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For the people eager to play with the latest state of development, two things are provided: regular dev builds source code SVN repository Development builds are created once per a few weeks from the current trunk. They can be obtained via tdm_installer. Just run the installer, check "Get Custom Version" on the first page, then select proper version in "dev" folder on the second page. Name of any dev version looks like devXXXXX-YYYY, where XXXXX and YYYY are SVN revision numbers from which the build was created. The topmost version in the list is usually the most recent one. Note: unless otherwise specified, savegames are incompatible between any two versions of TDM! Programmers can obtain source code from SVN repository. Trunk can be checked out from here: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/ SVN root is: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src Build instructions are provided inside repository. Note that while you can build executable from the SVN repository, TDM installation of compatible version is required to run it. Official TDM releases are compatible with source code archives provided on the website, and also with corresponding release tags in SVN. A dev build is compatible with SVN trunk of revision YYYY, where YYYY is the second number in its version (as described above). If you only want to experiment with the latest trunk, using the latest dev build gives you the maximum chance of success. P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

Hi folks, and thanks so much to the devs & mappers for such a great game. After playing a bunch over Christmas week after many years gap, I got curious about how it all went together, and decided to learn by picking a challenge - specifically, when I looked at scripting, I wondered how hard it would be to add library calls, for functionality that would never be in core, in a not-completely-hacky-way. Attached is an example of a few rough scripts - one which runs a pluggable webserver, one which logs anything you pick up to a webpage, one which does text-to-speech and has a Phi2 LLM chatbot ("Borland, the angry archery instructor"). The last is gimmicky, and takes 20-90s to generate responses on my i7 CPU while TDM runs, but if you really wanted something like this, you could host it and just do API calls from the process. The Piper text-to-speech is much more potentially useful IMO. Thanks to snatcher whose Forward Lantern and Smart Objects mods helped me pull example scripts together. I had a few other ideas in mind, like custom AI path-finding algorithms that could not be fitted into scripts, math/data algorithms, statistical models, or video generation/processing, etc. but really interested if anyone has ideas for use-cases. TL;DR: the upshot was a proof-of-concept, where PK4s can load new DLLs at runtime, scripts can call them within and across PK4 using "header files", and TDM scripting was patched with some syntax to support discovery and making matching calls, with proper script-compile-time checking. Why? Mostly curiosity, but also because I wanted to see what would happen if scripts could use text-to-speech and dynamically-defined sound shaders. I also could see that simply hard-coding it into a fork would not be very constructive or enlightening, so tried to pick a paradigm that fits (mostly) with what is there. In short, I added a Library idClass (that definitely needs work) that will instantiate a child Library for each PK4-defined external lib, each holding an eventCallbacks function table of callbacks defined in the .so file. This almost follows the idClass::ProcessEventArgsPtr flow normally. As such, the so/DLL extensions mostly behave as sys event calls in scripting. Critically, while I have tried to limit function reference jumps and var copies to almost the same count as the comparable sys event calls, this is not intended for performance critical code - more things like text-to-speech that use third-party libraries and are slow enough to need their own (OS) thread. Why Rust? While I have coded for many years, I am not a gamedev or modder, so I am learning as I go on the subject in general - my assumption was that this is not already a supported approach due to stability and security. It seems clear that you could mod TDM in C++ by loading a DLL alongside and reaching into the vtable, and pulling strings, or do something like https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3-sdk/ . However, while you can certainly kill a game with a script, it seems harder to compile something that will do bad things with pointers or accidentally shove a gigabyte of data into a string, corrupt disks, run bitcoin miners, etc. and if you want to do this in a modular way to load a bunch of such mods then that doesn't seem so great. So, I thought "what provides a lot of flexibility, but some protection against subtle memory bugs", and decided that a very basic Rust SDK would make it easy to define a library extension as something like: #[therustymod_lib(daemon=true)] mod mod_web_browser { use crate::http::launch; async fn __run() { print!("Launching rocket...\n"); launch().await } fn init_mod_web_browser() -> bool { log::add_to_log("init".to_string(), MODULE_NAME.to_string()).is_ok() } fn register_module(name: *const c_char, author: *const c_char, tags: *const c_char, link: *const c_char, description: *const c_char) -> c_int { ... and then Rust macros can handle mapping return types to ReturnFloat(...) calls, etc. at compile-time rather than having to add layers of function call indirection. Ironically, I did not take it as far as building in the unsafe wrapping/unwrapping of C/C++ types via the macro, so the addon-writer person then has to do write unsafe calls to take *const c_char to string and v.v.. However, once that's done, the events can then call out to methods on a singleton and do actual work in safe Rust. While these functions correspond to dynamically-generated TDM events, I do not let the idClass get explicitly leaked to Rust to avoid overexposing the C++ side, so they are class methods in the vtable only to fool the compiler and not break Callback.cpp. For the examples in Rust, I was moving fast to do a PoC, so they are not idiomatic Rust and there is little error handling, but like a script, when it fails, it fails explicitly, rather than (normally) in subtle user-defined C++ buffer overflow ways. Having an always-running async executor (tokio) lets actual computation get shipped off fast to a real system thread, and the TDM event calls return immediately, with the caller able to poll for results by calling a second Rust TDM event from an idThread. As an example of a (synchronous) Rust call in a script: extern mod_web_browser { void init_mod_web_browser(); boolean do_log_to_web_browser(int module_num, string log_line); int register_module(string name, string author, string tags, string link, string description); void register_page(int module_num, bytes page); void update_status(int module_num, string status_data); } void mod_grab_log_init() { boolean grabbed_check = false; entity grabbed_entity = $null_entity; float web_module_id = mod_web_browser::register_module( "mod_grab_log", "philtweir based on snatcher's work", "Event,Grab", "https://github.com/philtweir/therustymod/", "Logs to web every time the player grabs something." ); On the verifiability point, both as there are transpiled TDM headers and to mandate source code checkability, the SDK is AGPL. What state is it in? The code goes from early-stage but kinda (hopefully) logical - e.g. what's in my TDM fork - through to basic, what's in the SDK - through to rough - what's in the first couple examples - through to hacky - what's in the fun stretch-goal example, with an AI chatbot talking on a dynamically-loaded sound shader. (see below) The important bit is the first, the TDM approach, but I did not see much point in refining it too far without feedback or a proper demonstration of what this could enable. Note that the TDM approach does not assume Rust, I wanted that as a baseline neutral thing - it passes out a short set of allowed callbacks according to a .h file, so language than can produce dynamically-linkable objects should be able to hook in. What functionality would be essential but is missing? support for anything other than Linux x86 (but I use TDM's dlsym wrappers so should not be a huge issue, if the type sizes, etc. match up) ability to conditionally call an external library function (the dependencies can be loaded out of order and used from any script, but now every referenced callback needs to be in place with matching signatures by the time the main load sequence finishes or it will complain) packaging a .so+DLL into the PK4, with verification of source and checksum tidying up the Rust SDK to be less brittle and (optionally) transparently manage pre-Rustified input/output types some way of semantic-versioning the headers and (easily) maintaining backwards compatibility in the external libraries right now, a dedicated .script file has to be written to define the interface for each .so/DLL - this could be dynamic via an autogenerated SDK callback to avoid mistakes maintaining any non-disposable state in the library seems like an inherently bad idea, but perhaps Rust-side Save/Restore hooks any way to pass entities from a script, although I'm skeptical that this is desirable at all One of the most obvious architectural issues is that I added a bytes type (for uncopied char* pointers) in the scripting to be useful - not for the script to interact with directly but so, for instance, a lib can pass back a Decl definition (for example) that can be held in a variable until the script calls a subsequent (sys) event call to parse it straight from memory. That breaks a bunch of assumptions about event arguments, I think, and likely save/restore. Keen for suggestions - making indexed entries in a global event arg pointer lookup table, say, that the script can safely pass about? Adding CreateNewDeclFromMemory to the exposed ABI instead? While I know that there is no network play at the moment, I also saw somebody had experimented and did not want to make that harder, so also conscious that would need thought about. One maybe interesting idea for a two-player stealth mode could be a player-capturable companion to take across the map, like a capture-the-AI-flag, and pluggable libs might help with adding statistical models for logic and behaviour more easily than scripts, so I can see ways dynamic libraries and multiplayer would be complementary if the technical friction could be resolved. Why am I telling anybody? I know this would not remotely be mergeable, and everyone has bigger priorities, but I did wonder if the general direction was sensible. Then I thought, "hey, maybe I can get feedback from the core team if this concept is even desirable and, if so, see how long that journey would be". And here I am. [EDITED: for some reason I said "speech-to-text" instead of "text-to-speech" everywhere the first time, although tbh I thought both would be interesting]

Story: "Sir Barrington, as he likes to be known, enjoys a prestigious reputation of having lavish yet intimate dinner parties. I've heard the tales about what goes on in the noble's dining room, but I believed none of them 'till now. Orbach, a local shop-keep who makes special deliveries to the people of 'high stature' heard Sir Henry Hughbellow raving about Sir Barrington's special 'Elixir', It cures your ails and gives you vigor... By the Hammer, it extends your very life! he exclaimed. Orbach begged Sir Henry for a small sample, and after one sip he was sure that the potion was nothing more than mineral water and spirit. He asked Sir Henry if other folks were as fond of the elixir as he was, and he found out that folks are paying handsomely for these small vials on a weekly basis. Some lords pay for exclusive treatments and bathe in the tonic. Lord Barrington even brings in an occult expert every month, where supposedly the power of the elixir is renewed by the full moon. Never one to pass up the opportunity for a good scam, Orbach has decided to take a cut of this 'elixir' business. He has made an elixir of his own, but needs to convince Sir Henry that it's really the same as the 'magical' tonic that Lord Barrington has been selling. And that's where I come in. Its rumered that Sir Barrington's prized possession is a painting of the revolutionary inventor 'Guillermo de Sohase' the day after he won the Battle of Billinsdune. If I can steal this painting, Orbach can use it to 'prove' that he also got the elixir from Sir Barrington. Once Sir Henry tells all his friends that Orbach's stolen elixir is healing his heart, soothing his pains, and igniting his libido, they'll be lining up at his shop. Its time to go." Build Time: Version 1.0 was speed build of sorts, to build upon Springheels video's with the new modules. Took roughly 20hrs to build but this ended up happening over the space of a few months.http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18808-bikerdudes-speedish-build-using-the-new-modules/?hl=%2Bspeed+%2BbuildThanks: Co-auther: Obstortte for all his custom entities, scripting and showing me a thing or two about perfing.Resource: Springheel - new modulesReadables: nbhor1moreTesters: Bienie, Judith, Abusimplea, Cambridge Spy, Gerberox, MayheM, Amadeus, Goldwell, nbhor1more.Download: - mega Info: Repeat after me, "Read and explore, Read and explore"Known issues: This mission has been heavily tweaked and worked on to provide a playable experience for even low end machines.For very low end PC's please make use of the in-game LOD slider, as not only are details reduced, but the ambient_world fog is removed at the lowest setting.The medium difficulty is partially broken, the mission wont end when the player gets to the exit location. As this is the only issue with that difficulty level, I will fix this when I next update it to include the intro.

It won't help reliably, because the amount of impulse can vary greatly. The correct fix would be to set predefined velocity or impulse using script. The way it works now is it applies some predefined force, which is supposed to act exactly 16 ms, generating exactly the impulse mapper wanted. But now the duration of one game tic can be anything, so we should just look at the hardcoded force, compute impulse on the piece of paper, and make sure player gets exactly this impulse somehow.

Author note: It's hard to believe it's already been a year since Act 1 came out! Well during this mission the player will be following Corbin into the Grimwood district to followup on a lead from last night (Act 1) .. the mysterious tablet! This mission is my first time including full EFX support as well as a HD briefing video file, additionally a new script has been added crafted by the talented Obsttorte which has loot flying towards the player when you pick it up. On a level design front I have tried to change things up a bit by really catering towards a number of play styles, this mission can be completely ghosted or you can use the tools at your disposal to wreak havoc on the citizens of Northdale. For the first time I have tried to create more sandbox environments which don't offer clear answers handed directly to you, so if you're having trouble figuring something out try a different method. This mission takes between 1 - 2 hours to finish depending on the difficulty you play on and how thoroughly you explore. I hope you enjoy your night in Northdale! - Goldwell Voice actors Fen Phoenix Goldwell Random_taffer Yandros Beta testers Amadeus Boiler's Hiss Cambridge Spy Chakkman Crowind Epifire Kingsal SquadaFroinx Custom Assets Andreas Rocha DrK Epifire Grayman Kingsal MalachiAD Obsttorte Sotha Springheel SquadaFroinx Purgator With special thanks to Epifire for creating a large collection of custom models, Grayman for helping out with coding, Kingsal for drawing the ingame map and Moonbo for his script revision on the briefing video. Available via in-game downloader MIRROR File Size: 417 mb EDIT: If you are having performance issues please consult this post by Nbohr1more which may address your issue http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19936-fan-mission-shadows-of-northdale-act-ii-by-goldwell-20190320/page-2?do=findComment&comment=436271

The even more strange thing with us humans are we actually have the tech to get limitless energy but since we have not outgrown war it might not be such a good idea. one thing we could do if we were all on the same page is placing a giant space mirror somewhere about halfway to the sun that concentrates the sunlight into an immensly powerfull ray we could use for energy here on earth. it would actually carry more than enough to power everything we have now and then some. the downside is since we are still a warfaring people it would be rather dangerous to us as a terrorist might actually gain entry and then we have some serious problems as the beam would be as pointing a giant super laser on earth. in essence something much worse than the death star in star wars. sure the planet wont explode but you could essentially burn everything out of existance. theres also the problem of logistics and presicion, for one it needs to hit the collector on earth precisely or you will have a very bad day. the logistics problem is that we need to make much of it in space and the mirror might prove hard to fold and unfold. one other thing which is starting to gain traction is nuclear energy something we had the knowhow to do for many years now. the downside is as allways do we really want nations with completely alien and in some cases archaic ideas to have the power to have the possibility of making refined nuclear material ?. theres also the problem of techtonic stability, many regions on earth are not the best when you want to build something like this because of risk of earthquakes and other calamities. europa is pretty stable atleast the northern hemispheres but to export the power we would need to have a rather huge area dedicated to nuclear plants and as allways they would be suceptible to attack by other parties. in the end we might not have a choice soon with the climate changes but are we ready to live with the consequenses ?.

Whenever i hear space probe, The Whale Probe(year 2286) from Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home and Friendship 1 (2067) from Star Trek : Voyager immediately conjured up in my mind. This is the trivia behind the sad story of voyager 6 in Star Trek : https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Voyager_6

The Dark Mod 2.13 has been released! A new era in accurate AI Vision! When id Software released the Doom 3 modding SDK, The Dark Mod team saw the potential for something more than a multi-player cops vs robbers game like Thievery UT. The sheer amount of access to essential game-play systems meant that a true Thief style experience could potentially be created. One of the first things the team did was to investigate how a light-gem system could be implemented. Having a good way for both the player and AI to know when the player is visible to others is a crucial part of the Thief experience so if we couldn’t build it then the dream of a Thief style experience was over. Fortunately, there were enough parts of the AI visual logic and more than a few stub pieces of the Render code that gave us the ability to build a robust system. The downside of the light-gem system was performance. Even though we did our best to limit the viewport and resolution of the light-gem image captures, often the light-gem would cut FPS in half ( or less ). This was pretty painful, especially since most computers could just barely run vanilla Doom 3 at acceptable FPS. After this system was fully functional, other aspects of AI vision were investigated. Obviously, we could not afford to run the light-gem render for every object or body the AI might see so it was decided that the AI would do a more simplified light-gem calculation for things other than the player. This meant that ( to the AI visual scan ) all light volumes would be either cubes or pyramids with perfect exponential falloff. We would run a line-of-sight check to the objects then ( if it hit ) calculate the pixel brightness by the location of the spot in relation to the center of the light(s). This was far cheaper than rendering the whole scene but heavily impacted accuracy. Many solutions were proposed to improve things but a solution evaded us for years. 2.13 changes things! Now we have a "stochastic sampler" model that does regular measurements of the actual light volume pixels and builds a "running average" of how illuminated different entities are. The days of seeing knocked-out AI in the middle of a bright spotlight get ignored are over. Now all AI and loot entities (etc) essentially have their own light-gem and it performs excellently! Magnificent Mission Management! Daft Mugi has drastically improved the GUI menus for mission management. The Dark Mod mission list and in-game downloader now have a search filter window that follows modern conventions of reducing the listed items as each new letter eliminates a possible matching mission name. Both lists can be sorted by actual name ( The Rats Triumphant ) or Chicago Style ( Rats Triumphant, The ). Additional mission details ( readme data ) can now be scrolled so players can see more information about the mission without having to navigate to the darkmod/fms folders. The menus have also been tuned with smaller font sizes for more practical mission listing and have been hardened against buggy order of operations issues so that you will be far less likely to encounter strange issues or crashes when downloading and installing missions. Parallax Occlusion Mapping! Stgatilov has added the oft requested POM feature to the latest Dark Mod release! WellingtonCrab has coordinated with him to provide examples and check the functionality and quality. Now The Dark Mod is ready to offer a quantum leap in perceived geometric detail with all sorts of surfaces realistically showing 3D parallax rather than the flatter looking normal maps we usually offer. WellingtonCrab also created many texture variants that are tuned to look better with POM enabled. Other Graphics Goodies! Now cubemaps \ environment maps respect more stage keywords. This means that faked reflections on water shaders can now move in relation to the water texture movement offering a more convincing illusion! Subviews ( cameras, portals, mirrors, xray, etc ) can now be nested. You can now have a skybox render in a camera view, etc. Volumetric lights and particles now render in mirrors! Alpha-tested surfaces get alpha shadows in Shadow Maps mode. Tone-mapping now supports range compression to prevent unwanted overbright areas. Arcturus has introduced some new metal materials that use improved cubemaps as well as skyboxes with clouds that use POM! Stability and Performance! The console variable system ( CVAR ) has been improved to be thread safe. This should resolve some rare crashes that involve weapon scripts that rely on CVAR values. We now automatically detect the number of CPU cores and allocate Jobs based on the detected specifications. Level loading has been given more parallel execution optimizations including optimizations for loading audio samples in parallel. Uncapped FPS is enabled by default so Linux players will not have a poor first time experience and many audio and video playback timing bugs that occur only in classic capped mode are avoided. Finally, Linux vsync support has been greatly improved. Improved Training Mission! The Training Mission is supposed to help players understand the basics of Dark Mod game-play and controls. It was created to coincide with The Dark Mod v1.0 and was not significantly altered until TDM v1.08 ( when Bikerdude did some texture replacement for 2.0 standalone and improved the overall visuals ). As such, many new game-play features that were added since 1.0 were never included in the mission. Now the mission has been upgraded to include more game-play features such as the Vine Arrow as well as getting further visual upgrades and EFX Reverb! Drunken AI! Now that the AI have better visual accuracy, Amadeus decided to balance things out by fixing many of the broken behaviors of Drunken AI so that they are more reliable and consistent for use in missions by default ( no need to extensively customize the defs or use scripting to improve them ). Potions! Dragofer and Amadeus have completed the work on the Slowfall potion originally prototyped by VanishedOne. They also incorporated the invisibility potion by Kingsal ! These now have pre-defined slots in the gameplay menu as well as the default shop menu design. Assets Galore! Along with new POM textures, we now have: A new modular pipe set A new Lampion entity Some new Factory Machine entities Ornate wood and stone relief textures A new AI praying animation A new AI smoking animation And many fixes or improvements to existing assets EFX Reverb Location Preset! Frost_Salamander took some time away from his continued work on the excellent “The Lieutenant” series missions to make EFX reverb setup easier for himself and other mission authors. You can now add EFX preset spawnargs to location entities rather than having to use the EFX def file. Translation Packs! Between TDM 1.06 and 2.0 Tels and the translating community started translating many missions but these translations required that the original mission be altered in a way that made it harder for the mission authors to revise. That meant that translation packs were in limbo being hosted by 3rd party sites \ forums along with their orphaned old missions. The translators over at the Darkfate forums came up with an solution by including not only the translation strings in the translation pack but also the altered map files, GUI defs, etc that had translation work done to them. This would leave the original mission untouched but allow translation packs to override some parts. We have gone through the old archives of these translations and have reworked them to work with the latest version of TDM (and the associated missions). Most of the translations are Russian ( due to the continued work of the Darkfate people ) but many of the early TDM missions also have German, Italian, French, etc translations too. Also Nolok contributed a brand new Catalan menu translation! Subtitles! Datiswous has been creating story subtitles for many of the existing missions in the TDM mission database. Most authors have incorporated these into their official releases, otherwise players can still add them to the FM folder. A detailed list of changes can be seen here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What's_new_in_TDM_2.13 To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder. Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.13, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.13 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.13. Before upgrading, set TDM to use one of the built-in missions ( Training Mission, A New Job, Tears of St Lucia ) then use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates

The Glenham Tower is a small/medium sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter sets out retrieve an old book from a derelict tower. Mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank Melan, Fidcal and Bikerdude for playtesting. After I busted Lark Butternose out of the Old Town Jail (please see mission: The Beleaguered Fence) I hid and waited for Lark to regain consciousness. When he learned how he got out he was quite happy to offer me a significant portion of his share to our loot. After that our business was concluded and we went our separate ways. I heard Captain Godfrey Knighton was not at all pleased with the events at the Jail and was still looking for the people who robbed him blind. I decided to disappear and move north to a town called Braeden until things calm down in The City. After looking for work via the usual channels, I was approached by a bookstore owner named Victor De Grenefeld. He offered me a simple and entirely legal task of retrieving a rare old book from a derelict tower. The Glenham Tower was originally built by a wealthy family to provide a safe and secluded place to reside in the misty Glenham Moor. The family was disgraced by some kind of scandal and the Tower was later bought by a hermit scholar named Lord Morley who moved in with a single servant. Lord Morley, I learned, was doing some kind of research for the Builders. Some years ago the inhabitants of the tower simply stopped visiting Braeden anymore to buy supplies and food. The tower was found abandoned and sealed. The original residents, in fear of robbers, had installed an indestructible portcullis which was now closed and there was no way to enter the tower. Many have tried to force their way inside, but the portcullis is impenetrable. The windows are also made of this material. De Grenefeld told me that an skillful acrobat like me could easily climb the exterior of the tower to the top and gain entrance that way. He would pay a nice sum for a rare old book called 'De Vermis Mysteriis,' which he knows is somewhere inside the tower. I could keep all the other goods I find. The most dangerous thing would be the Tower itself: De Grenefeld told me that the tower is old and structurally unsafe, but I shouldn't worry if I'm careful enough to watch my step. The task sounded simple enough and the pay is extremely good so I agreed to De Grenefeld's offer. I need to buy some rope arrows and travel to the Glenham Moor. It is nice to do something legal for a change. LINKs: Use the ingame downloader to get it. WARNING! There are VISIBLE spoilers in this thread. I do not recommend reading any further until you've played the mission.

Let's call it 24 cores, 48 threads, a 50% increase using new 12-core chiplets. The rumored LP cores look like a direct copy of Intel's LP E-cores approach, but Intel has been playing around with how those work from Meteor Lake to Lunar Lake and soon Arrow Lake mobile, and has yet to put them in desktop chips (Arrow Lake-S desktop uses the cancelled Meteor Lake-S SoC tile with no LP E-cores). If I were AMD, I wouldn't allow heavy multi-threaded workloads to include the LP cores, in order to save some power for the iGPU and/or NPU, and not cause any scheduling issues. I think the easiest approach would be to detect that the computer is idling or under very low load, especially when not receiving any keyboard/mouse input, and use the LP cores then, turning off the CCD(s) completely. I assume they can be turned back on in like a few milliseconds. It will be impressive if you can use your computer without having the CCDs on, for something relatively lightweight like watching hardware-decoded video. 2-core, 4-thread low-clocked Zen 5 may be enough, but consider that web browsers can add a bunch of cruft (particularly ads, or chat messages rapidly inserted into the DOM from a live stream interface). When you look at something like "Bumblebee", the 2x LP cores represent 33% of the core count, so maybe they should be running at all times. That product is monolithic but AMD has the ability to "turn off" parts of a monolithic chip for power efficiency. Source: I heard it somewhere. Back at Intel, they may put LP E-cores in future desktop chips to improve idle power consumption. They may even put 4x instead of 2x. These cores are generally going to be hobbled by a lack of L3 cache, but may be surprisingly fast otherwise if they are Skymont or newer. Anyway, AMD's 12-core chiplets enable the exciting 24-26 cores, but more importantly they should force core counts to rise down the product stack. Suddenly, the 8-cores (currently ranging from ~$290 for the 9700X to ~$480 for the 9800X3D) would be a heavily disabled junk product of the Zen 6 generation if they get made, since yields for the chiplets are so high. We should see 10-cores (still ~17% disabled) become the new entry-mid level, below pristine 12-core products.

btw the board can be flashed to support the 5900X3D models which offers some of the best gaming performance. the X3D models arent the best overclockers though because they use chiplets. EDIT: sorry it is AMD's gfx cards that use chiplets the x3d models use a form of stacked geometry with the cache mem near the top instead of at the bottom. newer versions corrected that but sadly no version from the AM4 lineup. recently 4k gaming has dropped somewhat because the prices are so inflated and the cards that are able to handle it are allmost impossible to get your hands on unless you want to pay double or tripple the MSRP. the mainstream cards can handle 2K in most newer games and the AMD midrange alternative 9070 / XT stock was bought up by scalpers and is now selling for prices that would make your hair stand. resellers are pulling in more stock but these wont sell for anywhere near MSRP. the problem here being that AMD cant force them since they dont make there own 9070 / XT models so retailers can score whatever premium they want. the cheapest way to get your hands on one atm is buying prebuilds (yeah yuck....) but thats how things stand.

The Imperial Sword By: Bikerdude "When passing through the small town of Brouften, the locals mentioned that the Town Council have been having issues with one of the local nobels. One Lord Drafferi, who has been interrupting Town Council meetings and claiming that nobody on the council has any authority on town matters..." Notes: - TDM 2.12 or later is REQUIRED to play this mission. - This FM is based on an abandoned old version of The Elixir that doesn't resemble the current mission at all as a base for town of Brouften. - This FM should play on the vast majority of systems. I have perf tweaked this thing to within an inch of its life. And have moved almost all of the VL ligh effects to the ‘ better’ LOD level. - min recommended spec (as per beta testing) Intel Core i7(3rd gen), nvidia 1030 4gb (GDDR5), will get you 60fps inside and 45fps outside. - Various areas will look better with shadow maps enabled (SoftShadows set to high and Shadows Softness set to zero) at the possible expense of performance. - When you play there are 2 LOD settings of note, normal and better. On better all of the VL lights and alpha shadows are turned on. - I also suggest using MAPS shadows with softness set to low and quality so to medium or high. - And lastly this mission has subtitles for all the custom audio and briefing. Tip: - When searching for needed items, use the "F" \ "Lean Forward" Key Brunting Steel: The sword in this mission is made of Brunting Steel which is a semi-mythical metal in the TDM universe. It is similar to Damascus Steel which was famed for it's strength in comparison to other steel swords. In TDM mythology, it was originally forged on an island utopia, similar to the fabled metal "Orichalcum" crafted in Atlantis. The first mission to mention Brunting Steel is "Crucible of Omens: Behind Closed Doors" Download Link: - (v1.3.6) - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mu-FdGH1FivMgt4Fy1OgwiDjvIpA1Uck/view Changes: The briefing has been tweaked to remove some of the confusing aspects, aswell as the audio, so the narration is easier to understand. There is now more than one exit point to complete then mission. A number of annoyances that some players reported have been tweaked or outright changed. In game map ( The mission is also available in the Mission Database ) https://www.thedarkmod.com/missiondetails/?internalName=imperial_sword Credits: A big thanks goes to - - nbhor1more for his fantastic story and readables. - WellingtonCrab for the fantastic signs, plaques, decals & other textures. - Mortem desino, Narrator for their awesome and subtle custom dialog. - Goldwell for the "Grumpy old man voice" - Datiswous for the subtitles - Kingsal for the awesome new grass and flowers. - Flanders and Melan for their excellent models and textures. - Nobiax for his excellent small plants - nobiax.deviantart.com. - kyyrma and GigaGooga for thier ever-handy sounds packs. - Obstortte for the custom frob script. - Jackfarmer for the brilliant custom briefing. - freesound.org for ambient tracks, further details in sndshd file. - Beta testers: Mat99 (star tester), Nbhor1more, Amadeus, Xak, Jackfarmer, MikeA1 and S1lverwolf. Teaser: Before and After screens: 15yr Anniversary Contest Thread:

Actually, it is even more interesting. It is not just a force field. It is looks like a sliding door which pushes the player: "classname" "atdm:mover_door_sliding" "name" "launcher" "accel_time" ".1" "decel_time" ".1" "translate" "-40.185 0 335" "translate_speed" "15000" I must admit I don't know how to compute the velocity, and why it depends on frame rate. Perhaps better somehow record the initial velocity, while using capped FPS mode? Or just use binary search to find experimentally which velocity is good.

I did a bit of digging through the forum settings and I could not find any configuration for this. Looking at the underlying code, the comment count per page is hardcoded to 3. I could update the code, but I'm reluctant to do so as this would need to be re-applied after each update. That being said, it looks like we should start to brace for status updates being removed as Invision Forums v5 no longer supports status updates (we're still on v4.x): https://invisioncommunity.com/deprecation-tracker/status-updates-r19/ https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/480551-status-updates-have-been-removed-in-v5/

Isn't it broken since the inception of Uncapped FPS? We have big issues with "force" entities in general. I tried to untangle the mess once, but without success.

TDM Modpack v4.6 This update makes the TDM Modpack compatible with the development version of TDM 2.13, in case you want to test or use 2.13 now or during the upcoming beta phase and miss some mods... This new version of the Modpack remains, of course, compatible with 2.12. Let's take this opportunity to introduce a new mod: FORWARD LANTERN MOD I think this image explains very well what this mod is about: The implementation of the player lantern light has always bothered me. And while I understand the idea behind it, and despite its long radius, it feels annoying and frustrating for some reason. I started thinking about it and I realized the problem had to do with how light is distributed on screen: most of the times all I want is to focus on what's right ahead of me but the light forces me to focus on the sides. These two images should make my point very clear: ~ CURRENT ~ ~ NEW ~ On the technical side it is worth noting I moved the origin of the light from the hip to the bottom of the spine. I did this because in some situations the light would clip through objects and disappear but now that the light is well buried into the body clipping is impossible. Let us know your opinion about this mod and the player lantern in general! This mod is available for all missions except Flakebridge Monastery, Hazard pay, Moongate Ruckus, Snowed Inn, Vota 1, 2 & 3., which come with their own tweaks to the lantern. --------------------------------------------------- THE LOOP SKILL GET ITS FIRST UPDATE In the initial release I explained I was very conservative with the approach and in order to avoid potential issues you shouldn't be too close to walls or objects when using the Loop. Well, you will be glad to know a workaround has been found and the Loop is as responsive as it gets now and you can use it almost anywhere. Almost? I still haven't figured out how to force the player to crouch and the exception remains when there isn't enough vertical space. I hope someday the developers allow mappers and modders to force the player to crouch so that this mod can be fully realized and mappers can start their missions in vents or tight spaces. - Whoops, I'm outta here! You will probably notice that the Loop feels like it takes a little longer now: I detected that when jumping to some locations the engine needs some lead time to render the new environment. The jump essentially takes the same time as before but I added an extra second right after the jump to allow the engine to render everything properly. --------------------------------------------------- FINAL REORGANIZATION Starting now each skill is presented in its own slot and the Shadowmark Tool has been removed from Core Essentials and it is presented separately as well: Such a nice set of Mods we have! I hope you have fun with this new version of the TDM Modpack! The download can be found in the opening post. Here is the full changelog: • v4.6 New release - Minor changes to make it compatible with the upcoming TDM 2.13. - FORWARD LANTERN: Initial release. - SHADOW MARK: Now in its own mod slot. - SKILL UPGRADE: Skills now presented in their own mod slots. - SKILL LOOP: More responsive. Update to allow the engine render the world timely. - SHOCK MINE: Description added to the shop. - CORE ESSENTIALS - MISC: Decreased brightness of the Objectives and the Inventory. - CORE ESSENTIALS - MISC: Decreased brightness of stock newspapers. - CORE ESSENTIALS - MISC: Removed two anticlimactic player dying sounds. Cheers!

The old "Fixed FPS" ( com_fixedTic 0 ) mode is still as laggy and poorly performing as ever. With the new mode and maxFPS = 60 it's still waaaaaayyy smoother than the old mode. I can try setting it to max between r_displayRefresh and 120 to see whether a perfect double of screen refresh is still viable to remove the artifacts? I was trying to find a good way to query monitor refresh but it seems that the r_displayRefresh cvar is just an alternate to the GLFW mode data that feeds "parms.displayHz" . It seems that we treat that mode data a little differently in Win vs Linux? So I guess these are the paths to improvement here: 1) Try to use parms.displayHz instead of r_displayRefresh and hope the GFLW does a good job of picking the right value 2) Max between r_displayRefresh and 120 ? 3) Keep trying find a way to restrict maxFPS to 60 in the menus ( I got this one partially working but once you leave the game and return it's stuck at 60. I also had the inverse working, starting at 60 in the menu going to 300 then when returning to menu it was at 300 ) 4) Keep trying to find a way to force gameTic sync when entering and leaving menus ( I guess this is the "correct" thing to do... ). ( Thus far, all the glFinish, clear frame data and RunGameTic things I've tried have failed miserably. ) Sadly, r_displayRefresh is a sorta dangerous parameter to play with and thus it isn't archive-able. We could do it, of course but if a user has a legacy CRT and sets something crazy they could damage their hardware etc. Thus to enforce a higher refresh, users will need an autoexec.cfg or will need to constantly invoke the change in the console. Edit: Results thus far Max between parms.displayHz and any value ( 30, 60, 120 ) = artifacts appear Use parms.displayHz directly = artifacts appear Hard-code 120 = one blip artifact only on the first entry into the game Based on the above, and that hard-coding 60 also eliminates the artifacts I can only surmise that parms.displayHz is not picking up the correct value?

And some info can be found on this forum topics and wiki. Wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Parallax_mapping Topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22574-experimental-support-of-parallax-mapping-in-213/

As someone who tends to alert guards often and occasionally stir trouble when going through a FM, I noticed some major issues when it comes to AI realism and awareness during combat or when guards face difficult situations. Everything's fine when AI go about their usual patrols... once trouble takes place however, the illusion falls apart as guards act like they're less self aware than a toddler. Indeed AI realism can't be improved past a certain point as there's a limit to the effort the team can put into something so complex... yet I do believe a few improvements can make AI behavior much more realistic and exciting. After analyzing this issue for a long time, I decided to put it all it into a few main points... I apologize for their length as I wanted to go in a bit of detail on each one, hope folks have the time and patience to read them. Biggest issue is AI are unaware of where attacks are coming from. I recently made another thread on how I climbed on a table and blackjacked two guards to death as they sat there doing nothing, something that also happens when shooting them with arrows as guards only explore the nearby area. The issue seems to be that AI don't account for the direction a hit comes from, they only know something hit them but act as if it must be some mystical force of nature: If you're sitting in a parking lot and an asshole neighbor throws a tomato at you from his balcony, you aren't going to cluelessly investigate the road in front of you when the projectile clearly came from behind and hit you in the back of the head, instead you'll storm into the building and start looking for which of the neighbors facing that side of the road may be the culprit. Despite voice barks existing for this exact scenario, we never see AI running to get help from other AI. NPC's will do one of two things: If armed and with enough health they will attack or search for you nearby, if hurt or unarmed flee to a random location. I've never seen an AI consciously run up to another AI asking for help and bringing them to where they spotted me, even when fleeing the AI seems to go to a random location. They don't share knowledge with each other generally speaking: The only awareness AI spread to other AI is alert level, meaning NPC A becomes alert if it sees or hears that NPC B is alert too... beyond that there's no coherence or actual cooperation, the voices may indicate some form of searching together but friendly NPC's are never seen actually engaging. Another big issue is voices being played (or not played) in disconnect with what's actually going on. There are AI voices for most important circumstances but they're very rarely activated: It's a miracle to hear a guard say "someone's been hurt" or "there's a body here" when noticing someone who's unconscious or dead. What seems to happen is if AI was already alerted by another peculiarity such as a noise, they're no longer surprised by anything else and won't play the voices designated for that scenario, so they'll only mention a body if that's the first thing to alert them in any way. Furthermore AI don't actively talk with each other while searching together, everyone acts as if they're on their own and not a team. What happens after a conflict is over. For this discussion I won't focus on better permanent alerts, that has greater difficulty implications and I think I made a separate thread on it a while back. The problem I noticed is once the immediate alert has gone down, AI return to full normality and act abnormally calm: The idle voices change from saying things like "it's a quiet night" to "we've got an intruder" but that's about it. In any realistic scenario even a trained guard would be shocked after being in a fight or finding a body. Below I'll list the immediate improvements I see to those problems, which without having an understanding the code myself am presuming can be changed without too much effort: When an enemy hits the AI with any weapon, the AI should be alert to the estimate location of the shooter. If you're standing atop a tower and fire an arrow at a guard, the guard shouldn't draw his sword and look around their nearby vicinity like a fool, but instead run up to the tower where you're standing granted they can pathfind their way to that location. If the player is far away the destination should be fuzzy and a random location nearby, thus the guard won't run to your exact location but will still climb the stairs and enter a room near it. AI need to learn how to ask for help instead of fleeing to random places when not attacking. If an ally who isn't already alert can be found nearby, the scared AI should explicitly run to their location tell them where you are then have the ally either run to your location (if armed) or go to another ally to get them to your location (if unarmed). Even if an AI is already alert, finding a body or dropped weapon or broken arrow should result in the AI speaking the voice line for that circumstance, only being engaged in combat should suppress it. I'd go further and support repeating those voice lines: A guard yelling "we have a dead body" several times during the first seconds of discovery would make them appear more shocked. Similarly talking to a nearby guard shouldn't be done just once when the two first meet: When multiple AI are searching for you, they should constantly alternate between single voice lines (eg: "I bet you're right over there in those shadows") and looking at another guard to talk to colleagues (eg: "I know I saw him here keep searching"), this would be a huge improvement since guards currently act like they're completely unaware of each other during a coordinated search. Making guards permanently affected after an incident is a trickier one but a few tweaks could improve it. The most immediate solution would be changing the idle animations: Instead of stretching or blowing their noses or eating candy, AI should be seen randomly cowering or face-palming or even playing the scout animation to look around carefully. One suggestion I'd absolutely throw here: If the AI found a dead body from an ally, have them cry occasionally... I think that would be an interesting and unexpected detail, that will also get players to think and feel more about the consequences of their actions and how they affect the world. There are other ones I could get into, but some would be more difficult and likely not worth trying to solve. Most notable and worthy of at least a mention is how AI walk over the bodies of fallen friends as if they're doormats: Obviously there's no way to have them drag bodies to the side, but maybe an avoidance mechanism so they don't look like jackasses trying to profane their dead friends by literally stepping all over them could be a fix for that as well! Let me know what you think of those points and if there are other AI issues you've noticed yourself or better solutions you can think of: I'm not sure if I got everything here but I definitely believe the problems exist and we could make the world more natural and immersive with some simple fixes.

Happy 15th Anniversary to The Dark Mod! As of October 17th. 2024, 15 years have passed since the TDM 1.0 release! In that time, we evolved to most or all of the features that players were asking for since the concept of TDM was first mooted in the TTLG forums in late 2004. Campaign Support, Soft Shadows, EFX Reverb, Multi-Core Rendering, Uncapped FPS, Ambient Occlusion, Subtitles, are among the roster of perennial requested things that have been brought to life by the development team in addition to the core Thief 1 \ 2 game-play items like the Lightgem, Rope Arrows, Swim-able water, lock-picking and ( of course ) advanced AI enemies. To commemorate this occasion, please join us in celebrating the Release of 5 missions for our 15th Anniversary Contest! . The Imperial Sword Bikerdude was encouraged to reclaim an abandoned version of his older mission and rework it into a new one. Now the formerly lost work is a glorious new experience with scripted dialog, special events, and a decayed imperial cityscape! . The Wizard’s Treasure Thebigh has made yet another bite-sized mission with a focus on quality game-play and challenge. The mission is extra impressive for the scope and visuals achieved since his decision to join the contest was fairly late compared to other entrants. . You Only Fly Thrice DeTeEff has continued his progression of high quality and complex releases. Another relative late comer to the contest, this mission is a tour-de-force of excellent game-play ideas and is quite handsome with excellent volumetric lighting and modular asset usage. . Volta 3: Gemcutter Kingsal has decided to release his long awaited Volta Series sequel to be included in the contest. DO NOT MISS THIS MISSION! . Pinnacle: A Test of Talents UncertainTitle and TwilitWitch decided to risk their first mission release to be included in the contest roster. The use of both modular assets and many custom models give this mission a familiar yet refreshing visual appeal. . Please join the celebration and vote in the forum threads for each respective mission based on their contest criteria ( Game-play, Story, Visuals ). . . The Dark Mod 2.13 “Developer Build” The Dark Mod 2.13 is still a few months away from release but we wanted to highlight the fact that a few more of the long requested changes have been added in the upcoming release! . Parallax Occlusion Mapping! In the above video, you can see a that TDM has finally incorporated the long requested effect. This wont be applied to all textures since there may be some problems with visual anomalies and performance but we are already preparing for a future where lots of textures use this new and more three dimensional surface effect. Better AI sight! While the AI have always been good at seeing the player due to the lightgem ( sometimes “too good” so we had to nerf their sight ), AI have had various challenges seeing things like bodies, missing objects, opened doors, weapons, blood, etc. This is because it is not practical to give all entities \ objects their own lightgem. Instead we have used very simple math to represent lights which don’t match shadow and light textures. In 2.13 a new sampling approach aims to improve this so that AI can better see ( or not see ) items and bodies in a way that better matches the actual lighting in the mission. Mission Search! There is now a search window where you can specify the mission author or title to help you find your preferred mission rather than scrolling through over 170 missions. You can also change how mission titles are rendered with either the original title or the title with prefix words like “A, The” moved to the end. Improved Training Mission! The Training Mission has been upgraded to include a Vine Arrow tutorial, a Slow Match tutorial, EFX Reverb, Volumetric Lights, and some performance optimizations! Translation Packs! Between TDM 1.06 and 2.0 Tels and the translating community started translating many missions but these translations required that the original mission be altered in a way that made it harder for the mission authors to revise. The meant that translation packs were in limbo being hosted by 3rd party sites \ forums along with their orphaned old missions. The translators over at the Darkfate forums came up with an solution by including not only the translation strings in the translation pack but also the altered map files, GUI defs, etc that had translation work done to them. This would leave the original mission untouched but allow translation packs to override some parts. We have gone through the old archive of these translations and have reworked them to work with the latest version of TDM (and the associated missions). Most of the translations are Russian ( due to the continued work of the Darkfate people ) but many of the early TDM missions also have German, Italian, French, etc translations too. Subtitles! Datiswous has been creating story subtitles for many of the existing missions in the TDM mission database. Most authors have incorporated these into their official releases, otherwise players can still add them to the FM folder. . Hidden Hands: Blood and Metal Campaign Just before the 15th anniversary entries were starting to arrive, JackFarmer released an enormous 5 mission campaign that continues his well regarded “Hidden Hands” series!

Oohhhh, the day has come! This old lurker releases another creation of his deranged mind...! What has he in store? Does it involve sunlight and pollen and hayfever? Will it involve strange towers and priests with bad breath? Naah, just some mediocre airship type of mission, aimed at the Anniversary mapping contest! I have a lengthy/humourly rant/lore for some of the building process for anyone interrested, in spoiler tags. According to DarkRadiant I have worked 570 hours on this, and that doesn't take into account all hours of coding and scripting. This feels like an insanely huge amount of mapping time for this small mission but I try not to judge myself. DarkRadiant says 570 so...I say thanks to all calm hours at the night shift at work where I could sit and script and write readables. And I also humbly bow myself to the scripting genuses that are on the forums. A special thanks to my girlfriend who (almost) always lets me talk about my projects. She has also written some of the readables and voiced some recordings in the mission. Thanks to Dragofer, Mirceakitsune and Melchior for much needed scripting help. Thanks to YouTube channels BGM President and Sound Effects where I've borrowed some music and sound effects. Thanks to my betatesters; nbohr1more, Bergante, datiswous, Wesp5, nightmare, Jaxa and Cambridge Spy. And a big thank you to the mod in general for still being alive and supportive! ########################################## MISSION RELATED STUFF ########################################## On an airship, heading for Flowerdale a lot of strange things can happen. As some people guzzle down liquor in the bar, some others skulk around in the shadows. Certain people cannot be trusted and there are even those that kill for a living. Somebody may or may not work for foreign powers. But everyone yearns for those shiny pennies. There are some strange things in the cargo, huge coffers that can hold bodies, alive and dead. This story may unfold in several different ways; Three characters can be chosen; Zacharias the thief, Oliver Mortimer, the assassin or Rupert Peabody, youngling of the Wizlas woodfolk. DOWNLOAD LINK https://drive.google.com/file/d/10w_SJSBAxxVFYTwPjJhIo48fEzvuTo1M/view?usp=sharing

Hello taffers, the people over at TTLG forums have started a speedbuild game jam. 1st Thief Speedbuild Jam It's not a contest, and you have a tentative submission date of Dec 1, to get a mission built for T1-3 or TDM. Looks fun, and I'm going to participate too.

Inn Business It's business, at an inn, over three nights. Development screenshots: Download: https://drive.google...dit?usp=sharing Update 1.48 uploaded March 8th, 2014, one change: patches key rarely not being frobable in one of its possible spots Big thanks to my beta testers: Airship Ballet, Kyyrma and AluminumHaste! Development supporters of note: Sotha, Springheel and Obsttorte. Also thanks Sotha, for urinating in my mission. ;-) And thanks Kyyrma for the title screen! My appreciation to all forum/wiki contributors, without whom, this wouldn't exist. Thanks to positive commenters on my previous mission too, extra motivation helps! :-) Note this uses campaign features, what you use the first night, impacts subsequent nights. And to quote a tester, "...the level is maybe best experienced in more than one sitting". If you do pause between nights, please be sure to save, you can't begin partway through effectively. (If you accidentally start a night you already completed, just fail the kill objective to switch to another night.) If your frame rates are too low facing the cemetery, please reduce your "Object Details LOD" setting. It was designed with "AI Vision" set to "Forgiving", to be able to sneak through with minimal reactions, if you want more/less, adjust your settings accordingly. There are several random, conditional aspects, and ways of going about things, so others might have slightly different experiences. Post here if you discover hidden objectives for extra points! My condolences to loot completionists, I made a bit on the third night hard, you've got your challenge cut out for you! Speaking of which, there's a TDM bug that mission complete totals too high, here are the real amounts per night: 2026/970/202. Oh, there is something that in the U.S. would be rated PG, in case you play with kids in earshot. I hope you enjoy playing it, feel free to let me know you did, and I'm glad to respond to inquiries (like how stuff was done, nothing was scripted). (Note which night you are referring to if it's something specific.) (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] Developed for TDM 2.01. PS: Thiefette, good news, no spiders! Springheel, if you find an optional objective you can skip...you might find it immersion breaking. Others, no undead! There are a couple other interactive critters though. :-) Edit note: Some posts below were from users of an unreleased version of TDM 2.02 which broke several things, they do not reflect regular game-play.