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There are 10 released FMs that use custom arrow scripts for a variety of reasons. With this current dev build, if you try to use the bow, it just doesn't work. It's broken

Why? Do you have resentment toward these 10 missions in particular? Do you not care if you break any and all missions on your whim and then release a public build? Breaking existing missions and then making a public dev build available with broken FMs doesn't really seem like a great thing to do. I get that missions get broken from time to time because improvements need to be made to the core game, but this is essentially a public release (even though it is a "dev build" it is still a "public dev build" available to anyone and everyone, and with that comes certain expectations). You didn't even notify the affected FM authors beforehand. This is just not cool.

What is the problem with bugtracker 5600? Does the player start without a bow now?

Innovation is good: someone has a new idea (or need) and executes it to the best of his/her knowledge and ability. When we start borrowing and adopting other people's innovations we are no longer innovating but creating a trend, for better or worse. Stgatilov is touching the tip of this, still small, but growing by the mission iceberg.

As a matter of fact, I implemented passing info from briefing to game and from game to debriefing: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6509#c16671 At some moment I think I should put this info to wiki... This will be available in the future dev build. P.S. By the way, you can also override which .map file to start, although I'm very skeptical that this feature is worth the trouble you'll get in maintainability. Small variations of the same map should be better implemented by writing the "main" game script.

If it really crashes, then you can record crashdump and send it to someone with debugger. This often allows to learn what is wrong (but not necessarily where is the error).

Never thought it was enabled.....thanks! Stupid camera lens "simulation" effects (bloom when overdone, chromatic aberration, flares, dirt, etc.....even DISTORSION of the entire viewport in Atlas Fallen - it's only acceptable in a sniping UI) The only thing rivaling in "detest" feeling with camera lens effects is the pre-sharpening pass in case of Temporal AA (Chernobylite) or Depth of Field too (yes, I see you Dishonored 2 / DotO)

Disable Lens Flares For those making their own with Reshad or just dislike the look. Thief Game>Config>ThiefEngine.ini Look under [SystemSettings] LensFlares=True to LensFlares=False ON OFF

I like the Transition from dusk to night in the Prologue and the fact that it didn't last long. Hiding and stealing during the day feels weird to me. I couldn't digest Mankind Divided as much as I liked the Artistic touches for this reason. The Prague map felt so Arbitrary.

Oh, some implementations might work a little differently from what I remember the term megatexture referring to. From what I used to know, it meant turning the entire level into a single model or set that uses a single enormous texture. While the concept may have its upsides, there are two major issues that negate any benefit in my view: The first is system resources, you don't benefit from any reuse as every pixel is unique, the only way to do it at scale is with a gigantic image thus a huge performance drop in pretty much every department. The second issue is that level design becomes far harder and more specialized... while here in TDM we only need to draw a bunch of brushes and place some modules to make a level, an engine based on megatextures would require level designers to sculpt and paint the entire world in software like Blender which is far more difficult and we likely wouldn't have even half of the FM creators we do today, even for those that know how to do it imagine the task of manually painting every brick on every home and so on.

Completely disagree it was a very good idea that unfortunately came too early with idSoftware RAGE 1 because hardware was still and is not truly ready for it. Megatexture is for textures, what UE5 nanite is for geometry, it permits huge amounts of texture data in a level and even totally unique textures per each surface, no repetition unlike older methods. MT isn't simple a giant texture slapped unto a level, it is a type of virtual texturing system, the MT is a huge "texture" but it's data, is not all drawn on a level at the same time, like a normal one is, it is broken into smaller squared peace's and those peace's into even smaller ones for LOD aka mipmapping, then those peace's are streamed in, in real time has the player moves around. Again IMO It is a very cool idea and if the hardware was fast enough, to stream it fast and it was possible to compress the MT data, to very small amounts and still keep good quality, it would be a fantastic system for very unique levels. Rage 1 world may look bad at close distance, but at medium to large distances imo it looks fantastic and totally unique.

Rage didn’t have terrible loading times but people complained that it took awhile for the texture fidelity to catch up. Doom 2016 tried to fix that by front loading more but they went overboard with that.

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

I think that this discussion is probably similar to discussions that idSoftware themselves had about the challenges of texture storage in engines that heavily rely on Normal Maps for real-time lighting. The conclusion was Megatextures ( later known as partially resident textures ) but the suggestion was a little too ahead of its time. Heck, early Megatexture games would probably benefit from detail textures more than idTech4 because they capped the pixel density to allow larger map-sized textures. Many modern games have caught up and use partially resident textures but do so in a more conservative way thus making them part of a hierarchy of texture usage methods that includes texture atlases and traditional tiled textures.

Venturing beyond the base game... A candle set consists of a candle holder and a candle attached to it. Core candle holders, candles and candle sets are properly named in v1.0 but mappers sometimes create their own candle sets and because of how these object are handled by the engine we end up with a "Candle holder" on screen. We can approach this puzzle in different ways but for the sake of simplicity in v1.1 everything is a "Candle", including single candle holders. Find v1.1 attached to this post. Remember you need the Core Essentials for the mod to work. z_nameless_objects_mod_v1.1.pk4

Also, related to font improvement, I've just released "ExportFontToDoom3All256", a reconstruction of an earlier but now lost tool variant. This is described and available in the wiki article ExportFontToDoom3 I tested that tool using one of the TDM FM fonts, Andrew Script, for which a TTF file is available. I generated a fresh set of bitmaps (newly including any available Latin-1 characters). I also mucked about with FontForge, to reconfigure that TTF to be ordered like the TDM custom codepage. However, Andrew Script is missing a fair number of Latin-1 glyphs, so it would take some work to make it good (whether by editing in FontForge or post-export as bitmaps). I'm putting that aside for now, since the jury is out on whether Western language support in FMs and their fonts will become viable (see Western language support in 2024?). Instead, I plan to turn my font-improvement-for-2.13 attention to Stone 24pt, which (because its used in HUD captions) is more clearly worthwhile to work on. Looks like I'll have to convert the Stone DDS to TGA as a prerequisite to bitmap editing.

@Wellingtoncrab - thanks for the fast response! Thanks again for all your hard work - I'm looking forward to driving on with this FM!

@Ansome's question is correct. Nothing in real life ever has a perfectly sharp corner, and one of the pieces of advice often given to newbie modellers trying to make things look realistic and avoid the "obvious CG" look, is to give sharp edges a tiny bevel so they look like something that might be manufactured in real life. The problem you've got in DarkRadiant is (1) dealing with tiny bevels using regular brush geometry is awkward, and (2) brushes aren't smoothed at all (unlike the cube on the right which actually has full smooth shading which you don't notice because of the tiny bevel). So unless you're willing to create imported 3D models with smoothed bevelled edges and place them on the corner of your buildings, adding bevels in brushwork might be more trouble than it's worth. Probably the most important things with brickwork corners is to make sure the bricks line up properly. There's nothing more obviously CG than a plastered-on brickwork texture which just ends in an unrealistic column of cut-off bricks, with mortar joints that are completely unaligned with the brickwork on the adjacent face.

I agree, that is an issue. It would be better if the system handling briefings/readables could be revised as you indicated, to handle individual sentences as #str_, rather than whole pages. Baring that, having a key field like "#str_This is a whole page\nfull of text that goes on and on and on [...] until done" would appear as a very long single line. That is nasty to look at in the Readables Editor, and even worse in the .langs file, where the too-long text would appear twice on a line (once with #str_ prefix of English version, another in translation). So for those, it would be better in the short term to stick to symbolic keys, e.g., existing #str_12345 or revised form #str_myfm_book_of_spells_page_1 I might add, in the longer term, enhancing the Readable Editor to use the .lang files would be an enormous improvement for FM authors and a significant accomplishment. A fair amount of work though, but probably doable in increments over several releases.

Could people share some examples of Darkradiant window layouts you use? A screenshot is fine. I thought of making a wiki page with a couple of example layouts and what are the steps to make them happen in Darkradiant.

I'm just here to gush embarrassingly about another Wellington Crab mission. MD2: LHMN is a delicious bit of offbeat strangeness, dreamlike, surreal, but made odd sense to me at the right moments, so that I made it though the entire thing by myself this time, instead of being constantly (though enjoyably) overwhelmed as in Iris. Of course, it's lovingly crafted and peppered with clever little bits of window dressing that might seem distracting and extraneous in a lesser mission. I still have little idea what the overall story was, but I enjoyed every minute of the experience. Wellington Crab, you are a genius and an artist, and I look forward keenly to your next mission.

Maybe have a lang file check script with suggested fixes. Or even a console command for checking translation file compatibility.

One of the problems with the old #str_number system, that would not be automatically solved in the new #str_phrase system, is lack of versioning/history. For example, suppose in the FM I provide a new string: #str_Mother! which (by magic TBD, ideally in DR) generates this placeholder in all the .lang files: "#str_Mother!" "Mother!" The translator in the fr.lang file later does this: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" Still later, the FM author revises the string in DR: "str_Mother!!!" In a naive implementation, this breaks the link to the existing translation(s), which becomes orphan in all the .langs, and creates a new entry: "#str_Mother!!!" "Mother!!!" OK, how could we do better? Case 1 (as above): the FM author knows the change is trivial, and so (at revision time in DR) might ask the translations to be retained but marked for review. So maybe the fr.lang files gets: // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother!!!" "Mere!" // Needs minor review with removal of the orphans (after they become comments and moved to before their replacements) Case 2, where the revision is not trivial: the FM author (at revision time in DR) might ask the translations to be replaced by english but marked for review, e.g.: #str_Mother of Pearl! causes the fr.lang files to have (with orphan removal as case 1): // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother of Pearl!" "Mother of Pearl!" // NEEDS REDO Then the translator could eventually fix it: // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother of Pearl!" "Nacre!" // Done 2025-03-14 by Henri

I mentioned this elsewhere, but just a historical note: the existing i18n.pl conversion script expects only a numeric value after #str_ in its pattern matching regex (and possibly method of hashing). I do think @datiswous's idea to have key/value pairs with values like: "#str_Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." is a good way forward. Maybe with this version, DR could actually choose over time to provide some .lang support. And probably the engine would have to create hash tables to avoid slow string matching with these long non-numeric strings. (Oh, one other thing, since we're talking about The Outpost. When I played it earlier the month under 2.12, my screen would periodically go black for a second or two, every minute or two. I wonder if anyone else sees this, or just my odd Intel graphics chip?)