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I plan to gradually try out all or most of the different path node types and adjust them depending on the interaction. Though I don't plan to use it in this particular mission, I have a keen interest in the follow type, as I'll want an NPC to follow the player character in another, future FM I'd like to create. Never too soon to try out various functions while I'm already learning new FM-building skins after a long hiatus. Thank you for the suggestion. I completely forgot about the location system ambients as an option ! A few years back, when I was testing various stuff in DR, I did actually use that approach instead, once or twice. I haven't used DR much in recent years, so I eventually forgot about setting it up that way. Acknowledged, and I'll look into it. It'll save a lot of time concerning the audio side of the mission. My first few missions won't have much a natural environment, they'll largelly be small and focused on buildings or urban spaces, so I won't need to bother with detailed audio for rivers yet. I have an outdoor FM planned for later (it's in the pre-production phase), and I'll have a good reason to study it in greater detail. It's actually okay, I don't reallt need rectangular speakers. Given that I've been reminded I can set a main ambience for each room - something I did know before, but forgot, after not working properly with DR these past few years - I'll do just that, and use the speakers for more secondary ambience concerns. Handy indeed. A rectangular shape would be easier to remember. I'll just use the filters in the editor to put away the speakers if I ever the get the impression they're blocking my view. Also, I don't actually mind the shape all that much. As you and the others say, the size/radius of the speaker is the actual key aspect. I'm a bit disappointed it's seemingly not possible to resize speakers the same way you can resize brushes or certain models, though you can still tweak the radius numerically, manually. As long as I can work with that, the actual shape of a speaker isn't really important. My main concern is expanding the minimum and maximum radius areas to an extent where they'll be audible for most for all of the respective areas the player will visit, rather than fading away quickly once the player leaves the hub of the speaker behind. As was already said above, I'll use the different utility to set the main ambient for the individual rooms, rather than a manually placed speaker, and I'll reserve the speakers for additional sound effects or more local ambience. I've already added some extra parameters to the speakers I'm testing out in my FM, so I'll take a look at those soon, though I'll deal with the main room ambience settings first. I'd like to thank everyone for their replies. While I'm not surprised by the answers, I'm now more confident in working with the path node and speaker entities. On an unrelated sidenote to all of this, the same in-development FM where I'm testing the speaker placement and range was tested yesterday for whether an NPC AI can walk from the ground floor all the way to the topmost floor, without issues. Thankfully, there have been no issues at all, and the test subject - a female mage, whom I won't use in the completed FM, sadly - did a successful first ascent of the tower-like building that'll serve as the main setting. (That's all your getting from me for now, concerning the FM contents.)

Why do you want a square visualization for sounds? If is because you are afraid, that because of the fact the sound shape goes through walls, in a squared like room, that sound may go as well, then don't be, afaik unless there's zero portals in a scene, sound will be blocked by "walls" automatically. It uses the portals to know where it can "flow" into other rooms. So only the size not the shape of the visualization, is what matters, like OrbWeaver said, the shape is only a visualization for the inner and outer radius of a sound. In other words the area or "field of influence" of a sound and that "field" afaik, expands equally in a 3D volume, in a sphere like manner (to be more precise two spheres, a smaller inner one and a larger outer one), so a sphere shape, IMO is the best approximation for it. I also assume, a cube would be misleading because on the current system, if the player parked at the corners of the cube, he/she wouldn't hear the sound, thou I never tested it.

Those fire arrows are OP. I mean... don't change them, but maybe have them react with holy water to increase range? XD (Is that a thing?) You could, technically, make him either too parched to speak, mute altogether (hence why he lived, since he didn't scream and zombies didn't notice) or too shaken to talk. Maybe write a little lore piece where the PC recognizes the survivor as someone who was a good man (unlike our slave driver) and could incite the Player to help him (with an optional mission) Maybe have an option to bring him IN (if you found the other key) or bring him OUT (if you didn't) but you'd some food for both of you.

DarkRadiant 3.9.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Add "Show definition" button for the "inherit" spawnarg Improvement: Preserve patch tesselation fixed subdivisions when creating caps Improvement: Add Filters for Location Entities and Player Start Improvement: Support saving entity key/value pairs containing double quotes Improvement: Allow a way to easily see all properties of attached entities Fixed: "Show definition" doesn't work for inherited properties Fixed: Incorrect mouse movement in 3D / 2D views on Plasma Wayland Fixed: Objective Description flumoxed by double-quotes Fixed: Spinboxes in Background Image panel don't work correctly Fixed: Skins defined on modelDefs are ignored Fixed: Crash on activating lighting mode in the Model Chooser Fixed: Can't undo deletion of atdm_conversation_info entity via conversation editor Fixed: 2D views revert to original ortho layout each time running DR. Fixed: WX assertion failure when docking windows on top of the Properties panel on Linux Fixed: Empty rotation when cloning an entity using editor_rotatable and an angle key Fixed: Three-way merge produces duplicate primitives when a func_static is moved Fixed: Renderer crash during three-way map merge Internal: Replace libxml2 with pugixml Internal: Update wxWidgets to 3.2.4 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.9.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep creating Fan Missions! Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Keep on mapping!

Yet another breaking change, I'm afraid: 6346 Sounds have a bunch of parameters: minDistance maxDistance volume shakes soundClass The base value for each parameter is set in sound shader. However, it can be overridden with a different value in spawnargs (e.g. "s_volume" "-10") or in C++ engine code with SetSoundVolume (used extensively for footsteps). Unfortunately, Doom 3 engine has a special case: setting some parameter to zero means it will not override the base value. So there is no way to override sound volume with 0, because setting zero would mean "use value from sound shader", while setting 0.1 or -0.1 would mean "use volume = 0.1 or -0.1". This behavior causes confusion. It is especially bad when volume is set programmatically, because e.g. volume of player footsteps is computed as a sum of many modifiers (run, crouch, creep, in water, etc.) and it is hard to be sure you don't get zero sum in the end. The idea is to fix this mess and add a "don't override" special value in the system. Speaking of spawnargs, it would work like this: "s_volume" "13.4" = override with value 13.4 "s_volume" "0" or "s_volume" "0.0" = override with zero "s_volume" "" (empty string) = don't override Right now there are tons of zero values set in these spawnargs. It is not clear where the author intended to override with zero, and where he wanted to drop inherited override and use base value. I guess for compatibility reasons I'll have to replace spawnargs "s_volume" "0" with "s_volume" "" in all missions.

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.

Yes, definitely needs to be distinguishable. Clear glass with light bulb visible would be the best way: You know that if you see clear glass and the bulb inside you can shoot it. The distinction isn't always possible to make without first trying it out though... paintings are the best example, you always need to get close to see if a painting can be looted. As for players learning about this, we should add those lights to the tutorial level where the basics of TDM are taught: In one of the hallways we'd have examples with the message "solid lights can't be shot, but ones with fragile glass and a lightbulb can be broken with broadhead arrows", the player is given arrows and can shoot at different lamps to compare. As for explosive barrels those would be cool to have too! In their case they should already be doable with a script, just that no one's ever done them: Remove the barrel, spawn the same explosion as the fire arrow or mine, and some temporary lasting physical debris if possible. Breakable lights would need support added to the builtin spawnfunc.

What Stgatilov mentioned about the psychological aspect of some lights being breakable and others not is going to be the toughest hurdle for you to overcome with this idea. Realism with the clear glass casing idea is nice, but you are still fighting against the rigid Thief programming that electric lights are always unbreakable. It needs to be very obvious, perhaps best identifiable at a glance, that it can be broken by the player. Consider how all explosive barrels in video games are red: it immediately differentiates them from regular set dressing barrels. I don’t believe that I would be able to consistently identify or interpret a clear glass bulb as different from any electric light. Add a red stripe to them, give them a specific recognizable light texture, make them look inherently damaged, etc. You may need to sacrifice a degree of realism in order to communicate what is thus far a contradictory mechanic to the player effectively.

Breakable lights might be an interesting concept so long as they are not implemented retroactively. Add a loud sound or other punishment for breaking them as you see fit, but it would still change the difficulty and design intended by level authors if you applied it to all previously made levels. I would also suggest that if you instead intend to make breakable variants of existing light models that you add a clear visual indicator that the light is breakable, otherwise it would require explicit messaging to the player that electric lights are breakable in that particular FM. I’m hesitant to see something of this sort added as it is in stark contrast to Thief precedent, but I would be more supportive of it if it was added carefully and responsibly.

The weapon hack is something that IIRC forces a model to render in front of everything else. It's limited by the fact that it can only apply to .md5mesh models, currently, such as the viewmodel of the player's arm and any weapons attached to the arm.

Yeah, that is a true aspect. Which is why I think there could be one of two approaches if this happened: Either make breakable lights a new entity for some lamps that want to feature them, so just as you have "atdm_lamp_1" and "atdm_lamp_1_unlit" you'd have an "atdm_lamp_1_breakable"... or if we implemented it for all lamps retroactively, it should come at the cost of AI becoming suspicious whenever they see a broken lamp just like when they notice a rope arrow, in which case the player choosing to go down this route comes at the cost of attracting attention and possibly ruining their stealth score.

This kind of mechanic would break a ton of existing FMs. Some (I dare say even most) mappers often choose electric lamps so that they can't be extinguished or turned off, forcing the player to time their movements through the light. There are of course switchable electric lights, but that is up to the author on how they want to implement those. It would definitely be fun to see an FM implement this Splinter Cell-style mechanic, where the mapper has designed their map to function in such a way, but to add this as a core feature would break the gameplay of countless maps

Noticed all of these only because I played TDM by doing the opposite of stealth to practice swordfights. None of these bugs appeared as long as I played the game stealthily. Should also note that I used Snatcher's Core Essentials @snatcher on and off, but your mod does not alter the AI anyway, correct? Bugs happened both ways. 1) AI freezes in combat - https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6371 It happens a lot with auto-parry disabled. It never happened with auto-parry enabled. It never happened with some guards, while it happened many times with specific guards. They unfreeze when player dies, or when AI is forced to re-equip the melee when player returned from a spot that usually causes them to throw rocks. Also experienced behavior of them only slowly walking towards me at the pace of "hunched sneakily searching mode", attacking once finally in proximity. 2) AI may collectively lose the ability to hear any of the players noise caused by footsteps / landing. Still unsure of what causes this, but Lockner Manor has a good layout to get to the result. Just follow the right-most path and repeat the process of winning sword-fights with City Watch, and then jump around the next guard to see if they can hear you. If they can not hear you, likely nobody can. If they still can, just combat them too and you will likely have deaf AI by the time you have dealt with the 3 Watch Guards outside. In my experience, when they hear the death scream well enough to run to its location or start searching - the deafening did not work. 3) Helmeted AI does not react to (nor hear) players overhead sword strikes made directly on helmet, stealthily from behind. Not sure if the same issue as deaf AI bug, but happened at least once while it was active. (Lockner Manor) 4) (Moor?) AI may lose the ability to hear AND see player after nearby swordfights and after two slashes to bloody their face. (I may have also Moss Arrowed them to face). Any sword strikes I make simply go through their model with no audio of impact. Collision still gets player detected. (A Good Neighbor) 5) Crash to desktop when archer puts bow away to take out melee (while I may have collided with them on staircase). (Lockner Manor) 6) Crash to desktop when I shot a shortsword-wielding charging Noble. Sound of a deflected arrow played (same that you hear when shooting a stone wall), when I expected a flesh-hitting sound. (A Good Neighbor) 7?) Sometimes AI says "Ow that hurt" merely because I block their strikes. - Is this an intended feature? Do they take actual damage too? Anyway, I didn't find mentions about many of these issues. Reporting aside, if you want me to experiment with something or find ways to replicate - I don't mind updating this thread, as I plan to mess around with sword-fights anyway. Just posted this initial version should anyone want to chime in with similar experiences, and I wanted to know if some of these bugs could be mission-, or mod-specific. Maybe caused by much or unfortunately timed quicksaving / loading?

Since I'm bored and haven't posted in a while and yet still finished Thief 4 a few times, I feel compelled to post. In response to a number of observations @Rio_Walker made: Seeing your hands and all the animations newGarrett would do was fun... at first. But given all the looting and environmental interactions the game has it really did slow things down a lot, especially when the game would occasionally realign the player just perfectly before playing an animation to open a drawer. If they had an option to disable these animations or speed them up significantly I'd have been happy. I've played using the Custom difficulty with the option to disable focus and the experience is kinda mixed. While it does make things a bit more traditional without the superpower ability to find loot more easily, it does seem like the game is designed very much for focus and disabling it can hide things you never even knew were present. If it weren't for the focus for example, I would never have noticed the "special" candles hidden around the city that talk when you light them. This game reminds me of a movie that has been reshot several times with footage from separate reshoots blended together with bad editing. It's painfully clear the story has been chopped and changed over the many years of its development and there's assets in the game that clearly had greater importance in a previous iteration but for which their plot points were cut. The most obvious example is the automatons. There's a dude who provides missions on obtaining pieces for one he's building, but apart from that there's also signs in other areas they had more importance (e.g. you see rooms full of them when going up an elevator, the Baron has disassembled ones on tables in his cutscene, etc.) Some plot elements just feel not fleshed out because they had to cobble together something to create this Frankenstein's monster of a game from so many elements. The ending sucks and is incredibly abrupt. Do we even know what the deal is with that half-built ship? Probably another abandoned plot point. With all of its problems, I still kinda like it in so far as its general gameplay. But it doesn't have the longevity of something like TDM or the classic Thief games especially with all the user missions available for them. Oh well, maybe I'm just pining for what it could have been in the hands of a better developer.

You cheeky nandos. XD Have you not considered using the screen? She walks behind it, there is a shadow of her lifting her arms, the light flickers - POOF - model swap, she steps out clothed. Although, there had to be something preventing the player from walking behind the screen. I liked how you handled her undressing to begin with. What startled me earlier tho, along with creepy music while the Builder's priest sings in the background, is the dress mannequin... with human hands.

Well, I don't know about adding new difficulties, that seems like a lot of work. A hack way of getting the same effect, and which I use, is to create a simple .cfg file with the required changes and then execute it in-game (e.g. a text file called brutal.cfg then, in-game "exec brutal"). You could redefine the modifiers for, say, the hardcore difficulty, which are usually tdm_ai_hearing_hardcore "1.5" & tdm_ai_vision_hardcore "1.005" to something higher, although I don't know if they are capped or how to interpret those values. There are other cvars that might be useful, but I have never tried them. tdm_ai_sndvol seems useful. You'd have to test the changes in-game, probably in the Sound & Blackjacking map. For this, there are some very useful commands to see the sound direction, propagation, and values, but I can't remember them right now. There's an important caveat here, and why messing around with this stuff should be done at your own risk. I have found that some cvars go back to their default values as soon as you load or die, while others seem to stick around. Modifiers to the player's height (like pm_normalviewheight), revert to default if you load, but modifiers to the player's speed (pm_walkspeed) don't. And I know this because I have a .cfg file named halfling.cfg, and you can imagine what it does. To avoid this, I have a "default" cfg to restore the game to the normal values if (or when) something goes wrong (it's basically a copy of the Darkmod.cfg, but with a different name, and I only use it for this purpose.)

If shadow maps support more detail that stencil shadows can't offer, I'm absolutely in favor of enabling them: It makes sense to use them for obtaining new details and effects that weren't possible previously. Geometry based shadows are technically a legacy thing anyway, I imagine that once every player and their hardware work well with shadow maps then stencil shadows may someday be deprecated.

@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.

There's a cool trick that is making what you have on your "hand", very small, or at lest smaller enough to not get out of the player collision mesh, so it can never reach a wall, the player collider prevents it. And then move the object very near the camera "lens" and it will look big and normal despite the small size, is a nice trick that I learned a few fps games use. But I don't think is the one idTech 4 uses... Unfortunately I don't recall what that trick/hack is anymore, I just remember something about the engine code having what idSoftware called "weapon hack", probably just looking at the engine code and searching for weapon hack, will give some results, thou like I said, right now, I don't recall how it is used.

Rest assured, I haven't received nothing but praise thus far. Most of the constructive criticism about this FM's design arose during beta testing, and Dragofer in particular gave me a very useful write-up about what can be improved next time. Some examples being that he FM is a bit too spacious at times, its difficulty is rather low (a sentiment shared by thebigh), and the house design is a bit strange or tubular as a result of the FM's more linear nature. It's all been invaluable feedback as I continue to learn DR, and I intend to write up a post-first FM release retrospective near the end of this week going over what I've learned. I'm quite overjoyed about all the positive feedback I've received thus far, but that's not because I'm afraid of criticism, rather I was afraid of how a less traditional mission would be received by the community. I wanted to make something a bit weird with my first mission, and I was wary of how a short, linear mission with a limited player toolset would be viewed. Fortunately, the community has been very welcoming and accepting of weird little ideas, and I intend to take what I've learned into my next project right after my eyes stop burning from all those late-night Dark Radiant sessions. I hope you enjoy the FM, Chakkman!

I had this discussion a lot with my Bloodlines Unofficial Patch and honestly, nobody really knows what an unofficial patch can or should do, because a) it's unofficial and b) many developers add or change features with their patches (just look at CP2077 2.0 or TDM itself). I kept the name because it's similar to the other patches I do and does not stray as far away from the original game as e.g. Snatcher's Mod. Also to me, being able to extinguish candle flames but not oil flames, or enemies getting magically immune just by noticing the player are bugs. If not of the pure computer gameplay kind, then certainly of the consistent world building kind ;).

Congrats on the release! Remember to check ThiefGuild as well as the DarkFate forums (via Google Translate) for additional feedback.

Nice - did you find a solution for how to avoid it clipping into walls or other solid objects when coming too close? Off the top of my head there was also a need to handle its behaviour in case the player gets submerged, and various other ToDo's.

I thought it would be convenient to collect in one place a list of all mods\addons\improvements created by the community for TDM. After surfing the entire forum I collected the following list of mods, and I present to you their list below. I will be glad if you correct me and provide any other links to mods that I may have missed. Graphic mods Fresnel Mod (MoDB link) Flame Glare Mod (MoDB link) ModPacks Unofficial Patch (MoDB link) TDM Modpack (MoDB link) (with the possibility of separate installation) Gameplay mods Augmentation Mod Wearable disguises Player Lamp (beta) Adjust player speed with mouse wheel Stealth Statistics Tool & Loot Stealth Stat (MoDB link) Textures TDM Texture Mod Small UI tweaks Reflections to all materials containing specular maps Sounds New Footstep sounds Collection of adjusted sounds by Anton Thiefier Sounds Blackjack Draw/Sheath SFX (MoDB link)