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heh i was thinking the same though it might just have been a glitch when writing the names are pretty similar. But for correctness it is called the dark engine and the newer version that allows us to run these beauties on win10/11 is called newdark. newdark is kinda interresting as it just suddenly popped up on a french forum some time ago by an anonymous developer with the alias le corbeau who allegedly got his hands on the original source code and started updating it for modern OS. this was the original thread i believe -> https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085 bikerdude was on that forum to when the patch hit i noticed hehe.

Okay, I had no idea, I have googled it up now and you are right, to my own surprise. Done, I´ve put some paragraphs which were previously not in spoiler tags into spoilers.

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

We will look at some of this stuff, but SPOILER tags, please!!!

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

This may make sense in that the performance impact of the volumetric effect can scale with how much of the effect is filling the screen. We shipped with a “performance mode” but had to setup the entities by hand to do it (so it’s not perfect). If you change the LOD detail settings to “Low” or “Lowest” this will disable certain lights, particles and such that can be very heavy to render. You can try these settings and see if you notice an improvement. If not sending us some pictures of heavy areas (with spoiler tags please) will be helpful with tuning these “performance modes” in subsequent patches. Thanks for playing!

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.

Interesting, although I'm not sure what to make of that. One of my favorite games (The Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena) was published by Atari, and, they don't even seem to care to keep the activation servers running much. Or remove/change the copy protection, which doesn't work at all on Windows 11. I really hope that Nightdive delivers at the end of May... I'm not one of the shit storm crowd (it's absolutely horrible on the Steam forums...), but, 7 years of development is a long time, and delaying the release obviously has become a bit of a habit, to say the least.

(I apologize for the odd poll question layout. I wasn't able to add five yes-no questions, because polls are limited to three questions.) Hi everyone, I've recently been working on some patches for issues that I've read about from players on the TDM and TTLG forums — and Discord. My goal is to make it as easy as possible for players, especially new players and those who need usability/accessibility options, to find what they need in order to have a better TDM experience. I've already written the GUI and game engine code for these settings, which I've been using in my personal build. The reason for this poll and discussion is to both guide the finalization of my work and collect data to help inform the dev team. Which patches I submit depend on the outcome of this poll, discussion, and what the dev team agrees to accept. Once decided, I can coordinate with the dev team. I've attached screenshots of what the new settings menu would look like if all of the settings are accepted. Below, I have detailed each menu setting, so you can have an easier time understanding each one. Very important to keep in mind: None of these settings change TDM default behavior. They are all opt-in. If you are already happy with the behavior of 2.10, 2.11, etc. and these menu settings are accepted, nothing will change for you. Rename "Always Run" to "Run Mode" with options "None, Always, Toggle" After 2.11 was released, @i30817 requested that "toggle run" be added to the settings menu. Its cvar is already in TDM as "in_toggleRun" (same as Doom 3). I propose renaming the "Always Run" setting to "Run Mode" with options: "None", "Always", and "Toggle". None = in_alwaysRun 0; in_toggleRun 0 Always = in_alwaysRun 1; in_toggleRun 0 Toggle = in_alwaysRun 0; in_toggleRun 1 Show Blackjack Helper @Wellingtoncrab suggested that the new blackjack helper be added to the settings menu. Its cvar was added to 2.11 as "tdm_blackjack_indicate". More info: It's the new blackjack helper added to 2.11. When the game detects that the blackjack can be used for a successful hit or KO, the blackjack will rise slightly. I propose a "Yes/No" setting for this. Slider for "View: Head Bob" @ChronA requested a way to disable head bobbing, because a viewer watching him play was having severe motion sickness. Also, there was a bug in TDM that made setting the head bob in the console not stick after loading a saved game. (Even with 2.11, if a mission overrides the "tdm_player_thief.def" file and sets "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", "pm_bobup", and other cvars, it will override player preferences.) As far back as 2008, players have had trouble setting head bob. Another one from 2018. At the end of 2022, @Shadowex3 registered just to voice the need for a way to control head bob. I propose that a slider be added to adjust the amount of head bob. This would use a new "pm_headbob_mod" cvar with a value between 0.0 and 1.0 (default 1.0, no change). The "pm_headbob_mod" would be a multiplier for "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", and "pm_bobup". The advantage to this approach is that missions like Volta 2 and Hazard Pay would not need to adjust their "tdm_player_thief.def" files for head bob to work properly. And, the player can still adjust "pm_bobroll", "pm_bobpitch", and "pm_bobup" as they like. Slider for "View: Mantle Roll" This is similar to head bob for those who are sensitive to motion. Its cvar was added to 2.11 as "pm_mantle_roll_mod". A Thief player on Discord said, "2.11 will have a cvar to tune down the mantling animation at last." I propose that a slider be added for "pm_mantle_roll_mod". Auto-Search Bodies @Zaratul requested the "auto-search bodies" feature from Thief 1 & 2. Its cvar was added to 2.12 dev16783-10307 as "tdm_autosearch_bodies". I did a poll on the a Thief Discord server and roughly 20% of players there use the Thief auto-search bodies feature. I propose a menu setting for this, so that players coming from Thief 1 & 2 can easily find it.

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.

@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.

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

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).

Above 3 items are released now, on the "Barks" thread: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21740-english-subtitles-for-ai-barks/&do=findComment&comment=483331

Instead of that, you could, in that time period, start learning your own missions and in doing so become more active on the forums, learning from others. It's also great to understand how things work in the engine, when you play. It might spoil some immersion though.. Or learn to build games with other engines, like Godot for example.

Keep in mind also that mission size, and complexity have increased dramatically since the beginning. For a lot of veteran mappers, it can take over a year to get a map made and released. The last dozen missions have for the most part been pretty massive, with new textures, sounds, scripts, models etc. We seem to be long past the point of people loading up the tools, and banging out a mission in a few weeks that's very barebones. We still do see some of those, but I noticed in the beta mapper forums and on Discord, that mappers seem to make these maps, but don't release them, and instead use the knowledge gained to make something even better. Could just be bias on my part scrolling through the forums and discord server though.

I really knew that & shouldn't have said it, but thank you for correcting that. Oh wow, how did I not hear about EV_GetLocation() before? That's great! As for the performance part, stgatilov makes a good point. If you want to keep running track of the AI's location, you have to keep the script running in a loop, which can really eat up up cycles. (Performance was one of our big concerns with the Location script itself because of that.) One thing I'd think about is having the script or EV_GetLocation function called only when an AI is ready to make a bark, and it quickly gets its location from there and makes the bark, and then it's done. Then it's only a one-shot script or function call, which is always better if you can do it. The catch there is I think that'd call for a custom AI script. The issue is if the a future version of the game ever updates that AI script, the custom scripts won't be updated in that version. But since AI scripts should be self-contained, I mean changes almost always take deprecated old stuff into account so it doesn't break old FMs, a custom AI script shouldn't break the FM with new versions of the game. Those AI just won't have any new bells or whistles, which may still be worth it. Or you just quickly add the new things in and kick out a new version if you need to. Of course another option is that new functionality is added to the core game itself with some new spawnargs added to AI, where barks can be made Location specific. For that matter, the AI scripts might be updated to be more friendly to adding barks to existing AI generally, now that we have a good text-to-voice app to make them. Then all mappers get the ability to do this. That might be nice, if it isn't a big performance hit or otherwise troublesome.

I wonder if it would be possible to alter the Conversation process, to make it more friendly to subtitlers and conversation authors? So currently (and abstractly): "wait until finished" is clipDuration + betweenClipSpace, where betweenClipSpace is hardcoded to 0.2 seconds and based on reasonable audio flow in a real-life conversation. Suppose this was changed to: "wait until finished" is MAX(clipDuration + betweenClipSpace, subtitleDuration + betweenSubtitleSpace) where subtitleDuration is the clipDuration including any extension (due to 1-sec rule or specific extension ask) betweenSubtitleSpace is a temporal visual gap between subtitles appearing in the same slot. Candidate values might be 0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.15. This could be ultimately hardcoded and apply to all FMs, but maybe should be a CVAR for initial evaluation. I think this would be closer to what @datiswous had in miind.

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake? And thank god they got rid of unity, that engine is total trash garbage on anything over 60 fps. Just spend 5 minutes on steam forums for Unity project games, and there's just thousands of people complaining about poor performance, stuttering etc.

This is the first idea that comes to me. The easiest thing you can getkey from the AI is the literal xyz coordinate location. So you could have a script make a simple distance check from that to the player's position via good old Pythagoras's Theorem. If you trigger a "nearby" state at a distance that's close enough, that will probably put them in the same room or anyway nearby. And you can get the player's location, so you can still modulate the barks based on that. In the background of what you're talking about is that with the new text-to-voice AI they have now, we can make new barks that sound exactly like the original voice actor. That makes it possible to add to existing AI barks, so we can make convo barks in the same voice as the system barks, or we can make new system barks, etc. I think there's a lot of good potential with that for unique and more interesting AI interactions in FMs.

For inline, if there is the additional parameter, that specified duration (whether longer or shorter than 1 second) over-rides the 1-second rule. (Thus, if for a future "effect" sound of footstep, you wanted to provide a "(clop)" subtitle every 1/4 second, say, you still could; you'd just have to be explicit.) @stgatilov, @nbohr1more, @Dragofer: The potential to get the foregoing capability - or not - will affect how I strike a balance between authoring verbatim and shortened subtitles. So, I need to get feedback ASAP as to whether or not this is reasonably possible for TDM 2.12. If so, I'll add it to the bugtracker as a New Feature request, and leave more subtitles as verbatim. If not, I'll continue shortening affected subtitles.

i see a bluefilter on the screenshots. is there a way to add this filter to other fms via console too?

Here is the whole subtitle set (including srt files). @Sotha has no time to review this, so people can just test it to see if I made mistakes. It's mostly one conversation. Just unzip the contained subtitle directory inside the fms directory and it should work. I tested it and it fully works, but maybe I made spelling errors that I don't notice. Edit: subtitles added to mission.

Probably the .script file that's needed, but unfortunately can't be included with a prefab. Maybe there's a comment somewhere in the prefab (or in the wiki or forums) that says what script it needs and where to find it. (The similar combination setup I used earlier doesn't involve "slot", so clearly uses a different script that I what I have.)