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Really? Quake 4 used megatexturing?! If that is true, afaik they never talked about it in the game promocional material. I always thought Quake Wars was the first idTech game to ever use them. Despite the feature existing hidden in the engine, since Doom 3. And yes in Doom 3, a single 8k terrain megatexture is a couple of gigabytes (thou today games are reaching 200+ GB already...). Also I wonder why JC didn't supported tga RLE compression feature for the MT, when the engine can already use it for basic textures, it wouldn't be as good as the later compression system they used but would still take out a few megas from the size. Perhaps the tga decompression, just took to long for the MT streaming feature?

hmm experimented with upping the limit to 16gb and it does work atleast untill i hit the ceiling with a texture bigger than 12 gb (my 2080 ti only has 11gb). the biggest concern is loading time which quadruples and in some instances even hits 8 times slower loading . is this one of the reasons besides avoiding loading screens that modern engines adopted streaming ?. while pretty annoying with the long loading times it sure as hell is visible in the detail level wow!. so the question would be if it would be feasible with a setting which would allow upping texture memory instead of the static define it uses now ?. theres also the problem with the engine only supporting power of two texture sizes (there is texture loader code that allows using any texture dimension but i wonder what the backside is).

I edited my video description, I included a link to your bug report post for training missions as well

Story: "Sir Barrington, as he likes to be known, enjoys a prestigious reputation of having lavish yet intimate dinner parties. I've heard the tales about what goes on in the noble's dining room, but I believed none of them 'till now. Orbach, a local shop-keep who makes special deliveries to the people of 'high stature' heard Sir Henry Hughbellow raving about Sir Barrington's special 'Elixir', It cures your ails and gives you vigor... By the Hammer, it extends your very life! he exclaimed. Orbach begged Sir Henry for a small sample, and after one sip he was sure that the potion was nothing more than mineral water and spirit. He asked Sir Henry if other folks were as fond of the elixir as he was, and he found out that folks are paying handsomely for these small vials on a weekly basis. Some lords pay for exclusive treatments and bathe in the tonic. Lord Barrington even brings in an occult expert every month, where supposedly the power of the elixir is renewed by the full moon. Never one to pass up the opportunity for a good scam, Orbach has decided to take a cut of this 'elixir' business. He has made an elixir of his own, but needs to convince Sir Henry that it's really the same as the 'magical' tonic that Lord Barrington has been selling. And that's where I come in. Its rumered that Sir Barrington's prized possession is a painting of the revolutionary inventor 'Guillermo de Sohase' the day after he won the Battle of Billinsdune. If I can steal this painting, Orbach can use it to 'prove' that he also got the elixir from Sir Barrington. Once Sir Henry tells all his friends that Orbach's stolen elixir is healing his heart, soothing his pains, and igniting his libido, they'll be lining up at his shop. Its time to go." Build Time: Version 1.0 was speed build of sorts, to build upon Springheels video's with the new modules. Took roughly 20hrs to build but this ended up happening over the space of a few months.http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18808-bikerdudes-speedish-build-using-the-new-modules/?hl=%2Bspeed+%2BbuildThanks: Co-auther: Obstortte for all his custom entities, scripting and showing me a thing or two about perfing.Resource: Springheel - new modulesReadables: nbhor1moreTesters: Bienie, Judith, Abusimplea, Cambridge Spy, Gerberox, MayheM, Amadeus, Goldwell, nbhor1more.Download: - mega Info: Repeat after me, "Read and explore, Read and explore"Known issues: This mission has been heavily tweaked and worked on to provide a playable experience for even low end machines.For very low end PC's please make use of the in-game LOD slider, as not only are details reduced, but the ambient_world fog is removed at the lowest setting.The medium difficulty is partially broken, the mission wont end when the player gets to the exit location. As this is the only issue with that difficulty level, I will fix this when I next update it to include the intro.

Ooooof, I missed this post before I tossed up an announcement thread of my own. Yeah, I'm pretty excited. Totally not what I expected on my bingo card for today.

I wish all the cult classic franchises were never released as VR exclusives, because it's pretty much like a spit in the face of all the fans of such games, especially if they didn't have sequels for a long time. I had the same feeling when they released Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond and though I didn't care about HL: Alyx but I'm sure other people also felt betrayed when it was released.

The system requirements are vague as hell on the Steam page. But releasing this year is nice, so hoping for more details before too long. I just want to hear more Stephen Russell! A level editor would be cool, but I’m not holding my breath.

There are multiple mappers and active users using Linux. You want less missions? Also: Windows costs money. You ask people to buy Windows for a backup pc, while TDM is in fact multiplatform. I don't know how long tdm is multiplatform, but it must be a while. Listen Valve, Wesp says: Linux gamers are not normal gamers. Why is this relevant?

From an earlier post:

Any time you can spare would be greatly appreciated. Thank you both. I've created a post with more detailed information in the Beta Testing forum here:

May I ask why a libre version is necessary in the first place? Right now TDM already is a free standalone game. According to the first post the advantage would only be to add it to some repositories that I never even heard before. Would this be worth the effort?

I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. If agent A publishes a work W under a license L1 that allows agent B to build on the work as long as B publishes the derivative work under L1, then if A later decide to also offer W under another licence L2 (with similar stipulations about publishing derivative works under L2) then B can choose if their additions to W should be licenced under L1 or L2 or both. However, if the scrips in question were released as GPL then it would significantly reduce the risk of publishing derivative works based on them.

The proposal for a TDM libre is not about inclusion in a specific repository, or publication. I provided two just as examples. My hypothesis is this: A TDM libre will cater to a different audience than TDM regular. If a TDM libre can be provided in addition to TDM regular then the reach will be greater and the total audience will be larger. A larger audience will drive recruitment of contributors, to both versions. More contributors will drive quantity and quality of content, which in turn will further increase reach and audience in a positive spiral. As I understand it, if a software is included in a libre project (e.g. Debian), and they fix a defect in it that one of their users reported to them (because it is part of their distro), they will provide patches upstream to us which will then benefit all users, regardless of operating system. All contributions to TDM libre can be added to TDM regular. I also see TDM libre as a product associated with lower risks long term.

Sad, but thanks for trying! I appreciate it! Would it be feasible to re-write them? I don't see why the original files can't be used as references (and stubs) during such a work. As long as they are not outright copied.

Ya I saw that state class and wasn't sure what exactly the canonical way to interact with it was. I imagine there must be a better way - maybe dynamic_pointer_cast<BlindState>(GetMind()->GetState()); would be a better check? But I figured that was best left to the dev who ends up having to compile and implement the change. I wrote it that way just to illustrate the point. If I end up drafting the actual PR instead of just a forum post, I'll try to do better than string comparison haha - or at least extract the magic string from the class instead of just hard coding it in to the AI code. Not sure about the animation loop or the timer, but the bizarre hit detection is probably caused somewhere in https://github.com/stgatilov/darkmod_src/blob/trunk/game/ai/States/State.cpp#L489-L515 . In TDM, it looks like instead of dropping a flashbomb near-ish the AI, you have to drop it inside their vision cone in order for it to be effective, and they also have to pass a line of sight check to the bomb. That... might be too finicky or elaborate for the gameplay purpose of the flashbomb? Maybe it should be simplified to a radius or have more generous vision checks or something - there appears to be an else branch trying to do this in some cases. Or maybe there's a subtle math bug in one of those FOV checks or something?

TDM was never meant to be fully realistic, it would become impossibly difficult were that the case. None the less I still find myself wishing more could be done to make AI feel less like AI, especially when handling hostile encounters (usually the player). While like most aspects this could never be truly perfect, one area feels like it could be noticeably improved: Giving AI some form of long term memory, rather than just one alert level which goes back to zero after a short time. Here is the reason why I'm saying this: Walk inside your average heavily guarded mansion and step into the bright lights, making all the guards clearly see you and chase after you to attack. Once you've had enough fun repeating the process, hide somewhere and give everyone enough time to cool down. At the end of it all, hide somewhere in the shadows where you can barely be seen and let a guard walk past you: The guard will just say "is there something over there", at best waiting a few seconds and saying "probably just the shadows" before walking away... the same man that may have chased after you for 30 minutes and should by any logic know an intruder is still in the house, I mean come on Now I'm aware we have a basic persistence system: If I remember correctly an AI that's encountered the player and was alerted enough to draw their sword will have its acuity permanently increased by a slight amount. This however makes no noticeable difference as the AI behaves mostly the same. They'll keep telling fellow AI an intruder is in the area, this definitely helps but it's only a dialogue change not accompanied by noticeable modifications in behavior as you'd expect. Obviously massive modifications might be hard to do now without upsetting existing players since it would make everything harder. As such any such attempt would likely be an experiment and, if successful, a new menu option for the difficulty settings. Still I felt like suggesting my imagined solution just in case there's a point in considering tackling this. My idea: Replace the one-time bump in acuity with a paranoia level independent from the alert level... think of the existing alert system as short-term alert and the new one as long-term alert. The standard alert level of guards is slowly added to their paranoia level, thus the more time a guard spends being alert and the higher that alert is the more fear increases. Paranoia level may be allowed to decrease over time but at a far slower rate than the alert level: If an alert guard will typically take 3 minutes to fully calm down after losing track of the player, the paranoia level should take at least 30 if not 60 (real life) minutes to fully go down to minimum... even then it shouldn't drop below a certain degree after that point was reached, for instance just 50% of the maximum paranoia. This long-term fear level would have several effects on an AI as they patrol on their normal route... the ones I've thought about are: Increased acuity as they'll be more alert. This system would replace the existing simple bump we have in that regard, with a more fluid effect and also stronger effect. Increased playing of voices and idle animations: Due to being afraid the guard may talk to themselves or others a lot more frequently and babble excessively. Walking could be replaced by running for a while, even on path nodes that don't have the run flag. The AI would still patrol that same route just at a faster pace. As a map feature set by FM's: Some path nodes can be filtered by fear level, may already be possible with the simple system but I never tried it. An AI paranoid the player is still around but having resumed their normal patrol route may choose to patrol a more sensitive area it normally wasn't going to, which would be a fair way of punishing the player for being seen by having that AI start guarding a sensitive location from then on. If the paranoia level is allowed to slowly decrease, the guard may decide to go back on this decision... the player could then do something else for 15 minutes around the map till the guard abandons the paranoid patrol route. Here's an idea I like: AI randomly getting scared for no reason, thinking they see the player in every shadow even when there's nothing there. A scared guard normally walking on their patrol route would randomly become alert for no reason, typically when walking through a dark area, causing them to draw their sword or randomly run around for a second. The problem here is this effect would be random: Imagine you're hiding accordingly but a guard randomly freaks out and bumps into you, most players would find this unfair.

The Dark Mod 2.13 has been released! A new era in accurate AI Vision! When id Software released the Doom 3 modding SDK, The Dark Mod team saw the potential for something more than a multi-player cops vs robbers game like Thievery UT. The sheer amount of access to essential game-play systems meant that a true Thief style experience could potentially be created. One of the first things the team did was to investigate how a light-gem system could be implemented. Having a good way for both the player and AI to know when the player is visible to others is a crucial part of the Thief experience so if we couldn’t build it then the dream of a Thief style experience was over. Fortunately, there were enough parts of the AI visual logic and more than a few stub pieces of the Render code that gave us the ability to build a robust system. The downside of the light-gem system was performance. Even though we did our best to limit the viewport and resolution of the light-gem image captures, often the light-gem would cut FPS in half ( or less ). This was pretty painful, especially since most computers could just barely run vanilla Doom 3 at acceptable FPS. After this system was fully functional, other aspects of AI vision were investigated. Obviously, we could not afford to run the light-gem render for every object or body the AI might see so it was decided that the AI would do a more simplified light-gem calculation for things other than the player. This meant that ( to the AI visual scan ) all light volumes would be either cubes or pyramids with perfect exponential falloff. We would run a line-of-sight check to the objects then ( if it hit ) calculate the pixel brightness by the location of the spot in relation to the center of the light(s). This was far cheaper than rendering the whole scene but heavily impacted accuracy. Many solutions were proposed to improve things but a solution evaded us for years. 2.13 changes things! Now we have a "stochastic sampler" model that does regular measurements of the actual light volume pixels and builds a "running average" of how illuminated different entities are. The days of seeing knocked-out AI in the middle of a bright spotlight get ignored are over. Now all AI and loot entities (etc) essentially have their own light-gem and it performs excellently! Magnificent Mission Management! Daft Mugi has drastically improved the GUI menus for mission management. The Dark Mod mission list and in-game downloader now have a search filter window that follows modern conventions of reducing the listed items as each new letter eliminates a possible matching mission name. Both lists can be sorted by actual name ( The Rats Triumphant ) or Chicago Style ( Rats Triumphant, The ). Additional mission details ( readme data ) can now be scrolled so players can see more information about the mission without having to navigate to the darkmod/fms folders. The menus have also been tuned with smaller font sizes for more practical mission listing and have been hardened against buggy order of operations issues so that you will be far less likely to encounter strange issues or crashes when downloading and installing missions. Parallax Occlusion Mapping! Stgatilov has added the oft requested POM feature to the latest Dark Mod release! WellingtonCrab has coordinated with him to provide examples and check the functionality and quality. Now The Dark Mod is ready to offer a quantum leap in perceived geometric detail with all sorts of surfaces realistically showing 3D parallax rather than the flatter looking normal maps we usually offer. WellingtonCrab also created many texture variants that are tuned to look better with POM enabled. Other Graphics Goodies! Now cubemaps \ environment maps respect more stage keywords. This means that faked reflections on water shaders can now move in relation to the water texture movement offering a more convincing illusion! Subviews ( cameras, portals, mirrors, xray, etc ) can now be nested. You can now have a skybox render in a camera view, etc. Volumetric lights and particles now render in mirrors! Alpha-tested surfaces get alpha shadows in Shadow Maps mode. Tone-mapping now supports range compression to prevent unwanted overbright areas. Arcturus has introduced some new metal materials that use improved cubemaps as well as skyboxes with clouds that use POM! Stability and Performance! The console variable system ( CVAR ) has been improved to be thread safe. This should resolve some rare crashes that involve weapon scripts that rely on CVAR values. We now automatically detect the number of CPU cores and allocate Jobs based on the detected specifications. Level loading has been given more parallel execution optimizations including optimizations for loading audio samples in parallel. Uncapped FPS is enabled by default so Linux players will not have a poor first time experience and many audio and video playback timing bugs that occur only in classic capped mode are avoided. Finally, Linux vsync support has been greatly improved. Improved Training Mission! The Training Mission is supposed to help players understand the basics of Dark Mod game-play and controls. It was created to coincide with The Dark Mod v1.0 and was not significantly altered until TDM v1.08 ( when Bikerdude did some texture replacement for 2.0 standalone and improved the overall visuals ). As such, many new game-play features that were added since 1.0 were never included in the mission. Now the mission has been upgraded to include more game-play features such as the Vine Arrow as well as getting further visual upgrades and EFX Reverb! Drunken AI! Now that the AI have better visual accuracy, Amadeus decided to balance things out by fixing many of the broken behaviors of Drunken AI so that they are more reliable and consistent for use in missions by default ( no need to extensively customize the defs or use scripting to improve them ). Potions! Dragofer and Amadeus have completed the work on the Slowfall potion originally prototyped by VanishedOne. They also incorporated the invisibility potion by Kingsal ! These now have pre-defined slots in the gameplay menu as well as the default shop menu design. Assets Galore! Along with new POM textures, we now have: A new modular pipe set A new Lampion entity Some new Factory Machine entities Ornate wood and stone relief textures A new AI praying animation A new AI smoking animation And many fixes or improvements to existing assets EFX Reverb Location Preset! Frost_Salamander took some time away from his continued work on the excellent “The Lieutenant” series missions to make EFX reverb setup easier for himself and other mission authors. You can now add EFX preset spawnargs to location entities rather than having to use the EFX def file. Translation Packs! Between TDM 1.06 and 2.0 Tels and the translating community started translating many missions but these translations required that the original mission be altered in a way that made it harder for the mission authors to revise. That meant that translation packs were in limbo being hosted by 3rd party sites \ forums along with their orphaned old missions. The translators over at the Darkfate forums came up with an solution by including not only the translation strings in the translation pack but also the altered map files, GUI defs, etc that had translation work done to them. This would leave the original mission untouched but allow translation packs to override some parts. We have gone through the old archives of these translations and have reworked them to work with the latest version of TDM (and the associated missions). Most of the translations are Russian ( due to the continued work of the Darkfate people ) but many of the early TDM missions also have German, Italian, French, etc translations too. Also Nolok contributed a brand new Catalan menu translation! Subtitles! Datiswous has been creating story subtitles for many of the existing missions in the TDM mission database. Most authors have incorporated these into their official releases, otherwise players can still add them to the FM folder. A detailed list of changes can be seen here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What's_new_in_TDM_2.13 To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder. Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.13, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.13 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.13. Before upgrading, set TDM to use one of the built-in missions ( Training Mission, A New Job, Tears of St Lucia ) then use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates

Oh shoot, this post fell under the radar, sorry @BenJ. I can take a look at this issue, but can you replicate it? Mind offering up a few more details? It would also be good to know if you are playing with any additional mods or add-ons

Nvidia could have designed their low-end die (GB206 is used in both the 5060 and 5060 Ti) to have a higher maximum bus width, e.g. 192-bit for 12 GB or 160-bit for 10 GB. But the trivial thing for them to do would be to use the 3 GB (24 Gb) GDDR7 modules to reach 12 GB on 128-bit. These are already available (used in 5090 Laptop) but could be in short supply. The way to handle that is to simply delay the release of 60-class cards, and Nvidia is no stranger to releasing the top SKUs long before the bottom SKUs. I think there would be no problem with having 12 GB 5060 and 12/16 GB 5060 Ti options, but the upsell/scamming potential is worse for Nvidia in that scenario. As it stands, leakers have repeatedly pointed to the release of 5080 Super 24 GB and 5070 Super 18 GB cards using 3 GB GDDR7 sometime in the future. Nothing below that is confirmed. Intel Arc B770 reportedly still set for release, expected in the fourth quarter of the year

TDM Modpack 5.0 Compatible with The Dark Mod 2.13 (only!). The download link can be found in the opening post. Introducing... ~ THE LIGHT STONES ~ The shortcomings of the Light Gem come from the fact that we normally have nothing to compare its luminosity with and it is many times difficult to tell how lit we are. Fully concealed? Slightly lit? Besides, no wonder the original creator(s) of the Light Gem had to come up with the red frame because at some point it is impossible to discern medium from high brightness. The Light Gem has served us well but the time to mod it has come. Inspired by a comment by @Zerg Rush here is my take on the light indicator: This new light indicator does not make use of the red color. As far as usability goes I think it is best that we stick to yellow for light, red for health and blue for air. The Light Stones mod probably isn't the perfect solution but a step in the right direction for sure and the best thing of all is that I didn't touch a single line of code: the effect is achieved by simply altering five images. Light levels are calculated by the game engine the same as always but the outputs are displayed differently now. Love it? Hate it? See the Light Stones in action and let us know what you think! This mod is available in all missions. ~ Visually Visible Player Weapons ~ On the subject of light, according to the Light Gem Stones having the bow or the sword sheathed make you a tad more visible and I thought we could organically let players know by making these weapons "visually visible" in the dark. While I was at it I also made the Blackjack slightly visible for players to be able to discern its texture in very dark conditions instead of seeing a black shape. The change in the blackjack is minimal and I don't expect any complaint. This little tweak is included in Core Essentials and it is available in all missions except in A House of Locked Secrets, Hazard Pay and Noble Affairs. ~ Modpack Settings ~ Up until now we used an external file to configure some controls and now this functionality has been built into the game and the "Auto Commands" mod has been decommissioned. Simply click on the Modpack banner in the Main Menu to access this screen and setup controls to your liking: I haven't figured out yet how to detect if a particular mod is installed and this screen is always the same regardless of whether you have a mod or not. I will look to improve this in the future. ~ Inventory Menu ~ In previous iterations of the Modpack the Inventory Menu has gone through several visual and functional upgrades and this time thanks to @datiswous and @nbohr1more we can change the sorting of the items: ~ Flash Grenade & Shock Mine Mods ~ There's nothing new for players in these mods but I want to stop here for a second to say something. When creating mods I not only do my best to make them compelling and compatible with most missions but I also try to anticipate what mappers might do. The Flashbomb had never been modded by any mapper but due to some limitations during the 2.11 times the Flash Grenade mod was doomed to break a mission and it eventually happened in Kingsal's Moongate Ruckus. Despite it being my problem I wasn't sure how to tackle the situation and Kingsal was very kind and in an update he included a fix in his mission to avoid the incompatibilities. @kingsal, I once asked you include the file "def/tdm_playertools_flashbomb.def" in "Moongate Ruckus". I finally had time to review my mod in detail and make it as resilient as possible so feel free to remove the file in your next update. Thank you very much for your understanding. On a side note, the Shock Mine mod was also created during the 2.11 times and it has now received a similar treatment and the modded mine shouldn't break anything in the long run. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fellow @wesp5, For this release I revisited and updated most of the mods and some are of your concern: The bottle fragment in the "Fragile Bottles" mod used to replace the original entity but I changed it to replace only the model (and the skin) thus preserving the entity. This approach is way safer to guarantee compatibility with crazy stuff mappers might do. By default, FPS are uncapped in 2.13 and the "Blinking Items" and the "Loot Animations" mods have received and update to make them feel more or less the same under any FPS. Consider updating these mods in the Unofficial Patch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Once again, thanks @Dragofer for making standalone mods possible, thanks @stgatilov for everything you do, thanks @taaaki for hosting the game and maintaining this place and, last but not least, thanks @nbohr1more for all the house keeping. Here is the full change log (the download link can be found in the opening post): • v5.0 New release - Compatible with TDM 2.13 (only). - LIGHT STONES: Initial release. - AUTO COMMANDS: Decommissioned (replaced with an in-game menu). - CORE ESSENTIALS - MISC: Player weapons are visually visible in the dark. - CORE ESSENTIALS - MISC: The inventory grid/menu allows sorting items. - CORE ESSENTIALS - MISC: Inventory count removed for non-stackable items. - CORE ESSENTIALS - SMART OBJECTS: Added names to some actors / ragdolls. - CORE ESSENTIALS - FRAGILE BOTTLES: Bottle fragment now replaces the model instead of the entity. - CORE ESSENTIALS - LOOT ANIMATIONS: Mod revisited to make it work nicely with high FPS. - CORE ESSENTIALS - BLINKING ITEMS: Mod revisited to make it work nicely with high FPS. - FLASH GRENADE & SHOCK MINE: Removed potential incompatibilities with future missions. - SHOCK MINE: Shop price doubled (80 gold now). - SKILL LOOP: Final update to make it more versatile in destination. Happy Taffing!

Well, leaving aside the snark of the last post, note that nobody has to install wesp5's patch, so, nobody is forced to be fine with the changes to the ingame maps he made. I agree though that it's a different universe, thus "France" isn't full of Frenchies.