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How about setting this screen resolution in darkmod.cfg? I dont have a big screen to test it.

Full screen. Just tried running in windowed by changing the Darkmod.cfg setting. Still showing black screen with TDM mouse. I've got this version originally by updating from 2.06 to 2.07. The result was the same as now. Then I deleted all files except fms folder and downloaded the updater again from www.thedarkmod.com There are no subdirectories except fms and screenshots (which I deleted when I reinstalled TDM so now I only have missionshots folder inside fms and no screenshots folder anymore). I'll try reinstalling again and report back. qqq.txt

Thanks for that. Yeah I figured it was coming from the monitor, as if it can't display the output from the PC then it wouldn't be able to display any message from it too, but for those who just get a black screen & music this might help. And apologies for putting this thread in the wrong forum, thanks for shifting it, whoever it was

Hi all, I just put the 64 bit version of TDM on my machine running Zorin 15.2, I figured it's based on Ubuntu so it should be OK When I ran thedarkmod.x64 I got the intro music playing & a black screen with a pop up saying - I couldn't stop TDM & had to blip the power button to get the system to shut down. So I dug around a bit on my old windows system that ran TDM on the same monitor & found the following lines in Darkmod.cfg seta r_customHeight "1080" seta r_customWidth "1920" on the Linux system they were seta r_customHeight "600" seta r_customWidth "800" So I changed the figures to match the old windows system & tried again & it worked the training mission loads nicely I couldn't find any setting for 60hz, but as it seems to work I'm fine So I'm posting this in case anyone else has a similar issue

I've been optimizing my map to boost fps from in a lot of cases 25-30 to 45-65, doing this systematically. I have a newbie perspective, this being my first FM - so .... be kind. First off, when building the .map I began by dropping in shadow/no_shadow lights with zero care - just looking to light the areas being worked on. Same for entities, dropping them in with little care except for aesthetics and creating shadows for the player to hide in. That procedure made for a very unoptimized map. So, what's been the optimizing plan? First, clean up the geometry. Second, go thru' the map section by section, setting shadow/no_shadow on entities. There's a tradeoff: complexity of geometry multiplied by shadows gets out of hand, so a lot of care needed here. With a first pass on that done, redo the lighting. I eliminated all the small ambients I'd put in, whether shadowcasting or not, leaving just those lights attached to fixtures of some kind, which I wanted to be in general shadowcasting. I reset these shadowcasters to not overlap so far as viable. I was amazed to find that this made for a much much better looking map coupled with much more acceptable frame rates. I use hide_distance on entities sparingly as I don't like the pop-outs. Not at all! My map has a lot of transparent windows/doors. I use func_portals with hide_distance set on every one of these. Controlling pop-outs caused by func_portals is fairly simple. The func_portal pop-outs tend to be marked by abrupt lighting changes. These are very ugly and getting rid of them or making them unobtrusive is a priority. I cant see using any kind of light pop-out/pop-in spawnarg. Rather, I could see using a shadow/no_shadow hide_distance setting, which could be used more universally and quite unobtrusively. If that's possible now, please tell me how! Also, I could see using a fade-to-black hide_distance on lights, so there'd be no lights a popping.

Using the latest dev build, I'm noticing some of the default assets have issues with missing shaders or skins even certain meshes. Some entities appear as black boxes in-game whereas certain skins for good models come out as transparent white surfaces instead of a proper texture. I figured I should make a thread for reporting these seeing the issue is rather widespread to quite a few of the default models and entities. Here's one to start off with: Create an atdm:ai_mage01 then give it the skin plain_robes. The outer coat looks fine but the inner clothing causes ghosting.

This just started today with my update of SVN to 15737/8388 followed by a rebuild. Some textures (not limited to the door texture shown) are painted black in-game. (Working fine prior to the latest update.) For textures on frobable items, normal highlighting appears when the item is frobbed. For textures on non-frobable items, the texture remains black regardless of distance from the object. Backing away to turn off highlighting paints the texture normally. Anyone else seeing this?

I can repeat this BUT black is resolved by quick save\load, i.e. it's only black between map start and first load. Also, I can see the quick save/load adds draw calls and tri count. Is this what you see too? If so, it's probably related to BFG-style area\portal culling changes.

This matches what I’ve been seeing. Consecutive game starts w/o rebuilds might blacken the same textures, or the previously black sections might render normally and new sections turn black.

That's a really poor analogy, since car mirrors are one of the core functionalities of a car. It's more like an FM being shipped with light gem being dark all the time. You seem to be great at dogmatic theories from decades ago, but you're out of touch with modern practice. That's how development works these days, for quite some time now. Project scopes change all the time. Deadlines move, people have to abandon functionalities or settle for less. They leave half-working things in the background, move items to the backlog, so they can work on them when time / client allows. There are select people that prioritize bugfixes, but again, noone in their sane mind would waste time on implementing something that makes non-critical errors critical, just to push people to work harder. And getting back to FMs and more personal projects, the practical side of things is, again, that the map can contain several thousands of entities. Missing even several of them (or missing textures, materials) is a low to medium priority fix. Might be a high priority if it's a plot item, but engine still will render a black box not sure whether it's frobabble. But technically, it still might be possible to finish the mission with a key loot model missing. If a texture or material def is missing, it will just turn black, so again, a high priority, not critical. Nothing worth crashing the game.

Under which exact circumstances does the game crash? Does it crash before you see loading screen, while you see it, or after you "click attack to start", or somewhere in game? Does it happen on New Job mission? The condump that you attached does not witness the crash itself. It would be great to get condump with everything up to the very point of crash. The only way to achieve it is to open Darkmod.cfg, find the line with logFile, and change it to seta logFile "2" (UPDATE: it seems it is already set in your config file). Then run the game on New Job FM and reproduce the crash. Then find the log file at fms/newjob/qconsole.log.

Last issue I'm personally aware of, please report any others here if you've seen them. In the bushes category there's one entity called atdm:nature_bush_large_3 which has an invalid model and appears as a black box. All other bushes are fine on my end and it's just this one that has a problem.

Yet another reason to not mess with desktop screen resolution

I found a bit of a weird work-around for this, that's a bit of a pain to set up but appears to do something. Run TDM from one machine through Steam, stream it to the machine you want to play it on that has a weird aspect - Steam resizes everything to fit the screen of the machine to which TDM is being streamed. I've plugged in an old 4:3 monitor to an old machine and then Steam-streamed it to another machine that is running a monitor at 16:9 and there's no letterboxing as, eg, watching an old TV show from the 80's on a widescreen. There's a little clipping where it's stretched, compared to how the game looks on the other screen (sides cut off a little) but that can probably be fixed through FOV (which will tax the other machine further). GUI's look dodgy and stretched - but the game itself fits the monitor and doesn't look so bad, even if it is struggling because the other machine isn't really powerful enough to run the game. Quality is ok, takes ages to load. Don't notice any input lag but the game is almost unplayable due to the machine not being up to the task - it's basically playing it on a Gateway that is usually used for DOS 6.2 and Win 3.1, that can just about run XP, instead of on the powerhouse or streamed from one of my craptops (that have other aspects also, but I know I can stream 1920x1080 to them and use this machine for its power and play Total War Atilla on a computer that can't run it - Steam handles the resizing to fit). Not a very good work-around but it's a work-around. // doing it the other way - from the big machine at 16:9 to the gateway at 4:3 - it fits the screen and runs like a dream.

Thanks for testing. This help us too, to help other players in the future on their first-run. Some on the internet say, to also install the vcrun2015 component. Please install it and check it reaction. A black screen with sound is a video problem. You can solve this by change things in the tdm config file or run tdm with start-arguments. Run TDM windowed mode and low screen resolution: make a backup of the file "darkmod.cfg" (by make a copy of it) Then open the file with a texteditor, change the following values and save the file. r_customHeight 600 r_customWidth 800 r_fullscreen 0 If this works on your system, then you can change the video settings from the tdm main menu. If not, we need some logs. Create in playonmac a shortcut to the tdm executable and fill in some start arguments. (Configure button > select dark mod container > General tab > "Make a shortcut from this virtual drive" button)", select the dark mod exe inside the darkmod folder) After you created the shortcut in playonmac, hit the configure button again, select the darkmod container, then the darkmod exe shortcut and select tab "general" and where you can enter arguments in the "Arguments" input. we need to see how tdm loads. please create a log for us. using the start arguments: +gfxinfo +condump mylog.txt +quitThis generates a textfile inside the tdm folder and automaticly close tdm. We want to see the content of that file. (in spoiler-forum tags, please) If changeing the values for low resolution and windowed moded in the darkmod doesnt work Then use start arguments: +set r_customHeight 600 +set r_customWidth 800 +set r_fullscreen 0(or change these values in the darkmod.cfg file,) If this works on your system, then you can change the video settings from the tdm main menu. Folow the following tdm wiki article: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Debugging_TDM_systemerrors

With a currently .tga background and default darkmod.cfg cvars from updating to the main menu beta: Can't see an image_compression cvar in my darkmod.cfg, and the console doesn't seem to know it. My other seemingly compression-related cvars are: seta s_decompressionLimit "6" > seems to be something for audio files (max uncompressed sample length), so I didn't experiment with it seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "1" > setting this to 0 has no effect on the background and turns pretty much everything else into black rectangles/screens seta image_useNormalCompression "1" > setting this to 0 has no effect seta image_useAllFormats "1" > setting this to 0 has no effect seta image_useCompression "1" > setting this to 0 cures the problem. As sharp as ingame. Yes, I tried it in .tga, .dds and .jpg and made sure I didn't have both a .tga and a .dds in valid locations simultaneously.

The 64bit color buffer visibly reduces banding in fog and other particle effects and is also a requirement for the Bloom effect to work properly. No HDR screen is required to benefit from either of those.

Yes it is and its second hand. My PC needs a serious overhaul/rebuild. It can be, my computer does struggle with the larger missions. I do have it in mind to upgrade at some point but for the time being its still alive and working. I do have other games I can't run at all on my computer so likely in the near future I will have to get on and upgrade things in it. Its just the issue of time, money and getting the right parts. Ps. If you think that is an old computer part my screen is an old LG from I think 2004.

So I tried the newest beta driver for 6850 (I only tested with the WHQL the first time) Honestly I expected the same black GUI but AMD managed to get over their assheads with that one It just... crashes on qglGetProgramiv(... GL_LINK_STATUS ...) with the manylight shader Thank you, AMD, for setting the eternal gold standard in shit baths driver quality reputation

Hello, I am having this problem as well. Radeon HD 5500 graphics card. I decided ti try test15973-8778 based on this: It appeared to work, I now have the menu screen.

ran the updater and I am getting the same blue screen window as the first post. does running the updater install the hotfix or do i need to download that separately? Pardon me I misunderstood: Running installer now

I don't know if this has already been said, I could not find anything about it anywhere, and I hope this is the right place to point this out. I found this weird bug in the training mission, where the screen goes crazy if I go underwater when the health is not full. The majority of the screen freezes, and I can only see a smaller screen in the bottom left corner in which I can continue to play. If I return on surface, everything turn back ok, same thing if I cure full health (even underwater). I noticed this in the training mission only, in "Tears of St Lucia", for example, everything goes perfectly underwater even if damaged.

I updated SVN to see if I could confirm the problem, but when I try running the game all I see is a black screen. I can hear the music and the sounds of the options, but can't see anything, even when trying to pull down the console.

I (and we) have not read your darkmod logs yet, studentmaniac. And i still want to read them, because capability check written in them and can show other things. (and if there is a driver issue, we can also see that in the log. Than we have proof) "I'll not go fiddling with codes and notebook as I am naïve and technologically illiterate when it comes to these things." Please hold on! Then I write some easy instructions for you, which i did also for other people. instruction: open the file explorer and go to your darkmod folder. open file darkmod.cfg (right click > open with > notepad), look for value for setting "seta logFile", change the value "0" to "2", and the save the file. open file "currentfm", change its content to "training_mission", and the save the file. open a command prompt/powershell window in the tdm folder: In file explorer > click on menu "file" > open in powershell. Or in file explorer, hold your shift-key on keyboard and right-click in a empty space (shift+right click), > in the quickmenu select "open powershell / command prompt" here Or hit windowskey+r to open the execute window. input "cmd" and run.This wil open the black command prompt window If the game is located at c:\games\darkmod, enter the following line and hit the enter-key: cd games\darkmod Then run the following command by entering the following line and hit the enter-key: .\TheDarkModx64.exe +condump tdmwontstartlog.txt +map training_mission +quit this automatically start tdm, create logfile tdmwontstart and quit. This create a file "tdmwontstartlog" and we want to see its content. Open the file and post its content in the topic, or attach the file to the topic. (You can also look if there is a qconsole file in your fms\trainingsmission folder, but i doubt it.) end.

I want to know what is written in the qconsole.log, when you load the mission "A House of Locked Secrets" directly. This by generating a new darkmod.cfg, change the log setting in darkmod.cfg, change the name of current mission in currentmission.txt start the mission from commandline, automaticly quit and look for qconsole.log inside fms folder "ahouseoflockedsecrets". Generate a new darkmod.cfg, by renaming darkmod.cfg (to something else) and start and quit darkmod. open darkmod.cfg, look for value for setting "seta logFile", change the value "0" to "2" Change the content of currentfm.txt to "ahouseoflockedsecrets" hit windowskey+r to open the execute window. input "cmd" and run. This wil open the black command prompt window If the game is located at c:\games\darkmod, enter the following line and hit the enter-key: cd games\darkmod Then run the following command by entering the following line and hit the enter-key: .\TheDarkModx64.exe +map monastery.map +quit This will automatically start TDM, load the mission and quits. See if there is a qconsole.log inside folder fms\ahouseoflockedsecrets end.