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The mission easily goes to my list of replayable missions, which is my second highest rank. Yes, some vertexes aren't snipped together and there was a single piece of loot I wasn't able to get , but these are negligible issues. I appreciated the creative elements and little secrets and the way you used the light sources. Thank you for your work.

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.

Back in the day, Tels managed a squad of volunteer translators for TDM. I am not Tels, and could never do that. Nowadays, language translation using AI, either traditional machine learning (ML) models or large language models (LLMs), is common and increasingly fluent. It is often used as an adjunct to speed the work of professional human translators. By itself, AI translation can be imperfect but usually sufficient. Can this "sufficient" approach be used for TDM, to expedite translations? Let's see. I gave some initial thought to a bulk-translation daemon that might range across FMs and fill in all missing translations, without necessarily involving mappers. In the future, possibly AI could tackle that whole enchilada. I was at first visualizing something more modest: a backbone in a standard programming language (I sketched out C++ and C# projects, but lots of other possibilities) that would make calls to an API (I looked at those of Google Translate and ChatGPT). However, I changed focus due to certain concerns... Different FMs, and subsets with each FM, would likely have far better translations if they were properly grouped, ordered, and translated separately, with an appropriate context (e.g., phrase engineering) added. The FM's mapper is best placed to provide this grouping and context. I'll detail what I mean in the next few posts. The mapper would not be expected to know any TDM-supported languages besides English. Instead, each translated phrase could be back-translated to English and examined. Is the "round-trip" meaning OK, even if the English words have changed? Problematic translations could have their context tweaked and rerun. Many AI systems, particularly for API access, require a billing commitment (e.g., credit card). For a professional translator, this is no problem, and subscriptions allow access to more (and putatively better) models and higher quotas. This seems less appealing for TDM. A few paid AI systems have a no-subscription, pay-as-you-go account tier. The cost per translate is typically pennies. But it does introduce quota- and expense-management, and may exclude API usage. Access via API requires an API key (or at the higher end more elaborate security regime), with attendant key-security headaches. Which AI model is thought "best" for translation? Doesn't matter too much, because we can't afford the best. Furthermore, there's endless churn among AI models, with antidotal reports that a given model fluctuates in quality over time, and successor models can be worse than their predecessors. So, with these concerns in mind, I looked for public web-based AI sites that require no billing and provide low-quota but adequate AI. The mapper would enter and retrieve data manually. I will focus on ChatGPT in this exploration, after a quick preliminary test confirmed some promise. Also, as this exploration proceeds, I hope to propose changes to TDM to make it more viable for "sufficient" quality machine translation. Problem areas are incomplete fonts, space-constraints, and layout issues for translated strings. My proposals will likely surface as separate forum threads. That's enough for now. I'll be trying for 1 or 2 substantive posts per week, as I tackle a particular FM.

Yeah they are stock. I was aware this one was pretty loud, and tried to make a custom version of the shader and reduce the volume on it using the volume keyword, but it didn't actually do anything, and I never could figure out why. Maybe something to do with the location system? The other thing I could have done was reduce the volume on the location entities themselves, which does work. But by this point I had added that ambient to loads of locations already and didn't want to go and update them all (lazy, I know). Also, the wiki seemed to advise against doing this for some reason, so I just decided to rely on the ambient volume slider in the menu. If I do an update, I will just update the location entities, unless someone knows why updating the sound shader doesn't seem to do anything.

There's an interesting question with this, which if I'm not mistaken I approached in another thread long ago. I've considered making a big special project in TDM, which if I did I'd have wanted the option to distribute it as standalone: The idea was that the mission would be in the FM list like any other, but also packaged with a copy of TDM containing only the base pk4's the map uses. If this secondary distribution system were considered, I'm curious if there's be any issues with putting it in places like Itch or GoG or similar. Free of charge to respect the non-commercial licensing and wishes of the team in that regard, but I wonder if there's anything in the licensing that goes against posting your mission embedded in a copy of TDM.

Not sure if this will work with my 500W psu. And it takes 3 slots. Will have to measure it. Thanks for the suggestion !!

What about the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB? Should be able to work with my 500W PSU.

@Frost_Salamander Sorry for the delay. The .pkignore editor is in the Package -> Pack tab. You can completely ignore the the Files tab as it currently serves no purpose. It was intended for editing other files (scripts, xdata, etc), but I couldn't get it to work properly so I left it for sometime in the future. (As it stands it's best to always confirm the list of files that are packaged, as the filtering may still not be 100% reliable.) I like the idea of automating the versioning, especially naming the pk4 after it. For the darkmod.txt side of it, it would require a different setup. Last time I worked on this, I tried to separate the darkmod.txt editing into separate UI fields, but it was being a huge pain to get them all working properly, so I left it on stand-by as well. I'm not sure about the readme, though. Could you show me an example of how it looks like? Yes, for now the console is the only way of providing feedback. I'd like to improve on this at some point. For packaging, I could get a progress bar going, with the pack listing next to it. I'll see if I can get back to this project soon. I had to let it go for a while due to burnout.

could do it with mainboard model / CPU type. Can look up the info from that . mainboard model will tell us if it has PCIE 3 4 or 5. cpu type will give us some answers as to what GPU might fit best (they will probably all work "well not the intel models if the board has no rebar support", but if the cpu is to slow to feed it, then you start loosing fps).

also depends a bit on your CPU though bottlenecks are far from being as severe as they are touted it does matter to get the most out of it. example for a 6th gen intel like my old system core i7 6950x i probably would not go higher than a 2080 ti / rtx 3070 or radeon 6800. for my somewhat newer ryzen 5900x it could probably work well enough with even an rtx 5000 series or for AMD a 7900 or 9070 series. but it also depends if gaming at 4k or closer to 1080p as at 4k the CPU matters less. for intels gfx cards the 6th gen models all lack rebar in bios so that card wont work "AT ALL!" with it. then you have to look at where you get the most for your money which at this time can be a bit of a jungle. used cards can sometimes be an ok investment but you also run the risk that the card dies tomorrow or a week after and they usually dont come with warranty so...

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.

This seems like a futile process to me. We all love TheDarkMod and tremendous work has been done on the engine, but I suspect that when developing a new project, especially commercial, almost everyone would rather go for a more modern engine because the reality is that stealth games are a relatively small niche and you need everything you can get to make people notice and buy your thing. TDM with its historical limits on polycounts (unless switching to lightmaps removed that?) and other features that we're used to and have no problem with but that are not exactly state of the art in my opinion just isn't "it", and it's only going to be less and less "it" over time, despite being a brilliant game on its own. And making the game fully libre just so it can be included in certain distributions' free repos, while stripping out almost everything that makes TDM what it is, the community content, doesn't make sense to me either. If anything that could hurt its reputation because people who tried that wouldn't experience the actual game. I only skimmed parts of the thread, have I missed a good reason to do this? Also, another big issue that I think wasn't spelled out explicitly enough: I too thought that it would be awesome to have TDM on Steam. After looking into it, being educated by others and doing some searching I found out that TDM very likely contains a nontrivial amount of old content that may be seemingly re-licensed as CC-BY-NC, but legally cannot be, as its original license does not allow it. I'm talking specifically about old textures.com content - it uses its own asset license that explicitly disallows being released as CC (because CC allows redistribution anywhere and textures.com license explicitly prohibits that). Yet some of those assets are a part of TDM, and it's likely that nobody knows for sure which ones and how many there are. Textures.com was at one point even recommended as a source to create assets on the wiki. So you may get permission from some old mission author who doesn't even remember that he did this, but his content can still be non-free and in fact infringing on its original license. Realistically nobody cares because there's no damage to textures.com being done (the textures are not being redistributed anywhere, they're "just" being incorrectly rebranded with a license that would allow it), but it makes the whole libre thing even more difficult.

@greebo, @Springheel: Would you consider licensing your work on the def files and script files in question as GPL?

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

I personally still feel it's now a lost cause without first getting clarification over the licence for the def and script files from the original Doom 3, which is why, until such clarification is officially made I'm not doing anything further towards it. I believe that while currently Microsoft may turn a blind eye to copy and pasted text from these files in TDM due to its' non-commercial nature, the moment it were to become Libre then the ability to use it commercially could lead to problems. However to answer your question (bearing in mind I have a very limited knowledge of Doom 3/TDM modding other than what I learnt attempting to get a compiled cut-down version running). In terms of the game scripts the following are the only non-GPL header game scripts and you can comment them out from being loaded in source code: tdm_grandfather_clock.script tdm_turret.script tdm_audiograph.script tdm_camgoyle.script tdm_safe_lock.script tdm_safe.script Also Grayman put the values as comments in code for these two files so they can be easily created: tdm_soundprop.def tdm_ai_base.def It would be easier to seek out Greebo and Springheel and ask them to GPL their work since that would open up all the base def files without the task of re-creating them. I suspect that it would take a very long time to recreate all the def files, also bear in mind that some functionality is copy/paste from Doom 3 eula protected files (func_static for example). As regards the work done by Grayman, that would always remain NC-BY, however access to the SVN commits would allow you to diff remove his non-GPL edits from the .def files. The UI function calls for TDM are all within the GPL source code, and as the UI is all a text based language it probably wouldn't take more than a couple of days to re-create a basic (though not pretty) UI. There are many comments within the source code relating to the UI string references, so a relatively complete UI string language file can be re-created as well.

Cool. I remember back in the day I was advocating that the team should release asset packs that combine fan-contributed assets in a map like this, laid out kind of like an Ikea, which would make it so much easier for mappers to grab what they want and plug it into their own maps than have to trawl through threads searching for things. The idea never really took off, but it's good that convergent evolution led others to having the same idea at least for their own assets anyway. Oh also, these chests all look great, so good work on that!

@whoozzem (and anyone else): What is your current best estimate of how much work (man days) it would require to make the necessary changes to The game data scripts Produce a minimal set of core assets (primarily GUI and HUD?) Anything else? ... to make a TDM-libre that can be used to play a minimal mission without any AI, that requires only lockpicks and optionally lantern and that otherwise contains all assets that it can (textures, sound etc)?

That jewelry dresser is so cool!!! Great work on all of these

Sharing my stuff here (with permanent links this time!) Use them however you like Let me know if there's any issue with any of it and I'll fix them or get them up to standard! Merry Chests 2 Download These are on hold for the moment while I work on actual missions. I got as far as making 8 new containers/chests that are drop and go prefabs, made a little more efficiently and flexibly than the first lot. Technically 1 is from the first lot, I just liked it enough that I wanted to give it a refresh. They all come with little loot lights inside that switch on and off as the lid opens and closes for optimisation and visibility. Frob boxes, keys you can use or not, etc etc. Merry Paintings 2 Download I needed some office-appropriate paintings that were a bit more neutral than Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes so I grabbed 20 (mostly) C19th still life paintings, all public domain and CC0 scans. Some chiaroscuro, some pastoral, some with kitties This time around I've packaged them as light as possible so they're not the highest definition, just something to fill your walls with rather than lootable centerpieces.

First of all wow so much impressive stuff recently in the thread. I can't compete at all. What I've got is definitely rough, and I am well aware that certain textures are muddy at the moment. Second, this isn't quite abandoned yet, but don't get your hopes up. I'm usually very tired from work and if my stuff gets finished at all it will be a miracle. Yes, I am disregarding the advice to make your first stuff simple. Yes, I am being a hardhead. Gamma and brightness adjusted to make things more visible in the screenshots. It's a prison break-in mission with a twist. No interior to the prison yet, just exterior walls and a safehouse far in the countryside. Not exactly "Victorian" design. I'm going for a feeling that the institution is more modern than most stuff we have seen in TDM. The "death antennas" surrounding the walls are just cobbled together from previous contributor's work. An upside down water tank on a steel pole, with some high voltage transmitter looking stuff on the sides.

there was a megatexture demo for doom3 at some point with a really detailed map of a mountain with vegetation and a ski lift, that one map was bigger than the entire doom3 game . so yah the megamap code in doom3 actually does work but since it uses uncompressed targa format the stuff tended to be on the BIG !!! side. there has been some work on updating the code from one modder icecoldduke which replaced the targa format with compressed jpeg format and other bug fixes to the code. virtual texturing actually helps with large textures as its not as heavy on vram as loading huge tiled ones.

Hi @Skaruts. I thought I would try this out for my next release. It seems pretty cool and I'd be happy to use it, but I'm having some issues (maybe user error but let me know ) The .pkignore editor in the 'Files' tab doesn't seem to work. It just shows a screen with 'TODO' on it. It created the .pkignore file, but I can't edit it anywhere within TDM Packer 2. The 'Test' functionality doesn't seem to do anything. I packed my mission up OK, but when I pressed the 'Test' button it launched my Test TDM instance (a fresh install of TDM 2.13 in a different location), but it didn't copy the newly packed mission to it. (EDIT: this seems to be working now, not sure what happened before). Feature requests: I like to version my releases and note the release number and timestamp in darkmod.txt and readme.txt. I was previously doing this with a tokenized search and replace in my build script. Would you be able to add something like this? Just some config where you could record a version number and it would insert it into any file with some sort of configurable token like [VERSION] or the build time with [TIMESTAMP]. Actually, this is also useful to name the .pk4 file after the release (e.g. lt4-0.2-beta.pk4). This is especially useful during beta testing when there are loads of different versions of the file flying around. Some sort of user feedback when you pack the file would be helpful, even if it's just a pop up that says 'Pack complete' or something. (EDIT: nevermind, I just noticed the console there. I had it collapsed or something before I think) This is all with version a0.3.2 on Windows.

hmm experimented with upping the limit to 16gb and it does work atleast untill i hit the ceiling with a texture bigger than 12 gb (my 2080 ti only has 11gb). the biggest concern is loading time which quadruples and in some instances even hits 8 times slower loading . is this one of the reasons besides avoiding loading screens that modern engines adopted streaming ?. while pretty annoying with the long loading times it sure as hell is visible in the detail level wow!. so the question would be if it would be feasible with a setting which would allow upping texture memory instead of the static define it uses now ?. theres also the problem with the engine only supporting power of two texture sizes (there is texture loader code that allows using any texture dimension but i wonder what the backside is).

Double topic. See also topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22754-thief-vr-legacy-of-shadow-announcement/

I'm replaying old maps on 2.13 at the moment and found that some, I dare say, very very integral parts of TDM gameplay no longer works. Before, you could crouch and lean forward at the same time, find just the right angle with a bit of luck and slowly close the distance to a candle on a table just enough to put it out - without getting spotted. I know, it kinda is a stretch to believe a real human person could do that, but come on, game mechanics! This was pure genius, and f'ing fun! However, it seems to no longer work. Which sucks. Is this a result of whatever AI-something-lighting-something described in another thread (all just techno babble to me)? I'm probably the only one, but I don't like it.