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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

The thing is that you don't get hardware just to match what you can play today. Hardware can cost so much that you want it to perform for you tomorrow, and well into the future. Get a CPU that will run Windows 11 and beyond, that means no pre 7th Gen Intel CPUs and nothing that is unable to render ray tracing. Tomorrows games are just going to get more and more demanding, including TDM, so you want something beefy now to cover your cakes for the next generation.

I am pleased to announce the release of our new fan mission, The Hare in the Snare: Part 1 Mission type: City Missions + Inn/Tavern Description: People are being abducted off the streets and a Watch Captain requires the services of a thief to help him find out why. Download link (v1.0.2-release): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HYvM_u56wDB16uIlb7qgS_q3P24V69MO/view?usp=sharing Credits: Mapping and original characters: @Frost_Salamander Story, readables, custom models, voices and cinematics: @Kerry000 Menu title track produced and mixed by @JackFarmer with selected gigagooga sound samples Beta testers: @Cambridge Spy @Zerg Rush @Amadeus @Acolytesix @Lzocast @wesp5 @nbohr1more @Kerry000 @ate0ate @Wellingtoncrab @prjames Additional thanks: @Dragofer, @nbohr1moreand @peter_spyfor technical help @Springheel for the modules and tutorials @kingsalfor allowing @Kerry000to abuse his manbeast everyone else on Discord and the TDM forums who offered assistance Requirements and notes: This mission requires TDM 2.09. Earlier versions will probably work but you might see one or two missing models. You may experience some FPS drops in some areas with lower-end hardware. Mid-range and above should be fine. If you have issues, I highly recommend you use shadow maps instead of stencil (settings -> advanced -> shadows implementation). It makes a big difference. For 'Hard' and 'Expert' the light gem sensitivity has been increased by '1' (meaning easier for AI to detect you). Screenshots:

If a box is easier to implement than a cone, then no problem. The shape probably doesn't matter too much, what's important it is that it is a volume not just a single line. I don't think the volume itself should handle obstructions, since it would be tricky to work out if an obstruction is actually blocking the blackjack or just an irrelevant intrusion into the edge of the volume. Quite possibly you would need a ray trace in addition to the volume: i.e. the volume is used for AI head positioning, whereas a ray trace is used to check if there is a window or something between you and the AI head. I'll gladly test it out if and when it makes it into SVN and can be tested easily (e.g. with a cvar).

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.

I'd like to better understand what you want. The design of dragging bodies is to hold frob (key down) to drag and release frob (key up) to let go. That way it's impossible to walk away while unintentionally dragging a body. Plus, it's quick to grab and move several body limbs in rapid succession. This is thought to provide a better experience, especially for new players. Towards the beginning of this thread, I created a "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior" cvar. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22198-feature-proposal-frob-to-use-world-item/&do=findComment&comment=487580 "tdm_frobhold_drag_body_behavior", default:"1" Which drag body behavior? 1 --- on frob key up, drop body (limb). 0 --- on second frob, drop body (limb), TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. That cvar was removed shortly afterwards, because it was said that it wasn't needed. With that cvar set to 0, a second frob would be required to let go of the body. Is that the behavior that you want? If so, I can add that cvar back. Also, I saw elsewhere that you want the ability to revert back to the old way. If you mean that all of the controls match TDM 2.11, that can be done with "tdm_frobhold_delay 0" and there will be a menu setting to disable it as well.

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

It's not hard to make Thief fans happy, add path tracing to Thief 1 and 2... either ala Quake 2 RTX, or with a pseudo-remake of the games. Allowing for fan missions with a path tracing engine, is a must.

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!

Not to be a nag, but I was thinking about the columns problem. If you go to the view source tab in the wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod&action=edit The raw table data is accessible directly: |- !align=left|{{TDM-FM|written|Written in Stone}} |Bikerdude, Amadeus, Dragofer |{{Forumlink|https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21265-written-in-stone-beta-210-only-20220128/}} |2022-01-28 |338 |Yes |Yes |CCC 22, Elixir |City Missions |Undead, Horror Themes |- Each pipe character represents one of the columns.

Everything is rendered to 640x 480, then stretched to whatever screen you have. Giving some GUI element fixed real aspect ratio can only be achieved by computing inverse stretching at the moment when this element is rendered. I think we added "forcescreenaspect" window flag for X-ray overlay, which is usually combined with "hcenter" flag, and it is implemented exactly like this. Making font scale automatically is not a good idea, since it then you'll just get more variety with aspect ratios.

Terrific! The beta test thread is up: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22238-beta-testing-the-spider-and-the-finch/

Hi, I need to know what the code is to use Spoiler Tags. I am using my tablet and I don't have the options to use anything, like spoiler tags, quote tags, text changes etc. Thanks

Welcome to the Dark Mod forums MarsManon! Thank you very much for the kind words about SLL, it's always nice to hear We all worked real hard on bringing Grayman's map to life and I'm glad you enjoyed it

I was so enchanted by this FM, I had to sign up to the forums the same day I finished it to come thank the authors Genuinely, truly incredible work! I was so overwhelmed in places that I resorted to just shouting joy at my monitor two, three, maybe four entirely separate times while playing. Exploring, puzzling, finding something new, trying to use it, and finding it does a whole new, separate, wonderful thing! There aren't enough words inside me to describe the feeling. It was breathtaking. I don't have any specific feedback that hasn't come through this thread before Thanks so much for making this, for all the inspiration and ingenuity and effort it took. If I never play another level this good, in any other game, in my life, I'd be fine with that.

After a long time and a lot of delays, I'm extremely happy and relieved to announce the release date for my first map; Lords & Legacy, on Friday the 30th of August, 2013! Lords & Legacy v.2.1 Resume: Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/Lj8UJ#0 Notes: Build time: 2013/03/30 - 2013/08/30 To install, simply put the .pk4 file in your fm folder and install from the in-game mission menu. It is a large mission with optional objectives, so make sure to save often. The ropes in the beginning have a 'slick' surface, to simulate being 'slack lines'. They are difficult, but once you get a hang of the slide they can be fun. A couple of the large areas can be a bit rough on performance, and can be improved by adjusting the LOD slider in video options. A few of visportals open only when you get close. This is to keep the frames smooth inside the respective building, due to early inexperienced design. If you find any bugs which affect the gameplay experience, then you're very welcome to post them here, but please use the spoiler tags. Big thanks to 'Obsttorte', 'Springheel', 'Greyman', 'Bikerdude', 'Sotha' and rest of 'The Dark Mod Team'for all the help, guides and tricks. Also thanks to the other TDM users who provided fantastic support and feedback during the build. Thank you for beta-testing: 'Bikerdude', 'TylerVocal', 'Simplen00b', 'nbohr1more', 'Briareos H.' Special thanks to: 'Danus', 'Dsx' & 'Stanleh' for testing, help and support. v.2.0.1 changelog: Bugs: -The "Master Thief" challenge was impossible to do for a while, due to incorrect values. Fixed. -Getting seen by "The Killer" now also fails the "Ghost" challenge. -The 3 cardplaying guards no longer float mid air, as their chairs are now nailed to the floor. -Fixed the sound of the furnace continuing after the flames were extinguished. -Fixed weird glittering on the power cables around the map. -Fixed some moonlight popping in and out. -Fixed openable windows in Commons, clipping into the frame. -Fixed a book dropping through a desk. -Fixed visportals closing too close in Lancel's Tower, slight hit on performance though. -Added more monsterclip to Service Tower and Robert's Tower's entrance. -Improved a few vis_portals with func_portals. -Replaced curbs in Slums and Commons with some more detailed versions and changed textures. And a lot more little unecessary tweaks. Gameplay: -Added new challenge: (Jack White) - Do not knock-out anyone. -Reduced the amount of starting gear, depending on difficulty. -Added cubemaps to most windows on the map. -Redid most func_statics in Commmons Quarter to reduce tris and increase performance. Draw count is still somewhat high. -Removed all transparent windows as they didn't have actual gameplay value, just a performance drain in exchange for glitchy visuals. -Lancel's safe can no longer be picked. Find the key! -Added a couple minor cosmetic details in the sewers. -Moved a coinpurse from a wealthy commoner's sleeping butt to his nightside table. Also adjusted his furniture so thieves can better move around. -Changed sounds for several doors across the map. Once again, a big thanks to 'Bikerdude' for taking the time help out and locate room for improvement! v.2.0 changelog: Bugs: -Fixed various textures and surfaces and a few minor tweaks. -Tweaked some sounds to be in line with TDM 2.0 changes. -Fixed 2 certain AIs being too sensitive rather than drunk. (Thanks to AluminumHaste!) -Tweaked LOD on some objects, to prevent windows "popping" in and out. Gameplay: -Added more monsterclip to the towers, so the AI can now run up and down stairs. Only the stairs in the small tower has issues still. -Added more monsterclip in the city so the guards can follow you up all stairs. -Added a few minor details. -Windows in the city now dims sound, resulting in less aggro from guards and more convincing soundscape. -Reduced 'draw calls' in all the large areas, increasing performance. The map is still heavy at certain areas. Another big thanks to 'Bikerdude' and 'Greyman', for taking time out of their own schedules to help optimize the map's draw count and other significant adjustements! v.1.0.3 changelog: Bugs: -Fixed 4 black chairs in one of the towers -Fixed a floating painting -Fixed several clipping objects v.1.0.2 changelog: Bugs: -Fixed zfighting in the library's bookshelves -Fixed a black window in one of the towers -Fixed several typos in readables Gameplay: v.1.0.1 changelog: Bugs: -Fixed an issue with the main objectives not being in "sync". -Fixed console spam from a script Gameplay: -Adjusted required loot for each difficulty from "3000, 4000 and 5000" to "2500, 3500 and 4500".

The magic is in the denoiser. In Quake 2 RTX, you can even switch the denoiser off and see all the noise in it's glory if you want to. Basically, real-time implementations rely on very few samples, and aggressive denoising, not to mention fewer light bounces, Q2RTX being limited to only 3 diffuse bounces, as they are generally the slowest to calculate, at least in Blender they are. Additionally, most games that do real-time ray tracing only use it for one or two aspects of the scene like reflections, not for literally everything, like Q2RTX does. You can even have real-time emissive textured surfaces in Q2RTX, like the screen of a monitor in a dark room, where whatever is on the screen causes accurate shadows and colored lighting in the environment. It's amazing. Of course they can't just bolt this onto Thief's game engine and call it a day, the lighting and materials would also need to be reworked to properly take advantage of it.

I think dropping ray-tracing into Thief 1 and 2's levels would ruin their designed shadows and make sneaking around impossible, but a new game built from the ground up with raytracing in mind could be interesting.

Ray Tracing is just a failed SSAO trying its best to hide from its actual absolute ugliness. I know I'm being an absolute strawman, this is just a satire. My problem with Ray Tracing is that, as some people mentioned here, it is not even new at all (It was known as far as in 2012) and it only is so because Nvidia supposedly found ways to make it run fast on their VGAs...I don't get it, people nowadays enjoy more than 120 FPS, some are zealots when it comes to 144hz, maybe they're right, maybe they're senile, but honestly; all zealotry is bullshit. (To elaborate, the RTX 2070 can't even run RTX at stable 60 FPS, it flunctuates between 54 if lucky to as low as 15, same with the RTX 2080) Ray-Tracing is not a bad thing, it's GREAT, but for now, it's THE WORST. Yet again just like some of you said, we oughta wait way more years than just one to finally see a difference and it becoming standard issue. By the way, I own an RTX 2070 myself, it was cheaper than a GTX 1080 so I just went for it If you TDM boys are this crazy to try adding Ray-Tracing into TDM, do tell me.

Hold up, nbohr. Nvidia will not be the only game in town for raytracing: https://wccftech.com/amd-navi-20-radeon-rx-graphics-card-ray-tracing-gcn-architecture-rumor/ https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18401209/sony-playstation-5-details-8k-graphics-ray-tracing-ssds-ps4-backward-compatibility It is unknown whether the PS5's raytracing functionality will be a custom addition to AMD's Navi, but it wouldn't make much sense to spend years developing it only to keep it from the desktop GPUs for another year or two. And AMD has already hinted at a response to Nvidia's raytracing cores. Not that this info changes the difficulties of adding ray tracing to TDM, but considering any ray tracing would probably take years from now to land in TDM, there will be Nvidia and AMD support for the technique... and possibly Intel.

That would definetely make more sense. While the TDM world does indeed not has to work like real life in all its aspects, teh similarities will make the player assume that this is the case. So many players may simple not get the idea that the could use the glasses in that way. In addition we already have a mission that features these glasses, and they were tied into the story. Reusing these gadget over and over again will probably become boring by the time, not to mention one may not want to run around with those on over and over again. It may be worthwhile to think about different usecases of this feature. Combining it with cameras might open up new possibilities. Note that, although it is called x-ray it doesn't have to be used in that manner. Basically you get to see something else when applied, which isn't the definition of x-ray per se.

Version 3.0. Not much changed this time: I made a custom material to use a square falloff image, this helps the lamp cover more ground to make the most of the effect. Tried making flame irradiance pulsate but it didn't work, prolly too subtle to matter. Unless a major change comes to mind this should be the last one for now. tdm_irradiance_v3.0.pk4 At the moment this mod is still hit by three major deal breakers: On maps with a lot of portals the cutoff looks hideous and is barely better than letting the light shine through walls. It needs a better way to prevent wall leaks, obviously without using shadows. Performance is too affected on complex maps, I'd say I'm seeing -30 FPS at the very least. For such a simple estimation it's downright silly: We could have a smart algorithm doing real ray bounces at this cost. I'm not happy with overriding the base light classes to attach lights on top of other lights: I'd rather every light on the map gets an irradiance volume tailored to its exact appearance. This would be easy for me to do with a script that runs once scans all lights and attaches customized ambience to them... the next update would likely be that, but I don't know if I should bother unless #1 and #2 are also resolved (and this). Based on my experience making this mod, I have an idea on how we could do this properly with an engine change. @cabalistic@duzenko and other graphics devs I'd like your input here please. It's based on two essential things: An ambient light decreasing with distance is a good enough estimation for irradiance and provides realistic results. As it's directionless and requires no per-pixel effects (specular or normal mapping) this approach can in theory be very cheap too. In my opinion it looks far better than having nothing, would work great until some hypothetical future where we had real ray tracing... as a rule our engine already uses many such good tricks. The shape and radius of the indirect light doesn't need to exceed that of the direct light but should be equal to it. The effect is only visible in and intended for areas covered by the light's radius box, but not touched by its direct light due to shadows or surface direction. Knowing this I had the following thought: Suppose we had a setting to let every light have an ambient component, meaning any standard light material is treated like it has the "ambientLight" flag but without affecting the normal functionality of the direct light. The cvar multiplies the effect of the ambient component, when enabled you'd set it to something like 0.125 (since "_color 0.125 0.125 0.125" gives the best result in my tests). The ambient part uses all light properties normally: Same texture, color, etc... only difference is the brightness being multiplied by the cvar. The advantage of this method is we can get the exact same effect as what I'm doing here but without any extra lights, instead computing the ambiance as part of the same light using existing data to make the calculation as cheap as possible. As the ambient component must remain shadowless to play its role, this doesn't solve the wall leak issue. I have an idea for that but will leave it for later, I don't want to overwhelm with too much at once. I'd like to hear thoughts on this proposal: How easy and cheap would it be to let all direct lights act as ambient lights too for players who want this?

Ulysses 2: Protecting the Flock By Sotha The mission starts some time after the events of Ulysses: Genesis, and continues the story of Ulysses. It is a medium sized mission with a focus on stealthy assassinations and hostage liberation. BUILD TIME: 12/2014 - 05/2015 CREDITS The TDM Community is thanked for steady supply of excellent mapping advice. Thanks goes also to everyone contributing to TDM! Voice Actors: Goldwell (as Goubert and Ulysses), Goldwell's Girlfriend (as Alis) Betatesters: Airship Ballet, Ryan101. Special Thanks to: Springheel and Melan (for proofreading). Story: Read & listen it in game. Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwR0ORZU5sraRGduUWlVRmtsX3c/view?usp=sharing Other: Spoilers: When discussing, please use spoiler tags, like this: [spoiler] Hidden text. [/spoiler] Mirrors: Could someone put this on TDM ingame downloader? Thanks!

@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...."