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Would it possible to tweak or add to the model (.LWO and .ASE) export function the ability to reduce the amount of textures, or better still to export a single custom texture for the exported model..? For example atm if we take a bunch of Springheel's modular models, or just random models and brushwork and export that collection to a single model there is X number of textures which as I understand it increases the draw call count by the number of textures used. With Springheels modular models the texture count is lower due to the way he created them, due to the small amount of and similar textures used. But for maps like the one Im working on, I'm taking .ASE, .LWO and exiting brush/patch work and exporting to a single model.

Are there any such resources like that in dromed where you can download models, AI's and texture packs for Dark Mod, I have seen in FM's some different models that are not included (I think) in the choices available in Dark Radiant.

Here's textures/darkmod/plaster/panel_decorative_white texture, current normalmap only: Current normalmap plus heightmap generated in Stable Diffusion (with a bit of wavelet decompose + highpass filter in GIMP): And this one is using only the heightmap. Normalmap is generated from it using the blend bumpmap command in the material. textures/darkmod/plaster/panel_decorative_white { surftype15 description "tile" qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/plaster/panel_decorative_white_ed diffusemap textures/darkmod/plaster/panel_decorative_white { blend bumpmap map heightmap (textures/darkmod/plaster/panel_decorative_white_height , 10) } { blend parallaxmap map textures/darkmod/plaster/panel_decorative_white_height min -0.03 max 0.03 } } I used the Depth Anything v2 Large model using this addon I mentioned before and I think it did a great job. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cf1V861gnc0aPs8rn2BGcQuO0PYhIuLG/view?usp=drive_link

Google translated: https://rutracker-org.translate.goog/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6419292&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=nl&_x_tr_pto=wapp === There are lots of topics about black screens during the main menu. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/search/&q=Black screen&type=forums_topic&nodes=58&search_and_or=and

It was definitely nice to get around to this at last. First and only train mission so far to my knowledge: I was fascinated how you pulled it through from a technical perspective, using real moving geometry for the background rather than just a scrolling texture... I imagine scripting and / or path curves were involved, if I ever make my own train (which is tempting) I might look closer into it and try out alternatives! Found most stuff and enjoyed how linear yet fluid the gameplay was.

On the wiki, I'm working on a set of pages with the title-preface and broad theme "The Parts and Whole". This looks at the hows and whys of map objects being formed into collections. The hub of this is The Parts and Whole: Overview Within the hub, so far, the section "Techniques that Affect DR Only" is built out with comparison tables and child pages. This covers these techniques: Hide/Show, Region, Layer, Filter, Group, Selection Set. I'd appreciate any eyeballs on the work so far. Please suggest or edit-in improvements. In particular, are there links to videos or other wiki or forum pages that you think most apt and should be added, e.g., to the "See Also" section? "The Parts and Whole" effort is mostly intended for newbies and so is not afraid to state the obvious at times. In some cases, it covers ground also handled by the necessarily-concise DarkRadiant User Guide, but with more depth and context. In other cases, the info was only found buried in forums. Because I'm trying to cover a fair amount of ground, the pages are text-only. Some of the child pages could benefit from screenshots some day.

@Frost_SalamanderIt has been a good minute since i've played with particle collisions with rain, however I decided to revisit it after seeing your post and I can't seem to get it working. @stgatilov could you please confirm if this is the right flow as it doesn't seem to be working in my map: 1) Create a .prt file containing: particle rain2_heavy2024 { { count 100 material textures/particles/drop2 time 0.500 cycles 0.000 bunching 1.000 distribution rect 0.000 0.000 0.000 direction cone "0.000" orientation aimed 0.000 0.040 speed "1000.000" size "0.500" aspect "1.000" randomDistribution 0.000 fadeIn 0.200 fadeOut 0.000 color 0.040 0.040 0.040 1.000 fadeColor 0.000 0.000 0.000 1.000 offset 0.000 0.000 0.000 gravity 0.000 collisionStatic mapLayout texture 512 512 } } 2) Create a .mtr file containing: textures/darkmod/weather/rain2_heavy2024mtr { deform particle rain2_heavy2024 qer_editorimage textures/editor/rain nonsolid noshadows { //needed to emit particles blend filter map _white } } 3) Create the appropriate patch in game applying the above texture to it (with the texture fit to it and it facing down) 4) dmap missionname.map 5) runparticle missionname.map But ingame the rain just ignores the brushes and falls right through: Even using "particle_collision_static_blocker" "1" on this water entity, had no impact

Just fired up TDM on new system after a pause, built dark radiant via ebuild from wiki install instructions and encountered this bug. Small texture preview in "media" tab is not updating, and so is "textures" tab. Texture selector in Surface inspector works fine however. Textures tab updates and show textures when typing into filter field. I also get a lot of spam in terminal, in shape of "(darkradiant:10678): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_box_gadget_distribute: assertion 'size >= 0' failed in GtkSpinButton", but that may be unrelated. I upgraded wxGTK to latest (3.0.4) and then checked out and built last tagged version (2.6.0) of radiant, to no avail. Any ideas?

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

I should start by saying the suggestion was inspired by this exact feature being successfully implemented in the FPS Red Eclipse (Cube / Tesseract engine) for a long time with very good looking results. I'm a developer or at least mapper for RE as well, if you need more information I'll ask its admin Quin for more technical data on how the system works. I can also find or create a video showing how the wind mechanism functions if anyone can use that. TheDarkMod currently lacks any real system for simulating wind: If you want to make a FM that takes place in a stormy environment that looks good, you're out of luck. All we have is a handful of animated props animated to appear as if swaying in the wind, namely a tree and banner that move slightly: You can't adjust the intensity nor the direction of the wind effect, at best you can maybe tweak the animation speed to match the wind strength you'd like to depict. There is a much better way using vertex shader deforms defined in the global shader. The first step is defining wind direction, this can be done as a property of the location info and / or using an entity for radial wind direction. When touched by a wind value above zero, models (static or animated) will play a sine wave animation on vertices, its direction and distance and frequency defined by the wind entity spawnargs and the entity's distance from its epicenter. Obviously models must specify which vertices should be wavy, the most common way is using vertex colors though an intensity texture also works if that's preferred, in any case models must include per-vertice information to specify which points should sway in the wind and by how much. Particles also need to be blown away by the wind but that should be very simple, further effects like affecting the direction of noise transmission are optional and can be done later at best. Existing assets will need to be modified to make use of this. This includes every tree and grass so branches and leaves are affected by wind the further they are from the trunk and the base of the tree, obviously this should also be done for all banners and even the clothes on AI so you can see the the sleeves of characters flutter in the wind. All particles should be affected including flames and smoke so torches blow to the side. Note that old maps would not be affected even after the assets are modified since they'd need to specify wind information for the effect to activate.

Somehow I find the texture of the clouds not looking like clouds. It looks more like the surface of the moon. It seems also that there's a background image in it that doesn't animate.

So got a PM from JoeBarnin in relation to his current beta for some help looking for a window protection texture, so rather than just do the work I thought I would make a little howto vid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVest1d3jcg&feature=youtu.be

Hey all! I haven't properly played the Dark Mod since 2.05 or maybe even 2.04 until now and I've noticed that whatever I do in game the center and LFE channels of my 5.1 sound system remain silent. In other words, the output is actually 4.0 (2 front + 2 rear speakers) rather than 5.1. Now, I am not sure exactly but I recall no problems previously - until the EFX update 2.06, I think. I even found my older post about extremely loud LFE channel here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18741-really-loud-music/&tab=comments#comment-405277 As I understand, it is often made that the center and LFE channels are reserved for special sounds and not used often as the front speakers. For example, in Witcher3 center is mostly used for voices in the dialogs and the best way to check LFE is to use the aard sign magic. Or, in Skyrim it is known that LFE plays only when the dragon hits the ground. The first question is: do I have an issue with sound or not? Because maybe the sound output is ok and I've simply met no specific conditions utilizing the center and LFE channels? Minding my previous paragraph, I don't think it's EFX related but maybe the sound shaders simply changed since 2.05? This all brings me to another question: is there a way to check somehow in the Dark Mod wether the game outputs the sound correctly? About my setup now. I output sound via HDMI to Pioneer receiver with 5.1 setup. Everything works fine in modern games that provide 5.1 output support like the Witcher3 or Mortal Kombat 10 and 11. The windows sound configuration in control panel allows me to check all the speakers and it's fine. I have win 7 64 bit, OpenAl installed. The Dark Mod allows me to set 5.1 sound in options with no warning (I know that in other cases it gives a message like "your system does not support this sound configuration"). Please, help me to find out if anything's wrong with my setup and why my center and LFE channels are silent. Hate to start new threads but I didn't find anything related to my problem. Moreover, I feel the lack of sound-related discussions considering our community's interests.

Because that we would have to copy/paste all rain materials to introduce "deform particle" version. Note that we cannot delete "deform particle2" versions because they are already used, and they cannot be replaced that easily. Then we would have to copy everything again in order to add versions with collisions. But I'm sure mappers might want to create rain patches of different size, so we'll probably have to have versions with layout texture 1024 1024, layout texture 512 512, layout texture 256 256, etc. And then different mappers might have different feelings about the balance between quality and waiting time in case of layout linear, so we'll have many versions of snow too. All of this causes combinatorial explosion, and we'll get at least ten times more materials and particle decls than we have now, causing a lot of confusion. Perhaps combinatorial explosion can be avoided if these settings are specified in another file. I guess at that moment I was not brave enough to introduce a new type of decl files.

Given that this is a community developed game forum, I thought some of you would know of a good place to get a large pack of textures for free. I wouldn't be selling them or anything, they would strictly be for personal use. I'm talking about stuff like carpets, wallpaper/wood/stone/you name it. Any good references? Thanks

That's Godot's parallax shader, it tends to look like that especially when occlusion depth is turned off. The direction and highlights are correct though: That's mainly what I wanted to test when I generated the PBR versions of the texture pack.

Thanks for clarifying, and I agree with most of your points. I'm aware the effect doesn't look too realistic as it's still a 2D illusion and doesn't pop out of the actual geometry, though I do think it often looks better to have it than not. Especially with the self shadowing which can make all those highlights more realistic, that's the part I was excited about rather than the deform. I think the difference is I'm thinking of it more along the lines of shadow maps or ambient occlusion, where once they were added they worked everywhere... those are post-processing shaders not material shaders so it's indeed a different matter. The reason I say is it won't be used at large is that at no point will a FM enable it on every single texture: That would require turning it on for every brick, wood, metal, AI skin, etc used on the map meaning dozens of copied material / skin / entity definitions. Using it on everything like that is what I initially hoped would happen, but if there's really no way I understand, the devs who actually know the code and shaders have their reasons for the limitation. And yes, feel free to move this to another thread if that's more appropriate, though I think your point clarifies it.

We didn't have enough time to add npcs like we had planned. There was so much more I wish I could have done, but that just gives me more material for new maps! Thank you! As a fellow jumping/mantling enthusiast, I wanted to make sure I had some vertical elements! Thank you for the kind words ^-^ So I have one skin file with multiple lines, each line referencing a different model and texture to replace? Am I understanding correctly?

I also feel you. I used to be a regular here in the forums, but since my son was born in 2022, it basically grunded to halt, although I still get the mails on threads that I wrote in. Ironically, your post in June about not having time got me back here and got me motivated to try and use some of my precious spare time to get some progress on the map I started years ago. I still have not been able to finish a map and want to change that, as long long as the community here is still active

I think there was a quirk in the engine that treated pure 0 black as an artist error so a small uplift was added to ensure proper light response. This was more critical when the ambient had a Fresnel component. The DXT1 encoding was to save on storage. I think that's a silly rationale since a pure single color texture could technically be represented by a single pixel. No pressing need to compress that or even a 32x32 texture but I suppose if someone is obsessed with saving texture storage they could choose png or a better dxt version. TLDR; Transparent \ Blend textures should be fine with 0,0,0 color and single color textures don't need aggressive compression. _black should be fine for all such materials.

This is caused by DXT1 compression of textures/darkmod/sfx/black_matt.tga. This image has constant color (1, 1, 1) everywhere, i.e. almost black. Previously, the image was compressed by OpenGL driver, so you could get different results depending on vendor. I got (0, 0, 0) everywhere, you probably got the same. But someone else on another vendor could get something else. Now, compression is done by our code, same for everyone. It compresses the color to (0, 1, 0). Obviously, this is a bit closer to (1, 1, 1) than (0, 0, 0) Notice that DXT1 uses 5 bits for red and blue but 6 bits for green. So while it is possible to represent 1/255 value for green, it is not possible to do the same for red and blue. However, this 1 tick adds a bit of green to the overly black picture, and then you apply huge gamma correction (basically take sqrt of all color components) and this green becomes noticeable. Some ways to fix the issue: Use _black texture. It is (0, 0, 0), and I am rather sure it will be compressed to (0, 0, 0) by all implementations. Modify textures/darkmod/sfx/black_matt to be full black (0, 0, 0). Add forceHighQuality to the stage which blends textures/darkmod/sfx/black_matt. Add DDS version of textures/darkmod/sfx/black_matt to core assets. Note that points 1, 2, 4 produce equivalent output, i.e. force texture to (0, 0, 0) color. Point 3 leaves the texture as (1, 1, 1), but there is no way to do this for all materials: the keyword has to be added to each material. Points 1 and 3 look bad because they fix the problem now, but don't stop the problem from happening again in the future.