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EDIT - v1.1 can be found a few posts below ------------------------------------------------------------------ Nameless Objects Mod v1.0 Description: this mod adds names to almost all core objects players can grab and hold in their hands. ------------------------------------------------------------------- How to use: As of this moment the Mod only works if you have "Core Essentials", which is included in TDM Modpack v4.0. Make sure to have "Core Essentials" and then download the *.pk4 attached to this post and place it in your TDM folder. I try my best to provide stuff people can experience first hand to form an opinion. I suggest you try "Business as Usual" by Bikerdude since this mission includes quite a few items you can grab right at the beginning. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Technical: The mod consists in a couple of def files and a script. I had to include two defs because otherwise there can be issues related with inheritance. The script does most of the work and it will run in the background as soon as a mission starts. The script runs once but it takes its time (10 to 30 seconds) not to hinder performance. All this is transparent to you. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Future: I wouldn't like this to remain as a mod and I volunteer to add names to all core defs for 2.13. I would, of course, use the translation system so that names can be translated in the future to languages other than English. I can name all core defs in a couple of rainy mornings but the Development Team must guarantee this work won't go to waste. The idea is that we name all core objects today and we let it stay: nothing changes in the source code and nothing gets displayed on screen. We get stuff done in the background and someday perhaps, all or part of it sees the light in some form. ------------------------------------------------------------------ There are quite a few things that must be discussed and agreed before we get started but the first step is: yes or no. People that might be interested in supporting and helping with this initiative: @datiswous, @Geep. Cheers! z_nameless_objects_mod_v1.0.pk4

dev17042-10732 is public. We decided to restore the ability to create cvars, so the broken missions are "unbroken" as they are. Although I'll still try to hunt down and remove overriding scripts in the future.

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.

A big thank you and congratulations for this mission I would rate 10/10. I can't find a better one in my memory. It's so big and varied, full of new assets. Just... wow ! Finding a way through the was hard for me, as well as being able to jump and go through a narrow hole in the I also gut stuck in this area just below the horizontal mesh hatch that opens with Oh, and my game use to crash when firing a fire arrow at a Thanks again, you are so good at this.

Well, I actually found that initial folder in the HiRes SVN repo. This is different from the TDM assets repo as it has a bunch of source files for textures, fonts, etc, but they aren't really game-ready assets. This is where I found the tga image files for the fonts I thought you were looking for. I haven't uploaded Tels folder yet, but I was thinking of uploading them in the HiRes SVN repo, just for the sake of backing it up

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

I'm now considering the .xcf files as being in effect the source texture for the game fonts, at least those that have been bitmap edited in GIMP. So that's an argument for putting them in the TDM assets repo. But, in any event, they do need to be backed up somewhere official.

By searching at several music sites on ambient music (looking at the license) Or by creating them ourselfs, https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Composing_Ambient_Tracks_and_Music_Tracks

I agree entirely. Unless a mission is aiming to present a completely different gameplay experience (like making a rapid-fire archery-based combat mission instead of a stealth mission), I see no reason why things like bow aiming should vary on a mission-by-mission basis. If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed. If they are a matter of taste and there is no agreement on what the value should be, they should be configurable by the player and take effect in all missions. Imagine if every desktop application made its own tweaks to your keyboard layout or mouse acceleration because the author didn't personally approve of the default values. It would be a horrible user experience. Some applications actually do this with fonts, and yes, it's horrible. Potentially useful functionality made inaccessible because the author decided to ignore system font choices and DPI, and impose his hand-picked non-scalable 10pt font which I can barely read.

In By Any Other Name, I needed to deactivate the sword, bow, and blackjack for a while (during the middle part of the mission). I couldn't figure out how to "turn off" the bow, and then later turn it back on again. So I ended up cloning tdm_weapon_arrow.script, and modding it (adding a special variable that got checked when you tried to raise the bow). Pretty kludgy, and obviously can lead to breakage. (I also had to make similar changes to tdm_weapon_blackjack.script and tdm_weapon_shortsword.script.) Maybe all I need to do is remove all of the arrow ammo. That way the bow won't raise. That still leaves the blackjack and sword. I think there was a way of deactivating weapons, but I couldn't activate them back on again (?)

That's what we originally did, but mappers (or at least one mapper) complained in bug 6062 about the spawnargs disappearing if they were the same as the sound shader. I suppose we could have considered that "not a bug" and kept the original behaviour, but perhaps there are situations where the old behaviour was problematic — there would be no way to distinguish between "this speaker has default radii from the shader" and "this speaker has fixed radii which happen to be the same as the shader but must not change, even if the shader is edited". I don't know how common such a situation is in practice. Correct, but the freezeTransform method is called after the end of any transformation, and does not distinguish between what type of transformation was previously happening. I imagine resizing the speaker to the same size as the shader would also have triggered bug 6062, but speakers are resized less often than they are moved and hitting an exact size with the mouse would be rare, so the issue was only noticed when moving speakers. That's what I'm confused about. I have yet to see any situation in which DR will set a max distance of 0 on a sound shader, other than by explicitly editing the spawnarg to have a "0" value.

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

Are we switching 10 scripts for 10 defs? What if the core def changes sometime in the future and we then have not 10 but 15 or 20 missions from different authors with this def? What if, in the end, nobody is willing to change/enhance/improve the bow because of the trouble? This is the day people might look back to in the future, which reminds me:

A stealth way to do this is probably to overvolt the streetlights, there should be a way to do so but tell the player in a roundabout way

Seriously, if devs are never allowed to make changes that break things, then the mod never moves forward. It's a bandaid, rip it off, get it done. That's the point of dev builds. And if people are downloading DEVELOPMENT BUILDS to play the mod and shits broken, guess what, they should have read the very first post of this thread. For the people eager to play with the latest state of development 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

Speaking of actions for the missions which only tweak zoom delay. What would you prefer right now? Mission broken on the latest dev build (as it is now), but working as intended in the latest release. Mission working as intended on the latest dev build, but working without customization on the latest release.

Salter's Hall, Sudbury, Suffolk, England - 15th century The George Inn, near Norton St Philip, Somerset, England - 14th-15th century, upper storeys repaired in 16th century after fire The George and Dragon public house (now a former inn), Codicote, Hertfordshire, England - dates back to the 14th and 15th century, not used as a pub anymore since the late 2000s, but has a restaurant instead The Salisbury Arms Hotel, Hertford, Hertfordshire - the oldest parts date back to the 15th century, the inn was called The Bell until 1800, there had been some minor additions in the 17th, 19th and 20th century The Bell / Ye Olde Bell and Steelyard inn, New Street, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England - an inn constructed during the second half of the 16th century, its street then known as New Street. The latter of the two names is the contemporary name, the former name the original one. Disregard the Volkswagen Polo, please, LOL. Woodbridge has several old rural inns dating back to the early modern era, e.g. The Angel, also from the second half of the 16th century. The Stag Inn, Rockeford, Devon, England - the oldest parts are apparently 12th/13th century, the overall look solidified in the 17th century Ellesmere House, Whitchurch, Shropshire, England - early 18th century house, showing the transition from traditional vernacular timber-based construction to brick-based construction (I feel this could be used as inspiration for depicting townhouses reflecting TDM's socio-cultural tradition from a more medieval era to a tentative early industrial era) St Mary's Cottage, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England - I just found this a cute timber-framed house, so feel free to use it as inspiration for smaller TDM townhouses or taller rural houses in a market town, village, or something or other "Bayleaf House", an early 16th century farmhouse, originally from Chiddingstone, Kent, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England 3D tour of the "Bayleaf House" at this open-air museum Farmhouse built in 1609, originally in Midhurst, Sussex, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England 3D tour of the 1609 farmhouse at this open-air museum Poplar Cottage, originally from Washington, Sussex, England, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England 3D tour of the Poplar Cottage at this open-air museum A small house, originally from Boarhunt, Hampshire, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England Medieval stone cottage with thatched roof, originally from Hangleton, Sussex, England, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England A medieval house, originally from Sole Street (Cobham), Kent, England, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England A medieval house, originally from North Cray, Kent, England, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England Rural market hall, originally from Titchfield, Hampshire, England, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum in Singleton, West Sussex, south England You can read more about the individual buildings at said open-air museum here. The Old Market Hall, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England - additional photos here and here

"...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm proud to release my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short, 30-45 minute mission in which you are the getaway driver in a team of three small-time thieves. You and your associates were fortunate enough to overhear rumors of a famously wealthy and frail old man, but things change when your cohorts do not return from what is supposed to be their easiest and most lucrative job. Now it's up to you to brave the old man's house and find your associates. Download: The in-game mission downloader TDM Website's Mission Page Dropbox Special Thanks: The kind beta testers: Cambridge Spy, stgatilov, xlm, wesp5, nbohr1more, and Dragofer. peter_spy and Dragofer for answering my endless barrage of editor questions while learning DR. The TDM Discord for their warm welcome. Ending stinger courtesy of Zapsplat. Content Warnings: Enjoy!

The Black Mage ============================================================= Title: The Black Mage Filename: black_mage.pk4 Authors: Grayman, Jack Farmer Testers: datiswous, joebarnin, Shadow, Amadeus, madtaffer, wesp5 Release date: 24.12.2021 (version 1) - 05.03.2022 (version 2) - 23.12.2023 (version 3) Version: 3 (available via in game downloader) ============================================================= Grayman - Mapping, scripting & text for briefing video JackFarmer - Additional mapping & scripting, drafts for readables, conversations and in game comments Amadeus - Revision & editing of all readables, conversations and in game comments Dragofer, joebarnin, datiswous - Troubleshooting ============================================================= Voice Talents (in alphabetical order): AndrosTheOxen - Worried father / Counsel Lester Morlan (fincancial advisor to the lord) Bikerdude - Sami "Sausage" McNulty (the castle's chef) BoyLag - Percy Lockhard (the castle's chronicler) Goldchocobo - Robert (the son of the worried father) / Colton (a fallen Builder) Jedi_Wannabe - Friend of the worried father / Bennett (a fallen Builder) Malasdair - Lt. Godric (chief security officer) New Horizon - Lord Ewan Davenport (the Black Mage) Purgator - The Thief ============================================================= Paintings: New paintings provided by OGDA Grayman avatar painting created by Zerg Rush ============================================================= Assets: New kitchen equipment models provided by STRUNK ============================================================= Geometry: Selected cave architecture orginally created by Bikerdude & Dram for "Blackheart Manor" and later modified for "The Gatehouse" (rearranged with the orignal authors approval) ============================================================= Sound: Wind_rusting trees sound (main menu) taken from freesound.org produced by funwithsound "Madrigal" (briefing video) performed by Anthony Holborne Pub audience sound (briefing video) taken from freesound.org produced by yap-audio-production Footsteps sound (briefing video) taken from freesound.org produced by Nox_Sound Stand up from chair sound (briefing video) taken from freesound.org produced by kupp2 Tape-deck-startup sound (phonogram recording) taken from freesound.org produced by soundjoao Short metal scrape sound (phonogram recording) taken from freesound.org produced by Timbre Chains sound (phonogram recording) taken from freesound.org produced by arnaud-coutancier All other new ambient and sound fx recorded and produced by JackFarmer sometimes with altered sound effects/ambient sounds orginally produced by Gigagooga ============================================================= Video: Story board and sound arrangement by JackFarmer Briefing video produced by SirSmokeALot ============================================================= Known bugs: If you quicksave too soon after killing a fire elemental (within 4-5 seconds), the quickload crashes. (2.09 and 2.10) ============================================================= Production notes: Graymans's son gave this work in progress to the Dark Mod community according to grayman's will in June 2021. After discussions with Dragofer, I overtook this mission in June 2021 and started working on it in September 2021. Since I didn't know what else Grayman had planned, I made up my own story from the end of the briefing. The voice actors did an incredible job. Everyone I asked immediately agreed to complete this work of Grayman. This has now led to a fabulous eight voice actors taking part in this mission - from England, Ireland, Canada and the USA. ============================================================== Let's raise our glasses in Grayman's honor. Otherwise I wish you all happy holidays. Take care of yourself, your loved ones, and all of your friends.

Some good news! Tels dug around further in his old computers and found some gold. Namely, a whole fonts directory that includes GIMP .xcf files. Tels says: "The XCF files esp. are what I used to manually draw the new characters (like adding dots to an u to convert it to ü etc.) They contain many layers with different characters, that are layout exactly in the place where they need to be for the patcher script." That is, for english stone 24 pt, one .xcf file contains two independent RGBA bitmap layers, that can be saved separately as two .dds files. A quick glance of that content appears to match the current distributed stone_0_24.dds and stone_1_24.dds. So I won't need to back-convert from DDS to TGA after all. @Amadeus, I think a copy of this should be added to the TDM assets repository. Could you do that? * http://bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/pub/scripts/tdm_font_source.7z

@The Black Arrow That's a good analysis. I don't disagree but we're referring to different time periods with different quality aims: In the early days of 3D and low-res CRT screens when we had 256x256 textures, detail textures were used to make surfaces appear as if they have 1024x1024 textures... today in the age of 1080p monitors such texture can appear blurry from up close, we want to make 1024x1024 textures appear of 4096x4096 quality. Back then the goal was to get at least a little bit of perceived sharpness, today the goal is to see those microscopic details on every surface as if everything is real... while the concept of detail textures is old it scales to cover both aims. As you correctly pointed out, the ideal solution would be upgrading the actual textures themselves. Sadly there are two big problems with this that will likely never be possible to overcome: Someone must create or find identical textures to replace existing ones, which have to retroactively fit every old FM. That would be a huge effort for so many images, and will not look exactly the same way so people would complain how "this wall used to be made of small red bricks which are now larger and yellower which isn't what I intended and no longer line up". An advanced upscaling filter may be able to bump the resolution with good results, this would be a lot less effort and retain the exact appearance of textures. The even greater issue is storage and memory use would go through the roof. Imagine all our textures (from surfaces to entity skins) being 4096x4096 which would be the aim for decent quality today: TDM could take over 100 GB of drive space, you'd need at least 16 GB of RAM to run it, and the loading time of a FM will be 5 minutes. Detail textures are a magic solution for both problems: They're overlayed in realtime on top of the standard textures without changing their base appearance. This means you see pixels several times the scale of the image without requiring any image to actually be at that resolution, no vRAM or loading time increase. And if detail layers are disabled with distance you also don't lose FPS in per-pixels calculations when distant lights update.

A visually breaking change is planned for 2.13 (6354). Environment mapping is used when material contains a stage like this: { blend add cubeMap env/gen3 texgen reflect } Historically, there are two separate shaders for this case: one if the material has bumpmapping, and one if it does not. Note that if the material has diffuse or specular stage, then bumpmap is added implicitly. The shader with bumpmap was apparently "tweaked" by someone in TDM and got several major differences: it has fresnel term output color is tonemapped to [0..1] range using X / (1 + X) the color multiplier is hardcoded to (0.4, 0.4, 0.4) I'd like to delete all of these differences and restore the same behavior as in non-bumpmapped case. It is also the same behavior which is used in both cases in Doom 3 BFG (and supposedly in Doom 3 too). Speaking of points 1 and 2, nobody will notice the difference except in rare corner cases. The point 3 however is serious. It is also the main reason behind the change. Right now nobody can tweak the intensity of environment mapping: if you try to set red/green/blue/rgb, these settings are simply ignored. Now the problem is that the intensity of most environment mapping materials will change. In core files I see text like this (stainglass_saint_01) : { blend add maskalpha cubeMap env/gen3 // tone down the reflection a bit //I see no evidence that these values do anything red Parm0 * 0.2 green Parm1 * 0.2 blue Parm2 * 0.2 texgen reflect } Since the default parameter was 0.4, after the change this material will get 2x less intensity. The situation is even worse if rgb multiplier is not specified, since then it will change from 0.4 to 1.0, i.e. envmapping will become 2.5 times brighter. I can probably collect the list of all materials using environment mapping, but I'm not sure I'll be able to check them all one by one. Perhaps I can delete existing rgb settings, blindly set "rgb 0.4" and hope for the best.

It's true, there's no real place on the Wiki for menu customization... it relies on comments in the mainmenu_custom_defs.gui. So I'd guess I'd recommend you do a bug report, to either add a comment to that .gui file about it, or, if it's really a bug, fix it.

That blueprint looks like an image rather than a 3D file format? If so, mappers can use the background image feature to trace the geometry in brush / patch form: http://orbweaver.gitlab.io/DarkRadiant/#_adding_a_background_image That said, the is probably a good AI tool that can convert blueprints to geometry formats such as ASE or OBJ

I can understand your frustrations, however the main reason why we have had to replace the core files is because we don’t have the ability to make tweaks to the core game without doing this. In particular having the bow speed reduced from 6 seconds to 3 feels a lot better ingame. And it’s something that I personally have in all of my missions since I saw it in Kingsal’s mission the first time. If it’s possible for us to tweak that variable without needing to replace the .script file that would be really handy.