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Just finished this mission and wow I gotta say in great honor to Grayman and of course the rest of the team picking it up, this was something I've never seen before in any other TDM mission, especially visually wise. I am so happy that grayson gave green light for other experienced mappers to finish his last mission. And what came out of this is really something special. I'll put my review in spoiler tags since I'm now referring to critical mission details. Edit - How do I put spoiler text here on mobile?? [spoiler] test [/spoiler][SPOILER] test [/SPOILER] [spoiler[spoiler [sfah

You can try my alternative footstep sounds package which addressed the things you described together with a lot of other footstep sounds both for player and AI if you want to. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17631-new-footstep-sounds/

Mods can this moved again? @Acolytesix- can you make sure you post in the beta thread instead of this one please (this one is public, the beta thread is only for logged-in forum members): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

Plot: Act 1: Player is a sneaky ratman or ratwomen breaking free from pagan slavers, finding all members of their enslaved family, freeing them one by one and bringing em home. Act 2: Builders raid the rat village kill some ratpeople and steal an artifact of immense religious importance. Player gets tasked to recover the artifact and follows the builders to their outpost. Player somehow gets hold of the artifact and brings it back to the ratpeople village. It is decided that the infinite growth of the human settlements endangers the rat people as a whole and that something has to be done against that. But knowledge about the enemy is scarce and player is one of the very few, who can speak "human" (actually pagan, but close enough). So player gets send to infiltrate the next city with a tinkerer (maintains the player's gear) and a granny which happens to be the only one available who can read and write human (she is supposed to teach player that skill). Player makes camp somewhere reasonably safe outside next non-pagan human settlement and does some reconnaissance and resource gathering missions. As new villagers seem to mainly come from an actual city, that city becomes the new exploration target. The three ratpeople travel to the city, make camp somewhere safe outside, find a way in, find a safe place in the sewers and make camp there. More reconnaissance and resource gathering missions happen. It becomes more and more obvious, that resistance would be futile. The humans are just too many. The three ratpeople travel back to their village and report to the council of the united ratpeople tribes. The decision is to mount a covert resistance with the intent to delay the human expansions until some more sustainable solution is found. Act 3: Player has most experience in human-controlled area, so it is them who gets to do business in the big port city where all the support from the human's mainland arrives. From the sewer base, reconnaissance, sabotage and support missions to strengthen the local gangs (which are hostile to each other) are done. This is the longest act. Shittons of different missions are done by the player. The city becomes more and more chaotic. Sometimes the player sets stuff on fire. Sometimes they steal extremely valuable items, sometiems they frame officials - or assassinate them... Places get heavier guarded and look more and more desolate. Gang contacts yield opportunities for missions too. Message arrives from home that a solution might have been found. Player is to find out of the whereabouts of an ancient artifact and recover it. Player discovers in missions that the artifact has been brought to a keep in the human's homeland. So player needs to somehow travel to the human homeland with one of humans' big ships. Player is in a huge port city in humans' homeland. Finds a new hideout in the sewers (seriously the only place humans don't like to lurk around) and does reconnaissance missions to find out where the keep is. At that occasion, some opportunity sabotage and assassinations can be executed too. Player finds out where teh keep is and travels there. Player finds a way into the keep, finds out where the artifact is, finds out how to get through the mundane and magical safety and security measures and steals the artifact. The artifact immediately takes ownership of the player and commands them to collect the other artifacts of its set. Player travels to other places and does missions to retrieve the artifacts. Player immediately knows where the artifacts are which aren't protected but also has to do missions to find out where the protected ones are kept. The artifacts are reunited, player does the ritual to combine them and the entity within them demands a new worthy body and a kingdom to rule over. Player finds out where the humans' king is and gets closer and closer, finally touching the king with the artifact. The artifact disintegrates, its former tenant moves inside the king, the possession of player ends and player immediately kills the king (there is a reason why that entity could have been captured in the first place) and the entity is gone (probably just died like a normal person) - but so are the artifacts. Player travels back to port city, finds a ship headed towards home, sets sail - and arrives at port city it rat peoples' homeland. the city is more or less like it was when player left - just a bit more run down. Player travels back to their rat people village and reports. Act 4: Missing other options, the rat council decides to continue the covert resistance against the city dwelling humans. The pagans have "joined" the resistance mainly by raiding weaker frontier villages. But they also raid more in general now. So the player is sent to investigate, why... But that is content for the first DLC. Gameplay: Semi-open maps (maybe even a whole village as "open world" but no actual open-world-sized open world). Mechanics that interact with eachother waiting to be exploited by players in (un)anticipated ways. Real shadows, real sounds, some parcour (plus sliding down ladders/pipes/ropes, hanging down ledges and procedural free climbing). The blackjack, the rat's claws, the rat's teeth, the broadhead (but none of the other arrow types). No mines or grenades in most missions (just an unlimited supply of stones for distraction). No potions (maybe holy water to throw on the ground or directly at undead), healing by eating (very slow regeneration). Lockpicks with various designs (the minigame is the same but you don't have to choose the pick or change it in the middle and for some locks a purely cosmetic tension wrench is used for immersion's sake too). Missions are selected from the main menu, from a menu when using an exfiltration point, from a menu that pops up when frobbing a map in one of the hideouts or camps - or by talking with other people. Where game world consistency allows for it, missions are playable in any order. Once-completed missions can be replayed at any time. You can save whenever you want like in TDM and there are autosaves triggered on mission start/completion, map change and at mission-specified events. Tech & development: Unreal Engine 5, SpeedTree, prerendered AI-generated voices (they are good enough now), game mechanics from TDM plus a bit more procedural parcour, better physics and a dialog system. The stim system is rad and has to be in there too. Missions are mostly like small-to-medium-sized TDM maps. Assets are made in Blender, maps are made in Unreal. If something is needed that is missing in unreal or Blender, a plugin for Unreal or Blender is created... As it is impossible to fund such a niche game completely in advance, the game is developed as early access with modding as first-class citizen from the start and all plugins are released as FOSS as they are made (hoping to establish a Bethesda-style long-tail business due to people still buying the game ten years after creation because they want to play the mods).

sure - I would only ask that you follow the thread to make sure you don't report stuff that has already been mentioned: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

heh i was thinking the same though it might just have been a glitch when writing the names are pretty similar. But for correctness it is called the dark engine and the newer version that allows us to run these beauties on win10/11 is called newdark. newdark is kinda interresting as it just suddenly popped up on a french forum some time ago by an anonymous developer with the alias le corbeau who allegedly got his hands on the original source code and started updating it for modern OS. this was the original thread i believe -> https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085 bikerdude was on that forum to when the patch hit i noticed hehe.

Okay, I had no idea, I have googled it up now and you are right, to my own surprise. Done, I´ve put some paragraphs which were previously not in spoiler tags into spoilers.

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

We will look at some of this stuff, but SPOILER tags, please!!!

This may make sense in that the performance impact of the volumetric effect can scale with how much of the effect is filling the screen. We shipped with a “performance mode” but had to setup the entities by hand to do it (so it’s not perfect). If you change the LOD detail settings to “Low” or “Lowest” this will disable certain lights, particles and such that can be very heavy to render. You can try these settings and see if you notice an improvement. If not sending us some pictures of heavy areas (with spoiler tags please) will be helpful with tuning these “performance modes” in subsequent patches. Thanks for playing!

Interesting, although I'm not sure what to make of that. One of my favorite games (The Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena) was published by Atari, and, they don't even seem to care to keep the activation servers running much. Or remove/change the copy protection, which doesn't work at all on Windows 11. I really hope that Nightdive delivers at the end of May... I'm not one of the shit storm crowd (it's absolutely horrible on the Steam forums...), but, 7 years of development is a long time, and delaying the release obviously has become a bit of a habit, to say the least.

(I apologize for the odd poll question layout. I wasn't able to add five yes-no questions, because polls are limited to three questions.) Hi everyone, I've recently been working on some patches for issues that I've read about from players on the TDM and TTLG forums — and Discord. My goal is to make it as easy as possible for players, especially new players and those who need usability/accessibility options, to find what they need in order to have a better TDM experience. I've already written the GUI and game engine code for these settings, which I've been using in my personal build. The reason for this poll and discussion is to both guide the finalization of my work and collect data to help inform the dev team. Which patches I submit depend on the outcome of this poll, discussion, and what the dev team agrees to accept. Once decided, I can coordinate with the dev team. I've attached screenshots of what the new settings menu would look like if all of the settings are accepted. Below, I have detailed each menu setting, so you can have an easier time understanding each one. Very important to keep in mind: None of these settings change TDM default behavior. They are all opt-in. If you are already happy with the behavior of 2.10, 2.11, etc. and these menu settings are accepted, nothing will change for you. Rename "Always Run" to "Run Mode" with options "None, Always, Toggle" After 2.11 was released, @i30817 requested that "toggle run" be added to the settings menu. Its cvar is already in TDM as "in_toggleRun" (same as Doom 3). I propose renaming the "Always Run" setting to "Run Mode" with options: "None", "Always", and "Toggle". None = in_alwaysRun 0; in_toggleRun 0 Always = in_alwaysRun 1; in_toggleRun 0 Toggle = in_alwaysRun 0; in_toggleRun 1 Show Blackjack Helper @Wellingtoncrab suggested that the new blackjack helper be added to the settings menu. Its cvar was added to 2.11 as "tdm_blackjack_indicate". More info: It's the new blackjack helper added to 2.11. When the game detects that the blackjack can be used for a successful hit or KO, the blackjack will rise slightly. I propose a "Yes/No" setting for this. Slider for "View: Head Bob" @ChronA requested a way to disable head bobbing, because a viewer watching him play was having severe motion sickness. Also, there was a bug in TDM that made setting the head bob in the console not stick after loading a saved game. (Even with 2.11, if a mission overrides the "tdm_player_thief.def" file and sets "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", "pm_bobup", and other cvars, it will override player preferences.) As far back as 2008, players have had trouble setting head bob. Another one from 2018. At the end of 2022, @Shadowex3 registered just to voice the need for a way to control head bob. I propose that a slider be added to adjust the amount of head bob. This would use a new "pm_headbob_mod" cvar with a value between 0.0 and 1.0 (default 1.0, no change). The "pm_headbob_mod" would be a multiplier for "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", and "pm_bobup". The advantage to this approach is that missions like Volta 2 and Hazard Pay would not need to adjust their "tdm_player_thief.def" files for head bob to work properly. And, the player can still adjust "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", and "pm_bobup" as they like. Slider for "View: Mantle Roll" This is similar to head bob for those who are sensitive to motion. Its cvar was added to 2.11 as "pm_mantle_roll_mod". A Thief player on Discord said, "2.11 will have a cvar to tune down the mantling animation at last." I propose that a slider be added for "pm_mantle_roll_mod". Auto-Search Bodies @Zaratul requested the "auto-search bodies" feature from Thief 1 & 2. Its cvar was added to 2.12 dev16783-10307 as "tdm_autosearch_bodies". I did a poll on the a Thief Discord server and roughly 20% of players there use the Thief auto-search bodies feature. I propose a menu setting for this, so that players coming from Thief 1 & 2 can easily find it.

Above 3 items are released now, on the "Barks" thread: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21740-english-subtitles-for-ai-barks/&do=findComment&comment=483331

Instead of that, you could, in that time period, start learning your own missions and in doing so become more active on the forums, learning from others. It's also great to understand how things work in the engine, when you play. It might spoil some immersion though.. Or learn to build games with other engines, like Godot for example.

Keep in mind also that mission size, and complexity have increased dramatically since the beginning. For a lot of veteran mappers, it can take over a year to get a map made and released. The last dozen missions have for the most part been pretty massive, with new textures, sounds, scripts, models etc. We seem to be long past the point of people loading up the tools, and banging out a mission in a few weeks that's very barebones. We still do see some of those, but I noticed in the beta mapper forums and on Discord, that mappers seem to make these maps, but don't release them, and instead use the knowledge gained to make something even better. Could just be bias on my part scrolling through the forums and discord server though.

It's probably a massive task these days to develop an engine in-house which is up to par to, say, Unreal Engine. The advantages of an own engine are that you can modify it to your needs, and that you're 100% familiar with it. One of my favorite racing simulation developers, Kunos Simulazioni, switched from their own engine to Unreal Engine for their game Assetto Corsa Comeptizione. They had some real issues in the beginning, and, you can also see that the engine is not 100% perfect for these kind of games, and that they had to apply tricks to make it work for them. It's also not the most performant game, which is probably a combination of the elaborate driving physics calculations, and the lack of familiarity with the engine in general. But, they seem to have run into a dead end with their own engine, as there were issues with the lighting and stuff. As far as I've always read, more and more developers rely on third party engines, development frameworks etc. to make their work easier and better. It also happens in audio software: A lot of developers use frameworks to develop their audio plugins, like JUCE. They simply don't want to mess with the low level OS stuff, or develop their own framework to provide different plugin formats for different hosts and OS's. And, those frameworks also provide GUI resizability or preset management out of the box. In most cases, it will be a time and cost efficiency consideration. Also, of course, because such projects become more and more complex. I often scratch my head these days how huge and complex games have become. TBH, often for pretty useless things, like almost photo realistic graphics, or thousands of random items, or random tasks you can do in the game.

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake? And thank god they got rid of unity, that engine is total trash garbage on anything over 60 fps. Just spend 5 minutes on steam forums for Unity project games, and there's just thousands of people complaining about poor performance, stuttering etc.

Probably the .script file that's needed, but unfortunately can't be included with a prefab. Maybe there's a comment somewhere in the prefab (or in the wiki or forums) that says what script it needs and where to find it. (The similar combination setup I used earlier doesn't involve "slot", so clearly uses a different script that I what I have.)

Thank you for a great puzzle fm! I'm having real trouble with the TDM v 2.10-64bit on Linux Mint 21.1 Link to the guide supplied by V-Man339 https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/15844-fan-mission-the-gatehouse-by-bikerdude-goldchocobo-updated-02112014/page/7/#comment-429405

Hi, I'm having the same sound issue with TDM 2.11 on Pop!_OS 22.04 (which is using Pipewire). TDM says: ----- Initializing OpenAL ----- Setup OpenAL device and context OpenAL: found device 'ALSA Default' [ACTIVE] OpenAL: found device 'HDA Creative, CA0132 Analog (CARD=Creative,DEV=0)' OpenAL: found device 'HDA Creative, CA0132 Digital (CARD=Creative,DEV=1)' OpenAL: failed to open device 'ALSA Default' (0xa004), using default OpenAL: no device found, sound disabled and I have pipewire-alsa installed... ❯ dpkg -l | grep pipewire-alsa ii pipewire-alsa:amd64 0.3.65~1676316007~22.04~f87feb5 amd64 PipeWire ALSA plugin ii pipewire-audio-client-libraries 0.3.65~1676316007~22.04~f87feb5 all transitional package for pipewire-alsa and pipewire-jack but when I try to run openal-info I get... ❯ ALSOFT_DRIVERS=alsa openal-info Available playback devices: ALSA Default HDA Creative, CA0132 Analog (CARD=Creative,DEV=0) HDA Creative, CA0132 Digital (CARD=Creative,DEV=1) Available capture devices: ALSA Default HDA Creative, CA0132 Analog (CARD=Creative,DEV=0) HDA Creative, CA0132 Digital (CARD=Creative,DEV=1) HDA Creative, CA0132 What U Hear (CARD=Creative,DEV=2) HDA Creative, CA0132 Alt Analog (CARD=Creative,DEV=4) Default playback device: ALSA Default Default capture device: ALSA Default ALC version: 1.1 AL lib: (EE) ALCplaybackAlsa_open: Could not open playback device 'default': Device or resource busy !!! Failed to open default device !!! I tried finding openal documentation but got a little lost. If anyone can direct me to a FAQ or explain how I'm meant to set up my card to work with openal that would be great. [Edit] of course, a second after posting here I figured it out... I had Firefox running and holding the soundcard, seems that ALSA / openal needs all other audio sources to be closed so it can use the soundcard exclusively. So once everything else except TDM when closed, sound started working again.

I agree. I'm copying this idea over to the https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21741-subtitles-possibilities-beyond-211/ thread. Related: I'll probably do some more experiments with the current TDM font & size, to understand max char count versus field width.

Some years ago i succesfully downloaded the wiki with wget, for TDM dvd. I dont know if this method wikl work now. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19998-tdm-collection-dvd/#comment-437887

@datiswous, made that correction fm_test.subs --> fm_conversations.subs @stgatilov, about srt naming and file location, would you be OK with the following edit? New/changed stuff in italics: srt command is followed by paths to a sound sample and its .srt file, typically with matching filenames. An .srt file is usually placed either with its sound file or in a "subtitles" folder. The .srt file format is described e.g. [1]. The file must be in engine-native encoding (internationalization is not supported yet anyway) and have no BOM mark. It contains a sequence of text messages to show during the sound sample, each with start and end timestamps within the sample's timeline. It is recommended to use common software to create .srt files for sound samples, instead of writing them manually. This way is more flexible but more complicated, and it is only necessary for long sounds, for instance sound sample of a briefing video. It's a simple enough standard that it can be shown as an short example, demonstrating that subtitle segments can have time gaps between them. And the example can show correct TDM usage, without requiring a trip off-site and picking through features that TDM doesn't support. Specifically, the example shows how to define two lines by direct entry, rather than using unsupported message location tags (X1, Y1, etc.). And skips other unavailable SRT font markups like italics, mentioned in the wikipedia description. The example would also show the TDM-specific path treatment. The example could be inserted before the sentence "It is recommended to use common software...."

I guess the best image-to-normal conversions I've seen here in the forums are via njob. I am curious about this AI thing though: https://github.com/HugoTini/DeepBump has to be installed into Blender as a plugin?

DarkRadiant 3.8.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Support new frob-related material keywords Improvement: Mission selection list in Game setup is not alphabetically sorted Improvement: Better distinction between inherited and regular spawnargs Improvement: Silence sound shader button Improvement: Add Reload Definitions button to Model Chooser Fixed: Model Selector widgets are cut off and flicker constantly on Linux Fixed: DarkRadiant will not start without Dark Mod plugins Fixed: GenericEntityNode not calculating the direction correctly with "editor_rotatable" Fixed: RenderableArrow not drawing the tip correctly for arbitrary rotations Fixed: Light Inspector crashes on Linux Fixed: Models glitch out when filtering then showing them Fixed: Skin Editor: models not centered well in preview Fixed: "Copy Resource Path" includes top level folders Fixed: Skin Editor: internal test skins are shown if Material Editor was open previously Fixed: Changing Game/Project doesn't update loaded assets correctly Fixed: Model Chooser: initially hidden materials aren't revealed when enabling them Fixed: Choosing AI entity class 'atdm:townsfolk_commoner_update' causes crash Fixed: Sporadic assertion failure on shutdown due to LocalBitmapArtProvider destruction Fixed: Prefab Selector spams infinite error dialogs on Linux Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.8.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. 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!