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How you can help depends a lot on what skills you have. I can Record Video Recording "Let's Play" videos or simple walkthroughs of existing missions and posting them to Youtube is great exposure for the mod (see example .) Be sure to let us know so we can link to them. If you have some editing ability, Video tutorials, where you explain how the mod works, or how to use specific tools, would also be great. Video trailers, showcasing interesting places and features, are also great for publicity. An example is . I can Write Writing reviews for missions are always nice, especially if they include good screenshots. Not only does it give us something to post on other forums, but it makes mappers feel good when their mission gets attention (especially if it's positive). We have a collective thread to post reviews in: http://forums.thedar...s-walkthroughs/ Writing reviews of the mod as a whole, targetted an an audience that doesn't know much about TDM, is also very useful. You could also try offering your services to mappers to create interesting readables, or to proofread for their mission. I can Act and Record Audio We are always on the lookout for good quality audio recordings for vocal sets. If interested, you can pick a few different lines from this script: http://wiki.thedarkm...t:_Average_Jack and send the recordings to Springheel, who then writes a script based on the type of voice you have. I can Translate We could always use translations of our menu/hud into more languages. Also, only a few FMs are aavailable in more than one language, so there is a lot of work there, see the I18N Translator's Guide in the Wiki. I can Model Great! Take a look at the model request thread:http://forums.thedar...-requests-here/ and pick something that interests you. Or just post a, "Hey, anybody want a model?" thread in this forum and I'm sure mappers will get back to you. I can Animate Fantastic. We can always use more good animations. Our current character rigs use a Maya skeleton. PM Springheel for more info. I know C++ Have a look at our coding section in the wiki, pick an issue or feature from the bugtracker of the mod or the leveleditor, download the recent sourcecode release (or better ask for an SVN checkout) and get cracking. Make sure nobody is already working on that specific issue and feel free to ask questions. I can Edit Images We can always use completely new textures and/or improved versions of older textures. How to get started and how to import them into the mod. I can Take Photos Good quality photos of useful textures (medieval-ish building facades, dirt, rocks, wood, etc) are always welcome. The fewer directional shadows and higher resolution, the better. I don't have any skills Even if you can't do any of the above, you can still help out. Talk about TDM in other forums; share your (preferably positive) experiences with other gamers you know. Last, but not least, compliment people when you like their work. Saying "thanks", to a developer or, "I really enjoyed your mission" to a mapper will make their day. -------------------- I'll update this further as more things occur to me.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/wJeDZUHzlrY?si=a_LYYrPh1vs1sUEF Yes, it has been mostly possible due to AI doing the heavylifting, but it wasnt a cheap one prompt slop, every part of this project planned, designed and built step by step. But yes AI did the coding labor Works with all existing fan missions toggleable new climbing mechanic for mappers weapons, bows, item physics, inventory, door physics, lockpicking and more overhauled for VR controllers work in progress(open to ideas): -some climbing and grabbing bugs to fix -Main menu, mission selection, settings etc. are a pain to control with controllers, still need mouse for that. Have to fix it. -flashmine, potion, and food usage added -a small motel room for main menu and mission selection, missions come in envelopes as if gigs from contracts -Enemy AI overhaul to introduce more unpredictibility and personality to guards -a medieval skyscrapper raid mission for demonstrating climbing mechanics Link to the current build for anyone wanting to test, i appreciate any ideas and feedback, I'd love to have Thief community have their say in how it should be experienced: https://mega.nz/file/HB8FmT4L#hfcjRdphQWIK-CXu9-ZuP3c8h9hd4wdOAkSUWP907Bw Controls guide Bow - left shoulder Quiver - right shoulder Sword - left hip Blackjack - right hip Lockpicks - on either wrist Looting - Drop items at your stomach/chest area Sprint - L3 Inventory - Left controller button opens it up, circled with joystick, grabbed to take into the hand Arrow selection - same as inventory but on right hand Doors, lockpicks, keys, readables etc. are interacted with trigger button when grabbed Tools go back into their holsters when dropped by default to avoid losing them. This can be toggled off from console with : vr_toolsReturnToHolster 0

ThiefGuild has some tags: https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/?advanced_search=&series=&collection=&table=&page=&works=&work_lists=&sort_by=newest&search=&games=5&released_from=all&released_to=all&genre=all&original_games=fms Not sure how complete or accurate those are, after all either the author or users add the tags to the missions.

I don't know who has what skillset, as I am still pretty green on the forums. However, I do know that shader development does require some voodoo black magic! I understand the fundamentals of shaders, but understanding the basic how and why is very, very different from creating them.

Nice work! Is there a build/code that other users can download and try? Please merge back the code with TDM VR, see topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20468-the-dark-mod-vr-210-alpha-is-now-available/ === Reddit topic: link Video of JAKE's work:

For the people eager to play with the latest state of development, two things are provided: regular dev builds source code SVN repository Development builds are created once per a few weeks from the current trunk. They can be obtained via tdm_installer. Just run the installer, check "Get Custom Version" on the first page, then select proper version in "dev" folder on the second page. Name of any dev version looks like devXXXXX-YYYY, where XXXXX and YYYY are SVN revision numbers from which the build was created. The topmost version in the list is usually the most recent one. Note: unless otherwise specified, savegames are incompatible between any two versions of TDM! Programmers can obtain source code from SVN repository. Trunk can be checked out from here: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/ SVN root is: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src Build instructions are provided inside repository. Note that while you can build executable from the SVN repository, TDM installation of compatible version is required to run it. Official TDM releases are compatible with source code archives provided on the website, and also with corresponding release tags in SVN. A dev build is compatible with SVN trunk of revision YYYY, where YYYY is the second number in its version (as described above). If you only want to experiment with the latest trunk, using the latest dev build gives you the maximum chance of success. P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

For more info, read this topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23261-i-made-full-vr-support-for-the-dark-mod-new-bow-climbing-mechanics-and-more/ He based his code of TDM VR, so I referred him to this topic.

Darkmod underutilizes, in my opinion, capabilities for procedural animation. We already do some, like the random head and torso turns that are added on top of existing animations. There's also possibility for separate animation for top and bottom of the character as well as head. There's a missing opportunity for varied facial expressions. I talked about animation blending in this thread. Here's something that for example Thief: Deadly Shadows did. It's swaying side to side while turning. I used Gemini to add code to the tdm_ai_base.script. I don't know if this is the most efficient way of doing it, probably not. Here are the parts added: Gemini came up with the term "banking" which is used in car racing. I don't know if that's what it's called in animation or games. There's a lot of variables that can be tweaked. You can rotate this way any bone you wish. I use 'Origin', 'Spine_Dummy' and 'Neck' bones: You can tweak amount of rotation for each bone. setJointAngle(m_bankingJointHandle, 1, jointRotation * 1); setJointAngle(m_bankingJointHandle1, 1, jointRotation * 0.6); setJointAngle(m_bankingJointHandle2, 1, jointRotation * -1.5); There's also global intensity: (targetBanking = deltaYaw * 1.4;) and attenuation: m_bankingCurrentValue = (m_bankingCurrentValue * 0.95) + (targetBanking * 0.05); modifiers. Gemini also proposed to add an LOD system, which I thought was a great idea. So currently at a distance of 1500 from player the swaying will be disabled. Here are examples, each with slightly different values: And here's comically exaggerated one:

Phew, it's almost exactly been 3 years since my first post about my VR modification for TDM. Three more versions of the game have been released in the meantime, and with them come performance improvements that I feel it's finally viable to continue my work on the VR adaptation So without further ado, head on over to https://github.com/fholger/thedarkmodvr and grab the latest release. It's based on the future 2.09 version, but is fully compatible with a 2.08 install. Although I've tried to make the VR version use its own set of resources (separate `darkmod_vr.cfg` and shader folders), I'd recommend you make a backup or copy of your TDM installation to be able to get back to the flat version cleanly without effort. Please heed the README in the repository, particularly about the choices of VR backends. Some noteworthy information for this new version: performance should be considerably improved from the old alphas. That doesn't mean it's perfect - although the CPU bottleneck is now completely gone, the game is now severely fill-rate limited. So if you have a current-gen headset with high resolution and/or a weaker video card, forget about any supersampling or AA. I also strongly recommend to stick to stencil shadows and disable soft shadows and ambient occlusion - the latter isn't that impressive in VR, anyway, and simply not worth the GPU cost. And even then, there will be some scenes in some missions where reprojection is just unavoidable, even with the beefiest GPU. That being said, I have tried a multitude of maps, and I think it's very playable. the UI is finally usable! Both the menu and ingame HUD elements are projected to a virtual screen in front of your sitting position. It's not the most elegant or immersive solution for the HUD, but it works vertical mouse movement is excluded from the VR view - this was suggested by some of you way back, and I think it makes the experience much more enjoyable. It can make it a little hard, though, to aim with the mouse for actions like frobbing items, because there's currently no visual indication to where the mouse is pointing. I'm planning to add one asap, but in the meantime, you can equip a weapon to get a vague sense of your mouse orientation. If you do want to re-enable vertical movement in the view, set 'vr_lockMousePitch' to 0 in the console. Other than that, I hope you enjoy this new version. Let me know which improvements you'd like me to work on first. Also, there are probably any number of render and other bugs still left in there somewhere. If you find one, please report them over at the Github tracker (https://github.com/fholger/thedarkmodvr/issues), so I can keep track of them. Latest Update:

Revelator, Zerush: I remeber when Mircea Kitsune was banned. I saved the Xonotic vote page to the internet archive, but can't remeber the URL: What I do remeber is this: 1) First Havok (AKA: Forest Hale, IIRC) from Darkplaces banned Mircea because of some twitter opinion Mircea wrote three years prior. This is after Mircea work on code for Darkplaces for many years (for free). Havok then made an explicit rule in the opensource project banning everyone who expressed such views anywhere on the internet: they were banned from development and not wanted. It had to do with who one likes. Mircea was not allowed to like why they liked. Verboten in America. Mircea had programmed C for a Decade + for darkplaces. 2) Then Mircea fell back on Xonotic: and wrote about this on the blog. The feeling was "atleast I have this community that will not betray my kindness". He had programmed QuakeC for Xonotic/etc/whateveritusedtocallitself for a Decade; including great additions such as the code that makes better damage effects clientside. He also made 3d models to be used with Xonotic/etc and textures and everything else. Within a week, the head of that project: Divverent (AKA: Rudolf Polzer, IIRC) voted to ban Mircea because of his twitter opinion expressed 3 years prior: about who was liked/loved by Mircea. Verboten in America (and Germany (but less so)). The rest of the "heads" of that project also gleefully voted to ban and they happily stand by this decision to this day on their discord. 3) That crushed Mircea (according to the blog written) and this is the eventual result. In the past developers were never banned from opensource projects. I think that banning people who have contributed to an opensource project; directly their time, effort, and code; whereby the original understanding was "show us your code" "only code matters" etc; is a violation of a implicit agreement. I also think that banning them based off of speech they made; is an attempt to quell their speech; and a violation of their Federal Civil Rights. But that's just a theory. I also think the parents of Mircea Kitsune, in Romania, should be informed about the people who banned their child. It feels like a wrongful death to me.

Right - what you are doing is manually creating the distance culling I was speaking of! And you are right. One of the issues with distance culling is that things can suddenly appear/disappear when they traverse the boundary. A way around this would be to have TDM implement a distance fog zone that objects beyond it are not visible, and items in the zone are partially or wholly visible. That is what I am trying to work on with the different culling ideas. My thoughts are that map makers shouldn't have to worry about micro managing their map - the engine should handle those things. In that way the map makers can focus on their creativity to make fantastic scenarios faster. And to be clear, again, you area a MASTER map maker already. I apologize if my comments didn't translate well from English.

Following the discussion of the Released and Upcoming thread Fidcal and I came up with some ideas how we could save abandoned labours of love. We came up with the following for contributing and adopting unfinished work maintained in this thread: How to contribute? If for any reason you decide to quit working on a map, map parts, etc. please consider contributing your abandoned work to the community! Proof of concepts and appealing results from "just playing around" alike may be interesting for other people to pick up. To do so just send a private message to a team member (preferably a mission manager like nbohr1more) with all relevant information about your work so far (see format below) and a link where it can be downloaded. Please do not post any download links in this thread. Your work will be archived on one of the Team's TDM servers. FM's (WIP) Name: ... Former author(s): ... Current author(s): (If any) Status: (free for adoption / in work) Due Date: (the next date I expect a new WIP version and progress report) Type: (Mansion, City, Crypt, Wilderness, ...) Theme: (Gold Heist, Horror, Story Focused, Inventors, ...) Progress: (Geometry, Details, AI, Gameplay, ... in some rough percentage) Informations: (anything the authors like to share about the work so far) How to adopt? Send a PM to a team member (ideally a mission manager). If you have already released an FM for TDM then most likely adoption will be granted. If you have never released an FM it'll be less likely.. If you did release FM's for Thief or a mod for any other game please send details that help us to decide. If you're the original author you can always pick up your committed work again as long as it is still (or again) "free for adoption". What do we expect from authors who did adopt assets? All former authors must be given credit upon release. You may like to use the unfinished assets the way you like: use parts in your own map or continue finishing the abandoned map. We and the former authors have to trust anyone given responsibility of the assets of a possibly already superb unfinished map. We all know that it sometimes happens that people cannot continue a work for various reasons (if so, please PM the team member), lose interest or in the worst case just disappear! In this case, or if we try to contact you for a status update and do not hear from you in a reasonable amount of time, we will offer the map again for adoption to someone else who might want to finish the FM. We hope to see some great unfinished works being worked on again and completed. So, fellow authors ... contribute your unfinished work List of Abandoned Works _________________________________________ Please check the wiki for details of abandoned work free for adoption and adopted maps: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Abandoned_Works

On a lighter note (and because my holiday started today, oh yeah!), let's have a new thread for music, that you just enjoy and probably is not so well known...or somehow obscure but does not sound as strange as the songs we report in @STiFU's progessive music thread. Here is one of my new favourites, a similar recording of this track by other artists has been used in an US show broadcasted last year ( @Amadeus: What is the name of the show? )

I am working on improvements I can make to all.lang. The potential scope of work is overwhelmning, so I'm focusing at this time on the Main Menu, particularly Settings. I'd appreciate your review of the workplan, which has 3 main components - 1) commenting-out #str phrases no longer useful 2) adding #str to replace phrases hard-coded in English, in the relevant GUI files. a) in [English] b) in other languages (using AI) 3) For existing Settings #str in the GUI files, that were translated for some languages: do the remaining languages (using AI). I'm excluding this - - strings in *.cpp files - translations into Dutch and Swedish, where almost all strings are untranslated. Each of these is a project in itself, and I'm not up to it currently. Reviewers... My base is the 2.14 all.lang. If you know of 2.15 changes that could affect individual #str, please mention it here Details I have a revised all.lang WIP with the following changes done so far: - Group (1) work in both [English] and all other sections, as summarized and itemized here... - Group (2a), only in [English] so far, as summarized and itemized here... Workplan for Group 3 is WIP.

Today I am happy to announce the release of my first FM for The Dark Mod. After 6 years of using this lovely game creation engine, I'm finally able to contribute my own project for it! It took roughly two weeks of non-stop work to do everything from start to end... there's always some little detail to come back to when mapping, thus there were a few little things left out to prioritize others, but at the end of the day this came out almost exactly as I envisioned it. In this mission you play as the typical professional thief. You've been hired to retrieve a scroll containing forbidden knowledge from the mansion of a wealthy noble, put there by the builder church who is close to its owner and found it a more suitable spot. A banquet is being thrown by the lord who owns the mansion which is the perfect opportunity to make your move. Nothing out of the ordinary: You're to retrieve this scroll and get paid for your work... simple, right? Notice: Performance in some areas may be poor. I optimized the lighting setup as much as possible, trying to use as few long range light sources as I could. To achieve the desired theme however I had to leave parts of them map relatively open. Hopefully this won't be a hindrance to anyone... if it is you may need to lower some graphical settings. For people who don't like surprises and may be sensitive to certain themes, read the spoiler below. If you're okay with anything don't as it will ruin the experience! For people who are stuck and don't know how to proceed, instructions are provided in the spoiler below. Only read them if necessary. A tip that needs no spoilers: The key in this FM is exploration and reading everything carefully. There are secrets to be found: Always look everywhere and closely at everyone! I'm eager to hear what your experience with this FM is. Use spoilers when referring to specifics, but do let me know what your thoughts are! Especially with this being my first FM I could use tips, including technical ones if you look at the map in DarkRadiant. Here are a few screenshots of the main areas (intended for the installer): And finally the download links. Unzip and place the main directory inside your fms folder, this should get it to show up in the mission list. Mirror 1 Mirror 2

If mission overrides some base AI scripts, you can't add it without conflicts. Otherwise, what kind of conflicts do you mean? Script data is stored in savegames as raw binary, so any change in scripts may break it. That's why the engine writes checksum of script code: if it is different on load, then savegame refuses to load. It does not matter where you put the code, checksum will be different in any case. In a campaign, it should be okay to replay one mission, or just load the "end mission" save. It does not work right now?

"Out of all the districts in Bridgeport, the Pagan Quarter is probably the second worst... it's certainly the last place I'd want to live. Sadly, I don't have a choice in the matter." It's with great pleasure that I present my third Dark Mod FM, "The Maybury Idol, Part 1: A Trip to the Museum" https://www.thedarkmod.com/missiondetails/?internalName=maybury1 This is the first in a planned 4-part series which is largely already plotted out to conclusion, and I'm planning to get started on Part 2 soon. Compared to the last FM I submitted, this one is a lot more linear and story-driven, but it also includes conversations and a mid-mission cutscene... which along with learning some basic scripting has really opened up a lot of possibilities in mission creation, and I'm looking forward to putting the lessons learned here to use in future. I'd like to thank everybody in the Beta Testing thread for ironing out the many, many wrinkles that came up and for offering helping advice in how to patch up the map's shortcomings: @Baal, @Cambridge Spy, @Bikerdude, @wesp5, @Bergante, @Keruah, and @tapewolf I hope you enjoy it.

thanks, I enjoyed it! No FPS issues for me. It's 2026 after all. Also I wish this game had some little label or hint telling you about scary FMs so I dont play for an hour and then get a scare I try to avoid it as I get too immersed. But it was not difficult at all? I just GTFO real quick ? Anyhow. Thanks for your work!

If like me you scour the web looking for inspiration for your next TDM mission then look no further.. Now... talking of images have you guys seen the latest from the master that is DrK from his Rocksbourg4 campaign. We need more dirty texture in TDM me thinks...

I'm not even sure it will work. This is base class, every other class can override "scriptobject" with other field and then your script will be lost. And in general case: how to support this is someone else wants to add yet another feature? The better approach is to have e.g. "banking" as component. And then aggregate it into script classes which may need it. The problem is: D3 scripts don't have structs and aggregation (except for this awful inheritance), so this approach would mean "backing" has to become a separate entity. If this is undesirable, the other way to make it a component / mixin is to abuse preprocessor. List all members and methods in "banking_members.h" and all method implementations in "banking_impl.h". Both headers without include guard. Then include them in appropriate place in a class/entity where you need them. I'm not sure I understand the problem correctly. What do you want to achieve in the end?

I think we should create a thread where you can put requests and suggestions for Orbweaver. This thread should be NOT a discussion thread. If you want to discuss a proposal, create a specific thread for it. I want it to be only for collecting proposals, so we have an overview of what people might want to have. I guess this might also help Orb to decide what he should focus on once he gets productive. BTW: I really appreciate your effort, because we can really use this. So my personal wishlist proposal is that I would like to see a group handler. Similar like in Blender, where you can select several objects and put it in a group. When you select one or more of these groups, the objects are visible. If the group is not selected, it's invisible. In Blender and other 3D apps this is called layers (forgot the name before so I had to look it up).

This is likely in part due to the bannings by Darkplaces and Xonotic concurrently some years ago. That hit Mircea very hard: having put much of their life into _programming_ for BOTH of those projects, as well as alot of 3d work etc. For free. I, to this day, use Mircea's work: the extra hit effects client side. More recently was ported over the digital-read-out-on-weapons-models (like UT 1999) code that Mircea created for their fun vore-tournament mod. Mircea was visciouly rejected by the (so-called) Darkplaces and Xonotic communities after working for _YEARS_ for them: they decided they did not like something Mircea tweeted years before. Those people are the true enemy. To this day they make fun of Mircea and say "it was no loss" and they're glad Mircea is not working for them any longer. >was banned by unanimous vote from both the darkplaces and xonotic communities >behavior post-ban affirms our decision. i'm not a fan of cancel culture myself, but we just... don't associate with those kind of people, for reasons i sincerely hope you can appreciate... They laugh and mock Mircea to this very day. A person who did so much ACTUAL WORK for these people. >go ahead and google mircea kitsune and >there is a lot of negativity that comes up. theres your reasons for bans etc

Hello I currently tried to update the game to release version 214 but after a, by the way, very slow downloading process of about 15 minutes, I repeatedly get an error message about the hash value, when the game start to install. I tried installing with default settings as well as custom select the release 214. Both tries gives the same error messge. Could someone possibly help me with this ? Is there a way to download the complete installer manually somewhere, and run the installation process offline then ? Further the installer tells that it "was run as admin what is strongly discouraged" even though I didn't started it as admin and can't even stop it from doing so by itself. But that behavior was always like this, as I remember it right, and don't ever seemed to be a problem in the past. Greetings martin