VanishedOne

At a glance, I'm afraid you might be out of luck. I suppose you could try using hide/show to swap it with a func_static, though that might look bad if the player can see it at the time. Or replicate the bobbing behaviour with some other kind of binary mover.

Was there any resolution on this? In the 2.08 beta lanternbots have acquired "ko_immune" "1" (and I haven't seen this noted in any changelogs, so it's going to confuse anyone expecting the established behaviour).

It seems normal for me. The only thing I can suggest offhand is trying different texture scaling in case that has something to do with it.

What material does it use?

https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What's_new_in_TDM_2.08#Assets mentions the covered furniture models but I can't find them in the 2.08 assets yet. The clothed zombie has a model, which seems to be an improvement on the state described here, but still produces a lot of warnings about missing textures/darkmod/volta/* images, and also about "unknown copy_joint 'neckcontrol'". I've been unable to spawn a werebeast; the map exits with error "GetBody: no body with id 0 exists on ent <name>".

I don't know whether this will help with the loading times, but I recently found I had image_useCompression and image_useNormalCompression set to the default 1 (I was wondering why the colour banding on my TGAs was so bad in the game). According to https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/ these cause TGAs to get compressed at load time. Since TDM (currently) doesn't use pre-compressed normal maps, that might be one cause of loading delay, though I can't say I've noticed a big speed-up (and presumably setting 0 will use more RAM). The question of nominating recommended 'showcase' FMs comes up occasionally, but besides the point stgatilov makes, it raises other questions: what if A is a stunning, impressive mission but utterly brutal to inexperienced players? What if B is third in a series where the first two no longer impress so much? What if C is great fun but long since ceased to be a visual showcase for TDM? (I was going to suggest that instead of trying to list 'best' missions it might be nice to have an occasional spotlight on missions that made a splash in their day - n year anniversaries for former competition winners, perhaps, since they were already entered into a public ranking - but that idea naturally biases things towards the sometimes less pretty past.)

The cvar conversation reminds me of my first attempt to get a speed potion working via scripting: if I restarted the map before the potion ran out I'd be stuck with increased movement speed. With ambient and interaction shaders no longer selectable via the menu, does that mean the basic ones are being phased out? Should material authors stop including stages to support the simple ambient? There are certainly a few materials that look strikingly different with the specular fix, and rather more that look more subtly so, but at least with the fix they can be tweaked within the material decls. From the way it was described as controversial I was worried it was going to turn the world Doom 3 plastic or something, which doesn't seem to be the case.

I've found makeIrradiance() good enough for my purposes so far; I've even found having a quick way to make a blurry version of a cubemap can be handy in regular materials, like these pearls: If there's a strong case for improving it, I think maybe it comes in the context of other things we might want to do to generate cubemaps in a less manual way, i.e. env_cubemap style probe entities.

Are materials (on SVN) still out of sync with what the shader expects?

Nice. :-) One minor detail: there seem to be hidden white marble surfaces in the mesh, which means the model loads a material the map might not need. I suggest caulking those, then having the exporter (I assume this was made in DR) skip all the caulk surfaces; it should shave off unneeded geometry.

The ones I know about (not having been around back then) are: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/9762-zombies-ghouls-and-revenants/page/2/&tab=comments#comment-198310 https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14066-needed-for-standalone-animated-werebeast/

Hmm, more complex than I anticipated. I suppose another possibility would be to give each save file its own supplementary file, but at that point the number of proposed files is growing quite a bit, all for the sake of a feature that only benefits those wanting evidence of their ironman playthroughs. I don't think deliberate manipulation by players is worth worrying about, though: if you want to cheat you have plenty of options. Activate godmode and notarget from the console. Edit the mission map file. Edit the GUI. Recompile the engine. Edit your screenshot in an image editor. So to a substantial extent it'll remain an honour system in any event. Fun fact about D3BFG's achievement-tracking code: it disables achievements if you have the console enabled, but only performs the check at the moment you meet the criteria for an achievement. Nothing stops you making keybinds for cheat modes.

Or create/update a supplementary save file that just contains the number of loads. (That should avoid having to work out what to do about multiple save files, and ensure save/load-related bugs weren't made harder to diagnose.)

Regarding comparisons between HeresJonny's shader demo and the vertexColor set-up, the latter lets you blend pairs of diffuse and specular textures using a pair of normal maps as appropriate, so replicating that in a shader would take more than just an option for multiple diffuse maps. If they hadn't gone the vertexColor route, I imagine this is the sort of thing id might have introduced an image program for (c.f. addnormals() and so on). The thing is, though, blending two sets of textures via a monochrome mask is one thing we might want to do: it gets us to where we can blend the same number of textures we can now but with greater precision. Then we might want to blend three texture sets using an RGB mask (one of my links above involved RGB vertex blending). Or blend based on the height and slope of terrain. Or...

If I understand it correctly, vertexColor/inverseVertexColor literally works by multiplying the texture colour by the vertex colour or its inverse. So e.g. where the vertex colour is mid-grey, both your diffusemaps will be multiplied by 0.5, and the multipliers always sum to 1, so the overall brightness level looks correct. For a material that blends different diffuse, normal and specular maps there can be six stages instead of three. In Doom 3 there are materials that blend two textures evenly (the point of the vertex colour feature is to do it unevenly) and even fade from one to the other over time, by fading the RGB multiplier for one of them from 0 to 1 and for the other from 1 to 0: I pasted an example into https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5044

I'm glad to hear it's been thought about. I linked above to your 2017 exchange with rich_is_bored, where there seemed to be doubt about vertex shaders' capabilities in light-interactive geometry. For a use case like blending textures, we don't even need to move vertices around, just to calculate a pixel colour from the textures before feeding it to the lighting system. And currently what we have is the vertexColor/inverseVertexColor set-up, which requires a material stage for each texture to be blended, so I'd have imagined blending within a shader might be faster.

I remember finding the Nightblade thread from 2010 and swooning over the environment art. It makes me wonder about salvageable assets rather than gamecode, though.

That's pretty much how Obsttorte had 'fragment blending' work: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17308-epis-many-questions-thread/&do=findComment&comment=375331 At one point SteveL even suggested a tweaked interaction shader to allow three-way RGB vertex colour blending: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17308-epis-many-questions-thread/&do=findComment&comment=375331 Light interaction is usually where these things run into complications: the old 'soft alpha transparency without light interaction or hard alphatested edges with it' limitation is another one. And since real-time lighting plays such a central part in TDM...

Could it be related to this? I noticed while playing with duzenko's experimental skybox material that it has 'translucent' set even though there's nothing behind a skybox to be shown through it; when I removed that I encountered problems that looked like z-fighting, even in blend modes that have no obvious relation to depth. My hunch at the time was that 'translucent' was making the material draw after opaque surfaces; but nobody seems to know exactly what translucency does.

Suppose I want to have a nonsolid entity (specifically, one with a particle model) react to being caught in explosions. The explosion might not have a stim associated with it. Is there a way?

You mean personally identifying data, right? Otherwise the survey seems a bit futile... :-P A small niggle: your age brackets overlap, e.g. a 35-year-old is both 30-35 and 35-40. A larger one: I didn't understand 'Within the right context, I always prioritise building/exploring' - 'building' isn't a word I associate with stealth games generally. Was I meant to be thinking about character builds?

By displacement, do you mean heightmaps (the ones with filenames ending _h that get invoked with heightmap() to convert them to normal maps at runtime)? If the engine supports displacement mapping that definitely passed me by.

Maybe that's what studies of unexplained death turn into when nobody wants to inhabit the house afterwards...

I found a highpoly scan of the statue under CC-BY. (Warning: link will throttle your machine if it's as decrepit as my laptop.) Sketchfab can't be the original source of the mesh, though; the upload isn't old enough. It seems you can buy physical replicas as garden ornaments (with variations like having both breasts covered): https://www.gardensite.co.uk/garden-ornaments/hebe-goddess-160cm-marble-statue-garden-ornament-sculpture.htm https://www.ancientsculpturegallery.com/hebe-lifesize-museum-replica-statue-64.html

It might be worth fiddling with the spawnargs, which are possibly just D3 values carried over. If "velocity" "100 100 00" uses the world axis then it's 0 in global z. (Then "random_velocity" is turned on, which apparently semi-randomises the values in all three axes.) Also "gravity" "266" must be pulling them downwards. Yes, I agree it's good to have both. The flinder system seems to be intended for cases where the direction comes from an external impulse, and spawnargs only determine mass, friction, etc.