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For the FM? For beta 1 it's here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/H1QBB04GA0#oBZTb1CmVFQb I've already done around 100 fixes though, so you might want to wait for beta 2 which should be ready in a couple of days hopefully. All links are in the first post of the beta thread here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22439-the-lieutenant-3-foreign-affairs-beta-testing/

That may be where @Amadeus got the folder provided to me earlier. Tels folder has - - .xcf files, not found in earlier work - for any given system font (stone, carleton, manon) and size(particularly 24 or 48), often more .tga/.dds files than earlier work (which originally had just ASCII characters). (You can open the files in GIMP to be even more definitive).

Sounds great. Unfortunately you don't have to get very far in any discussion about either changing existing gameplay mechanics or about giving players more in game customization options to see why mappers stop bothering with the debate club politics and instead divert the energy to do what they can to address what issues they can themselves. There is clearly also a disconnect between how people think they feel about these changes and how they do in practice. Kingsal's missions seem to be widely considered as some of the most polished missions in the game, because they are a holistic designs that look, sound and play a certain way. As a result I have never seen a player complain about something like the run modifier being increased in a particular missions thread and it’s clear there are very few players who are ultimately conscious of anything besides that the overall experience feels good. So there is reason these get adopted by other authors. The players are entitled to their opinion - but it's the mission authors choice ultimately. And I can only speak for myself, but I came to TDM because I saw working examples of things I wanted in my mission. These were not “stock” or “standard”. They were achievable by virtue of the games extendability. If the day comes where we get locked out of that kind of control of our designs, I would probably walk.

I think this is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because the ability to customize exists does not mean most mappers will use it. On the contrary, if one considers the customization that are already available, we see that the overwhelming majority of mappers stick to the defaults. The exceptions are interesting also. Kingsal's the only mapper that readily comes to mind who habitually deviates from presets seemingly just for the sake of being different. However everything they make is clearly in service of cohesive visions. Hazard Pay, no matter how you feel about it, unarguably loses a great deal of its survival horror character if you take away the napalm arrows or the punishing save system. The Voltas don't need to use Thief style elemental crystals in place of TDMs arrow model, but the fact that they are there makes a definite statement about the author's awareness of their inspiration for their work in TDM from the original games, which in turn draws attention to other, subtler creative choices. I think it's also telling that some of kingsal's modifications have been adopted by other authors. As OrbWeaver said, "If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed." However, how can the community come to a consensus unless there are maps to showcase the advantages of new innovations? Requesting, or worse requiring, players to go in and manually change settings in order to experience a new mechanic is never going to gain any traction. Certainly it is not worth the effort of creating an entire map built around a new paradigm.

As a player, one thing I'm also not too fond of is the lack of uniformity. I think mission authors should take into account that especially players new to the mod want to figure out how the weapons work, and, they will have a hard time doing so, if many missions tweak the weapons. Apart from the "WTF" moment, they will also not know what the default behavior of the weapon is. Also not a fan of some other things some missions introduce, like the different sounds for foot steps etc. Most of them don't improve anything over the default sounds, to be honest. They're rather worse, and irritate me every time I play a mission with custom sounds.

Also, I've built another console app, "datBounds", to visualize the bounding box around each bitmap character. Starting from your choice of .dat, .fnt, or .ref file, it generates a set of .tga files, e.g., stone_0_24_bounds.tga & stone_1_24_bounds.tga. You can optionally include a 2-hex-digit label on each bounding box. More about that in May. I'm using the results of this to understand the current complex codepoint mapping of the Stone 24pt glyphs, and develop the workplan and grid layouts for upcoming work.

Beta testing thread started here:

I created discussion here and mentioned authors (maybe I missed someone though). Unlike the previous thread about main menu GUI overrides, I think the new one does not look aggressive . The main question there is why this was done, and how to adapt to avoid this problem now and in the future. Indeed, all the missions will be fixed by 2.13 even if some authors don't respond. Dev builds regularly break something, although usually it is done unintentionally. I added "known issues" point on the dev build, which happens pretty rarely. I apologize for the negative emotions this change has caused. Sometimes I am too rough in communications. Moreover, I am not a creative kind of person, I'm more a technical type of person. Thus I believe in interface boundaries, so in my mind the blame for breakage is always on the side that violates these boundaries. Anyway, I know I'll have to fix the breakage, probably myself if necessary.

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

Throwing a few words people used to say long ago to help enrich those texts. Not sure if they all work in English since I'm just translating from Spanish but I think most should work well. - Stratagem: Used by Nobles to describe a plan, course of action as in "Device a Stratagem" use instead of Strategy. - Given Word (People used this one a lot, had weight). You can't betray the given word. - Sophistry or Sophist (as in dirty sophistry). Play of words to deceive. -Countenance (Please execute/exercise Countenance) - Artifice: Plan or plot to deceive. - Modesty (Lacking Modesty) - Sylph: Slender woman. - Cameo (As in compliment: "She's beautiful like a Cameo")

There are 10 released FMs that use custom arrow scripts for a variety of reasons. With this current dev build, if you try to use the bow, it just doesn't work. It's broken

Good question. Maybe because I don't feel myself too guilty breaking these missions? Maybe because I know that fixing them will be a long story. And I feel confident that we (or more likely I ) will be able to fix all of them by 2.13. You might have noticed that I have also enabled two behavior changes in the latest build (1 2). In these cases it is not even mappers' fault that behavior change is needed. I have a script which can update all missions at once so that they work properly both in 2.12 and dev builds. But somehow I feel I should wait for at least some feedback on the new behavior before doing a massive change to dozens of missions.

So because of bugtracker 5600, does that mean that 10 FMs (Written in Stone, Northdale 1 and 2, Volta 2, Hazard Pay, etc.) do not work in this new dev build, and yet, the dev build was released anyway? That's not cool.... The bow is kind of an important gameplay element, especially for Hazard Pay. Why even release this build if it breaks 10 existing FMs?

Welp it's about that time again to wheel out The Lieutenant for another mission and I could use some help making sure it's at least somewhat playable. Please register your interest here and I'll start a new beta testing thread soon. Due to custom assets the file size is quite large (about 500 MB). Potato users welcome. Some screenshots:

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.

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.

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.

@Wellingtoncrab - thanks for the fast response! Thanks again for all your hard work - I'm looking forward to driving on with this FM!

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.

Correctly me if wrong. Apperantly xdata formatting doesn't work well with the lang references. So this: maps/man2/mission_briefing { "num_pages": "1" "page1_body" : "#str_b1" "" "#str_b2" "" "#str_b3" } Doesn't work. You can only do this: maps/man2/mission_briefing { "num_pages": "1" "page1_body" : "#str_b1" } And then in the lang file you have to add the whole text of page 1 and get newlines via \n etc. So writing a (text only) briefing or readable and after that translating, is probably not something you want to do. I didn't actually test this with readable's, but it seems to me it would have the same limitation.

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

The Blender export scripts have been updated to work with the new Blender 4.1 series. In this Blender version, they removed "Autosmooth" altogether, along with the corresponding parts of the Python API. This meant that the "Use Autosmooth settings" option had to be removed from the LWO exporter, where it was previously the default setting. The new default is "Full", which smooths the whole mesh, giving similar behaviour to ASE models, although "None" is still an option if you want a completely unsmoothed mesh.

I tried the German translations for fm The Thiefs Den. Doesn't work. When I include the russion translation pack from Darkfate, the original German translations work as well. The translation package from Darkfate adds a lot more files, including the xd and map files.

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.