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I don't have a bugtracker account, so no I don't believe there is any tracking for this. I'd be willing to do the actual write-ups, but I'd need to be inducted as a bugtracker person or have someone paste them in for me. I think I'd make three separate tickets at this point? 1. flashbombed state increases the blackjacking radius (the original post) 2. flashbombed state plays its animations properly (wellingtoncrab's june 9th reply here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22738-proposal-flashbombed-ais-become-blackjackable/#findComment-502037 ) 3. flashbombs deal damage to team 9 enemies (undead, not mentioned here but another glaring issue that makes them less useful than their original TG/T2 incarnations)

I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.

in retrospect the developers are not at fault here the corporations that own them are. i would be thrilled if say EA started to treat there staff as something more than just walking ATM's and start giving them time to actually finish a product instead of forcing the corporate line of time is money so crunch crunch crunch. i lost count of how many tripple A developers got axed by them for not being able to keep up with the shareholder demands . bioware the dead space crew etc etc. also does not help that most modern games have to be hyper realistic and so take a good deal of time to build (no matter what the higher up's say). respect to those who can actually live in an environment like that id be a nervous wreck if i had to.

A Plan for Readables with AI Translations I’ve created a separate forum thread, "Proposal - Fade-In Translations for Readables", for a new style of readable more adaptable to translations. This would require engine changes, but can be faked in the short term. I plan to create custom .gui to do this for Air Pocket. And if the proposal wins favor and moves to timely implementation, to revise Air Pocket to use the new system. I'ill be pausing my posts here for a moment to build out that other thread, then come back to explore the actual AI translations for Air Pocket readables.

Testing Air Pocket with Just English Strings Why? So far, English is the only language with all #str_ done; the rest have only inventory items and shouldered names done. Preliminary testing of the just the English version is mainly because of all the manual renaming. If #str_ were generated automatically with better naming, this could be largely skipped. How? The [English] part of our emerging all.lang was copied out and became the heart of a replacement strings/english.lang. I didn’t have to bother with gen_lang processing. This works because English is restricted here to ASCII and that’s common to both all.lang [UTF-8} and english.lang [Windows-1252]. To speed testing, I added the Master Key at startup (in DR, entity key_master gets inv_map_start 1). The game was then played through in English. This is a short FM, with just a few readables and messages that don’t really change with difficulty level, so this is viable. The briefing has to be eyeballed once, and the objectives list a few times during play, to ensure all is well. Results? As expected, a few typos were introduced when editing #str in .map, .xd, .lang. files, so needed correcting. I have some thoughts about strategies for the upcoming testing in the other languages, as well as in larger FMs, but later for that.

Thanks for your response...in fact it's your latest mission that I want to play, but I need to upgrade to ver 2.13 in order to play it. Maybe it's the "impulse xx" that confuses me. It has no meaning to me. I want to customize the settings found in Dark Mod's pulldown menu's... Main Menu / Settings / Controls / etc.... I know I can do this manually, but I thought there would be a quicker way. So I'm trying to find where the default settings are stored and just copy/paste to the newer version. I don't see anything in DarkmodKeybinds.cfg that points directly to default settings (there is a lot of "binding" which I also do, but that's not what I'm talking about) Another example....once ver 2.13 is installed, the default for "speed" is "walk". I want it to be "run". Is there a file somewhere that lists all these defaults so that I can copy/paste from ver 2.12 or do I have to go through each default one at a time and change it

Inventory Item Results The AI results, generated in a flash, were successful overall. The desired output format was achieved, and the back translations detected very few problems. An example result (before alphabetic ordering), from [Italian]: "#str_fm_map_inv_key_sea_trunk" "Baule da mare" Sea chest "#str_fm_map_inv_key_galley" "Cucina di bordo" Ship’s galley "#str_fm_map_inv_key_mess" "Refettorio" Mess "#str_fm_map_inv_key_master_key" "Chìave maestra" Master key ... Caveats: A judgement of “overall success” is without ground-truthing by human translators. The back-translation uses the same AI as the forward-translation... loosely analogous to “grading its own paper”. Though told not to look at the original English when back-translating, is it cheating and lying? Revisions and Refinements Title Casing for Inventory Items. I should have explicitly prompted to generate this in the results. I manually corrected these (leaving separators like di, de, do, del in lower case), but a few cases required ChatGPT consultation to get the proper upper-case Unicode letter. Mess. Two translation needed revision, because they seemed to suggest an eating area of a much larger or luxurious ship: [German] "#str_fm_map_inv_key_mess" "Offiziersmesse" Officers’ mess [French] "#str_fm_map_inv_key_mess" "Salle à manger" Dining room Rather than rerun the whole translation, I just asked ChatGPT about these cases: On a small ship, what is the mess or eating area called in French? On a small ship, the eating area is typically called la cambuse or le carré, depending on the context: Le carré – This is the standard French nautical term for the crew's or officers’ mess (eating/living area) on a ship. It’s equivalent to the English term mess. Carré des officiers – officers' mess Carré de l’équipage – crew mess La cambuse – Often refers to the ship’s food storage or sometimes the galley (kitchen), but in some informal or small-vessel contexts, it can be used more broadly, though this is less precise for "mess." So for a small ship’s mess or dining area, the best and most nautical French term is le carré. Consequently, I just replaced "Salle à manger" with “Carré”. Likewise, in German, simply “Messe”. Master Key. This was back-translated as “Main key” in 6 of the languages, which I guess is OK. In Air Pocket, a Master Key (entity name key_master) was left in the blue room, if needed for a debugging build; inaccessible otherwise. Arguably, it should not be translated at all. So I’ll comment those non-English lines out. (“Master key” is not part of TDM’s base strings?) Captain’s – Odd Punctuation and Perhaps Compound Unicode. The German translation of “Captain’s Cabin” had odd punctuation: "Kapitan­s¬kajüte" (and some evidence of a Unicode “combining character”). I did a separate follow up to ChatGPT, and revised to drop the punctuation and add an umlaut over the 'a': Kapitänskajüte. Another German use of “Captain’s” was similarly revised. German reportedly never uses apostrophe for possessive form. Captain’s – Title versus Name. There was one case in [Danish] where the word “Captain’s” was not translated, as if it was a person’s name. (Also, reportedly, Danish does not generally use apostrophes for possessives; there are exceptions, but doesn’t seem to apply here.) State of All.Lang So Far Starting from a temporary file into which I pasted the raw AI results (with [<language>] headers added), I fabricated all.lang by: Making sure it had Unix line ending, not CRLF. (In Notepad++, Edit/EOL Conversion/Unix). Begin it with a first-draft preamble comment, heavily adapted from TDM’s all.lang preamble. Following that, a line with just an opening bracket. And a closing bracket line at end of file. Making the handful of translation corrections mentioned above. Change the casing to Title Case. (I didn’t bother changing the back-translation’s case.) Tagging the back-translations with “//bt:”, so they are denoted and if need be can be quickly stripped out with an editor. (If subsequent revision is manually applied, the delimiter will also be altered; preamble will provide guidance.) Lessons Learned So Far Improvements to Prompting... Specify that the FM’s ship is small. Specify that “Captain” is a title, not a person’s name. (Hmm, there’s some shouldered names, not touched by I18N.pl, that maybe should be partially-translated too, with titles like “First Mate Logan”.) For inventory items (and likely readables titles), ask the AI to make the output in Title Case. Tell the AI not to generate Unicode combining characters. Ask the AI to add a special delimiter “ //bt: “ before the back-translation. To the extent possible, convert any directional punctuation (apostrophes, single quotes, double quotes) to non-directional, to comply with TDM font limitations. Since it seems to give better results if you ask about one specific item (like “mess” in French), maybe it’s optimizing for speed instead of accuracy. Ask it to take more time? ChatGPT translation seems to have problems with possessive forms... or at least those problems are more-easily spotted during review. Speculation: maybe one cause of this is that I didn’t specify which country or regional dialect of a language to use. Perhaps a prompt to “prefer the form of language spoken in a language’s originating country, within or adjoining Europe.” Concerns about Translation Length... The results are generally short, but in-game will some of them prove to be too long? Traditionally, inventory names are limited to 2 lines, with “\n” needing to be inserted. This will need to be tested eventually.

That's correct but many people just use the in-game mission downloader to check for new stuff without even looking at the forums, which is what I did. In the past a lot of missions that required a newer version of the game executable and assets would tell you this when you tried to start them up. I was just reporting on this and that you don't need to reinstall, just update via tdm_updater if you find this issue.

Aight well if I'm poking around posting fm reviews, code change suggestions, and asking for tech help I might as well also put up my work. Putzing around with DarkRadiant is quite fun. Not sure when or if I will produce a full map but, considering that I haven't touched dromed or made maps for other games before, I'm really happy with what I've got so far. Kudos to the tooling designers for making something reasonably idiot-friendly. One of the first things the A-Z tutorial tells you is to not use 0 0 0 for ambient lighting, and I immediately said nuts to that lol. I'm really enjoying the harsh darkness and the contrast from light sources. I didn't intend for it to happen, but I've ended up with something that looks like it crawled straight out of TDS. It also makes traversing the level have an interesting trade off - you need light to see, but enemies can see you carrying it and if its in your hands you have to drop it to pull out the bow or mantle stuff. I'm trying to build a whole level around this "mechanic"/"gimmick".

Hrm I wasn't able to type on *after* the spoiler and accidentally already submitted the reply.. (Does this forum somewhere have a raw mode where you type text with tags around them or something instead of this broken WYSIWYG editor?) Anyway, what I was gonna add: This was a great mission and I already played Away1 - I'm really looking forward to Away2, want to see how the story goes on

Another update to the saga of leak complaints: Sometimes things which didn't leak before start leaking all of a sudden after a few saves. I swear I can't possibly be moving the walls and leaving a gap in the corner- if I were the pointfile would be going there, but it goes straight through, even after I practically build a Matryoshka around the whole map. It's like some entities just become cursed. I've even had them copied and pasted into other maps and leak or not leak according to chance. And now, on to my real question. Is it possible with the tools already available to do a scripted fade of an NPC's opacity / alpha ? What about overlaying a color on an NPC, making them blue or charcoal colored or whatever. Thanks

heres a much more updated port -> https://github.com/bibendovsky/ltjs work in progress but strives to make it multi platform. uses SDL2 And OpenAL soft to replace old win9x dx9 calls. old bink code replaced with ffmpeg like in RBDoom3BFG. a truely monstrous load of fixes to allow it to compile with newer compilers. should build with msvc clang and gcc. this port can use the NOLF2 assets

Scope of Work TDM currently supports a partial localization with a moderate amount of work. With a heroic effort, and a separate build on a separate site like DarkFate.org for Russian, one particular language can be fully supported. I'm not striving for that. Instead, I'm looking at AI-enabled moderate-effort partial localization across ALL TDM-supported languages for a particular FM. Choosing a Test FM As a test case, I'm going to report on internationalizing my small FM "Away 1: Air Pocket" (install name is airpocket). This FM is an "internationalization virgin". Furthermore, here's what it DOESN'T have: Custom video or speech audio Custom inventory items or weapons Custom images with embedded language text Signage Mission title & credits on splash screen (as either text overlay or embedded) Instead, these are my work targets, to translate to ALL languages: Text briefing Standard inventory items, mainly keys, but with custom names. Objectives A few sheet readables Some "thought messages" from the player (in the form of white text in midscreen, done with atdm:gui_message with atdm_gui_message_no_art.gui)

It's always better to get something out and learn in the process than to learn and then scrap the output and start again: you did a fantastic job of optimising it in record time and can build your next one with both in mind!

Believe it or not, an earlier build had lots of rooftop climbing and alternate routes, but poor design on my part meant I had to put them all out of reach to slice the outdoor area into chunks for visportalling/optimization after the fact. I took my "city streets" approach a bit too literally and directly this time around, and I've realized that the claustrophobia and verticality of some of the best Thief FMs were born as much out of necessity as out of choice.

Back in the day, Tels managed a squad of volunteer translators for TDM. I am not Tels, and could never do that. Nowadays, language translation using AI, either traditional machine learning (ML) models or large language models (LLMs), is common and increasingly fluent. It is often used as an adjunct to speed the work of professional human translators. By itself, AI translation can be imperfect but usually sufficient. Can this "sufficient" approach be used for TDM, to expedite translations? Let's see. I gave some initial thought to a bulk-translation daemon that might range across FMs and fill in all missing translations, without necessarily involving mappers. In the future, possibly AI could tackle that whole enchilada. I was at first visualizing something more modest: a backbone in a standard programming language (I sketched out C++ and C# projects, but lots of other possibilities) that would make calls to an API (I looked at those of Google Translate and ChatGPT). However, I changed focus due to certain concerns... Different FMs, and subsets with each FM, would likely have far better translations if they were properly grouped, ordered, and translated separately, with an appropriate context (e.g., phrase engineering) added. The FM's mapper is best placed to provide this grouping and context. I'll detail what I mean in the next few posts. The mapper would not be expected to know any TDM-supported languages besides English. Instead, each translated phrase could be back-translated to English and examined. Is the "round-trip" meaning OK, even if the English words have changed? Problematic translations could have their context tweaked and rerun. Many AI systems, particularly for API access, require a billing commitment (e.g., credit card). For a professional translator, this is no problem, and subscriptions allow access to more (and putatively better) models and higher quotas. This seems less appealing for TDM. A few paid AI systems have a no-subscription, pay-as-you-go account tier. The cost per translate is typically pennies. But it does introduce quota- and expense-management, and may exclude API usage. Access via API requires an API key (or at the higher end more elaborate security regime), with attendant key-security headaches. Which AI model is thought "best" for translation? Doesn't matter too much, because we can't afford the best. Furthermore, there's endless churn among AI models, with antidotal reports that a given model fluctuates in quality over time, and successor models can be worse than their predecessors. So, with these concerns in mind, I looked for public web-based AI sites that require no billing and provide low-quota but adequate AI. The mapper would enter and retrieve data manually. I will focus on ChatGPT in this exploration, after a quick preliminary test confirmed some promise. Also, as this exploration proceeds, I hope to propose changes to TDM to make it more viable for "sufficient" quality machine translation. Problem areas are incomplete fonts, space-constraints, and layout issues for translated strings. My proposals will likely surface as separate forum threads. That's enough for now. I'll be trying for 1 or 2 substantive posts per week, as I tackle a particular FM.

Haha, that was unintended, but maybe it works. He should at least mumble when searching I agree with you on the echo in the intro, I just couldn't get it quite right. Your feedback helps though, thanks. @datiswousThe settings slider won't effect the reverb in the intro video since its baked into the audio track. @gokudoThanks for playing, the tight spaces in the boat were a real challenge to build so Im glad to hear it works.

I see. I suppose I may be able to go even a bit further and support arbitrary variables, so you could do something like this and have less worries. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FM Title : $title Author : $author Build Date : $pack_date Version : $version ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So the readme is displayed when you click the 'notes' in the mission description while in-game. All I meant was I usually have a token replace here as well with the build version and timestamp. See here from Lieutenant 3: https://github.com/FrostSalamander/lt3/blob/5517148beab710eee054d4626d55deb74025a95d/readme.txt#L5 Any token replace shouldn't be file-specific though - maybe just confine the operation to certain folders (or just the root folder but not subfolders). And yes, naming the .pk4 with the version number would be useful as well, especially when you have loads of beta versions flying around during testing (although I suspect the dev team would maybe rename it when putting it into SVN). I hope you continue supporting this, as it's now my preferred way to pack the missions. I love the 'test' functionality too - I did this manually with every build previously and it was tedious - this make it hassle-free!

Might this not be better suited to https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/58-tdm-tech-support/ or failing that make the text collapsable.

Hi @Skaruts. I thought I would try this out for my next release. It seems pretty cool and I'd be happy to use it, but I'm having some issues (maybe user error but let me know ) The .pkignore editor in the 'Files' tab doesn't seem to work. It just shows a screen with 'TODO' on it. It created the .pkignore file, but I can't edit it anywhere within TDM Packer 2. The 'Test' functionality doesn't seem to do anything. I packed my mission up OK, but when I pressed the 'Test' button it launched my Test TDM instance (a fresh install of TDM 2.13 in a different location), but it didn't copy the newly packed mission to it. (EDIT: this seems to be working now, not sure what happened before). Feature requests: I like to version my releases and note the release number and timestamp in darkmod.txt and readme.txt. I was previously doing this with a tokenized search and replace in my build script. Would you be able to add something like this? Just some config where you could record a version number and it would insert it into any file with some sort of configurable token like [VERSION] or the build time with [TIMESTAMP]. Actually, this is also useful to name the .pk4 file after the release (e.g. lt4-0.2-beta.pk4). This is especially useful during beta testing when there are loads of different versions of the file flying around. Some sort of user feedback when you pack the file would be helpful, even if it's just a pop up that says 'Pack complete' or something. (EDIT: nevermind, I just noticed the console there. I had it collapsed or something before I think) This is all with version a0.3.2 on Windows.

Double topic. See also topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22754-thief-vr-legacy-of-shadow-announcement/

i am having a hard time searching for specific keyword in bug tracker so i decided to wade into google search and found similar thread with similar issue : https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/13723-key-drop-melee-animation-glitch/

Just to complicate your life, there are 3 additional aspects to consider about the circa-2014 Mason files, and subsequent circa-2017 improvements to the 'english' version perhaps applicable to your work. (These issues are covered in the wiki "Mason Font" article, with a bit more in my "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts", https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/. The 2017 changes can be seen in the *current* 2.13 TDM English Mason files.) 1) Need for custom DAT-scaling on certain Mason characters The source TTF had upper-case and lower-case characters that were early-on considered too similar to size. So (before 2014) in the DAT, selective per-character scaling was used to differentiate them. See https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Font_Metrics_%26_DAT_File_Format#Per-Character_Font_Scaling for details. As you add new characters, you should do likewise (relatively easy with refont). 2) Creating the "glow" of mason_glow How Tels created the glow (for 'english' carleton & mason) is discussed in reasonable detail here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/5/#findComment-262661 That could be done for Russian too, which I recall currently fakes a glow, and possibly would require a minor GUI or engine code change to use. Note: To best accommodate glow and retain GIMP-visualization-alignment between base and glow characters, Tels moved some base characters within their bitmap, to keep their glyphs 2-3 pixels away from any bitmap edge. You should consider this when placing new base glyphs. Note: For the 3 mason bitmaps doubled in size circa-2017 as discussed next, the mason_glow bitmaps were also doubled. 3) Extensive bitmap editing to solve main menu character jaggedness. On Oct. 5, 2017, @Springheel in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19129-menu-update/#findComment-412921 said: "Looking at the Mason fonts, it looks like they were super low res to begin with, and were then just resized [presumably referring to per-character scaling], making them even worse. I'll see what I can do." [Further on, referring to fonts in the TDM menu system:] "It appears that resizing the dds file to make it higher res is possible, so I'll proceed." Later, on Oct 13, 2017, he concluded within a "More detailed list of changes: "Updated the menu fonts, which were surprisingly bad before" Unfortunately, I couldn't find details on how this work was actually done. I assume the bitmap editing was all done in GIMP. It started with doubling the size of certain bitmaps from 256x256 to 512x512. This was done for the first 3 bitmaps (i.e., those with ASCII, some Latin-1). Then characters were made more crisp and smooth-edged. How? Dunno. Also, some odd but harmless artifacts happened within GIMP (noted in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/page/3/#findComment-499660)

I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. If agent A publishes a work W under a license L1 that allows agent B to build on the work as long as B publishes the derivative work under L1, then if A later decide to also offer W under another licence L2 (with similar stipulations about publishing derivative works under L2) then B can choose if their additions to W should be licenced under L1 or L2 or both. However, if the scrips in question were released as GPL then it would significantly reduce the risk of publishing derivative works based on them.