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Who I am is of little importance, what matters is the job I am offering. Though the item in question may be simple, I can assure you that the reward is anything but. The task, to those brave enough to follow through, is this: During the peak of Braeden's Harvest Festival, break into Lord Alister Squashbottom's manor and steal that which is most valuable to him: his prize-winning pumpkin. This is the very pumpkin he intends on submitting to the judges of this year's competition, and you are to ensure he has no choice but to resign in failure. It may be dangerous, to which you will be amply compensated, but I have little doubt you will be able to weather all obstacles and keep your eye on the prize to complete this task. For those brave enough to accept the job, start here. Cordially, E. Siltstone Gameplay Notes TDM version 2.12 is required to play this mission. Mines are pickable; simply approach them with lockpicks equipped to frob-disarm. A moss arrow can be shot at glass to make it break more quietly. I recommend playing all three difficulties, as they are very different. This FM may be more hardware intensive than normal. LOD settings can be set below "Normal" to improve performance on low-end machines. Download Version 1.0 - This FM is available here via Google Drive, and will soon be made available via the in-game mission downloader. Promotional Screenshots ThiefGuild Release Page Credits A huge thanks to my beta testers Goldwell, WellingtonCrab, Kingsal, Baal, and Rezar for all of your fantastic feedback Voice Credits - Goldwell! Asset Credits Kingsal Wellingtoncrab Goldwell Sotha Bikerdude Refle3cks Arcturus +++And thank YOU for playing!+++

Just for the record to benefit readers here, the archived Stone .tga's turned out to be the original ASCII-only versions, not the versions that got extensive bitmap editing. Too bad.

Indeed and try to wait until you are sure the model is finished before you go through the trouble of aligning textures. I couldn't tell you how much time I spent realigning textures after adjusting walls, windows, etc., or changing my mind about the materials (especially when bevels are involved).

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

The translation pack has the german string in the base pack rather than in the fm subfolder. I will fix it in the mission database. Edit: Fixed in the mission db Edit 2: Nope. Not exactly fixed. It seems that lang files in the mission string folder need to be "complete" because they fully override the core strings. If I am correct, this was broken in 2.11 when we permitted in-file overrides of core files in missions. Edit 3: Still broken in 2.10, rolling back to 2.07 Edit 4: Still broken in 2.07. Something has gotta be wrong with the translation specific to this mission. Edit 5: The core mission XD files don't use the strings so nothing happens if the lang files are in the strings/fm subfolder. Probably means that the translation packs "never worked" for many missions unless impacted players sought out special editions of the missions on Tels' server. What a mess. Fuzzy recollection time: I think Tels was trying to push the team to mass convert all missions to move XD data into strings/fm/english.lang but nobody wanted to broach it and even mission authors weren't happy about this way of handling things. If the translation pack takes precedence, the best way forward is to include the converted XD file into it. Testing... Edit 6: Couldn't get the XD update to work, so I decided to checkout Darkfate's version. It works flawlessly. I copied their pack into the standard translation pack and the added string files for the other languages worked as well. Darkfate's packs include map files so I'll need to study whether we can avoid that. Otherwise we are basically doubling our mission db or "damaging" our hosted versions to make them translatable. Since this mission is so small and probably will never be edited again we can probably use darkfate's version as-is.

I wasn't really thinking about cohesiveness. i was trying to give the game a more Golden touch like in DXHR. I'm using Cinetool Lut which has many options for color combination. Each one makes the game look and feel different and it's a great Reshade Tool.

Since TDM 2.06 is such a different animal to the other 2.x builds (which are also much different to the 1.x builds prior to 1.08), I thought it would be a good idea to see what folks can do when armed with our performance tuning wiki: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks How low can you go? Certainly, you can no longer do tricks to make TDM run on DX8 hardware with unless that hardware fudges GL2 support via driver workarounds. If you set image_downsize to 16 can you run this on 64mb GPU's? How old of a CPU supports Multi-Core? I'm not expecting a large number of respondents but those who wish to go into their storage and revive an old ATI X1600 or Geforce FX 5900 to see "can it run" please post here.

My issue with the Gold filter in HR is that overpowers all colors making the game monochromatic. These artistic liberties work on short games but in long games once the novelty wears down it could make the game feel monotone. Something similar happens in Thief 4. The art director made the textures almost colorless to add a bleak and sad effect to the game, cool but overtime the player might feel the game is dull and boring. Colors not only give look but also feel. Bur regardless. Here's my attempt to Replicate the Gold Filter in Deus Ex Art Director's Cut OFF ON The Directors Cut has this Pinkish Copper Tone: ON

LOL. Recently I have reassessed the infamous "Gold Filter" of DXHR, thanks to enabling it in DC with this: CookiePLMonster/DXHRDC-GFX: A plugin for Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut, restoring the gold filter, post processing and shading from the original Deus Ex: Human Revolution (github.com) It fixes the lighting system and the bad (really BAD) DC bloom too (you can force the original 2011 one)! And just avoid the SSAO, it's terrible (temporally unstable) in the DC. Without the Gold Filter the game really looks washed out (and see my avatar )

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

I think you need to do things at the exact moment in DR that the user changes a field, so you can capture both the old value and the new value. Would be way better if DR just handled everything natively, but could be done through a hook to an external script too, I suppose. Or some complicated logging.

@Grey Mauser thanks for taking the time to play! I am glad to hear you are enjoying it. Yeah at some point the glasses effect became much more subtle than it was during development and this should probably get fixed at some point. It seems near impossible for a lot of players to make out.

This is just amazing! I'm a latecomer to TDM and have only tried out a few FMs. I didn't think anything could ever approach the immersive experience of The Painter's Wife, until now. Tip of a HUGE hat to Wellingtoncrab and their team for what must have been an enormous labor of love! Now to a request for some help re. House Ursine:

The main problem of the art direction of T4 is that is *ONLY* that kind of dark (=the "gloom" fallen over the City), prologue apart. Prologue atmosphere is just perfect

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

Correctly me if wrong. Apperantly xdata formatting doesn't work well with the lang references. So this: maps/man2/mission_briefing { "num_pages": "1" "page1_body" : "#str_b1" "" "#str_b2" "" "#str_b3" } Doesn't work. You can only do this: maps/man2/mission_briefing { "num_pages": "1" "page1_body" : "#str_b1" } And then in the lang file you have to add the whole text of page 1 and get newlines via \n etc. So writing a (text only) briefing or readable and after that translating, is probably not something you want to do. I didn't actually test this with readable's, but it seems to me it would have the same limitation.

This is how i18n typically works in code: Developers write the strings in English (or their native language), but mark all the strings with a function/macro which identifies them for translation. In C++ this might be _("blah") or tr("blah") — something which is short and easy to write. A tool (which may be integrated into the build system), extracts all the strings marked for translation into a big list of translatable strings. This list is then provided to the translators, who do not need to be developers or compile the code themselves. They just create a translation for each listed string and send back a file in the appropriate format (which may or may not be created with the help of translation tools, perhaps with a GUI). At runtime, the code looks up each translatable string, finds the corresponding translated string in the chosen language, and shows the translated version. At no point do developers (who in this case would be mission authors) have to mess around with manually choosing string IDs. All they do is use the appropriate function/macro/syntax to mark particular strings as translatable. String IDs may be used internally but are completely invisible to developers. I suggest that any system that involves instructions like "search the list of known strings for a similar string" or "manually choose a string ID between 20000 and 89999 and then write it as #str_23456" are over-complicated, un-ergonomic and doomed to be largely ignored by mappers.

The Blender export scripts have been updated to work with the new Blender 4.1 series. In this Blender version, they removed "Autosmooth" altogether, along with the corresponding parts of the Python API. This meant that the "Use Autosmooth settings" option had to be removed from the LWO exporter, where it was previously the default setting. The new default is "Full", which smooths the whole mesh, giving similar behaviour to ASE models, although "None" is still an option if you want a completely unsmoothed mesh.

If it's supposed to be an octagon, I don't think the corners need to be bevelled. Certainly it looks much better to bevel square corners, but the angles of an octagon don't look bad imo. If you want a smooth cylinder though, the default cylinder patch has 16 sides, which looks smooth enough in game. That would be easier than bevelling 8 corners. Speaking of smoothing; I was pleasantly surprised to find that if you make a model in Blender with smooth-shading ticked, then export an ase file, it will retain the smooth shading when imported to darkradiant.

I'm looking for the setting that controls the number of difficulty levels in the options menu. The current "hardcore" setting is not challenging enough for me, and I'd like to make it more difficult, like this one for thief. I can edit the Darkmod.cfg file and would like to know if I can create a separate *.pk4 file with this file, removing everything unnecessary except the parameters I need. Will the game load the default settings from the game root and the additional data from my file? Of course, it would be better if you could tell me how to create an additional difficulty setting. I've searched through all the archives and couldn't find what I need. Thank you for your help.

I'm at the beginning of a new area, where bandits fights each other. Near the end, I imagine, but I'm not going to bother finishing it. The thing is tedious. It's very obvious your focus was on telling a story. The issue is that's not my thing, and I also think this is not the right game for it. You're trying to make it do things it was never designed to, so it feels clunky. I think the game shines best in a smaller map with some backstory and little touches in the mission, like notes one character leaves for another. Here, it feels like I'm being pulled along from place to place, having to go back where enemies have artificially respawned, with locked doors everywhere, JUST to further the story, not to give me an interesting challenge. And in terms of story, it's the same thing we see all the time: Pagans are the poor, downtrodden, nice people, and the Builders, are the heartless monsters. Yawn. I don't get how the gargoyle switch works in that guy's office, even after having read your explanation. I don't even understand what the situation is supposed to be. The gargoyle looks like it's locked inside a glass case, and therefore you want to get that glass case open. The note says the gargoyle switch is behind the downstairs desk. Downstairs from this note, there is no desk. And the note calls it the "gargoyle switch", which implies it's a switch for the gargoyle, not that the gargoyle itself is a switch. It's confusing for no good reason. Random notes: Boring name, as others have mentioned. A cursive font in letters is annoying to read. Loud music and sound effects are not fun, it just hurts the player's ears. The map is a screenshot. That ruins immersion. The light issues have been covered. For me, it never felt like I was in shadows, as opposed to other missions. Almost everything looks pretty brightly lit. I saw someone mentioning rope arrows are pointless, and I agree. You asked how that player could have made it past something without using one; well, I haven't used it either. You can just mantle. Of course, that's not an issue in itself. There's not reason to cry "I'm getting review bombed" when people are just giving their opinion.

Query: when playing a level, how sharp must a corner in the level geometry be for it to look bad to you? I'm sculpting my current FM from scratch as there aren't many prefab modules fitting my theme and the question has been nagging me for a bit. I've been using bevel patches to smooth out 90 degree corners made of brickwork for a slightly more realistic look to them, but I'm not sure where else I should be smoothing out the angles of my level geometry. Most notably I have a larger room where the main center piece is a large octagonal tower made of brick and I'm unsure if players will find its sharp angles unappealing to look at despite its ornamentation. Try as I might to smooth out those corners, an octagon is still an octagon.

I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.

Iris is one of the very best, for sure.