Search the Community

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.

Thanks! Would someone mind fixing my spelling mistake from "indigator" to "indicator"? And add a sentence "Use of the lightgem can be practiced in the [[Training Mission (OM)|Training Mission]], primarily in the room Stealth & Shadows."? Perhaps also add a row about the lightgem in article "Equipment_(player_character)#Tools" and link to "lightgem"? As a new player I think I would appreciate that the new article covers details not covered in "The_Dark_Mod_Gameplay#HUD_(Heads-Up_Display)" Another new article "Bow" could be: " [[File:Nocking and aiming a broadhead arrow.png|right|thumb|Picking up, nocking, drawing, and aiming a [[Broadhead Arrows|broadhead arrow]]. The image in the lower right shows the zoom-in-view.]] [[File:Arrows.jpg|right|thumb|A selection of some of the [[Arrows|arrows]] the player can choose from:<br/>1. [[Fire Arrows]]<br/>2. [[Gas Arrows]]<br/>3. [[Noisemaker Arrows]]<br/>4. [[Rope Arrows]]<br/>5. [[Vine Arrows]]<br/>6. [[Water Arrows]]]] The '''bow''' is a long-range [[The_Dark_Mod_Gameplay#Weapons|weapon]] used for shooting various kinds of [[arrows]] to harm, distract, or confuse enemies. A few seconds after the player draws an arrow, the camera will zoom in, showing a more detailed view of the target. If the arrow is not released, the player avatar will start getting tired and wobble the arrow, eventually lowering the bow without shooting. The bow and quiver are objects that the player always carries and they are not visible in the [[inventory]]. Only the arrows are visible there. Use of the bow and arrows can be practiced in the [[Training Mission (OM)|Training Mission]], primarily in the room Archery. [[Category:Equipment]] " (Again, with the caveat to use the preview-functionality to fix any formatting errors.) I would also link "Bow" from "Equipment_(player_character)#Ranged_weapons" to the new article "Bow".

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.

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.

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/

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

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...

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

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"

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

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.

Stencil shadows are more susceptible because only backfaces cast shadows. I'll bet on placebo

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.

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).

Looking at the code, the originals were "pm_mantle_pull 750" and "pm_mantle_pullFast 450". The new "pm_mantle_pull" value is "400". A "pm_mantle_pullFast" value of "450" would be slower than regular pull, not faster. With both being set to "400", they are at least similar. Other than that, it's subjective and the feedback from playtesters was positive. Also, referenced internally here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22256-movementcontrols-settings-in-main-menu/&do=findComment&comment=489158

That sort of tone doesn't fly in our forums.

I would use this massive list for any fan missions, it includes campaigns too: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148090 There are a lot of Fan Missions for the picking, I myself go for the lesser known ones and the short variety, because sometimes they hide a gem or two. Just like jaxa, I'm a bit outdated after the temporal retirement, but I do remember some amazing campaigns like "The Black Frog". If you intend to play The Black Frog, you should play the first two of the L'Arsene series missions, it's how I did it myself. Also, yes, L'Arsene are a fantastic series. The first mission of L'Arsene is a "rough draft", author was a bit new to Thief level making, but still great either way, after the 3rd you will see how his skill increased by a massive amount.

Unfortunately, TDM forum deletes the separator between the numbers. So I have to guess where one number ends and the next starts Also, user can rename screenshot manually, or push it through something that would rename it automatically. Thenwe won't see coordinates on screenshot address on forums.

tdm_show_viewpos cvar and screenshot_viewpos command: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22310-212-viewpos-on-player-hud-and-screenshots/

V2.12beta crashed at the mission "the shadows at northdale" ---snip--- 354 msec to load m1 Interaction table generated: size = 0/512 Initial counts: 4418 entities 406 lightDefs 3765 entityDefs Restarting ambient sound snd_thieves_highway'(phantoms) with volume -8 Changed location from 'loc_apartment_streets' to 'loc_thieves_guild'. The ambient 'snd_thieves_guild' (music_thieves_guild) for location 'loc_thieves_guild' is now playing. Changed location from 'loc_thieves_guild' to 'loc_apartment_streets'. The ambient 'snd_thieves_highway' (phantoms) for location 'loc_apartment_streets' is now playing. Changed location from 'loc_apartment_streets' to 'loc_thieves_guild'. The ambient 'snd_thieves_guild' (music_thieves_guild) for location 'loc_thieves_guild' is now playing. WARNING:Cannot find sound snd_lockpick_lock_picked on door atdm_door_96x48_2hinge_29 DEBUG: entity atdm_loot_painting_medium_5 was frobbed and frob_loot runs DEBUG: entity atdm_loot_painting_small_7 was frobbed and frob_loot runs Trying to load image models/darkmod/props/textures/painting03_l_d from frontend, deferring... Trying to load image models/darkmod/props/textures/painting03_l_d from frontend, deferring... signal caught: Segmentation fault si_code 1 Trying to exit gracefully.. terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::shared_ptr<ErrorReportedException>' double fault Aborted, bailing out shutdown terminal support About to exit with code 6 ---snap---

Was about to say the issue happens with both shadow maps and stencil shadows. Then I remembered I have r_shadowMapCullFront enabled since it improves performance a little. That explains why I get those leaks even more than everyone else

I think a little dynamics to the windows (with light) on various buildings would add quite some life to the dark mod. A first step might be to just simply animate the brightness of *some of* the window texture slightly and randomly +/- 5% or so to give the impression of a candle burning inside. Windows that are close to rooms - for example a window next to a window that you can open could perhaps be enhanced by shadows moving inside (for example when a guard/person is moving by). Not sure if this have been suggested before, or if this at all possible. Personally I think it would add a lot of life to the game and make it less static in places.

Relax @Näkki, it's great to hear you enjoyed the game. My personal expectations were just a bit different when I read the Steam page, although the various trailers should have been a warning that stealth maybe wasn't the biggest priority of the devs. From the Steam page: "Weird west legends meet eldritch horror in BLOOD WEST, an immersive stealth FPS." Also "Blood West is a stealth FPS inspired by the genre classics such as the Thief series (whose fans will be happy to hear the voice of Stephen Russell, the actor voicing the master-thief Garrett, returning here as the protagonist), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, or - from the contemporary catalog - Hunt: Showdown. The gameplay rewards the careful approach: scouting the area, stalking your enemies, and striking from the shadows. Can you figure out a way to clear a fort full of ghouls and monsters without raising an alarm?" From my personal experience I think the game is predominantly Hunt: Showdown, a bit of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and a very small portion Thief. Stealth is very unforgiving and makes it almost impossible early game when there are various enemies around, but hey maybe I just suck at it. I don't see Deus Ex in it, unless the skill leveling is the Deus Ex part for you and then I have to disagree with you, as that seems like the trait system in Hunt: Showdown. Edit: What I also understood from the Steam forums is that the original VA was dropped close before the release of the full version and replaced by Russell with no real explanation from the devs why this was done.