Black and White/Sepia Tone Missions in NewDark

LaughingMan008 on 6/7/2022 at 14:21

So, I was looking at Ranstall Keep and The Burrick’s Head Inn: Vintage Edition and I noticed that many items and assets in both missions that are supposed to be black and white/sepia are instead in color. Books, chests, doors, burrick’s heads, etc. I assume that is because of some of the updated/fixed assets that come in T2Fix. (I notice that this DOESN'T occur in Thief Noir for some reason.)

Anyways, I was wondering if there was any easy way to fix this. At the moment, I can play the missions as they are supposed to look by either loading them up with the Legacy executable, or in the case of Ranstall Keep, downloading a black and white "mod" from Dark Fate and unzipping it into the Ranstall Keep FM folder, ensuring all its assets overwrite whatever fixed ones NewDark tries to load. I didn't see a sepia equivalent otherwise Ide have just done that for BHI.

I read that in FMSel you are supposed to be able to disable mods for fan missions by clicking "edit", going to the "mod path excludes" box and entering an * there, but that doesn't seem to work for this, and since I don't use any mods to speak of other than Thief2 Fixed and T2FMDML I don't know if it works at all.

I apologize if this is some sort of rehash of something that has been discussed before, but I haven't seen any mention of it in their respective fan mission threads.

Also was wondering if anyone knows of any other missions effected by this. Since Thief Noir somehow manages not to be, I assume there must be different ways of making a mission's colorization different that makes this only effect certain missions.

Jax64 on 7/7/2022 at 06:16

It is worth noting that the active fan mission directory has a higher priority than normal mod directories in NewDark's path search order, meaning that fan mission assets will take priority over assets included with a mod, provided that it was installed correctly. Consequently, your issue is unlikely to be caused by a mod, especially ones like T2FMDML or Thief2 Fixed, as the former includes no resources at all and the latter only includes corrected versions of original resources.

It is possible to disable mods with that field in FMSel's edit window. You can disable a particular mod by providing its path or disable all mods at once with just an asterisk. If you are not sure whether they are properly being disabled, you can take a look at the game's generated log file, which reports the provided mod paths along with many other configuration variables. However, there are some other FM loaders that make disabling mods easier, such as AngelLoader.

As for the issue itself, it occurs as a result of the default behavior of the new renderer included with NewDark. Both Burrick's Head Inn VE and Ranstall Keep include replacement palettes to complete their looks, intended to be used with the palette-based object textures included with the game's resources. These palettes are always applied with the original renderer, but when the new renderer converts these palette-based textures to be loaded as 32-bit, the textures' own palettes are used by default rather than the global palette. This is why it looks correct with the legacy executables but not with NewDark. Further, Thief Noir does not include a replacement palette, which is why it looks correct regardless of this difference. Fortunately, you can enable the use of the global palette when converting palette-based object textures with the new renderer, though this is probably best done on a case-by-case basis. Specifying the "legacy_32bit_txtpal" configuration variable should solve the issue with these missions. You could simply add this to a new line in cam_ext.cfg to enable this option in all missions, but it would probably be better to put it in fm.cfg in the mission's own directory, as this would only enable the option for that mission.

I hope this proves to be helpful. Considering the intended appearance of these missions, this issue can be quite jarring.

LaughingMan008 on 7/7/2022 at 11:36

Thank you so much for all the info! Its super appreciated, not only getting an answer, but getting all the hows and whys.
Your suggestion about the fm.cfg worked perfectly. On a related note, can you put ;new_mantle in one of these cfg files to disable new mantle in specific missions that don't work well with it?

baeuchlein on 7/7/2022 at 14:27

To disable new mantle in a specific fan mission, put the line "new_mantle 0" (without the quotation marks, of course) in the fm.cfg file of that mission. "0" is the number zero here, not the letter "O" (as in "Oscar").

FenPhoenix on 12/7/2022 at 16:25

When playing OldDark FMs I used to disable new_mantle all the time to make sure I didn't accidentally sequence break (though I gave that up after a while cause it got annoying having to go in there manually and toggle it all the time). So it's been on my mind for quite a while that I could give AngelLoader a feature to let you change it per-FM with a quick checkbox click. But I never got around to adding it, figuring maybe nobody else would care about such a thing. Now that this b&w palette fix thing has been mentioned, I wonder if I should add per-FM toggles for both of these options to AngelLoader? Just as a convenience. Pity we can't fix the palette thing with dmls (I assume).

fortuni on 12/7/2022 at 17:58

Excellent idea Fen, we try to fix as many Newmantle issues as we can with dml's but it's just not possible to find and fix everything that you climb that authors in Olddark days did not expect players to be able to climb.

Many people would prefer to play missions as authors intended, including not being able to mantle up onto tall bushes, fences, lamp posts, sloping rock faces and even open windows (there's a window in The Mirror that you can mantle into the City Watch station allowing players to bypass a highly memorable puzzle involving persuading Benny to come back from the pub)

SlyFoxx on 14/7/2022 at 13:17

New mantle on/off at the loader would make this 'ol taffer happy.

Is it possible to have the loader read the mission date and just default to old mantle for anything before new dark appeared? 2012 I think?

LaughingMan008 on 14/7/2022 at 14:04

Quote Posted by SlyFoxx

Is it possible to have the loader read the mission date and just default to old mantle for anything before new dark appeared? 2012 I think?

YES. This. Ive long felt that something like this was needed. The level of support and care that the fan mission back catalogue has gotten from the community is astounding and wonderful, but there's still some massively user unfriendly bits to it. Having to edit config files and make them for certain missions and this and that is a massive pain. Ideally playing a fan mission is a 2 step process. Install, then play. Without having to dummy out new mantles and change color palettes and things.

I would switch from FMSel to AngelLoader in a heartbeat if it could do stuff like that...
Speaking of, is there any trouble with that? I don't have AngelLoader installed right now. Would me having used FMSel cause me problems, trying to use AngelLoader after?

FenPhoenix on 15/7/2022 at 08:18

Quote Posted by SlyFoxx

Is it possible to have the loader read the mission date and just default to old mantle for anything before new dark appeared? 2012 I think?

In most cases yes but release dates are tricky and can occasionally be wrong. Sometimes file timestamps are broken and will say 1980 or whatever. But actually there are other ways to detect olddark/newdark so I could prolly still do it.

Quote Posted by LaughingMan008

I would switch from FMSel to AngelLoader in a heartbeat if it could do stuff like that...
Speaking of, is there any trouble with that? I don't have AngelLoader installed right now. Would me having used FMSel cause me problems, trying to use AngelLoader after?

AngelLoader is designed to be a painless switch from any other loader. It can import your data from FMSel if you want (FM tags, notes, etc.), otherwise no further action is required, it will just work. :)

FenPhoenix on 15/7/2022 at 11:02

Quote Posted by Jax64

As for the issue itself, it occurs as a result of the default behavior of the new renderer included with NewDark. Both Burrick's Head Inn VE and Ranstall Keep include replacement palettes to complete their looks, intended to be used with the palette-based object textures included with the game's resources. These palettes are always applied with the original renderer, but when the new renderer converts these palette-based textures to be loaded as 32-bit, the textures' own palettes are used by default rather than the global palette. This is why it looks correct with the legacy executables but not with NewDark. Further, Thief Noir does not include a replacement palette, which is why it looks correct regardless of this difference. Fortunately, you can enable the use of the global palette when converting palette-based object textures with the new renderer, though this is probably best done on a case-by-case basis. Specifying the "legacy_32bit_txtpal" configuration variable should solve the issue with these missions. You could simply add this to a new line in cam_ext.cfg to enable this option in all missions, but it would probably be better to put it in fm.cfg in the mission's own directory, as this would only enable the option for that mission.

Is there a foolproof way to tell if a mission needs the global palette fix? If a mission is OldDark and has a pal directory with a [something]pal.pcx file in it, is that sufficient sign that we can enable the fix automatically with no side effects / false positives?