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Now that The Dark Mod 2.11 is out, please share any thoughts, issues, or well-wishes here. Thank you!

As the author of this older thread, is it all right if I revive it ? I myself have a few questions about narrative structure while making an FM, and I don't want to make a completely new thread. Especially when this thread is still rather short. We don't need ten different threads with the exact same topic.

Hello folks, I wanted to share some work in progress comps for the main menu visual updates. (these were done a while ago) These are working in game, but are still just examples. I haven't looked into any of the more complicated menus (settings, mission downloader, slide show mission briefings, ect) Right now I am not planning on changing the UX, these are purely visual updates. EDIT: In-game menus have a requirement that we use the same text color. (so we dont break custom guis in-game) I'll post some mock ups of those soon. Let me know what you think! Using custom missions screenshot (curtesy of @Spooks) Btw this NOT volta 3 (i wish), its just a comp Using the default background art: Mock up of the store (needs some work to make more legible):

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).

Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.

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.

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")

Do we have one of these? I know we kind of have one for upcoming TDM projects, but not a general game thread. I'll start. Elden Ring:

I am curious as to which distributions and tool version are known to work when compiling either the 2.10 source archive or svn trunk. Cmake errors out with both Archlinux and Mint 21 for me. For good measure I will include some information I gathered about these errors, but I just want to be able to successfully build tdm on something. (My end goal is to compile in either pulseaudio or pipewire support for openal if that's possible; even though this thread got my audio working (arch audio subsystem is pipewire{,-alsa,-audio,-pulse} & jack2 ) ) I've also tried compiling against the latest svn trunk, that fails too, although the point in which it fails is slightly different. What do the developers use to build the linux release? System information for the failed builds against the 2.10 archive: System #1: cmake 3.22.1 | gcc 11.3.0 | kernel 5.15.0-56-generic | distro Linux Mint 21 System #2: cmake 3.25.1 | gcc 12.2.0 | kernel 5.15.83-1-lts | distro Arch Linux src archive used: sha256sum thedarkmod.2.10.src.7z 73aa974635293e6ca07396be19901355f8224637bdf3ce73404b8eef74148a1c thedarkmod.2.10.src.7z Build command from root of extracted src: [ -d build ] && rm -rf build mkdir build && cd build && cmake --debug-output --loglevel=DEBUG -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release" .. &> cmake.$distro.log && \ make -d --debug=a -j &> make.$distro.log ; cd .. make.mint.log.gz make.arch.log.gz cmake.mint.log.gz cmake.arch.log.gz

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.

I've also added new links to royalty-free music in my other external music database thread. I've covered the historical music fairly in-depth, but the royalty-free tracks were lacking in numbers, so I searched around for some interesting ones. There's more to come in that other thread in particular.

Hello taffers, The campaign "Hidden Hands: Blood & Metal" consisting of five missions is now basically ready for beta testing (the briefing videos are missing and there are still some "real" speakers missing, at the moment there are tentative robot voices in these places, hope to replace them in the next two or three weeks). Unfortunately, the project has become somewhat more extensive than originally planned. It took me about two hours to test each mission. So you should allow at least12 hours for all five missions on the first run. Beta testing shall start at the beginning/middle of next week. The difficulty level is somewhere between "The Anomaly" and "The Lost Citadel". Some things are easier, others are not, but proper exploration and usage of the available resources/objects should always pave the way to success. Sign in here, if you are taff enough! Jack Testing thread:

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

Inn Business It's business, at an inn, over three nights. Development screenshots: Download: https://drive.google...dit?usp=sharing Update 1.48 uploaded March 8th, 2014, one change: patches key rarely not being frobable in one of its possible spots Big thanks to my beta testers: Airship Ballet, Kyyrma and AluminumHaste! Development supporters of note: Sotha, Springheel and Obsttorte. Also thanks Sotha, for urinating in my mission. ;-) And thanks Kyyrma for the title screen! My appreciation to all forum/wiki contributors, without whom, this wouldn't exist. Thanks to positive commenters on my previous mission too, extra motivation helps! :-) Note this uses campaign features, what you use the first night, impacts subsequent nights. And to quote a tester, "...the level is maybe best experienced in more than one sitting". If you do pause between nights, please be sure to save, you can't begin partway through effectively. (If you accidentally start a night you already completed, just fail the kill objective to switch to another night.) If your frame rates are too low facing the cemetery, please reduce your "Object Details LOD" setting. It was designed with "AI Vision" set to "Forgiving", to be able to sneak through with minimal reactions, if you want more/less, adjust your settings accordingly. There are several random, conditional aspects, and ways of going about things, so others might have slightly different experiences. Post here if you discover hidden objectives for extra points! My condolences to loot completionists, I made a bit on the third night hard, you've got your challenge cut out for you! Speaking of which, there's a TDM bug that mission complete totals too high, here are the real amounts per night: 2026/970/202. Oh, there is something that in the U.S. would be rated PG, in case you play with kids in earshot. I hope you enjoy playing it, feel free to let me know you did, and I'm glad to respond to inquiries (like how stuff was done, nothing was scripted). (Note which night you are referring to if it's something specific.) (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] Developed for TDM 2.01. PS: Thiefette, good news, no spiders! Springheel, if you find an optional objective you can skip...you might find it immersion breaking. Others, no undead! There are a couple other interactive critters though. :-) Edit note: Some posts below were from users of an unreleased version of TDM 2.02 which broke several things, they do not reflect regular game-play.

I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.

Is this a burglars request thread? Edit: This question was raised onto the original title of this thread, which looked somewhat like a request for players of sorts.

After playing various Dark Mod FM’s, I become hooked to the game, like I was with Thief (and its FM’s). So, like I do to all games I love, I tried to find ways to improve it. Since my first contact with DM and after playing T1 and T2 with the fantastic “HD Mod”, it became apparent that graphically, TDM struck me strange. Of course, it is clearly a BIG improvement over T3 and it’s not worse then Thief 2014 -- if you remove all those post processing effects, the textures are actually very bad for today standards – but it could be a little bit better. So I started to change a texture here, a texture there, whenever I found a texture that could be improved. Initially, I made this for my own amusement, while i was playing, but as the changes increased, I started to think I it would only be fair to share it with the community. As a note, I really appreciate the amount of work done by the contributors to TDM. It’s amazing how an open source project of a game whose genre is unfortunately condemned to target a niche player base could attract so many talented people to work together and create what essentially is the Thief 4 we never had. So this is in no way a mean to disrespect the contributors and their work. What changed and how Currently, around 530 files were changed. The changes end up in one of the following categories: NOTE: “texture quality” noted below is subjective and represents only my point of view. Again, It is in no way a mean of disrespect for the original author and its work. The texture is good but is in a low resolution – upscale it using AI image enhancement methods. The texture is poor and low res, with poor AI upscale results – try to replace it using various free PBR or raw Image sources (1) or create my own. If necessary, adjust the image using (colors, saturation, contrast, …) The texture has a good resolution and its not quite good but can be improved – improve using gimp (ex: on textures with bur, use sharpen, noise reduction or/and other features) (2) The texture depicts an horrible stew – change it to a decent and delicious stew, because my Portuguese roots forced me to do it. Additionally, specular and normal maps were added to some textures. (1) Free textures and PBR sites already discussed on this forum (texturehaven.com, 3dtextures.me, cc0textures.com and so on). (2) Finding the right texture is not always easy. I always tried to follow the same “feel” and appearance of the original image, but i confess that this is not always the case. Again, very subjective. New version 2021.01.08 * Around 170Mb of textures processed Some tree barks enhanced Stucco change more enhancements on doors, paint paper, fire places, ground textures, curtains .. and much more Screenshots and Comparisons It’s obviously undoable to show the comparison for all changed textures, so keep in mind that the following screenshots are just a very small example of the whole project. Also, very important, keep in mind that there is so much you can do with screenshots and in game the differences are much more clear than what is shown below. Sir Talbot's Collateral https://imgsli.com/MTI2NDE https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzY https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzc https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzg https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzk https://imgsli.com/MTI2NDA WS3: Cleighmoor https://imgsli.com/MTI1OTE WS1: In the North https://imgsli.com/MTI2MTY https://imgsli.com/MTI2MTc WS2: Home Again https://imgsli.com/MTI2MjM https://imgsli.com/MTI2MjQ https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjc https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjg https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjk https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzE https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzM New (version 2021.01.08) Briarwood Manor https://imgsli.com/MzUwNDY https://imgsli.com/MzUwNDg https://imgsli.com/MzUwNTE https://imgsli.com/MzUwNjc The Builder's Influence https://imgsli.com/MzUxNjM https://imgsli.com/MzUxNjQ No honor among thieves: forest https://imgsli.com/MzU0ODE https://imgsli.com/MzU1NTQ https://imgsli.com/MzU1NTk How to install 1) download the pk4 file from here 2) drop it on your TDM game folder (where all the other pk4 files are) 3) Play! Uninstall Just remove z_TDM_HD.pk4 file from your TDM install folder. Disclaimer If you are a purist, please don’t use this texture mod. Don’t bash it for not being “exactly the same as the original ones but hires”. If you find some texture that is copyrighted, please let me know and i will replace it. Fell free to suggest changes, but please don't make requests. Understand that i am doing this while playing and if i start feeling that i'm working instead, i will probably start to loose my interest. PS: I really don't know if this is the right thread to make this post. Let me know if i need to change it to another thread.

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.

@Petike the Taffer Well that was challenging, but I managed to get it to work with a dummy AI (but with a warning message). Using hide doesn't work on the dummy, as each time it moves it un-hides. You need to use an invisible model. I used the atdm:ai_base, which surprisingly worked with these spawn args so it doesn't interfere with the player position and is inert as possible. Then you just need to trigger a follow script, e.g.: void follow_dummy() { $dummy.setOrigin($player1.getOrigin()); $dummy.hide(); //not sure why this is needed, but it stopped working when I deleted it sys.wait(0.2); //needed to prevent game from hanging thread follow_dummy(); } Alternatively, I tried to just bind the dummy to the player instead, but then the follower ai wouldn't follow me.

Could be something funky going on with our implicit RGTC compression. We use a Microsoft BC format for pre-compressed normals but our on-the-fly encoder is supposed to use standard OpenGL tangent space normals. I wonder if the work to fix BC loading had some unintended effect on uncompressed loading? Maybe @orbweaver can be convinced to take a 2nd look?

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.

This last month, I've been exploring TDM's font situation, and improving the documentation as I go. In the wiki, "Font Conversion & Repair" was rewritten, with parts broken out and expanded as: Font Files Font Metrics & DAT File Format Font Bitmaps in DDS Files ExportFontToDoom3 Q3Font Refont As announced earlier, that last item is a new C++ console utility for revising font metrics in DAT files; essentially another alternative to Q3Font and Font Patcher. It now has additional functionality that provides font-coverage analysis. A summary of current results across all TDM fonts is reported in the forum thread "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts". Also, refont allows its human-readable outputs to be decorated with an annotation for each character (out of 256 codepoints). Associated with that, I've just created and released 4 annotation files: 1 Cyrillic version for TDM's russian map 3 variants for TDM's custom english/european char map. One of the variants was derived from another new mapping file that is now available from existing wiki article "I18N - Charset". Within that file is a list, in a standard format, of the 256 TDM bitmap codepoints mapped to the corresponding Unicode U+NNNN value and name. This may be useful in defining TDM's mapping to TTF font editing programs. For all these wiki pages mentioned, I imagine there will be additional cross-links and tweaks. But pretty much done.

The real St. Alban was a pagan who became a celebrated religious personality, this All Saints Day 2010 The Dark Mod places its own spin on this mythical figure. Screenshots: Intro: "'Business' has been slow lately, even more so after most of my gear got snatched during a Watch raid... I've since been forced to hit the streets and pick pockets for a living. But my luck was about to change, last night I was approached by a red hooded figure with a proposition... As we sat down in a dark corner of a nearby inn, he told to me that the Builders of St. Alban's Cathedral in the Old Quarter had recently unearthed a discovery that might lead to the final resting place of some saint." " But before I do anything, I need to get my tools and stash from the evidence room at the local watch station." "with the hawks, doves will congregate they will drop honey from the cliffs wine will surge over the earth the sheep will wander harmlessly with the wolf then the wicked will rise, but to retribution" - 'scripture of St Alban' There is a new version out now, see the following thread St Albans Cathedral version 1.6 Build Time: about 2-3 months. Thanks:- Huge respect to the Dark Mod team for such a great mod and for all the hard work they put into it and continue to put into it. Special thanks to Fidcal, Serpentine and others for their help on the forums and to Testing:Ugoliant, Baddcog, Grayman, Lost soul, Bjorn and Baal (for doing all the Vp work in the town. Readables: Ungoliant and Mortemdesino for all awesome work on the readables. Resource: Fids, Grayman, Ungoliant - guis, models & images. Misc: Loren Schmidt - the author of the map I based the cathedral on. Info: # Like Thief2, some things are climable, pipes, wall vines etc.. You can also drop some of the keys, some door that are frobbabe mean there is another way inside - explore u taffer! # Due to TDM being a lot more of a resource hog than T2 I have been forced to limit the number of Ai in the mission, but they have better placement than my last mission. # On all difficulty levels the player starts with vertualy no tools/weapons, there are weapons to be found - read, read, read! # For the love of all that is holy, read the briefing otherwise you will problems completing the mission. Known issues:- # This mission will have less than optimal fps at a few points on the map, mid range DX9 card(X1900/GF7800) or higher required. # On low end PCs I recommend, V-sync is off, AA is off, Aniso is 4x or lower and that any and all background apps are closed.