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https://www.information.dk/indland/leder/2024/04/ny-cheminova-sag-paa-tide-miljoeet-faar-lov-veje-tungere-erhvervet in danish so you might need google tranlate but oh boy... and it is not the first time they ended with a shitstorm either. In essence an old firm with a history of serious pollution turned out to have a state mandate to flush several 1000 times the amount of arsen (basically the same stuff as rat poison) into the ocean. the way they did it to get around eu directives was to expand the area from where it was lead out into the sea by a factor of 100km instead of the 100m from the letout that was the norm. creative thinking which would have been better used on problems which are not illegal as all hell i would say.

gah... ok makes sense in a way now 256 bit bus and back then at the chip shortage time micron could only deliver gddr6x with 1 gb pr chip = 32 bit x 8 = 256 bit bus. sadly while the 3090 which was a hotplate in its original configuration with vram on both sides of the card, got 2 gb chips when they became avaliable so they could move them to the front and get rid of the heat issues the 3070 newer got the same chips. to make matters worse the stock 3070 has gddr6 which has only half the bandwidth of gddr6x but atleast the ti version got stocked with gddr6x chips so at high resolutions it should make a dent but at lower resolutions they performed to close to each other to really justify upgrading.

It would be nice to be able to create your own EFX presets, this will solve that issue. https://github.com/kcat/openal-soft/blob/master/include/AL/efx-presets.h lists all the presets. Here they can be seen in the tdm source file. I think these could be read from an external file instead of inside game code? If TDM reads the presets from an external file, anyone could easilly make their own presets by overriding that file and these could be used inside a spawnarg when that gets implemented.

This topic is going in different directions and it is difficult to tell if we all are in the same page. Facts: Stgatilov wants to change (improve, I guess) something and while implementing the change he realizes he will break some mission in the process. Mappers have been including (now obsolete) core files in their missions and the developer wants to know why these files were included in the first place, as in: the purpose. Changes in two mission are unavoidable, unless the authors go back and revisit the entire logic of their missions. Changes in eight missions are avoidable, in the sense that missions remain essentially the same with or without these changes. Regardless, if the improvements are to be implemented ten missions need to be reviewed and updated. Now my opinion: Considering how the topic is going the next time Stgatilov wants to improve something similar he might think it twice (we all lose because of ten missions). If these same improvements were to be implemented in the future chances are not ten but fifteen missions would have to be reviewed and updated which begs the question, does the inclusion of core files in missions put the present and future development of some areas at risk? No, as long as things remain under control: preserve what must be preserved, encourage and support innovations, identify and address trends. This requires an effort by all parties involved.

Our journeys began at the exact same place

On https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/ I see the "log in" link, but I cannot find a "create account" link, or any description on how to create an account, or who/where to ask for one.

Thanks for the replies, particularly the reference to the embarrassingly-obvious "Music & SFX" subforum just below this one. I just like the music: I don't have any illusions about creating a fan mission. I messed with Dromed way back in the day, and I remember what a black hole of time and sanity it was.

I made a small update including the fixed fonts by Geep and also brought Snatcher's Whistle back, because a) I noticed that hitting something with blackjack or sword has not the same effect and b) the name now doesn't look bad anymore because of the font fix .

I think wiki pages for these files would be useful: mainmenu_custom_defs.gui mainmenu_briefing.gui mainmenu_background_custom.gui I think those are the only files with official support for editting.

A basic little detail we don't yet have is breakable decorations, I was wondering what is up with that and if maybe we can change it. Mainly thinking of new small decorations: I believe breakable crates or barrels were once experimented with, the entity may still be there but I've never seen them used, maybe someday those can be finished too. Just like metal goblets / plates / vases / bottles you can pick up and throw, it would be nice to have alternatives made of fragile transparent glass. The difference being that when they hit a surface past a certain velocity, they disappear and shatter into glass shards... I believe the fundamental system for this already exists with breakable glass panels? Gameplay wise they'd have a particular property: When they break they should make a louder noise, causing a slightly higher alert that makes AI look there for longer, not as much as the noise arrow but somewhere between it and throwing a conventional object. As a potential penalty, stepping on a small glass breakable should shatter it which is hearable to AI, FM's that use them may encourage being a bit extra careful where you're going.

I have never been truly satisfied with the Whistle: it was either too much or too little. The latest version (v4) is so far the best (imho) although I still disagree with some things. Are you up to date or are you keeping a previous version for some reason?

I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.

I've actually thought of this exact thing as well! It would be both easier to manage and equally interesting as a mechanic. Very easy concept to implement too: Just add a stim that temporarily changes the light's sound shader for a few seconds before reverting back to normal one, give lights an s_shader_wet spawnarg and include a low volume flickering noise... it should make guards a little suspicious but less than the noise arrow in this case. Just remembered this was in fact a plan for my flash arrow, a custom weapon I've been asking to get included in vanilla but so far it's been forgotten. I believe the last version only blinds guards using the flash bomb effect, but one of the goals was to have lights temporarily turn off or flicker before coming back on after a few seconds, though this would require a custom script at best.

My new mission, A Night in Altham, is available. We are already up to version 2! @Dave the Tafferfound an problem that deserves a fix, so here is version 2: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/y4r1dmziuq6clh2im3qz1/altham2.pk4?rlkey=m3cv5v6v70lxbc9xha61nuxoj&dl=1. I will ask @nbohr1more to update the databases. Thanks to JackFarmer (alpha testing and custom ambient music) and the many beta testers (jaxa, Shadow, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, thebigh, datiswous, Mezla, MirceaKitsune, Melchior, Acolytesix, TheUnbeholden, prjames, Bergante). Thanks to @peter_spy for his beautiful Builder Compound assets. This is a large mission, so be ready to take some time. I recommend that you do named saves occasionally (I actually implemented auto-saves for this mission, but it was causing crashes on Linux, so I removed it). This mission has a lot of keys, so it implements a key management mechanism. Keys are removed from the game when no longer needed. This includes when you use a key to open a door, or if you pick a door/lock that also uses a key. Most keys are automatically removed, but there are a couple that aren't (for example, if they open up more than one door). In a certain area, this mission uses the Keyhole Peek feature of TDM. Typically, this is when you lean forward (F key) into a door keyhole and you can see into the next room. But in this case you don't lean into a keyhole. It's a hole of another kind. It's an unconventional use of something that isn't used a lot in TDM; hopefully the mission context will make it clear when to use it. The mission does not use Keyhole Peek for regular doors. Be aware, there is a known problem on Linux, where the peek feature can cause a crash. Peeking is not required for mission completion. This has been tested on TDM 2.11a and the current dev build of 2.12 (dev16854-10518). Scary things warning: Difficulty settings make a difference. Things that are affected by the difficulty level: Enjoy!

for the original 3070 id agree it was the ammount though the increased bandwidth in the ti models should help in 4k hell even the old AMD fury-x could at the time run 4k with only 4gb due to the hbm memory being that much faster to swap but yeah theres more than one way to skin a rhinocereus . a 3070 with 2 gb gddr6x 16 gb would have been pretty interresting to say the least .

@stgatilov @nbohr1more I'm wondering if it would be possible to get this implemented for 2.13? I'm really not loving the EFX files - it's way too easy to miss/forget locations and just a general PITA. I am even considering offering to help implement - any reluctance on my part is purely down to lack of confidence. But with some hand-holding I could possibly accomplish something that isn't a total disaster. Maybe an alternative is to have a feature that allows DR to manage the EFX preset in the EFX file? Basically what I'd like is to be able to manage everything related to a location entity in the one place, preferably in DR. Not sure if that's ever been considered? @greebo?

That's a very valid question. Personally, I'd say the key is to watch what the otherwise-disengaged fringes of the community are saying. If first time posters or long time lurkers start coming out of the woodwork about well made new missions, praising them for their geometry and story but saying that innovative parts of the gameplay felt frustrating or off, that's probably the first sign that the innovations are starting to get out of hand. For a more concrete example, re-read the comments on Hazard Pay. As much as I and many others love that mission, it's clearly a case where the author strayed further than many people were comfortable with. It also points to the likely endgame if authors do take their customization too far. After getting the negative feedback, kingsal made adjustments, and now the mission is much more friendly towards player preferences that don't match the author's original vision. You don't need to restrict the mapmakers' tools to stop them from straying too far from the traditional formula. When people start speaking up, the authors will rein themselves in on their own.

I think this is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because the ability to customize exists does not mean most mappers will use it. On the contrary, if one considers the customization that are already available, we see that the overwhelming majority of mappers stick to the defaults. The exceptions are interesting also. Kingsal's the only mapper that readily comes to mind who habitually deviates from presets seemingly just for the sake of being different. However everything they make is clearly in service of cohesive visions. Hazard Pay, no matter how you feel about it, unarguably loses a great deal of its survival horror character if you take away the napalm arrows or the punishing save system. The Voltas don't need to use Thief style elemental crystals in place of TDMs arrow model, but the fact that they are there makes a definite statement about the author's awareness of their inspiration for their work in TDM from the original games, which in turn draws attention to other, subtler creative choices. I think it's also telling that some of kingsal's modifications have been adopted by other authors. As OrbWeaver said, "If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed." However, how can the community come to a consensus unless there are maps to showcase the advantages of new innovations? Requesting, or worse requiring, players to go in and manually change settings in order to experience a new mechanic is never going to gain any traction. Certainly it is not worth the effort of creating an entire map built around a new paradigm.

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.

For free ambience tracks it's as Freky said: you look around on the internet for tracks with the appropriate license to be included in your FM. Fortunately, you likely don't even need to bother doing this as a beginner as there's an entire "Music & SFX" section of the forums full of good ambient tracks for you to use if the stock tracks do not meet your fancy. You might also be interested in Orbweaver's "Dark Ambients", which come with a sndshd file already written for you.

I just made an interesting discovery. In my FM that's in beta I have custom main menu music, but it doesn't always work. Basically it works: When you first start the game (whether the FM is currently selected or if you change to this mission and the game restarts) during the text briefing It doesn't work (i.e. you only get silence) When escaping back to the main menu while in-game After quitting a mission and it goes back to menu As far as I know I had all the correct settings in mainmenu_custom_defs.gui: /// Menu music after startup (not in-game) #define MM_MENU_SOUND_CMD "music fs_muslim;" /// Played in main menu when in-game (ESCaping out of the game) #define MM_INGAME_MENU_SOUND_CMD "music fs_muslim;" /// Played during non-video briefing #define MM_BRIEFING_SOUND_CMD "music fs_muslim;" It turns out the problem was I had this line set in the sound shader: leadin sound/ambient/ambience/silence.ogg Commenting that out on a hunch fixed the problem. So you might be saying to yourself 'that's all very interesting but who cares?'. My point is: Just an FYI in case someone else runs into this I don't think there is anywhere on the Wiki that covers menu customization? @Geep you've done a whole bunch around GUI scripting recently - is there somewhere you can recommend I can stick this?

Stone 24pt Font Upgrade, May 9 2024 Interim Release This first release just clears away some of the low-hanging fruit, while buffing the new datBounds program. In summary - stray mark next to W removed poor spacing of J and AE improved 6 characters got accents added. The download is made up of: .dat and 2 .dds files, for distribution/game inclusion .ref [with changes annotated] and .xcf [master source GIMP project, including datBounds layers] 2024 May 9 Stone 24 Interim font update.zip The changes were also doubled-checked using the testSubtitlesANSI FM. As this work continues, with an interim release approximately monthly, characters to be fixed will be chosen seemingly "at random", but actually due to layout considerations... you don't want to know. They'll all be done eventually. Details of Improvements:

Sixty years ago the famous deLisle family fell into ruin. The last heir of their house believes an ancient heirloom will restore their fortunes. Retrieving it should be worth braving a haunted house for... Get it from the in-game mission downloader.