A change I'm sure No One wants- Light-responsive readables

[BoilerDunce]

Reading in the dark is virtually impossible.
In this game, however- no problem. Your readable GUI is always illuminated.

But suppose the 2D readout was only as bright as the local light level. 
If a mission had the oversight of requiring the player to read an unmovable readable in the dark without any provided light sources, 
it could be impossible to complete without a walkthrough if there's a critical hint in that readable.

On the other hand, it would add a nice extra purpose to the mechanics of relighting candles and moving them as desired,
and it also just feels fun to me to light my lantern before reading anything, for instance. 

There is a somewhat ambiguous line that has to be drawn though if it was decided to make this affect mission objectives that depend on acquiring information.
That would be: How bright is considered bright enough that the player character counts as being able to read that information?
It would have to be an estimated in-game equivalent to a few candelas per square meter.
 

Spoiler

Which brings another thing to mind-
Rooms which are supposed to be dark might catch a guard's attention if he can see light through the door seam, I would imagine.
These two mechanics together would add tension to trying to read in a dark room, as an approaching guard could force you to snuff out your candle or lantern.

 

[chakkman]

Quote

A change I'm sure No One wants

I think you're correct about that.  

Seriously, some things are gameplay decision, and this is one of them. Nobody wants to go to a brightly lit room just to read readables, not to talk about being exposed to be spotted by guards.

Edited September 28, 2025 by chakkman

[wesp5]

Also in almost all missions you have access to your lamp and could use it to read readables in a dark area.

[snatcher]

It would have been nice if it had been designed this way back in the day but after 200 missions... A light source is not always guaranteed. It is never too late for anything, though.

[thebigh]

This is, I think, one of those times when gameplay fun outweighs strict realism. There's already missions where static readables are placed under unextinguishable lights, giving you the thrill of a brightly lit library heist without having to have the player lug candles around.

But this'd be a cool idea for a mission: an ancient inscription (custom graphic decal) in a zombie-infested crypt that can only be read by the light of a blazing pagan orb (decal as a func_static turns on only when the orb is nearby).

I think this would have to be a per-mission thing, rather than applying to Dark Mod generally.

 

[datiswous]

Quote

A change I'm sure No One wants

I would prefer it, at least if a player lantern is included in the inventory. So I can't just hide in the shadows while around me lots of guards walk past and I can read the objectives in full bright light. Makes no sense.

[demagogue]

I think this could be a good idea to have available for mappers to make maps based around, though not as a basic mechanic.

I'd think it'd be best worked, in terms of gameplay, in combination with the lantern. So you can always read it with your lantern on, but of course that makes you visible for the time you're reading it. So the player should move to a safe space to do it and a good mapper could play with that tension, safe spaces you can go to vs. the time it takes to get to them vs the value of the info in the readable, etc. 

Anyway, I think it'd be interesting to see in one-off FMs that played with the idea and would welcome seeing it in action. I agree with everyone else that I don't think it'd be great as a general mechanic for the base game. But I'd encourage someone to make a map with it in action to see how it plays. 

Edit: Also, if someone is going to all that effort, there should be a way for players to make it standard for themselves in all FMs too, since some players might want it for their own games. I have an idea that it might require a source code change, though, meaning it'd call for a modded .exe file, not just a mod you can drop in a folder, which complicates it somewhat. But maybe someone like wesp or somebody could put it as an option in their mod pack, as I think it might be a hard sell as a voluntary option in the base game, but you never know. Maybe it could be. 

[wesp5]

5 hours ago, demagogue said:

But maybe someone like wesp or somebody could put it as an option in their mod pack, as I think it might be a hard sell as a voluntary option in the base game, but you never know. Maybe it could be. 

I can take a look, but if it can't be done by some simple def file changes it won't be happening ;).

[BoilerDunce]

In my opinion, a voluntary option should never be thought of as a hard sell. It's voluntary. If it defaults to unchanged, who can complain? Honestly. 

I feel like this has to be repeated so much that it may as well be a topic of its own, but I'm probably not going to start it.

Making things toggleable can remove the controversy from almost any change that isn't outright vision-changing like "include a potion that turns the player the size of a mouse."

[datiswous]

So I guess the brightness of the gui overlay should be linked to the brightness of the lightgem for it to work.

Or maybe actually based on brightness level. It's also not clear if you would set this in a material or in a gui file.

Maybe use if commands on brightness level and then set the brightness of every gui, font, etc.

Edited September 30, 2025 by datiswous

[BoilerDunce]

32 minutes ago, datiswous said:

So I guess the brightness of the gui overlay should be linked to the brightness of the lightgem for it to work.

Or maybe actually based on brightness level. It's also not clear if you would set this in a material or in a gui file.

Maybe use if commands on brightness level and then set the brightness of every gui, font, etc.

I was thinking it won't matter which. You can only read small pages of stuff that's not too far away to read, so the light gem value could be recycled with nothing seeming out of the ordinary.

And since a long range frob for giant signs isn't in the game to my knowledge, we don't have to adapt for the possibility of trying to gather remote luminosity information and all the computational hiccups that has been said to involve. If its a big signpost or something, the player would naturally be happy enough just looking at it.

[wesp5]

I took a quick look at the readable def files and couldn't find a variable that is used to set reading brightness.

[demagogue]

19 hours ago, BoilerDunce said:

In my opinion, a voluntary option should never be thought of as a hard sell. It's voluntary. If it defaults to unchanged, who can complain? Honestly. 

Just to clarify, and going off of wesp's comment, the hard sell isn't deciding to add a voluntary option per se. The ethos of this whole game is to let players and mappers do what they want within a pretty broad range of styles. So it'd be an easy ask if it were a trivial thing to do, like change a "0" to a "1" or some other value in some def file like wesp is saying. 

But when it's not a simple task like that but one that requires quite a bit of coding support like it seems this it, the hard sell is asking someone to dig through the source code and figure out how to code the thing in a way that is robust & doesn't break other things, which means research, planning, coding, debugging, play testing, and then more coding to fix everything and deal with all the comments that come in. 

If you really want to get down to brass tacks, the central ethos around here is DIY. If you really care about this, there's a place you can get the source code, and we have an entire forum and wiki that has all of our institutional knowledge to research almost any topic. If you don't know any coding, this is your perfect chance to learn, like I and a lot of us did just to put in new features we wanted but no one else was gonna do.

Basically, if we can't get wesp5 on the job, it's only going to be harder to recruit the other usual suspects. So if you want to see it, you may need to do it yourself, but you might be happily surprised at the willingness of people to answer your questions and help you with the task, if you're really serious about taking it on, that wouldn't otherwise do it themselves. 

[wesp5]

5 hours ago, demagogue said:

Basically, if we can't get wesp5 on the job, it's only going to be harder to recruit the other usual suspects.

Snatcher has much more knowledge of the game than I do, but if he can't find an easy way, you are right!

Edited October 1, 2025 by wesp5

[datiswous]

17 hours ago, wesp5 said:

I took a quick look at the readable def files and couldn't find a variable that is used to set reading brightness.

I was more thinking about darkening the image and changing the text color based on different brightness. Via if commands, say something like: If brightness is lower than this amount, use this background, font, etc. I think the brightness of the screen is not affecting the on-screen gui, so you have to change the gui manually I think.

 

For example this material code is making the lightgem show different on different brightness (I think):

Spoiler

tdm_lightgem_00031_mid
{
	// Lightlevel 0 is unhandled since the lightgem value is always clamped to DARKMOD_LG_MIN which is one.

	// For Lightlevel = 1 & < 4
	{
		if ( parm0 < 4.0 )
		blend		gl_one, gl_one_minus_src_alpha
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00001
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			1 -((parm0-1) * 0.33333333)
	}
	{
		if ( parm0 < 4.0 )
		blend		add
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00004
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			(parm0-1) * 0.33333333
	}

	// For Lightlevel >= 4 & < 12
	{
		if ( parm0 >= 4.0 && parm0 < 12.0 )
		blend		gl_one, gl_one_minus_src_alpha
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00004
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			1 -((parm0 - 4.0) * 0.125)
	}
	{
		if ( parm0 >= 4.0 && parm0 < 12.0 )
		blend		add
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00012
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			(parm0 - 4.0) * 0.125
	}

	// For Lightlevel >= 12 & < 24
	{
		if ( parm0 >= 12.0 && parm0 < 24.0 )
		blend		gl_one, gl_one_minus_src_alpha
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00012
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			1 -((parm0 - 12.0) * 0.0833333333333333)
	}
	{
		if ( parm0 >= 12.0 && parm0 < 24.0 )
		blend		add
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00024
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			(parm0 - 12.0) * 0.0833333333333333
	}

	// For Lightlevel >= 24
	{
		if ( parm0 >= 24.0 )
		blend		gl_one, gl_one_minus_src_alpha
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00024
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			1 -((parm0 - 24.0) * 0.1428571428571429)
	}
	{
		if ( parm0 >= 24.0 )
		blend		add
		map			guis/assets/hud/lightgem/lightgem_00031
		translate 	0.28, 0
		scale 		0.46, 1
		rgb			(parm0 - 24.0) * 0.1428571428571429
	}
}

 

 

Edited October 1, 2025 by datiswous