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I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.

I don't know if I'd call it a necessity given places like GOG exist. I might tolerate some DRM so long as it's crackable or there's a plan in place to remove it at some point. I read somewhere that Denuvo has moved to a subscription model which has motivated publishers to remove it after a while once its value has diminished beyond a certain amount. I think this is the reason why games sometimes release an update that removes Denuvo after a while - most of the bulk purchases would have been made by that point so there's no value in continuing payments for it. Unfortunately it's taken a lifetime for me to accept that I have very little influence in most matters and ultimately the only decisions I can make are those for myself. If I wish to boycott a company or product or anyone that is doing something I disagree with, that is a personal decision and I cannot expect others to do the same. Even if it means your hobby or interest ends up going to shit because of the indifference of others, it sucks but all you can either do is navigate the shit or do something else. We must follow our own value systems, even when there's an incredible amount of money invested in an industry that is continually pressuring us to not do so (you MUST play this game, you MUST buy this console, you're missing out! FOMO, etc).

This reminds me of Chronicles or Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena... One of my favorite games ever, unfunctional, because of the copy protection. That said, I do get though, that software is a phase-out model. At some point, publishers or developers simply can't guarantee anymore that the stuff will run on current software or hardware. And, it's also not easy to provide the games as is, with a license which allows modifcation of any kind. I can't count how many times I read "Please Open Source your software!". Well, it's not that easy, with potentially loads of licensed code or assets.

Desired Results File with All Languages What is want to end up with from our AI (with any iterative fixup and manual integration) is an FM-only version of TDM’s UTF-8 all.lang. That file has 17 language sections in a particular order, which we will adopt too (in the prompt further below), although, other than English being first, it doesn’t really matter. Once we have our FM all.lang, we can easily generate all the required ISO-encoded *.lang files, e.g., french.lang. Strategy of Feeding the AI One approach would be to just feed the entire #str list in one gulp, with prompt engineering that covers all aspects. This would minimize the post-translate integration time. But the concern is that prompt engineering becomes more difficult. The AI might get confused about what restrictions and hints apply to which strings. While sometimes shared context across strings can be helpful, too much shared context could lead to overly-creative translations (e.g., hallucinations). [BTW, if accessing the AI through an API, there’s often a "temperature" value you can specify, from 0.0 to 1.0, from most-predictable to most-creative. We can use a few words in the prompt to approximately achieve similar ends.] So, to maintain more control, I’m going to batch-feed. The assumption is that translating #str_ in batches of related input groups will allow more focused guidance from prompt engineering, leading to better results. I’ll start with inventory items, that have the shortest strings and most dictionary-like lookup. An alternative/additional batching (particularly needed with large FMs) would be by "scene". In the case of Air Pocket, it could be thought of broadly as 4 scenes, based on timeline and location. The story, as driven by objectives, is fairly linear; larger FMs would typically have some randomization in scene order. Would batching by scene be useful (i.e., give better AI results) for some of Air Pocket’s #str_ s? Thinking this over. But for now, treat inventory items independent of scene. Prompt Engineering for Inventory Items A stab at a reusable template follows in blue. It describes the overall translation task, the desired tone, and input and output formats. Text specific to inventory items is shown in bold. Text that is specific to this FM, to clarify the context and the meaning of particular words, is in italics, with spoilers hidden. You are an expert translator between English and other European languages, including Russian. You wish to translate a list of inventory items, all inanimate objects, from English to these other languages. Each line of the list begins with a tab, then a word beginning with #str_ within double quotes, then another tab, then a phrase within double quotes. When you translate a line, in the output keep the tabs and the #str_ word unchanged, and only change the phrase to the other target language in UTF-8, keeping it in double quotes. Make the translated phrase reasonably short while preserving the formal meaning. Avoid modern slang. Old-fashioned wording is fine. At the end of each line, add another tab, and then add a back-translation of the previous phrase into English again. When back-translating, ignore the original English phrase. Most of the inventory items are keys, and the associated phrases describe locked doors to particular locations aboard a ship, or locked trunks or safes on a ship. The "Master Key" opens all locks. Following the input list of inventory items, append output lists in these target languages: 1. German 2. French 3. Polish 4. Italian 5. Spanish 6. Portuguese 7. Russian 8. Czech 9. Hungarian 10. Dutch 11. Slovak 12. Danish 13. Swedish 14. Romanian 15. Turkish 16. Catalan. List of inventory items: [... skipping 1 potential spoiler] "#str_fm_map_inv_key_captains_cabin" "Captain's Cabin" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_captains_safe" "Captain's Safe" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_galley" "Galley" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_master_key" "Master Key" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_mess" "Mess" "#str_fm_map_inv_key_sea_trunk" "Sea Trunk" Using ChatGPT As discussed at the outset, you can use this without signing in (it will nag you). Also, if you’d like it not to retain your input for training purposes, click on the circled question mark and change it under "Settings". As of this post, of you ask ChatGPT what model it’s using, it responds "You're currently chatting with GPT-4o, the latest model from OpenAI as of 2025. The "o" stands for "omni" — it's designed to handle text, images, and more, all in one model." Following up by enquiring about usage limitations, it says "Free users can access GPT‑4o, but with strict usage caps, which vary based on demand and time of day". More specifically, "usage falls in the range of 5–16 messages per 3–5 hours, after which you'll be limited or switched to GPT‑4o‑mini." The latter is a faster but lower-accuracy model. "We’ll notify you once you’ve reached the limit and invite you to continue your conversation using GPT-4o mini or to upgrade to [paid] ChatGPT Plus." Because I’m doing this at a leisurely rate (and reporting it to you in posts), the usage restrictions should not bite. About Input and Output Formats As you can see above, the input is the AI prompt, appended with content from english.lang, namely, the lines between the "{" and "}" brackets. For those lines, no change to tab-separation is done. The output is the same format, but with an added English back-translation added to each line. When ChatGPT generates the response, each requested language is enclosed in its own HTML response frame, with a separate "copy" link. So you have to copy each link separately, pasting them successively into your FM-specific all.lang file while adding headers, e.g., [French]. Also, the frame margin contains the word "vbnet". When I asked, ChatGPT indicates that’s the style of syntax highlighting applied to the results, based on source material, but it may be inappropriate and so ignorable. Which explains why the word "key" was always colored green. In the next post, I’ll discuss the specific results.

That's correct but many people just use the in-game mission downloader to check for new stuff without even looking at the forums, which is what I did. In the past a lot of missions that required a newer version of the game executable and assets would tell you this when you tried to start them up. I was just reporting on this and that you don't need to reinstall, just update via tdm_updater if you find this issue.

Hrm I wasn't able to type on *after* the spoiler and accidentally already submitted the reply.. (Does this forum somewhere have a raw mode where you type text with tags around them or something instead of this broken WYSIWYG editor?) Anyway, what I was gonna add: This was a great mission and I already played Away1 - I'm really looking forward to Away2, want to see how the story goes on

Im ok with it but it is getting a bit long in the teeth for a ryzen 5900x even the low cost ryzen models have plenty power to drive this card. I would have used my 3070 instead but with 8gb im running into some rather annoying texture loading problems. So a 16gb model will be next project but the lower end while having plenty vram are just not worth upgrading to with such a small percentage. Guess ill donate a kidney for a 9070 or 5070

Back in the day, Tels managed a squad of volunteer translators for TDM. I am not Tels, and could never do that. Nowadays, language translation using AI, either traditional machine learning (ML) models or large language models (LLMs), is common and increasingly fluent. It is often used as an adjunct to speed the work of professional human translators. By itself, AI translation can be imperfect but usually sufficient. Can this "sufficient" approach be used for TDM, to expedite translations? Let's see. I gave some initial thought to a bulk-translation daemon that might range across FMs and fill in all missing translations, without necessarily involving mappers. In the future, possibly AI could tackle that whole enchilada. I was at first visualizing something more modest: a backbone in a standard programming language (I sketched out C++ and C# projects, but lots of other possibilities) that would make calls to an API (I looked at those of Google Translate and ChatGPT). However, I changed focus due to certain concerns... Different FMs, and subsets with each FM, would likely have far better translations if they were properly grouped, ordered, and translated separately, with an appropriate context (e.g., phrase engineering) added. The FM's mapper is best placed to provide this grouping and context. I'll detail what I mean in the next few posts. The mapper would not be expected to know any TDM-supported languages besides English. Instead, each translated phrase could be back-translated to English and examined. Is the "round-trip" meaning OK, even if the English words have changed? Problematic translations could have their context tweaked and rerun. Many AI systems, particularly for API access, require a billing commitment (e.g., credit card). For a professional translator, this is no problem, and subscriptions allow access to more (and putatively better) models and higher quotas. This seems less appealing for TDM. A few paid AI systems have a no-subscription, pay-as-you-go account tier. The cost per translate is typically pennies. But it does introduce quota- and expense-management, and may exclude API usage. Access via API requires an API key (or at the higher end more elaborate security regime), with attendant key-security headaches. Which AI model is thought "best" for translation? Doesn't matter too much, because we can't afford the best. Furthermore, there's endless churn among AI models, with antidotal reports that a given model fluctuates in quality over time, and successor models can be worse than their predecessors. So, with these concerns in mind, I looked for public web-based AI sites that require no billing and provide low-quota but adequate AI. The mapper would enter and retrieve data manually. I will focus on ChatGPT in this exploration, after a quick preliminary test confirmed some promise. Also, as this exploration proceeds, I hope to propose changes to TDM to make it more viable for "sufficient" quality machine translation. Problem areas are incomplete fonts, space-constraints, and layout issues for translated strings. My proposals will likely surface as separate forum threads. That's enough for now. I'll be trying for 1 or 2 substantive posts per week, as I tackle a particular FM.

yes, a very large scale model. It was originally made by Dram, as was the bones of this mission/campaign.

actually i found one that was even cheaper in germany here -> https://www.caseking.de/en/sapphire-pulse-radeon-rx-9060-xt-gaming-oc-graphics-card-16384-mb-gddr6/GCSP-272.html or this one but i was unsure if a 3 fan model would fit your case -> https://www.caseking.de/en/asus-prime-radeon-rx-9060-xt-oc-edition-graphics-card-16-384-mb-gddr6/GCAS-683.html

The chipset is quite ok. The x570 chipset is the same as mine though the cpu is a bit on the low side for it. The fastest cpu for your board is either the 5700x3d or 5900x. The x3d model is arguably the best for gaming but if you do content creation the 5900x would be the best choice. And im quite happy with mine . The board should be capable of driving even the largest gfx cards with a cpu upgrade, but for the one you have an amd 9060 xt 16 gb would surely rock the boat. Or if short on cash some of the new intel cards. The board does support rebar so you should be all set. Hell i run my old 2080 ti in a similar board and its damn close in performance to a 3080 < 10 fps.

could do it with mainboard model / CPU type. Can look up the info from that . mainboard model will tell us if it has PCIE 3 4 or 5. cpu type will give us some answers as to what GPU might fit best (they will probably all work "well not the intel models if the board has no rebar support", but if the cpu is to slow to feed it, then you start loosing fps).

hmm yeah the 9000 series is still quite expensive here in denmark. the most affordable model atm is this one https://www.proshop.dk/Grafikkort/PowerColor-Radeon-RX-9070-XT-Reaper-16GB-GDDR6-RAM-Grafikkort/3331586?utm_source=pricerunner&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pricesite which is 895 US dollars. otherwise they go for close to or above 1000 US dollars so about 350 dollars over MSRP. the 7900 models are even more pricey and go for close to 1500 dollars for the most affordable model.

or get the 16 gb model which seems to do quite ok with pcie 3.0 . tbh if i were to get one i would go for that model anyway.

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.

I'm 99.5% sure this particular model has been fixed. curious as to why it's showing up again. And I'll take a look at the blue elemental issue

oh it did indeed use it but only for the background, i guess to make the maps seem bigger than they actually were (idtech 4 was mostly geared towards corridor shooters and had some problems with big outdoor maps). yeah also wondered that myself about targa since targa2 had been out quite a while by then, we actually used targa2 in most quake ports. added benefit of the targa2 code was that it did not need the image flip bit and also supported more colormap formats as well as better compression. at the time of quake 4 a 200 gb's game would have gotten a lot of flak, large drives were expensive back then . i think the biggest one i had at the time was 1tb and it cost me around 250 dollars. because i wanted a 10000 rpm model. the 5400 and to some extent 7200 rpm models were allready starting to be on the slow side when loading stuff hehe. from the wiki: Quake 4 was known for its attention to detail and realistic visuals, achieved through a combination of detailed models and textures rather than "solely relying on megatextures" for large-scale terrain representation. so yah it did use it to some degree but only for a few things

@Amadeus@Dragoferdidn't, I/we fixed that black cube (its a missing model) in the latest version..?

It could be from the physically based rendered materials having less details on the texture itself and having more of the detail being born from shaders and model geometry but I see that kind of pastel look beyond 3d rendered things like in music videos and recent movies, and even in some Linux ui custom "rices" it all kind of reminds me of 60s era art, maybe a little saturated than the colors from then, and of course more detail oriented.

Not sure if this is a bug or my computer doesn't have enough memory. When I try to extinguish one of those blue fire elementals, the game ends and goes to main menu without showing anything. I checked the console and here is an error I found that might be related to this: Error:idafentity_base::setmodel: model imp_explosion_blue.prt is not modelDef

Double topic. See also topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22754-thief-vr-legacy-of-shadow-announcement/

i am having a hard time searching for specific keyword in bug tracker so i decided to wade into google search and found similar thread with similar issue : https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/13723-key-drop-melee-animation-glitch/

Just to complicate your life, there are 3 additional aspects to consider about the circa-2014 Mason files, and subsequent circa-2017 improvements to the 'english' version perhaps applicable to your work. (These issues are covered in the wiki "Mason Font" article, with a bit more in my "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts", https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/. The 2017 changes can be seen in the *current* 2.13 TDM English Mason files.) 1) Need for custom DAT-scaling on certain Mason characters The source TTF had upper-case and lower-case characters that were early-on considered too similar to size. So (before 2014) in the DAT, selective per-character scaling was used to differentiate them. See https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Font_Metrics_%26_DAT_File_Format#Per-Character_Font_Scaling for details. As you add new characters, you should do likewise (relatively easy with refont). 2) Creating the "glow" of mason_glow How Tels created the glow (for 'english' carleton & mason) is discussed in reasonable detail here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/5/#findComment-262661 That could be done for Russian too, which I recall currently fakes a glow, and possibly would require a minor GUI or engine code change to use. Note: To best accommodate glow and retain GIMP-visualization-alignment between base and glow characters, Tels moved some base characters within their bitmap, to keep their glyphs 2-3 pixels away from any bitmap edge. You should consider this when placing new base glyphs. Note: For the 3 mason bitmaps doubled in size circa-2017 as discussed next, the mason_glow bitmaps were also doubled. 3) Extensive bitmap editing to solve main menu character jaggedness. On Oct. 5, 2017, @Springheel in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19129-menu-update/#findComment-412921 said: "Looking at the Mason fonts, it looks like they were super low res to begin with, and were then just resized [presumably referring to per-character scaling], making them even worse. I'll see what I can do." [Further on, referring to fonts in the TDM menu system:] "It appears that resizing the dds file to make it higher res is possible, so I'll proceed." Later, on Oct 13, 2017, he concluded within a "More detailed list of changes: "Updated the menu fonts, which were surprisingly bad before" Unfortunately, I couldn't find details on how this work was actually done. I assume the bitmap editing was all done in GIMP. It started with doubling the size of certain bitmaps from 256x256 to 512x512. This was done for the first 3 bitmaps (i.e., those with ASCII, some Latin-1). Then characters were made more crisp and smooth-edged. How? Dunno. Also, some odd but harmless artifacts happened within GIMP (noted in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/page/3/#findComment-499660)

Or, just get in contact with the owners of the IP and ask them since just because an IP lawyer in one jurisdiction says it would be okay, doesn't mean it would be okay globally. There are several packs out there of scripts/definition files which are licenced under free licences (CC0 and WTFPL mostly) and claim their freedom by recreating them using "clean-room way". In fact, I used them in getting TDM running with mostly free licenced files by selectively choosing which had clearly been written from scratch albeit with reference to the originals, and which were just direct copy and paste with claimed free licences (I didn't use them). Then it was a case of finding/replacing the core engine textures, sounds, etc. the engine required to launch with free alternatives (again checking the packs since some were just copied direct from the game files and claiming to be free). In the end, the only non-free licenced files that were still required were those from TDM itself. The result of this TDM version is the screenshot I posted some posts ago here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/page/3/#findComment-500642 However, you will notice the giant cursor on the screen in the screenshot, why? because the only reference to hiding the cursor is within the UI files which come under the game eula, so I didn't add in the command to hide it in game. In the case of the script/def files, this "clean-room" approach has stood up in a court of law when I looked online, however you wouldn't really want to end up being in the position of ending up in court defending yourself in the first place. The flaw in the def/scripts that were recreated are that they all wrote their files using the originals as reference. So if the originals are under the game eula, and if the information contained is in some way protected, then all these "clean-room" files revert to the original game eula, as the authors didn't have the right to change the licence. I believe (with a pinch of salt )that if the core scripts/files were made GPL by idSoftware/Microsoft then as files based off of or using them as parents (basically all TDM scripts/defs as far as I can make out) then all of the TDM scripts and def files would automatically become GPL as their authors could also not claim their work was NC-BY since it was then based on GPL work.

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.