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We may be thinking about this from opposite ends. The technical aspect that makes it feasible is that there's already a game there. The alternative (if you want a new system is) you have to completely remake the game, and keep in mind TDM has been in constant development from 2005 to 2020, so it has 15 years of work put into it. Between taking an existing game and adding multiplayer and taking empty code and adding a game and multiplayer, it's obvious to me that the former is the shorter path, acknowledging that "shorter path" is still probably more than a year of work for a dedicated person or few people. Let me back up too. If you want to play multiplayer right now, you can already do it with Thievery and Thief 2's multiplayer mod. Thievery has the same problem cabalistic just mentioned; it's geared towards competitive gameplay, and you're not going to find enough people to make for good games. So it's kind of a dead game, since without a good group of people there's nothing to do with it. But my experience wtih T2MP is that coop is different. For coop, you're not waiting for people to join servers, you're contacting a friend or two directly and asking them if they want to play a map coop with you. It's something you play with your friends. And that can still happen even if people aren't joining servers. So that leaves you with two options, either play T2MP, which by the way is not compatible with New Dark. So you're really playing a 20 year old game with it. Or put multiplayer in a new engine. And then you have two options, branch off of TDM or start from scratch on a new engine. And my original point was just that, between those two options branching off TDM is the shorter path. I suppose one thing to consider is that you could try to port a lot of the TDM code into a new engine. But I don't know if that's even going to save you much time. It's true that TDM's code does not have multiplayer in mind, and it will be an issue at every turn. But for me the two choices are recreate an entirely new thieving game thinking about multiplayer from the start (a 5+ year project for a large team) or walk through the TDM code with a fine-tooth comb and retool it for multiplayer literally line by line. In my understanding, that would also be a massive project, but now we're talking about a project for one person over a year and a half, instead of 5+ years for a large team. So that's the case I was trying to make. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to pull off. But I think it'd be worth it for coop style, since I know I'll always have a few friends that would like to play it coop style with me.

Thanks for playing and the kind feedback re: the bugs: the brew tank is a new one - thanks for that. Will add it to the list for any future update. the bow: I think that's a TDM bug. I experienced it as well, but only the early days of developing the mission so I thought it had gone away, but I guess not: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21345-210-crashes-may-be-bow-frontend-acceleration-related/ the keys on the guard: never did get to the bottom of that one as I could never reproduce it.

Maybe it's just my video card drivers? I have noticed now in two FMs 1. Lord Dufford's 2. No Honor Among Thieves (Forest level) There are certain places like wall lights that shoot out small flying black squares like they are pieces of black paper or something. In Lord Dufford's it happens out of the sewer access building. In the Forest level from No Honor Among Thieves it happens after you climb the vine on the wall beside the large guarded gate. There are lights along that wall and they are all shooting out these black squares. Is it just me?

Hi all, me again Now that I've learned how to take screenies on DM (thanks to Aluminumhaste) I wanted to post one that I took but I got an error saying that the image ext that I used was not allowed in these forums, It was .jpg so I changed it to .png and I got the same error again. They're on Photobucket.

There are rumors that a legendary ruby, the Heart of Saint Mattis, actually exists. Break into the the Northgate Cathedral, find it, and steal it. Background This is my second Dark Mod mission (Mission of Mercy was the first). This is a small-medium mission, with some extras. See below for hints. My wife just gave me an idea for mission number three, so look for that next year. I notice that Dragofer just released a mission today. I hope I'm not violating an unwritten protocol by releasing another mission on the same day. Download The mission is available in the in-game downloader. As well as here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jah5svj5eagnhs8/heartstmattis.pk4?dl=1. (<-- NEW LINK. Per grayman's request, the name of the pk4 and map have been changed). Place the PK4 in your \fms folder. TDM will recognize it as a new mission. I18n I have not done the work required for internationalization. OpenAL EFX This mission uses it (version 2), so I recommend turning it on in the Audio Settings. Thanks Many thanks to the beta testers, who really helped me get this mission into shape: Cambridge Spy, Shadow, Jedi_Wannabe (who also did some performance work on the map), SuaveSteve Thanks to Mike and Chloe for their outstanding voice work! The cathedral in this mission was inspired in many ways by bikerdude's excellent St. Albans Cathedral. I haven't played all of the DM missions, but to me St. Albans is the gold standard of cathedrals. Music includes Cantus Firmus Monks by Doug Maxwell/Media Right Productions (royalty free) The video series by Springheel and Sotha were helpful and energizing. Thanks to the entire Dark Mod community for building an amazing project. Hints and Tips (warning: contains progressive spoilers)

Thanks! Hint for the safe code here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=485264 Actually, it's probably time I added these hints to the original post....

They thought this song would reflect their agenda, of course they were wrong and the band made it clear that the lyrics have the opposite meaning of what they had in mind: Nico Vega - Beast of America That being said, Ken Levinson certainly wouldn't have used it in Bioshick Infinite if they were right. If I recall correctly, a similar video with shorter running time was part of the original release in 2013 but does not show up on the remaster.

This is covered in the Training Mission, and a handful of other FMs utilize this mechanic as well

Thomas Porter is back in a TDM FM called... LQD is a medium sized FM, made for the TDM unusual contest 2013, where Thomas Porter sets out to get rid of the Lich Queen once and for all! Will he succeed, or will the evil Lich Queen get her sinister revenge on Thomas? The mission was created by me, Sotha. Betatesters: Bikerdude, nbohr1more and Obsttorte are thanked for their efforts on improving this work. Big thanks to TylerVocal for excellent voice acting. Thanks to freesound audio artists: Amliebsh (39222), Steveygos93 (80401), Jackie4ever (83095) and Klankbeeld (133100). Immense thanks for the developer team and everyone contributing to the mod. Release notes: *This mission has player character narration. There is no way to control the volume of the player lines in TDM 1.08 and they are at 100% volume at all times. For optimal experience, be sure to set SFX and ambient close to 100% volume in the in-game audio settings and fine tune the volume to nice levels from you operating system's mixer. That way the world sounds match the player voice in volume and your gameplay experience is not reduced by very loud player narrative. *This mission involves using objects with other objects. Normally objects are used like this: push R to drop the item into your hands, move the item where you want to place or use it. *This mission has a video briefing, so you have the habit of skipping the TDM logo which is visible before the briefing, do not skip it or you will miss the briefing. Download link: Use the ingame downloader to get it. As always, it is not recommended to read the thread further before you have completed the mission. Someone will fail to use spoiler tags. [spoiler] This will be hidden [/spoiler] Enjoy! Please remember to give comments and vote! -Sotha.

All those options look good to me. I suppose with these things there is always a worry about making the menu overcrowded, but this still seems pretty reasonable. Compare with the number of graphics, gameplay, and accessibility options that have become industry standard on high profile PC releases and this actually seems restrained to me. Plus, this is the kind of community that will appreciate having options more than they will be put off by needing to hunt through a long menu. So my vote is full steam ahead on all items. The one piece of useful critique I can give is that "none" is a bit hard to interpret as an option for run mode without more of a tooltip. I'm having a hard time thinking of a better alternative though (other than "default", which still has the same problem). Anyway, thanks for including my head bob request. It would be nice not to fiddle with cvars to get that adjusted should I find myself playing with an audience again, or just want a little extra comfort when taking on one of the big FMs.

Can I delete the _missionshots folder in the fms folder? Will this glitch out any map intros? I'm a bit of a sucker for cluttering my folder. (ie if its not essential, I tend to delete it) Can I delete this folder?

Another utility program, "findToolLongSubtitles", is now available, which scans a directory for .subs and .srt files, and checks the length in characters of each subtitle line against a maximum fieldwidth expressed in characters: Win executable C++ source code file It is more fully described in the latter as: findTooLongSubtitles.cpp By Geep, March, 2023, for The Dark Mod, under the terms of its open-source license. Purpose: Given a particular subtitle maximum fieldwidth, evaluates TDM subtitles - contained in .subs and .srt files - and reports those that don't fit. Assumes a maximum 2-line subtitle field. If a subtitle doesn't currently fit (or suboptimally relies on auto-word-wrap to fit), but could be made good by inserting or adjusting a linebreak, locations where that break could be positioned are shown. This program only examines a single folder at a time for contained .subs and .srt files. If your FM has these files in multiple places, run this program more than once. For an "inline" subtitle, a string-embedded "\n" causes a manual linebreak. When shown in this program's output, that subtitle has 2 lines, as in the game. This allows use of a common output routine for inline & srt subtitles. Console program invocation: findTooLongSubtitles -m maxSubtitleCharsPerLine [default is 42] -d dirWithSoundFiles [default is current dir] -o output file [default is stdout] Build: Requires C++ 17 or later For example outputs, evaluating subtitles found in the 2.11 releases of FMs New Job and St. Lucia against a proposed 42-character fieldwidth, see here.

According to this link - https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Visportals#Multiple_Joined_Visportals - you can make multiple brush visportals. ...and so in that case, this location overlap might be caused by some sort of invalidation of the shorter of the two visportals, because its nodraw volume - which shouldn't matter - is occupying the same space (as seen to the left in the image) at a 90 degree angle with a third visportal. If that's the case, can I rotate a visportal brush 180 degrees, without it breaking?

The Transaction is a small/medium sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter delivers the cryptic book, 'De Vermis Mysteriis' to a bookstore owner named Victor de Grenefeld. It is the fourth mission in the Thomas Porter series, continuing from where The Glenham Tower ended. The mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank BrokenArts, Melan and Ocn for playtesting and Bikerdude, BrokenArts and Ocn for voiceacting. An enormous thanks goes also to the fine people who created TDM and are still working hard, bringing it ever closer to perfection. Thanks also to the community for helping with my mapping efforts. Extra thanks to freesound.org -contributors who make excellent quality sound effects available for free. Trailer (thanks to ocn!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBdEsKoqWl4 Briefing: Ah, the town of Glenham. I never really thought I would be happy to see its shabby wooden miner dwellings, but after the nightmares of the Glenham Tower I'm happy to see any kind of civilization. During my return trip from the tower the ghostly mist veil transformed into an intense thunderstorm and heavy rain. My clothes are soaked and I'm dreadfully tired of the harsh tribulations of the past few days. My task for tonight is simple. All I have to do is to get the strange and incomprehensible book I obtained from the tower, 'De Vermis Mysteriis,' to the bookstore owner Victor de Grenefeld. And more importantly collect the hefty sum the bookstore owner promised to pay me. With that kind of sum I can sit back and relax for a while. I'd better stay in good terms with my customer and not steal from him. I have the hunch that de Grenefeld is a well connected man so staying on his good side might be beneficial for me in the future: maybe they'll need a skilled adventurer like me and I could turn legitimate. I could earn my keep and I wouldn't need to constantly hide from the city watch. At any rate, I've got it all planned out for the remainder of the night. I'll visit the bookstore, drop the book to de Grenefeld and collect my fee. After that I'd better hide in the basement of an abandoned building I've spotted near the town north gate and get some well deserved rest. I don't think the city watch would think a cloaked and armed person like me would be on honorable business in a stormy weather like this so it would be wise to avoid all confrontation with the guards. I do not need any misunderstadings with the city watch right now. The undead horrors in the Tower forced me to expend most of my tools and I desperately need more equipment if I intend to continue my budding adventuring career. I should get some extra gold for new gear and maybe a few holy water potions just in case. There is a Builder church nearby where I might be able to find some. I suspect those fanatics might have gold hidden there as well.. It is time to move in the town and get the things done quickly. Somehow I have a bad feeling about all this. It's probably nothing, probably I am just jumpy because of the horrors in the Tower and sleep deprivation. Tomorrow I'll sleep long, relax and eat well. UPDATED LINK: Use the ingame downloader to get it. Bikerdude was added in the author, I forgot him. No other chages. Could The Powers That Be make sure that this version ends up in the ingame downloader? Thanks! Known bugs: One betatester experienced an error ("ERROR: Failed to spawn player as 'atdm:player_thief'"), which drops the player back to main menu upon map load. If you experience this scenario, please turn EAX off in the options menu. That cleared the problem for the tester. Warning! There is ALWAYS someone who fails to use spoiler tags appropriately. I recommend you read this thread further only after playing the mission! Avoid spoilers.

@Goldwell This missing material I found in TDM 2.03: This does have vertex program code (arb?) still in it, not sure if really needed. This is how it looks ingame (when I add the material to the fms material folder): Not sure if this is how it's supposed to look, but better than nothing. This texture now shows up fine (previously I reported there was a black square on it). Maybe Dragofer fixed it for 2.11:

That's true. But most TDM fonts have slow readability, which is definitely not what you want in a subtitle. "Stone Print" would be a good substitute for Carleton. I'm not sure we never need a subtitle background. But it could be made a user choice, with a CVar toggle on/off. Regarding moving subs up, this is another compromise. Given that there are up to 3 stacked 2-line subtitles possible, and existing FMs that show messages centered on screen.

PLAYERS 1) A lot of effort was put into optimizing loading times. It includes: better integration of decompression, multithreading, immutable texture storage, handwritten normal map compression and mipmap generation, removing artificial delays. As the result, we even had to modify loading screens of some missions, because allocated 10% of loading time was no longer enough for a player to read the hint 2) Generic performance improvements were done too. Most importantly, we fixed performance regressions since 2.07: rendering static geometry (5598) and soft stencil shadows with antialiasing. This hardly makes a difference, but it is nice to know that TDM can now use AVX instructions on Linux builds too. 3) We made some changes to window / input systems. Most importantly, Linux build now relies on GLFW library to create window and handle keyboard / mouse (thread), so a lot of the issues with OS integration on Linux should go away. On the Windows side, some minor changes were made to fullscreen/borderless modes. 4) New implementation of object dragging / manipulation (thread) Afraid to grab a candle near a sleeping guard? Hopefully, you will make less noise while moving objects in 2.10. And if you hold the creep button, the moved item will not make any noise at all. Also, dragging unconscious bodies should feel better now. Rats slighty spoiled the joy of this improvement (rats often do), but hopefully it is fixed now Finally, now you can control how far a rock flies by holding throw button for a different amount of time. 5) New visual style for frob-highlighting objects. This point is still surrounded by debates though (thread, poll), so the fate of the frob outline is yet uncertain. 6) Tooltips are now shown in the main menu. Perhaps the text is not perfect yet, but this is a birth of the long-awaited feature! 7) Tweaked starting new mission in the main menu. The old way of "installing" and starting missions was quite confusing for newcomers. So we reorganized the main menu a bit, and now it is hopefully more intuitive. MAPPING 1) Entity limit is no more (thread). Well, number of entities is technically capped by 65536, but I don't think it can be reached by ordinary mapping. You should no longer use the insane tricks of the past striving to reduce the number of entities (unless the tricks have other benefits, of course). 2) Behavior of spotlights (projected lights) reverted back to how they worked in 2.07. It means that the missions released before 2.08 should now look as intended. The sad thing is that the missions with projected lights tweaked for 2.08 or 2.09 are probably a bit off now. Also, fixed a bug that spotlights illuminated surfaces outside their light volumes. 3) Security camera improved. Security cameras have been reworked from the ground up with the aim of bringing them to the same level of polish as TDM's AIs, both when it comes to stealth gameplay and how mappers can work with them and customize them. Most importantly, security cameras in new FMs will track the player once they catch sight of him rather than freezing in place, making them considerably harder to shake off. All the details can be seen on the wiki page. 4) Volumetric lights can now be used on projected lights (thread). Unlike adding fake translucent geometry, the real volumetric lights automatically match their source light, including light volume geometry, projection & falloff texture, and even shadows. Full description of available settings is available on the wiki page. 5) X-ray screens feature added. This feature that was originally in Doom 3, has been reintroduced to TDM and developed further. The screens are able to change the appearance of entities seen through them, even making them appear or disappear if desired. Look out for them in future Inventors Guild and magical themed FMs. You can find the thread here with links to the relevant wiki articles. l 6) Added a system for tracking secrets. Now it is easy to set up, with no custom scripts required. They'll also be shown on the mission statistics screen at the end of the mission, if the FM uses the new system. More can be read on the wiki page. 7) Main menu GUI has been reworked to allow more customization. Mappers can change music, background, disable screens in the uniform way. Debriefing videos work exactly as briefing videos do. The same customizations can be applied to ordinary missions and separately to every mission in campaign. You can find more details in guis/mainmenu_custom_defs.gui inside tdm_gui01.pk4. A lot of the released missions were updated to use the new customization system (thread). Which unfortunately means that their customizations won't work in 2.09 and earlier versions anymore. 8| Dmap times have been reduced (thread). Optimizations were made all over the dmap code, adding some new algorithms and data structures. Of course, the time difference varies between maps. As a side product, precision has been improved in a few places. 9) Added location diagnostics to dmap (thread). Setting up location entities and separators is an error-prone process, and previously there was no good way to find the error. Now dmap will post warnings and even produce pointfiles in case something is wrong with locations, similar to already existing visportal diagnostics. 10) Added native support for PNG image format. Now PNG images can be used in materials. In some cases PNG is a good alternative to TGA for uncompressed images. Note however, that loading PNG is slower than loading TGA, and we have yet to discover if this is a problem or not. As a side note, DDS images can now be used in image programs, although doing so is discouraged because of additional loss of quality due to compression. 11) Subtitles can now be assigned to sound files (thread). While implementation is a bit raw yet and needs to pass test of time, subtitles have already been added to Saint Lucia prebundled mission. Note that we did not consider localization of subtitles yet (localization as a whole is in weird state in TDM). Full description is available on the wiki page. 12) New script events have been added to the repertoire for use by mappers: a) sys.VecRotate( vector vec, vector angles ) rotates a vector by a set of angles, allowing to match vectors such as offsets to an entity's current orientation. b) entity.getEntityFlag( string flag ) allows to find out properties about entities such as "notarget" (for the player entity) or "invisible". c) $player1.getCalibratedLightgemValue() retrieves the current value of the lightgem, using the same weighting as AIs do. d) entity.setSolid( boolean state ) allows to change the solidity of an entity at runtime. Note that it's still experimental. e) sys.getLocationPoint( vector point ) returns the location of a point in space. f) sys.pointIsInBounds( vector point, vector mins, vector maxs ) evaluates whether a point lies within a volume specified by 2 corner points. g) sys.getTraceSurfType() returns the type of surface the most recent trace has hit, such as "snow", if any. *) Some other improvements: a) Supported "set XXX on head" spawnarg on AIs. b) Some LOD improvements, e.g. for lights. c) Hot reload supports more of the popular spawnargs (i.e. without respawn). d) In-game downloader can update the currently installed mission. ASSETS 1) Automaton AI from Ulysses mission by @Sotha have been added to core, together with new prefabs for (cosmetic) recharging stations to include in patrol routes and a camera screen showing what the automaton sees. 2) @Wellingtoncrab contributed a whole new suite of fancy wooden furniture pieces including prefabs. They can be viewed in their release thread. PROGRAMMING Some interesting things happened on programming side too. First of all, the limited GL profiling has been replaced with Tracy profiler, which has its own cool viewer. It has greatly helped us in our optimization efforts. More technical stuff: generic hash table has been added, Clear in idlib method now works as most programmers expect, unit tests integration has been improved. Another major event that happened this year is migration to the new mission database, based on SVN repository. Hopefully, there will be less confusion about mission updates, and old versions of FMs will not be lost anymore.

DarkRadiant 3.2.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Show entityDefs related to selected models in Model Chooser Feature: Support for rendering blend lights Feature: Implement sorting of Interaction Stages Feature: Recognise type of "set x on y" spawnargs Feature: OBJ files: loader supports usemtl keywords directly referencing material names (without .mtl file) Fixed: Material editor: additional preview object in textures/glass/ materials Fixed: Every attempt to load a texture will trigger a SIGSEGV signal caught: 11 Improvement: Update to wxWidgets 3.2.0 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.2.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. 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. Have fun mapping!

I'm sorry to hear. Somebody should convert this to an audio book. After finishing both fms I should start reading this.

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?

January & February 2018 update: I'm almost done with the translation of the base install package (i.e. the GUI of the game, the translatable texts in two of the three FMs in the package). I've decided it wouldn't be all that bad if I provided you guys with some insight into the current state of things, what will still need resolving, and so on. First, I want to talk about some of the minor GUI issues I've run into (and which I prefer to resolve first), then also cover the issues with the FMs from the base install (which can still be fixed/improved later). October 2019 update: I have gone through the entire opening post and tried to rework the layout a bit, to increase readability. The separate download links for the hosted screenshot images have been removed, since that part of the image-hosting service (Mediafire) was acting up during the last year. The screenshot images linked should still be visible, without a fuss, once the links below are clicked. The images are still downloadable by simply opening the links, then saving each displayed image to your disk or to a USB storage device, whathaveyou. 1. GUI TRANSLATION 1.1) GUI Font Problems and Glitches The following paragraphs are a hopefully complete list of problems I’ve run into while translating the game's GUI into the Slovak language. The problems are sorted into issues concerning: a.) the visual appearance of letters in fonts. In this section, I’ve listed the problems in orders of decreasing severity. b.) the current inaccessibility of some GUI titles to translators (as they are still „visually hard-coded” at this time, in this current version). 1.1 a.) Problems with letters in fonts First problem: The letters ľ and Ľ are not depicted correctly when written down. This prevents many Slovak words using these letters – particularly kľúč ("key") to be displayed correctly in-game. My recommendation is simple: These two letters need to be added to the standard game fonts in some future language update for TDM. Naturally, only if it's in any way possible for the particular font we used for most of the menu text. (But I have a feeling it certainly is possible.) Until then, I've decided that all Slovak translations of TDM content will replace these letters with "l" and "L". An improvised solution, but it at least prevents the words that would include the letter from looking weird. Second problem: The letters ť and Ť ("t with a caron" and "capital t with a caron"), while working well in the prevalent font, have some degree of aesthetic problems. The "Ť" letter is actually all right appearance-wise, but the way the "ť" letter is depicted makes it look a bit like it was actually the letter "t with an acute accent" (this is a non-existant letter in real world alphabets). It’s not a major problem, certainly not on the smaller titles of the GUI, but in the GUI of the main menu, it looks rather odd and ugly. For the time being, just for the sake of visual appeal, the more major titles in the major game menus have had the "ť"-s in them changed to "Ť"-s, since it looks a little better and less confusing that way. This is, obviously, just a temporary solution at best. But for now, it will have to do. Third problem: A more minor issue, but still quite annoying. The letter á ("a with an acute accent") works pefectly everywhere in the game, with the sole exception being the GUI element „Enter Name“ in the Save/Load menu. It’s translated as „Zadaj názov“, but the á letter is not showing up correctly. For the time being, I’m changing the letter to a simple „a“, but this font issue will need fixing in the long term. Fourth problem: Issue similar to the third problem. The letter č ("c with a caron"), which otherwise works perfectly in the game, is replaced by an "@" on the "Loading" splash screen title of the mission screenshots preview gallery (the clickable one, in the previews of the mission downloader). The splash screen title is translated as "Načítavam...", and the glitch is making it look like "Na@ítavam..." in-game. For the time being, I’m changing the letter to a simple "c", but again, this font issue will need fixing in the long term. Fifth problem: A really minor one. The translated titles for the little settings bar in general video settings doesn't show letters with diacritics. 1.1 b.) Problems with untranslatable bits of the GUI Some of the GUI titles are simply not yet available to be translated from English via the .lang files. Here’s a list of all these titles: "Load Mission", "Save Mission", "Description", "Mission Statistics", "Downloaded Missions", "Online Mission Archive", "Download Status". The popup window informing the player about all newly downloaded missions is translated fully, outside of the bit in parentheses at the end of the sentence (‘New Mission’), which for some reason remains in English. This is probably not due to an unaccessible font, but because of an algoritm I may have either overlooked, or don’t have direct access to via the .lang files. I'll probably look into this soon, there might be a solution. Some strings for translating newer elements of the menus, already present in 2.05, are not available. Inventory Grid cannot be found in the all.lang file of 2.05, not even among the English language strings of that file. Currently, Inventory Grid is possibly the only untranslated line I have in the options menu, given the inaccessiblity. I've seen some advice on adding new strings, but I'd prefer if my own synced up with an official English one (code number and all). 1.2) Screenshots of the translated GUI Here's a mix of screenshots, older and newer, to show how the finished translation of the GUI looks like. Main menu Audio settings General video settings Language video settings Advanced video settings General gameplay settings Difficulty gameplay settings Movement control settings Actions control settings Inventory control settings Weapon control settings General control settings Tool control settings Downloading a mission 1 ("1 mission successfully downloaded", etc.) Downloading a mission 2 ("new missions available", etc.) Restart after mission install Cleanup of a mission install folder Loading a mission save Mission launch menu FM objectives and difficulty menu (from Glenham Tower, showing fairly typical difficulty level names) FM Shop menu: Before purchase, After purchase FM Shop menu items and goods: Blackjack, Sword, Lockpicks, Compass, Spyglass, Lantern, Flashbomb, Mine, Broadhead arrow, Water arrow, Moss arrow, Fire arrow, Rope arrow, Noisemaker arrow, Health potion, Holy water. (The Gas arrow and other rarer items are also translated and work in a shop, but I can't remember an FM with a starting shop that sells them. I have seen them work perfectly fine in the shop menus, like the items in these images.) FM start of mission popup FM mid-mission options menu FM exit mission menu FM ingame objectives scroll (from A New Job, the objectives were not translated, hence English) FM ingame inventory (an overview collage, with translated HUD and item names) FM Mission Statistics 1 (from A New Job, hence the custom name for the difficulty level) FM Mission Statistics 2 (from A New Job, hence the custom name for the difficulty level) FM Mission Completed Version status popup window (up to date for 2.05, the current version) Do you really want to quit, yada yada... Can't post too many screenshots visibly in the post, so I prefer linking to them. They should be easy to view. Same with the FM screenshots further down this post. 1.3) .lang files stuff for the GUI only Finished, up-to-date .lang files, ready for download and testing. all.lang file: http://www.mediafire.com/file/pzj632l2edobdl0/all.lang (other DL link) slovak.lang file: http://www.mediafire.com/file/20189ddeec1w888/slovak.lang (other DL link) tdm_base01.pk4 file (with up-to-date .lang files): http://www.mediafire.com/file/t3mvkj81tldkr7o/tdm_base01.pk4 (other DL link) These are the most up-to-date versions of the GUI .lang files (all.lang & slovak.lang) and of a working tdm_base01.pk4 file with said updates. Anyone of you can have a look and criticque whether the menus or the HUD text need a little rearranging to look better or not. Though I've taken great care to avoid omitting something, I'm sure I could have still overlooked something, and that's partly why I need your second opinions. 2. BASE PACK FMs TRANSLATION 2.1) Translated Training Mission and Tears of St. Lucia FM Font Problems and Glitches The following paragraphs are a hopefully complete list of problems I’ve run into while translating the two base pack FMs (sans the latest, A New Job, which lacks usable .lang files) into the Slovak language. The problems are sorted into issues concerning: a.) the varying presence or absence of letters in fonts, the visual appearance of letters in fonts b.) translating some of the signs and items via the regular l10n method (involving strings and the separate l10 pk4) 2.1 a.) Presence and absence of letters in fonts, visual problems with letters in fonts This mainly concerns readables, but in the case of the Training Mission, also the various hints you get throghout in the upper left corner of the screen. Diacritical letters don't occur within translated readables at all. The book readables and the note readables do not display any diacritical letters, whatsoever. This results in virtually unreadable texts. (Unreadable without extensive guess work about the missing vowels and consonants with diacritics, at least.) Diacritical letters do show up in mission briefings, and on the hint scrolls in the upper left corner of the screen that are unique to the Training Mission. However, even in these case, some of the diacritical letters are either missing completely or getting bizarrely replaced with entirely different letters (resulting either way in equally unreadable text). Diacritical letters that are displayed correctly (on briefings and hint scrolls only? Á á, Ä ä, É é, Ú ú, Ô ô, Í í, Ý í, Č č, Ň ň Diacritical letters that are displayed incorrectly (on briefings and hint scrolls only? a.) Š š are replaced with U u, for some reason b.) Ľ ľ are displayed as some other forms of L (roughly like a Polish "L with a stroke" letter) c.) Ď ď are displayed as D´ d´ (arguably a problem similar to the strange look of a non-capital ť letter in the GUI) d.) Ĺ ĺ are apparently replaced with Å (upon closer inspection, this letter has the identical ALT+0197 as the two acute accent Ls, but on the English keyboard, not the Slovak one) e.) Ť ť and Ž ž are not displayed at all and are replaced by blank squares 2.1 b.) Problems with translating some of the signs and items via the regular l10n (localisation) method I've tested the translation in the Training Mission in particular, because the TM has just more content and thus more ground to cover. One of the unpleasant surprises was the realisation that, although the translation for all of the readables and the little hint scrolls in the Training Mission work, the translation for items and for in-game signs does not work. Mind you, all of the signs and all of the items unique to the Training Mission are listed in the strings of the same .lang file as the mission's readables and hints. The hints and readables work, but the items and signs are still in English. This is a mystery to me. Do those particular texts require a separate manipulation of the Training Mission's .lang file ? 2.2) Screenshots of the translated missions (Training Mission, Tears of St. Lucia) Here's a mix of screenshots, older and newer, to show the current state of the two FMs' translation. Each of these is provided with a commentary by me. 2.2 a.) Training Mission TRAINING MISSION - READABLES Book readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 1 The introductory book readable in the TM's atrium. All the letters with diacritics are gone. I.e. I will have to add them to this font. And not only to this font, unfortunately... The font in the book readables is the "Mac Humaine" font used by TDM. Book readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 2 Same thing. The text looks okay, but any letter with a diacritic is simply not registered by the readable. Book readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 3 The book readable on lockpicking. Once again, all letters with diacritics are completely missing. In addition, I'll have to ammend the translation of the title, because there is no way I can get a conventional translation of "lockpicking" into that one line reserved for the title. Book readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 4 The text itself looks nicely, but the diacritical letters are missing. Book readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 5 Book readable about object handling. Missing diacritics again... For instance, the title is supposed to read "Ovládanie predmetov" (Handling of objects, Controlling of objects). Book readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 6 To make matters just a little bit worse, the original text in the second half of the readable is hard to translate, because you have to cram in all your translated text, and even then, a portion of it gets cut off at the end. This is even without all the missing letters with diacritics. Mind you, I've tried to keep my translated text as brief as possible. But sometimes, it's hard to really fit it in, even in some readables like this one. Scrap of paper readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 1 Scrap of paper readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 2 Scrap of paper readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 3 Scrap of paper readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 4 Scrap of paper readable completely lacking letters with diacritics 5 The above are in the "Nancy" font used by TDM. Not much to say about these. If you get the impression they're bizarrely sparse, that's because the length of these notes, and the amount of letter with diacritics used in them, absolutely messes up the text once they're absent. You can still vaguely make out my translated text, but given the different style and size of the font, the absent letters are even more noticeable here than in the book readables. TRAINING MISSION - MENU & BRIEFING TEXT AND ADDITIONAL TEXT Hint scroll with a missing or incorrect "L and D with caron" (outlined in red and blue) Now we're getting to the real meat of the issues, but these are thankfully unique to the hint scrolls and wall signs that appear in the Training mission. The hint scrolls are, just like the menus and briefings of TDM, in the "Carleton Caps only" font. First off, as in the GUI, the Ľ letter doesn't work properly. This isn't obvious from the screenshot, where a normal L is seen instead in the second line. But this is because I have pre-emptively removed the Ľ, awaiting the same issue as with the GUI. I've outlined it in red. Secondly, a Ď letter is in the first line of that screenshot excerpt, but shows up as more of a "D with an acute accent", with an acute accent diacritic above it instead of the caron diacritic. I've outlined it in blue. Why is Ľ/ľ in particular such an issue in both the GUI and the FM font usage ? If Wikipedia is correct on this, the letters Ľ and ľ (l with a caron) only exist in Slovak. Ergo, they're very rarely used letter outside of the language. Hence, they weren't accounted for in any of the current fonts, because no one would really suspect such an obscure letter with diacritics to show up at all. The Ď/ď letter is only slightly more frequent, existing in a few more languages, but not that many either. Rather rare diacritic letter in most fonts. Hint scroll with a missing "T and Z with caron" (outlined in red and blue) and a static sign issue The letters Ť/ť ("t with a caron") and Ž/ž ("z with a caron") don't show up at all. They're replaced with squares. So, these need to be added to the diacritical letter library of whatever font is used for the hint scrolls. I have outlined the missing ť letters in red and the missing ž letters in blue. There is also the added issue of the static signs in the Training mission having translatable strings, but the result of that translation not showing up at all. Hint scroll with a missing "S with caron" and a U letter replacing it (outlined in red) The letter Š ("s with a caron") gets messed up more than most. it's neither a square, or an S with acute accent, it outright changes into another letter: U, of all things ! Believe me, it got very annoying whenever I tried to read the hint scrolls containing Š/š, and I read U/u all the time. Horribly distracting and makes the words utterly nonsensical. Š isn't a very common letter with diacritics, but it shows up in some languages. The phonetic nature of the letter is widespread, though. E.g. in English, it shows up commonly as the combination "sh" (shadow, short, etc.), and in French, as the combination "ch" (chien, cheval, etc.). Hint scroll with an "L with an acute accent" displayed as a different letter (outlined in red) The letter Ĺ ("L with an acute accent") is a rather rare letter too, similarly to the Ľ. When it comes to how it shows up in probably only this one hint scroll, it is displayed as a weird "A with a circle" letter. Similar situation as with Š, showing up as a completely different letter. Hint scroll with surprisingly unfaulty translated text - no diacritical letters missing Suprisingly enough, a tiny minority of the hint scrolls that had diacritical letters already present in the font for the scrolls showed the translated text well. This is one of the few scrolls where I found nothing wrong with the translation. Pity so much of the other text from the Training Mission looks nowhere near as finished and correct as this example... Translated strings of item names do not show up at all Like with the translated strings for the mission-specific signs seen in the FM, for some reason, the translated strings for mission-specific items (keys, etc.) don't show up either. They're still in English. All of my translated strings are in the same .lang file, which is structurally identical to the FM's English-language .lang file. Do I need to do a separate perl process for the item and sign strings or what ? Any ideas ? TRAINING MISSION - FIXING READABILITY AND FITTING STUFF IN Due to the limiting nature of both the fonts (at least currently) and especially some of the strings for the Training Mission, it is a bit difficult to get it localised. Nevertheless, I want to provide a few sample screenshots of where this has worked out fine, even if I had to do a bit of out-of-the-box thinking. Note on stealthing a warehouse with 2 guards - Original, not fixed Note on stealthing a warehouse with 2 guards - Updated, fixed A letter to brother Jarvis - Worked fine originally, no need for fixing * Elevator note - Fixed Injury risk note - Original, not fixed Injury risk note - Updated, fixed Note on moss arrow usage, page 1 - Original, not fixed Note on moss arrow usage, page 2 - Original, not fixed Note on moss arrow usage, page 1 - Fixed, edited, but nothing left out Note on moss arrow usage, page 2 - Fixed, edited, but nothing left out Note on flashbomb usage, page 1 - Fixed Note on flashbomb usage, page 2 - Fixed Note on noisemaker distractions - Original, not fixed Note on noisemaker distractions - Fixed, edited, nothing left out, but needs a slight tweak ** * - I've noticed a few minor font-related typos in the final sentences on the screenshot, but these have been already repaired since I took it. Will update the screenshot when I'll have time. ** - The slight tweak needed being that I apparently have enough space to reintroduce the blank line between the title and the text. I don't like cramming text in these readables, and whenever at least some space can be spared, I prefer to spare it (though space is at a premium in most shorter readables, due to the limitations of the strings). 2.2 b.) The Tears od St. Lucia THE TEARS OF ST. LUCIA - READABLES Disappointing bit of news: After testing my l10n addon for the mission, I realised that the varied fonts are going to pose an even bigger problem. This time, it isn't just missing diacritical letters. Effectivelly, none of the readables (at least those that I had time to find and view) showed any of the translated text. All readables remained in English. So far, I've only had experiences with how the translated text looked like within the fonts used in the Training Mission, which uses about 3 different fonts max. St. Lucia uses a lot more custom fonts, and aside from Carleton, none of the fonts from Training reappear in St. Lucia. I was in for a cold shower... Message from John to Sophie 1 Message from John to Sophie 2 This readable is in the "Shopping List" font. Letter to father Brenard This readable is in the "Andrew Script" font. Tears of St. Lucia soup recipe This readable is in the "Popsies" font. Untranslatable readable (ad on outside of a house) This one actually isn't much of a biggie. It's a photoshopped image, much like the various posters and notes dotting the level. There are no strings assigned to it, so I doubt it can get a translation without remaking the asset (and it's dubious whether the player would need to read this one for any hints, unlike the readables). Not entirely sure about the font used for this ad, it's probably the "JD Hand" one or similar. THE TEARS OF ST. LUCIA - MENU & BRIEFING TEXT Untranslated custom map item in shop Tears of St. Lucia objectives and difficulty levels Tears of St. Lucia ingame objectives scroll All three of these seem to be in the "Carleton Caps only" font, typical of most TDM menus and popups (including those seen in the two FMs detailed here). Important addendum (please read): Earlier this week, Springheel explained to me why there are plenty of issues with translating a still-in-development official mission like St. Lucia. To summarise, it's a bit of a headache to regularly update everything, including the existing strings, so it's possible I might have to play the long game with these official missions. Prepare the translations if needed, but be ready it might take a while before their implementation can become technically feasible. (Ideally, having the missions in a state that is considered closed and definitive would help a lot.) Yes, this is unfortunate, but I'd rather work on something that can be finished sooner than much later. Therefore, you'll still be getting at least a stripped-down translation of the Trainining Mission, and once I get the fonts to work, possibly translations of other completed FMs (other than the two from the official campaign). 2.3) .lang files and l10n stuff for the translated missions (Training Mission, Tears of St. Lucia) only .lang file and l10n pack for the Training Mission (2.06 compatible) coming the following week (12th-18th February) I have them largelly finished and have used them for testing (hence the screenshots above), but the GUI is more top priority now. (All the more that fixing the font issues in the FMs might take a good while longer than the much less numerous GUI font issues.) ---- Closing thoughts for now (late January 2018) I doubt I'll get all the fonts issues resolved by 2.06, so we might opt for a barebones translation without repaired diacritics (the GUI one already is, albeit only for one or two of the letters that don't work) and then fix these font issues a little later, for 2.07. I'm already doing two different versions of the texts (one with diacritics, one without), so it wouldn't be much of a time issue on my part. I can prepare the diacritics-less text for the two FMs in no time, and much of it is already done. Of the people who could help with fonts, Tels and Charisma are currently away and unavailable. I've contacted Skina, who has some practice with editing the font sets, so I might eventually patch all the missing letters and get the whole thing to work well with the translated GUI and translated texts in FMs. In the absence of Tels, Grayman also seems to know a bit about this area, but I'm not sure how much. I'm all very new to fixing issues with fonts and it might take me a while to fix those issues. Which brings me to what I wrote in the first of these three paragraphs: As things currently stand, it is highly probable a Slovak release with repaired diacritics will only show up in 2.07. So, it might still be a bit of a wait. However, I want to ensure that the Training Mission, at the very least, gets a (for now) "without diacritics" translation release for 2.06, alongside the GUI translation release for that same upcoming version. ---- P.S. I am hosting the screenshots via Mediafire. If some of the screenshots don't load, even if they loaded perfectly well before, it's a problem of the hosting service, not your computer.

A theory: I think a lot of people either started or re-committed themselves to grand creative projects at about the same time during the first few months the pandemic lockdowns. That caused a surge of both high quality projects being completed and creators finding themselves in burnout during the last year, due to life returning somewhat to normal with the accompanying loss of free time. I suspect things will pick up slightly in the latter half of 2023 as the people who didn't finish their projects recover enough stamina for another push. Expect a few years of weird boom-bust cycles going forward as the world recovers from the pandemic pinch and the resulting shockwaves (and I'm not just talking about TDM FMs either).

Just my two cents, but savegame mechanics are a rather fundamental part of game design, and missions should be designed around such fundaments. Just adding savegame restrictions on top of a mission that isn't designed for that is neither creative nor fun. And whether it makes the mission more challenging also depends on the mission. In regards to implementation there are already means for mission authors to alter the savegame behaviour, and therefore players can, if they feel the desire, create mods to add such stuff. On the examples you listed: chronos mode: Having a timer that runs down may encourage the player to just wait. This will become tiresome pretty soon as the mission has to have elements engaging the player in moving forward. If the mission doesn't has this as it isn't designed for that... lethal mode: This approach means that the amount of savegames is tied to the amount of health potions available. As they are mostly placed in a rather thoughtless manner (they are for example part of some prefabs), the changes in gameplay will be erratic. treasure mode: Similar to the above loot placement is completely erratic in most missions. The amounts placed as well as the value normally don't follow any logical order and therefore saving tied to the loot amount found will have very different effects depending on the mission it gets used in. ironman mode: Length and difficulty of missions differ heavely. Some also include parcour like parts or a high amount of verticality, both of which makes dying more likely. Restricting it to one save without taking these aspects into consideration is pretty erratic either. As the person who both suggested as well as implemented the possibility for mappers to modify how saving in their fms work I may add that it was never my intention that this gets used to increase difficulty (it's an artificial approach similar to kill or ko restrictions and no good game design imho) added on top of existing missions A specific game mechanic isn't good or bad per se, it doesn't guarantee you fun or challenge. It is a tool that has to be properly used. My impression is that due to the lack of stealth games many people relied on playing games like thief (or fms or tdm) over and over again, getting bored or aren't challenged after a while and started to invent house rules to get more entertainment out of it. This led to all those, I never kill, I never get detected, I leave everything behind the way I have found it etc... players. Players who restrict themselves to have fun, which basically means that the game as it is isn't fun anymore. More tools (like the possibility to alter savegame mechanics) allow mappers to try to move away from the standarized gameplay, mix it with other things or other genres to get even experienced players out of their comfort zone and into an engaging experience (something that is very common in board games, but doesn't happen all too often even in professional computer game design). One that may cause them to make use of their possibilities again instead of restricting themselves by not using them at any means because they know the game would get boring pretty quickly if they do.

@wesp5I was actually responding to Oktokolo. I am all with you that the setup as is isn't optimal. Similar to the ai's acuity it would be best if mappers would adjust the respective values for their fms. I don't think that is the case mostly, although I may admit that I never really checked. I know that I haven't done it either in my fms back in the day (in addition to a dozen other things I messed up )