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Intro to Air Pocket’s Readables Air Pocket has just two readables, with shared and duplicated pages; there are really only two unique pages. One is titled “Appointment to Service”, and represents printed, rather draconian boilerplate given by the ship captain to every hired seaman. The other, titled “Further instructions”, is handwritten and specific to our hero and his lady. This appears as a readable by itself, but is also collated (as page 2) in a bundle and nailed up with two copies (pages 1 and 3) of the “Appointment to Service”, for Thief and Emily as new hires. These immobile readables appear at the outset of the FM, which makes iterative localization testing easier. They merely set the scene and have no game hints, so no worries about spoilers here. Because these are not mobile readables, there is no need for inventory names with associated #str_ . (If they were mobile, the translations of the titles could serve as inventory names.) In this post, I’ll discuss the AI translation, saving the largely (but not entirely) post-translation text-expansion issues for the next post. Prompt Engineering for Readables When feeding to AI, the two pages can reasonably share a prompt, but otherwise be treated independently; there is no compelling reason to prompt them as story flow. I am skipping asking ChatGPT to do the back-translation, because I don’t trust it to not cheat. Just put a tag at the end of each line, “//uv”, for unverified. Perhaps I’ll ask another AI to back-translate later. A draft reusable template follows. It describes the overall translation task, the desired tone, and input and output formats. Text specific to readables is shown within the next section in bold. Text that is specific to this FM, to clarify the context and the meaning of particular words, is in italics. Input to ChatGPT You are an expert translator between English and other European languages, including Russian. You wish to translate a list of pages from English to these other languages. In the list, each page is shown by two consecutive lines: the title text of a page followed by the body text. Each line of the list begins with a tab, then a word beginning with #str_ within double quotes, then another tab, then a phrase within double quotes. When you translate a line, in the output keep the tabs and the #str_ word unchanged, and only change the phrase to the other target language in UTF-8, keeping it in double quotes. Avoid generating “Unicode combining characters”. Try to keep the character count (including spaces and punctuation) in each translated phrase not too much longer than the original English, while preserving the formal meaning. Specifically, for title text, try to keep character count under 50% longer, and use a title style of word casing. For body text, try to keep the character count under 30% longer. Before, between, or after sentences, one or more “\n” may appear, indicating a line break; retain these in the translation. Avoid modern slang. Old-fashioned and historic nautical wording is fine. At the end of each line, add another tab followed by the fixed text "//uv", indicating unverified. There are two pages. They relate to a fictional voyage, several centuries ago, of a small sailing merchant ship Esmeralda. The first page is a printed boilerplate notice, given by Esmeralda’s Captain Riggs to each seaman hired for a voyage. It is effectively a contract, written with lots of words in the body capitalized to make it seem more official and legal. Parts of the text are designed to be somewhat threatening, as if this hiring was aboard a big government naval vessel, not just a merchant ship. The second page is an informal handwritten note, also by Captain Riggs, with more specific instructions to two hired crew members. On all pages, leave “Riggs” and “Esmerelda” unchanged during translation. Following the input list of pages, append output lists in these target languages: 1. German 2. French 3. Polish 4. Italian 5. Spanish 6. Portuguese 7. Russian 8. Czech 9. Hungarian 10. Dutch 11. Slovak 12. Danish 13. Swedish 14. Romanian 15. Turkish 16. Catalan. List of pages: "#str_fm_airpocket_xd_sheet_appointment_to_service_pg1__title" "Appointment to Service\n" "#str_fm_airpocket_xd_sheet_appointment_to_service_pg1_body" "\n\nHEAR YE ALL, that the Bearer is found Fit to Serve, and appointed to the Rank of Ordinary Seaman, aboard the Merchant Ship Esmerelda, by Authority of the Shipmaster, Captain Riggs.\n\nThe Appointee serves Under the Direction and at the Pleasure of the Captain and Officers. By the Law of the Sea known by all, while Aboard, Violations of Duty will be Judged & Punished by the Captain and Those carrying out his Orders. Thievery, Mutiny, Assault, and Other Gross Breeches of Order will be met by Flogging or Death. At Successful Voyage End, the Appointee upon Discharge will receive the Agreed Wage recorded in the Ship’s Log, less any Deductions.\n" "#str_fm_airpocket_xd_sheet_appointment_to_service_pg2__title" "Further Instructions\n" "#str_fm_airpocket_xd_sheet_appointment_to_service_pg2_body" "\n\n\n\nAs agreed, the 2 new crewmates will bunk in the galley, and share the sea trunk nearest the door in the mess.\n\nCaptain Riggs\n" Output ChatGPT broke up the results into frames by language again, but I just noticed that, beyond the end of the output, there is an overall “copy” button. So I don’t really have to copy each language individually. But still in either case, I’m post-copy editing to put separating headers in the proper form, e.g. [German]. The first time I did this, in late evening, it did the whole gulp very fast. The second time, with a more-complete prompt (shown above), at noon time, the system was evidently being hammered (or maybe just a policy slowdown). It typed out slowly and paused several time, asking me to hit a Continue Generating button. Frames where those pauses occurred got messed up in the overall copied output, so I had to recopy those individual frames, which were OK. Also, ChatGPT applied a different text color highlighting this time. Doesn’t matter. At first glance (and without back-translation verification yet), results looked pretty plausible. Interesting that where the text mentions "Captain Riggs", for most languages the "Captain" was left in English. Next, I’m going to add the new preliminary readables translations to all.lang and generate the *.lang, for the purpose of estimating and testing text scaling.

I don't have a bugtracker account, so no I don't believe there is any tracking for this. I'd be willing to do the actual write-ups, but I'd need to be inducted as a bugtracker person or have someone paste them in for me. I think I'd make three separate tickets at this point? 1. flashbombed state increases the blackjacking radius (the original post) 2. flashbombed state plays its animations properly (wellingtoncrab's june 9th reply here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22738-proposal-flashbombed-ais-become-blackjackable/#findComment-502037 ) 3. flashbombs deal damage to team 9 enemies (undead, not mentioned here but another glaring issue that makes them less useful than their original TG/T2 incarnations)

Perhaps there is no reason. Or perhaps the ROQ playback works in pretty weird way (and FFmpeg videos try to repeat them as perfectly as possible). And the people who made the original briefing video had some issue which disappeared with "loop" keyword. Recall the in the original system, duration of the video was specified manually in GUI file. If it was a bit longer, then the video might... play from the beginning? Don't know. Anyway, there is no reason to set "loop" in the modern videos.

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.

Alright settle down, I don't pick fights for no reason generally.

I don't know if I'd call it a necessity given places like GOG exist. I might tolerate some DRM so long as it's crackable or there's a plan in place to remove it at some point. I read somewhere that Denuvo has moved to a subscription model which has motivated publishers to remove it after a while once its value has diminished beyond a certain amount. I think this is the reason why games sometimes release an update that removes Denuvo after a while - most of the bulk purchases would have been made by that point so there's no value in continuing payments for it. Unfortunately it's taken a lifetime for me to accept that I have very little influence in most matters and ultimately the only decisions I can make are those for myself. If I wish to boycott a company or product or anyone that is doing something I disagree with, that is a personal decision and I cannot expect others to do the same. Even if it means your hobby or interest ends up going to shit because of the indifference of others, it sucks but all you can either do is navigate the shit or do something else. We must follow our own value systems, even when there's an incredible amount of money invested in an industry that is continually pressuring us to not do so (you MUST play this game, you MUST buy this console, you're missing out! FOMO, etc).

I do usually have my ambient a bit darker than usual. I find the 'standard' is too bright and, to borrow a term frequently used here, 'immersion breaking'. There is no reason increasing the gamma shouldn't help though. But... feedback acknowledged. @chakkman if you're still stuck:

Saw the new mission of the Lieutenant series and decided to replay the whole thing, because for some reason forgot to played Lieutenant 2. Want to congratulate you with the release. I'll post my opinion in a week I think.

This is one of the biggest misunderstandings, I think. Such games that choose spacetime-warping DRM or online services they wish to neglect on a whim, can still exist - they simply must provide some 'truth in advertising' by clearly informing customers of a minimum support window. If a product only to support for 6 months, they certainly can, but not sure if customers will be as motivated to join in that experiment, that's all. This whole movement is to stop treating players like labrats and preserve ALL games for ANY reason. It is NOT about stopping any development, definitely not legally, whatsoever. Go ahead and still produce the cigarettes, just make them honest about it.

Two other little issues: here (1920, -934, 60) I picked up the newsrunner 4 (already had one in inventory) and then dropped it again. Instead of the newsrunner that image was dropped?! The second issue was that I somehow managed to permanently get "needs junkroom key" written on the screen, not sure how.. maybe I saved while it was displayed when frobbing that door? Might even be a non-mission-specific TDM bug, IDK ---- Having finished this mission (on expert): Holy shit, this was insane! Fun and challenging mission and the amount of enemies sometimes reminded me more of Serious Sam than Thief :-D (The amount of enemies might be the main reason why this FM requires more beefy hardware) TBH I tend to just blackjack every enemy to explore maps in peace, which of course can make them a bit easy (even on expert), unless there are superficial restrictions like "don't blackjack (more than N enemies)". I'm usually too impatient for playing as ghost Anyway, this mission was even challenging when blackjacking, which I enjoyed, but I can imagine that it's pretty frustrating for people who insist on ghosting.. OTOH there's no shortage of water arrows, so maybe ghosting is more doable than I assume (as long as the ghost doesn't insist on not extinguishing any lights). This certainly is no criticism from me, just a possible explanation why some people found it too frustrating The story is pretty great and I liked those portals I'm looking forward to Thomas' next adventure! By the way, regarding As others wrote, it is definitely not unplayable and shouldn't be removed. You could fix a few issues, like the locking of those desk drawers, and maybe reduce light in some places (especially that room that Helot is often in at first is pretty overbright), but I don't think it needs a rewrite. It might not be perfect, but who cares. As someone who has played a lot of FMs, this certainly is one of the better ones, especially impressive for a first mission! (Though I enjoy most FMs, even if they're a lot more amateurish than this one). I don't think you should spend more than one or two days with fixes/tweaks on this mission (if at all), as @datiswous wrote, it would be better to start a new mission with the experience gained from this one

Hi there I've been playing the dark mod for a while and have been taking notes on a few things that I feel if changed, would make for a slightly better and more enjoyable experience. 1 - Moving sideways when climbing ladders, pipes, nets, vines, etc, is ridiculously slow. Garret does it way faster in Thief 1 and 2... hell, even I can move sideways faster while climbing ladders and I'm no thief! Speeding it up a bit would make for more satisfying maneuvering, and also more fitting given that Corbin is an agile and experienced thief. 2 - There is no falling to your death sound. I was playing The Painter's Wife a while ago, and I fell to my death multiple times, and it always felt so weightless and anticlimactic doing so. In Thief 1 and 2 you could hear your bones being crushed whenever that happened. Having a sound cue like that would make me very very happy, or at least less frustrated from dying, which I do, a lot, because I suck. 3 - On the topic of dying, it would also be nice to add an option to enable a loose camera with physics instead of the Doom 3's standard tilted perspective and pointing 80º or so degrees upwards whenever you die. It looks so jarring to me that I feel even a standard camera animation pointing downwards like in Thief 1 and 2 would look better and more fitting than that abrupt cut. 4 - This is a small nitpick, but the water footsteps sound a bit off. Everything else in the sound department is generally very good, but the water footsteps sound as if someone dipped their fingers on a bathtub and is moving them around. It lacks impact. Thief 1 and 2 sounded better IMHO. 5 (bug) - And lastly, there is a bug that I want to report. For some reason you can't see your compass underwater. You can scroll through and view every item in your inventory (you can even read underwater!), except the compass that for some reason completely disappears. I noticed this when trying to navigate through a maze of underwater tunnels in a FM a while ago. That's all folks.

It's possible that cvar isn't archived or something like that. Whatever the reason, you can probably get around this by adding that cvar to your autoexec.cfg in your darkmod folder.

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

If you're satisfied with what you have and it's not broken, there's no reason to upgrade, and that was true even in better times. Unless you can make an argument based on operating cost (electricity). RTX 6000 will definitely use a new node, so it will look much better. I think UDNA could be a good jumping in point on the AMD side since that will mark a huge shift in their driver strategy.

The first two buildings definitely have marble flooring. Probably the reason why the K.O.'s fail. Because, "Yo, I hear you, so you can't knock me out.". As if that made any sense.

Hi Jack a big thanks for this hijack into this excellent Mission ! as allways your mission-design is outstanding ; excellent in graphics and exiting/challenging in playing. at first sight one may think it´s a tunnel-Mission - but it´s not . there are sideways , byways or for a good reason Places that look like reachable but only to tell one : you may come here later don´t know how to praise more but i have some questions , some comments and some critics here they are : all in all you get a 5(-) / out of 5 ( the - only for my problems by trying to (Sup.-) ghost this fantastic Mission

Yeah they are stock. I was aware this one was pretty loud, and tried to make a custom version of the shader and reduce the volume on it using the volume keyword, but it didn't actually do anything, and I never could figure out why. Maybe something to do with the location system? The other thing I could have done was reduce the volume on the location entities themselves, which does work. But by this point I had added that ambient to loads of locations already and didn't want to go and update them all (lazy, I know). Also, the wiki seemed to advise against doing this for some reason, so I just decided to rely on the ambient volume slider in the menu. If I do an update, I will just update the location entities, unless someone knows why updating the sound shader doesn't seem to do anything.

The official releases of System Shock 1 & 2 and Thief 1 & 2 also include fan patches in them. Well typically these games have a clause buried in the license that they own modifications too, so that's gonna be the reason why, and they're going to quietly presume they own the whole thing without digging into it, which might not be really kosher, but nobody disputes it -- except I recall the maker of the SS2 patch Kolya was a little miffed that his patch was put into the commercial release, or rather that they restricted it's use outside of the product while integrating it, since he wanted to keep it freely available & not to make a company money, although he granted that they had the legal right to do it. TDM is a little special just because it's a non-commercial game, idTech4 was open sourced, or anyway GPL'd, and about the only thing we restrict is that assets are under a CC license. The disputes we sometimes get aren't really about the license so much as tact & courtesy, e.g., to not recycle or change someone else's map as one's own, or at least you should get their consent first.

Practically speaking, to get on to Steam you also need to formalize the team as a legal entity, which brings up stuff like tax filings, a board of directors and executives, reporting requirements, etc., that I think nobody was keen to take on or hand over to others to take on. To begin with, it'd change the whole character of the team & the project a lot, I think. I forgot the issues with GOG and Itch now. I think everybody admitted it sounds good in principle at least. It's just herding cats when you get into the details, and half the cats are missing. That's before you even get to the actual mess with all the licenses. --- I noticed in the credits of Blendo Game's Skin Deep, when I played it recently, that there's a credit for the TDM Engine, from which he evidently lifted some things for his game. Brendon has long been making his games with Doom engines, so there's a reason he did that. I'd say he's also a friend of the community. He's visited the forum & is known for his games & thinking on immersive sims. But the point is that there's an example of someone branching off the TDM engine for a commercial project (that's also on Steam BTW). So if you have questions about it, that's someone you can contact to ask about it. I'm sure it matters that probably none of the assets carried over, though, only the game engine, or parts of it.

good value 1440p card can even dip into 4k territory with its 16gb vram. but if you can then go for the 9060 xt instead. reason ? it is a newer and faster card and the 7000 series does not support FSR4. should also be in the same price range.

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.

This seems like a futile process to me. We all love TheDarkMod and tremendous work has been done on the engine, but I suspect that when developing a new project, especially commercial, almost everyone would rather go for a more modern engine because the reality is that stealth games are a relatively small niche and you need everything you can get to make people notice and buy your thing. TDM with its historical limits on polycounts (unless switching to lightmaps removed that?) and other features that we're used to and have no problem with but that are not exactly state of the art in my opinion just isn't "it", and it's only going to be less and less "it" over time, despite being a brilliant game on its own. And making the game fully libre just so it can be included in certain distributions' free repos, while stripping out almost everything that makes TDM what it is, the community content, doesn't make sense to me either. If anything that could hurt its reputation because people who tried that wouldn't experience the actual game. I only skimmed parts of the thread, have I missed a good reason to do this? Also, another big issue that I think wasn't spelled out explicitly enough: I too thought that it would be awesome to have TDM on Steam. After looking into it, being educated by others and doing some searching I found out that TDM very likely contains a nontrivial amount of old content that may be seemingly re-licensed as CC-BY-NC, but legally cannot be, as its original license does not allow it. I'm talking specifically about old textures.com content - it uses its own asset license that explicitly disallows being released as CC (because CC allows redistribution anywhere and textures.com license explicitly prohibits that). Yet some of those assets are a part of TDM, and it's likely that nobody knows for sure which ones and how many there are. Textures.com was at one point even recommended as a source to create assets on the wiki. So you may get permission from some old mission author who doesn't even remember that he did this, but his content can still be non-free and in fact infringing on its original license. Realistically nobody cares because there's no damage to textures.com being done (the textures are not being redistributed anywhere, they're "just" being incorrectly rebranded with a license that would allow it), but it makes the whole libre thing even more difficult.

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/