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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?

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/

Well that doesn't mean that everyone is d'accord with all the gameplay choices he made in these missions, does it? All I can say is that I never got the impression here or elsewhere that there are issues with the weapon behavior in TDM. Maybe apart from the blackjacking, which has been a controversial topic in the past. I can only repeat myself in arguing that the big problem is the uniformity of essential gameplay elements. The game just doesn't feel coherent, if every FM author changes important gameplay dynamics, and it makes it difficult and frustrating, not just for beginners.

Yeah, I can do that. Shouldn't be a problem, unless anyone has a particular objection to it being uploaded to the repo

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.

And... running another update and the problem is solved. Sorry for the noise.

There is a problem. You may or may not see it but the problem is there. We can do something about it or we can look the other way. It's in your hands, guys. By looking the other way you can say goodbye to future core improvements on certain features / mechanics.

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.

What is the problem with bugtracker 5600? Does the player start without a bow now?

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.

@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.

The main problem of the art direction of T4 is that is *ONLY* that kind of dark (=the "gloom" fallen over the City), prologue apart. Prologue atmosphere is just perfect

If all written strings were kept in XD files, the process would be easier. We shouldn't need map edits for this. The current system makes mission updates a real problem to the point that only long dormant missions are viable for translation.

BTW, my concern about #str values is about those distributed in FM-specific .lang files. For standard assets, where the info would be in tdm_base01.pk4/all.lang and its derivative .lang files, I guess that's less of a problem. In that case, maybe, instead of using a #str_<number>, you could use a fixed prefix, like: #str_shouldered_<english_name> or #str_moveable_<english_name> That is, like #str_shouldered_chair A general string like that might be used with multiple different chair models, as you intended. If the author overrode the shouldered name with a non-#str name: #str_shouldered_chair --> cushy chair with clue then any translated general strings would be hidden, and just the English version shown.

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/

It's a big project, so it's important to test everything thoroughly and run several tests. "The Lost Citadel" had a lot of bugs in the first release because I didn't test enough. I will not repeat this mistake. I have fixed all problems found during beta 2. Beta 3 shall include all subtitles and briefing videos. The problem is that I'm still missing some voices. This means we can't complete the game subtitles and produce the briefing videos. In the worst case, I'll have to do a new audition for this stuff, but currently I don't feel like it.

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 believe the engine sets mindistance = 1 and maxdistance = 10 if they are not set explicitly in the sound shader. At least that's what I see here: https://github.com/stgatilov/darkmod_src/blob/trunk/sound/snd_shader.cpp#L154 Anyway, if DR sets spawnargs to the same values as in sound shader, that's not a problem for the suggested change in the meaning of zero value. But setting maxdistance = 0 will be

heh yeah i wonder if trumph has stock in nvidia ? all those lawsuits... , not even so sure it will just blow over tbh, here in denmark we allready use AI heavily. one example of all things it now governs are taxes well in the worlds most tax heavy country who just loves tech i'd say thats a no brainer but c'mon... not really feeling the need for more upgrading for a good time either, my machines now run the latest stuff no problem and i recently aquired a motorized table for my aching back (well it really started to ache after i had to lift it to the first floor... damn that hing is heavy 65 kg) and me nearing 57 years with a back who was broken in two places which required operation with two artificial discusses and a lot of screws and with heavy nerve damage because it took them 10 years to dicover it was broken i can only say ouch.

sadly the upcomming 8xxx series from amd will only be for midrange atleast according to leaks (grain of salt maybe ?). well it would be something quite different thats for sure not sure if 32 gb vram would actually help (what is the max texture size today ?), it might help if they really go nuts with the detail level in upcomming titles but i suspect this might take longer as the game companies dont want to alienate players with less vram. ofc it will come at some point but i dont see it in the near future. the 2 and 3 gb vram chips might actually make a dent in the bus width war. what the hell happened with hbm memory ???, the old fury cards could actually do 4k no problem with only 4 gb vram because the hbm memory was so blazing fast.

Alright, so, I'm a Texture Artist myself for more than 20 years, which means I know what I'm talking about, but my word isn't law at all, remember that. I've worked (mostly as mods, I am a professional but I much prefer being a freelance) with old DX8 games up to DX12. When it comes to Detail Textures, for my workflow, I never ever use it except rarely when it's actually good (which, I emphasize on "rarely"). This is one reason I thought mentioning that I worked with DX8 was logical. One of the few times it's good is when you make a game that can't have textures higher than what would be average today, such as, World Textures at 1024x1024. Making detail textures for ANY (World, Model) textures that are lower than 128x128 is generally appealable. Another is when the game has no other, much better options for texturing, such as Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping. Personally, I think having Detail Textures for The Dark Mod is arguably pointless. I know TDM never had a model and texture update since 2010 or so, but most textures do seem to at least be 1024x1024, if there's any world texture that's lower than 256x256, I might understand the need of Detail Textures. Now, if this was a game meant to be made in 2024 with 2020+ standards, I would say that we should not care about the "strain" high resolution textures add, however, I do have a better proposition: Mipmaps. There are many games, mostly old than new ones, that use mipmaps not just for its general purpose but also to act as a "downscaler". With that in mind, you boys can add a "Texture Resolution" option that goes from Low to High, or even Lowest to Highest. As an example, we can add a 2048x2048 (or even 4096x4096) world texture that, if set to Lowest, it would use the smallest Mipmap the texture was made with, which depends on how the artist did it, could be a multiplication of 1x1 or 4x4. One problem with this is that, while it will help in the game with people who have less VRAM than usual these days, it won't help with the size. 4096x4096 is 4096x4096, that's about 32mb compressed with DXT1 (which is not something TDM can use, DXT is for DirectX, sadly I do not know how OpenGL compresses its textures). I would much rather prefer the option to have better, baked Normal Maps as well as Parallax Mapping for the World Textures. I'm still okay with Detail Textures, I doubt this will add anything negative to the game or engine, very sure the code will also be simple enough it will probably only add 0.001ms for the loading times, or even none at all. But I would also like it as an option, just like how Half-Life has it, so I'm glad you mentioned that. But yet again, I much prefer better Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping than any Detail Textures. On another note...Wasn't Doom 3, also, one of the first games that started using Baked Normal Maps?

Alright, new problem with making these skins (or should I make a new thread about this?) Why are my skinned models coming up black? Here is my updated code for a simple skin. And here is the model in the skin editor, changed to its creamy, plaster version. Yet for some reason, all of my skins are pure black. The wiki says this is caused by the editor not finding the skin definition, and that there are spelling errors somewhere. I am not sure what this means, though, since all of my directory paths are spelled right (otherwise, how would the skin editor display them perfectly fine?) Does the name of the file have to match the declared skin name?

Yes. Sure, I will change it, but I do mind. In addition to changing the forum title, I have also had the name of the pk4 changed in the mission downloader and the thiefguild.com site’s named changed. It's not just some "joke". The forum post and thread are intended to be a natural extension of the mission’s story, a concept that is already SUPER derivative of almost any haunted media story or most vaguely creepy things written on the internet in the past 10 or 15 years. Given your familiarity with myhouse.wad, you also can clearly engage with something like that on some conceptual level. Just not here on our forums? We can host several unhinged racist tirades in the off-topic section but can’t handle creepypasta without including an advisory the monsters aren’t actually under the bed? (Are they though?) I am also trying to keep an open mind, but I am not really feeling your implication that using a missing person as a framing of a work of fiction is somehow disrespectful to people who are actually gone. I have no idea as even a mediocre creative person what to say to that or why I need to be responsible for making sure nobody potentially believes some creative work I am involved in, or how that is even achievable in the first place. Anyway, apologies for the bummer. That part wasn’t intentional. I am still here. I will also clarify that while I love the game, I never got the biggest house in animal crossing either. In the end Tom Nook took even my last shiny coin.

Did you set Windows to show file extensions? Otherwise a file named blabla.skin.txt shows in Windows as blabla.skin Edit: Nevermind, the screenshot shows it's a SKIN file. In general I would recomend using Notepad++ as text editor instead. I use these problem cases to (re)learn how to do things, but after copying the file and folder structure from your example with an other model, in my case the skin showed up fine.. Although putting the skin in a subfolder doesn't work for me.

I havent tried in 2.11 yet but I will. Just an update on this. For now I think I fixed it by: - Addressing most of the warning in the log above. Outside common errors like some missing textures and such that are part of the core. - Made sure to give my parallel lights "parallelSky " "1" spawnarg. - Deleted my .aas files and rebuilt them - Dmapped the entire thing Right now I am not getting the load error . It's a very hard problem to nail down because the console isn't giving a specific script name that it's getting hung up on (if that is even the issue similar to Amadeus's problem) AND I am actively working on the mission, creating new errors, fixing other broken things. ect. Its definitely something I fear will pop back up in beta testing though