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All of sudden, as I am building my mission, I am getting an error message that boog_gotisch is missing. Neither part of that name exits in my skin.mtr,or map files. In DR if I search for that name I see is listed under textures/darkmod/boog_gotish and it says Defined in _autogenerated_by_darkradiant_.mtr and Description says the material is missing! Well, DUH. I have not seen the name and it does NOT, nor as I know never has existed in my mission or ANY of the files. Is this part of default Dark Mod files? Confused (as usual), BlackMagic

I just read@motorsep Discovered that you are able to create a brush, then select it and right click "create light". Now you have a light that ha the radius of the former brush. Just read it on discord and thought it may be of use for some people in the forums here too.

I just found this thread on ttlg listing Immersive Sims: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151176

Recently revisiting the forums after a longer period of time I wanted to check the unread content. I don't know if I am doing this wrong since.. ever... but on mobile (visiting the unread content page on my smartphone) you have to click on that tiny speech bubble to go to the most recent post in a thread. If you don't click correctly you'll hit the headline and end up at post 1 in the beginning of the thread. It's terrible on mobile, since not only the speech bubble is really small and was to miss. But also the thread headline is just millimeters away from it so you go right to the first post that was ever made instead of the most recent ones. Am I doing it wrong? I just want to go through u read content a d the to the newest post from that topic.

@snatcher Hopefully there will be a sequel in the future. I started concepting and even building multiple times in the last ten years but never came close to something useful. I wish that I find more time in the future to have a decent sequel for this mission, yes.

A@datiswous Ah yeah, well sorry, I was quiet busy and only visiting discord. First time here on the forums since months now I think.. Thank you for the subtitles. I encourage everyone who is interested in using them to download it from here as I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them myself into the mission. Again, thank you for your work.

Of course, it is one of the reasons for the decline of online forums, since the advent of mobile phones. Forums on a mobile are a pain in the ass, but on the other hand, for certain things there are no real alternatives to forums, social networks cannot be with their sequential threads, where it is almost impossible to retrieve answers to a question that is asked. has done days ago. For devs for internal communication, the only thing offered is a collaborative app, such as System D (not to be confused with systemd). FOSS, free and anonymous registration, access further members only by invitation, full encrypted and private. https://www.system-d.org

Ignoring is somewhat inadequate as you still see other members engaging in a discussion with the problematic user, and as Wellingtoncrab says such discussions displace all other content within that channel. Moderation is also imperfect as being unpleasant to engage with is not in itself banworthy, so there is nothing more to do if such people return to their old behaviour after a moderator had a talk with them, except live with it or move away. I'd be more willing to deal with it if it felt like there were more on-topic discussion, i.e. thoughts about recently played fan missions or mappers showcasing their progress, rather than a stream of consciousness about a meta topic that may or not have to do with TDM. I guess the forums already serve the desired purpose, or they just compartmentalise discussions better.

It never occurred to me to have modular city sections but that's a pretty neat method. And it's nice that it increases performance too.

Vertigo is a fun project, multiple paths will result with different outcomes, increasing replayability. I'm building the FM in shapes, ie: The standard city block: 512x512, alleyways: 256x512, market 1024x1024 (with minor deviations) etc. After building the presets, I stack them like legos; I found this method speeds up my build time by a huge margin, it also makes it easier to optimize with visportals. Also, I found building in this fashion (with twisting alleyways), increases performance by a lot, making it easier to add an incredible amount of visual fidelity. My original intention with Vertigo was to keep it small, but it's definitely grown in scale since I've started. I can't apply this method to Life of the Party considering I'm trying to keep key areas recognizable, while adding my own spin on how creative I want to be.

@snatcher did you play the FM? @computertech82 Your review is almost identical to that of the other review bomber, neonstyle, who didn't play the FM for even 5 seconds but who noclipped to an area where he airdropped before the same door which confounds you. How did you get to that door if you didn't use a rope arrow in the vents? If you were a bit observant and were actually trying to play the FM you might've noticed that the building with that confounding door has two floors, the second of which is ringed by a wooden balustrade where a well placed rope arrow (!!) allows the nimble or even not so very nimble player an entrance to a hall where there's a shooting gallery of open windows to use the water arrows (the player should have 20 or more of them by now) to extinguish the confounding torches. There's also a keyed (!!! how awful !!!) door up there where the thoughtful player might expect a key might be snagged from off the ass of one of the guards sitting up ahead playing poker. That allows the easiest entrance. But oh what the hell. Once targeted by bombers ever targeted and there's nothing to do about it. In a post above I appended an edit to a response to vozka that, since it was an edit, probably went unnoticed so I'll repeat it here since it's really my last word for the time being, given my circumstances of having to learn how to edit all over again (yes, I found myself in a situation where I lost the ability to do even basics like change the ambient light setting! and a lot of the necessary fixes are difficult). @vozka I can now give a more coherent reply and I'm recovering nicely. I agree with every point of the critique and I'm in a quandary about how I should go about applying fixes. I think your preamble to the actual critique shows an exact understanding of what I was attempting to do in the FM. You understand that it is story driven. You understood the main elements of the story, that basically a farm boy of pagan background entrusts himself with a mission. His village needs help. Because he's earned a certain bad reputation and fits the bills requirement for having daring and a certain amount of cunning, so the mission is a natural fit; also amongst other things he wants to earn himself a good name. He has friends to help him along the way, and makes friends of friends along the road of the pagans. The FM uses devices to distinguish the pagans from the enemy they face and divides the space into distinct enemy and pagan areas, and areas in between. The pagans are opposed by corrupt nobles and their army of fundamentalist Builders, as corrupt as the nobles they serve. It's very black and white. Then there's the city guard who, being ousted from real power by the Builders are resentful and won't help the Builders and will ignore the player unless attacked or the player is caught trespassing in their inner court. That's about it. The critique mentions some gameplay elements that detract from the story and I agree about those. It also mentions gameworld failings that interfere with enjoyment, with gameflow and immersion. It seems to me that to fix these flaws will require a total rewrite of the FM, rebuilding the entire thing. For example, I understand the problems mentioned w.r.t. the lighting and know how to fix them, or at least bandage them over so technically there's no apparent problem. But I have a notion that the not so apparent problem here is in what's being lit. That there should be a rearrangement of things so light can be more focused and contrasted with the dark. I'm only starting to think through ways that I might do this. Needless to say anything like this would take time, probably a year, and I'm not sure whether I'm up to it. I've been playing a new mission by Kingsal and know I haven't anything near that level of skill. IMO the FM is unplayable right now. Actually I had asked that it be removed from the TDM database. I don't like the idea of leaving a blot. Thank you again.

I'm finding this mission a bit too frustrating. Far too many doors that needs keys, and nothing that needs lock picks. Then there's a building with only a single desk and guard, and the rest of the building completely empty, except for a few guards. Then a courtroom of that building with far too many guards and lights. Just one foot in that courtroom, completely lit up like a Christmas tree. And odd having rope arrows with no place to use them. Played for a few hours, could only find one key.

@Fidcal I know where you're coming from. GPT-4's continuity can sometimes falter over long stretches of text. However, I've found that there are ways to guide the model to maintain a more consistent narrative. I've not yet tried fully giving GPT-4 the free reins to write its own long format fiction, but I co-wrote a short story with GPT-4 that worked really well. I provided an outline, and we worked on the text piece by piece. In the end, approximately two-thirds of the text was GPT-4's original work. The story was well received by my writing group, showing that GPT-4 can indeed be a valuable contributor in creative endeavors. Building on my previously described experiments, I also ran GPT-4 through an entire fantasy campaign that eventually got so long the ChatGPT interface stopped working. It did forget certain details along the way, but (because the game master+player dynamic let me give constant reinforcement) it never lost the plot or the essential personality of its character (Thrumm Stoneshield: a dwarven barbarian goat herder who found a magic ring, fought a necromancer, and became temporary king of the Iron Home Dwarves). For maintaining the story's coherence, I've found it helpful to have GPT-4 first list out the themes of the story and generate an outline. From there, I have it produce the story piece by piece, while periodically reminding the model of its themes and outlines. This seems to help the AI stay focused and maintain better continuity. Examples: The adventure of Thrumm Stoneshield part 1: https://chat.openai.com/share/b77439c1-596a-4050-a018-b33fce5948ef Short story writing experiment: https://chat.openai.com/share/1c20988d-349d-4901-b300-25ce17658b5d

I don't recall a system for noise masking. It sounds like it'd be a good idea, but when you get into the details you realize it'd be complicated to implement. It's not only noise that that goes into it, I think. E.g., a high register can cut through even a loud but low register rumble. And it's not like the .wav file even has data on the register of what it's playing. So either you have to add meta-data (which is insane), or you have to have a system to literally check pitch on the .wav data and paramaterize it in time to know when it's going to cut through what other parameters from other sounds. For that matter, it doesn't even have the data on the loudness either, so you'd have to get that off the file too and time the peaks with the "simultaneous" moment at arbitrary places in every other sound file correctly. And then position is going to matter independently for each AI. So it's not like you can have one computation that works the same for all AI. You'd have to compute the masking level for each one, and then you get into the expense you're mentioning. I know there was a long discussion about it in the internal forums, and probably on the public subforums too, but it's been so long ago now I can't even remember the gist of them. Anyway the main issue is I don't know if you'll find a champion that wants to work on it. But if you're really curious to see how it might work, you could always try your hand at coding & implementing it. Nothing beats a good demo to test an idea in action. And there's no better way to learn how to code than a little project like that. I always encourage people to try to implement an idea they have, whether or not it may be a good idea, just because it shows the power of an open source game. We fans can try anything we want and see if it works!

I'm using the version from kcghost. I just tested and I can't see any difference inside the inventory. On the stats itself it doesn't show the different loot types (still seen in the inventory), but instead gives more info on stealth score. Edit: I see Dragofer made an updated version of his script. I have to check that out. Edit2: That version works: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=21272&key=02755164a3bed10498683771fe9a0453

The problem I have with antiportals is that using them is too hard. If the obstacle is small, then antiportal won't help much. If it is huge, then it's probably some building and you try to optimize outdoors area. The antiportal over whole building makes sense, but: Rectangular antiportal is not enough: you need something that fills as much of the building's volume as possible, at least a box or two crossing antiportals. Are you really 100% sure player cannot open doors and look through the whole building? Are you sure you would set antiportal in such a way that it won't block something visible? Your antiportals cannot affect all areas like visportals do, because when player is indoors, the antiportal will block his visibility. You want antiportal to work only when player is outdoors, so you need some filter with locations. It becomes so messy that if a mapper wants to optimize his building, he just better place all the portals around and hope for the best.

Oh yeah, I should second this as well. A mission is not fun if it's designed to be painfully tedious in terms of dodging the visibility of the AI. I can't remember which mission it was, but the mapper must have been in a bad mood that day since too much of the interior of an important building was lit very brightly with non-dousable light sources, with few if any viable hiding areas to obverse patrol routes. I don't know what the intent was, maybe it was a challenge for elite players or something, but it wasn't fun and I resorted to my power move of the "notarget" command just to make it bearable. Forget even looking for loot in such environments.

I looked but didn't see this video posted in these forums. It's pretty cool.

I suppose it depends on mission goals. If the primary mission objective is to steal a certain item, an additional loot goal on top of that could be a bit superfluous. If it's a more open-ended exploration mission, where the point is just to break into houses and burgle everything, it's a lot better. I don't think I've seen anyone make use of the difference between loot types. When was the last time you saw a mission that wanted you to steal 500 in gems? The new "secrets" functionality effectively adds an objective to missions without being official or mandatory, which is nice. When I put a loot goal in, I don't decide how much it should be until I've finished building it. Then I think something like, "On Easy mode, the player should be able to find half the loot excluding the secrets" and round that off to the nearest nice number. For Expert it might be 70 or 75%.

It wasn't a "sacrifice", it was a deliberate decision. People wanted the game to be as close as possible to the original, including pixelated graphics. If you ask me, the former version based on the Unity engine looked and felt better. But, hey... I guess I'm not the right person to judge that, as I never played the original, and always found that the art style of System Shock 2 is much better anyway. This also illustrates the issue with community funded games: Too many cooks spoil the broth. In game design, you need freedom, not thousands of people who want you to do this and this and that. Just take a look at the Steam forums and see how all those wimps complain again about everything. Hopeless.

So giving it none of those tags, but making the AI invisible, silent, non-solid, and on a team neutral to everyone would not work? Oh well, it was a horrible inelegant idea anyway.

Yes, I started a new map, made my usual Large brush box (with default lighting/etc.) and saved it. Then loaded the box and imported the original layers. Things are fine with each layer, no internal leaks or external leaks. As I have been proceeding, and adding more structure/areas - each in it's own layer I am only having normal(?) blunders as I am trying to re-learn scripting, DEF's, etc. Can't seem to seal any building with transparent windows, and in one new area DM drops two portals but does not say why (no lin files) and throws another out as useless (inside a non leaky building but separating two rooms). Still have a long to-do list, finish town, visportals, add AI, yadda yadda. BTW I downloaded a free to use 3D cowboy hat but it is in obj format. Imported it in DR how do I orient it/attach to heads? Man, this stuff is time consuming! but loving it.

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.