Search the Community

Probably the .script file that's needed, but unfortunately can't be included with a prefab. Maybe there's a comment somewhere in the prefab (or in the wiki or forums) that says what script it needs and where to find it. (The similar combination setup I used earlier doesn't involve "slot", so clearly uses a different script that I what I have.)

I think that the existence of a dedicated bug tracker for this engine proves that I should somehow make it known when it crashes. I just figured that the tracker was an internal thing between developers, and that it was okay to instead report the bugs here, especially since I desperately needed help with it, and since you have two sub-forums mentioning that they're intended for reporting bugs. ...so why, when I report a bug, am I getting shamed for it? Why was the guy in the thread you linked getting shamed for not backing up his project, instead of the main dev acknowledging that there is a very deceptive button in the engine, that can remove fan mission folders when you press it? Blaming the reporter for not backing up his work, is certainly not how I would personally handle reports of entire projects disappearing, but I guess now I'm warned about how he sees these things, to the point where I'm wondering if it's a good idea to report any bugs I find in the future, at all, if I'm just going to be considered a bad person for it. "Hm, to my experience, crashes in free software is a regular thing. Try "Natron" and you will understand what I mean." I don't understand your point. If crashes happen frequently enough, should we treat them like Covid and just "try to live with it"? I'm pretty sure that the bind bug is easy to fix, but it's like you're saying that bugs have a right to exist too. "Lots of longtime DR mappers ask questions in the Newbie thread (myself included). Nothing to be ashamed of and by DR/DM standards you are a newbie (and you have not to be ashamed of that as well! )" So if I've programmed for 30 years, mapped for Dromed for countless years (since roughly the turn of the millenia), mapped for the Dark Mod for 1 year, but joined these forums just a few weeks ago, I'm a newbie. I think that by that definition, the word "newbie" has lost all meaning. Besides, reporting crashes are not the same as just asking questions. Anyone can reply to a question. It takes a developer to fix a crash issue. ...and it's like you don't expect the developers to even fix crashes, and I really hope that you're wrong about that. For example, since I updated to this year's version, Dark Radiant itself, hasn't even crashed once, and it used to crash all the time, and so I take that as evidence that development involves fixing crashes. "If you want to report a bug, then please use the Bug Tracker." Will do. I was just fooled by the subforum descriptions actually telling me to report bugs in them. "You wouldn't believe how many mappers lost WIPs because of defective hardware" Again: I don't see your point here, where you argue for not fixing defective hardware. When I'm told about a bug in my program, I just go "Thank you. I'll fix that.". I don't go "Well, weren't you a sucker for using my program.". That's not how I was brought up at all. "for somebody who expects Armageddon in the near future (and there are really good reasons for that), you have a pronounced need for communication. I think that does not fit, because: Why go on with communication when all hell will break lose the day after tomorrow?" Well, why not? Yes, I am so interested in mapping, that it's actually cutting into my apocalypse survival routines a bit, but that's just human nature, and a month's vacation from prepping, won't make that much of a difference. "I hope that you - despite of your own assessment - will finish your WIP and we all can enjoy a cool new mission in the future with your name in the credits." Well, for me, mapping is about pleasing myself - not others. Play The Beginner's Guide, and you'll see what I mean.

Since it already has been mentioned in the forums, I'd like to announce a small project of mine. A few weeks ago I was playing Legend of Grimrock and it struck me that their level design is extremely simple and modular, and yet, the player can spend quite a lot of time in the game. And it looks pretty, too! So I wondered if it wouldn't be possible to create a modern "Dungeon Crawler" (solve puzzles, fight monsters, collect loot, progress your character, upgrade your equipment) type of game inside the TDM engine. The engine already supports a lot of things one needs for this, and the overal structure and assets work, too. And with prefabs, one might get the level layout done quickly. However, building a few test prefabs in DR is easy, but creating a full mission out of them is quite painful. Not only needs it a lot of planning, but you can also spend a lot of time "upgrading" things later on. For instance if you later want to add a grime decal to the walls, you have to revisit the entire map. Even worse is if you find out later that your block size must be bigger or smaller. So the idea was born to create a sort of framework that can assemble missions from prefabs. Preferable while getting the description of the mission from a text file. So far, this has been a lot easier than I thought. Here is what I got working so far: Overview: You can describe your mission in a (Unicode) text file. This contains overall options, different locations (each location can have its own ambient light, music,name, fog), and the connections between the locations. Each location can have multiple "floor levels", these are stacked on top of each other. The config file also specifies which symbol means "use this prefab". It is also possible to specify links (per location), which means you can say "this lever with the symbol A opens the door with the symbol D". The framework reads the prefabs, and then positiones them in the map. It also glues all the locations together, adds location_info entities, a player start, an exit, and an objective to reach the exit. The resulting map is then enhanced with script objects (all nec. assets are bundled together), and automatically dmapped via TDM. Everything then is packaged together into a working .PK4 file. My demo map takes about 20 seconds, where 15 are dmap. In addition to the "basic" stuff I also managed to get a few things working, like a pressure plate, portcullies, and also made some puzzles. Oh, and per location fog (fading from location to location). Different difficulty levels are also supported, one can specify "this prefab appears only on easy" etc. You can find more info and screenshots and demo here: http://bloodgate.com/swift/ There is also a developer diary where I will be posting interesting entries from time to time. Here is an DR shot of a sample level, consisting of small modular prefabs and one large (the large hall on the lower left): The next steps will be to add more randomness (either static at map generation, or at runtime, so the map is slightly different each time you replay it). Also, while it is already possible to "overlay" prefabs (e.g. "for this location, look first here before falling back to the default"), it is not yet possible to "reskin" prefabs. This would be something which is impossible in DR (you cannot really reskin worldspawn brushes, unless you live with the fact that it is all manual For now I'm quite excited!

Thank you for a great puzzle fm! I'm having real trouble with the TDM v 2.10-64bit on Linux Mint 21.1 Link to the guide supplied by V-Man339 https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/15844-fan-mission-the-gatehouse-by-bikerdude-goldchocobo-updated-02112014/page/7/#comment-429405

I agree. I'm copying this idea over to the https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21741-subtitles-possibilities-beyond-211/ thread. Related: I'll probably do some more experiments with the current TDM font & size, to understand max char count versus field width.

Since I don't know the extend of one's knowledge in this area (what's obvious & overlooked to me may not be the case for others) I'm posting a new thread to deal with mesh & animation issues. * sharing animations: Thief: Deadly Shadows shares animations between AI in Unreal format (psk, psa) without the need of resizing animations since the size of the AI is in on the mesh itself (any animation would work regardless of size depending on if they share common joints & layout). Doom 3 animations, on the other hand, the size of the animations dictate the size of the mesh. If you use a citywatch animation (the citywatch md5anim is bigger) on the thief then the thief would resize to the citywatch. For example, if you copied (which is pointless since you can use the def file to point to that animation) the citywatch run.m5anim to the thief folder, then the thief would appear to grow when he's running. In order to share (misnomer since the md5anim is not actually shared) animations point the def file, when exporting, to the source Maya binaries (mb or ma) of the animations you want shared. * rigging discrepancies: The Unreal format is more forgiving. If there are extra joints in the mesh then an animation with those missing joints could still work as long as the major joints are shared. D3 needs matching joints to work exactly. There is no room for error. Thus the -keep option on the def file is used to match the animation joints to the mesh joints. Due to various discrepancies in AI rigs, the -keep option is often used. These discrepancies are not often the fault of the person who is rigging. Sometimes Maya gets flakey. Flooding the skeleton when rigging in Maya does help to keep stray vertices from going to the nearest, and often unused, joint. When finding out which joints to use, the md5anim and md5mesh can be viewed in a text editor. Then add or subtract which joints in the -keep option (used before the .mb animations decls in the def file) to match the animations to the mesh. When rigging, the leg mesh is separate from the body mesh so use the flood option (flood the legs with "Hips", flood the body with "Spine"). Look here for more info: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/...aracter_rigging After this FAQ continues we can add this to the wiki. def examples may be included.

@KlatremusI also use front end acceleration and have never had a problem so I am guessing that’s fine. I am not seeing much of a difference in cpu utilization between the script versions either but I am wondering if there is some kind of inefficiency in it that is causing other things to break. If you are peeking at the console keep an eye out for warnings related AAS (NAV mesh/path finding) or maybe stack overflow if there is some kind of broken loop in the script. I have been continuing the mission off your save and at least haven’t run into any other stuck ai yet.

Well I am happy you managed to load my save, and also interesting that the condump didn't give any info. Keep in mind that when I Supreme Ghost I save and reload a lot. At the end of a Supreme run in a mission this size, it's not uncommon for me to have several hundred saves/reloads in the stats. If there is a miniscule chance each reload that a guard that is close to his nav mesh border might get stuck, this chance could get compounded by the amount of saves/reloads I do. I am just guessing here really, as I have no idea. I just know that happens in Thief, although of course it's a completely different engine.

Some years ago i succesfully downloaded the wiki with wget, for TDM dvd. I dont know if this method wikl work now. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19998-tdm-collection-dvd/#comment-437887

Just to clarify, if someone maybe wondering, the 16 poly limit, is only for dynamic rigid body physics, not the normal static world and mesh collision mesh's. Now IMO, you can't really compare idtech 4 physics engine, to any other in the market, is a very basic and simple physics engine, done inhouse by a single developer at idSoftware, made to be more complex than Quake 3 physics but still a very performant and fast simple physics system, "good enough" for a 2003 game. In reality, is inferior to any third party physics engine on the market, ODE (used in Stalker), Newton dynamics (used by Frictional games), Bullet, Havok, PhysX and others, are way better and more complex physics engines, today any of them, are a better choice for a game engine than idtech 4 physics engine, why, because they are all multicore physics engines (not sure about ODE), while the one on idtech4, afaik still runs on a single core! And if someone is thinking this, even thou it would be awesome, I don't think the TDM physics engine will ever be replaced, the source of it, was the first thing idSoftware released in 2004 and no one, apart from AAA dev houses, have to this day, at lest that I know, improved it further or even replaced it entirely. So imo If 16 polys is the limit than so be it, time to be cleaver and creative with shapes!

I guess the best image-to-normal conversions I've seen here in the forums are via njob. I am curious about this AI thing though: https://github.com/HugoTini/DeepBump has to be installed into Blender as a plugin?

Nice. I was so free to setup everything for it to be used as a LOD model in TDM. Two notes, though: The lod distance values are set erratic. They probably need tweaking. But this is something mission authors should do anyway. The models don't seem to have a dedicated shadow mesh. That could make them unneccessarely performance houngry. Someone with model expertise would have to take a look at this. https://www.mediafire.com/file/nwdnwtriio5d0co/tdm_statue_sealandbear.pk4/file

No, not really, have only seen him on the forums many years ago. He deserves a lot of credit for providing the SVN infrastructure in the beginnings of the project, it's been only later when we transferred this to a hosted server. Memory is blurry, but I think my time working on TDM and his don't overlap that much - I had been getting more active, and he pulled back a bit. He bootstrapped quite a few important systems, IIRC he's been working on light gem and the first Stim/Response and Inventory implementations. From what I recall, he gave the project an organisational backbone in the technical department which is crucial to keep things together. Folks like Spring and NH who have joined long before me could give more insights, I guess. (Looking at my join date makes me feel old either way. From TDM's current view point, the year 2006 seems like right at the beginning, but actually the mod had already been existing for two years by that time I joined. With the first release in 2009, 2006 is rather in the middle. Heck, I haven't touched the mod code for at least 10 years - and I can still remember a few things, which is a testament of how much it occupied my thoughts back then).

Had a problem with the web server yesterday that led to a crashed table in the forum database. This has now been repaired and things seems to work again. I was on travel so it took a while before I was able to fix it. Merry Christmas!

There are other complications though. How much fall damage should player take, if they decide to jump off a rope with the body? Should the player let go of the body or not? Also, right now it's much harder to jump off the rope with the body than without it. Why? And last but not least, how would you teach players these things, possibly without much hand-holding and text prompts explaining the rules? I guess I'm with @STiFUon this one, if you restrict dropping the body, you'll save yourself (and mappers) a lot of headaches. But even that doesn't solve all the problems, I know I'm in the minority in these forums, but as a player, I really appreciate the beauty and efficiency in simplicity of the design. Not overthinking everything and adding more and more rules for the sake of realism (or anything else).

I can get on the main forum now but still get an error when trying to load posts. Anyone else?

This is basically "do include my work ASAP because I worked so hard, or else *sulk*". This is similar case: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21679-beta-testing-211/page/10/#comment-482352 This is neither a commercial product, nor a phishing email. That sense of rush and pressure is artificial. These releases typically do take long, and even then, there are often many things broken by mistake or omission. Often there aren't enough people to test stuff, or they're not competent enough, etc, etc. There's little point in hurry.

After several months of working on this project, I'm happy to finally announce the release of my anthro character set for The Dark Mod! The package contains anthropomorphic characters for use in fan missions, with which artists can include furries as part of their story. Below is the repository, as well as a short FAQ describing the mod in more detail. GitHub repository How do I install the mod?The character set is meant to be used with fan missions. To include it, first clone the GitHub repository mentioned above somewhere on your drive. Then simply copy all of the directories into the root directory of your FM (eg: darkmod/fms/myfm/). You should now be able to find the characters in DarkRadiant under the AI section and add them to your map! What characters are included?There are 5 species, 7 overall fur patterns, 3 character definitions per race, plus male and female versions of each person. Races include wolves, foxes, leopards, squirrels, rabbits. Voices, personalities, as well as other traits were carefully tweaked to match each character as closely as possible. What license is the mod, and who are the authors?The initial model and texture were created by Untied Verbeger, who publicizes his works under the CC0 license. As such, the anthro models and textures are themselves licensed under CC0 / PD. The characters included were based on his wolf model, to which I made several fixes and contributions in the past. Obviously it's meant to work with other assets in TDM, which have their own licenses (typically CC-BY-NC-SA). The original model and authors can be found on Blendswap at: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/79735 http://www.blendswap.com/user/Verbeger http://www.blendswap.com/user/MirceaKitsune Wait... so was this made by furries?The mod was put together by me (MirceaKitsune) and I am indeed a furry. I chose to clarify this as I'd like to avoid negative remarks on the aspect; This is a contribution I made with enthusiasm and attention to detail for The Dark Mod, same as all contributions done by other artists in the TDM community. I've spent a lot of time adapting the mesh, rigging it, creating the materials, setting up definitions, and testing against long loading times. I don't care whether someone has a negative opinion of the furry community, but please respect the work that was put into this project at least. How can I support the mod?Although the mod itself is released under a free license, I won't accept financial contributions, in order to respect the wish of the community for The Dark Mod to not be used commercially. The most important way in which you can support my mod is to use it: If you're a fantasy mission creator who is a fan of anthro characters, include this into your FM and add the characters to your world! Also, if you notice any bugs or wish to improve something, feel free to inform me or send me your contribution or open a pull request on GitHub. Lastly, if you believe the characters might match the theme and quality standards needed for inclusion, support adding them to The Dark Mod!