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There's been talk over the years on how we could improve texture quality, often to no avail as it requires new high-resolution replacements that need to be created and will look different and add a strain on system resources. The sharpness post-process filter was supposed to improve that, but even with it you see ugly blurry pixels on any nearby surface. Yet there is a way, a highly efficient technique used by some engines in the 90's notably the first Unreal engine, and as it did wonders then it can still do so today: Detail textures. Base concept: You have a grayscale pattern for various surfaces, such as metal scratches or the waves of polished wood or the stucco of a rough rock, usually only a few highly generic patterns are needed. Each pattern is overlayed on top of corresponding textures several times, every iteration at a smaller... as with model LOD smaller iterations fade with camera distance as to not waste resources, the closer you get the more detail you see. This does wonders in making any texture look much sharper without changing the resolution of the original image, and because the final mixture is unique you don't perceive any repetitiveness! Here's a good resource from UE5 which seems to support them to this day: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/adding-detail-textures-to-unreal-engine-materials Who else agrees this is something we can use and would greatly improve graphical fidelity? No one's ever going to replace every texture with a higher resolution version in vanilla TDM; Without this technique we'll always be stuck with early 2000's graphics, with it we have a magic way of making it look close to AAA games today! Imagine being able to see all those fine scratches on a guard's helmet as light shines on it, the thousands of little holes on a brick, the waves of wood as you lean into a table... all without even losing much performance nor a considerable increase in the size of game data. It's like the best deal one could hope for! The idTech 4 material system should already have what we need, namely the ability to mix any textures at independent sizes; Unlike the old days when only a diffuse texture was used, the pattern would now need to be applied to both albedo / specular / normal maps, to my knowledge there are shader keywords to combine each. Needless to say it would require editing every single material to specify its detail texture with a base scale and rotation: It would be painful but doable with a text injection script... I made a bash script to add cubemap reflections once, if it were worth it I could try adapting it to inject the base notation for details. A few changes will be needed of course: Details must be controlled by a main menu setting activating this system and specifying the level of detail, materials properties can't be controlled by cvars. Ultimately we may need to overlay them in realtime, rather than permanently modifying every material at load time which may have a bigger performance impact; We want each iteration to fade with distance and only appear a certain length from the camera, the effect will cause per-pixel lighting to have to render more detail per light - surface interaction so we'll need to control the pixel density.

Never thought it was enabled.....thanks! Stupid camera lens "simulation" effects (bloom when overdone, chromatic aberration, flares, dirt, etc.....even DISTORSION of the entire viewport in Atlas Fallen - it's only acceptable in a sniping UI) The only thing rivaling in "detest" feeling with camera lens effects is the pre-sharpening pass in case of Temporal AA (Chernobylite) or Depth of Field too (yes, I see you Dishonored 2 / DotO)

Megatextures were a horrible idea for obvious reasons, not sure why ID chose to learn that the hard way. The concept from what I remember is the whole map uses a single gigantic texture... instead of how we independently pick a couple of 1024 px brick materials for a few brushes and surfaces, the whole map acts as one model with one material and a single texture which probably needs to be 1 million x 1 million pixels even for a small level. This is ridiculous from a perspective of system resources with 100's of GB's of storage and huge (v)RAM requirements and hours of loading time, as well as raising the skills required for level editing since you now need mappers to also be texture artists and sculpt / paint their levels instead of just placing stuff. The only thinkable benefit is there's no repetition since every pixel on every part of the world is unique, but who notices any similarity with independent texturing if it's done right anyway? Detail textures have yet another advantage there: Since you scale the pattern independently on top of the original texture, you can make every surface appear as if it has unique pixels like megatextures. Hence why I'd advice having the details be very high-res, 4k or 8k even 16k if we can take it: Yes that's enormous, but remember we'd only have a few patterns probably no more than 15 in total, and can store them as grayscale then use a single image to modify both albedo / specular / normal (heightmap to normalmap): Map the detail in world space rather than the brush or model UV map, and the resulting pattern on every surface in the world will always be unique since the original and detail textures will be out of sync.

I like the Transition from dusk to night in the Prologue and the fact that it didn't last long. Hiding and stealing during the day feels weird to me. I couldn't digest Mankind Divided as much as I liked the Artistic touches for this reason. The Prague map felt so Arbitrary.

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.

Found the White Flash Hex Value but not the one for the Shroud effect. I'm playing the Epic Version.

This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, houses, events, incidents and particpants in this forum thread/fm are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Hello everyone, I am saddened that my first post here is to bring you all the news concerning the disappearance of my dear friend, wellingtoncrab, which was last seen on March 10 of this year by heading to the woods of northern California . Unfortunately, without trace or tracks, we have no choice but to cancel research. In addition to finishing 1.25 FMS, wellingtoncrab was known as an partner of many famous people and models, and to have the largest animal crossing house. We will miss them a lot. Of course, an immediate concern was devoted to determining the status of their unpublished FM(s). I must admit that the passage through their hard drive has not turned much, but I was intrigued to find a file called "IRI2.PK4". Unfortunately, my computer cannot load the card (too old, lol ), but I will download it here for posterity as well as the text included in the README: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SdZswFLUh5VwReIq79uFL_ahXyKxg34F/view?usp=sharing ========================================= WellingtonCrab Presents: IRI2: The Totally Unauthorized Sequel to Moving Day: Moving Day 2: Look Who’s Moving Now *For Richard and Linda* “There once was a hole here. Now it is gone.” With enduring gratitude to: Testers: ImaDace Goldfish Kingsalmon Acknowledgments: @Jedi_Wannabe for graciously unauthorizing this sequel to his great mission "Paying the Bills 0: Moving Day." Mr. Squirrels: you know who you are and what you did. The name "Lampfire Hills" originates with the author Purah and now is part of the extended universe of many subsequent Thief missions. Bikerdude and Goldchocobo then brought the name into the setting of The Dark Mod with the FM "The Gatehouse." It then came to me in a dream. @Dragofer for all of his scripting work and support over the years. Polyhaven.com for its many excellent CC0 assets. I recommend supporting them on Patreon if you can spare the change: https://www.patreon.com/polyhaven/ Textures.com "One or more textures bundled with this project have been created with images from Textures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default. Please visit www.textures.com for more information." Google Image Search.

Completely disagree it was a very good idea that unfortunately came too early with idSoftware RAGE 1 because hardware was still and is not truly ready for it. Megatexture is for textures, what UE5 nanite is for geometry, it permits huge amounts of texture data in a level and even totally unique textures per each surface, no repetition unlike older methods. MT isn't simple a giant texture slapped unto a level, it is a type of virtual texturing system, the MT is a huge "texture" but it's data, is not all drawn on a level at the same time, like a normal one is, it is broken into smaller squared peace's and those peace's into even smaller ones for LOD aka mipmapping, then those peace's are streamed in, in real time has the player moves around. Again IMO It is a very cool idea and if the hardware was fast enough, to stream it fast and it was possible to compress the MT data, to very small amounts and still keep good quality, it would be a fantastic system for very unique levels. Rage 1 world may look bad at close distance, but at medium to large distances imo it looks fantastic and totally unique.

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.

One of the problems with the old #str_number system, that would not be automatically solved in the new #str_phrase system, is lack of versioning/history. For example, suppose in the FM I provide a new string: #str_Mother! which (by magic TBD, ideally in DR) generates this placeholder in all the .lang files: "#str_Mother!" "Mother!" The translator in the fr.lang file later does this: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" Still later, the FM author revises the string in DR: "str_Mother!!!" In a naive implementation, this breaks the link to the existing translation(s), which becomes orphan in all the .langs, and creates a new entry: "#str_Mother!!!" "Mother!!!" OK, how could we do better? Case 1 (as above): the FM author knows the change is trivial, and so (at revision time in DR) might ask the translations to be retained but marked for review. So maybe the fr.lang files gets: // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother!!!" "Mere!" // Needs minor review with removal of the orphans (after they become comments and moved to before their replacements) Case 2, where the revision is not trivial: the FM author (at revision time in DR) might ask the translations to be replaced by english but marked for review, e.g.: #str_Mother of Pearl! causes the fr.lang files to have (with orphan removal as case 1): // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother of Pearl!" "Mother of Pearl!" // NEEDS REDO Then the translator could eventually fix it: // WAS UNTIL 2025-01-01: "#str_Mother!" "Mere!" "#str_Mother of Pearl!" "Nacre!" // Done 2025-03-14 by Henri

I have updated my Refont program, to now have a function that can analyze a font DAT file for missing or problematic characters. As part of a broader inquiry, I've just applied that program, individually, to all current 'english' font DAT files. I'm reporting the overall results here. I'm sure this will not be a surprise to some of you, but may be to others. Background As you know, TDM fonts are based a bitmap system, derived from 256-character code pages, of which "English" and "Russian" are currently supported. "English" is actually Latin-1, with additional characters to cover more European languages in a single codepage. This is (in theory) quite good for major European languages, less so for less-prominent ones. For each font, bitmaps are distributed in 3 sizes (12, 24, 48 pt), with the engine doing interpolation scaling. Current Font Findings 12-pt Size for All Fonts Only ASCII (i.e., lower range 0-127) characters are provided, no European. For some fonts (stone, mason, mason_glow), the 12-pt DAT is not distributed, so the engine will substitute a larger size, which typically has better Latin-1 coverage. For Fonts Used in Main Menus, HUD, or Subtitles The numbers shown approximate the number of "characters needing work" Fontname Size-24 Size-48 carleton 20 16 carleton_condensed 20 35 mason -- 33 Since 24 pt is not distributed, engine uses 48 pt. stone 30 83 For Additional Fonts Used in FM Readables, Etc. Except for one font (treasure_map), all the remaining fonts are ASCII-only, i.e., no characters in the upper range. In the lower range, routinely the 24 and 48 pt sizes have equivalent coverage. Most of these fonts are fully or nearly complete, while some neglect certain punctuation symbols. The worst is "everette", with 24 "needing work" characters. Further details are here:

The Megatextures concept predates idSoftware. It even predates hardware accelerated 3D in consumer graphics. The problem it solves is managing image diversity. It is well suited to photogrammetry where almost nothing is repeated \ tiled. It is not well suited to human texture artists because even the most perfectionist ones are going to use some sort of template that they repeat and thus it is a waste to store the resultant work as unique pixels rather than tiles.

@Ansome's question is correct. Nothing in real life ever has a perfectly sharp corner, and one of the pieces of advice often given to newbie modellers trying to make things look realistic and avoid the "obvious CG" look, is to give sharp edges a tiny bevel so they look like something that might be manufactured in real life. The problem you've got in DarkRadiant is (1) dealing with tiny bevels using regular brush geometry is awkward, and (2) brushes aren't smoothed at all (unlike the cube on the right which actually has full smooth shading which you don't notice because of the tiny bevel). So unless you're willing to create imported 3D models with smoothed bevelled edges and place them on the corner of your buildings, adding bevels in brushwork might be more trouble than it's worth. Probably the most important things with brickwork corners is to make sure the bricks line up properly. There's nothing more obviously CG than a plastered-on brickwork texture which just ends in an unrealistic column of cut-off bricks, with mortar joints that are completely unaligned with the brickwork on the adjacent face.

I think that this discussion is probably similar to discussions that idSoftware themselves had about the challenges of texture storage in engines that heavily rely on Normal Maps for real-time lighting. The conclusion was Megatextures ( later known as partially resident textures ) but the suggestion was a little too ahead of its time. Heck, early Megatexture games would probably benefit from detail textures more than idTech4 because they capped the pixel density to allow larger map-sized textures. Many modern games have caught up and use partially resident textures but do so in a more conservative way thus making them part of a hierarchy of texture usage methods that includes texture atlases and traditional tiled textures.

Sixty years ago the famous deLisle family fell into ruin. The last heir of their house believes an ancient heirloom will restore their fortunes. Retrieving it should be worth braving a haunted house for... Get it from the in-game mission downloader.

Disable Lens Flares For those making their own with Reshad or just dislike the look. Thief Game>Config>ThiefEngine.ini Look under [SystemSettings] LensFlares=True to LensFlares=False ON OFF

I agree, that is an issue. It would be better if the system handling briefings/readables could be revised as you indicated, to handle individual sentences as #str_, rather than whole pages. Baring that, having a key field like "#str_This is a whole page\nfull of text that goes on and on and on [...] until done" would appear as a very long single line. That is nasty to look at in the Readables Editor, and even worse in the .langs file, where the too-long text would appear twice on a line (once with #str_ prefix of English version, another in translation). So for those, it would be better in the short term to stick to symbolic keys, e.g., existing #str_12345 or revised form #str_myfm_book_of_spells_page_1 I might add, in the longer term, enhancing the Readable Editor to use the .lang files would be an enormous improvement for FM authors and a significant accomplishment. A fair amount of work though, but probably doable in increments over several releases.

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!+++

I always say that...The only thing that beats a fail is a try. I'm actually interested in these Detail Textures now that you further talked about its history and how today we'd use it on 1080p for 512 and 1024 textures. If anything, it would be a fun experiment just to see how it would look and how it would go. Also, yeah, I wouldn't want the game to be bigger than 100GB and have extreme loading times, all in the name of modern textures at 4k, I have a very hefty computer but that doesn't mean poor ol' but venerable IdTech 4 wants to handle it.

Venturing beyond the base game... A candle set consists of a candle holder and a candle attached to it. Core candle holders, candles and candle sets are properly named in v1.0 but mappers sometimes create their own candle sets and because of how these object are handled by the engine we end up with a "Candle holder" on screen. We can approach this puzzle in different ways but for the sake of simplicity in v1.1 everything is a "Candle", including single candle holders. Find v1.1 attached to this post. Remember you need the Core Essentials for the mod to work. z_nameless_objects_mod_v1.1.pk4

Also, related to font improvement, I've just released "ExportFontToDoom3All256", a reconstruction of an earlier but now lost tool variant. This is described and available in the wiki article ExportFontToDoom3 I tested that tool using one of the TDM FM fonts, Andrew Script, for which a TTF file is available. I generated a fresh set of bitmaps (newly including any available Latin-1 characters). I also mucked about with FontForge, to reconfigure that TTF to be ordered like the TDM custom codepage. However, Andrew Script is missing a fair number of Latin-1 glyphs, so it would take some work to make it good (whether by editing in FontForge or post-export as bitmaps). I'm putting that aside for now, since the jury is out on whether Western language support in FMs and their fonts will become viable (see Western language support in 2024?). Instead, I plan to turn my font-improvement-for-2.13 attention to Stone 24pt, which (because its used in HUD captions) is more clearly worthwhile to work on. Looks like I'll have to convert the Stone DDS to TGA as a prerequisite to bitmap editing.

============== -= IRIS =- ============== WELLINGTONCRAB TDM v 2.10 REQ Ver. 1.2 *For Maureen* -=- "Carry the light of the Builder, Brother. Unto its end." -Valediction of the Devoted "What year is this? Am I dreaming?" -Plea of the Thief Dear Iris, I am old and broken. When we were young it felt like the words came easily. Now I find the ink has long dried on the pen and I'm as wanting for words as coin in my purse. I can tell we are nearing the end of the tale; time enough for one more job before the curtain call... ============== -Installation- Requires minimum version of TDM 2.10 -Iris does not support mods or the Unofficial Patch- Download and place the following .pk4 into you FMs directory: Iris Download ============== *Thank you for playing. Iris is a large mission which can either take as quickly or as long as you are compelled to play. I hope someone out there enjoys it and this initial release is not completely busted - I tried the best I could!* *Iris both is and isn't what it seems. If commenting please use spoiler tags where appropriate. If you are not certain if it would be appropriate a good assumption would be to use a spoiler tag* *Support TDM by rating missions on Thief Guild: https://www.thiefguild.com/* ============== WITH LASTING GRATITUDE: OBSTORTTE - Whose gameplay scripts from his thread laid the foundation which made the mission seem like something I could even pull off at all. Also fantastic tutorial videos! DRAGOFER - Who built upon that foundation and made it shine even brighter! And whom also provided immeasurable quantities of help and encouragement the past couple years on the TDM discord. ORBWEAVER & GIGAGOOGA - For generously offering their ambient music up for use. EPIFIRE - Who lent me his fine trash and trash receptacle models. AMADEUS - Who was the first person who wasn't me to play the damn thing and provided his excellent editorial services to improving the readers experience playing TESTERS AND TROUBLESHOOTERS: AMADEUS * DATISWOUS * SPOOKS * ALUMINUMHASTE * JAXA * JACKFARMER * WESP5 * ATE0ATE * MADTAFFER * STGATILOV * DRAGOFER * KINGSAL * KLATREMUS - What can I possibly say? Playing this thing over and over again could not have been easy. Deepest thanks and all apologies. -=THANKS TO ALL ON THE TDM DISCORD AND FORUM=- ==SEE README.TXT FOR ADDITIONAL ATTRIBUTIONS & INFORMATION== HONORABLE MENTION: GOLDWELL - If I hadn't by chance stumbled into Northdale back in 2018/2019 I would probably still be trying to get this thing to work in TDS, which means it probably would not exist - though more details on that in readme. ============== Boring Technical Information: *This mission makes use of volumetric lighting in several scenes. While optional if you wish to see this feature enable the "maps" lighting model and I recommend you also disable image sharpening. If you do not like the effect or are concerned about performance use stencil shadows* *Iris is a performance intensive mission and I recommend a GTX 1060 or equivalent. I find the performance similar to other demanding TDM missions on my machine, but mileage may vary and my apologies if this prevents anyone from enjoying the mission.* *Iris heavily modifies the behavior of AI in the game, how they relate/respond to each other and the player. So they may act even stranger than they do typically in TDM. Feedback on this is useful - as it can potentially be improved and expanded upon in future patches.* -=- This is my first release and it has been a long time coming! If I forgot anything please let me know! God Speed. 2.10 Features Used:

In considering my possible upcoming TDM projects, such as upgrading some fonts to Latin-1 or "TDM Latin", I reviewed the current status of support for European Latin-based languages. Basically, for FMs, the translation system has fallen into disrepair and disuse (or perhaps kicked into the grave). Neither "converted" (i.e., #str using) FMs nor Language Packs are now being maintained and distributed by thedarkmod.com. As to other sites, for Cyrillic/Russian, DarkFate provides such resources. Are there any such sites in native Western European tongues, say, German, French, Italian, that likewise offer translated TDM FMs? So, turning back to thedarkmod.com, questions - - is Western Language support (outside the main menu system) officially dead? - if so, maybe it's time to stop pretending otherwise. - if not, should the converted #str system be revived, with better infrastructure? - or an alternative translation system be devised... if so, what? I'm just trying to identify work worth doing. (I started to draft a doc with a litany of problems with Western language support, and possible sub-projects to address them, but TL;DR. And really, not pertinent if support is considered dropped.) Thanks for your thoughts.

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.

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.