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question on dark mod i am new so dont flame me


Poison_The_Well

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i have been hearing about dark mod for years now,i am part of the ttlg board,so if i got this right i will just need a doom 3 game cd and the dark mod tools?

 

will that have the fm player built into it?

 

 

or do i use my excisting dark loader or garrett loader

 

 

looking forward to playing it

 

also since my comp can play thief 3 i dont think i will have issues using darkmod

Edited by Poison_The_Well
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You do need D3.

 

To make levels you would need the beta mappers stuff.

 

To play levels you would need the FM AND the Darkmod stuff (not yet released)

 

They will play thru Doom, so no you won't use Darkloader or Garrett loader. It's possible someone will make a loader when FM's become available, but it is unlikely it will be needed as Doom reads zip files (renamed .pk4)

Thief did not read the zips, they needed unpacked.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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T%he author will zip up the files and rename MyMission.zip to MyMision.pk4 and you'll need to download and place in correct folder. (I can't tell you what that is yet)

 

For now you can run Doom3 and when it gives you the start game menu you will see a MODS button. If it was a doom mod it would start from there.

 

Darkmod has it's own menus so it looks similar to Thief/Morrowind start up menu, there will be a FM selection.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Does that mean, while Darkmod doesn't have a loader, it does have a medieval-looking Doom front-loader? Is that's what you mean by "own menus", or are you just talking about like in-game GUI after you've already started an FM or Darkmod or whatever it is you start?

 

It just doesn't seem as fun to have to load DM FMs through the Doom startup page if there's another way ... sort of dampens the atmosphere. Also, it'd be nice if the same program that frontloaded an FM also organized them together, etc.

 

Anyway, I'm sure you guys have already discussed these sorts of things ad nauseum, and maybe you're not really to that stage anyway, so I can trust you'll figure something out that works and looks nice.

Edited by demagogue

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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No, I just mean for know to play a Doom mod you go thru Doom/mods.

 

Darkmod DOES have its own medievil style menus. Load screen, all that. Work is in progress getting the loadout store working. Scripters handling that.

 

I'm not sure what is final, some of the art may change but I'm not the one to speak on that.

 

What I can say is the menus as they are right now are VERY cool. Very. Better than T2, T3 and Morrowind. But somewhat similar in style. I'm not sure who did all the work on em, but dare I say I think they are about some of the coolest looking menus I've seen?

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Does that mean, while Darkmod doesn't have a loader, it does have a medieval-looking Doom front-loader? Is that's what you mean by "own menus", or are you just talking about like in-game GUI after you've already started an FM or Darkmod or whatever it is you start?

 

It just doesn't seem as fun to have to load DM FMs through the Doom startup page if there's another way ... sort of dampens the atmosphere. Also, it'd be nice if the same program that frontloaded an FM also organized them together, etc.

 

Anyway, I'm sure you guys have already discussed these sorts of things ad nauseum, and maybe you're not really to that stage anyway, so I can trust you'll figure something out that works and looks nice.

 

Dark Mod has its own menu art. Once you load up the mod, you won't see anymore D3 menus. You'll be able to load up an FM through the menu...but someone may decide to write some kind of external custom app...though it's really not necessary.

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You don't have to load the Dark Mod via the futuristic-style Doom 3 menus - if you create a shortcut with the right parameters you can start up straight into the Dark Mod. Which is not only more atmospheric (I seriously got chills when I loaded up the TDM menu for the first time - the art is great and the music is perfect) but also more convenient. :)

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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Dark Mod has its own menu art. Once you load up the mod, you won't see anymore D3 menus. You'll be able to load up an FM through the menu...but someone may decide to write some kind of external custom app...though it's really not necessary.

 

Garrett Loader already have a Dark Mod button. If it works, that will be cool. :)

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You'll be able to load up an FM through the menu

I'm not actually sure if this is true. We'd certainly like to be able to do that, but I think the latest word was that you can't swap PK4s in/out while Doom 3 is running. So something along the lines of GarrettLoader may be necessary.

 

None of this is final, though. The whole question of mission distribution hasn't really been nailed down yet (but rest assured it will be before we release).

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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I guess that will just depend on the extent of the mission. If it's just a simple map it shouldn't be a problem to launch it from a menu or even the console. But if someone decides to create his own hud, new menubackgrounds and other thief-common stuff like that, things will get more complicated, because the files in the pk4 of the mission could possibly "replace" existing ones, so that you would have the custom hud in all other FMs. (Of course, it doesn't actually replace the original files, if you delete the new pk4 again, you got your old files "restored" )

 

That is the only flaw of the otherwise very good pk3/pk4 system. =) I once wanted to include custom weapon skins into my quake 3 trickrun-map, but I decided against it, because the default skins would've been overwritten by mine. ID Software should really have fixed this problem by adding tag-files (or something similar) to those pk3s. Then, that system would be perfect!! :)

 

So I guess, some Garrettloader kind of thing would come in handy, at least if you don't come along with a different system or proove me wrong in any way. ;) The only thing that tool would need to do though, would be to copy the concerning pk4-file into the TDM-base directory and launch the mod with a maploading parameter.

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I was a bit surprised at this so thought I'd try it. It seems to work OK but I only tried it on a few map files. This is what I did. I took a couple of short test missions and my own mission and moved just the map files and the associated files in the maps folder from the maps folder to a spare folder where I put them in a new maps folder. I did not include any separate texture files etc if any. I zipped each up separately and renamed to pk4 then moved those archives into the darkmod folder.

 

Loaded up Dark Mod and at the Dark Mod Main Menu I selected 'New Mission'.

 

I then had to type the mission name in on the Dark Mod New Game menu (there's an obscure little input just above the start button for the moment) and click start but I'm sure the names could just as easily be selected from a list once it is set up like the temporary demo menu.

 

I then select 'New Equipment' and go to that menu page.

 

At the New Equipment page as there is no special equipment set up for these maps I just selected 'Start Mission'.

 

All three missions started OK by this means directly from their pk4 archives. While testing they did not exist anywhere but in the pk4 files. :)

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All three missions started OK by this means directly from their pk4 archives. While testing they did not exist anywhere but in the pk4 files. :)

Sure, PK4 files work great normally. The problem comes when you have the same file in multiple PK4s, and they conflict with each other. There's no way for us to tell Doom 3 which PK4 takes priority, so it might choose the file from the wrong FM. So you need to have some way of swapping PK4s in and out (whether you do it by hand or using a tool such as GarrettLoader), and you can't do it at runtime.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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I couldn't have said that any better. Oh wait, I did!! :P No, just kidding. You hit the problem on its head!! :)

 

@Fidcal: Even if the file exists unzipped, the file in the pk4 has priority. It took me quite some frustrating time to notice that back in the old q3 editing days. I had my map pk3ed to sent it to a friend for testing purposes. Then I wanted to change some things but didn't see the proper effect ingame. That was really mean!! :) So do yourself a favor and delete those pk4s now if you test your map from time to time in that TDM install!!

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@Fidcal: Even if the file exists unzipped, the file in the pk4 has priority. It took me quite some frustrating time to notice that back in the old q3 editing days. I had my map pk3ed to sent it to a friend for testing purposes. Then I wanted to change some things but didn't see the proper effect ingame. That was really mean!! :) So do yourself a favor and delete those pk4s now if you test your map from time to time in that TDM install!!

That's not true for Doom 3. The unzipped files (outside the PK4s) override the ones in the PK4 archives.

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Yes, this is a shame but at least the FMs can be shipped in pk4 form and just copied one by one into the darkmod folder without unpacking. (?) So long as there is only one in at a time? Then it's up to the level designer to avoid conflict with known file names with the original DM resources. If I understand this right then the only conflict would be between same filenames in different pk4 FMs in the darkmod folder together? But then I suppose the DM files might be updated or modified at a later date so maybe unpacking every FM is the only way.

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Yes, as long as there are no naming conflicts, you don't need to unpack the PK4s; just copy them into the right folder.

 

I'm not sure what would happen if you had TDM assets in one PK4 and map assets in another PK4 that conflicted with each other. That might be undefined behaviour.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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It shouldn't be that hard to have a naming convention, though.

You could just prefix (or suffix) all TDM assets with tdm_[...] (or tdmo_), and have a rule that no custom material can start with that prefix. It won't be likely that a person would randomly start with that prefix, anyway, so it's sort of self-enforcing. If you don't know it, you won't do it anyway.

Edited by demagogue

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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That would work for resolving accidental conflicts, but there might be cases where a mapper *deliberately* wants to replace a core TDM file. One hopes this would never be necessary, but it would suck to have to explicitly disallow it.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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No, we don't really have access to that.

 

There is this existing functionality though:

fs_game  mod path
fs_game_base  alternate mod path, searched after the main fs_game path, before the basedir

 

So if we wanted to make sure that mod assets have priority over FM assets where there may be conflicts, we could conceivably put FMs in this other fs_game_base directory.

 

However, don't we want to allow the FM author to change some things? For example, T2x changed the T2 sound-set to female, and changed the main menu GUI. It seems like as long as our assets have been fairly stabilized, the FM author knows what they're doing when putting certain mod filenames in their .pk4 to overwrite them. Maybe you guys are talking about stuff that's harder to determine, like textures that just happen to be named the same? They can browse thru all the mod textures though, so can't they check before making something? Or are we worried that the "official" mod structure will constantly be in flux for a long time after release?

 

You could conceivably split up the .pk4 into stuff that should overwrite and stuff that shouldn't overwrite, and the loader would put the stuff that should overwrite in the fs_game directory, and stuff that shouldn't overwrite in the alternate fs_game_base directory.

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I'd say fanmission makers should have ability to override TDM stuff. Maybe in DR there could be a command something like Check Resources Names (or some other...) which would look for same names in your pk4 and original TDM folders and would give you a list of name conflicts. It would be then up to mapper to ignore those which he wants to override or to change names of its own assets to avoid conflicts.

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No, we don't really have access to that.

 

There is this existing functionality though:

fs_game  mod path
fs_game_base  alternate mod path, searched after the main fs_game path, before the basedir

 

So if we wanted to make sure that mod assets have priority over FM assets where there may be conflicts, we could conceivably put FMs in this other fs_game_base directory.

Interesting. I didn't know about that.

 

However, don't we want to allow the FM author to change some things?

We do, but I didn't think it was possible without extracting the contents of the FM PK4. I'm happy to be proved wrong. :)

 

Could we set fs_game to an "FMs" directory and fs_game_base to the main mod directory? Would that break anything?

 

(Yay for having dev discussions on a public forum. ;) )

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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We do, but I didn't think it was possible without extracting the contents of the FM PK4. I'm happy to be proved wrong. :)

I still don't understand why FM overwriting assets couldn't work in one directory, unless we put all the mod assets in .pk4 form also? If the mod assets are not in .pk4 and just in the directory, and the FM comes in as a .pk4 with files of the same name, won't the files in the .pk4 overwrite the mod assets as desired?

 

Could we set fs_game to an "FMs" directory and fs_game_base to the main mod directory? Would that break anything?

Don't know. If it works as advertised, it should be happy with all the mod stuff (.dll with the .pk4, etc) in the fs_game_base directory instead of fs_game.

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