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No issues whatsoever, runs great, easy setup. There's nothing like lounging around the couch being able to play my favorite FM's. Image was captured at work.

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.

EDIT - Please note there is a mod somewhere down this thread.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Taffers, It's a shame moveables didn't get a spawnarg for a proper name back in the day. Names could have added personality to the beautifully crafted moveables and exploring the world would have been way more interesting: "ent_name" "Apple" "ent_name" "Bottle of Wine" "ent_name" "Medium Crate" ... Mappers, of course, would have made use of this simple but nifty feature in a myriad of interesting ways Adding a proper name when a new item is first introduced takes not time but we are now talking hundreds of nameless objects... Oh well, as the saying goes: it never is too late! (or is it).

Since we have a Random Video of the Day thread, it seems like this is fair. Show us any article you find interesting, or funny, or surprising, or whatever else is out of the ordinary. I'll begin: http://www.dailytech...rticle33998.htm I never imagined people pissing in an elevator. Of all the strange ideas I've had in my life, that was never one of them. Personally, I suspect the thug. ... and this comment cracked me up. "Why in the world would someone pee in an elevator? Also, when the system catches someone, they don't have to call the police. All they have to do is lock the elevator doors, engage the heaters and shaking motors, and get paid ad money on YouTube for the footage. "

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.

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.

Yes. Sure, I will change it, but I do mind. In addition to changing the forum title, I have also had the name of the pk4 changed in the mission downloader and the thiefguild.com site’s named changed. It's not just some "joke". The forum post and thread are intended to be a natural extension of the mission’s story, a concept that is already SUPER derivative of almost any haunted media story or most vaguely creepy things written on the internet in the past 10 or 15 years. Given your familiarity with myhouse.wad, you also can clearly engage with something like that on some conceptual level. Just not here on our forums? We can host several unhinged racist tirades in the off-topic section but can’t handle creepypasta without including an advisory the monsters aren’t actually under the bed? (Are they though?) I am also trying to keep an open mind, but I am not really feeling your implication that using a missing person as a framing of a work of fiction is somehow disrespectful to people who are actually gone. I have no idea as even a mediocre creative person what to say to that or why I need to be responsible for making sure nobody potentially believes some creative work I am involved in, or how that is even achievable in the first place. Anyway, apologies for the bummer. That part wasn’t intentional. I am still here. I will also clarify that while I love the game, I never got the biggest house in animal crossing either. In the end Tom Nook took even my last shiny coin.

Since upgrading my gpu to an nVidia RTX 3060, I can only set v-sync via driver setting Sync to Vblank. At least I thought that's what that setting does. Enabling V-sync in TDM does nothing. I use Manjaro Linux xfce Both TDM 2.11 and 2.12

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.

Interesting idea. Not sure about my upcoming time availability to help. A couple of concerns here - - I assume the popup words uses the "Informative Texts" slot, e.g., where you might see "Acquired 80 in Jewels", so it likely wouldn't interfere with that or with already-higher subtitles. - There are indications that #str is becoming unviable in FMs; see my just-posted: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22434-western-language-support-in-2024/

I wanted to internationalise The Hare in the Snare before I released it but I couldn't get the scripts to work and had some other questions as well. I posted about it Newbie Dark Radiant Questions and nobody replied, so I gave up. It being my first FM I didn't feel confident digging into it and just wanted to release the FM. I just got the impression that it wasn't a big deal and nobody cared about it. From memory, the script worked once but I needed to re-run it and just couldn't get it to work. It's also Perl which nobody really uses anymore. I think I recommended to a 'I want to help' person to convert it to Python, but that didn't go anywhere. I don't think you need the script though if you internationalise from the very beginning (i.e. create your own dictionaries). At the end of the day it's extra work for the mapper and if it adds too much overhead (i.e. is broken or is a PITA) then nobody is going to use it. https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Internationalization

edit: TL;DR: I've tweaked the .lwo exporter to preserve autosmooth angle Ahem. When I started writing this post a couple of days ago, it was supposed to be a "please help me, models won't smooth" kind of thing, but as I started taking screenshots and such for a comprehensive view of the problem, the question morphed into a "is there a hack to get .lwo's to export the way .ase's do", then to "how to get the same surface smoothing from Blender as you can get from Lightwave" and eventually to "does anyone around know python and blender enough to fix the export plugin". But then I fixed the addon myself, so it was almost as if there's no point to the thread. However, while googling around for a solution I stumbled upon a whole bunch of incomplete (1,2) or outright wrong (1,2) information, and whenever the question came up the issue was never really resolved completely. That might be because the problem isn't obvious, since a lot of exported models will actually end up correctly smoothed on export, leading one to believe wrong shading in rare cases is due to modeling mistakes / bad shadowmesh / etc. Point is, having the definitive .lwo smoothing post seems useful. Identifying the problem: Here's the mesh. I add an 'edge split' modifier (I use sharp edges while modeling the low poly, so I can uncheck the 'edge angle' option). I can now apply the modifier(s) and export to .ase (triple the mesh either in export options or in modifiers beforehand). The .ase looks alright in-game: Now I'll export it to .lwo using this script. Depending on export options, here are the results: If I also check "remove doubles", I'll lose all of the split (sharp) edges: (recalculating normals on export can be unpredictable as well, so clean up the model beforehand instead) Right about this point I start searching for a solution online, stumble upon this and try the renderbump hack. However, all it seems to do is weld all of the vertices back together at runtime and attempt to smooth the whole surface, similarly to "remove duplicates", but with no upper threshold. (to anyone possibly reading this in the future: don't forget to revert your changes to the materials!) Source of the problem: At this point I still wasn't sure if it's even possible to get .lwo's identical to .ase's, so I installed Lightwave. Naturally, it took some time to eventually stumble upon Surface Editor (F5), and the "smoothing threshold" contained therein. But then I just had to crank it up to 180 and export to "LWO2". That fixes everything in-game: So the issue is trivial, I just have to find a way to somehow pass on a smoothing angle through the exporter. However, the "auto smooth" option on the object data tab doesn't seem to affect anything regardless of angle. Long story short, after some hex-comparison magic, I home in on SMAN block in the exporter script: So what it actually does is set your smoothing angle to either 90°, 86°(??), or 0°, depending on whether you've chosen "idtech compatible", "smoothed", or neither. The solution: Now, I don't know Python and I don't know Blender scripting, so I can't say with full certainty that I didn't break anything. But I did cobble together a version of the script that seems to do the job. Here it is, mirror / do whatever you want with it. If your mesh has autosmooth enabled, and you've checked "idtech" or "smoothed" on export, your chosen autosmooth angle will now transfer to the surface in .lwo: I took the liberty of changing the default export options to what seems to suit TDM the best, you can just open the script in notepad and edit them to your taste. Wrapping up, there are still some mysteries I didn't solve, such as "idtech compatible" models taking up only half the size of models exported otherwise (including from Lightwave itself), there doesn't seem to be any visible difference in-game, at least in TDM. That "1.5 radian" in the code still makes me scratch my head. And I still don't know if the 4-8x size savings over .ase matter for in-game memory at all (but at least I know I won't have to edit the *BITMAPs manually anymore). Even after all this, the .ase still has just slightly better shading, but since the outputs of the exporter and Lightwave itself are now identical, seems safe to say it's as good as it gets.

So this online store I bought a pair of headphones from decided to gift me 12$ today. Since the voucher would expire in in two weeks unless used and I had nothing else to get, I decided to spend it on a 17$ gamepad so I'd have one of these as well. I understand they should work fine under Linux these days, plus it supports both dinput and xinput so I'm not concerned. I never played any FPS or most games using something other than the keyboard and mouse, this feels like an interesting opportunity to try it out. TDM is one of the games I might enjoy playing with such a thing, especially since it doesn't require super-fast reactions till I get used to it like a deathmatch shooter. So until the device arrives tomorrow, I figured I'd ask how well I can expect TDM to run on such a thing! Especially now that we have a new rendering and input management system for the upcoming TDM 2.10. There's a few things I wanted to know. One is if both looking around as well as movement using the finger pads is supported. I remember some games allowed walking more slowly if you only pushed the pad slightly; Does this mean it's possible to sneak by only moving the pad a bit, in a way that affects how much guards hear you? Otherwise I was curious if force feedback (vibration) is implemented and used. For TDM this mainly makes sense when you take damage, are in radius of a sound that has the shake effect, and other potential situations I might be missing now. Is gamepad vibration a feature in the engine at least?

In post https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/254-orbweaver/&status=3994&type=status @nbohr1more found out what the Fixup Map functionality is for. But what does it actually do? Does it search for def references (to core?) that don't excist anymore and then link them to defs with the same name elswhere? Also I would recommend to change the name into something better understood what it is for. Fixup map could mean anything. And it should be documented in the wiki.

I have quite a few assets from WIPs I'll probably never use elsewhere, so I thought I could share it here. Some of these are older and not necessarily matching the TDM lore, but I hope someone will find use for them. In terms of package format, I'll be creating 7zip packages with just model and/or texture files, so you can place them wherever you like in your project. I'll also include example material or def setup. I'll leave textures in .tga format, so you can make edits on uncompressed source and save as .dds later. So first up is a door/frame/key combo: Temp upload of all assets: https://we.tl/t-BOdrlNEXWJ See readme_notes for design / placement instructions.

I'm trying to get DR to work with my Godot projects, to replace TrenchBroom, but my first attempts haven't been fruitful. I need DR to see my project's textures, 3D models and entity definitions. I told DR where to find my game in the Game Setup window, but I'm having some issues. As far as entities go, I think I'm probably fine. I unpacked a few of TDM's .pk4 files and found the folder def with many .def files. I tried placing misc.def and tdm_base.def in there, to see if DR would load those entities after restarting, and it does but only if the game type is TDM. I'm probably fine with that, as it makes no difference, as far as I can tell. The Godot importer only cares about the contents of the .map file, which I know I can export in a few formats, so that should be fine (Q3 at least should work fine). However, DR is not seeing my project's textures. I don't know if DR can work with .png files, but I brought in some .tga files from TDM for testing and DR doesn't see them either. So something is missing, but I don't know what it is. I tried placing the textures in a textures folder at the project's root, but nothing happened. Although ideally I'd like to have the textures in root/assets/textures. I haven't tried to use 3D models at all yet, so I'm in complete darkness about that. I wonder what formats DR supports, though. I usually work with .obj, which bypasses Godot's import weirdness.

DarkRadiant 3.9.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Add "Show definition" button for the "inherit" spawnarg Improvement: Preserve patch tesselation fixed subdivisions when creating caps Improvement: Add Filters for Location Entities and Player Start Improvement: Support saving entity key/value pairs containing double quotes Improvement: Allow a way to easily see all properties of attached entities Fixed: "Show definition" doesn't work for inherited properties Fixed: Incorrect mouse movement in 3D / 2D views on Plasma Wayland Fixed: Objective Description flumoxed by double-quotes Fixed: Spinboxes in Background Image panel don't work correctly Fixed: Skins defined on modelDefs are ignored Fixed: Crash on activating lighting mode in the Model Chooser Fixed: Can't undo deletion of atdm_conversation_info entity via conversation editor Fixed: 2D views revert to original ortho layout each time running DR. Fixed: WX assertion failure when docking windows on top of the Properties panel on Linux Fixed: Empty rotation when cloning an entity using editor_rotatable and an angle key Fixed: Three-way merge produces duplicate primitives when a func_static is moved Fixed: Renderer crash during three-way map merge Internal: Replace libxml2 with pugixml Internal: Update wxWidgets to 3.2.4 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.9.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep creating Fan Missions! Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Keep on mapping!

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?

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.

Im experiencing a crash on loading quick saves in my work in progress FM. What are steps for diagnosing this and figuring out what is causing that crash? Thanks very much Kingsal

On a lighter note (and because my holiday started today, oh yeah!), let's have a new thread for music, that you just enjoy and probably is not so well known...or somehow obscure but does not sound as strange as the songs we report in @STiFU's progessive music thread. Here is one of my new favourites, a similar recording of this track by other artists has been used in an US show broadcasted last year ( @Amadeus: What is the name of the show? )