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Basically someone always asks. We're all grownups here and it's in spoiler tags so...

With as little fanfare as possible, I'd like to announce the release of the third installment of The Lieutenant series: Foreign Affairs. Huge thanks for my beta testers: @Bergante @Cambridge Spy @chakkman @Mat99 @Shadow @wesp5 For a full list of credits, please see the readme.txt that ships with the mission, or go here. More screenshots can be viewed here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBr44M Download link #1: https://github.com/FrostSalamander/lt3/releases/download/1.0/faffairs.pk4 Download link #2: https://drive.proton.me/urls/JESNV8CNKW#ljttGnbkkAOh @nbohr1more here's the 800x600 versions of the screenshots: https://drive.proton.me/urls/MFGZ3WXCAW#WXXAnYkPgGZX Stuff to be aware of: TDM 2.12 required The only difference in difficulty settings is the (optional) loot goal If you see a tile material, chances are it's a custom version changed to sound like stone. I did this in order to preserve the aesthetic of the setting without making it maddening to play. Some vines are climbable, some aren't. Just try them and see. The FM makes use of latches on doors, a new feature created by @Wellingtoncrab and myself. Read more here: https://github.com/thedarkmodcommunity/test-latch/wiki Here's a list of the secret locations. Obvious spoilers:

I hope that is not the new TDM version. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20784-render-bug-large-black-box-occluding-screen/

Thanks for the replies, particularly the reference to the embarrassingly-obvious "Music & SFX" subforum just below this one. I just like the music: I don't have any illusions about creating a fan mission. I messed with Dromed way back in the day, and I remember what a black hole of time and sanity it was.

For free ambience tracks it's as Freky said: you look around on the internet for tracks with the appropriate license to be included in your FM. Fortunately, you likely don't even need to bother doing this as a beginner as there's an entire "Music & SFX" section of the forums full of good ambient tracks for you to use if the stock tracks do not meet your fancy. You might also be interested in Orbweaver's "Dark Ambients", which come with a sndshd file already written for you.

Unlike some fan missions for the Thief games, the TDM fan mission authors take care that there is no copyrighted material in the missions.

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/

"May his iron mold the current as we were molded. May his instrument expel all obstruction as we are his instruments." - Collected Sermons of Master Plumber Roto Rooter Few would dare cross the Bridgeport Plumber's Guild. Fewer still could glimpse their secrets and live. CC0 POLYHAVEN PLUMBER PACK BETA Includes: Fully modular pipe kit with optimized shadow mesh, two skin variations and near perfect grid snapping at grid level 4 Moveable plunger prop which is fully compatible with the AI weapon system Worry free CC0 license All credit to the great polyhaven.com for the original mid poly meshes - consider supporting them on patreon. I just decimated and then rebaked the assets as well as converted the maps from pbr and made the additional model and material variations.

Megatextures were a horrible idea for obvious reasons, not sure why ID chose to learn that the hard way. The concept from what I remember is the whole map uses a single gigantic texture... instead of how we independently pick a couple of 1024 px brick materials for a few brushes and surfaces, the whole map acts as one model with one material and a single texture which probably needs to be 1 million x 1 million pixels even for a small level. This is ridiculous from a perspective of system resources with 100's of GB's of storage and huge (v)RAM requirements and hours of loading time, as well as raising the skills required for level editing since you now need mappers to also be texture artists and sculpt / paint their levels instead of just placing stuff. The only thinkable benefit is there's no repetition since every pixel on every part of the world is unique, but who notices any similarity with independent texturing if it's done right anyway? Detail textures have yet another advantage there: Since you scale the pattern independently on top of the original texture, you can make every surface appear as if it has unique pixels like megatextures. Hence why I'd advice having the details be very high-res, 4k or 8k even 16k if we can take it: Yes that's enormous, but remember we'd only have a few patterns probably no more than 15 in total, and can store them as grayscale then use a single image to modify both albedo / specular / normal (heightmap to normalmap): Map the detail in world space rather than the brush or model UV map, and the resulting pattern on every surface in the world will always be unique since the original and detail textures will be out of sync.

I was looking into this a bit more and conclude that the translation system in itself is actually an universal external data system. So instead of xdata, you could use a #str_someword and then reference to that in the /strings/fm/english.lang file. Well I guess it's probably not really news for some of us. Edit: This actually works fine: File english.lang for Thief's Den "#str_Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." "Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." Then in the objective editor you add #str_ before every objective text. This way it's easier and you can still see which is which.

This might be frowned onto by tdm mappers/veterans, but I find it strange that it's considered ok to use text inside entities, which can then be found inside map files. That in general seems badly organised. Like for example with text decals: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Text_Decals_for_Signs_etc.#The_Decal Personally I think xdata could/should be used for all instances of text (except maybe darkmod.txt and subtitles), including readme files and GUI files. Or at least some kind of external text file. Could be something else, but the xdata format seems good and supported. So the sign text prefab could have a default xdata_contents spawnarg instead of gui_parm1 . Edit: Objective description text is also inside an entity inside the map file, but it could just as well be a reference to an xdata file. I posted about this before, here:

I don't like pumpkins, but fortunately we were not required to eat any. I ate the mushrooms though! It sounded like the pub goers were having a great time, stomping to the beat of the music - a cool and fitting soundtrack. +1 for the Canadian reference

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.

Another failure by @kingsal. Firstly the mission is way too short. And like his other missions, the quality is supreme, keeps me playing and neglecting real life duties. Never feeling the frustration of getting stuck, never resolving to walkthrough material. Is it a sign of excellent design or rather a lack of challenge? Also extreme attention to detail, engaging maps from room to a room, gorgeous visually. I understand this is just a free-time effort for someone who could instead make money out of his skills but, I'm sure you could do better.

There's been talk over the years on how we could improve texture quality, often to no avail as it requires new high-resolution replacements that need to be created and will look different and add a strain on system resources. The sharpness post-process filter was supposed to improve that, but even with it you see ugly blurry pixels on any nearby surface. Yet there is a way, a highly efficient technique used by some engines in the 90's notably the first Unreal engine, and as it did wonders then it can still do so today: Detail textures. Base concept: You have a grayscale pattern for various surfaces, such as metal scratches or the waves of polished wood or the stucco of a rough rock, usually only a few highly generic patterns are needed. Each pattern is overlayed on top of corresponding textures several times, every iteration at a smaller... as with model LOD smaller iterations fade with camera distance as to not waste resources, the closer you get the more detail you see. This does wonders in making any texture look much sharper without changing the resolution of the original image, and because the final mixture is unique you don't perceive any repetitiveness! Here's a good resource from UE5 which seems to support them to this day: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/adding-detail-textures-to-unreal-engine-materials Who else agrees this is something we can use and would greatly improve graphical fidelity? No one's ever going to replace every texture with a higher resolution version in vanilla TDM; Without this technique we'll always be stuck with early 2000's graphics, with it we have a magic way of making it look close to AAA games today! Imagine being able to see all those fine scratches on a guard's helmet as light shines on it, the thousands of little holes on a brick, the waves of wood as you lean into a table... all without even losing much performance nor a considerable increase in the size of game data. It's like the best deal one could hope for! The idTech 4 material system should already have what we need, namely the ability to mix any textures at independent sizes; Unlike the old days when only a diffuse texture was used, the pattern would now need to be applied to both albedo / specular / normal maps, to my knowledge there are shader keywords to combine each. Needless to say it would require editing every single material to specify its detail texture with a base scale and rotation: It would be painful but doable with a text injection script... I made a bash script to add cubemap reflections once, if it were worth it I could try adapting it to inject the base notation for details. A few changes will be needed of course: Details must be controlled by a main menu setting activating this system and specifying the level of detail, materials properties can't be controlled by cvars. Ultimately we may need to overlay them in realtime, rather than permanently modifying every material at load time which may have a bigger performance impact; We want each iteration to fade with distance and only appear a certain length from the camera, the effect will cause per-pixel lighting to have to render more detail per light - surface interaction so we'll need to control the pixel density.

Is it possble to make skins for brushes/patches by conferting them to func_static? Models are func_static when you add them in DR, but in the skin file you reference them with the model name instead of the entity name. When you convert a brush/patch though, it converts it uses a model with the same name as the entity name, so in this case func_static_1 for example. Would it be enough to use that in the skin file? Allthough the wiki article states it's important to add an extension.

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.

I'm honestly not sure, it's a race condition maybe? I found and fixed 2 different segfaults (PR is here), one relating to threading and the other one relating to a variable being referenced after it was cleared out. This stops the skin editor from crashing, but it seems there are still a lot of usability issues. I'm not sure if they are all Linux only, but here's what I found: The rename operation happens every time you type a character, which is a little laggy. It would be better to rename it when you are done typing and the field loses focus Typing new characters while renaming works as expected, but deleting characters causes the box to highlight so you have to reset the cursor before deleting another one. On the Material Replacements tab, click to edit is not working for me. I spent a lot of time on this, I can get a box to show up if I replace the editbox+button with a simple edit box. I think it's related to the compound control not being able to have focus. The skin name is showing up on top of the Close button This will require more wxWidget-fu than I have time to do right now.

A couple of things you can try (yes .ase files should work): I'm no expert with models, but do you have a field in the .ase file that looks something like this: *MATERIAL_NAME "textures\darkmod\plaster\plaster01" ? If the material name there isn't exactly as you specify in the skin it won't get replaced Check the console log in DarkRadiant to see if you have any errors when loading the skin. It's there in the 'console' tab.

I've seen fun workarounds like that in other game modding as well. Years ago, maybe even a decade, some fella who was making a mod for Mount & Blade over at the Taleworlds forums revealed that he put invisible human NPCs on the backs of regular horse NPCs, then put the horse NPCs inside a horse corral he built for one of his mod's locations/scenes and then did some minor scripting, so the horses with invisible riders would wander around the corral. The end result was that it looked they're doing this of their own will, rather than an NPC rider being scripted to ride around the corral slowly. Necessity is the mother of invention. I don't know about the newest Mount & Blade game, but the first generation ones (2008-2022) apparently had some sort of hardcoded issue back in the earlier years, where if you left a horse NPC without a rider in its saddle, the horses would just stand around and wait and you couldn't get them to move around. Placing an invisible rider in their saddles suddenly made it viable again, at least for background scenes, of riderless horses wandering around, for added atmosphere. First generation M&B presumed you'd mostly be seeing horses in movement with riders, and the only horses-wandering-loosely animations and scripting were done for situations when the rider was knocked off their horse or dismounted in the middle of a battle. Hence the really odd workarounds. So, an invisible NPC trick might not be out of the question in TDM, even though you could probably still bump into it, despite its invisibility.

I tried the script on the core assets, and find an interesting case called textures/darkmod/metal/flat/tiling_1d/gen_smooth_gold01 This material has time-dependent envmap color: { blend add maskalpha cubeMap env/gen1 red sintable[time*0.1] green sintable[time*0.1] blue sintable[time*0.1] texgen reflect } I wonder whether it was intentional or not. Here is how it looks: I suppose it would be worthwhile to manually review the modified materials, because in some cases the color adjustment was actually meaningful...

DarkRadiant 3.9.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Add "Show definition" button for the "inherit" spawnarg Improvement: Preserve patch tesselation fixed subdivisions when creating caps Improvement: Add Filters for Location Entities and Player Start Improvement: Support saving entity key/value pairs containing double quotes Improvement: Allow a way to easily see all properties of attached entities Fixed: "Show definition" doesn't work for inherited properties Fixed: Incorrect mouse movement in 3D / 2D views on Plasma Wayland Fixed: Objective Description flumoxed by double-quotes Fixed: Spinboxes in Background Image panel don't work correctly Fixed: Skins defined on modelDefs are ignored Fixed: Crash on activating lighting mode in the Model Chooser Fixed: Can't undo deletion of atdm_conversation_info entity via conversation editor Fixed: 2D views revert to original ortho layout each time running DR. Fixed: WX assertion failure when docking windows on top of the Properties panel on Linux Fixed: Empty rotation when cloning an entity using editor_rotatable and an angle key Fixed: Three-way merge produces duplicate primitives when a func_static is moved Fixed: Renderer crash during three-way map merge Internal: Replace libxml2 with pugixml Internal: Update wxWidgets to 3.2.4 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.9.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep creating Fan Missions! Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Keep on mapping!

I've decided to make a list of my posts in this thread thus far. Only the posts where I shared images of real world locations for inspiration (mostly reference images of various historical architecture). 19th century octagon houses as inspiration for more fancy houses of industralists (12 May 2015) Old electric powerplant building in Poprad, Slovakia - red brick Gothic Revival stylistics (17 July 2015) - needs image fixin' Plas Mawr in Conwy, Wales - well-preserved medieval and early modern Welsh townhouse, with interior museum (29 July 2015) Castell Coch in Wales - reconstructed medieval castle, with minor 19th century industrial details (13 August 2015) + addendum Illustrations and concept art for Bree from various game projects (3 September 2015) Run-down Neo-classical manor house in a rural area (15 December 2015) - dated image links, I need to fix 'em Smaller but interesting manor houses and fortified manor houses in Slovakia (30 August 2016) Manor houses and fortified manor houses in Slovakia (13 March 2017) Environmental storytelling inspired by "reading" real world ruins (3 May 2021) Stokesay Castle rural fortified manor house, one of the few of its kind in England (26 March 2024) Houses, inns and market halls of medieval and early modern England (26 March 2024) Aberconwy House in Conwy, Wales - well-preserved 14th century Welsh medieval merchant townhouse (27 March 2024)