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Recently, about a month ago, @demagogue mentioned the following in another discussion: While we're at it, someone really needs to write an official history of the Empire and a lot of associated fanfic to give our world backstory. And someone ought to make an art book with screenshots across all our FMs and some story, as if it were like one of those travel photo books. Something people put on their coffee table for discussion and just to flip through for fun, or in your case actually make the things. I see the idea you're talking about as something along those lines. I even promised demagogue I might look into it in the future. All of this got me thinking... We know The Dark Mod does not have a strict canon, per se. There's Bridgeport and The Empire, a few other cities, there's notes on what technology, society and the fantastical elements of this setting are, what the various typical "factions" are and how they vary greatly, what the atmosphere and tone is like, and so on and so forth. However, the rest of the things are far more nebulous and are generally down to what an individual player or fan of TDM is willing to accept as potential canon. We had the references to cities (Braeden) or minor setting elements (the mandrasola drug, etc.) throghout multiple missions by unrelated authors, and those are just the simplest of examples. In short, what constitutes as TDM canon, beyond those fairly official basics, is quite maleable. With all of the above in mind, and taking demagogue's ideas into account, I think we could compile a rough, loose history of the overall setting. It doesn't need to be obsessively filled with details, but we could give people some vague idea of what happened in the last two thousand or so years before what we generally portray as the "present day" of the TDM setting. I think we already have plenty of interesting source material to work with, if our goal is to create a rough timeline/outline of The Empire's history, the Builder church's history, and hints at what the history of the world outside of The Empire has been like (also counting with possibly biased accounts, in-universe). Now, speaking about that source material, what do I actually consider as source material ? Technically, every mission or nearly every mission made for TDM could be potentially considered source material. However, I am a little bit more picky about this. I think the closest we have to an established, "hard canon" for the game's universe, is a lot of the above-mentioned source material, and that occurs primarily in two places: In the two or three official missions that come with the basic TDM install (Training Mission, A New Job, The Tears of St Lucia), and in the main Universe articles on the TDM wiki. These are going to be my primary source for compiling the history, chronologically and otherwise. In addition to the official-as-official-gets missions and official universe notes, I am also willing to include stuff from all fan missions, if it expands the history of the setting in interesting, but reasonable ways. If the premise of a mission clearly doesn't fit the rest of the setting directly or is quite jokey, then I won't consider it a reasonable enough source for a potential addition to "canon". Why would demagogue suggest we should compile such a more detailed background history ? Personally, while I don't mind the idea, I am also fine with keeping things as they currently are. At the same time, I have noticed the number of people who come to the forums, clamouring things like "Where's the sprawling story campaign ? Where's the sprawling background story of the setting ?". Less of the latter thankfully, more of the former, for understandable reasons. Still, it seems that a lot of newcomers to TDM, especially those with pre-conceived notions from their time playing Thief (or other fantasy games), seem to want more from the overall setting than just the missions and mission series we have. Honestly, I'm torn on this. I've always been an elliptical storytelling style guy. Less is more. A hint here, a hint there, a throw-away comment there... Some games try to overdo it with super-detailed lore and the results can be... questionable and grating. Part of why I'd prefer that, if we do compile more of a broadly accepted "canon" for TDM's setting, then it should still be accepted in that "broad" way. I.e. it is soft and maleable enough that it does not tie mission-maker's hands, with regards to missions and stories set in the past, present and potential future of the TDM setting. A lot of players think they know what they want if they want a detailed setting, but more often that not, it just ends up with things being overexplained and losing their "charm" and a reasonable degree of mystique. After all, even die-hard Thief fans should acknowledge one thing: Thief didn't try to explain everything. Far from it ! The entire trilogy was very fond of elliptical storytelling, with hinted-at stuff and loads of unexplained stuff and references. I think TDM should keep with that, even if we potentially expand the "hard canon" parts of TDM's canon. Not stuff like "in this or that year, William Steele was born", but certainly stuff like "from the 4th to 7th century of its existence, the Empire was ruled by this or that dynasty, in a unique tetrarchic set-up", and similar.

I'm sorry in advance if this is a stupid question but if anyone has any ideas, they are very welcome! When I was working on a document in microsoft word, having some music from YouTube playing, the laptop suddenly turned off without any warning. It did not turn back on as fast as it does usually. Then, not without some hesitation it did turn on but the keyboard did not work. In device manager the keyboard driver driver "Standard PS/2 Keyboard" had an error something about time out. After some screwing around, disassembling the laptop, cleaning dust, disconnecting and connecting the connector tape and in the end praying for almighty google "me stupid, me no understand" - I found out that my keyboard and/or BIOS drivers must be wrong. Deleted the keyboard drivers and now it works. Just in case updated BIOS and processor drivers and everything else the "System Update" app from the Lenovo website offered. Question: Did the computer turn off suddenly because of some deprecated/conflicting BIOS update or is the problem with the keyboard drivers and I should update that as well to prevent future instant shutdowns? I'm just a little paranoid to lose work progress if something happens suddenly and I have a deadline this month. People on forums mention that for some, installing an "ELAN pointing device" touchpad driver helped as well. However the touchpad worked for me and it always had the "ELAN pointing device" drivers. Should the keyboard driver also be ELAN or is it okay as it is and I'm just overreacting? System specifications copy/paste from dxdiag in spoiler below: DxDiag_Lenovo_ideapad_330.txt

It's not really a substitute by any means, but this may be relevant: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/16730-tutorial-technique-to-texture-rotated-brushes/

Thanks for the replies! I'm thinking that in order to keep it simple, at first we wouldn't allow users to provide subjective opinions directly, mainly to avoid the issues mentioned above, such as spamming or demoralizing opinions, but I agree that at some point down the road, if this works well, this may evolve into what you are thinking. One thing that the system could do though is scrape forum threads for information about particular missions. For example, there are many threads asking people what are their top missions; the system could add some kind of tag to missions appearing in those lists (e.g., "Top Mission", or a star or medal icon), and maybe even provide more recognition to those that appear in the majority of top lists. Another thing that the system could do is pull data from the thread of each mission. For example, in the thread for In The North, there are lots of mentions of the mission being atmospheric and having great architecture. So that could lead to the tags "atmospheric" and "great architecture". Another thing: in the past, demagogue suggested sending stealth server scores to a server. If we end up having this kind of data for missions, this could be a great way of showing other pieces of objective information about missions, such as average stealth scores, average completion time, etc. which could be very valuable to indicate difficulty and length of a mission, as well as whether a mission is fully ghostable (or whether it has ever been ghosted, to be more precise). Good idea! What about a filter such as "Is mission part of a campaign?" This allows finding campaigns in which at least one of the missions meets the filter requirements (for example, one of the missions in the campaign has rain and it's a city mission). Good idea too. Please see my comment a few paragraphs above regarding how to automate this. Seems that at first though we'd rely on forum threads for this information. I agree with MBs, although maybe we need two independent filters? One for MBs (which seems like a more advanced filter for experienced players) and another one more "human" (e.g., small/medium/large/very large)? I'm saying this mainly because the size in MBs doesn't really say much to new players. Raising the stakes, but I like this idea! We could actually use the same application, just use different DB tables for the mapper tools. In some cases we could even interconnect some of the data, and maybe find out some interesting relationships between resources used by FMs and their reception by the public (a simple example: maybe we find out that FMs using a specific set of resources tend to be regarded as "atmospheric").

I would be against subjective user tags like "ugly" for the reasons VanishedOne mentions. I think it should be restricted to objective criteria like "has it got spiders".

I think it is a good idea! Our ingame mission downloader and mission view has long been subject of multiple improvement suggestions. Due to the sheer mass of missions that have been released in the last 15 years, things got really cluttered and especially newcomers will have a hard time finding what they want. However, improving the ingame guis is quite a task, so a web-based application might really suit this scenario well. Maybe we could even add a linke to it from our ingame menus, so user can access it quicker. Some more things to think about Would users be able to add custom tags and downvote / upvote certain tags, much like the system of Steam? This would also allow to add tags like "beautiful", or "difficult". Actually, the more users can contribute to this system, the better, because it will be automatically maintained then. The browser should also contain a flag for whether the FM belongs to a connected series of FMs or not and have the capability to go to the previous or next FM in that series. There should also be a flag for fully fledges campaigns. Some might like a flag whether or not an FM is "ghostable".

For your information, each FM has its own thread here on the forums. So, if you've got feedback, praise or criticizm regarding any FM, that's usually the place to post such stuff.

Sir, sir, Obsttorte told me to do it sir! In ITB's guis/mainmenu_objectives.gui: /* ============================================================================================= * * This file is part of The Dark Mod's Main Menu GUI * * Mission Authors: DO NOT EDIT, INCLUDE OR OVERRIDE THIS FILE IN YOUR MISSION PK4. 'I've modified a lot of such files containing that warning and hey, I'm still here.' -- Obsttorte, http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18729-how-about-redesign-tdms-mainmenu/page-3#entry405730 * * ============================================================================================= */ As for what it actually changes, it increases the dimensions of a text box so I can fit in a difficulty level called 'For your eyes only' (compare windowDef Difficulty2 to the others).

I'm trying to create a .tga with transparency, that I can use as a decal. I erased part of the image in Photoshop (old Elements 8 ) to add transparency. I can save as a .png file, and all appeared to be good. But if I try to save as .tga (32 bit, uncompressed), the transparent section comes out white (on reload into PSE, or in TDM). I gather from the Photoshop forums that you have to do backflips and blood sacrifices to get .tga with alpha channel to be emitted. A trip of the .png file through GIMP and exported out resulted in a corrupted .tga I know there are online file converters, so maybe it will come to that. But I'd like to hear your recommendations.

I did not know about this project until it was finished, or I would have been all over it. I remember being on forums when Thief 3 was being made and the two suggestions I made (and I probably was not the only one who did) was an escape the prison level, which happened in 3, and dogs, which was not well done in that pretend 4th game. Keeping them in cages was NOT the point. I was hoping to have to either make friends or subdue the guard dogs as part of new challenges. Someone should make a real 4th Thief, game and not omit Pagans and Keepers and Hammers. Erin should have been a character you got to know BEFORE something weird happened to her. Just my own thoughts. Thief 4 should change its name and the area and character names and just be a stealth game unaffiliated to the franchise. Darkmod waaaay better than that pretend 4th game. When I get a better computer that isn't old enough to go to middle school, I hope to create levels too.

Tip o-the-day for these problems. Keep a text editor or desktop sticky notes widget open and paste the text there first (unformatted, if given the option when pasting), then re-copy to paste to forums.

We've had some high-end master race gamer come crying in the forums that their uber rig can't do 4K with 16xAA and SS maxed out On the other hand Radeons 4000 theoretically must run TDM but give black screen practically. Nvdia drivers can crash the app when a particular mission has used up too much VRAM. How do you put that in system requirements? I think it's the mapper's duty above anyone else to suggest the PC speed level as mappers are not limited in that.

You're right, artists don't choose the text, nor do they choose the Gatherer ID that goes along with it (in this case it was 1488). I'm sure Wizards is now being a lot more careful about who they accept art from. It's their choice who they want to accept artwork from and it is also their choice (and right) to remove content they own that they don't like. They decided that the art they purchased from McNeill no longer aligns with their values so they did what they were allowed to do and removed it. Like I said, we are all hypocrites, myself included and I'll still enjoy TDM. And I still think space travel is cool even though the rockets were designed and built by Nazi scientists (Operation Paperclip is a wild bit of history). But no one on these forums is constantly and loudly spouting off how much they like lynching Black people or how much they think that Hitler "really wasn't a bad guy". If that started happening and became the culture around here, then yeah, I'd probably move elsewhere.

And Alpha 3 is available: https://github.com/fholger/thedarkmodvr/releases/tag/v2.0.9_alpha3 @BuckleBean I've implemented your idea of a cone of mouse movement that does not turn the player view. You can control its size by vr_decoupledMoseYawAngle. Setting it to 0 disables the whole thing What do you think? The other noteworthy change is that I've dealt with cutscenes (e.g. the beginning of NHAT): since these take active control of the player camera, I'm rendering them in 2D to the overlay instead of to the eyes to avoid nausea. In general, I'd appreciate some feedback for this version. I think it is now in a state where I should promote it outside of these forums.

That's very cool! Definitely not what I was expecting (some kind of mammalian beast). Should make for some interesting fantasy environments like castles or dungeons - always had a treasure hoard of some kind in mind. Regarding your extra steps, I haven't been involved with implementing a character, though I'd have this to say: I think the closest AI type to this is the werebeast, due to the inbuilt head and natural attacks. I think that AI can reasonably be used for both beasts, though would have to see whether there's support for a turning animation to avoid that it just spins in place like the horse. I don't think any of those involved with creating the 2.08 beast characters use Blender (Springheel: Maya, Kingsal: 3DSmax, Diego: ?), so a .blend file would be unfamiliar terrain for them. Arcturus, however, is very skilled with Blender and still occasionally pops in to the forums. I think he'd surely point to or describe (or already has described) the steps needed to export a character for TDM from Blender. Also, as it happens Samson recently made a new .md5 import/export script for Blender 2.80+. The defs & co. should be reasonably straightforward as we already have the example of the werebeast. The big roadblock that halted its development for years, however, was the ragdoll setup. Obsttorte and Springheel somehow sorted it out in the end. To get back to Kingsal's comment about the pathfinding, I think this will in any case be larger than a horse due to the wings, so ideally there'd be a new AAS type - and we have very capable coders. In a pinch, mappers can just very generously monsterclip their map to avoid that the dragon tries to get into too small spaces, while leaving gaps for smaller AIs. The question is how big exactly it should be: the larger it is, the harder it is to create a suitably large & well-performing environment for it. Maybe it could come in 2 sizes.

I don't think the devs are going to consider something like this. But I don't think it's as difficult to code as you might think. This is one of those projects that's well within a fan's ability to mod in for themselves. I'd search the forums and the source code for anything to do with head movement, and I think it wouldn't take long before the key code you'd have to change pops up.

@lowenz Thanks very much! But I'd suggest holding off a couple days because I've just posted version 2 in the beta forums, with a focus on improving the ship's playability and more content for the ruined house.

Heh, the dmap times where unbelievable for a little while a few months ago. I have a fairly decent rig, but I'd start dmapping, then leave to make dinner, eat dinner, then find the pc still dmapping, it'd take a solid half an hour to 45 minutes or so. But with 2.08 and a few other changes, that time was drastically cut. so now its only like 5-10 minutes to dmap @MrMunkeepants Do you mind kindly putting that image in spoiler tags please, thank you!

I understand where Fieldmedic is coming from pretty well, because I am also a very sporadic contributor and sometimes I kind of have a bad concsience about that. About once a year, I have a phase where I am really enthusiastic about a project for TDM and hustle like crazy, but the rest of the year, I mostly just hang around the forums. It's just that free time has become scarce, especially since my son was born, and I also want to play games, enjoy a movie or go out sometimes. But there really is no reason to feel bad about anything, because this is a community project and, first and foremost, a hobby.

It's expected, 0.76>0.70 you used. But using that value you can compare to 1280x800 resolution 1:1 Of course you can lower the resolution scale to 0,609523 (1024x640).....but please disable the VSync as first step. Those 2 FMs are killer cases :D, please try the "classic" mansion FM: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20416-fan-mission-a-night-of-loot-one-mans-treasure/

Hi. There is only freyk's installer but I don't know if he has a Google Drive or Torrent download solution. I also don't know if the installer gives you the lastest 2.08 version. It doesn't seem so from the name. After downloading it, there is no update process. It installs just like any app. The installer itself is here - http://tdmcdn.azureedge.net/various/beta207_01/TDM_installer.exe The author's profile: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/13309-freyk/ Perhaps he can offer more information.

@Dragofer can you grace the TTLG folk with a thread? ( www.ttlg.com/forums )?

Yes, try to update your video drivers. And if there is a darkmod.log in your darkmod folder, we would like to see it. Open the file with notepad and copy its content in this topic. in the following topics, you can find some other pointers: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/search/&q=black screen&quick=1&type=forums_topic&nodes=58

@STiFU thanks for pointing it out, I've fixed it. It seems the new forums don't really like text getting copy-pasted in.

Jeez. First, why triple posting? Edit button is your friend. Second, wrap some damn spoiler tags around most of what you wrote about the story. I don't care about it that much since I already read that by accident, but some people might want to play the game and learn that by themselves.