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I know this is not the right thread for my question but I didn't want to read through the mission's threads for an answer. Why are the 2 newest missions pitch black?? Like there is no ambient light at all ... it makes playing a lot less fun ... Thought it was only 1 mission but both have the same so I guess it has something to do with new lighting system or something? Question is: how to get "normal" ambient light back?

A lot of questions, and a lot ifs and buts. And, that illustrates the problems with this thing. I doubt that anyone would want to use Windows 7 or Linux to make stuff work. Everybody wants stuff to work with the lates OS on their computers. Which just wouldn't work, when the games were never designed to run on it. And, again, it also denies the fact that software has a shelf-life, like everything. You can't magically keep things working. The best thing you can hope for is some modders modifying the game to work with modern hardware, and, that happens a lot, fortunately.

Do you think that is realistic though? As I mentioned, it just needs a new OS sometimes to make software stop to work.

SKG isn't (necessarily) asking for source code, or ongoing infinite support. Just an end-of-life plan that could credibly allow people to play what they already have a copy of. It's also not retroactive, so games would be built differently to accommodate new laws only after a certain date years in the future. If you need to rent out a 256-core Graviton server on AWS to be able to make a multiplayer game/mode work for a decent amount of players, that is better than "dead forever". Actual details of the implementation aren't spelled out in the initiative, that will be hashed out by lawmakers and stakeholders. Both petitions need extra signatures to ensure that they have hit the mark after fakes/bots/'Mericans are weeded out. With the momentum and remaining time, +50% might be possible so it looks good.

May the Builder send mighty lightning bolts to destroy your computer so that this debauched and seductive work never sees the light of day!

Well, that seems to work! Thank you for the tip! I noticed that when running TDM after adding that line, that line is removed from the config file. Is that expected behavior? I assume TDM still "ingests" the command?

Maybe some of you have the same sort of situation and haven't found an aswer for the pointer appearing in the centre of your tdm game when switching to an other computer and back, and have to quit and restart the game for it to go away ... I just found a solution!: I hooked up another mouse (both logitech now, so maybe that matters .. dunno) to my game computer and just left it on top of the case .. only to keep saying to the game computer: I'm a mouse! Now I can play TDM and switch to mij low wattage internet computer, use my main mouse and keyboard, switch back and don't have the annoying pointer in the middle of my game : ) It will probably work for other games with the same issue.

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.

Wow! Stellar work! I'm really digging that last screenshot; love the detail and what look to be custom pillars

Aight well if I'm poking around posting fm reviews, code change suggestions, and asking for tech help I might as well also put up my work. Putzing around with DarkRadiant is quite fun. Not sure when or if I will produce a full map but, considering that I haven't touched dromed or made maps for other games before, I'm really happy with what I've got so far. Kudos to the tooling designers for making something reasonably idiot-friendly. One of the first things the A-Z tutorial tells you is to not use 0 0 0 for ambient lighting, and I immediately said nuts to that lol. I'm really enjoying the harsh darkness and the contrast from light sources. I didn't intend for it to happen, but I've ended up with something that looks like it crawled straight out of TDS. It also makes traversing the level have an interesting trade off - you need light to see, but enemies can see you carrying it and if its in your hands you have to drop it to pull out the bow or mantle stuff. I'm trying to build a whole level around this "mechanic"/"gimmick".

I have got to the end, and found it very challenging and enjoyable. Much appreciated. Some general feedback. 1) The first time I found the Warwick Tower caretaker, I didn't find what I needed to go the next step in the Tower. I went back later, expecting there to be a master key I failed to spot. Which you might expect a caretaker to have. Only because I read in this thread there was a did I know to look for one. A hint in a readable would have seemed appropriate (or did I miss it?) 2) On the outward trip to Fishend, the game was semi-linear, which I found helpful, because it was not always straightforward how to progress to the next area. a) Early on it was evident that the next step was to get into the Art Dealers. b) And when I first reached the Armoury, there seemed no way forward. But because I knew there had to be one, and other options I tried didn't work, I eventually worked out what the route had to be. 3) I eventually found the room with Should I have guessed? Based on ethnicity? 4) I read in this thread what to do about the Clarice objective, but couldn't make it work. So gave up, since it was optional. 5) I did this on Difficult, but only found 7200 out of the target 8000 loot. So clearly I missed stuff, and that's on me. But at least that Objective was optional too.

this was a tough one! It took a week, on and off, so some things might have been changed but I was in progress with v1 and didn't want to start over. as much as I love a Thieves Highway and snaking through tertiary structures, I kept running against barred doors and being confused as to where to go next. (At one point I decided to noclip through the door and work backwards to where I was stuck.) Sometimes it was simply not realizing I could catch and climb a narrow ledge. I finally turned AI Hearing down all the way with this mission; its been an issue for me with Dark Mod, but here I felt they could hear me from a block away (or stories, in the tavern) and it was unfair/unfun. Is there a way of escaping after finding Clarice in the Tower? Thankfully I quicksaved before but if I hadn't I don't know that I would have put together what I needed to do from hints in readables. There's a fine line between obtuse and obvious, maybe its just because my playthrough was spread over some time. I still really enjoyed the mission, thank you so much for the work you've put into creating this world and the experiences for us!

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

Starting the Conversion with I18N.pl Folks have found that it is best to do the conversion only when an FM is complete, which is certainly the case here. As a prerequisite, I installed and tested Strawberry Perl on my Win11 dev box. It worked this time, unlike in the distant past on a different, Win10 machine, where I tried and failed for 3 days to get it to work. Then, as specified in our wiki’s I18N page, I set up a directory with the airpocket.pk4, and a copy of TDM 2.13 strings/english.lang. (The wiki specification missed that last step, which I corrected.) Running the I18N.pl script generated the expected results in its “output” folder: an altered airpocket.pk4 and new airpocket_l10n.pk4. Within both, a /strings/ folder was now present with just an english.lang file, with 28 #str_ entries, covering: maps/airpocket.map xdata/airpocket.xd xdata/mission_briefing.xd darkmod.txt readme.txt However, I believe #str_ support for the last 2 was never implemented (and the output version of those files don’t include #str_ s). So this will be lowest priority for me. Also, I don’t see any auto-generated #str_ for the 5 player “thought messages”. Probably need to add these. English text for these is in the .map file (found by searching for tdm_message_no_art).

I think what happens after detection is the major source of jank in this game vis-à-vis tedious alert states and funky running animations, but I've honestly never had any issue with blackjack behavior. It could certainly be better delineated in terms of the animation and hitbox since it's a bit flappy and covers the whole screen, but it's as simple as walking or creeping up to someone and bopping them, I don't get it. The answer is certainly not allowing people to bunny-hop up to guards and KO them on the way past 2 seconds after they've already been alerted, nor just lure them somewhere shadowy and blackjack them on full alert, as seen in the dark engine. The AI is no doubt a long-standing stick in the mud, but I don't think it's blackjacking that's the issue, moreso how detection can work strangely and how most all of the level design goes out the window once the guards are sprinting around the building at full pelt and never going back to idle.

@chakkmanBefore joining this forum I completed all available fan missions for TDM, but before playing them I had significant experience with other stealth games and fan missions for Thief series and I will tell you that I hated TDM's gameplay for its jankiness, but at the same time, paradoxically, I learned my ways around all those broken mechanics. And yet I still don't think that this jank should be a norm for TDM and your point of view only proves it, because you're not alone who may see things like this when they had better experience in other stealth games. And so this huge pile of gameplay imperfections just does TREMENDOUS disservice to the popularity of TDM, some people may try it and just say to themselves: "Screw this crap, I prefer player friendly games!" and they will be absolutely right. But why I learned to be tolerant to such things? Well, because I saw a lot of passion in all those fan missions I played and still exactly because of this I think that TDM has no right to be so broken. I think that it is mostly thanks to the modding community TDM is not dead, without all the great fan missions barely anybody would ever touch it and they just deserve better platform for their work. The problem here is that TDM wasn't created by a professional game designer, it's harsh but true. As I understand it, the dev team just had their opinion about certain things and instead of doing them in the best way possible they simply ignored all the better examples in the stealth genre.

I know all this. The blackjacking system is simply way too finicky about things like distance, the area you have to hit, sounds you make before you blackjack etc. It simply has to be more forgiving, more like in the original Thief games. The system is too convoluted, and too unforgiving. I keep preaching that for years now, and others have said the same, yet here we are, and in almost 20 years, the system didn't see the changes it should have. I even changed the A.I. hearing in the past to cope with that, but, that's just a workaround the fundamental problem really. The system should work, and it should also work for people new to the mod, and not punish anyone for things nobody understands.

I think the issue is the noise you make when getting close to a moving AI. It alerts them to the next level of awareness, where knockouts don't work anymore (or something like this; I don't know the details). Maybe the blackjack helper does not take this into account. It means you can't just run up to them and knock them out on every surface; you have to find the right opportunity (when they stop for a while, or are waling on carpet).

Hi! I play The Dark Mod on Linux and I prefer to use a controller for most games, so for games that lack native support I use a program called AntiMicroX to map gamepad buttons from my Xbox One controller to keyboard keys. It works pretty well, and I've enjoyed using an identical setup for Thief, Thief 2, and TDM. I was pretty excited when TDM added native gamepad support, but for reasons I still prefer my setup with AntiMicroX. So I completely cleared my "DarkmodPadbinds.cfg", threw in"unbindPad" to completely disable the native controller bindings, and everything was fine. Either that was a fluke, or one of the most recent updates changed something, because I'm now finding that "unbindPad" no longer unbinds the control sticks in TDM. I can confirm this by running TDM with my config file and without running AntiMicroX; with a controller plugged in, the control stick bindings still function both on the menu and during gameplay. Some of the button bindings also still function in the menu. So my questions are: 1) Is it possible to completely unbind the gamepad (including the control sticks) in DarkmodPadbinds.cfg using "unbindPad" or another command? 2) Is it possible to add rebinding of the control sticks in a future update? (I realize this is probably a lot more work, but it would be nice to have!) Thanks for all the effort you guys put into this game, I've been enjoying it for many years.

If you'd like me to work on it faster I accept donations via Paypal and little brown envelope.

I completely agree and always found the timer illogical and killing the atmosphere. Thus throwable holy water bottles have been in my Unofficial Patch for a long time, created by the great Obsttorte. They do not work on pools though...

Yep, and it's very satisfying going back over it all with what I've learned since. I'm usually a proponent for not revising your work, but in this case I think it's worth it.

heres a much more updated port -> https://github.com/bibendovsky/ltjs work in progress but strives to make it multi platform. uses SDL2 And OpenAL soft to replace old win9x dx9 calls. old bink code replaced with ffmpeg like in RBDoom3BFG. a truely monstrous load of fixes to allow it to compile with newer compilers. should build with msvc clang and gcc. this port can use the NOLF2 assets

Finished! Fun mission - nothing groundbreaking but a nice town to work my way through. Issues: Opinion:

Scope of Work TDM currently supports a partial localization with a moderate amount of work. With a heroic effort, and a separate build on a separate site like DarkFate.org for Russian, one particular language can be fully supported. I'm not striving for that. Instead, I'm looking at AI-enabled moderate-effort partial localization across ALL TDM-supported languages for a particular FM. Choosing a Test FM As a test case, I'm going to report on internationalizing my small FM "Away 1: Air Pocket" (install name is airpocket). This FM is an "internationalization virgin". Furthermore, here's what it DOESN'T have: Custom video or speech audio Custom inventory items or weapons Custom images with embedded language text Signage Mission title & credits on splash screen (as either text overlay or embedded) Instead, these are my work targets, to translate to ALL languages: Text briefing Standard inventory items, mainly keys, but with custom names. Objectives A few sheet readables Some "thought messages" from the player (in the form of white text in midscreen, done with atdm:gui_message with atdm_gui_message_no_art.gui)