Search the Community

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:

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'm working in DarkRadiant on a new map, and I'm having something odd I've never experienced before. There's a fire in a stove model on the second floor of a building... walls, floor, ceiling, etc are all worldspawn brushes with appropriate textures, neither player nor AI have any trouble traversing the entire place, so I think it's assembled as it should be. However, if I douse the stove on the second floor with a water arrow, the water splash somehow drips through the floor brush and douses a torch in the same rough area down on the first floor. I tested it on various positions in the building, and it seems to happen everywhere, not just on that one light. Water arrows that impact on the second floor fall through the floor, and if a light is presence in the fall area it's extinguished. Is this expected behaviour? I would have through a solid brush would stop water from traveling any further once released.

I'm now considering the .xcf files as being in effect the source texture for the game fonts, at least those that have been bitmap edited in GIMP. So that's an argument for putting them in the TDM assets repo. But, in any event, they do need to be backed up somewhere official.

i want to try darkradiant on linux. Not sure how heavy the software is. i don't want to abuse this poor thing Now i am in the process of researching new SSD replacement & GaN charger. i have found a primer on magnetic spinning disk & the underlying technology of solid state drive but i still found it hard to grok the magic behind this technologies cylinder, head and track number.. That's the last thing I heard when I was messing around with the solaris installer

This is the continuation of my first post above. Weeks ago i got a string of bad days. My main PC(elitedesk 800 g3) suffered a SSD failure and i noticed my thinkpad charger have an exposed wire. So i decided to dust off my old lenovo ideapad(ideacrap) yesterday. The spec is i3 6th generation, 4 gigs of RAM, 2.5" 500GB spinning drive and it's equipped with Intel HD & Nvidia GT 920MX. It runs Ubuntu mate 20.04 with Nvidia proprietary driver version 470 installed on it. I tried running TDM 2.12 on it and i got a somewhat 'playable' framerate at 25-33 FPS. I could hear this poor thing groaning when running TDM. It got hot quickly around 25-30 minutes into game.

For the FM? For beta 1 it's here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/H1QBB04GA0#oBZTb1CmVFQb I've already done around 100 fixes though, so you might want to wait for beta 2 which should be ready in a couple of days hopefully. All links are in the first post of the beta thread here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22439-the-lieutenant-3-foreign-affairs-beta-testing/

Texture normal map type: does TDM use opengl or Direct X?

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.

"May his iron mold the current as we were molded. May his instrument expel all obstruction as we are his instruments." - Collected Sermons of Master Plumber Roto Rooter Few would dare cross the Bridgeport Plumber's Guild. Fewer still could glimpse their secrets and live. CC0 POLYHAVEN PLUMBER PACK BETA Includes: Fully modular pipe kit with optimized shadow mesh, two skin variations and near perfect grid snapping at grid level 4 Moveable plunger prop which is fully compatible with the AI weapon system Worry free CC0 license All credit to the great polyhaven.com for the original mid poly meshes - consider supporting them on patreon. I just decimated and then rebaked the assets as well as converted the maps from pbr and made the additional model and material variations.

The training mission’s job is not cover the diversity of FMs across the entire platform. There are lots of stuff in volta universe missions which are not covered: explosive barrels, ammo crystals, loot you dislodge by shooting it with an arrow, completely different undead AI with a completely different damage model, etc Just like in northdale missions: neutral/hostile areas, in game shops, simplified lockpicks, etc Why would you need to be told any of this is happening by anything other than the game itself? That’s how games communicate: you play them.

Oh, some implementations might work a little differently from what I remember the term megatexture referring to. From what I used to know, it meant turning the entire level into a single model or set that uses a single enormous texture. While the concept may have its upsides, there are two major issues that negate any benefit in my view: The first is system resources, you don't benefit from any reuse as every pixel is unique, the only way to do it at scale is with a gigantic image thus a huge performance drop in pretty much every department. The second issue is that level design becomes far harder and more specialized... while here in TDM we only need to draw a bunch of brushes and place some modules to make a level, an engine based on megatextures would require level designers to sculpt and paint the entire world in software like Blender which is far more difficult and we likely wouldn't have even half of the FM creators we do today, even for those that know how to do it imagine the task of manually painting every brick on every home and so on.

Completely disagree it was a very good idea that unfortunately came too early with idSoftware RAGE 1 because hardware was still and is not truly ready for it. Megatexture is for textures, what UE5 nanite is for geometry, it permits huge amounts of texture data in a level and even totally unique textures per each surface, no repetition unlike older methods. MT isn't simple a giant texture slapped unto a level, it is a type of virtual texturing system, the MT is a huge "texture" but it's data, is not all drawn on a level at the same time, like a normal one is, it is broken into smaller squared peace's and those peace's into even smaller ones for LOD aka mipmapping, then those peace's are streamed in, in real time has the player moves around. Again IMO It is a very cool idea and if the hardware was fast enough, to stream it fast and it was possible to compress the MT data, to very small amounts and still keep good quality, it would be a fantastic system for very unique levels. Rage 1 world may look bad at close distance, but at medium to large distances imo it looks fantastic and totally unique.

The Megatextures concept predates idSoftware. It even predates hardware accelerated 3D in consumer graphics. The problem it solves is managing image diversity. It is well suited to photogrammetry where almost nothing is repeated \ tiled. It is not well suited to human texture artists because even the most perfectionist ones are going to use some sort of template that they repeat and thus it is a waste to store the resultant work as unique pixels rather than tiles.

Rage didn’t have terrible loading times but people complained that it took awhile for the texture fidelity to catch up. Doom 2016 tried to fix that by front loading more but they went overboard with that.

Megatextures were a horrible idea for obvious reasons, not sure why ID chose to learn that the hard way. The concept from what I remember is the whole map uses a single gigantic texture... instead of how we independently pick a couple of 1024 px brick materials for a few brushes and surfaces, the whole map acts as one model with one material and a single texture which probably needs to be 1 million x 1 million pixels even for a small level. This is ridiculous from a perspective of system resources with 100's of GB's of storage and huge (v)RAM requirements and hours of loading time, as well as raising the skills required for level editing since you now need mappers to also be texture artists and sculpt / paint their levels instead of just placing stuff. The only thinkable benefit is there's no repetition since every pixel on every part of the world is unique, but who notices any similarity with independent texturing if it's done right anyway? Detail textures have yet another advantage there: Since you scale the pattern independently on top of the original texture, you can make every surface appear as if it has unique pixels like megatextures. Hence why I'd advice having the details be very high-res, 4k or 8k even 16k if we can take it: Yes that's enormous, but remember we'd only have a few patterns probably no more than 15 in total, and can store them as grayscale then use a single image to modify both albedo / specular / normal (heightmap to normalmap): Map the detail in world space rather than the brush or model UV map, and the resulting pattern on every surface in the world will always be unique since the original and detail textures will be out of sync.

I think that this discussion is probably similar to discussions that idSoftware themselves had about the challenges of texture storage in engines that heavily rely on Normal Maps for real-time lighting. The conclusion was Megatextures ( later known as partially resident textures ) but the suggestion was a little too ahead of its time. Heck, early Megatexture games would probably benefit from detail textures more than idTech4 because they capped the pixel density to allow larger map-sized textures. Many modern games have caught up and use partially resident textures but do so in a more conservative way thus making them part of a hierarchy of texture usage methods that includes texture atlases and traditional tiled textures.

I always say that...The only thing that beats a fail is a try. I'm actually interested in these Detail Textures now that you further talked about its history and how today we'd use it on 1080p for 512 and 1024 textures. If anything, it would be a fun experiment just to see how it would look and how it would go. Also, yeah, I wouldn't want the game to be bigger than 100GB and have extreme loading times, all in the name of modern textures at 4k, I have a very hefty computer but that doesn't mean poor ol' but venerable IdTech 4 wants to handle it.

Indeed and try to wait until you are sure the model is finished before you go through the trouble of aligning textures. I couldn't tell you how much time I spent realigning textures after adjusting walls, windows, etc., or changing my mind about the materials (especially when bevels are involved).

@Ansome's question is correct. Nothing in real life ever has a perfectly sharp corner, and one of the pieces of advice often given to newbie modellers trying to make things look realistic and avoid the "obvious CG" look, is to give sharp edges a tiny bevel so they look like something that might be manufactured in real life. The problem you've got in DarkRadiant is (1) dealing with tiny bevels using regular brush geometry is awkward, and (2) brushes aren't smoothed at all (unlike the cube on the right which actually has full smooth shading which you don't notice because of the tiny bevel). So unless you're willing to create imported 3D models with smoothed bevelled edges and place them on the corner of your buildings, adding bevels in brushwork might be more trouble than it's worth. Probably the most important things with brickwork corners is to make sure the bricks line up properly. There's nothing more obviously CG than a plastered-on brickwork texture which just ends in an unrealistic column of cut-off bricks, with mortar joints that are completely unaligned with the brickwork on the adjacent face.

If it's supposed to be an octagon, I don't think the corners need to be bevelled. Certainly it looks much better to bevel square corners, but the angles of an octagon don't look bad imo. If you want a smooth cylinder though, the default cylinder patch has 16 sides, which looks smooth enough in game. That would be easier than bevelling 8 corners. Speaking of smoothing; I was pleasantly surprised to find that if you make a model in Blender with smooth-shading ticked, then export an ase file, it will retain the smooth shading when imported to darkradiant.

That is one reason. That is 2 more reasons. You'd like a script that, if you had to run it again, would "do the right thing". Unfortunately, that right thing is very hard to program, and needs IMHO to be both bidirectional and with a better method of string version control, to support both the FM author's updates and potentially multiple translators. Yes, another reason. Currently, it is my understanding that updating an FM (from the non-converted copy) and running the conversion script again causes mis-alignment of newly-generated #str values and previous .lang #str values. Another important cause of "nobody is making these language packs" is that Dark Radiant at best tolerates converted FMs. It offers no special translation support, as expressed in this code comment: "...we don't have any support for parsing the mod-specific translation data...." [from DR's DifficultySettingsManager.cpp]. That's where we are now. So officially give up on FM Western translations? Or improve the #str system to make it work for everyone? Or invent a new system? A new system. What would that look like to the FM author? To a non-author translator

Interesting idea. Not sure about my upcoming time availability to help. A couple of concerns here - - I assume the popup words uses the "Informative Texts" slot, e.g., where you might see "Acquired 80 in Jewels", so it likely wouldn't interfere with that or with already-higher subtitles. - There are indications that #str is becoming unviable in FMs; see my just-posted: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22434-western-language-support-in-2024/

In post https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/254-orbweaver/&status=3994&type=status @nbohr1more found out what the Fixup Map functionality is for. But what does it actually do? Does it search for def references (to core?) that don't excist anymore and then link them to defs with the same name elswhere? Also I would recommend to change the name into something better understood what it is for. Fixup map could mean anything. And it should be documented in the wiki.

I'm at the beginning of a new area, where bandits fights each other. Near the end, I imagine, but I'm not going to bother finishing it. The thing is tedious. It's very obvious your focus was on telling a story. The issue is that's not my thing, and I also think this is not the right game for it. You're trying to make it do things it was never designed to, so it feels clunky. I think the game shines best in a smaller map with some backstory and little touches in the mission, like notes one character leaves for another. Here, it feels like I'm being pulled along from place to place, having to go back where enemies have artificially respawned, with locked doors everywhere, JUST to further the story, not to give me an interesting challenge. And in terms of story, it's the same thing we see all the time: Pagans are the poor, downtrodden, nice people, and the Builders, are the heartless monsters. Yawn. I don't get how the gargoyle switch works in that guy's office, even after having read your explanation. I don't even understand what the situation is supposed to be. The gargoyle looks like it's locked inside a glass case, and therefore you want to get that glass case open. The note says the gargoyle switch is behind the downstairs desk. Downstairs from this note, there is no desk. And the note calls it the "gargoyle switch", which implies it's a switch for the gargoyle, not that the gargoyle itself is a switch. It's confusing for no good reason. Random notes: Boring name, as others have mentioned. A cursive font in letters is annoying to read. Loud music and sound effects are not fun, it just hurts the player's ears. The map is a screenshot. That ruins immersion. The light issues have been covered. For me, it never felt like I was in shadows, as opposed to other missions. Almost everything looks pretty brightly lit. I saw someone mentioning rope arrows are pointless, and I agree. You asked how that player could have made it past something without using one; well, I haven't used it either. You can just mantle. Of course, that's not an issue in itself. There's not reason to cry "I'm getting review bombed" when people are just giving their opinion.