peter_spy

These hobo symbols would look quite obscure to players, I guess. I don't think having all of them would be useful, making them on "per map" basis should do. Same goes for text, otherwise you might end up with situation a la Dishonored, the same "Blood from the eyes!" decals everywhere.

For me, "open-world" and "amazing" doesn't go together (it might be impressive, but only for a few minutes). I prefer meaningful experiences, and these don't fall into e.g. 120 hours of roaming and busywork. That goes for much better games than Ubisoft's too. Witcher 3 is probably awesome, but I'm not even starting it. Heh, I barely touched Dark Souls 3 because of its length, and I love the series

Firearms is a whole another topic IMO. There's huge difference in mindset on this in USA vs. rest of the world. In Europe, we are aware we had to give up basically any violence and killing as part of social contract, a pillar of modern democracy. We rely on external bodies, like police and attorneys, to react to violence, catch, and sentence those who breach that contract. So far, along with very restrictive gun laws, it seems that this approach has more pros than cons.

While TDM engine is limited, e.g. it probably uses like 10% of your hardware capabilities before going down from 60 fps, there's still a lot of room for improvement. For example, most materials are underdeveloped (you can get a lot of lovely effects with basic diffuse/specular/normal combo which isn't hardware-intensive, but you need to know e.g. how and when to use color speculars). Also most framerate problems are caused by how assets were created. They are clogging the CPU-GPU pipeline, which is the weakest link, regardless of your configuration or engine used. (I'd wager you'd see similar problems with UE3 or Unity.). While raising the limits would always be welcome, I'd still argue that there's a lot of untapped potential here anyway.

Yup, as it is with rendering static images for archviz now.

Good thing this will soon end, at least in EU. Once GDPR is in place, all those practices will be banned, and all companies that continue this will be fined. Fines are really high, so it will hurt their profits badly.

I use FXAA in my drivers all the time anyway, so that helped, thanks! One other thing, changing Anisotropic Filtering settings in menu during play either disables all shadows (FBO 0), or makes the screen go full white (FBO 1).

Does anyone still get garbled pixels from lights on some surfaces? I vaguely recall that might have something to do with using soft shadows with AA, but I'm not sure.

IMO things like that are worth investigating, e.g. this view looks simple, but there is more rendered than player actually sees. In this case it's still below the DC limit, so the framerate doesn't go down, but it's worth watching, as low fps would make those climbing sections harder for players (as in any case of more "arcade" activities).

I just started playing it, and there are places where drawcalls are ineed too high for what's being drawn on screen. When you go out of the apartament on the balcony, you get like 4600 DCs, even though you're looking at a plain wall. There should either be portals that would seal this properly, or LOD system for objects. The scene doesn't look complicated, and there are no AIs around, but for some reason it demands a lot from the hardware.

I didn't like Limbo, it looks great, but it's puzzle design is frustrating. Inside is great in basically everything it does, from presentation to movement and simple puzzles.

AFAIR, you don't need two texgen declarations. The difference between skybox and wobblesky is that the latter can be rotated to around a given axis (x, y, z). If you don't need to translate your skybox, just use texgen skybox.

That's actually Unreal Engine 2, which is even more impressive. But I can't say I liked the game overall.

That's impressive overall, although I must say there are elements that kind of drag down the new high quality of the presentation. Like the "Powered by The Dark Mod" animation is awesome, but TDM logo and its appearance looks like pasted quickly from elsewhere, and it's weak by comparison. IMO, it's also kind of redundant, since you already got the Powered by TDM message (a flash of light and transition to next part would be enough). Mission Title looks amazing on the other hand, as well as those ice-like transitions. It's Lord of the Rings quality, but then we get same old oilified, unsharp-masked sepia shots. I know it's tons of work, but if you can get those elements to be on par with all the new high-quality stuff, you will really knock people's socks off

That's a nice idea for a tribute. It's impressive, given it was built in just 3 weeks. Technically it's also pretty sound, I had no problems with framerate. If I had any problems with this mission, it was lack of variety between mansion floors and rooms. But that would definitely take more than 3 weeks to build.

Btw. that might be useful to you Epi (and other modelers), because in the end I didn't need to add any loops to the corners of the model. I just exported it with the same smoothing groups I had, when I was baking the model (i.e. the picture above). This way the gradient in normals is no longer a problem. Good thing idtech4 recognises exported custom smoothing groups! Set the specular to _white here for exaggeration:

Nope, you have to use the nonsolid global keyword in your material. Otherwise the engine will use both. You can preview collision with g_showCollisionModels 1 to see if it works properly. The camera has to be close to a model though.

At first, I tried to bake normals without any Smoothing Groups on low res mesh, but that looks even worse, I get ugly sharp lines where uv islands end. But I expected that, the idea with 4 SGs was a better one, since there is some continuity in the frame, both inside and outside. Baking it with one SG would be a disaster too, the result would be averaged to an angle between all these surfaces, and all the lines would look distorted. I think you're right, adding a few edges is a best idea here. The model itself is exported with one smoothing group, and it's only 250 tris, so I can give the engine a bit more to work with, without breaking the polygon budget.

That's the hope, thank you Weird thing is, those pieces are on separate uv islands, and there are hard edges there on the high poly mesh. Maybe my choice of smoothing groups on low poly mesh had something to do with it. I had to re-bake it anyway, because I accidentally moved the front outer edge of the frame, so it was slanted. It looks a tad better now:

If those models use the same material, DCs should go down. In Biker's example there are many different skins and materials, so merging those models into a bigger one won't make much difference.

That's more or less what I had in mind Text(s) will be different but the frame and the materials will do.

These are just solid colors on to narrow down the look and shape. I'll show you the final version when it's done

Speaking of great interiors, these sunken ruins from Uncharted 4 could easily inspire a similar place in TDM. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lZrO5

Everything looks clean for me, both for original TDM and my WIP FM shortcut. I don't use anything more than +set fs_currentfm though. You can use allow_console and other stuff in autocommands.cfg. Is +set fs_game_base darkmod still necessary for something? Never used it.