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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/

Sounds great. Unfortunately you don't have to get very far in any discussion about either changing existing gameplay mechanics or about giving players more in game customization options to see why mappers stop bothering with the debate club politics and instead divert the energy to do what they can to address what issues they can themselves. There is clearly also a disconnect between how people think they feel about these changes and how they do in practice. Kingsal's missions seem to be widely considered as some of the most polished missions in the game, because they are a holistic designs that look, sound and play a certain way. As a result I have never seen a player complain about something like the run modifier being increased in a particular missions thread and it’s clear there are very few players who are ultimately conscious of anything besides that the overall experience feels good. So there is reason these get adopted by other authors. The players are entitled to their opinion - but it's the mission authors choice ultimately. And I can only speak for myself, but I came to TDM because I saw working examples of things I wanted in my mission. These were not “stock” or “standard”. They were achievable by virtue of the games extendability. If the day comes where we get locked out of that kind of control of our designs, I would probably walk.

I agree entirely. Unless a mission is aiming to present a completely different gameplay experience (like making a rapid-fire archery-based combat mission instead of a stealth mission), I see no reason why things like bow aiming should vary on a mission-by-mission basis. If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed. If they are a matter of taste and there is no agreement on what the value should be, they should be configurable by the player and take effect in all missions. Imagine if every desktop application made its own tweaks to your keyboard layout or mouse acceleration because the author didn't personally approve of the default values. It would be a horrible user experience. Some applications actually do this with fonts, and yes, it's horrible. Potentially useful functionality made inaccessible because the author decided to ignore system font choices and DPI, and impose his hand-picked non-scalable 10pt font which I can barely read.

I understand some changes that break backwards compatibility, long as they're kept minimal and hopefully don't render old FM's unplayable unless patched. We should keep in mind some maps may never get updated, especially ones who's authors might no longer be around... at the same time some things can't be easily improved because keeping it backwards compatible is more challenging, I felt a few things were limited for that reason a couple of times.

Yeah, as I said elsewhere, it's not so much that the missions are broken that is frustrating to me and several other affected authors, it's that there was zero communication to the affected authors that this was going to be happening beforehand. There is no reason why a message couldn't have been sent to the affected authors saying "hey, this will be broken in the upcoming dev build for X reasons. I thought you'd like to know before surprising you." Or even an open discussion beforehand about why these authors decided to make these customizations to begin with. Plain and simple, that's just a lack of respect. If you have the time to break these, you have time to communicate and see if there might be a solution to avoid all this (and there is!). And perhaps from YOUR perspective, you might think this reaction seems silly, unnecessary, and that this is totally fine, but from my perspective and that of a few others, it's not. EDIT: In addition, when creating or modifying existing assets, I and others take great care in making sure that these changes don't break existing maps. And if they do, we do whatever we can to own up to that and fix it. I do expect that same level of respect to be shown to existing maps so they aren't just broken with reckless abandon and no clear path forward.

On Debian (testing) dev17035-10724 runs very "laggy" for some reason (even the menu). Last time I experienced the same "laggyness" was on a non-accelrated VNC connection to another machine.

I can understand your frustrations, however the main reason why we have had to replace the core files is because we don’t have the ability to make tweaks to the core game without doing this. In particular having the bow speed reduced from 6 seconds to 3 feels a lot better ingame. And it’s something that I personally have in all of my missions since I saw it in Kingsal’s mission the first time. If it’s possible for us to tweak that variable without needing to replace the .script file that would be really handy.

I like the Transition from dusk to night in the Prologue and the fact that it didn't last long. Hiding and stealing during the day feels weird to me. I couldn't digest Mankind Divided as much as I liked the Artistic touches for this reason. The Prague map felt so Arbitrary.

Wasn't "Megatextures" the reason Doom 2016 (IdTech 6) takes years to load though, even on a high-class SSD? I've then heard that Megatextures were scrapped out in Doom Eternal (IdTech 7), which apparently could add to the fact it loads incredibly fast.

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.

The commit which introduced unconditional writing of the s_mindistance and s_maxdistance spawnargs was this one: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/commit/541f2638c810588ada12e9a28360f16df6143d45 and it appears it was intended to fix this bug: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6062 The current logic is to set the spawnargs to the same values as in the sound shader, if a shader is set: // Write the s_mindistance/s_maxdistance keyvalues if we have a valid shader if (!_spawnArgs.getKeyValue(KEY_S_SHADER).empty()) { // Note: Write the spawnargs in meters _spawnArgs.setKeyValue(KEY_S_MAXDISTANCE, string::to_string(_radii.getMax(true))); _spawnArgs.setKeyValue(KEY_S_MINDISTANCE, string::to_string(_radii.getMin(true))); } This happens in the freezeTransform method which is called after performing some manipulation of the speaker entity such as moving or resizing it. In this case _radii is the object which contains the modified speaker radii, so this code is persisting the modified radii into the relevant spawnargs. This seems to be working correctly when I manipulate a speaker with a valid sound shader. The only way I can get 0 is by creating a speaker with a sound shader like blackjack_swing which does not have radii defined. In this case the speaker has a default minimum radius of 0.0 and a default maximum radius of 10.0. We could avoid setting a radius at all, but then the speaker just appears as an entity box rather than a sphere/circle, which I assume is the original reason for setting a default value. Right now I have no idea what code path would lead to having both a minimum and a maximum of 0.0. I think we'd need more detailed reproduction steps. This is the current logic for setting the spawnargs on speaker construction (rather than manipulation, which is the previous code): // Initialise the speaker with suitable distance values auto radii = soundShader->getRadii(); entity.setKeyValue("s_mindistance", string::to_string(radii.getMin(true))); entity.setKeyValue("s_maxdistance", radii.getMax(true) > 0 ? string::to_string(radii.getMax(true)) : "10"); So there is a specific check that s_maxdistance is greater than 0 before setting it as a spawnarg. Code similar to this has existed for many years, as far as I can see, and I have to go as far back as 2009 to find something different (originally all speakers just had hardcoded 16/32 radii to make them visible).

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?

ok so after getting myself a rtx 3070 im left with a bit of a wonder about all the fud on the net. elitist users claim the 3070 cant do 4k (debunked it handles 4k just fine but you need to lower the texture resolution in some titles to not overshoot the frankly rather low amount of vram -> 8 gb). some back and forth on the 2080ti some claim that the 3070 is faster while others claim the 2080ti is. (from my own experience the 2080ti is a bit faster in 4k while the 3070 is a bit faster in lower resolutions). if you play exclusively in 4k go for the 2080ti -> reason it has more vram 11gb vs 8gb this might not sound like a huge deal but the extra 3gb helps a lot with ultra high texture resolutions. debunked (claims that the 3070 uses newer dlss features, it does not. the 2080ti supports the exact same dlss features that the 3070 does, it even supports dlss 3 minus the framegen feature. some claims the 3070 uses newer tensor cores which are faster, well is they are i dont see it... the 2080 ti has 4 times the amount of tensor cores compared to the 3070 while the 3070 has around 1000 more cuda cores hmm ???). the real reason i think the 3070 got so popular is that it delivered close to the same performance of the insanely overpriced 2080ti, i cant fault people for that choice but i would like some realism in the comparison and not something based on just the price. the 2080ti was a highend card back when it was new while the 3070 is a mid range card at half the price of the 2080ti with at least comparable performance but lacks enough vram to play all titles at 4k with everything cranked to the max. playing hzd forbidden west on the 3070 atm in 4k with everything on max except texture resolution which i have on high and i get > 80 fps with the framegen mod and around 45 fps without it (dlss is flaky in this game though), the 2080ti in the same game in 4k gets around 100 fps with the framegen mod and 55 fps without it with texture resolution at the highest setting).

Skins don't require a model path, that's just a convenience feature to allow the skins to be associated with the model(s) in the editor. However I have no idea if an unassociated skin can be used on a func_static. I suppose there's no reason why it couldn't work, but it's not something I've ever tested and I wouldn't be surprised if it fails to do anything (either in the editor or the game).

I'm lost for some reason I can't get past the difficulty screen there is no start the mission icon? Ok it was invisible I found by blindly clicking in lower right portion of screen. I think this is because of my video settings?

@Zerg Rush like it this immediately reminds me on two other sessions : and Natalie Merchant from the Leave Your Sleep Album recorded at Saint Augustine Church : sadly there seems to be only this to vids from the recording P.S.: it´s not been your only reason to show the Bard because he looks like your Avatar ?

Your skins don't have a model specified in the skin code. How do you think it works that way? Edit: The reason this happens (I think) is that the skin name cannot start with a number. skin one_brick_teal_blue { model models/title_models/walls/wooden_frame/straight_frame/straight_frame_wall_128_x_128.ase textures/darkmod/plaster/plaster_01 textures/darkmod/stone/brick/blocks_tealblue_dark }

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.

Okay... so... I'll be honest. The verticality of the first mission blew my mind, made me really pay attention, explore. But the verticality of this mission made me frustrated. It didn't help that I kept stumbling upon things, without context. Moreover, some areas didn't have anything, but were traversable, while others had a plenty and required not a clear and direct path but some convoluted route that wasn't obvious to me. And the size of the level... It took me 4 and a half hours to search every nook and cranny, find and complete all objectives and discover the loot. But that time was split between two days, because I could only play before work, and I experienced CTD whenever I'd draw a bow inside the manor. So by the end I ran around like a headless chicken, trying to remember where I've left this NPC and where is that NPC and where the safe is... Now... some things really gave me a pause. For example, the direction of our poor LT's life XD Or the fact that we had such a horrible person working for our Target. But I really liked the story here. All the twists, the clues (that little thing in the cabinet damn), I liked using Thief's Highway... but man was I lost there. I would like to know... how was I supposed to find the Barrel? I had no real reason to actually head there aside from "I see a window open". But since I was thorough, I found the Barrel there before the readable mentioning it in the same place. Was there a hint pointing me there to begin with? (Did I miss it, like the combination to the safe the first time?) Also - the Safehouse dude was freaking me out.

Disgraceful. It seems like people will do anything for a coin these days. That’s a big reason why I made this mission just about a house with zero coins in it.

That's a great reason to play the mission again! Now the difficulty names make sense, I wondered why they were named like that