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I have no problem. I use Firefox. @Zerg Rush also uses Vivaldi. Have you tried without extensions, or in another browser?

(btw. bold, italic and underline have shortcut keys: Ctrl B, Ctrl I and Ctrl U, you could try that)

That was so cool to go through!

Very effective. There's Thief fans there admitting they never heard of TDM, and now they are trying it. So excellent.

Since I wasn't the one mainly asking, I'll just cite you in the original thread instead.

There already is a kind of sorting, sort nearest, sort decal, sort <n>. For things like windows and such, sort nearest should probably have the desirable affect, though looking through multiple translucent shaders might kill performance.

Is having multiple render effects really killing performance that badly? I don't understand. You're saying that if I have two transparent objects side-by-side, then they'll just count as two render effects, but when combined, they somehow become something much more difficult to render?

Never-the-less, unless we're talking some kind of infinite portal problem, why not let the mapper choose how much he wants to kill performance? Just warn him against putting too many effects close together.

Yeah and the wiki and moddb. It should have those links in the footer I think. Probably easy to add by an admin.

Edit: And a link to the bugtracker. I'm always searching for a post in the forum that links to that because I can't remember the url.

I drew attention to this several times in the last few years. No one payed it any attention, so I just gave up.

Reluctance to improve the forums is matched by reluctance to allow more people to work on it. Talk about trust and power.

Thanks for your comments! If you are writing with reference to The Painter's Wife, do note that most of the basic street geometry is the work of Shadowhide, who built it about five or six years ago (he is no longer active on the forums). All later contributions, including mine, are refinements of that basic blueprint.

That said, my designs follow fairly similar principles based on organic city growth patterns. My main reference work is Christopher Alexander's great Pattern Language, combined with personal experience visiting old cities throughout Europe (mainly the Mediterranean). While my personal research field is a bit different, I do work in regional studies, and have a natural interest in city development.

Of course, there are two caveats:

1) My cityscapes are rooted in surrealism, not realism - they are architectural fancies, not socio-economic experiments;

2) they also serve gameplay (navigation, stealth, route-finding, climbing, etc.), which is an important consideration, too.

You have some very interesting studies! I'll look up that book later. I'm reading a book called "A Burglar's Guide to the City" by George Monaugh right now. I posted a short message about it in the Off Topic section of the forum, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention as well. It's very entertaining.

I'm wondering though, about your first precept. Do you create your own structural guidelines for each cityscape indivually, or do you have a master template that you've built up that governs your universe?

I have read Monaugh's book; it is excellent! Very useful in thinking about level design, too. I think I first read about it on these forums, then purchased a copy.

On your question, I have ideas about how the City looks and works in general - lack of open spaces, organic construction, rapid industrialisation that's still struggling to keep up with demand, and very little if any planning (beyond some basic public works). This is a core idea that is open to development in multiple directions. I also try to experiment with new ideas, so Penny Dreadful 2 or 3 is fairly different from Disorientation, which is different from Rose Garden. For example, PD3 is built on a stretch between canals and a hilltop fortress, which is different from Disorientation's waterfalls and steep streets, or Rose Garden's massive, derelict noble palaces. The basic idea dictates the details. So there is some logic o it - even though the results are not plausible in conventional reality. Springheel's TDM missions are definitely more realistic in this respect.