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I suggest you use the term "I", to make clear that it is something YOU want, and that you speak for yourself. But, as wesp5 mentioned, I don't really know what this is about, at all. And, I'm also wondering about all the newly registered people lately, who just arrived at this forum, and already want to revolutionize this mod. This is a thing I noticed 2 or 3 years ago, and which hasn't been present in the 15 years I play this mod and frequent these forums now. Really seems like a common thing these days, to not knock on the door, but kick it in, and stomp right in.

This is the same scheme the most radical voices in this debate have been asking for from the start. (Myself among them.) I thought it was settled that having extinguish on short click created a back-compatibility risk for a small subset of old FMs. I think the concern was putting out candles that are needed as a light source to progress, and then not having flint to relight them. That's why the current (mechanically and cognitively sub-optimal) compromise was selected. Am I remembering right? If so, let's just all reread the thread history rather than rehash this argument over again.

TDM has tons of textures from "free" texture resources that do not allow redistribution and cannot be incorporated into a commercial project. Someone would need to create a huge replacement pack of textures that do not break the look of existing missions and do not infringe on the copyrighted textures. Also, many artists who contributed to this project do not want 3rd party entities to use their work in commercial projects. They intended the models, textures, sounds, animations to be exclusively used for Darkmod content. You would either have to replace ALL assets or contact every contributor and ask them to re-license their assets. Many contributors are no longer active with the project and haven't visited the forums in years so it would be no easy feat. I cannot speak to Debian policy but I think that they treat installers that add non-free content the same as non-free content itself. One could argue that Steam is such an installer but I guess Debian would counter that there are a few fully Libre games on Steam. I think Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint need to consider a repo that allows for games (etc) that include non-libre content but intentionally offer this content for free to the community with no stipulations other than "don't try to sell it as a product".

The gamepad implementation allows for a great degree of flexibility to personalize settings, aside from a few minor issues that I mentioned here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22337-gamepad-bindings/ I would say that playing TDM with a gamepad works very well, especially considering that it was implemented as experimental and hasn't been changed since then. If I could, I'd go back to 2021-you and congratulate you on buying that gamepad. I notice that your DarkmodPadbinds.cfg looks very different from mine...

It seems like more and more "thief" and "thief players" is becoming a short hand to dismiss community members earnest desire to improve the game - which happens to be a barely legally distinct "thief style" game which was made by thief fans for thief fans and is "designed to simulate the stealth gameplay of Thief". Who is the predominant player base of the game supposed to be beyond fans of the thief games? Is there some better avenue to find feedback for the game beyond this forum? FOSS and linux forums? I have seen maybe half a dozen posts from that segment. I am a thief fan, I play thief fms, my association with those games is what drives me to play and make things for this game. Are we supposed to pretend the original games are not a huge reason why most of us are here at all? TL;DR version:

I wonder what the benefit is of a zone approach over a speaker approach. source It does not say why it's more powerful though.

In the early versions there was an initial pop of sound right at the moment of transition, then an immediate drop to zero sound, and then the fade in, or that's what I thought was happening. I never really understood the source of the problem to begin with, I guessed what I said above, and the shader business was a speculation about how to fix it if that really was the problem. I don't recall hearing that kind of pop since like 2010 though. So I figured it fixed itself at some point. It may have been that my laptop at the time was very, very slow, or something like that too.

Thanks! 1) Doing LONG_PRESS PAD_A (what I, for lack of knowledge, call "jump-mantle" or "_jumpmantle") differs from doing PRESS PAD_A ("_jump"). "_jumpmantle" differs from "_mantle", so they must be mapped to different button-calls. "_jumpmantle" differs from "_jump", so they must also be mapped to different button-calls. This appears to be the case, but it is not evident (or changeable) in DarkmodPadbinds.cfg. "_jumpmantle" seems to be hard coded to always connect to the same button as "_jump" but with a long press. It is as if bindPadButton PRESS PAD_A "_jump" is not actually just binding PRESS PAD_A to "_jump", but rather interpreted as "link PAD_A (regardless of button press time) to behave exactly like keyboard SPACE for short and long presses". I would have expected the default DarkmodPadbinds.cfg to explicitly read: bindPadButton PRESS PAD_A "_jump" bindPadButton LONG_PRESS PAD_A "_jumpmantle" bindPadButton PRESS PAD_B "_crouch" bindPadButton LONG_PRESS PAD_B "_mantle" ... but neither LONG_PRESS PAD_A or "_jumpmantle" is listed in the file. If there are actions "_jump" and "_mantle", I suppose there must also be an action "_jumpmantle" since it is possible for the player to do all those movements: * "_mantle" does the movements "crouch on the high surface, then stand up" * "_jumpmantle" idoes the movements "jump slightly forward, then land standing on the high surface" * "_jump" idoes the movements "jump up, then land exactly where you started" If the actions "_jump" and "_moveup" are not synonymous, then perhaps the action "_moveup" is what i call "_jumpmantle"? 2) Thanks for the link! It was useful in more than one way. I'll link to that page from https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Bindings_and_User_Settings#Gamepad_Default_Bindings if I can get an account on the wiki, which proved more difficult than i thought (https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22327-how-can-i-create-an-account-on-the-tdm-wiki/). However, it does not answer my question how to find out the name ("<button>") used for a button on my gamepad. Basically, I would need to press the button on my gamepad and some program could tell me "That button is called 'PAD_A'". In my case, I have a gamepad "Logitech F310" (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logitech_F310_Gamepad.jpg) which has a "Logitech button" (see image) that I want to use. I was hoping to find out the "button name" for that button and then edit DarkmodPadbinds.cfg to map it to a function. 3) ... but if that button has an "unusual name" that TDM does not recognize, then it may perhaps not work. E.g. if that button is called "PAD_LOGITECH" and TDM cannot recognize that name, then I cannot map anything to it via DarkmodPadbinds.cfg. Using QJoyPad I can map any keyboard key to it instead, as a workaround, but I cannot map MODIFIER to it (since MODIFIER cannot be set to a keyboard key). If current implementation is still called "experimental", then I must say it works very well; @cabalistic: kudos for that! I may not have continued playing TDM had it not worked with a gamepad.

It is possible that this is a setting that needs to be activated to work: https://mantisbt.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23221

Mandrasola is a small sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter steals some herbal products from a smuggler. The mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank Bikerdude, BrokenArts and Ocn for playtesting and voice acting. Thanks goes naturally to everyone contributing and making TDM possible. This mission occurs chronologically before the Knighton's Manor, making it the first mission in the Thomas Porter series. Events in chronological order are: Mandrasola, The Knighton's Manor, The Beleaguered Fence, The Glenham Tower and The Transaction. The winter came early and suddenly this year. Weeks of strong blizzards and extremely harsh cold weather hit Bridgeport hard. With the seas completely frozen, a rare occurence indeed, most of the City harbor commerce has stopped completely. Vessels are stuck in the ice and no ship can leave or enter the City, resulting in the availability imported goods declining and their prices skyrocketing. One of these imported items is Mandrasola, a rare herbal product, which is imported overseas from the far southern continents. Mandrasola has its uses in alchemical cures and poisons, but mostly this substance is used for its narcotic qualities by commoners and even the nobility. The problem with Mandrasola is that excessive use is extremely addicting and the withdrawal effects are most grievious. Many are utterly incapable of stopping using Mandrasola and are transformed into quivering human ruins if they do no get their daily dose. And now this expensive and rare substance is running out from the whole City. Me and my fence, Lark Butternose, would love to grab this monopoly to ourselves: selling the last few doses in the City would probably be worth a fortune. According to Lark's sources, there remains only one smuggling lord who still has Mandrasola in stock. The problem is that this individual maintains an exclusive clandestine operation and only supplies a few nobles. Despite our best information gathering efforts we couldn't learn who the smuggler is and where he or she operates. Luckily we have an alternate plan. While searching for Mandrasola related information, we learned that a noblewoman called Lady Ludmilla is addicted to the substance and has paid high prices for small amounts of it. We also know that she has visited frequently someone in the Tanner's Ward waterfront, and since she goes to the area personally we believe she is visiting the smuggler. The plan is simple: I must monitor Ludmilla's most likely entryway to the Waterfront and then follow her to the smugglers hideout. I'd better be very careful around Ludmilla. She must not realise I'm following her or she probably won't lead me to her dealer. Hurting her is also out of the question. After she leads me to the smuggler's hideout, I can take my time to break in carefully and steal all the Mandrasola I can find. While I'm there it wouldn't be a bad idea to grab some loose valuables as well. I've now waited in the blistering cold for a few hours already. Looks like there are a few city watch patrols in the area to complicate matters... I think I heard a womans voice beyond the north gate. That must be lady Ludmilla, I haven't seen many ladies in these parts. I'd better get ready.. Links: Use the ingame downloader to get it. WARNING! Someone always fails to use spoiler tags. I do not recommend reading any further until you've played the mission.

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.

Then the characters that you removed the pixels from would be less-well shaped. The right solution is to change the metadata around character spacings. That's deep in the weeds. And probably better pursued as part of generating a 12pt Stone image. If you want to take this on, I can send you some links. I did some prelim research on this last year, related to computing the width of a Stone string, but never tried to do a font edit or gen, because a lot of steps seemed unclear. EDIT: Some of my thinking here is that maybe the scaling down from the available 24pt Stone image to a desired 12pt is introducing artifacts. Also, backing off a bit from what I said above, maybe not removing pixels, but shifting any problematic character glyth sideways within an image, would fix things well enough. EDIT2: These are the main forum links I found helpful The "Stone Print" source font in ttf form is available, e.g., from www.fontpalace.com. Useful Doom 3 tutorials are #10 "Using custom fonts" & #11 "Editing fonts". Tools include "Export Font to Doom3 - v1.02" and Q3Font. Some of this stuff comes from the wayback machine of the internet archive. I can get you copies. Sorry, can't help much with DDS editing tools.

Sure! My first draft for a wiki article "Lightgem" would look like this: " [[File:Hud.jpg|right|thumb|The lightgem is shown as part of the [[The_Dark_Mod_Gameplay#HUD_(Heads-Up_Display)|HUD]]:<br/>2. A breath indicator when underwater<br/>3. The lightgem itself<br/>4. A health indicator.<br/>Two wings flank the lightgem indicating if the player is crouching.]] The '''lightgem''' is a light indigator on the [[The_Dark_Mod_Gameplay#HUD_(Heads-Up_Display)|HUD]] and an important part of [[The Dark Mod Gameplay]]. The lightgem itself indicates how visible the player is. The visibility is based on how much light is hitting the player, but also depends on whether you are crouched, moving, have a weapon drawn, or being under water. The wings on either side of the gem indicates when the player is crouching. Below the lightgem is a health indicator. When the player is injured, a small red bar appears below the lightgem. The bar shows how much health you have left and decreases from right to left. Health potions and various types of food will replenish health. The bar remains visible until the health is fully restored. Above the lightgem is a breath indicator. When the player is under water, a small blue bar appears above the lightgem. The bar shows how much air you have left and decreases from right to left. When the bar runs out, you'll begin to take damage. Surfacing or using a Breath Potion will restore your air bar. The lightgem is an object that the player always carries and is not visible in the [[inventory]]. A user can disable the lightgem and the wings in Settings - Gameplay - General - Hide Lightgem. The health indicator and breath indicator will remain visible. [[Category:Equipment]] " (With the caveat that I would need to use the preview-functionality to fix any formatting errors I may have made before publishing it.) I would also * link "BREATH INDICATOR", "LIGHTGEM", and "HEALTH INDICATOR" from "The_Dark_Mod_Gameplay#HUD_(Heads-Up_Display)" to the new article "Lightgem". * create "health indicator" redirecting to "lightgem" ("#redirect[[lightgem]]") * create "breath indicator" redirecting to "lightgem" I registered on The Dark Mod Bugtracker on 29 December and I have since reported 68 issues from a personal log of issues that I had assembled during hours of testing TDM 2.11. The reports are not perfect, but I think they show my intentions are good. I understand the reluctance, especially if there have been incidents of spammers on the wiki, but as an open source project relying on volunteer work it is also important to keep a low threshold for contributing to the product. If I'm not up to par, you'll discover it quickly. Or, rather, you would have already discovered it in the Bugtracker.

Hello dear people of The Dark Mod A question about the code of this lovely game. Is every bits of The Dark Mod code open sourced? And under which license? If not all and every file, then which files are open and which not? A question I could probably find out myself but if you want you may answer: what engine do you use and how easy is it for newcomers to start working on code, assets etc? Does it have to be done through the community or can we also work on our own - Is it allowed to just download/copy code and start creating things for myself? And a side question: does the TDM community have a Discord server? Thank you for clarifying. Yours mouser

The subtitles of The Cynic (aka Bernie) vocal set, are now available for eventual incorporation into TDM: testSubtitlesCynic.pk4 This male character is often snide or crabby. In addition to general barks, there are phrases for a guard of the city watch, and for a trader. Note for Integrators This release incorporates and supercedes the TDM 2.10 subtitle demo, provided by @Dragofer, with its version of tdm_ai_cynic.subs. Likewise, it obviates the need for the distribution's fm_test_subtitles_ai_cynic_dragofers_dozen.shdshd Statistics In file fm_root.subs there are 301 inlines, including: 40 with an explicit linebreak, intending 2 lines 261 without 23 of these have explicit duration extensions, as follows: 16 from 0.25 to 0.49, for 17 cps 7 capped at 0.50 seconds, for 17-20 cps none with more than 0.50 seconds, for 20 cps There are 12 SRTs, including: 10 with 2 messages 1 with 3 messages 1 with 4 messages Of the 27 total SRT messages, there are: 17 with an explicit linebreak, intending 2 lines 10 without In all, there are 313 voice clips with subtitles, showing 328 messages. Corresponding Excel File TheCynicSubtitles.xlsx This is based on Version 6 of the Excel Template for TDM bark subtitles. The "Script Subtitle" column contains Dragofer's original subtitles. About the GUI Like The Drunk, subtitle backing fields for The Cynic uses the "tabbed widget" design, with reduced main field heights, one of several design alternatives that were being discussed. For the sound source widget itself, it uses snatcher's white sector oval provided by beta3.

Yeah that's weird, as that source file is right there in the source code tree: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/tree/master/radiant/xyview Maybe I did the checkout process wrong.

If there are missing files reported, it's likely the .vcxproj needs to be updated with moved or renamed source files. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to do that (without guessing) because I only build on Linux which uses an entirely separate (CMake) build script. I don't know the cause of the other errors but I would guess they are downstream consequences of not having all the required source files in the build script.

Very interesting reading, Welli. Here is a different spin when it comes to new players. The number one selling point of TDM within its genre is content. Thanks to talented and dedicated artists such as yourself we now have around 175 self contained stories. I would say TDM crossed the barrier from medium to high selling point with the 100th release. From this point on it doesn't matter if the game offers a hundred or a thousand maps. A hundred maps is A LOT already. Want content? Look no further. Requisite fulfilled. The number two selling point is... you tell me. Free? Open Source? Multi OS? Map editor? Being maintained? Just like with any form of entertainment people will either love TDM at first sight, tolerate it and even get to like it, or simply dismiss it. No amount of small tweaks can fundamentally change TDM and certain changes may end up dividing the community. My ultimate goal here is to make this community aware of the potential of a healthy modding scene to attract artists and experts in all departments and feed hungry and demanding players. Mods can be the second selling point of TDM: thief it your way.

Edit: in post 5 I discovered Whisper which does this task MUCH better. So don't use vosk. Some of the info till post 5 is still relevant for subtitle editing in Kdenlive in general. I previously posted about this in a status update. To make it a bit more in-view for the future I post the info also in this topic. I recently figured out how to make subtitles work for missions following this wiki guide: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Subtitles You can type in the subtitle-text manually either in the .subs or .srt files (in a text-editor) or use an video editor for that (recomended for .srt). What is also possible on some advanced editors including the free and open source multiplatform (Windows, Linux and Intel-Mac) Kdenlive editor is to auto generate the subtitle text for you from the audio or video file. You can then export to an .srt file that works directly in tdm. If you want to use the subs files for shorter sentences, you can just copy text from the .srt files. In Kdenlive you can install speech to text libraries from VOSK. For this to work you have to download and install Python. Info how to do the process of installation and usage can be seen in the following video (6.5 minutes): To sum it up: Configure first time: Install Python. (on Windows) During setup, you have to select Advanced Options and there mark Add Python to environment variables (super important!). In Kdenlive go to menu settings, click on configure Kdenlive. In that configure window, click in the left menu on Speech to text. There you click on the link to download speech models. On the website ( https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models ) you can click on a model download link, but keep the click pressed and move your mouse with the link to the configure Kdenlive window. Kdenlive then asks to install the model from url. vosk-model-en-us-0.22-lgraph is probably decent for most use cases. but you can install and test them all. To use it: First load an audio or video file into the view by dragging the file in one of the audio or video bars at the bottom (video: v1, v2 or audio: a1, a2). Click on menu Project > Subtitles > Edit Subtitle tool. You see an extra Subtitles bar on top. Now you select the audio or video file (it is sellected when it is outlined with an orange border) in the specific bar and then click on menu Project > Subtitles > Speech recognition. In the Speech recognition dialog, you select the correct language model and choose option Selected clip. After generation, you can preview the generated subtitles via the top right window. Make sure it is at starter position for playback. Using an audio file, you see a black background with the subtitles on top. Now you can tweek the position and edit the text directly in the Subtitles bar. This takes up the most time. Unfortunatelly the generation is not flawless, so you have to correct some words. Tweeking the subtitles for Requiem took me hours, becouse I wanted them to line up differently. Usually the subtitles are not generated as full senteces. This looks sloppy. If you want to add subtitles quickly without spending much time on it, it can be done this way. If you want to do it right, it still takes a lot of time in my experience. To export to .srt is shown in the following video: Although actually it's just one step: Click on menu Project > Subtitles > Export subtitle file. Alternativelly you can just save the kdenlive project and then the srt is exported as well. Every save will update the srt file. I might create a wiki article about it later. Kdenlive edit window:

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/

I would prefer the tab, just because it shows more of the world unimpeded, and that unimpeded zone provides a wider vertical gap between stacked subtitles. But I could live with the alternatives: a tall background; or a ring that partially pokes above the background. But... Good question. I'm ready to fully abandon backgrounds, just because they are such a source of conflicting visions. As to how thick the outline should be, I don't think the potential for very rare color markup should be a deciding factor.

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...

The subtitles of The Drunk vocal set, with the assistance of MirceaKitsune, are now available for eventual incorporation into TDM: testSubtitlesDrunk.pk4 This male alcoholic character has a rough, gravelly voice, slow and sometimes a bit slurred or halting. Besides general barks, there are utterances as a guard of the city watch. Statistics In file fm_root.subs there are 405 inlines, including: - 59 with an explicit linebreak, intending 2 lines - 346 without Of these, only 1 needs an explicit duration extension (in the range 0.25-0.49, for 17 cps). There are 32 SRTs, including: - 27 with 2 messages - 5 with 3 messages Of the 69 total SRT messages, there are: - 23 with an explicit linebreak, intending 2 lines - 46 without In all, there are 437 voice clips with subtitles, showing 474 messages. Corresponding Excel File TheDrunkSubtitles.xlsx This is based on Version 6 of the Excel Template for TDM bark subtitles. Change to GUI New features of testSubtitlesDrunk to advance TDM 2.12beta: The oval ring showing sound source direction is now in a raised tab above the caption backing field (and matching it). That field is not as tall as it used to be, being somewhat tighter around the caption text vertically. The ring, with snatcher's sector design, and its red dot are also positioned better.

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"

Actually, you can notice in my graphic I moved the center point a couple of pixels back because otherwise there was too much "empty space", if you know what I mean. Having the red dot off by half unit compensates in a way for that. EDIT - The above statement about the red dot is BS because the dots are more far away from each other that way. I don't know, having both the center point and the red dot a little off in opposite ways looks good to me. The widget (source) isn't pixel perfect but it gives the idea that there's more room ahead of you than behind. I don't know