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I've seen fun workarounds like that in other game modding as well. Years ago, maybe even a decade, some fella who was making a mod for Mount & Blade over at the Taleworlds forums revealed that he put invisible human NPCs on the backs of regular horse NPCs, then put the horse NPCs inside a horse corral he built for one of his mod's locations/scenes and then did some minor scripting, so the horses with invisible riders would wander around the corral. The end result was that it looked they're doing this of their own will, rather than an NPC rider being scripted to ride around the corral slowly. Necessity is the mother of invention. I don't know about the newest Mount & Blade game, but the first generation ones (2008-2022) apparently had some sort of hardcoded issue back in the earlier years, where if you left a horse NPC without a rider in its saddle, the horses would just stand around and wait and you couldn't get them to move around. Placing an invisible rider in their saddles suddenly made it viable again, at least for background scenes, of riderless horses wandering around, for added atmosphere. First generation M&B presumed you'd mostly be seeing horses in movement with riders, and the only horses-wandering-loosely animations and scripting were done for situations when the rider was knocked off their horse or dismounted in the middle of a battle. Hence the really odd workarounds. So, an invisible NPC trick might not be out of the question in TDM, even though you could probably still bump into it, despite its invisibility.

I created discussion here and mentioned authors (maybe I missed someone though). Unlike the previous thread about main menu GUI overrides, I think the new one does not look aggressive . The main question there is why this was done, and how to adapt to avoid this problem now and in the future. Indeed, all the missions will be fixed by 2.13 even if some authors don't respond. Dev builds regularly break something, although usually it is done unintentionally. I added "known issues" point on the dev build, which happens pretty rarely. I apologize for the negative emotions this change has caused. Sometimes I am too rough in communications. Moreover, I am not a creative kind of person, I'm more a technical type of person. Thus I believe in interface boundaries, so in my mind the blame for breakage is always on the side that violates these boundaries. Anyway, I know I'll have to fix the breakage, probably myself if necessary.

So this online store I bought a pair of headphones from decided to gift me 12$ today. Since the voucher would expire in in two weeks unless used and I had nothing else to get, I decided to spend it on a 17$ gamepad so I'd have one of these as well. I understand they should work fine under Linux these days, plus it supports both dinput and xinput so I'm not concerned. I never played any FPS or most games using something other than the keyboard and mouse, this feels like an interesting opportunity to try it out. TDM is one of the games I might enjoy playing with such a thing, especially since it doesn't require super-fast reactions till I get used to it like a deathmatch shooter. So until the device arrives tomorrow, I figured I'd ask how well I can expect TDM to run on such a thing! Especially now that we have a new rendering and input management system for the upcoming TDM 2.10. There's a few things I wanted to know. One is if both looking around as well as movement using the finger pads is supported. I remember some games allowed walking more slowly if you only pushed the pad slightly; Does this mean it's possible to sneak by only moving the pad a bit, in a way that affects how much guards hear you? Otherwise I was curious if force feedback (vibration) is implemented and used. For TDM this mainly makes sense when you take damage, are in radius of a sound that has the shake effect, and other potential situations I might be missing now. Is gamepad vibration a feature in the engine at least?

Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.

I totally agree that players usually don't care whether some non-customizable constant like bow shoot time is same as in core or not, as long as the mission plays well. This is a problem only for TDM development. But I don't know a proper way of solving this: mappers usually want to customize something "right now", and waiting for new release is rarely an option. And often customizations are not implemented until someone really wants them (or right away uses them), so that's also the chicken-and-egg problem here.

Good question. Maybe because I don't feel myself too guilty breaking these missions? Maybe because I know that fixing them will be a long story. And I feel confident that we (or more likely I ) will be able to fix all of them by 2.13. You might have noticed that I have also enabled two behavior changes in the latest build (1 2). In these cases it is not even mappers' fault that behavior change is needed. I have a script which can update all missions at once so that they work properly both in 2.12 and dev builds. But somehow I feel I should wait for at least some feedback on the new behavior before doing a massive change to dozens of missions.

Innovation is good: someone has a new idea (or need) and executes it to the best of his/her knowledge and ability. When we start borrowing and adopting other people's innovations we are no longer innovating but creating a trend, for better or worse. Stgatilov is touching the tip of this, still small, but growing by the mission iceberg.

So because of bugtracker 5600, does that mean that 10 FMs (Written in Stone, Northdale 1 and 2, Volta 2, Hazard Pay, etc.) do not work in this new dev build, and yet, the dev build was released anyway? That's not cool.... The bow is kind of an important gameplay element, especially for Hazard Pay. Why even release this build if it breaks 10 existing FMs?

This last month, I've been exploring TDM's font situation, and improving the documentation as I go. In the wiki, "Font Conversion & Repair" was rewritten, with parts broken out and expanded as: Font Files Font Metrics & DAT File Format Font Bitmaps in DDS Files ExportFontToDoom3 Q3Font Refont As announced earlier, that last item is a new C++ console utility for revising font metrics in DAT files; essentially another alternative to Q3Font and Font Patcher. It now has additional functionality that provides font-coverage analysis. A summary of current results across all TDM fonts is reported in the forum thread "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts". Also, refont allows its human-readable outputs to be decorated with an annotation for each character (out of 256 codepoints). Associated with that, I've just created and released 4 annotation files: 1 Cyrillic version for TDM's russian map 3 variants for TDM's custom english/european char map. One of the variants was derived from another new mapping file that is now available from existing wiki article "I18N - Charset". Within that file is a list, in a standard format, of the 256 TDM bitmap codepoints mapped to the corresponding Unicode U+NNNN value and name. This may be useful in defining TDM's mapping to TTF font editing programs. For all these wiki pages mentioned, I imagine there will be additional cross-links and tweaks. But pretty much done.

There's been talk over the years on how we could improve texture quality, often to no avail as it requires new high-resolution replacements that need to be created and will look different and add a strain on system resources. The sharpness post-process filter was supposed to improve that, but even with it you see ugly blurry pixels on any nearby surface. Yet there is a way, a highly efficient technique used by some engines in the 90's notably the first Unreal engine, and as it did wonders then it can still do so today: Detail textures. Base concept: You have a grayscale pattern for various surfaces, such as metal scratches or the waves of polished wood or the stucco of a rough rock, usually only a few highly generic patterns are needed. Each pattern is overlayed on top of corresponding textures several times, every iteration at a smaller... as with model LOD smaller iterations fade with camera distance as to not waste resources, the closer you get the more detail you see. This does wonders in making any texture look much sharper without changing the resolution of the original image, and because the final mixture is unique you don't perceive any repetitiveness! Here's a good resource from UE5 which seems to support them to this day: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/adding-detail-textures-to-unreal-engine-materials Who else agrees this is something we can use and would greatly improve graphical fidelity? No one's ever going to replace every texture with a higher resolution version in vanilla TDM; Without this technique we'll always be stuck with early 2000's graphics, with it we have a magic way of making it look close to AAA games today! Imagine being able to see all those fine scratches on a guard's helmet as light shines on it, the thousands of little holes on a brick, the waves of wood as you lean into a table... all without even losing much performance nor a considerable increase in the size of game data. It's like the best deal one could hope for! The idTech 4 material system should already have what we need, namely the ability to mix any textures at independent sizes; Unlike the old days when only a diffuse texture was used, the pattern would now need to be applied to both albedo / specular / normal maps, to my knowledge there are shader keywords to combine each. Needless to say it would require editing every single material to specify its detail texture with a base scale and rotation: It would be painful but doable with a text injection script... I made a bash script to add cubemap reflections once, if it were worth it I could try adapting it to inject the base notation for details. A few changes will be needed of course: Details must be controlled by a main menu setting activating this system and specifying the level of detail, materials properties can't be controlled by cvars. Ultimately we may need to overlay them in realtime, rather than permanently modifying every material at load time which may have a bigger performance impact; We want each iteration to fade with distance and only appear a certain length from the camera, the effect will cause per-pixel lighting to have to render more detail per light - surface interaction so we'll need to control the pixel density.

My old friend Andreas urgently needs my help. He asked if I could meet him at the Lion's Head Inn, our favourite retreat in a quaint part of the city called Mirkway Quarter. He’s got a small apartment nearby where he makes a modest living off paintings he sells to pompous nobles and the odd merchant. Not long ago, his wife Lily was hired as a servant at the manor of the local alderman, one Lord Marlow. Now she hasn't been home for days. Andreas went to the manor looking for her, but the guards shoved him into the gutter and warned him not to return. Andreas is certain that something bad has happened, and I don’t think he’s wrong. Gallery Authors’ Notes It all started many years ago when Shadowhide laid the foundation for a sprawling and convoluted city and worked with MoroseTroll and Clearing to create a macabre storyline to befit this medieval metropolis. At some point, however, the beast grew too large to handle, so he handed the keys to the City to Bikerdude and Melan. Together, the two worked tirelessly, passing the map back and forth, each playing to their respective strengths. Notably, Melan reworked the story concept, toning down many of its darker, R-rated elements. Eventually Melan, too, moved on in 2017, but by then large swathes of the community had become involved in this map’s development. Mapping work was contributed by Baal, Grayman, Fidcal, Ubermann, Skacky, and Flanders, while Destined, nbohr1more, and Obsttorte wrote story texts. Several scripts were provided by Grayman, Baal and Obsttorte, such as an elevator with scissor gates, a TDM first. Even after all this input, the daunting task still remained to transform what had grown into the largest TDM map ever made into a playable mission. Bikerdude hammered away at this for some more years still, on and off between other projects, until in early 2020 when he deemed it ready for public viewing. It was then that Dragofer and Amadeus joined in. In the months that followed, the trio reworked, finished, and polished the mission in nearly every aspect, fully writing out and editing the story as well as adding countless scripted effects and (with help from Bienie) many new readables. The good working atmosphere and pooled creativity brought forth several new secrets, of which the largest likely hasn’t been done before in TDM (hint: check the libraries). In the very end, the name “Fractured Glass Company” was drawn up to refer to everybody who was involved in creating this very special mission. Without the hard work of all these people, most of all Bikerdude and Shadowhide, this mission would likely never have seen the light of day, let alone become what you see here before you. The mission is, as Bikerdude puts it, a homage to Thief 1 & 2, and it’s our hope that you catch these vibes as you explore and enjoy this mission. Update 1.2 (released 04/04/2021) Update 1.1 (released 11/11/2020) Credits - Mapping: Shadowhide, Bikerdude, Amadeus, Baal, Dragofer, Fidcal, Flanders, Melan, Skacky, UberMann - Original Story Concept: Clearing, MoroseTroll, Shadowhide - Story & Readables: Amadeus, Bienie, Bikerdude, Dragofer, Destined, Melan, nbohr1more, Obsttorte, Shadowhide - Editor: Amadeus - Scripting: Dragofer, Baal, Grayman, Obsttorte - Voice Acting: AndrosTheOxen (Andreas), Joe Noelker (Player) - Video Editing: Bikerdude (briefing), Goldwell (briefing intro) - Custom Models: Bikerdude, Dragofer, Dram, Epifire, Grayman, Obsttorte - Custom Textures: Airship Ballet, Dmv88, Hugo Lobo - Custom Sounds: GigaGooga, Sephy, Shadow Sneaker, alanmcki, andre_onate, Deathscyp, dl-sounds.com, Dmv88, dwoboyle, eugensid90, gzmo, lucasduff, mistersherlock, qubodup, randommynd, richerlandtv, sfx4animation, Speedenza - Betatesting: Amadeus, ate0ate, Biene, Bluerat, CambridgeSpy, Cardia, Dragofer, Garrett(Monolyth-42), JoeBarnin, Kingsal, Krilmar, ManzanitaCrow, MikeA, Noodles, S1lverwolf, s.urfer Download Note: this mission requires TDM 2.08, which is now available for download. Please be aware that old saved games will no longer work after you upgrade to 2.08's release build. Note: it’s highly recommended to run this mission using the 64-bit client (TheDarkModx64.exe), since there've been frequent reports the mission won't load on the 32-bit client (TheDarkMod.exe). Both are found in the same folder. The mission is available from the ingame downloader. In addition to that, here are some more mirrors, as well as the official screenshots for anybody uploading this mission to a FM database: Mission: Google Drive / OneDrive Mission (v1.1, slimmed down version for 32-bit clients): Google Drive / OneDrive Official Screenshots: Google Drive / OneDrive Hi-Res Map: Imgur Links Secret loot & areas walkthrough by @Lzocast

I think it's time to replace the frob material stages with a shader (probably add a param to the existing ambient shader) There is more than one angle to this issue but I am mainly concerned about too many stages in materials that are somewhat taxing in terms of performance. Imagine rendering of 3K surfaces interacting with 3 lights in average and using materials with 7 stages in average. The renderer loops through every stage for every surface making it ~ 20K checks per loop. It has to happen during the depth stage, then each light and then the ambient pass resulting in 100K checks. It makes sense to try to reduce this load, especially considering that the frob stage is relatively rarely invoked and the checks happen on the backend making it hard to parallelize the computation. I am thinking adding a top-level material keyword that would apply as frob color and get passed to the ambient shader when the surface is a part of a frobable entity. I would like to hear your thoughts from the mapper/designer POV.

The new behavior is available in the latest dev17026-10712. If you set cvar r_envmapBumpyBehavior to 1, then you get new behavior. The old behavior is for value 0, which is default yet. The missions/core files are not adjusted yet. But I'd say everything is ready to do it.

The Black Mage ============================================================= Title: The Black Mage Filename: black_mage.pk4 Authors: Grayman, Jack Farmer Testers: datiswous, joebarnin, Shadow, Amadeus, madtaffer, wesp5 Release date: 24.12.2021 (version 1) - 05.03.2022 (version 2) - 23.12.2023 (version 3) Version: 3 (available via in game downloader) ============================================================= Grayman - Mapping, scripting & text for briefing video JackFarmer - Additional mapping & scripting, drafts for readables, conversations and in game comments Amadeus - Revision & editing of all readables, conversations and in game comments Dragofer, joebarnin, datiswous - Troubleshooting ============================================================= Voice Talents (in alphabetical order): AndrosTheOxen - Worried father / Counsel Lester Morlan (fincancial advisor to the lord) Bikerdude - Sami "Sausage" McNulty (the castle's chef) BoyLag - Percy Lockhard (the castle's chronicler) Goldchocobo - Robert (the son of the worried father) / Colton (a fallen Builder) Jedi_Wannabe - Friend of the worried father / Bennett (a fallen Builder) Malasdair - Lt. Godric (chief security officer) New Horizon - Lord Ewan Davenport (the Black Mage) Purgator - The Thief ============================================================= Paintings: New paintings provided by OGDA Grayman avatar painting created by Zerg Rush ============================================================= Assets: New kitchen equipment models provided by STRUNK ============================================================= Geometry: Selected cave architecture orginally created by Bikerdude & Dram for "Blackheart Manor" and later modified for "The Gatehouse" (rearranged with the orignal authors approval) ============================================================= Sound: Wind_rusting trees sound (main menu) taken from freesound.org produced by funwithsound "Madrigal" (briefing video) performed by Anthony Holborne Pub audience sound (briefing video) taken from freesound.org produced by yap-audio-production Footsteps sound (briefing video) taken from freesound.org produced by Nox_Sound Stand up from chair sound (briefing video) taken from freesound.org produced by kupp2 Tape-deck-startup sound (phonogram recording) taken from freesound.org produced by soundjoao Short metal scrape sound (phonogram recording) taken from freesound.org produced by Timbre Chains sound (phonogram recording) taken from freesound.org produced by arnaud-coutancier All other new ambient and sound fx recorded and produced by JackFarmer sometimes with altered sound effects/ambient sounds orginally produced by Gigagooga ============================================================= Video: Story board and sound arrangement by JackFarmer Briefing video produced by SirSmokeALot ============================================================= Known bugs: If you quicksave too soon after killing a fire elemental (within 4-5 seconds), the quickload crashes. (2.09 and 2.10) ============================================================= Production notes: Graymans's son gave this work in progress to the Dark Mod community according to grayman's will in June 2021. After discussions with Dragofer, I overtook this mission in June 2021 and started working on it in September 2021. Since I didn't know what else Grayman had planned, I made up my own story from the end of the briefing. The voice actors did an incredible job. Everyone I asked immediately agreed to complete this work of Grayman. This has now led to a fabulous eight voice actors taking part in this mission - from England, Ireland, Canada and the USA. ============================================================== Let's raise our glasses in Grayman's honor. Otherwise I wish you all happy holidays. Take care of yourself, your loved ones, and all of your friends.

EDIT - Please note there is a mod somewhere down this thread.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Taffers, It's a shame moveables didn't get a spawnarg for a proper name back in the day. Names could have added personality to the beautifully crafted moveables and exploring the world would have been way more interesting: "ent_name" "Apple" "ent_name" "Bottle of Wine" "ent_name" "Medium Crate" ... Mappers, of course, would have made use of this simple but nifty feature in a myriad of interesting ways Adding a proper name when a new item is first introduced takes not time but we are now talking hundreds of nameless objects... Oh well, as the saying goes: it never is too late! (or is it).

(Original Post) Hey ho. I am currently working on an alternative approach to blackjacking that doesn't rely on animation based hit collision, as it is now. Part of this approach is that the player gets a feedback on whether he can knockout the enemy in front of him via a suitable animation. As I am not familiar with neither modeling nor animating I would humbly ask for someone to help me out here. What I need is an animation that starts in the blackjack's idle state. The blackjack should then be slightly raised. Thanks in advance. ========================================= To test this out you can run the tdm_installer, select custom version and then select the dev16599-10071 dev build that can be found under dev/2.11. In addition you have to use this custom manifest url: http://ftp.thedarkmod.com/custom_builds/blackjack/manifest.iniz EDIT: There is a newer dev build available containing all the changes. The manifest is no longer needed. The ko indication can be toggled via the cvar tdm_blackjack_indicate. =========================================

Ah, pity I wasn't reading the forums back in February. I'm fond of that game, along with Bugbear's other early title, Rally Trophy. I was never too good at FlatOut, but it was always a hoot to play.

I think you need to do things at the exact moment in DR that the user changes a field, so you can capture both the old value and the new value. Would be way better if DR just handled everything natively, but could be done through a hook to an external script too, I suppose. Or some complicated logging.

Author Note: This is a brand new mission and a new entry into the accountant series. There are some different than usual puzzles in this FM, so if you find yourself stuck try to think about your pathway forward in a logical manner. And if you're still having troubles then pop by this thread and ask (preferably with spoiler tags). This FM is brand new and serves as the first installment in The Accountant series, a few years back there was a small prologue style mission released however I felt that it did not represent The Accountant series so I decided to go back to the drawing board and do a whole new mission that's larger, has a better level design and has a story that lines up closer to what I plan to do with the accountant series. The mission is medium sized and you can expect between 30-90 minutes to complete it depending on your playstyle. Beta Testers Captain Cleveland Crowind Kingsal PukeyBee Skacky SquadaFroinx Voice Actors AndrosTheOxen Epifire Goldwell Stevenpfortune Yandros Custom assets Airship Ballet Bentraxx Bob Necro Dragofer DrKubiac Epifire Kingsal MalachiAD Sotha Springheel SquadaFroinx Available via in-game downloader File Size: 233 MB - Updated to v 1.1 (01.06.2018)

Seems like the reddit voters are hoping that new missions will be "out there, strange, new". I guess they would've wanted a new "Unusual Contest". Regardless of the winning theme, voters will probably be giving higher marks for "crazy new stuff".

@snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.

After several months of hard work, we are proud to announce the latest edition of "No Honor Among Thieves"!!! EFX EDITION!!! EFX reverb has been added to all missions! NHAT has never been more immersive. From the dry woody reverb of the local pub to the sonorous and lofty echo of the Cathedrals, prepare your ears for a auditory treat! PERFORMANCE!!! Several major sore spots that impacted performance in v3 and older have been substantially optimized. Players with less capable hardware will now be less frustrated traversing caves, courtyards, and forests. VISUALS!!! Many areas have been visually overhauled!!! Improved lighting, new scene geometry, new textures, new water effects ( thanks @Arcturus !!! ), more vertex blended terrains, and more. Some areas have been visually redesigned to better match the story and convey the key characters. GAMEPLAY!!! Some new play areas have been added. A little more rooftop action is available for climbers. A few new readables for side characters expand the lore of the mission. Improved AI scripted events in the final mission escape sequence!!! Other things: The ROQ videos have been converted to MP4 to make them more compatible with the latest TDM versions. This mission still uses 2.09 style API controlled videos, we will rework the menu gui to be 2.10 (beta) compatible shortly so that "Dev Build" players can enjoy the additional performance and improvements available in those builds. Credits: @Bikerdude for the majority of the mapping work in this overhaul @Dragofer for assisting with scripting and def setup @nbohr1more new cathedral textures and improved water material def setup, a few readables @Arcturus MD3 animated water and water textures Original crew: @Goldchocobo @RailGun @Mortem Desino who created the original version along with updates to versions up to v2.0. Thank you for permission work on this update! V4 Beta testers: @AluminumHaste @JackFarmer Screenshots: Hotfix release: Should fix two minor issues: Newest Hotfix: Gdrive - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e_LHa4RdZ0a1AD3FhgLq7OwvBmWUchJZ/view?usp=sharing Onedrive - https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuwAFc1gTZzehn0z9PsAVEIH0iFn?e=Gj0p6O ( Some additional performance optimization to the forest and fixes to other items found by Biker and Aluminumhaste in another round of testing.) For those of you who are testing the Dev Builds ( 2.10 alpha ), here is a 2.10 compliant version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xyPwDQjMQH1TAH98Vd29UUiB0Nki1-7j/view?usp=sharing

If I create a new skin in the skin editor it creates a new skin with name new_skin . When I try to edit the name DR immediately crashes. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? But it should not crash at least. Using DR 3.7.0 under Linux