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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.

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.

The problem with a "theme" system (I think) is that it's forcing the assets into categories they may not fit well into or that don't make sense; or I mean it's forcing the mapper to think in terms of discrete "categories" at all, when that may not be most effective. Whereas a tagging system doesn't impose any "system"... Tags are completely open-ended, and could be at any level of scale or heirarchy -- you could have: bathroom-furniture, made-of-wood, Victorian, X-author's set, good for triggers, items for a bookshelf, architectural, magic, etc, etc... as tags, but not all of those categories make sense as discrete themes with other co-themes at the same level. I guess this is a longwinded say tagging more intuitively lets you target what you want without imposing a structure you have to wedge it into ... just a totally open field of tags from any walk of life. Edit: This is not to say tags should be arbitrarily specific. There should be tags of general categories too of course; even these will be the backbone of the system. But the whole point is tagging allows multiple layers, so you can use the general category tags to start your search, then ween it down with increasingly specific tag sets, whatever is best for the asset set. Some asset sets, or especially combinations, will categorize differently than others, and tagging is ok with that. Edit2: The image I have in my mind anyway is like a photo-collection tagged collection. There's an opening page with a tag cloud with the most common basic tags (general category) the largest in size and minor ones smaller, which you click on and then you get a browser with that set of textures. Then on the left hand bar will be all the tag-combinations within that set (other tags textures in the set are carrying; then in parentheses maybe the number of AND-textures it'd filter down to / OR-new textures they'd bring in), the major tags again larger or highlighted somehow, which if you click one of those new tags, it'd filter the browser to show the AND set. And maybe there's also an option so you could have an OR set and get both (or even select a new OR set from the full tag cloud), which adds new textures into the browser window, and also new sets of tags in the left-bar (the new tags carried by one or more textures in the new set). Also there's a place you could back out of a tag to cut that subset out. So you could open up & winnow down the set as you desire. It ends up a kind of way to browse through the whole collection by navigating through tag AND/OR combinations. Also there's a search bar where you could type in a tag at any time also.

I just stumbled on this website. http://www.dedalo-3d.com/ The software is primarily target at Blender, but I guess it should be easy to convert these models to other formats. I wonder what our modelling expert says to such a tool. I think it is a bit like this head generator, only for complete humanoid models. Since it is open source, it might be a better alternative to Headgen. Not neccessarily in quality (I don't know yet), but in terms of legallity.

Personally I think this is the worst idea ever. The Reason forums has LOADS of info and knowledge, built up through years and years. I'm really sad to see it go away, and I can't understand why they've made this decision. https://www.propellerheads.se/forum/showthread.php?p=1579099#poststop

As far as my cyberpunk conversion goes, I believe I can handle most of the basics. Mainly since I'm using existing freely licensed stuff, not creating new assets on my own as much... it's all about finding an easy way to convert and adapt stuff, ideally automating as much of it as possible. I've already ported all of the Xonotic characters to TheDarkMod, as well as two texture packages. The existing animations work fine for humans, at least for now till we get around to making new ones... they will be using the same rig in any case, for compatibility with both old and new anims. Once I get enough done to prove the potential of the idea, I'm hopeful more developers will join in. As far as MakeHuman goes, I realize that fully exporting to md5mesh might be too much to hope for. I do however at least hope for a MakeHuman version of the TDM rig, so that I don't have to arrange every bone for each character in Blender. That part is a lot more doable, as MH joint templates can be defined in a way that lets them scale with the property settings of the character. I'm curious if anyone might be willing to look into that... if not I might myself eventually, but I really don't know how this works and if I have the tools to do it.

The spoiler tags aren't for you, it's for the rest of us reading this thread so WE don't get spoiled. Thanks for spoiling the frobbable book on a shelf for the rest of us. EDIT: I'll be unsubscribing to this thread to avoid further spoilers. Maybe I'll check back after I've finished the mission Amadeus

Let me elaborate on this tactic: 1) Postulate some crazy concepts about historical events until one gains a little traction either by morons or people who find it to be an amusing meme 2) Test the waters in different forums and social media spaces to see how folks react to this 3) If the forum crowd is determined to be largely left-wing and rationale, overamplify how "idiotic" people are for believing XYZ and then slowly begin associating these "idiots" with anyone they consider their social or political adversaries until you get large numbers of forum members to rant about right-wing "Trump-tards" (etc) and foam at the mouth about all their political grievances 4) Pretend to be a right leaning person, act like a jerk, and get your posts censored 5) Go to right leaning forums and show them that this "theory" is being censored and see if you can get them to integrate it into the larger narrative of "true things that the left is censoring". ( Eg, add it to the pile of Qanon nonsense ). 6) Return to the left leaning forums to mock the right leaning folks for doing step 5. Mission accomplished, you've entrenched more poorly educated people into an absurd belief system and you've ignited a bunch of left-wing derision against them. This type of agitated polarization works well whether you are Putin, the Republican Party, Democrats, etc. Divide and conquer. Here's a tip: Nobody needs to grouse around about what "idiotic" things people believe. If you don't like people believing dumb things, then create a blog, youtube video, or podcast explaining the topic in easy ( and friendly ) terms to those you wish to evangelize into the world of being "not idiotic". The language of referring to people as "those idiots who believe" is a cancer that we suffer too much of these days with political propaganda organizations such as "Media Matters for America" (MMFA) who basically write a single set of political jokes about a daily topic and feed them to all the Late Night television hosts so that if you don't hear them say "republican person X did \ said this dumb thing" from one late night personality, you surely will hear it from another one and the version of what is told omits any nuance or rational counterpoint. In some cases, the words are out-right fabricated from out-of-context statements or things that MMFA thinks people will believe. Here's a perfect example: To this day, late night comedians treat the incriminating emails on Hunter Biden's laptop as "fake Russian slander" even though the New York Times has corroborated their authenticity and they are DKIM signed. They use the laptop story as a talking point about how Republican's are "pro Russian idiots" even though nobody of either political party would be happy to have the son of a vice president using his father's position to arrange financial scams and deals with geopolitical enemies ( China ). Because the latter information is largely invisible to over 50% of the US populace, it serves as a perfect place for political divide and conquer. If the entirety of mainstream entertainment and news are gonna bury or distort legitimate news stories about their allies, what are the chances that anyone will vote for a moderate "middle" candidate? The left will see right-leaning voters who discuss the laptop story as Russian traitors and the Right will see the left as "idiots" who get all their news from television comedians and insane "woke" SJW blue hairs. Perfectly divisive. People need to stop looking at the proles on the ground and start thinking about all the groups that are trying to pull the strings. So I state again, this is no place for astro-turfers, propagandists, and non-linear warfare. Nobody here really cares about what dumb things are floating through the brains of a small group of internet denizens. If these "idiots" grow in numbers, calling them idiots "louder" will not "cure" them or shrink their numbers. The only thing you will achieve is more entrenchment and polarization.

DarkRadiant 3.3.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Remove menu options which are not applicable to current game Feature: Grey-out menu entries that are not applicable Feature: FX Declaration Parsing Support Feature: FX Chooser Feature: Renderer now takes "translucent" keyword into account Fixed: Lighting Mode Renderer draws hidden lights Fixed: Loading map results in "Real Hard DarkRadiant Failure" exception Fixed: Crash when trying to set default mouse or keyboard bindings Fixed: Unit Tests intermittently get stuck on Github runner Fixed: xmlutil thread safety problems Fixed: Some materials aren't displayed correctly Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.3.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

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.

I decided to test facegen vs. makehuman. Here's where I got the source photo of Andrea: http://www.3d.sk/?id=15 *Warning - nude picture of obese lady on here Here's a comparison shot: Here's the resulting wireframes from both programs: Needless to say, I just let facegen do its thing while I manually did everything with makehuman. The nice thing about facegen is that its automatic, but there's a hefty license to distribute the models generated with that program. Makehuman is open source & I came pretty close to matching Andrea's face. The wireframes show that the makehuman model is higher poly (I didn't do a count because makehuman's body would be added to the head since I didn't delete that part of the mesh). There's also the eyes, tongue, teeth, eyelashes, etc. in the makehuman model. With additional sculpting & texture work I could probably get the makehuman model closer to Andrea's photo. EDIT: Here's a pagan male I put together (render shot from makehuman):

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....

DarkRadiant 3.2.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Show entityDefs related to selected models in Model Chooser Feature: Support for rendering blend lights Feature: Implement sorting of Interaction Stages Feature: Recognise type of "set x on y" spawnargs Feature: OBJ files: loader supports usemtl keywords directly referencing material names (without .mtl file) Fixed: Material editor: additional preview object in textures/glass/ materials Fixed: Every attempt to load a texture will trigger a SIGSEGV signal caught: 11 Improvement: Update to wxWidgets 3.2.0 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.2.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?