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Ok I got it working. The reason is that it's explained wrong in the wiki. The wiki example says this: subtitles fm_briefing { verbosity story srt "fromVideo video/briefing/briefing.mp4" "video/briefing/briefing.srt" } and But it should actually state the video briefing material, instead of briefing video file. Correct? It must be, because now it works correctly, also in The hare in the snare.

Simple reason to avoid local shadowing parallel light of any kind: And this is fully within one area. When walls, areas and portals appear, things get worse.

Of course, it is one of the reasons for the decline of online forums, since the advent of mobile phones. Forums on a mobile are a pain in the ass, but on the other hand, for certain things there are no real alternatives to forums, social networks cannot be with their sequential threads, where it is almost impossible to retrieve answers to a question that is asked. has done days ago. For devs for internal communication, the only thing offered is a collaborative app, such as System D (not to be confused with systemd). FOSS, free and anonymous registration, access further members only by invitation, full encrypted and private. https://www.system-d.org

I think that a Social Network, like Discord, or much better Mastodon, Lemmy or another from the Fediverse is fine to promote TDM or chat with the user, but not for game related or developement issues, for the reason which @thebigh mencioned, for this the Forum is insustituible.

Ignoring is somewhat inadequate as you still see other members engaging in a discussion with the problematic user, and as Wellingtoncrab says such discussions displace all other content within that channel. Moderation is also imperfect as being unpleasant to engage with is not in itself banworthy, so there is nothing more to do if such people return to their old behaviour after a moderator had a talk with them, except live with it or move away. I'd be more willing to deal with it if it felt like there were more on-topic discussion, i.e. thoughts about recently played fan missions or mappers showcasing their progress, rather than a stream of consciousness about a meta topic that may or not have to do with TDM. I guess the forums already serve the desired purpose, or they just compartmentalise discussions better.

I am most definitely still working on the FM. I do not plan on giving up, considering it is a personal passion project. I would assume the layout is 75% complete. I'm slightly deviating with other FM's I'm working on (Vertigo), to keep me from burning out. Unfortunatley there are days where I simply do not have the time to mess with Radiant.. (life can take wild turns).. that is simply the only reason why it is taking me a melania. I hope one day everyone can enjoy the FM as much as I enjoy creating it.

I think there is no problem with noshadows parallel lights: they are well-defined in the current engine. It can be used as local light to brighten the window, as @HMart does. I hope there is no reason to have shadows in this case? The parallel and parallelSky are almost the same thing, except that parallelSky traces light beams from areas containing portalsky world surfaces, while parallel traces light beams from the area where light origin is located, which is never what you need for a global parallel light (like moonlight). There are many missions where this issue is hacked around, and all of them result in issues like double lighting if door is open, or lack of lighting in some outdoors areas. And there is no way to fix the engine to make these missions work properly --- the maps themselves are wrong. If you want to do a global parallel light, the parallelSky is surely what you want to have, and parallel is most likely not. But note that to make parallelSky work you also need to follow some rules. The issue with local parallel light is that objects outside light volume can cast shadow over objects inside light volume. This is pretty weird by itself: you move object closer to light volume, and at some point its shadow instantly turns on. The engine determines whether object intersects light volume approximately (using bounding boxes and such stuff), so whether you get shadow from an object close to light volume or not is implementation-defined. Today you have no shadow and it looks nice, tomorrow culling is changed and the scene gets unexpected shadow. So the bottom line is: Global parallel lights should use parallelSky and follow some rules. Local parallel lights should be noshadows. All the rest is not well-defined: you'll avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding it altogether.

Well it's not that bad is it? I thought multiple people have finished playing it already. No reason to remove a mission that has some issues, but can still be played and finished. You can put a warning in your mission description, but let players decide if it's worth it or not. I think removal is not something anyone will be happy with. I think it would be better if you start on a new mission and with the (hopefully positive) experience that you gained, you can fix things in this mission later.

First of all, ChatGPT , independent of the version, is a language model to be able to interact with the user, imitating being intelligent. It has a knowledge base that dates back to 2021 and adds what users contribute in their chats. This means, first of all, that it is not valid if you are looking for correct answers, since if it does not find the answer in its base, it has a tendency to invent it with approximations or directly with false or obsolete answers. With this, the future will not change, it will occur with AI of a different nature, on the one hand with search engines with AI, since they have access to information in real time, without needing such complex language models and for this reason, they will gradually search engines are going to add AI, not only Bing or Google, but before these there was Andisearch, like the first of all, Perplexity.ai, Phind.com and You.com. Soon there will also be DuckDuckGoAI. On the other hand, generative AI to create images videos and even aplications, music and other, like game assets or 3D models., The risk with AI came up with Auto GPT, initially a tool that seemed useful, but it can be highly dangerous, since on the one hand it has full access to the network and on the other hand it is capable of learning on its own initiative to carry out tasks that are introduced as if it were a Text2Image app out there, what was demonstrated with ChaosGPT, the result of an order introduced in Auto GPT to destroy humanity, which it immediately began to develop with extraordinary efficiency, first trying to access the missile silos nuclear weapons and to fail, luckily, trying to get followers on Twitter with a fake account that he created and where he got more than 6000 followers, hiding later, realizing the danger that can be blocked or deactivated on the network. Currently nothing is known about it, but it is still a danger not exactly to be ruled out, it can really become Skynet. AI is going to change the future, but not ChatGPT which isnt more than a nice toy.

FXAA is cheap but looks awful. Supersampling AA is strictly more expensive than multisampling, no reason to use it if multisampling looks OK. Temporal AA requires major changes in the engine in order to be used, plus it kinda requires motion blur to hide its uselessness on fast camera motions. So don't expect multisampling to be replaced soon.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/15/amazon_echo_disabled_allegation/?td=rt-3a The cloud strikes again! I.e. You can be instantly locked out of an entire ecosystem at any time for any reason, even if you have done nothing wrong at all.

I'm seeing the improvement with shadow maps too, albeit I keep their quality at lowest. Indeed MSAA is still costly even so, I kept it disabled even now for that reason. Fingers crossed the next release may get shader-based Anti-Aliasing: From my tests in Tesseract / Redeclipse, FXAA / SSAA / TAA all tend to be cheaper, hope we get at least one someday.

My brain is reeling with overload! First, being enthralled with your goblin roleplay, I overlooked your second link to your clockwork story. That is now even more fascinating to me. In particular, the AI's reasoning powers (eg, when it perceives and describes the allegorical element of your story) is staggering. Clearly the AI can reason intelligently. No matter that it isn't conscious and, like all software, it's merely a list of instructions & data (thought HUGE!) it can reason in an intelligent way. In that instance it was better than me! It definitely has (or can represent and function as if) an understanding of language. And I say if something looks like a spade, and be used to dig, then it's a spade, even if constructed differently. thanks, now found the sharing feature and discovered your post is publicly-readable but posting to it requires an openAI account. I added a brief message to test if you can see it. I'm sure it can be seen on the public page. But does that sync with the copy in your private version of it? For further interest, I posted a version of one of my earlier tests that might be of interest at.... https://chat.openai.com/share/36420a5f-f8d8-4eeb-939b-a1c4c017c2b3 It's a failed story fragment but I learned a lot about how to work with gpt.

Thanks for clarifying. Unfortunately there's still a bug as the barrier never goes away: When I first enter the apartment the husband says "is she hurt, please put her on the bed"... I do so and the objective is completed, but after that the husband says nothing else and the barrier never goes away. I looked around the room and tried frobbing him, but nothing ever happens for some odd reason. Wonder if some triggers or signals got broken in latest dev?

For some reason I thought this FM was just released, didn't realize it's 3 years old already! Just finished it at last with 5100 loot and 3 secrets found, not bad for something of this scale. I was stuck on one of the objectives but finally found it so I removed my question. This has to be the most structurally intense FM ever made: I don't think a city of quite this size and complexity was ever done for TDM in one map before, the parkour and little hidden areas are insane! This is nice albeit mentally straining as it's impossible not to miss something or properly keep track; In many cases I had to noclip to discover how to get to certain areas, reloaded and went there without cheats afterward but don't know how I could have found some areas otherwise. Easy to get lost but this is compensated by the extremely useful feature of the map highlighting where you are so you don't have to guess using signs. Ran into a few bugs. Most noteworthy is a breaking glitch that makes it impossible to continue without noclip: Other than that nothing too significant: Managed to catch a case of a door that opens too wide and goes through the railing, there was a hatch that did it too but I forgot that one. I can also confirm the black box bug... first thought it's caused by my mod to remove spiders because I have arachnophobia, they set the entity to null however so it shouldn't be a box per say.

I don't recall a system for noise masking. It sounds like it'd be a good idea, but when you get into the details you realize it'd be complicated to implement. It's not only noise that that goes into it, I think. E.g., a high register can cut through even a loud but low register rumble. And it's not like the .wav file even has data on the register of what it's playing. So either you have to add meta-data (which is insane), or you have to have a system to literally check pitch on the .wav data and paramaterize it in time to know when it's going to cut through what other parameters from other sounds. For that matter, it doesn't even have the data on the loudness either, so you'd have to get that off the file too and time the peaks with the "simultaneous" moment at arbitrary places in every other sound file correctly. And then position is going to matter independently for each AI. So it's not like you can have one computation that works the same for all AI. You'd have to compute the masking level for each one, and then you get into the expense you're mentioning. I know there was a long discussion about it in the internal forums, and probably on the public subforums too, but it's been so long ago now I can't even remember the gist of them. Anyway the main issue is I don't know if you'll find a champion that wants to work on it. But if you're really curious to see how it might work, you could always try your hand at coding & implementing it. Nothing beats a good demo to test an idea in action. And there's no better way to learn how to code than a little project like that. I always encourage people to try to implement an idea they have, whether or not it may be a good idea, just because it shows the power of an open source game. We fans can try anything we want and see if it works!

it's worth trying whatever you want to try and then see what the beta testers think. Just have a plan B ready to implement in case it goes over like a lead balloon. If there is no loot goal, the first thing people are going to ask is 'where is the loot goal?', so you just need to have an explanation that makes sense and provide that in the release thread, or even in the mission briefing (e.g. don't rob innocent people or something). The only reason I make loot goals optional is to make players like myself happy, who are terrible at finding loot and don't want to spend hours searching everywhere before the mission completes.

Not all players respond to loot the same way I suspect. For players who principally enjoy exploring, the loot objective doesn't serve a reward function at all. Instead, for them it is mostly a handy barometer for how close they are to seeing the whole level. For this group having a specific number to target that is at least 70-80% of the total loot on the map is important, but they wouldn't care if it is optional. Then there are the power-fantasy roleplayers' whose joy is living out the dream of being a master thief. I think those players actually do want an obligatory objective and a specific target number, but they don't care as much about what that number is. They just get satisfaction from hitting a required target. Conversely, players who come to roleplay or otherwise experience the story might be annoyed by having a loot goal at all. Picking up treasure gets in the way of them experiencing the story. In their minds it should be entirely up to them what they do or don't want to pick up. And of course there are also completionists, who don't need loot goals for the exact opposite reason. They will grab absolutely everything in the level of their own accord. You can't make all of these groups happy no matter what you do. In the Thief games I'd wager loot objectives existed partially to make sure everyone picked up enough money to buy gear for the next level, but in TDM that mostly does not apply. So unless you are putting equipment sellers in your mission like Iris and reward looting that way, I don't think there is a right answer. People will do what they want and someone will feel like their toes are being stepped on no matter what you do. So do whatever makes you happy.

That was immediately obvious to me when I saw it. Which was part of the reason I asked the original question, because, it seemed like an old mission to me which he continued to work on.

Don't want to comment on that chatbot / spambot thing, to me it's just the latest mass hysteria created overnight to further shove the world into madness. But like I said the main reason for my idea is I find the lack of a permanent alert level too unrealistic, even by game character standards; It would be nice if this could be solved without altering difficulty but universally to all FM's. I'm just hoping there's a satisfactory way to avoid having guards literally chase you, you hide and wait 3 minutes for the whole crew to calm down, then 5 minutes after you were just being chased a guard will calmly go "what was there in the shadows, probably just the rats"... that behavior makes them almost as dumb as "chat GPT" For now I wonder: The current behavior to boost NPC acuity after a level 3 alert... is there a spawnarg to customize the amount or is it hard-coded? It would help if at least the FM can increase the offset and make a guard super-alert once they saw you. I believe another suggestion I made long ago might also be relevant: We have difficulty settings for AI sight and hearing in the menu, but could we have a third option to multiply how quickly enemies give up on searching for you? If you're impatient you could set it to low so AI forget you in just a minute, whereas if you want maximum realism have them still looking even 10 minutes later! Wouldn't be a fix to the unawareness issue once they calm down but this could improve it.

I'm using the version from kcghost. I just tested and I can't see any difference inside the inventory. On the stats itself it doesn't show the different loot types (still seen in the inventory), but instead gives more info on stealth score. Edit: I see Dragofer made an updated version of his script. I have to check that out. Edit2: That version works: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=21272&key=02755164a3bed10498683771fe9a0453

This may have been discussed long ago on Discord and I since forgot the details. It's an option that seems so simple and effective it kept itching me to ask in more detail. The latest dev version increases performance by +20 FPS which has me excited to know more on what seems like it could be a final huge optimization. At the moment we have view frustum and visportal culling but no form of occlusion culling. I wonder how much FPS we'd gain if we also used world geometry to derender what the player can't see. Would it be worth the effort to add this even as a hidden setting to experiment with? Given it was never attempted in all those years (to my knowledge) I imagine there's a reason and I may be excited for nothing, I'm sure @stgatilov and other devs can offer more insight but I'm happy to hear what anyone thinks. Here's my exact proposal: Occlusion culling would be done after portal culling (which wouldn't change in any form) ensuring only entities and geometry in the same room are compared. Only world geometry (solid brushes) are used to mask: A counter-argument was that calculating this mask will be costly... world geometry is almost always very simple, checking a few boxes should cost almost nothing compared to the gain of hiding every light / model / portal behind any wall. We can probably iterate through all world surfaces facing the camera within a distance limit if necessary, then use the resulting rectangles to preform the same overlap calculation as portal faces but in reverse (they close behind them instead of opening); Especially now that we have entity scissors and efficient 2D detection of 3D projections this could be huge My reasoning is no matter how well you portal your map, you'll always have many entities hidden behind a wall but not a portal, the engine still renders so much stuff you can't see: To even try getting close to this level of efficiency, every single edge and corner would need to radiate portals in each complementary direction, an impossible nightmare for the mapper to even attempt which would destroy dmap if they tried (I got close with limited success). Visportals will always be the simplest and most effective form of culling, but they're ultimately markers to separate rooms and represent openings thus can't cover all situations: If on top of that we also masked by world brushes the gains could be remarkable.

Instead of remakes of excellent old games, why not remake bad games? Surely there must be stealth games that had an interesting premise or a cool setting but, for whatever reason, fell flat. They might be worth taking a second shot at.

How do you do that, though? I tried changing its success logic to make it depend on the "go to exit" objective, but that didn't make any difference. Still didn't get checkmarked at the end. I mean... it's the end of the mission. I don't think there's any assumptions to be made. If the player didn't kill by then, then the objective can only be fulfilled. Same for the loot one I made. The "no kills" objective is different from the loot one, in that it's "satisfied at start" and "irreversible". If the player kills, the mission fails, rather than the objective. It's only not checkmarked from the beginning because it's "ongoing", I think. But I still don't see any reason why it shouldn't get checkmarked at the end.

TDM was never meant to be fully realistic, it would become impossibly difficult were that the case. None the less I still find myself wishing more could be done to make AI feel less like AI, especially when handling hostile encounters (usually the player). While like most aspects this could never be truly perfect, one area feels like it could be noticeably improved: Giving AI some form of long term memory, rather than just one alert level which goes back to zero after a short time. Here is the reason why I'm saying this: Walk inside your average heavily guarded mansion and step into the bright lights, making all the guards clearly see you and chase after you to attack. Once you've had enough fun repeating the process, hide somewhere and give everyone enough time to cool down. At the end of it all, hide somewhere in the shadows where you can barely be seen and let a guard walk past you: The guard will just say "is there something over there", at best waiting a few seconds and saying "probably just the shadows" before walking away... the same man that may have chased after you for 30 minutes and should by any logic know an intruder is still in the house, I mean come on Now I'm aware we have a basic persistence system: If I remember correctly an AI that's encountered the player and was alerted enough to draw their sword will have its acuity permanently increased by a slight amount. This however makes no noticeable difference as the AI behaves mostly the same. They'll keep telling fellow AI an intruder is in the area, this definitely helps but it's only a dialogue change not accompanied by noticeable modifications in behavior as you'd expect. Obviously massive modifications might be hard to do now without upsetting existing players since it would make everything harder. As such any such attempt would likely be an experiment and, if successful, a new menu option for the difficulty settings. Still I felt like suggesting my imagined solution just in case there's a point in considering tackling this. My idea: Replace the one-time bump in acuity with a paranoia level independent from the alert level... think of the existing alert system as short-term alert and the new one as long-term alert. The standard alert level of guards is slowly added to their paranoia level, thus the more time a guard spends being alert and the higher that alert is the more fear increases. Paranoia level may be allowed to decrease over time but at a far slower rate than the alert level: If an alert guard will typically take 3 minutes to fully calm down after losing track of the player, the paranoia level should take at least 30 if not 60 (real life) minutes to fully go down to minimum... even then it shouldn't drop below a certain degree after that point was reached, for instance just 50% of the maximum paranoia. This long-term fear level would have several effects on an AI as they patrol on their normal route... the ones I've thought about are: Increased acuity as they'll be more alert. This system would replace the existing simple bump we have in that regard, with a more fluid effect and also stronger effect. Increased playing of voices and idle animations: Due to being afraid the guard may talk to themselves or others a lot more frequently and babble excessively. Walking could be replaced by running for a while, even on path nodes that don't have the run flag. The AI would still patrol that same route just at a faster pace. As a map feature set by FM's: Some path nodes can be filtered by fear level, may already be possible with the simple system but I never tried it. An AI paranoid the player is still around but having resumed their normal patrol route may choose to patrol a more sensitive area it normally wasn't going to, which would be a fair way of punishing the player for being seen by having that AI start guarding a sensitive location from then on. If the paranoia level is allowed to slowly decrease, the guard may decide to go back on this decision... the player could then do something else for 15 minutes around the map till the guard abandons the paranoid patrol route. Here's an idea I like: AI randomly getting scared for no reason, thinking they see the player in every shadow even when there's nothing there. A scared guard normally walking on their patrol route would randomly become alert for no reason, typically when walking through a dark area, causing them to draw their sword or randomly run around for a second. The problem here is this effect would be random: Imagine you're hiding accordingly but a guard randomly freaks out and bumps into you, most players would find this unfair.