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1.08 Impressions


Springheel

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great work guys, the new version rocks! tears of st lucia looks awesome.

 

the only problem i have is: i cant start the training mission with eax on, other missions work. when the loading screen finishes i just get back to the objectives screen, loosing all sound. pressing start mission will load it again at bring me back to the objectives and so on...

 

i have a Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium Fatality Champion Series.

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Soooo....

 

1) Updated to 1.08

2) Prayed that it would start (other Doom 3 GPL compiles I've played with wouldn't...)

3) Success!

4) Tried Betrayal

5) Screen is full of terrible OpenGL artifacts and errors worse than my old Nintendo 64 emulator issues:

Flickering, missing objects, random opaque polygons, cats and dogs, etc.

6) I noted some weird z-fighting in 1.07 since installing Crystal Grave beta so I removed the mission

7) Same behavior

8) I conjectured that TheDarkMod.exe wasn't finding Doom 3 base resources so I copied those into the darkmod directory

9) Same behavior

10) Deleted DoomConfig.cfg, DarkmodConfig.cfg, and autoexec.cfg

11) Tried another small mission (Mortem's detail texture demo)

12) It worked as expected

13) Went on to try a bunch of other missions

14) Blown away by the visual updates to St Lucia and the Training Mission

15) Tried Return to the City v2

16) Malloc errors

17) Checked cvars, compression was enabled

18) Forced Video Ram to 1024

19) Malloc errors

20) Disabled Vertex Buffers cvar

21) Mission starts!

22) Everything looks good

23) Get into the cellar area behind the stairs

24) The small statue on the safe is black

25) Several barrels are black...

 

 

Can someone try RTTC v2 and confirm?

 

If so, can someone with a powerful system dmap it under 1.08?

 

(I also tried dmapping Betrayal by got a malloc error...)

 

Thanks.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Firstly are you running windows 7..? if so you need to download and install alchemy

 

To enable EAS in TDM you also need to enable surround speakers.

sry totally forgot about that. im running win7 x64, surround speakers are enabled.

i tried it with and without alchemy, no success.

i tested more missions, its just the training that wont start.

Edited by Oedi
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Played some St Lucia and so far it feels a lot more polished compared to 1.07. Can't really pinpoint individual improvements as it's been a while since I last played, but the feel is definitely smoother and aside from one AI issue with doors, a mismatch in floor textures and footsteps (though that's probably the FM itself), and rarely getting stuck between the edges of brushes and objects, everything else feels professionally done up.

Edited by bad marine ass
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8) I conjectured that TheDarkMod.exe wasn't finding Doom 3 base resources so I copied those into the darkmod directory

Don't do that. There is a cvar "fs_basepath" that you can set to your doom3 directory (according to taaaki). First you should make sure that the mod finds the location of doom3. You can find this somewhere in the console output.

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Thanks Biker.

 

Can you upload that the dmap files somewhere please?

 

Also, did you check to see whether the mini Aphrodite statue on the safe is black in-game?

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Hello everyone, new to these forums. Great mod and update - pretty impressive list of enhancements and additions. St Lucia was great to play and some things did stand out nicely. I don't know if AI relight behaviour was present previously, but it was fun to annoy guard again and again to relight the same torch, nice animations and it looks very impressive when the light and shadow are dynamic - after a while it becomes a bit funny because guard doesn't get suspicious. Guards sounded better and player seems to have better grunt sounds. Thankfully the AI is more merciful and does not alert as easily and this makes the mod more fun to play. Especially I am appreciative of the performance optimizations because for the time being my rig has an integrated POS graphics and every little improvement is welcome. I did not have any technical problems aside the fact that my computer sucks a bit. Minor details: the new flames look wonderful, there is no question about it. Overall, a job well done and a great addition to already excellent mod. Sure, there are some nitpicks and things I would like to see fixed, but for the time being I guess they can wait.

:)

 

 

Bit offtopic - could someone look into my problems with Darkradiant:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14061-problems-building-darkradiant-on-archlinux-from-git/page__st__25

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The training mission looks fantastic! After playing around for a while I went immediately to the changelog, because I was a little confused. I wasn't expecting this version to look better but it does, and I don't know if that's the 1.08 in action or the revamped TM. Is it the new shadow thing? Most of the visual improvements certainly come from the improved textures, it immediately draws my attention that some now have occlusion (?) and dirt (?). Also the lights look awesome with particles and fog.

 

One thing that bugged me, and I don't know if this is new, is that the AI doesn't really go to where the noise arrow landed (he didn't even fully left the room he was in, making that part of the training mission a bit challenging). It probably works (guessing here) the same way as when it hears a noise made by the player's footsteps, to make it a little forgiven the AI doesn't actually go all the way to the source of the sound, but that would be a good thing if the source is a noise arrow though.

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I haven't fully tested it yet, but, at a glance, it's a great update. :)

 

The audio has improved greatly, the graphics quality seems better, and it runs much smoother now, etc,. :D

 

One thing I've noted, is that it doesn't seem possible to unbind a key via the settings menu. (I'm aware of alternate means to accomplish this, but, I haven't been able to figure out how to do it from the menu, so, if it's already possible, let me know, if not, I suggest adding that in a future update.)

 

Also, I did have an NPC rush into combat after getting a glance of me, which I thought was fixed? (I might have been being too obvious, I'll have to test it some more.)

 

Anyways, I'd like to say thanks to everyone involved with making it all happen, I really appreciate you doing this, and sharing it with us. :D

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Wow, St. Lucia is so much fun. Absolutely loved the map layout, opportunities for creativity and awesome loot locations. Physically manipulating the environment for unique pathways, objectives and loot is such a highlight of the The Dark Mod and this level brilliantly demonstrates what's possible in this great mod. Top notch work!

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Wow, St. Lucia is so much fun. Absolutely loved the map layout, opportunities for creativity and awesome loot locations. Physically manipulating the environment for unique pathways, objectives and loot is such a highlight of the The Dark Mod and this level brilliantly demonstrates what's possible in this great mod. Top notch work!

Glad you like the work that was put into the updated version, but then the original that was mostly built by Jdude was a good template to begin with ;-)

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My god, guys. This is now not just the best thief game ever but quite seriously a contender for one of the best games of all time, ever. Now we just need more cohesive mission packs to make it seem less like a sandbox and more like a game but wow.. just wow. There is simply no way Thief 4 will be anywhere near as good as this, hell, in terms of game mechanics this is eons above any thief or other stealth game ever. Now just a question.. when is it going stand-alone? :D

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... when is it going stand-alone? :D

 

We haven't discussed the goals for the next release yet, but I suspect that if we don't achieve independence in that release, it will at least take another big step in that direction. 1.08 started us down that path in a big way, but we still use a ton of D3 assets that all need to be replaced. Big job.

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Hello guys and gals,

 

Congratulations on the release (I suppose Crucible of Omens are right behind the door...soo many sleepless night :P)!

 

Game seems to be running much more smoother. but I have a problem: even when I change my aspect ratio and resolution to 1440x900 (native to my monitor), I have a black stripes on the sides and they just don´t want to disappear. Also, text in the menu seems a bit blurry opposite to the previous one (but that may be cause by the resolution& black stripes). Do you know what´s going on?

 

I have a Win7 64x, 4 GB ram, GeForce 9600m GT

 

Thanks for any advice.

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Congratulations on the release (I suppose Crucible of Omens are right behind the door...soo many sleepless night :P)!

That's unfortunately not the case. I think people seriously overestimate the number of contributors doing regular or semi-regular work on it.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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!!! alert !!!

tdm_update did not auto-update my versions of Training Mission and ToSL to 1.08 versions. The only way I could get them both was to delete my current copies and run tdm_update again. Considering ToSL is no longer available on in-game mission downloader, and Training Mission is still only available on 1.07 version in the mission downloader, this seems like it might be a serious problem for some folks.

 

For now, I encourage other users to check their ToSL and Training Mission notes in the install menu to check that "1.08" is mentioned somewhere to make sure you have the updated versions.

Edited by ungoliant
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So, is this supposed to use the 'darkmod folder to search the 'base' directory or what?

 

I'm pretty sure that if i moved the doom3/base dir to the darkmod folder things would start without the data needing to be in the harebrained 'defaults paths' (the home dir or somewhere unwritable like /usr/something/somewhere.

due to this:

WARNING: using hardcoded default base path

no 'base' directory in exe path /home/i30817/Desktop/The Dark Mod/doom3/darkmod, skipping

 

 

But should i do it?

<_>

 

I never played doom3 and never will anyway, despise shooters. I assume the plan is to not use that dir eventually anyway when the mod goes fully self bootstrapping and that dir's contents will not be needed anymore - but i find it strange it is looking for the dir from where the exec was called and not from where the exec *is*. (as you'll see if you try to run it from the folder above, where it where it finds 'base' but fails to find 'darkmod' folder and searches for it in '~/.doom3')

I assume this is because in standard linux things are not mobile and in windows, things are run from the dir anyway, since shortcuts in explorer take the care to cd to the dir before running. But i find it strange that it seems the mod is prepared to run things like that and yet there was no new instructions if it is possible.

 

fuck it, going to make the bash file make a renewing symlink in .doom3.

 

You can also call the thedarkmod.x86 with +set fs_basepath . The symlink route should work as well. The problem you are experiencing is most likely due to us moving the executable into the "darkmod" folder instead of running through tdmlauncher. I'll have a look into the searchpath initialisation for Linux (I made some minor changes in the searchpath initialisation code to allow thedarkmod.x86 to run from darkmod/ but I didn't do extensive testing on Linux) and see if I can't make it more flexible.

 

We are aware of the problem with the fixed paths in Linux (and there is an issue tracker entry related to this). It's targeted for 1.09 though, but if I get a bit of time, I will get this implemented sooner (and then we can probably release a mini patch for Linux). It isn't hard to remove the fixed paths, but we decided that we didn't want to tackle this right before the release of 1.08.

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I am the bat. The night is mine.

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@ungoliant: Linux or Windows?

 

One or both missions are brought in at the end during a 1.07->1.08 update. Are you sure tdm_update said it was finished? It has a lot of moments when you need to press buttons to move things along (on Windows).

Windows 7 ultimate x64. I'm positive, and even double checked tdm_update to tell me no downloads available.

Here's what I'm not sure of: if the existing FM installs were detected in doom3/missionX and was used to play those missions while the new .pk4 files were sitting in darkmod/fms/missionX completely unused. Seeing as I deleted all traces of the FM folders in /doom3 and /darkmod/FMs for a clean download of the FM's from tdm_update, I have no way to verify that.

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I'll have a look into the searchpath initialisation for Linux (I made some minor changes in the searchpath initialisation code to allow thedarkmod.x86 to run from darkmod/ but I didn't do extensive testing on Linux) and see if I can't make it more flexible.

 

What i'm mostly looking for is that the it's a option to have the filestructure set up exactly like the windows install. So that the mod can be moved/executed across operating systems, and computers and i can unzip a archive of Doom3 in ~ whatever and install/run darkmod like that (i do own the game, don't worry).

 

I really dislike the linux lsb for being 'my way or the highway'. I don't object to it in system programs, but not on games.

Edited by i30817
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What i'm mostly looking for is that the it's a option to have the filestructure set up exactly like the windows install. So that the mod can be moved/executed across operating systems, and computers and i can unzip a archive of Doom3 in ~ whatever and install/run darkmod like that (i do own the game, don't worry).

 

That is exactly what I want to achieve and what I was alluding to with the removal of fixed paths. This will be a lot cleaner for all Linux users once we go full standalone, but in the meanwhile, we may just have to rely on symlinks or manually setting fs_basepath.

I am the bat. The night is mine.

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