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I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.

TBH, I also found some of the mandatory jumps pretty hard to do. I would have liked it better if there had been more climbable surfaces, like ivy on walls, pipes, or even rope arrows.

Indeed like you said TDM engine is not outdated, at lest not like the original Doom 3 engine is. Yes is not using PBR and nanite and raytracing and all that new Unreal Engine 5 stuff that makes it a very fast engine ... not ... but the TDM engine has a ton of updates, above the original idtech4 engine from Doom 3, IMO has now more in common with idTech 5 than idTech4. And all done by a very tiny team of TDM players, with the necessary knowhow, on their free time, for absolute free. Man some people don't deserve to get nice things for free... And I'm not talking about you datiswous. To anyone wondering, here is some of the things TDM engine has above original idTech4 that I'm aware: - soft stencil shadows like Wolfenstein 2009 (original is hard stencil shadows only). - new shadow system using shadow maps. - volumetric lighting (aka god rays). - more advanced AI system (so more CPU heavy). - GLSL shaders support and OpenGL 3.x akin to D3D10/11 level, (original is OGL 2.0 akin to d3d9 level and uses ARB assembly shaders only). - modern multicore support (original is single core only). - unlocked framerate (original is locked at 60hz) - 64bits color support - Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - Parallax Occlusion Mapping And a ton of more changes, like LOD support, obj models support, improved gui system, improved scripting system, better window system with support for high dpi monitors and 16 by 9 and other screen ratios, etc, etc. None of these changes were easy to make and took years of hard work, again for free, for a free game that we wall consume without paying a dime. IMO the lest some people can do, is respect that! Enough said.

The Problem Readables are available in a wide range of TDM bitmap fonts. Unfortunately, the majority of these fonts lack non-ASCII glyphs for European languages, and it would be a prohibitively lengthy task to craft them. This is one of several translation hurdles. (Another is soliciting, organizing, and distributing the work of human translators; see “AI for Translations: An Exploration” for work on an alternative. This also promotes the use of meaningful alphanumeric #str_ IDs - possibly automatically generated – instead of traditional numeric.) A Proposed Solution Suppose that when a particular page of readable is shown, it is shown first is English, with the mapper-specified font (e.g., Camberic), and then, after a number of seconds, shown in the current user-selected language, with a different font (e.g., Stone), one that offers the needed diacritics? And with the translated font size scaled down to accommodate potentially more-lengthy translated strings? Both the English and translated text can be viewed in sequence. That opens the door to “quick and dirty” default translations, e.g., machine translation. In particular, the reader may sometimes be able to work-around any layout problems and sub-optimal translation by consulting the English text. (Nevertheless, default translations may sometimes miss subtle nuanced hints, so the ability to improve them with tweaked text is a necessity.) The Proposed Mechanics Recall that the game engine currently passes these values to a readable’s gui: gui::title gui::body With a multipage readables, the content of these parameters changes as pages are flipped. For clarity, it is proposed to replace them with: gui::titleEnglish gui::bodyEnglish gui::titleTranslated gui::bodyTranslated The latter 2 would be just like gui::title and gui::body, except that they would serve empty strings when the current language is English or there is no translation available in the current language (and so be used for gui code program logic, to suppress a transition). Observe that this behavior does not substitute an English string for a missing non-English string. Skip the remainder of this section if details are not of interest. Each stock readable .gui would need a one-time conversion to use them. Instead of the traditional 2 winDef overlays for text, there would be 4, corresponding to the 4 text-passing parameters just mentioned. This allows the translated text to fade in while the English text fades out, when an onTime event starts the transition (at 2 seconds in this example). Here is the fragment of .gui code that has been altered: Aspects of this Design – Transition from English The transition is timed, so no extra “Translate” button is shown, nor a hard-to-come-by hot key required. If you want to see the English again, you would briefly navigate away from the page to another, then return; or, if a single-page, close and re-open it. A simple implementation (as the code above and example below) uses a fixed, hard-coded time. Alternative Mechanism. At some cost to code clarity, it is probably possible to get by with just the 2 normal text-passing parameters (gui::title and gui::body) and their traditional 2 overlays, though additional variable(s) would be needed for tight time-synchronization between engine and gui; and overlapping fade-in/fade-out between English and translation would not be possible. Advanced Version. In the longer term, timing could be made more flexible, by passing it as parameter from the engine, e.g.: “gui::transitionTime” Where does this value come from? While it could somehow encoded into the .xd file by the mapper, I prefer a different approach. Have the engine calculate it from character or word count of the body, with user-specified globals for reading rate and min and max bounds, e.g.: sys_readablesWordsPerSecTransTime sys_readablesMinTransTime sys_readablesMaxTransTime A drawback of a timed transition is that additional reading time is needed to get to the translations, which may, with immobile readables, increase risk of discovery by guards. So having these additional user controls would let a user get to the translations faster, even skip the English entirely by setting bounds to zero. A Simulated Example – FM “readableTranslationFadeIn” In the absence of engine support for the 4 text-passing parameters, it is still possible to make an approximately-functional mockup using some hard coding. However, this prototype DOES NOT suppress the transition when the current language is English. That is, it shows (rather than prevents) an English-to-English transition with change of font & font-scale. TDM with the languages set to “Francais” (French). The first screen shot shows page 1 of a 3-page scroll, momentarily displayed in English with Camberic title and body. After a few seconds, it transitions to the second screen shot, in French in Stone font. With accents. While shown here as a scroll, this approach should be easily adaptable to books and sheets. About the Example’s Implementation The screen shots are from a prototype FM: readableTranslationFadeIn Notable files are: guis/readables/scrolls/scroll_calig_camberic.gui, a custom override of the standard Camberic scroll readable, with the translation transition mechanism from above, plus additional simulation fakery described below. strings/all.lang, a UTF-8 file containing 6 #str_ (2 per scroll page – title & body) in each language section. Only the [English] and [French] sections were implemented. The English example content was loosely derived from the St. Lucia FM. The English text (without #str_ structuring) was manually converted to UTF-8 French using Google Translate (website, not API). strings/english.lang & french.lang. These were generated from all.lang using my gen_lang_plus program to create the 8-bit “ANSI” versions as required, e.g., ISO-8859-15 encoding for French. xdata/readableTranslationFadeIn.xd, that contains the #str_IDs for the 3 scroll pages. Within scroll_calig_camberic, this simulation had this fakery: “gui::title” and “gui::body” were stand-ins for hypothetical parameters “gui::titleTranslated” and “gui::bodyTranslated”; The English text was hard-coded, and the appropriate content selected by actual parameter “gui::curPage”, to make up for missing hypothetical parameters “gui::titleEnglish” and “gui::bodyEnglish”. The READABLE_FADE_TIME is currently set to 2 seconds for testing. Probably 5-6 seconds would be better during game play. Aspects of the Design – Font Scaling As mentioned earlier, the translated font is scaled to make the text smaller than the original, to accommodate languages that need more room. A simple implementation (like in the example code) uses fixed values with “textscale”. So the textscale for the two Translated winDef overlays is smaller than for the 2 English winDef overlays. Specifically, in the example GUI code, the text scaling factors from the original Camberic readable were retained: textscale 0.4 // titleEnglish textscale 0.31 // bodyEnglish and supplemented by (with a different font, namely Stone): textscale 0.33 // titleTranslated textscale 0.24 // bodyTranslated The goal is to keep the rendered text smaller than the original English rendering for languages with more characters per sentence. These values, while hard-coded, will differ across readables (due to different starting fonts), and would need to be experimentally determined. But this treatment, with just a fixed scaling value that is independent of both text content and current language, is unlikely to be very satisfactory. Better ideas, needing additional engine modifications, will be considered in a follow-on post. Additional Considerations When Authoring the XD File. Recall that TDM is relatively inflexible when using #str_ within an .xd file. So this form will not work: "page1_body" : { "" "" "#str_fm_scroll_camberic_pg1_body_parish_inspection_excerpts" } Instead use "page1_body" : "#str_fm_scroll_camberic_pg1_body_parish_inspection_excerpts" With the 2 leading linebreaks moved into the #str content as leading \n\n. When Testing. If there is a mismatch between the TDM Language setting and the PC’s language setting (e.g., under Windows), then some characters may turn out wrong or indicated as missing (e.g., as boxes). The degree will vary by language, and is unlikely to be seen in the initial English render (because that’s almost all in ASCII, common to all the ISO encodings.) Even with such mismatches, the translation can be reviewed as to overall length and where linebreaks occur. Be aware that direct editing of *.lang files is not recommended, and could risk converting from a particular “ANSI” raw 8-bit encoding into “UTF-8”. Applying this Technique More Broadly. A few fonts have oddball glyphs for certain characters, e.g., a skull and crossbones in Treasure Map. This would require special handling during translation. For Briefings, Objectives, and Messages, similar approaches can be conceived. However, for each of these (and different from readables), only one particular font is routinely offered. And there are alternative designs to be considered. For instance, the English and Translated text could be shown simultaneously side-by-side in various ways, instead of sequentially. The Objectives have the additional complication that the font size is already user-adjustable.

I'm not sure what people are asking is feasible for companies to provide. For example, when it comes to DRM servers getting shut down, how are companies supposed to turn of DRM then? Those things are made to be really hard to remove, change or turn off, and many are made by 3rd party companies. People are asking companies to deactivate a thing they didn't make themselves, and which one of its core functions is specifically to resist deactivation as much as possible. And in some cases the DRM is intertwined with the game's systems, such that removing it will break the game. When it comes to online games, if the game only supports official servers, is it easy to add support for private servers in the end, and without introducing more bugs and regressions? I personally don't know, but my assumptions is that if it was easy, then people would often create unofficial patches to bypass official servers. My prediction is that these things will not go away until consumers stop buying games that include them. So maybe that means never, because a lot of people don't really care about it. There's always the possibility that we must come to terms with the fact that some games have a finite shelf life, like so many other things, and those of us that don't like it can simply consume other games (it's what I do). OR the problem may go away if someone makes a business out of providing end of life support for those games. Something like what GOG does, which is something companies are often happy to engage with, because they may still gain some more money from it while being relieved of all the related costs. I don't think governments will ever be able to mandate anything substantial. And that is if they ever do anything at all. The EU doesn't seem willing, and I heard something about companies moving against SKG now (and maybe understandably).

I think you are right, i also never heard of any paid games (offline) that have been actively disabled yet, but it does not seem implausible to me. I bought the first version of the Quest VR headset. When it started out, still as Oculus, it was stated that no facebook account will be necessary. After a few years i had to create an account with facebook nonetheless, but then it was still separated as an oculus subaccount. Then after a few more years eventually i got the message that now i have to merge this account to be a regular Meta account or i will loose my library of completely offline and functioning games. They shipped the headset with a fully working gallery software that was able to display 360 spherical stereo images. The gallery program simply crashes on startup since in about 2 years down the line. Reviews left on the product page reported the same. Decrepit. They also shipped it with a small introductory game called Bogo. It was removed from the library in 2023 and well.. remotely disabled. These were 'free' - so what can you do - not even this proposition would defend against that i guess. I ask though if it were so hard to offer a chance to keep the library of completely offline games and opt-out of further updates? or maybe try an update and revert, keep a snapshot on an external storage. We can still do these on a Pc, but i fear without regulation it will last as long as the sanity of the next guys heading the industry. *Update* Just found out that Bogo was brought back to availability some time after its shutdown.

every house in TDM has this samey diary book, the writing is illegible & hard to read but I try my best to extract as much information as possible. When i don't feel like doing the main mission , i just putter around looking at the surrounding objects

That's correct but many people just use the in-game mission downloader to check for new stuff without even looking at the forums, which is what I did. In the past a lot of missions that required a newer version of the game executable and assets would tell you this when you tried to start them up. I was just reporting on this and that you don't need to reinstall, just update via tdm_updater if you find this issue.

Hrm I wasn't able to type on *after* the spoiler and accidentally already submitted the reply.. (Does this forum somewhere have a raw mode where you type text with tags around them or something instead of this broken WYSIWYG editor?) Anyway, what I was gonna add: This was a great mission and I already played Away1 - I'm really looking forward to Away2, want to see how the story goes on

Im ok with it but it is getting a bit long in the teeth for a ryzen 5900x even the low cost ryzen models have plenty power to drive this card. I would have used my 3070 instead but with 8gb im running into some rather annoying texture loading problems. So a 16gb model will be next project but the lower end while having plenty vram are just not worth upgrading to with such a small percentage. Guess ill donate a kidney for a 9070 or 5070

Here's a recent example that I've just run into: https://drive.proton.me/urls/TEDVJ2RAGW#xUPlKrSWj4Yp

Gains are so node dependent that it's hard to even count Blackwell. It's on the same node, the 5080 was the same die size as 4080 Super, the 5090 got some performance simply from increasing the die area by 23%. The 5060 is another "winner" from using a larger die and delivering 25% more cores than its predecessor, but it's hated for having 8 GB. This is easily fixable in the near future by giving it the proper 12 GB using 3 GB modules. APUs are going to service the low end, especially in cheap mini PCs but also with most desktop CPUs coming with a basic iGPU, or people will have to get used to paying $200 minimum for a new GPU. Which isn't that bad in theory, just stale given what's on offer. I'm talking about the RTX 5050, successor to the 3050, which may be released around July 1st, and will be laughed at if it's significantly above a 199 USD MSRP: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5050-8-gb-gpu-reportedly-launches-1st-july/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-officially-launches-laptop-geforce-rtx-5050-gpu/ Weirdly enough, it's using GDDR7 in the laptop variant. There were persistent rumors of GDDR6, which may be desktop only... Edit: OOF. $249 MSRP rumored. Edit: Confirmed.

UPDATE! Version 2 is now available. It addresses most of the issues people have found, but the main highlight is a new in-game map provided by the talented @Airship-Ballet! Unlike version 1, the map isn't in your inventory to start with. You need to find it but it's not hidden. Changelog: https://github.com/FrostSalamander/lt4/releases/tag/2.0 Download: https://drive.proton.me/urls/PV79JTNVAW#7zDvAvipKG0I @nbohr1more could you please update the FM database?

AMD UDNA architecture rumored to power PS6 and next Xbox with big ray tracing and AI gains They are going hard down the path of raytracing, with UDNA supposedly doubling raytracing performance and AI TOPS, and FSR4 Redstone improving the path tracing situation. Smaller increases to raster performance, but not non-existent. There's probably a few decent nodes left before they have to start looking at "optical", or my favorite, 3D. The option for 3D Infinity Cache exists, and may have been deployable with RDNA3, but AMD hasn't taken it yet. Even tighter integration of memory and compute is inevitable in the future. As we journey from RDNA4 to UDNA3/4 or whatever through the mid-2030s, I think we could see another tripling/quadrupling of raw raster performance. This is not only from per-CU gains, but having more compute units. Big L3 caches (AMD's "Infinity Cache" in GPUs) could be moved off die onto separate, cheaper chiplets, allowing the more advanced chiplet to devote more die area to compute units. And notice that as CPU clock speeds are creeping up into the 6-7 GHz range, GPU clock speeds are also higher than ever before, with the 9060 XT officially boosting to over 3 GHz, for example. The fastest RDNA1 cards only boosted to around 1800-1980 MHz, so GPU clock speeds have risen by around 50% in just a few years.

I took some time to sit on my thoughts on this one, so I forget my exact totals, but I completed this mission in around 2hrs and had ~7000/11000 loot on the middle difficulty setting. I enjoyed my time overall? But a lot of quality issues held me back on this one: - The AI really seemed to be out for my blood, and I'm not sure why or how they saw me lots of times. I think at one point I had 6 guards running around the market place. I think this was maybe a portaling issue? Because I managed to piss off guards in neighboring buildings or on different streets often during this mission. - The do-not-kill objective didn't work. I discovered this by blackjacking a sleeping commoner who bethesda-physics'd into the wall so hard that she died (a TDM classic, not the fault of this mission), and the objective didn't tick failure. I used this to my advantage for the second half of the mission and made the streets run red because of my previous AI woes. - The mission was very flat. There weren't a lot of opportunities to run across rooftops, crawl through sewers, or emerge through vent shafts to new floors of buildings. There was a little bit of all of that, but I was struck by how isolated and one-off those moments felt, and how the streets were perfectly level from one side of the map to the other. - I found lots of polish issues in the geometry, including a pretty sizeable gap in the ceiling of a side room in the pumping station, windows not aligned to the buildings they were supposed to be attached to, and a visible seam through the second floor of the manor under a bedroom door. That said, I liked the ambition and creativity overall, and that kept me going. I think I'm at like a 6/10 or 7/10 on this mission. Good effort, solid ambition, needs refinement.

answers in hiding : stucks : not sure how quick i will go again - was a hard and long night - we will see

everytime Jensen traverse through air ducts / air vents , that reminds me of "Nakatomi Space" in Die Hard movie. there used to be a blog that discussed that. It means "navigating through a space in a way that was unintended by the architect, but instead being the most useful or efficient method for the navigator" i'd call Jensen the "HVAC man" next time , a nimble-footed air duct traveller

I'm proud to announce the release of The Lieutenant 4: A Reciprocal Gambit Huge thanks to beta testers: @Mat99 @Bikerdude @Cambridge Spy @Shadow @DavyJones Screenshots: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCit3B 800x600 versions for @nbohr1more: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCir1t Download link (version 2): https://drive.proton.me/urls/PV79JTNVAW#7zDvAvipKG0I TDM 2.13 required. Enjoy! Frost

I've got a feeling, with how poorly Arkane's fortunes have been in recent, there's a solid chance they might actually return to their golden boy for a sequel. Depending on if their Blade game ends up shipping or selling well, or if they get closed down by ZeniMax (which would be extremely unfortunate indeed). I know Deathloop takes place in the same universe but I still have yet to boot it ups in my Steam. Just didn't grab me, like Dishonored or Prey. Hard to say after the closure of Arkane Austin but there's a chance.

Bit of a shot in the dark but you wouldn't have any tips on doing it in Unity anyway, would ya? Pretending performance isn't an issue right now, I'm trying to bash something like this together myself but I'm running into the issue: I'm still learning and I'm having a hard time working out exactly what I need to do. Don't suppose you've got your attempt laying around somewhere handy to look at.

Might this not be better suited to https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/58-tdm-tech-support/ or failing that make the text collapsable.

See my post fella, I added a google drive link for people to download and hopefully give feedback.

Just got around to playing this one, liked the twist Thanks for all your hard work Bikerdude.

Some games do make it a black flash instead of white in the accessibility options, couldn't be too hard to implement (I say, with no experience in implementing anything).

The "issue" with the animation at least appears to be on the script side, so even those of us who only know enough to be dangerous can still play with it. In "tdm_ai_base.script" there are blocks to specify how animations are handled when an ai is blinded. It only plays the animation once across the torso and legs channels and the ends regardless if the ai is still blind or not. The result is it that rather quickly after the animation is complete, the ai seems to snap to idle and it is imo very hard to tell what state the ai is actually in. You kind of expect them to snap out of it, but they are actually still blind and just standing there: I am a very bad scripter, but by copy pasting the torso channel animations a few times and adding some pauses in between for the leg channel you already get what is imo a not perfect but a much more legible "I'm blind" response: The ai is covering their eyes the entire time, they switch between stumbling forward and standing in place, they change direction, etc. You can also much more clearly see the difference from the randomization at the end the blind timer: Again very bad at scripting. There is probably a much better way to handle this. For example it'd probably be better to pull the blind duration spawnargs from the ai and loop the animations for that length specifically and not repeat so many lines. Maybe introduce some kind of randomization to try and break up the "synchronized swimmer" look.