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I don't have a bugtracker account, so no I don't believe there is any tracking for this. I'd be willing to do the actual write-ups, but I'd need to be inducted as a bugtracker person or have someone paste them in for me. I think I'd make three separate tickets at this point? 1. flashbombed state increases the blackjacking radius (the original post) 2. flashbombed state plays its animations properly (wellingtoncrab's june 9th reply here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22738-proposal-flashbombed-ais-become-blackjackable/#findComment-502037 ) 3. flashbombs deal damage to team 9 enemies (undead, not mentioned here but another glaring issue that makes them less useful than their original TG/T2 incarnations)

Yeah TAA would be a good option to have here, but I don't think it's possible to hack that in, whereas SMAA and DLAA are totally viable. Also my cpu is so bad Stencil shadows run worse on low than shadow maps on medium... Maybe it's an AMD problem or an l3 cache problem, either way the Ryzen 4500 is trash.

Brightness, gamma and ambient. Brightness and gamma are user settings mappers can't (shouldn't) change. My opinion is that players shouldn't feel the need to change these unless real-life conditions change around them (day vs night, lights on/off, new monitor, etc). What mappers do in their missions is setting a single or multiple "ambient" lights to their maps. We can think of it as "the mood of the map or area". This ambient can change between zones: bright fullmoon outdoors, pitch black sewers, blue ghostly atmosphere, etc. My opinion is that players should be able to adjust the ambient of a mission based on their preferences or current mood (brighter or darker). You can try this yourself. Set your brightness and gamma just how you like it. Launch this mission, bring down the console and enter, in example: r_ambientGamma 1.2 The mission suddenly is a tad brighter and the light gem and gui/hud elements remain unaltered. Mind you, r_ambientGamma is persistent: you have to set it back to 1 when you are done with the mission, otherwise it stays at 1.2.

I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.

I think it comes down to peer pressure (people will notice if an FM is extremely demanding, and mention it during the beta testing phase), and peer assistance (mapping help from people who know what they are doing). Maybe there are things that can be done with the engine that can help support more gigantic "open world" style maps but I'm not sure what they are. It is reasonable for hardware recommendations to go up as the game evolves over decades and mappers push the limits. A bargain bin i3-10105 smashes the old A6-3400M I used to play TDM on, and multiple cores can actually be utilized. Le code it yourself geg I say excuse the rudeness as long as the criticism is anywhere near valid (debatable). Man's sober now at least. It's actually quadruple the pixels: 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 2560 x 1440 = 3,686,400 (~1.78x 1080p) 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400

That is your subjective opinion ("games that look better"). And, as you mentioned Dishonored 2 earlier, it's pretty comparable to TDMs performance in maximum details. Note also that some fan missions look significantly better than others, due to lighting, the amount of detail and the textures in the maps.

Indeed like you said TDM engine is not outdated, at lest not like the original Doom 3 engine is. Yes is not using PBR and nanite and raytracing and all that new Unreal Engine 5 stuff that makes it a very fast engine ... not ... but the TDM engine has a ton of updates, above the original idtech4 engine from Doom 3, IMO has now more in common with idTech 5 than idTech4. And all done by a very tiny team of TDM players, with the necessary knowhow, on their free time, for absolute free. Man some people don't deserve to get nice things for free... And I'm not talking about you datiswous. To anyone wondering, here is some of the things TDM engine has above original idTech4 that I'm aware: - soft stencil shadows like Wolfenstein 2009 (original is hard stencil shadows only). - new shadow system using shadow maps. - volumetric lighting (aka god rays). - more advanced AI system (so more CPU heavy). - GLSL shaders support and OpenGL 3.x akin to D3D10/11 level, (original is OGL 2.0 akin to d3d9 level and uses ARB assembly shaders only). - modern multicore support (original is single core only). - unlocked framerate (original is locked at 60hz) - 64bits color support - Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - Parallax Occlusion Mapping And a ton of more changes, like LOD support, obj models support, improved gui system, improved scripting system, better window system with support for high dpi monitors and 16 by 9 and other screen ratios, etc, etc. None of these changes were easy to make and took years of hard work, again for free, for a free game that we wall consume without paying a dime. IMO the lest some people can do, is respect that! Enough said.

If by "alot" faster you mean ~%50, then yeah where you're getting 100+ I'd be getting 75. Still I'd rather drop a couple settings to play at 4k and not have to rely on in game aa. For an RTX card you're probably better off just using DLAA, or rendering at 4k via DLDSR. Currently I've settled on 4x aa at 4k, but I'll probably end up using some SMAA via reshade instead. I get what people are saying about shadow maps, but I find they look better than stencil when set to high, most of that noise is removed at high when softness is set low enough. You have to look at softness differently for stencil and maps, just because the slider is set lower doesn't mean the shadows are less soft.

Two other little issues: here (1920, -934, 60) I picked up the newsrunner 4 (already had one in inventory) and then dropped it again. Instead of the newsrunner that image was dropped?! The second issue was that I somehow managed to permanently get "needs junkroom key" written on the screen, not sure how.. maybe I saved while it was displayed when frobbing that door? Might even be a non-mission-specific TDM bug, IDK ---- Having finished this mission (on expert): Holy shit, this was insane! Fun and challenging mission and the amount of enemies sometimes reminded me more of Serious Sam than Thief :-D (The amount of enemies might be the main reason why this FM requires more beefy hardware) TBH I tend to just blackjack every enemy to explore maps in peace, which of course can make them a bit easy (even on expert), unless there are superficial restrictions like "don't blackjack (more than N enemies)". I'm usually too impatient for playing as ghost Anyway, this mission was even challenging when blackjacking, which I enjoyed, but I can imagine that it's pretty frustrating for people who insist on ghosting.. OTOH there's no shortage of water arrows, so maybe ghosting is more doable than I assume (as long as the ghost doesn't insist on not extinguishing any lights). This certainly is no criticism from me, just a possible explanation why some people found it too frustrating The story is pretty great and I liked those portals I'm looking forward to Thomas' next adventure! By the way, regarding As others wrote, it is definitely not unplayable and shouldn't be removed. You could fix a few issues, like the locking of those desk drawers, and maybe reduce light in some places (especially that room that Helot is often in at first is pretty overbright), but I don't think it needs a rewrite. It might not be perfect, but who cares. As someone who has played a lot of FMs, this certainly is one of the better ones, especially impressive for a first mission! (Though I enjoy most FMs, even if they're a lot more amateurish than this one). I don't think you should spend more than one or two days with fixes/tweaks on this mission (if at all), as @datiswous wrote, it would be better to start a new mission with the experience gained from this one

As I said, you can adjust it, but you will lose the softness while the banding doesn't disappear entirely. And then what is the point of having it? Also, sometimes peter-panning happens but that's a meta-flaw of shadow maps.

I think you have to put the slider all the way to the left for shadow maps?

Inb4 it makes your eyes bleed. You can adjust the softness but it's like a whack-a-mole and in general shadow maps suck ass in TDM, so I'd rather turn this crap off. Maps vs. Stencil on high softness:

Fyi if you want to set aa to FXAA, you have to set it in your driver settings (or in a profile) and disable aa in tdm. At least that's my experience I had on a 1050ti. performance is very good, but the type of aa is not the best quality wise. Currently on a 3060 I decided to switch to ingame aa (setting 8 ) because I can with this gpu. Also, don't set aa setting higher than 8 (if you do use ingame aa). Difference between 8 and 16 in performance degration is huge. Not worth it. When there's vl in a scene, shadows of vl are automatically set to shadow maps (because stencil shadows are incompattible with vl, so it's decided to force shadow maps so to not break the scene), even though you might have set stencil shadows in settings. In my experience, the low setting for stencil is good enough. for shadow maps you need at least the medium setting, but the higher settings do make it better.

I have heard mention it may run better under Linux, but I've never tried it, my Darkmod.cfg is standard, nothing tweaked except the ingame settings. Soft shadows and volumetrics did indeed tank performance on my 970, and probably on the Rx 590 I was using before that. It does seem to run better on Nvidia cards. Sounds like my expectations are just off the mark for the experimental effects, though stencil often barely runs better than maps, I suppose that could also be cpu bound (Ryzen 4500). I would like to find a fix for the broken AA though, maybe the 1600 series just doesn't support it anymore but I'd heard there were 3rd party tools that could re-enable it?

Soft shadows and volumetric effects destroy performance the most and in general it's not worth using them even on a middle range hardware if you want solid 60 FPS experience on big levels. And from my experience soft shadows may look very ugly with severe banding artifacts in some places if you set them to maps instead of stencil. Also, I wonder how much worse performance will get when people start using parallax mapping everywhere?

If value the games you buy, you should sign one of these petitions - SIGN THE EU CITIZENS INITIATIVE: - https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home SIGN THE UK PETITION: - https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/ EU petition is @ 826K- needs to hit 1'000'000 UK petition is @ 97K - needs to hit 100,000 A video from Gamers Nexus on the subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ahH6HrtTc ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EU: This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state. Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher. UK: The government should update consumer law to prohibit publishers from disabling video games (and related game assets / features) they have already sold without recourse for customers to retain or repair them. We seek this as a statutory consumer right.

I'm glad this was your experience, because this is what I was hoping for. One of the reasons I cited Painter's Wife and The Sound of a Burrick In A Room as inspirations is that both have relatively simple objectives on the opposite side of sprawling maps. Theoretically somebody could make a beeline for the objective and skip 90% of the map, but exploring the nooks and crannies on your own initiative is half the fun.

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.

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".

Thanks for playing! Let me re-iterate: I don't ever tweak the AI or the maps to make the hearing more difficult. I don't try to make it easier either. It's all stock TDM. You did the right thing by changing the difficulty settings to suit your preferred experience. Also, there are moss arrows and things to help with this that the entire player base seems to have forgotten about (e.g. for the marble floors). Regarding Clarice:

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).

Another update to the saga of leak complaints: Sometimes things which didn't leak before start leaking all of a sudden after a few saves. I swear I can't possibly be moving the walls and leaving a gap in the corner- if I were the pointfile would be going there, but it goes straight through, even after I practically build a Matryoshka around the whole map. It's like some entities just become cursed. I've even had them copied and pasted into other maps and leak or not leak according to chance. And now, on to my real question. Is it possible with the tools already available to do a scripted fade of an NPC's opacity / alpha ? What about overlaying a color on an NPC, making them blue or charcoal colored or whatever. Thanks

"Dame Fortune is a fickle mistress. Every time she opens a door, she throws a brick through your window..." I'm happy to announce that my second FM, "The Last Night on Crookshank Lane", is now available on the Mission Database: https://www.thedarkmod.com/missiondetails/?internalName=crookshank Backup download is also available here: https://share.anon-kenkai.com/crookshank.pk4 Big thanks to @Airship-Ballet, @wesp5, @JackFarmer, @taffernicus, @Bergante for beta testing and feedback. Special thanks to @datiswous for generously providing in-mission subtitles. This is a much bigger and more ambitious FM than my first attempt, and it ended up taking a year and a half to complete. It was also a very educational lesson in the importance of proper map optimization. It's a sort of soft-sequel to "The Threepenny Revue", but not part of a series per se, and can be played as a standalone mission. I took inspiration from FMs like "The Painter's Wife" in TDM, and "The Sound of a Burrick in a Room" from Thief Gold, and although I'd never put myself in the same league as either, I was always impressed by their size, scope, and detail. City exploration FMs have always been my favorite, and those maps and others like them inspired me to take a crack at something similar. Enoy!