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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.

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.

On this FM in particular around various areas, 4x AntiAliasing eats up between 10 and 20 FPS on latest TDM dev snapshot. I still keep AA disabled since I want 144 FPS for my 144 Hz monitor, even if performance with it has improved quite a bit recently. I never go beyond 4x as there's no visual benefit just more performance loss, even 16x doesn't fix some sharp edges. VSync always enabled as I don't need to push my graphics card beyond what my monitor can render.

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.

Vsync while nice that it gets rid of screen tearing, also causes so many performance problems. From stuttering (60-30-15 etc) but it's been proven that fps higher than monitor refresh rate has benefits to input lag and feel of smoothness. Instead try this, set TDM to com_maxfps 200, then use something like https://gitlab.com/torkel104/libstrangle to cap your FPS to 144 with no vertical sync on. For example, on my computer I set TDM to 300 fps cap, and use Rivatuner to cap FPS to 238 FPS, so it's always within the freesync window and get no tearing and no input lag. So even when the game chugs down to 150-180 fps on certain maps, it still feels smooth without having to use Vsync. Freesync/Gsync is a really nice technology. But if I set TDM to cap at 240FPS then it doesn't do that, it will fluctuate all over the place. I know the Linux world for gaming is fraught with poor support for features compared to Windows, but it's worth trying. I can't tell you how many people complain about performance and stuttering etc, only to find them running 16xAA and Vsync set to on. For years I was on team "60 FPS is more than enough", until I got a computer with a 120hz panel because I didn't have a choice and I've never looked back.

I hope I'm not proposing some unfeasible idea that was already imagined before, this stuff is fun to discuss so no loss still. Riding the wave of recent optimizations, I keep thinking what more could be done to reach a round 144 FPS compatible with today's monitors. An intriguing optimization came to mind which I felt I have to share: Could we gain something if we had distance-based LOD for entity updates, encompassing everything visual from models to lights? How it would work: New settings allow you to set a start distance, end distance, and minimum rate. The further an entity gets the lower its individual update rate, slowly decreasing from updating each frame (start distance and closer) to updating at the minimum rate (end distance and further). This means any visual change is preformed with frame skips on any entity: For models such as characters animations are updated at the lower rate, for lights it means shadows are recalculated less often... even changes in the position and rotation of an entity may follow it for consistency, this would especially benefit lights with a moving origin like fireplaces or torches held by guards which recalculate per-frame. Reasoning: Light recalculation even animated models or individual particles can be significant contributors to performance drain. We know the further something is from the camera the less detail it requires, this is why we have a level-of-detail system with lower-polygon LOD models for characters and even mapmodels. Thus we can go even further and extend the concept to visual updates; Similar to how you don't care if a far away guard has a low-poly helmet you won't notice, you won't care if that guard is being animated at 30 FPS out of your maximum of 60, nor if the shadow of a small distant light is being updated at 15 FPS when an AI passes in front of it. This is especially useful if you own a 144 Hz monitor and expect 144 FPS: I want to see a character in front of me move at 144 FPS, but may not even notice if a guard far away is animating at 60 FPS... I want the shadows of the light from the nearby torch to animate smoothly, but can care less if a lamp meters away updates its shadows at 30 FPS instead. The question is if this is easy to implement in a way that offers the full benefit. If we use GPU skinning for instance, the graphics card should be told to animate the model at a lower FPS in order to actually preserve cycles... does OpenGL (and in the future Vulkan) let us do this per individual model? I know the engine has control over light recalculations which would probably yield the biggest benefit. Might add more points later as to not make the post too big, for now what are your thoughts?

I have an 144 Hz monitor for a couple of years. My main wish is for TDM to never go bellow 120 FPS, which still happens on low settings but is still pretty good compared to the past. I use VSync as I don't see any benefit in stressing the video card for more frames than the monitor can render, problem is it's still hard to reach the monitor refresh limit constantly. Regarding other bottlenecks like input lag or perceived performance, it would help a lot if the engine had native Wayland support on Linux rather than still going through X11, still yet to happen to my knowledge. I use the stock amdgpu driver and performance is pretty amazing all in all, latest dev snapshot did wonders and it will prolly get even better

Well, as someone who has a 240hz freesync monitor and the requisite hardware, I want even more frames. Not only that, but the higher you go in frame rates, the less effect that uneven frame times will have on your experience. When you have 16.6ms between frames at 60fps, having those frames show up on your screen in a timely window is really important. But, when there's only 4.16 ms between each frame on your screen, well it starts to matter less. And now that we have 500hz displays we're talking 2 ms between each frame being generated and thrown on screen, so if it's slightly late, you might get a gap of 3 ms? That's not noticeable anymore. All of this matters only if you have the requisite hardware to push those frame rates of course.

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!

And I always wondered why I have to set gamma so low in-game, with a monitor with a near perfect gamma. In most games, I don't have to do that. 9 out of 10 display absolutely perfect, and I don't have to change anything.

TDM Modpack v3.2 released in the opening post Completing a mission without being seen is something that can be done with some practice and patience, and I find this self-imposed challenge quite rewarding. The STEALTH ALERT MOD will play an alerting chime whenever you are seen so that you don't have to monitor the Stealth stats all the time. This mod has been in my back-burner for some time. Despite the small scope getting it right not to annoy anyone was key and it was challenging to find a middle ground for players that may be interested in the feature and players that just don't care about stealth. The mod has been extensively tested and the end result blends in quite well, imho, and I hope it will either be useful or go unnoticed... You can find the download in the opening post. Full changelog: ============================== v3.2 - New release ------------------------------ • STEALTH ALERT MOD v1.0: Inital release • QUIET DOORS MOD v1.1: Improved code Cheers!

I was just thinking if a conventional depth pass may also do the trick: Render world geometry as an untextured unlit Z-buffer at a small cheap resolution (eg: 256x128 default)... knowing each entity's distance from the camera, an entity is discarded when its projection doesn't touch at least one pixel darker / further than its own location. Could that work? Something worth noting: If you own a relatively modern video card (last 5 years or so) and use an 1080p @ 60 Hz monitor, you may get the maximum performance... even that requires lower quality settings (absolutely no MSAA) but now it's possible to get a constant round 60 FPS. The big problem is playing on either a 4k or 144 Hz screen and hoping to reach anywhere near your VSync limit, god forbid both at once. Most of us don't want more pixels in our monitor so 1920x1080 is still the expected standard, unless we have TDM players who play on a large TV which wouldn't surprise me. Yet we are going for 144 Hz... once you get used to it and can't go back, anything under 120 FPS starts to feel like you're lagging. At the moment I get +80 FPS in most areas, +100 in some, +120 very rarely when I'm lucky... the full 144 only if I'm literally staring at a wall and of course in the main menu.

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

Did you max out the Antialiasing as well? In my experience, setting it from 8x to 16x chops the frames per second in half (while still looking good). It's a real eater. Of course, you will only notice that if you play without Vsync or frame limiter on, or if your monitor only does 60 Hz with Vsync enabled.

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

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.

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.

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.

@datiswous I haven't yet tried out the high end performance. Always so far it's been dumbed down by the lower end samsung monitor interface. I've got some cognitive problems setting this up, so perhaps this'll take about a month or so to get past that. It's a bitch.

@datiswous @vozka I recently upgraded from my old geforce 1060 desktop to an azus rog strix scar something or other with a 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900H 2.50 GHz with 16.0 GB (15.7 GB usable) RAM and an Intel Geforce 1080Ti card of which I'm unsure of exact values but must be fairly high. I also upgraded to a 55 inch samsung 4K monitor. I instantly noticed a huge increase in brightness of my WIP. When using the 55 inch monitor I'm forced to a 1920 x 1080 resolution with no bells and whistles. No HDR. I haven't tried playing with the 55 inch monitor turned off and the strix scar in native mode. Noticing these huge differences for the first time I wonder what the best guideline would be for correcting lighting for all or most darkmod gameplay?

considering the beastly performance of todays cards it had to drop at some point, not to mention getting a case where that 4090 ti will fit i also need a nuclear power plant to drive it hehe. it is quite funny AMD was allways known in the past for power hungry toasters when it came to gfx cards but no AMD card today holds a candle to the 4090 in power draw not even the R9 295 Xt which had a rather ( blow your fuses ) attitude the 4090 can go up to 800 watt power draw!!! that is insane and just shows how powerfull a card has to be to drive an 8K monitor. but here is something rather scary the AMD rx 7900 xt can match it if you remove the restrictions on power draw ( a guy tried that out recently ) with a hacked driver. the card needed a tripple fan liquid cooling system but that was all and it stayed at 45" while trading blows with the 4090 ti holy sh..

Hello togehter, I am just wondering. I got a PC with good specs (Ryzen 5700X, 32GB DDR4-3800 and RTX4090) but in some missions with many light sources I have high GPU utilization or even drops below 60fps. CPU util is low. My Monitor is an ultrawide wth 5120x1440 @ 60hz, FPS capped to 60fps. Is there a trick ?