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This is something I'm working on currently. I'm having isues with stencil shadows (beta212-03, maps work correctly in this case). The left edge does not cast a shadow, while the right does. Edit: The problem went away after further work on the map. But I guess I need to look closely for issues like this. They are easy to miss.

A new screenshot from Shadows of Northdale Act 3

I am going to sort-of reveal that this is loosely like the nature of my upcoming mission. I noted it here when JackFarmer asked about things that are coming along in this post: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/37993-jackfarmer/&status=3943&type=status It too is a builder church. The player is requested by a hopefully famous character in another mission to handle some business that is affecting the congregation. I am looking to invoke some info and history laid down in other missions as a hook story.

I recently switched from a 27" FHD screen to a 34" 1440p 21:9, and now I see this : https://i.postimg.cc/t4Xb2gV0/ws5-2021-04-07-20-37-05.jpg

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

I created the page: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Lightgem In the source I placed the following text: <!-- Page text made by forum user Fiver: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22327-how-can-i-create-an-account-on-the-tdm-wiki/&do=findComment&comment=491145 --> Personally I think the page isn't really necessary because the info is already present under HUD.

What I found is that changing the color of the text by using the escape character [^] is a feature of the Doom 3 engine and not something created for the subs in TDM. What is happening in your "extremely bolted" example is that when using a color other than the default we are also rendering all eight "shadows" in that other color, hence the bold appearance. The above solution doesn't solve a thing and I cannot think of anything other than having the source code deliver a copy of the subtitles stripped from color escape characters. In any case, imagine for a second you are watching a TV series and each episode comes with subs in different colors...

Our friend Skacky ( and his team "Feuillade Industries" ) has released a full sized Thief expansion \ campaign "The Black Parade": https://www.moddb.com/mods/thief-the-black-parade t is finally here! After 7-ish years of development, The Black Parade is finally released. So, what awaits you in this campaign? - 10 huge, open-ended and meticulously crafted missions with varied themes packed with content. - A brand new protagonist thrown into a dark, intricately woven story of crime and conspiracies. - 4 new tools happily supplied by the undermarket, at a price. - Many tweaks to the AI to make the game a bit more challenging but still fair. - A brand new "banter" system where AIs greet each other during their rounds and nightly life. - 28 voiced characters totaling roughly 1,800 new lines of dialogue. - 30 minutes of gorgeous hand-drawn briefings and cutscenes. - Brand new AI motions making the denizens of The City look more alive. - Full English subtitles. In The Black Parade you play the character of Hume, a hardened criminal who was sent into exile as a punishment for his crimes. The year is 833, you are now back in The City, a sprawling metropolis of soot-caked brick, greasy fumes and noisy machinery, with many a sinister conspiracy whispered behind closed doors. Lost and without a penny to your name, you are back to your life of thievery and must find your old associate Dahlquist. Shadows and silence are your allies. Light is your enemy. Stealth and cunning are your tools. And the riches of others are yours for the taking. The Black Parade aims at being a love letter to Thief: The Dark Project, and we hope we succeeded! It is recommended to have played through Thief: The Dark Project and/or Thief 2: The Metal Age at least once beforehand, since these missions are overall tougher than the base game. The Black Parade also comes with a few tweaks to the classic Thief gameplay formula: - Hume is not a Keeper and thus never received Garrett’s training: AIs will now notice you if they bump into you or vice versa, sometimes even in a perfect shadow. Be careful! - Hume can move banners aside instead of having to slash them. - Hume has additional footstep sounds for chains and pipes; these are metal sounds that aren’t as noisy as regular metal (about as noisy as stone/wood). - Water arrows can now be used to expand moss patches. - Servants will re-light extinguished torches on higher difficulty levels. - Servants may clean moss on the floor if they notice it on higher difficulty levels. - Zombies now smash wooden doors open instead of simply opening them. - Electric lanterns carried by guards can be turned off. - A few guards in the campaign are outfitted with heavy armor and helms so they cannot be knocked out using the Blackjack. - Hume can pick up small creature corpses such as spiders or sweels. DOWNLOAD (912 MB) MIRROR 1 MIRROR 2 Here is a very handy guide by nicked on how to set up Thief Gold for Fan Missions. !!!IMPORTANT NOTES!!! The Black Parade requires NewDark 1.26 or above! Make sure you use the latest version of TFix/TFix Lite before playing! The Black Parade should be launched with FMSel, NewDarkLoader or AngelLoader. It is not recommended to launch this campaign with DarkLoader or GarrettLoader. Note that mods such as Thief Gold HD Mod, NecroAge or Enhancement Pack are not compatible with this campaign. Remember that this is a campaign for THIEF GOLD, not Thief 2! Known issues: - Due to the complexity of the missions, there can be cases where some NPCs might get stuck walking against walls. There is unfortunately not much that can be done about this. Happy 25th anniversary to Thief: The Dark Project, and have fun taffers!

Your latest design is OK, but doesn't touch on several aspects that I addressed in my design: ring lower edge no longer crushing the top of 1st line text excess backing field below text 2nd line trimmed, to allow space for (1) backing field behind ring, as I believe requested by snatcher & datiswous I could further discuss this and the narrowing issue, where views differ, but I'm more than OK to "switch from background boxes to outline around text", as you suggest. There is still leaves improvements to ring vertical spacing - a la (1) - and not have the ring interior be transparent (probably just opaque) - similar in spirit to (3). And of course, actually implementing it in the beta. snatcher found 8-fold to be visually best. The minor artifacting with the scaled Stone font (e.g, a wisp to the left of a capital T) will become more prominent with drop shadows. But that could be addressed in a font update to include native Stone 12pt in 2.13

The "Classic Blackjack" will not work in the following missions: A House of Locked Secrets By Any Other Name Hazard Pay Iris Noble Affairs Snowed Inn Shadows of Northdale ACT I Shadows of Northdale ACT 2 Volta 1: The Stone Volta 2: Cauldron The mod won't break any of these missions, the "Classic Blackjack" will simply not be available. When mission creators include base files in their missions there's no elegant way to override this decission. The developers should seriously give us players control in this area.

I dunno, it seems to me that if you're not going to show the ring widget (because, say, it's the narrator talking, so second parameter SUBTITLE_SPATIALIZED is false), you shouldn't show the tab it sits on either. About the red dot location. I understand what you are saying about perspective earlier, but that might have been more apt when the ring had a thicker lower edge. As it is, I tested by first facing the sound source, then turning 180 degrees. I expect the red dot to be about the same distance from the ring perimeter... that's why I tweaked by 0.5 px Hmm, maybe we should at least try to get subtitle font color among the possible CVars. That is probably the least controversial. I see the choice as either to be fully flexible (triplet for RGB) or, easier for the user, just a boolean (white vs yellow). Either would work for me. You guys? BTW, it is possible to markup particular words in the subtitle with a primary color, for emphasis. @datiswous, you asked about this a while ago. Did you actually apply it to any game FM? The 2 obvious colors for emphasis are red and yellow. A yellow emphasis would be lost if all the text was yellow. Another potential problem: if the fake drop shadows were an option, then the markup would also override the black shadow with color, leading to the emphasized word becoming an unreadable blob. (This could be resolved by the engine providing a second version of the text string, stripped of markup.) Otherwise, maybe a policy for subtitlers: "no markup on subtitles"

IMPORTANT It is highly recommended that you play with shadow maps turned on to get full use of the new volumetric lights in 2.10. Go into Settings -> Video -> Advanced -> "Shadows Implementation" set to "Maps". Additionally it is recommended that you play with EFX and HRTF turned on. Go into Settings -> Audio -> Turn "OpenAL EFX" & "OpenAL HRTF" set both to "On". Author note Noble Affairs features a brand new female protagonist named Clara who comes with a new female voice set. Originally this mission was meant for the connection contest which is why you will notice a lot of references to Kingsal's Volta universe. Due to time constraints this mission was not entered into the contest and instead I decided to release this as a standalone mission. This mission takes place after the events of Volta 1: The Stone but before the events of Shadows of Northdale Act 1. This mission is dedicated to Grayman, may he rest in peace! - Goldwell. A big thank you first up to Epifire for his very helpful advice and putting in some really hard effort and creating some amazing custom models! Please check out his art station page: https://www.artstation.com/epifire I wanted to thank Amadeus, Dragofer, Epifire, Kingsal & Skacky for helping out by providing custom models, readable/text improvements and also general mapping advice. You guys have been incredibly helpful, thank you! I also want to thank my A-Star beta team who helped to squash many bugs: Amadeus, Epifire, Kingsal, Moonbo, Nbohr1more, Random_Taffer & Skacky. And I wanted to thank the fantastic vocal cast: Clara - Joy Hayward Shop keeper - Andrew Bartmess Produce Merchant - Epifire Citywatch guard - Random_Taffer I wanted to thank someone who often doesn't get enough love and that's Greebo who works very hard to create the tools that myself and all other mappers use. Dark Radiant is a fantastic application which is always finding new ways to innovate and improve the mapping experience. Without the work you put in Greebo there would be a lot less missions made, so thank you! Thank you to the Cryo Chamber label for granting permission to use their music throughout the mission. Please check them out at: https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com Thank you to Michael Ghelfi for his audio ambient tracks. You can find more of his work at: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelGhelfi And if you wish to support him he also has a patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/MichaelGhelfi And finally thank you to you, the player for playing my missions and providing all the wonderful support and feedback over the years! DOWNLOAD HERE (Requires 2.10) Version 1.2 File Size: 465mb

Haven't tried 2.12 yet but I want to ask,any work done on ambient occlusion? I have found it to improve the looks of many missions but it didn't work well always. For example when changing your view some of the fixed shadows in the corners vanish. edit: Ok I tried the 2.12 latest version and I liked the leaning more than the previous versions also deactivating the mantle roll feels like an improvement for me. Movement is closer to the first two originals of the series. Also is there a way to keep settings unchanged when installing a new version? Everything resets even if i tick the box to keep the original file up on installation.

I did play a little with the last two betas (stencil shadows) and did not notice any lighting/shadow issues. I did not look that closely, though.

I wonder if you could test 9x versus 4x-diagonals and 4x-non-diagonals? Maybe the extra 5 renders don't add much. There probably is some minor performance effect. I think you're still showing the widget too high, so it seems to be associated with the wrong subtitle. I prefer @stgatilov's original vertical positioning, even though it pushes the widget's lower edge against the top of the caption lettering. I wasn't sure what you where trying to point out as a problem... was it the word wrap? Yeah, the automatic word wrap with centered text can look ugly at times. An FM author can choose to insert a manual line break in that case. I do that routinely all the time for barks. Since padding is part of the background box, sure. It occurs to me now that maybe, to improve the appearance of text centering, the background box should also have equal-size padding on the left. That is, the location and size of the inner box is unchanged, but the outer box is wider and its origin shifted left, so the inner box is centered horizontally within. The padding can certainly be made smaller. I imagine the seed value of 17px was for a worse-case character like "W", that was then rounded up to 20. We could shrink it by: - choosing the seed character as the widest that might actually be at the end of a line followed by space to cause word wrap. Probably "w" or "A". - not rounding up - scaling by the compression aspect ratio I'll try to come up with a new number. No problem here with having the background by default. But recognize there's a compromise between world visibility and text readability. Can't we make it possible to turn the background off for people who hate it so much that they avoid using subtitles because of it? "...visible in all circumstances" may be too high a bar. The simple implementation would be a single CVar that toggles the background on/off and possibly, conversely toggles fake drop shadows off/on.

I will take a look this coming week. In my heart of hearts, I'd rather make "background or not" a user choice. The simple version of that wouldn't be too hard: just a CVar settng the backing field visibility. The more sophisticated version, where no-background implies fake-drop-shadows, requires more thought to make it live with the backing field code.

In the first post of the other topic Geep proposed: Then Stgatilov's answer: But I think applying subtitles in different languages shouldn't be too hard I would think, but I don't know how the current translation system works. The engine should apply the correct subtitles based on the applied language setting, this doesn't need a whole new language system I think. Not sure who's going to write those subtitles though. I can only do Dutch and English and nobody needs Dutch I think. I suggest further discussion of this to take place in topic https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21741-subtitles-possibilities-beyond-211/

So I was interested in how the soft shadows work in TDM and came across this video. At around 40 minutes in he starts discussing the stair stepping in the soft shadows and supplies a fix. What he does is use bi-linear interpolation on each PCF sample, instead of nearest neighbor. He says it is a hack but the result looks great. I have a AMD RX 580 and using higher settings of soft shadows brings the GPU to its knees. Using soft shadows is a huge performance hit ~25%. Lowering the shadow map resolution to 512 does not help much. But using this method should allow using low soft shadows and low shadow map resolution and still enable smooth transitions from shadow to light.

Find an example attached. It is all based in your first concept from 15th August so big thanks for you work! You had all ingredients but one too many: the extra animation. Very basic rules (unless KO-immune): Civilians: Can always be knocked out from any direction Combatants: Can always be knocked out (including when fleeing) from any direction except when in high alert state (normally in combat mode) We can think of extra rules (for helmets, in example) but this is as simple and as close to the original Thief as it can get therefore it is named Classic Blackjack. For what is worth, I almost always (try to) ghost but to each his own. Obsttorte, sorry to hijack the topic but the indicator isn't the solution. Perhaps my take isn't the solution either but give it a try, and if you want, please make it yours and expand on it. -------------------------------- EDIT (1) As far as I can tell the Classic Blackjack mod conflicts - and may very well break - the following missions: A House of Locked Secrets By Any Other Name Hazard Pay Iris Noble Affairs Snowed Inn Shadows of Northdale ACT I Shadows of Northdale ACT 2 Volta 1: The Stone Volta 2: Cauldron Author's included in their missions either tdm_weapon_blackjack.script OR tdm_weapon_blackjack.def but not both meaning you will be missing half of the puzzle either way you look at it. The "Classic Blackjack" will be improved in the future. -------------------------------- EDIT (2) The download provided in this post has been removed. The improvement Obsttorte is working on has different goals and is heading is a different direction and the "Classic Blackjack" will be developed separately in a different topic in due time. Thanks for your understanding.

Creating a new thread for this as it was being discussed in an old beta-testing thread starting here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/&do=findComment&comment=490751 I suppose the main questions are: when should this spawnarg be used, if at all? why was it introduced in the first place? Can we get it documented properly on the Wiki so misuse isn't propagated? @stgatilov @Dragofer

I have stencil shadows enabled. What are those old cvars? Btw. I was still using last dev version, because the beta came in when I was playing it. Now I upgraded to b1 and started playing ws3 (with subtitles).

True just haven't seen this type of prettiness yet. As for trees casting alpha shaodws, I'm afraid that won't work by default, and I wish this were fixed in vanilla: The leaf material has "noshadows" enabled... I think: What we need is to only use noshadows on transparent materials if shadowmaps or alpha texture shadow casting are disabled, otherwise cast shadows... I enabled those settings but for me trees still cast shadows only from the trunk, I think the noshadows flag needs to be removed from some surfaces. Edit: I might be wrong on that. Looking in tdm_models_decls01.pk4 at materials/tdm_models_nature_trees.mtr the materials with "leaves" in their name don't have the "noshadows" flag. But then why didn't I see shadows cast by lights on trees even with r_shadowMapAlphaTested set to 1? I'm positive I looked in Seeking Lady Leicester and it wasn't working for the small trees and plants in the yard, either from my lantern or lamps I think shined over the trees.

Hello! Tracking down information on software and plug-ins that work with D3 / TDM can be a tough. So I have created a thread here where people can post what software/ plug-ins/ tutorials or other references they've had success or failure with in TDM. 3DS MAX 2013 64bit .ase - Default .ASE model exporter works. However you have to open the .ase file in text edit and manual change the *BITMAP line on each material to read something like: "//base/textures/common/collision" which allows the engine to read the correct material path. md5.mesh / animation - Beserker's md5 exporter/importers for 3dsmax. http://www.katsbits.com/tools, Importing and exporting works. The model must be textured, UV'd, with a skin modifier attached to the bones to export. PM me (Kingsal) for help with this. Imported models using the script will not be weighted appropriately, so this is not recommended if you are simply trying to edit existing tdm content. (Use blender instead) MAYA 2011 32bit md5.mesh - So far I've not had any luck with Maya 2011. I am using Greebo's MayaImportx86 for Maya 2011. I've got the importer working however I get a "Unexpected Internal Failure(kFailure)" and the import fails. This could be due to something finicky in Maya that I am not doing correctly. Will keep trying.. Blender 2.7 about - Blender is commonly used and pretty well supported on the forums/ wiki. Various versions may work as well - https://www.blender.org/download/ md5.mesh / animation Blender MD5 importer/exporter (io_scene_md5.zip): https://sourceforge.net/projects/blenderbitsbobs/files/ Sotha's guide Blender Male/ Female rigs by Arcturus - Here Edit by Dragofer: more links found in this post.

There's a group of players who have meticulously tested and adjusted ghosting rules for The Dark Mod. Please see: Official Ghosting Rules: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148523 Ghost Rules Discussion: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148487 Why alienate an established group of dedicated players?

Thief’s Shalebridge Cradle mission taught me to fear asylum/orphanage combo platters This still scares the pants off me A new Polygon article that brings back some old memories, and yes it's true, that was one scary ass mission! I remember it very well. I am considering playing this again now while we have slow new mod releases lately. https://www.polygon.com/2020/10/11/21509328/thief-deadly-shadows-halloween-scary-level-shalebridge-cradle