360 field like normal lights, instead of only looking at portals and entities within their cone. If this is the case I support making some of the default hooded lights targeted as an optimization, given some are omnidirectional and self shadowed in a way that the upper area is covered but still calculated. An obstacle I remember encountering is at the moment, there's a limitation in both DarkRadiant and TDM engine that prevents targeted lights from having an origin offset, even if the origin spawnarg is set the center falls back to the entity's position making this unusable on some lamp models.

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

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.

I got it! Just needed to move the ai_see out of the brackets. lights/biground1 { description "Round point light." { forceHighQuality map lights/biground1.tga colored zeroClamp } ai_see 0 }

Biker is working on a small update that incorporates volumetric lights and other fixes. He is asking for a few beta testers:

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.

Following the release of my first FM I wanted to offer a little surprise to the TDM community. I've implemented a little feature I wished to have for a while: Colored flame lights! This covers all fire based light entities, meaning all torches and gas lamps get versions with colored flames. They work the same way as the normal flames in terms of functionality, meaning you can move candles around and water arrows put them out and the player can relight them with matches. Colors include: Red, green, blue, pink. The implementation is very flexible: Each color variation inherits its original entity and only changes the light color or particle definition, thus changes to the base def will automatically reflect to the colored versions during development modifications. The colored entities replicate the same DarkRadiant tree structure as the normal lights directory except in their own subdirectories. I'm eager to hear what you think and if you like them! My goal is to offer this submission for vanilla TDM, ideally as a new feature for 2.09... I think they would look very nice for many fantasy setups! And of course, here are some screenshots of how each color looks in-game (red, green, blue, pink): The pk4 is attached to this post as it includes only particle and entity definitions so it's ridiculously tiny. You can install it in one of two ways: Either unpack its contents inside the directory of your fm, or copy the file as is inside the darkmod folder next to all the other pk4's... both should work just fine. color_lights_1.0.pk4

Oh yes: I have both sight and hearing set to Forgiving. I didn't think that would be related: IIRC it only affects the multiplier for how much being seen in light or heard while making noise increases the alert level per event. I should test on a higher alert level too just in case: I tend to be sloppy and impatient thus I used that for years so I wouldn't get caught all the time on more difficult FM's (lots of guards in tight areas with lights you can't turn off). I have noticed an aspect that does work well: If you're making noise by running even in darkness, alert AI will head toward your direction while searching, they won't go around randomly but actually care where the impulse came from. The problem is that this doesn't seem to scale over larger distances: If they briefly see you in broad light at a distance enough to draw weapons, AI won't head toward your general direction but begin searching their own vicinity... and at least on Forgiving the same happens if you shoot a broadhead arrow at a guard's helmet: I still think the guard should actively run toward your location instead, not exactly where you are but they should go to that road or barge into the same building.

Since I saw many good missions with foggy and dusty areas, I was checking the wiki for advice. However there's scarce information about how to achieve this (if you don't really know what you're looking for at least). So I wanted to kindly ask the people who know the engine far more well than me and the ones who maybe already created a dusty indoor area. My goal is to create a cellar which has torches in it that looks foggy / dusty. I already have that cellar which consists of multiple rooms with their torches and some decal patches on the surfaces. Still it looks very bright and clean. How would I implement a foggy area here (also in terms of performance)? I tried volumetric lights, which results in a really good looking result, however I notice a performance drop (because of the unnessesary shadow calculations I guess) I tried a func emitter, but it seems to be emitting the fog even when the player isn't in that area (again, performance reasons could apply here if I would place multiple emitters there I guess). Also the particles are not bound to that area, so you can see them in the rooms above the cellar sometimes I guess in the end it can be a mix of multiple methods. What's your suggestion? What technologies would you choose?

We didn't make the holidays (such a busy time of year) so here's a New Year's gift, an unusual little mission. Window of Opportunity Recover an item for a regretful trader out in a wilderness setting, and discover more! Available within the in-game mission downloader or: Download: http://www.thedarkmo...ndetails/?id=79 Alternative: https://drive.google...WTMzQXZtMVFBSG8 Some unorthodox gameplay on regular/ghost difficulties. (Arachnophobes might prefer short mode...) Please expect to need your lantern in regular and ghost modes! Short ("easy") mode is a smaller map, so if you are looking for areas others reference below, or 100% of the loot, you'll need to play on another mode. I wanted to create my first mission before I became influenced by too many others' ideas, and limited myself to what has been done before. As such, this mission is not set in a city/town, and has some features that are likely to be provocative. There's a section some really like, which others don't, either way I kept it short to not last too long. That being said, I hope you do find it fun! :-) Special thanks to those who provided valuable testing and feedback: Goldwell, Kyyrma, plotzzz, 161803398874989, PPoe & Bikerdude (who also contributed a sound). (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] If you are having trouble finding the main objective, here's what to pay attention to in the mission for hints: There is a spot it's possible to get stuck on the ground in the corner by the cliff/rockfall where there's a rope laying on the ground, please take care if you poke around there!

Thank you so much for this post! I have been trying to bind the lights/mesh/flare to the strobe light for a couple of days now and not getting anywhere. I can't find any tutorials or explanation about doing this anywhere. Using the DoomEdit specifically to bind all my lights/meshes with Shift-K and then returning back to DarkRadiant appears to be the only solution. Of course, then it looks like a big ? mark in Dark Radiant, but I can live with it just to get the effect working.

With TDM 2.12, after the credits finished, the "Mission Complete" screen did not display. I found that the screen was black and I could hear my footsteps when I tried to move around. I think the reason for the mission not completing successfully was that the "Do not kill or harm allies" objective was never marked as "1 = STATE_COMPLETE" instead it was left as "0 = STATE_INCOMPLETE". Note, I didn't use noclip throughout the mission. Same as: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18054-fan-mission-the-accountant-2-new-in-town-by-goldwell-20160509/&do=findComment&comment=458491

How about using TDM automation framework (and maybe pcem/qemu)? More info see: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19828-automation-features-and-discussion/

Beta 11 Fix finished-on state auto-update was unreliable Slighty improve scanner title/author detect Tags are now named some whatever regular-version-looking thing to force GitHub to put the newest at the top

I opened DarkRadiant and am now trying to understand how the sun lights were supposed to work. No idea thus far. Looks like an awful experiment with massive caulk overuse.