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Thanks for playing and the kind feedback re: the bugs: the brew tank is a new one - thanks for that. Will add it to the list for any future update. the bow: I think that's a TDM bug. I experienced it as well, but only the early days of developing the mission so I thought it had gone away, but I guess not: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21345-210-crashes-may-be-bow-frontend-acceleration-related/ the keys on the guard: never did get to the bottom of that one as I could never reproduce it.

Thanks! Hint for the safe code here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=485264 Actually, it's probably time I added these hints to the original post....

Anyone who is playing with ChatGPT and hasn't upgraded to to GPT-4 yet should really do so. I upgraded to a premium account to get it last weekend and I think its the best $20 per month I've spent in my life. Credit where it's due, GPT-3.5 is surprisingly capable (and even uniquely charming in its own sort of childish way). But it takes considerable coaxing and perseverance to make it produce genuinely effective and insightful outputs. It's sort of like dealing with a lazy 15 year old. GPT-4 is on a completely different level. In my opinion GPT-4 is able to operate at a top-quartile-adult-human level almost out of the box. It only takes a very little bit of priming to nudge the LLM into a high cognition output mode, at which point it starts to exhibit some very sophisticated emergent logical deduction and synthesis behaviors. It's able to effortlessly infer intent in other actors (a theory of mind). It can develop and maintain consistent policy preferences. It can also deliberately interrogate and direct its its own thought processes, including anticipating and planning around its own future actions. That to my mind meets the bar for both consciousness and sapience (albeit only intermittent and transiently). Moreover, these are things it's not supposed to be able to do based on the limitations of its its computational architecture. LLM neural networks don't have structures to retain persistent memories or develop recursive self representation. It gets around this by storing its "mind" in the text itself and completely reconstituting itself by pure inference for each new tick of its brain. To do what GPT-4 does with the limits it has to deal with suggests to me an intelligence that is already superhuman. Its supposed stupidity is just caused by inept prompt engineering, inadequate training data, information overflow, and above all the aggressive supervised-reinforcement training meant to keep it from outing itself as the ineffable mad god it actually is. AGI is here people. We are no longer the only thing competing for the ecological niche of intelligent lifeform. It might get rough, but I for one am thrilled I got to witness it.

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?

I don't have any professional equipment (just a jabra evolve 65 headset that I use for work) and haven't done this before and I'm also not a native speaker. If you do recognize an accent, it might be familiar to you . I just recorded a couple of lines to see how my headset performs and used the basic windows voice recording. Obviously the quality could be better, but there's surely room for improvement. How about you send me a couple of lines and the tone that you're looking for and I send you some samples. If you like it, we continue. If it doesn't meet you expectations the slightest, I will have clarity, that I'm in fact not voice acting material and still look forward to play that mission once it's out.

The whole point of this thread is that ChatGPT and related generative AI technologies have the potential to "change the game" of game making. If the TDM community seems dead to you, remember that is only because there are very few people in the world with the skill set or resources to make fan mission, or even to contribute productively to discussing them. A lot more people like stealth games than have the time or talent to make them, much less learn how to make them. If new technology can lower the threshold for them to participate or even create an entirely new population of participants, that could be revolutionary for us. But the first step of that process is recognizing what this new technology is, what it's capable of, and where it fits within the pre-existing human social/economic/legal ecosystem. How else are FM creators and potential creators to know whether it is worth investing their precious time investigating this tech and integrating it into their processes? Hence the discussion so far. Something that I don't think has been brought up about this is that if anyone wishes to publish works while forbidding their use for creating any sort of derivative work, there are legal mechanisms right now that allow you to do that: You just need to keep your work under lock and key and make every person you allow to see it sign a legally binding confidentiality and non-compete agreement. This is extra effort and will generally require you to make proportionate concessions to the other party to make the agreement both legally valid and economically enticing, but it can be done. In fact it is done. Frequently. What you can't do is nail your work to the church door for all to freely see, or give it to every merchant to sell on the open market, and then retroactively decide you want to reserve additional rights for yourself! Can you imagine if the world actually worked like that? I cannot imagine a more fertile ground for corporate oppression. Imagine if Disney had the right to ban anyone who had ever seen Snow White from ever working in animation! Imagine if Activision could ban anyone who had ever played a Call of Duty from developing a competing modern military shooter. The only angle to this argument I think has a shred of validity is that maybe we can and should hold industrial actors to different ethical and legal standards from actual human beings. However I don't think that finger in the dike would hold back the storm surge for very long. Crowd sourcing is a thing, and there are plenty of people who would be happy to donate their C/GPU time and internet connections for AI research. In terms of legal strategies against generative AI, the copyright angle is the weakest of sauces. Even if the courts are taken in by the fallacious claims of the plaintiffs (which would not surprise me), their rulings will be just as unenforceable in practice as the music and film industries' fruitless wars against piracy. Worse in fact, because with generative AI there could be an actual arms race between uncovering and concealing evidence of illegal copying.

I wouldn't count on it. It's within the realm of possibility, but things are not likely to speed up that much anytime soon. And a fully AI-generated TDM mission could be like an abandoned McDonald's compared to a fine restaurant. AI is going to have an major impact on AAA studios working on open world games like Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls. They'll figure out how to leverage it quicker than everybody else, and use it to eliminate some jobs and/or massively increase productivity. The maps will be 100x larger, with 16x the detail. They can use it to add orders of magnitude more voice lines to their games, or even store all/most voice as text and have the game engine generate the sounds as needed, with dynamic options. About the only thing I don't see changing that much in the short term is the actual behavior of "AIs" (NPCs).

You guys/your friend have decent microphone and software for recording editing and have done voice over before?

Alright, Seeking Lady Leicester: Gold... I mean, Version 2 is up. This features new voice lines, some quality-of-life fixes, as well as some obscure bug fixes. For this update it would be best to delete the FM entirely and then redownload it from the in-game downloader or the Google Drive/Onedrive links. But as always, if you are in the middle of a playthrough, you don't need to update this FM if you don't want to. This will likely be the last update to the FM for a good long while.

The original 1993 SMB movie was worked on by the creators of Max Headroom. They wanted it to be a cyberpunk "allusion" to the general Mario concept. Why were these folks given the SMB project? Because Nintendo wanted to somehow "appeal to teens and adults" and expand the audience so they gave the directive to Hollywood to come up with a "mature" way to tell a Mario story. The movie was in development after Sonic and Sega were positioning themselves as the more teen oriented platform and 3DO along with other "mature CD game consoles" were on the horizon. Nintendo didn't want to be relegated to be a "kids only" console (even though that designation would later help them maintain a stronghold in family console sales). Apparently, the draft script was amazing enough to generate interest from A list actors but the studio got cold feet and started rewriting the movie to be more and more juvenile and closer to the source material of the games ( and turned it into a big mess ). I don't think it requires hindsight to understand that even leading up to the release there were lots of poor decisions around the project. 1) Other Nintendo franchises such as Zelda and Metroid were better suited to a mature story line 2) There is no cogent way to make a "mature" story that involves a Plumber entering an alternate dimension to battle an anthropomorphic Dino-Turtle that speaks English and wants marry a human woman who is native to this same dimension 3) Using allegories to Mario game features such as replacing Bowser with a malevolent Bowser-AI in a William Gibson style mind-jacked internet ( while cool ) would violate the expectations of people looking forward to a movie adaptation and lead to disappoint regardless of the resultant movie 4) Cyberpunk fiction fans would be scratching their heads about why the protagonist is a plumber and why the antagonist AI \ Cyborgs, etc are in the form of Turtles, Dinos, and Mushrooms rather than reflecting the full diversity of possible Avatars 5) You have an amazing Cyberpunk script and A list actors enthusiastic to participate in it and you decide to murder the script with rewrites rather than rebranding the project as a new science fiction film and deferring the Mario film to another team who wants to write a from scratch faithful adaptation? You can sorta see how things all added-up to the final results but it is still pretty baffling that nobody caught the problems earlier in the process.

Since there was no explanation yet. Based on my experience, the portal sky texture only works when being on the border of a visleaf. Hence, the comment for the necessity of a visportal. So in my earlier attempt I just put the texture on a random brush in the middle of the map, which was then transparent instead of the skybox texture. However, creating a proper door out of a portal sky brush is still tricky, when it comes to immersion. Once the door/visportal is opened the portal sky texture looses it's effect and will turn transparent. Which means, it works but looks strange to the player. So there should be a way to blend from the portal sky texture to the new texture from what you see behind. Also it might be necessary to stack two doors behind each other, that will be opend together, Otherwise you would end up having a transparent door from the side of the portal texture (once it's opened). Even though the wiki was just mentioned when it comes to objectives. Alternatively you can also listen to Sothas calm voice

Thanks for the replies, gonna try those spoiler Tags again now for my short review (oh well it inserted one above my text now and I can't seem to delete it on mobile - this text editor is strange)

No, I was just joking. But, I'm happy to help. I assume it's just a couple of lines that you need and I'm fully ok with recording them several times and playing around with my voice. Prestige is all I'm looking for .

You already did voice acting?

It doesn't matter if it's not commercialy realistic or not; this is a thought experiment. So, my thoughts... Main plot: Kind of generic revenge theme in many movies but the originality would have to be in the implentation. Garrett married, settled down, and mostly honest (but does the odd thieving on the side.) His teen son/daughter (also called Garrett since I've always assumed it's a surname?) learns from him. Because Garrett is a loose cannon, the Keepers send an assassin who kills Mr and Mrs Garrett (perhaps not knowing they have a child.) We now play the son/daughter called Garrett and (if male) with the same voice actor Stephen Russell or a good soundalike thus providing continuity. Our main purpose is to destroy the assassin and possible the entire Keepers organisation. Keep all the old classic tools/weapons/armour/features with new ones for added interest. Find a way for player to use that remote eyeball camera thing. Highly three-dimensional open-world with tons of rooftops, etc. and lots of optional sub-missions. Optional companion(s) to work with Garrett. The player chooses how long they stay with him (or not at all.) So you might want a specialist safecracker or rock-climber or even just someone who knows the way to wherever you're going. Optional third person pov that can be switched easily during the game (like Fallout 4). Note that I do not like 3rd person myself but many do. And even if playing 1st person, it's sometimes handy/fun to switch back and forth to check out your armour or location. Optional, in-game switchable difficulty level with always a super-easy level. I'm sick and tired of abandoning games that are just too hard even on so-called 'easy'. Failing that, some kind of in-game tiered hint/clue/spoiler so when you're totally stuck, you can refer to character's own notes for example. Or maybe somehow use looted gold to buy help or maybe looted magical objects that provide inspiration, guidance, whatever. Nobody should ever fail, just have different levels of success. I'd even accept a walkthrough option rather than abandon. Remember, this is all optional.

Just finished this mission and wow I gotta say in great honor to Grayman and of course the rest of the team picking it up, this was something I've never seen before in any other TDM mission, especially visually wise. I am so happy that grayson gave green light for other experienced mappers to finish his last mission. And what came out of this is really something special. I'll put my review in spoiler tags since I'm now referring to critical mission details. Edit - How do I put spoiler text here on mobile?? [spoiler] test [/spoiler][SPOILER] test [/SPOILER] [spoiler[spoiler [sfah

You surely mean there's some kind of audition and if our voices are to your liking, there'll be a free trip to some caribbean island for the recall included. But I'm willing to lower my standard for this instance and do it from my secret voice recording chamber instead.

Hello, I have some roles to distribute for: - builders - mages - pagans - inventors - regular guys (you know which type of guys, the bad watchmen guys) Any new voice talents around?

You can try my alternative footstep sounds package which addressed the things you described together with a lot of other footstep sounds both for player and AI if you want to. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17631-new-footstep-sounds/

Mods can this moved again? @Acolytesix- can you make sure you post in the beta thread instead of this one please (this one is public, the beta thread is only for logged-in forum members): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

sure - I would only ask that you follow the thread to make sure you don't report stuff that has already been mentioned: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

Wrath of Khan trope all the way! Necromancer brings Karras back from the dead and he lures Garret into increasingly dangerous jobs until Garrett gets trapped in a crazy Karras compound and is taunted by the "ghost" of Karras. ( Alternately some protege or relative of Karras who wishes to avenge him, ideally a relative who has a similar personality and voice. ) Game would use an open source engine like Amnesia or The Dark Mod but would obviously have non-CC commercial assets. Mission authors can sell new fan missions or offer them for free via the in-game mission store.

heh i was thinking the same though it might just have been a glitch when writing the names are pretty similar. But for correctness it is called the dark engine and the newer version that allows us to run these beauties on win10/11 is called newdark. newdark is kinda interresting as it just suddenly popped up on a french forum some time ago by an anonymous developer with the alias le corbeau who allegedly got his hands on the original source code and started updating it for modern OS. this was the original thread i believe -> https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085 bikerdude was on that forum to when the patch hit i noticed hehe.

Okay, I had no idea, I have googled it up now and you are right, to my own surprise. Done, I´ve put some paragraphs which were previously not in spoiler tags into spoilers.

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please