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Frost Don't get me wrong - I greatly appreciate 'challenging' Which is why I normally do missions on Difficult. And I don't mind if I spend half an hour working out how to get past a particular 'obstacle'. If there ends up being a couple of areas where I have to come here for hints, then the difficultly is probably about right(!)

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

I've also been playing lots of TG/T2 missions recently and I definitely feel this sentiment, but I do also remember how TDM played before the blackjacking revamp. Now that was garbage. Post revamp, with the animation tell, I've actually felt comfortable enough with the way TDM does things now? Like its still definitely more difficult and finicky than TG/T2 and that frustrates me in the moments where I fail to blackjack and thought I was gonna succeed, but I at least respect it as a design decision. TG/T2 really do make it too easy to give an entire city block migraines by bopping people in the feet. What needs to change is how quickly AI goes from unaware to perfectly invincible - a "surprise" state, where they play some comical "BWA-HUH?!?!" shrug animation and can still be blackjacked while you're running up to them or if you suddenly jump out of the shadows, would probably go a long way to making the blackjacking mechanics and hitboxes feel the way they're intended to feel.

This is a splendid mission, thanks Jnon. Classic thief with a fine big map and lots of sneaking and exploring to enjoy. I can't agree with most of the criticism. The only thing I didn't like were the irrelevant (and ugly) "street crowd sound FX" that often mar these otherwise atmospheric city missions, but I'm aware that opinions differ on this matter.

Fun mission, maybe i would have liked some side quests on the way, but as the player is leaving town, maybe it didn't matter as much? I realized that some of the buildings can just be entered from the main doors, not needing the alternate paths. Maybe this was fine to keep it a little fast paced. Some more of the readables could have been pick-up-able. I loved the: I don't usually like sprawling city missions, but this was very right sized.

Multiple missions, yes Specifics are out of mind by now. Shouldn't take too long to find an example. I would say shorter range sounds tend to be more obvious, so look for things like hissing steam pipes or a lonely light.

@wesp Does your / can your patch remove the asterisk before translated mods in the DL'able missions list? I don't want missions I've done / possess to be visible in the non-DL'ed missions. Alternatively, is there another way of simply removing these annoying "translated" missions?

Hello! To celebrate 15 years of TDM, and because so amazing missions have been made in my absence, I felt compelled to made a small mission for everyone to enjoy: The Last Offering! Mission briefing: Build time: roughly 30 h darkradiant time during october-november 2024. AI has been used for initial mission brainstorming, proofreading and polishing readables. Thanks: *Whole TDM community for everything. *Betatesters: thebigh, datiswous, Shadow Other: I challenge you to play this short mission without saving or loading! The player gets plenty of gold for gear: buy a good thieving kit and enjoy the mission without saving! It is quite possible it is more exciting that way. Let me know what you think replying to this thread: I'd love to hear about your experiences and opinions. Enjoy, and I hope you have as fun playing as I had making this! Download link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HthqgoeBKf7kgYTRm5ice5t31_90_PRu/view?usp=drive_link

The mission easily goes to my list of replayable missions, which is my second highest rank. Yes, some vertexes aren't snipped together and there was a single piece of loot I wasn't able to get , but these are negligible issues. I appreciated the creative elements and little secrets and the way you used the light sources. Thank you for your work.

I had the total opposite of this, nobody detected me, I only had some mumble reactions in the statistics. In general when you play such semi-open world missions you need to be extra careful where you walk. Disagree, the gameplay is solid and guard placement is fine, it only needs more goals. Lots of big levels like this often have goals too simple or too generic but they need something very imaginative to be more memorable.

Very nice sandbox, managed to incapacitate everyone on the level and had some fun screwing around with enemy AI in the process just for lulz. I only wish it had more goals, exactly because of the lack of them I had to entertain myself in my own way. TBH I wouldn't compare this FM to The Painter's Wife and The Sound of a Burrick in a Room, even if it was inspired by them, but it's quite similar to other TDM fan missions on the streets which is not bad at all.

When talking about a possible libre version of TDM (https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/) it seems we believe all media/gamedata included in TDM is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. I am not familiar with how the process of adding new media/gamedata works today; I have seen files uploaded to the bugtracker which developers then commit to SVN, but I don't know if there are other ways. It may be a good idea to implement a process that when new components (media/gamedata included in TDM) are added, the contributor is asked to be explicit about the license (a choice which may defaults to their previous preference, for usability). It won't fix the past, but it may help in the future. This will make it easy for contributors to add future data under a more permissive license if they choose. Libre media can be added and its license can be tracked, rather than assumed to be CC-BY-NC-SA. I suggest looking at how Wikimedia Commons has implemented this: the contributor state the source and license at the time the data is uploaded. This can be done either by providing urls or by saying "It's my work and I choose this licsense". The first step could be to add a way to keep track of each filepath in SVN, author, license, sources. Start by setting the value for each file's license to "(default/legacy CC-BY-NC-SA)". Possible implementations for a user interface for new additions are: * Use our own wiki, which runs Mediawiki (same as Wikimedia Commons). I see several benefits of this, but we also need a way to accept uploads of batches, not just single files. * Look at how other open source projects have solved this. There may be more appropriate solutions available. ... but I'll leave the implementation open. Suggestions are very welcome! If the author of each file already in SVN can be tracked, then it may be possible that the author is willing to give a blanket permission for all their past files in one statement, and all their files in SVN can be updated in one commit. A productive contributor willing to release some of their work under a more permissive license could make a big change. If Dark Radiant would support letting mappers search media/gamedata by license (does it already?), it would make it easier for mappers to create a completely libre mission, which would help facilitate a TDM-libre release. If I understand things correctly. This post does not address all details and it may contain misunderstandings or assumptions, but it's a start. Also relevant: * Is there a compiled and maintained list of recommended or deprecated resources for mappers to use? * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20311-external-art-assets-licensing/

Regarding the existing Russian version of TDM's MasonAlternative font, this had a different origin than those Russian fonts processed by Riff_Keeper. Tels created this in 2012. He started from bitmaps of an ASCII Mason font, then used his Perl patch program to copy selected ASCII glyphs (that resemble in some way Cyrillic) to new font "MasonAlternative". See https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274617 In GIMP, he flipped or otherwise hand-edited to make them Cyrillic. He said, "There are still a few dozen missing, but this is enough to render the two headlines we have (New Mission and Setting)" https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274623 This accounts for the incomplete coverage. Speculatively, he took this approach because it couldn't find a Mason-style TTF font with both Russian characters and an acceptable license (e.g., public domain, or at the least freely redistributable for non-commercial use). @kalinovka,I wonder what the licensing is for your masonchronicles3.ttf.

Congrats to the release of this beautiful Mission (or as i say , this collection of mini missions ) an accident happened on my first look into it happy greetings ---

woah you found it earlier than me, nice catch ! yup I'm still wondering what makes some keys not affected by this bug. The way I trigger the bug is also more difficult in fan missions outside of training missions. Basically you need the right timing to jump, which direction the key is facing (rotated or not) and the timing to hit the key into the wall.

Evidently a significant portion of the Cyrillic work was done by Keeper_Riff (in conjunction with Tels) back in 2011. These folks are not active in TDM these days. Keeper_Riff outlined a workflow, starting with FontLab to edit TTF files... https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/12/#findComment-271548 Specifically Carleton: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/4/#findComment-262135

Websites prove their identity via certificates, which are valid for a set time period. The certificate for forums.thedarkmod.com expired on 10/18/2024. Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE

I found a "bug". When playing this mission in TDM 2.13 with the addon z_tdm_loot_stealth_stats.pk4 a litlle tool to show loots and stealth score all weapons are invisible . It's Ok in TDM 2.12 It's so simple , similar is in TDM modpack which I use only for fun. I checked some other missions as well in TDM 2.13 and so far did not see this bug. I guess the addon is old and maybe was not updated for later TDM versions ? Anyone to debug it ?

Did so. Deleted the folder, erased it out of missions.tdminfo, reinstalled it. It's the same just right from the start, but didn't recognize it because I wasn't using the torch. Outside floors look absolutly normal. Strange question: I installed 2 weeks ago beta version 2 of "Last Night in Stonemarket" where there was some trouble with lighting issues. I had never such kind of in any regulary installed mission before with this actual version of TDM. Is there any possibility that a beta mission or maybe an very old mission I tried some time before "changes" or "damages" anything in the TDM setup? Sounds like a nutty idea... I guess I have to delete the whole TDM and reinstall it.

Might this not be better suited to https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/58-tdm-tech-support/ or failing that make the text collapsable.

This message appears after installing missions yourself. It's kind of a double message. Because after download it gives you a message in the downloader about the missions installed (although you wouldn't see this when you would manually download them outside of the downloader) and then in the Missions list it gives you this message. I think usually it's enough for an instakill, but maybe not when ai has helmet, or maybe when health is increased by mapper. Anyway, this should actually be up to the mapper. The player can then decide to mod it again.

Is it possible to disable the auto save every 5 minutes feature? The game stutters/freezes for a second while it saves, especially in more complex missions, so when this happens automatically every 5 minutes it feels weird. I'm pretty good at quicksaving when needed anyway. And the F9/quickload key always reloads the last quicksave rather than a more recent autosave, so it's not as convenient, in my opinion.

I never noticed this before, and I hope there isn't a thread on this already. I checked and didn't see one, but I could be missing it as easily as I miss loot. The missions come up sorted by date, and that's the way I like it, and I selected the newest one for downloading. New missions I downloaded recently weren't showing, and I thought they usually showed up even though they were already on my computer. So I thought maybe the list needed to be refreshed. I selected to sort by title and saw that the mission I had selected for download changed. I figured it wouldn't really download the one it changed to, and went ahead and hit the button to download, and I'm not sure what it did. But the mission it changed to was already on my computer, and the new one I wanted did not download. I tried a few other things to try to figure out what was going on, and I'm not organized enough to figure out what appears to be happening, but if this is really an issue, it appears to be that the system is grabbing a specific spot on the database, and a resort keeps the spot(s) chosen, not recognizing that the newly sorted titles have moved into those spot(s). I tried selecting 3 titles for download, resorted, and one selected title stayed the same but the other two changed to something else. It isn't a big problem, you can get anything you want to get by not resorting, just thought I'd point this out and once again, sorry if this is well known, I couldn't find it in a topic.

So the readme is displayed when you click the 'notes' in the mission description while in-game. All I meant was I usually have a token replace here as well with the build version and timestamp. See here from Lieutenant 3: https://github.com/FrostSalamander/lt3/blob/5517148beab710eee054d4626d55deb74025a95d/readme.txt#L5 Any token replace shouldn't be file-specific though - maybe just confine the operation to certain folders (or just the root folder but not subfolders). And yes, naming the .pk4 with the version number would be useful as well, especially when you have loads of beta versions flying around during testing (although I suspect the dev team would maybe rename it when putting it into SVN). I hope you continue supporting this, as it's now my preferred way to pack the missions. I love the 'test' functionality too - I did this manually with every build previously and it was tedious - this make it hassle-free!

A Winter's Tale By: Bikerdude "One of the few pleasures I have as a man of the thieving profession is to return to my old home town for the holidays and relax in the company of friends and relatives. But a local lord has been going out of his way to making the lives of the locals a miserable." Notes: - TDM 2.12 or later is REQUIRED to play this mission. - This is my entry for the speedbuilding jam. - This FM should play on the vast majority of systems. I have perf tweaked this map with low end players in-mind. And have moved the globale fog/moon lights to the ‘ better’ LOD level. - min recommended spec (as per beta testing) Intel Core i7(3rd gen), nvidia 1030 4gb (GDDR5), will get you 60fps inside and 45fps outside. - Various areas will look better with shadow maps enabled (SoftShadows set to medium/high, Shadows Softness set to zero and LOD set to 'better'), at the possible expense of performance depending on your system specs. - this mission continues the imperial theme, with this being a border town slightly further out from the main imperial lands than Brouften. - build time roughly 130hrs. Download Link: - (v1.4) - https://discord.com/channels/679083115519410186/1310012992867405855/1310022631415746632 v1.4 changes: I have been tweaking the LOD levels through-out the map - - Snow fall has been moved to LOD low/normal. - world fog moved to LOD better. - fireplace grills to LOD better. - world moonlight moved to LOD high. Other tweaks - - reduced light counts in all the fireplaces. - reduced the length of the looping menu video background. - Some new assets Gameplay: - added more ways for the player to get around. - tweaked existing routes to make some easier or more of a challenge. - and added an additional option objective. Credits: Special thanks go to - - Nbhor1more, flashing out the briefing and creation of readables. - Amadeus, Help w/custom objectives, script work, proof reading, mission design & testing. - Dragofer, for custom scripts and script work for the main objective. - Baal, for additional tweaking of the main objective and script work,. - Beta testers: Amadeus, Nbhor1more, Mat99, DavyJones, S1lverwolf, Baal & Dragofer. - Freesound.org, for ambient tracks, further details in sndshd file. Speed Jam Thread: - https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152747