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For the FM? For beta 1 it's here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/H1QBB04GA0#oBZTb1CmVFQb I've already done around 100 fixes though, so you might want to wait for beta 2 which should be ready in a couple of days hopefully. All links are in the first post of the beta thread here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22439-the-lieutenant-3-foreign-affairs-beta-testing/

I let my account lapse a while back biker dude used that app a very long time ago

This topic is going in different directions and it is difficult to tell if we all are in the same page. Facts: Stgatilov wants to change (improve, I guess) something and while implementing the change he realizes he will break some mission in the process. Mappers have been including (now obsolete) core files in their missions and the developer wants to know why these files were included in the first place, as in: the purpose. Changes in two mission are unavoidable, unless the authors go back and revisit the entire logic of their missions. Changes in eight missions are avoidable, in the sense that missions remain essentially the same with or without these changes. Regardless, if the improvements are to be implemented ten missions need to be reviewed and updated. Now my opinion: Considering how the topic is going the next time Stgatilov wants to improve something similar he might think it twice (we all lose because of ten missions). If these same improvements were to be implemented in the future chances are not ten but fifteen missions would have to be reviewed and updated which begs the question, does the inclusion of core files in missions put the present and future development of some areas at risk? No, as long as things remain under control: preserve what must be preserved, encourage and support innovations, identify and address trends. This requires an effort by all parties involved.

That's a very valid question. Personally, I'd say the key is to watch what the otherwise-disengaged fringes of the community are saying. If first time posters or long time lurkers start coming out of the woodwork about well made new missions, praising them for their geometry and story but saying that innovative parts of the gameplay felt frustrating or off, that's probably the first sign that the innovations are starting to get out of hand. For a more concrete example, re-read the comments on Hazard Pay. As much as I and many others love that mission, it's clearly a case where the author strayed further than many people were comfortable with. It also points to the likely endgame if authors do take their customization too far. After getting the negative feedback, kingsal made adjustments, and now the mission is much more friendly towards player preferences that don't match the author's original vision. You don't need to restrict the mapmakers' tools to stop them from straying too far from the traditional formula. When people start speaking up, the authors will rein themselves in on their own.

Plan B in case Joebarnin cannot get it right with immobilizations. By Any Other Name: attached to this post are the Bow/Arrow, Blackjack and Shortsword scripts updated to 2.12. I didn't take any liberties. Blame snatcher if something isn't right. @joebarnin, @stgatilov z_byanyothername_212_scripts.pk4

A House Of Locked Secrets: attached to this post are the Bow/Arrow, Blackjack and Shortsword scripts updated to 2.12. I didn't take any liberties. Blame snatcher if something isn't right. @Moonbo, @stgatilov z_ahouseoflockedsecrets_212_scripts.pk4

Do you disagree with the core defaults in general or is this a character-specific setup for your mission? Or is it a test or...? ---------------------------------------------- Sometimes we must take things to the extreme to see the whole picture. Let's pretend all these years mappers have been tweaking the player slightly and depending on the mission: You walk faster or slower. You jump very high or you barely get off the ground. You jump long or fall short. You can mantle high or low. You make more noise or less. The lightgem is more sensitive or less. You inflict or take more damage or less. ... Any thoughts from anyone about this scenario? I wonder how the playerbase would feel. My opinion is that the above tweaks are justified when a different universe is competently established. Or when a new, fully realized character is introduced. Otherwise we are tweaking simply because we can, nothing to do with the story.

I understand some changes that break backwards compatibility, long as they're kept minimal and hopefully don't render old FM's unplayable unless patched. We should keep in mind some maps may never get updated, especially ones who's authors might no longer be around... at the same time some things can't be easily improved because keeping it backwards compatible is more challenging, I felt a few things were limited for that reason a couple of times.

Seriously, if devs are never allowed to make changes that break things, then the mod never moves forward. It's a bandaid, rip it off, get it done. That's the point of dev builds. And if people are downloading DEVELOPMENT BUILDS to play the mod and shits broken, guess what, they should have read the very first post of this thread. For the people eager to play with the latest state of development P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

Throwing a few words people used to say long ago to help enrich those texts. Not sure if they all work in English since I'm just translating from Spanish but I think most should work well. - Stratagem: Used by Nobles to describe a plan, course of action as in "Device a Stratagem" use instead of Strategy. - Given Word (People used this one a lot, had weight). You can't betray the given word. - Sophistry or Sophist (as in dirty sophistry). Play of words to deceive. -Countenance (Please execute/exercise Countenance) - Artifice: Plan or plot to deceive. - Modesty (Lacking Modesty) - Sylph: Slender woman. - Cameo (As in compliment: "She's beautiful like a Cameo")

It's taking too long for Beta 3 for Hidden Hands: Blood and Metal to come out, so I'll test this one out in the meantime.

I totally agree that players usually don't care whether some non-customizable constant like bow shoot time is same as in core or not, as long as the mission plays well. This is a problem only for TDM development. But I don't know a proper way of solving this: mappers usually want to customize something "right now", and waiting for new release is rarely an option. And often customizations are not implemented until someone really wants them (or right away uses them), so that's also the chicken-and-egg problem here.

Good question. Maybe because I don't feel myself too guilty breaking these missions? Maybe because I know that fixing them will be a long story. And I feel confident that we (or more likely I ) will be able to fix all of them by 2.13. You might have noticed that I have also enabled two behavior changes in the latest build (1 2). In these cases it is not even mappers' fault that behavior change is needed. I have a script which can update all missions at once so that they work properly both in 2.12 and dev builds. But somehow I feel I should wait for at least some feedback on the new behavior before doing a massive change to dozens of missions.

I like the Transition from dusk to night in the Prologue and the fact that it didn't last long. Hiding and stealing during the day feels weird to me. I couldn't digest Mankind Divided as much as I liked the Artistic touches for this reason. The Prague map felt so Arbitrary.

Venturing beyond the base game... A candle set consists of a candle holder and a candle attached to it. Core candle holders, candles and candle sets are properly named in v1.0 but mappers sometimes create their own candle sets and because of how these object are handled by the engine we end up with a "Candle holder" on screen. We can approach this puzzle in different ways but for the sake of simplicity in v1.1 everything is a "Candle", including single candle holders. Find v1.1 attached to this post. Remember you need the Core Essentials for the mod to work. z_nameless_objects_mod_v1.1.pk4

Also, related to font improvement, I've just released "ExportFontToDoom3All256", a reconstruction of an earlier but now lost tool variant. This is described and available in the wiki article ExportFontToDoom3 I tested that tool using one of the TDM FM fonts, Andrew Script, for which a TTF file is available. I generated a fresh set of bitmaps (newly including any available Latin-1 characters). I also mucked about with FontForge, to reconfigure that TTF to be ordered like the TDM custom codepage. However, Andrew Script is missing a fair number of Latin-1 glyphs, so it would take some work to make it good (whether by editing in FontForge or post-export as bitmaps). I'm putting that aside for now, since the jury is out on whether Western language support in FMs and their fonts will become viable (see Western language support in 2024?). Instead, I plan to turn my font-improvement-for-2.13 attention to Stone 24pt, which (because its used in HUD captions) is more clearly worthwhile to work on. Looks like I'll have to convert the Stone DDS to TGA as a prerequisite to bitmap editing.

I agree, that is an issue. It would be better if the system handling briefings/readables could be revised as you indicated, to handle individual sentences as #str_, rather than whole pages. Baring that, having a key field like "#str_This is a whole page\nfull of text that goes on and on and on [...] until done" would appear as a very long single line. That is nasty to look at in the Readables Editor, and even worse in the .langs file, where the too-long text would appear twice on a line (once with #str_ prefix of English version, another in translation). So for those, it would be better in the short term to stick to symbolic keys, e.g., existing #str_12345 or revised form #str_myfm_book_of_spells_page_1 I might add, in the longer term, enhancing the Readable Editor to use the .lang files would be an enormous improvement for FM authors and a significant accomplishment. A fair amount of work though, but probably doable in increments over several releases.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but just a historical note: the existing i18n.pl conversion script expects only a numeric value after #str_ in its pattern matching regex (and possibly method of hashing). I do think @datiswous's idea to have key/value pairs with values like: "#str_Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." is a good way forward. Maybe with this version, DR could actually choose over time to provide some .lang support. And probably the engine would have to create hash tables to avoid slow string matching with these long non-numeric strings. (Oh, one other thing, since we're talking about The Outpost. When I played it earlier the month under 2.12, my screen would periodically go black for a second or two, every minute or two. I wonder if anyone else sees this, or just my odd Intel graphics chip?)

My issue with the Gold filter in HR is that overpowers all colors making the game monochromatic. These artistic liberties work on short games but in long games once the novelty wears down it could make the game feel monotone. Something similar happens in Thief 4. The art director made the textures almost colorless to add a bleak and sad effect to the game, cool but overtime the player might feel the game is dull and boring. Colors not only give look but also feel. Bur regardless. Here's my attempt to Replicate the Gold Filter in Deus Ex Art Director's Cut OFF ON The Directors Cut has this Pinkish Copper Tone: ON

LOL. Recently I have reassessed the infamous "Gold Filter" of DXHR, thanks to enabling it in DC with this: CookiePLMonster/DXHRDC-GFX: A plugin for Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut, restoring the gold filter, post processing and shading from the original Deus Ex: Human Revolution (github.com) It fixes the lighting system and the bad (really BAD) DC bloom too (you can force the original 2011 one)! And just avoid the SSAO, it's terrible (temporally unstable) in the DC. Without the Gold Filter the game really looks washed out (and see my avatar )

Hello @Filizitas first of all : i fell in love to your Avatar and i wish you all the best for now and the future it´s more than a year ago - i discovered you where doing some special stuff - but i´ve not been in the forum for a long time in between . the last days i had a closer look to what you're doing ! and WOW immediately I looked for your downloads and immediately looked into them - wonderful but now there are 2 questions : 1. what happened to the german version in Delightfyl v.0.0.7.6 ( it seems v.0.0.7.5. is not anymore to download) 2. how to save in last linked Project (Project-SITN.exe) herzliche Grüße bissous Bergante

Did @LePetit_Baguette_69 die by baking in the oven for too long after his first post?

If all written strings were kept in XD files, the process would be easier. We shouldn't need map edits for this. The current system makes mission updates a real problem to the point that only long dormant missions are viable for translation.

Interesting idea. Not sure about my upcoming time availability to help. A couple of concerns here - - I assume the popup words uses the "Informative Texts" slot, e.g., where you might see "Acquired 80 in Jewels", so it likely wouldn't interfere with that or with already-higher subtitles. - There are indications that #str is becoming unviable in FMs; see my just-posted: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22434-western-language-support-in-2024/

EDIT - v1.1 can be found a few posts below ------------------------------------------------------------------ Nameless Objects Mod v1.0 Description: this mod adds names to almost all core objects players can grab and hold in their hands. ------------------------------------------------------------------- How to use: As of this moment the Mod only works if you have "Core Essentials", which is included in TDM Modpack v4.0. Make sure to have "Core Essentials" and then download the *.pk4 attached to this post and place it in your TDM folder. I try my best to provide stuff people can experience first hand to form an opinion. I suggest you try "Business as Usual" by Bikerdude since this mission includes quite a few items you can grab right at the beginning. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Technical: The mod consists in a couple of def files and a script. I had to include two defs because otherwise there can be issues related with inheritance. The script does most of the work and it will run in the background as soon as a mission starts. The script runs once but it takes its time (10 to 30 seconds) not to hinder performance. All this is transparent to you. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Future: I wouldn't like this to remain as a mod and I volunteer to add names to all core defs for 2.13. I would, of course, use the translation system so that names can be translated in the future to languages other than English. I can name all core defs in a couple of rainy mornings but the Development Team must guarantee this work won't go to waste. The idea is that we name all core objects today and we let it stay: nothing changes in the source code and nothing gets displayed on screen. We get stuff done in the background and someday perhaps, all or part of it sees the light in some form. ------------------------------------------------------------------ There are quite a few things that must be discussed and agreed before we get started but the first step is: yes or no. People that might be interested in supporting and helping with this initiative: @datiswous, @Geep. Cheers! z_nameless_objects_mod_v1.0.pk4