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I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.

That's correct but many people just use the in-game mission downloader to check for new stuff without even looking at the forums, which is what I did. In the past a lot of missions that required a newer version of the game executable and assets would tell you this when you tried to start them up. I was just reporting on this and that you don't need to reinstall, just update via tdm_updater if you find this issue.

Hrm I wasn't able to type on *after* the spoiler and accidentally already submitted the reply.. (Does this forum somewhere have a raw mode where you type text with tags around them or something instead of this broken WYSIWYG editor?) Anyway, what I was gonna add: This was a great mission and I already played Away1 - I'm really looking forward to Away2, want to see how the story goes on

Might this not be better suited to https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/58-tdm-tech-support/ or failing that make the text collapsable.

Double topic. See also topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22754-thief-vr-legacy-of-shadow-announcement/

i am having a hard time searching for specific keyword in bug tracker so i decided to wade into google search and found similar thread with similar issue : https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/13723-key-drop-melee-animation-glitch/

Just to complicate your life, there are 3 additional aspects to consider about the circa-2014 Mason files, and subsequent circa-2017 improvements to the 'english' version perhaps applicable to your work. (These issues are covered in the wiki "Mason Font" article, with a bit more in my "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts", https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/. The 2017 changes can be seen in the *current* 2.13 TDM English Mason files.) 1) Need for custom DAT-scaling on certain Mason characters The source TTF had upper-case and lower-case characters that were early-on considered too similar to size. So (before 2014) in the DAT, selective per-character scaling was used to differentiate them. See https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Font_Metrics_%26_DAT_File_Format#Per-Character_Font_Scaling for details. As you add new characters, you should do likewise (relatively easy with refont). 2) Creating the "glow" of mason_glow How Tels created the glow (for 'english' carleton & mason) is discussed in reasonable detail here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/5/#findComment-262661 That could be done for Russian too, which I recall currently fakes a glow, and possibly would require a minor GUI or engine code change to use. Note: To best accommodate glow and retain GIMP-visualization-alignment between base and glow characters, Tels moved some base characters within their bitmap, to keep their glyphs 2-3 pixels away from any bitmap edge. You should consider this when placing new base glyphs. Note: For the 3 mason bitmaps doubled in size circa-2017 as discussed next, the mason_glow bitmaps were also doubled. 3) Extensive bitmap editing to solve main menu character jaggedness. On Oct. 5, 2017, @Springheel in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19129-menu-update/#findComment-412921 said: "Looking at the Mason fonts, it looks like they were super low res to begin with, and were then just resized [presumably referring to per-character scaling], making them even worse. I'll see what I can do." [Further on, referring to fonts in the TDM menu system:] "It appears that resizing the dds file to make it higher res is possible, so I'll proceed." Later, on Oct 13, 2017, he concluded within a "More detailed list of changes: "Updated the menu fonts, which were surprisingly bad before" Unfortunately, I couldn't find details on how this work was actually done. I assume the bitmap editing was all done in GIMP. It started with doubling the size of certain bitmaps from 256x256 to 512x512. This was done for the first 3 bitmaps (i.e., those with ASCII, some Latin-1). Then characters were made more crisp and smooth-edged. How? Dunno. Also, some odd but harmless artifacts happened within GIMP (noted in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/page/3/#findComment-499660)

Or, just get in contact with the owners of the IP and ask them since just because an IP lawyer in one jurisdiction says it would be okay, doesn't mean it would be okay globally. There are several packs out there of scripts/definition files which are licenced under free licences (CC0 and WTFPL mostly) and claim their freedom by recreating them using "clean-room way". In fact, I used them in getting TDM running with mostly free licenced files by selectively choosing which had clearly been written from scratch albeit with reference to the originals, and which were just direct copy and paste with claimed free licences (I didn't use them). Then it was a case of finding/replacing the core engine textures, sounds, etc. the engine required to launch with free alternatives (again checking the packs since some were just copied direct from the game files and claiming to be free). In the end, the only non-free licenced files that were still required were those from TDM itself. The result of this TDM version is the screenshot I posted some posts ago here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/page/3/#findComment-500642 However, you will notice the giant cursor on the screen in the screenshot, why? because the only reference to hiding the cursor is within the UI files which come under the game eula, so I didn't add in the command to hide it in game. In the case of the script/def files, this "clean-room" approach has stood up in a court of law when I looked online, however you wouldn't really want to end up being in the position of ending up in court defending yourself in the first place. The flaw in the def/scripts that were recreated are that they all wrote their files using the originals as reference. So if the originals are under the game eula, and if the information contained is in some way protected, then all these "clean-room" files revert to the original game eula, as the authors didn't have the right to change the licence. I believe (with a pinch of salt )that if the core scripts/files were made GPL by idSoftware/Microsoft then as files based off of or using them as parents (basically all TDM scripts/defs as far as I can make out) then all of the TDM scripts and def files would automatically become GPL as their authors could also not claim their work was NC-BY since it was then based on GPL work.

Regarding the existing Russian version of TDM's MasonAlternative font, this had a different origin than those Russian fonts processed by Riff_Keeper. Tels created this in 2012. He started from bitmaps of an ASCII Mason font, then used his Perl patch program to copy selected ASCII glyphs (that resemble in some way Cyrillic) to new font "MasonAlternative". See https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274617 In GIMP, he flipped or otherwise hand-edited to make them Cyrillic. He said, "There are still a few dozen missing, but this is enough to render the two headlines we have (New Mission and Setting)" https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274623 This accounts for the incomplete coverage. Speculatively, he took this approach because it couldn't find a Mason-style TTF font with both Russian characters and an acceptable license (e.g., public domain, or at the least freely redistributable for non-commercial use). @kalinovka,I wonder what the licensing is for your masonchronicles3.ttf.

Evidently a significant portion of the Cyrillic work was done by Keeper_Riff (in conjunction with Tels) back in 2011. These folks are not active in TDM these days. Keeper_Riff outlined a workflow, starting with FontLab to edit TTF files... https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/12/#findComment-271548 Specifically Carleton: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/4/#findComment-262135

I don't think I'll use it, or at least as it is now, but it looks like you've executed the concept pretty well. Congrats on the good work! It does add a layer of immersion or feeling of being embodied in the world. If I were working on this, I'd probably pour a crazy amount of time on polishing the look and feel of the models and animations, and in that frame of mind, these videos strike me as more proof of concept waiting for that polish. But I also recognize the challenge of that. I remember those videos showing a third person view of the Mirror's Edge player character. That's a case where the visible arms was done very well, but when you see the 3P view, it's really obvious how exaggerated and unnaturally the models and animations were made to fit the view to the player camera, and look completely bizarre from any other angle. It gives you an idea of how much fine tuning goes into it. But of course there are different levels this could be at, and some people may already really like how it is now, or you have a target look & feel you're aiming for. But anyway, overall I think in terms of executing the concept, you've done a great job, and if I have any push-back or constructive feedback it's on the look & feel of it in this version. Edit: Well, one other thing, if you're not specifically using your hands--in idle, walking, and running--I don't think one's hands are just hovering in front of a person. It actually looks tiring. I think they'd periodically swing slightly into view while walking and running, and maybe a little in idle.

And some info can be found on this forum topics and wiki. Wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Parallax_mapping Topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22574-experimental-support-of-parallax-mapping-in-213/

The Dark Mod 2.13 has been released! A new era in accurate AI Vision! When id Software released the Doom 3 modding SDK, The Dark Mod team saw the potential for something more than a multi-player cops vs robbers game like Thievery UT. The sheer amount of access to essential game-play systems meant that a true Thief style experience could potentially be created. One of the first things the team did was to investigate how a light-gem system could be implemented. Having a good way for both the player and AI to know when the player is visible to others is a crucial part of the Thief experience so if we couldn’t build it then the dream of a Thief style experience was over. Fortunately, there were enough parts of the AI visual logic and more than a few stub pieces of the Render code that gave us the ability to build a robust system. The downside of the light-gem system was performance. Even though we did our best to limit the viewport and resolution of the light-gem image captures, often the light-gem would cut FPS in half ( or less ). This was pretty painful, especially since most computers could just barely run vanilla Doom 3 at acceptable FPS. After this system was fully functional, other aspects of AI vision were investigated. Obviously, we could not afford to run the light-gem render for every object or body the AI might see so it was decided that the AI would do a more simplified light-gem calculation for things other than the player. This meant that ( to the AI visual scan ) all light volumes would be either cubes or pyramids with perfect exponential falloff. We would run a line-of-sight check to the objects then ( if it hit ) calculate the pixel brightness by the location of the spot in relation to the center of the light(s). This was far cheaper than rendering the whole scene but heavily impacted accuracy. Many solutions were proposed to improve things but a solution evaded us for years. 2.13 changes things! Now we have a "stochastic sampler" model that does regular measurements of the actual light volume pixels and builds a "running average" of how illuminated different entities are. The days of seeing knocked-out AI in the middle of a bright spotlight get ignored are over. Now all AI and loot entities (etc) essentially have their own light-gem and it performs excellently! Magnificent Mission Management! Daft Mugi has drastically improved the GUI menus for mission management. The Dark Mod mission list and in-game downloader now have a search filter window that follows modern conventions of reducing the listed items as each new letter eliminates a possible matching mission name. Both lists can be sorted by actual name ( The Rats Triumphant ) or Chicago Style ( Rats Triumphant, The ). Additional mission details ( readme data ) can now be scrolled so players can see more information about the mission without having to navigate to the darkmod/fms folders. The menus have also been tuned with smaller font sizes for more practical mission listing and have been hardened against buggy order of operations issues so that you will be far less likely to encounter strange issues or crashes when downloading and installing missions. Parallax Occlusion Mapping! Stgatilov has added the oft requested POM feature to the latest Dark Mod release! WellingtonCrab has coordinated with him to provide examples and check the functionality and quality. Now The Dark Mod is ready to offer a quantum leap in perceived geometric detail with all sorts of surfaces realistically showing 3D parallax rather than the flatter looking normal maps we usually offer. WellingtonCrab also created many texture variants that are tuned to look better with POM enabled. Other Graphics Goodies! Now cubemaps \ environment maps respect more stage keywords. This means that faked reflections on water shaders can now move in relation to the water texture movement offering a more convincing illusion! Subviews ( cameras, portals, mirrors, xray, etc ) can now be nested. You can now have a skybox render in a camera view, etc. Volumetric lights and particles now render in mirrors! Alpha-tested surfaces get alpha shadows in Shadow Maps mode. Tone-mapping now supports range compression to prevent unwanted overbright areas. Arcturus has introduced some new metal materials that use improved cubemaps as well as skyboxes with clouds that use POM! Stability and Performance! The console variable system ( CVAR ) has been improved to be thread safe. This should resolve some rare crashes that involve weapon scripts that rely on CVAR values. We now automatically detect the number of CPU cores and allocate Jobs based on the detected specifications. Level loading has been given more parallel execution optimizations including optimizations for loading audio samples in parallel. Uncapped FPS is enabled by default so Linux players will not have a poor first time experience and many audio and video playback timing bugs that occur only in classic capped mode are avoided. Finally, Linux vsync support has been greatly improved. Improved Training Mission! The Training Mission is supposed to help players understand the basics of Dark Mod game-play and controls. It was created to coincide with The Dark Mod v1.0 and was not significantly altered until TDM v1.08 ( when Bikerdude did some texture replacement for 2.0 standalone and improved the overall visuals ). As such, many new game-play features that were added since 1.0 were never included in the mission. Now the mission has been upgraded to include more game-play features such as the Vine Arrow as well as getting further visual upgrades and EFX Reverb! Drunken AI! Now that the AI have better visual accuracy, Amadeus decided to balance things out by fixing many of the broken behaviors of Drunken AI so that they are more reliable and consistent for use in missions by default ( no need to extensively customize the defs or use scripting to improve them ). Potions! Dragofer and Amadeus have completed the work on the Slowfall potion originally prototyped by VanishedOne. They also incorporated the invisibility potion by Kingsal ! These now have pre-defined slots in the gameplay menu as well as the default shop menu design. Assets Galore! Along with new POM textures, we now have: A new modular pipe set A new Lampion entity Some new Factory Machine entities Ornate wood and stone relief textures A new AI praying animation A new AI smoking animation And many fixes or improvements to existing assets EFX Reverb Location Preset! Frost_Salamander took some time away from his continued work on the excellent “The Lieutenant” series missions to make EFX reverb setup easier for himself and other mission authors. You can now add EFX preset spawnargs to location entities rather than having to use the EFX def file. Translation Packs! Between TDM 1.06 and 2.0 Tels and the translating community started translating many missions but these translations required that the original mission be altered in a way that made it harder for the mission authors to revise. That meant that translation packs were in limbo being hosted by 3rd party sites \ forums along with their orphaned old missions. The translators over at the Darkfate forums came up with an solution by including not only the translation strings in the translation pack but also the altered map files, GUI defs, etc that had translation work done to them. This would leave the original mission untouched but allow translation packs to override some parts. We have gone through the old archives of these translations and have reworked them to work with the latest version of TDM (and the associated missions). Most of the translations are Russian ( due to the continued work of the Darkfate people ) but many of the early TDM missions also have German, Italian, French, etc translations too. Also Nolok contributed a brand new Catalan menu translation! Subtitles! Datiswous has been creating story subtitles for many of the existing missions in the TDM mission database. Most authors have incorporated these into their official releases, otherwise players can still add them to the FM folder. A detailed list of changes can be seen here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What's_new_in_TDM_2.13 To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder. Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.13, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.13 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.13. Before upgrading, set TDM to use one of the built-in missions ( Training Mission, A New Job, Tears of St Lucia ) then use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates

@nbohr1more, I just recently noticed that back in Oct you reported in https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152771 I didn't see anything about this in the current "What's New in 2.13". Will this new functionality actually happen for 2.13, and if so what FMs can now be re-downloaded to get the enhanced translation packs? Particularly "early TDM missions [that] also have German, Italian, French, etc translations". Pointer to any new bugtracker/forum/wiki info about this appreciated.

I think it's good to make sure it's only happening in 2.13 and not also in 2.12. If it also happens in 2.12 it's probably just an (lod related) mission bug that the missionmaker (bikerdude) has to fix. I already send your post info to him (he's not on the forums)

I did a bit of digging through the forum settings and I could not find any configuration for this. Looking at the underlying code, the comment count per page is hardcoded to 3. I could update the code, but I'm reluctant to do so as this would need to be re-applied after each update. That being said, it looks like we should start to brace for status updates being removed as Invision Forums v5 no longer supports status updates (we're still on v4.x): https://invisioncommunity.com/deprecation-tracker/status-updates-r19/ https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/480551-status-updates-have-been-removed-in-v5/

Something wrong with the hosts? See following topic for the investigation. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22663-cannot-download-dark-mod/

Maybe something is wrong on the hosts on that time? Others cant download it as well. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22662-error-missing-end-chunk-0-193/

I would like the development team to consider applying the GPL3 licence to the following Text file which was created by @Tels, @Greebo and @Dragofer. tdm_internal_engine.mtr (darkmod>materials) The reason for this request is that it is a critical core file and without it the engine (when built from source) cannot launch at all. I would also like to query whether the following script files created by @Obsttorte and @Dragofer: tdm_audiograph.script tdm_camgoyle.script tdm_grandfather_clock.script tdm_safe_lock.script tdm_safe.script tdm_turret.script were intentionally released under the CC-BY_NC_SA_3 licence or if this was an oversight? I ask since all other .script files included with TDM (and which are all called by the engine source) all contain GPL3 headers while these files have no licence information at all so naturally fall under the CC-BY_NC_SA_3 licence. Additionally in investigating which text files are required by the engine depending on scenario (and while I understand that the number of developers who are no longer on the development team may affect how many of these files can be licenced) I wondered if these too may be open for consideration as to their licence? tdm_base.def tdm_soundprop.def cursor.gui mainmenu_background_custom.gui mainmenu_background.gui mainmenu_briefing_video.gui mainmenu_briefing.gui mainmenu_credits_background.gui mainmenu_credits.gui mainmenu_custom_defaults.gui mainmenu_custom_defs.gui mainmenu_debriefing_video.gui mainmenu_defs.gui mainmenu_download.gui mainmenu_failure.gui mainmenu_loadsave.gui mainmenu_main_ingame.gui mainmenu_main.gui mainmenu_message.gui mainmenu_music.gui mainmenu_newgame.gui mainmenu_objectives.gui mainmenu_quit.gui mainmenu_settings_audio.gui mainmenu_settings_controls.gui mainmenu_settings_gameplay.gui mainmenu_settings_gamma.gui mainmenu_settings_guisize.gui mainmenu_settings_language.gui mainmenu_settings_video.gui mainmenu_settings.gui mainmenu_shop.gui mainmenu_success.gui mainmenu_utils.gui mainmenu.gui msg.gui tdm_objectives_core.gui tdm_subtitles_common.gui tdm_subtitles_message.gui tdm_gui.mtr tdm_tables.mtr tdm_guis.sndshd all.lang english.lang These provide the foundation of a working base main menu. TDM's main menu also includes several undocumented commands (that neither show in listcmds nor listcvars) which are useful to know for anyone wishing to use the base source code. I have listed the .lang files solely because of the #StringNum associations, I appreciate that they are not truly required for the above to be a foundation. While looking into how far I could break TDM in removal of files, I came across this thread by @Fiver suggesting a Libre version of TDM: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/ I believe that in that instance all text based files would need to be GPL3 licenced, leaving only videos, sounds, textures, models and the like as still being under the CC_BY_NC_SA_3 licence since remaking the files would likely result in most cases with near-identical looking files to the original. Thankyou for your consideration.

It might be best to simply encourage them to come to the forums

There's a person messaging the Dark Mod twitter account, saying they can do a Catalan translation of the game. I pointed them in the direction of the Wiki and the forums, but they're saying they want to email someone about it. I'm not really involved in the translation side of things, so I don't have any useful input here. Any ideas?

Yeah I thought later that amd had a better card for me (I think it was a 6600xt) at that moment, but it had 8gb and I thought 12gb was more future proof. Still, it's a good card and I use cuda sometimes. Btw. The 2 components at the bottom (gpu and psu) were moved from my old system, so they're not new. Bought the gpu a year ago.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is possible—at least not with the way the mod is currently implemented. All the models and animations are tied to the “unarmed” weapon entity, not the player entity. In order to have the legs and the rest of the body, we would need to add the models and animations to the player entity and modify the source code to allow the body to be visible, kind of like how it's done here. I did initially try this method but realized that the existing model/animations are a bit of a mess and it would be a LOT of work to make it look good. Also, I chose to do it this way to allow the mod to be compatible with everything, since the script and def files for the "unarmed" entity aren’t modified by any FMs (as far as I know—I haven’t tested them all). I assumed that someone may have tweaked the player files for their FM, as those are far more relevant than the "unarmed" files (which are essentially blank in the vanilla game). If I had overwritten them, I’d risk breaking their mission. There has been some discussion in the forums about having full body awareness and there didn't seem to be a lot of interest in it. Plus, it could end up being immersion-breaking. Imagine standing on a small rope and then looking down, only to see your feet just kind of floating in midair.

This is no longer a proof of concept - I am taking it seriously now! The Lieutenant 2: High Expectations

You are assuming way too much, and you're creating artificial pressure. Nobody in the public forums knows whether TDM team even considered including this feature in TDM core, regardless of its completion state or quality. Obviously you have right to have a personal opinion on the modification itself (which I think is cool too). Sorry for the offtopic here Jivo, you're doing great, and don't let this little side note distract you from your work