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TDM after D3 Source code release


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Guess it's a good thing I'm pulling in Wulfen's lovely remade textures right about now ;)

 

Edit:

They usually release with some patches that have been pushed upstream, so we might get a few fixes from after the last d3 patch, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's Doom3+q4 source. I doubt it will be anything later due to the shift to deferred shading etc.

 

As for memory, yes there is a lot of room to improve that, sound is most likely the least important, however off the bat, changing the internal texture format to not add alpha channels to everything might be possible, that would save somewhere in the region of 20% of the texture usage, following that up with 3Dc support in the DXTn handling would push it down to like 50%. Anyway, it's all still a dream til there's code and many more people to make light work.

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We need a thumbs-up emoticon.

 

Fuckin' A

 

B)-b

 

Well, it's the Doom 3 version of id Tech 4...not Quake 4 or Prey.

 

Which is to say we don't get a few things that came later, like the megatexture compression from ET:QWars.

 

Edit:

Mobile titles could be our best shot at bringing back “the golden age of modding.”

:unsure:

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Great news! :laugh:

 

Hopefully integrating the D3 source with our heavily-hacked version of D3 will be something not too hard :ph34r:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Heh, someone in that Phoronix thread asked "Do you plan to port your mod (TDM) to Linux?" Little does he know that it has been available for almost two years and there are over 45 missions for him to play right now. I don't have an account so I couldn't answer him, but you may want to let him know.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Heh, someone in that Phoronix thread asked "Do you plan to port your mod (TDM) to Linux?" Little does he know that it has been available for almost two years and there are over 45 missions for him to play right now. I don't have an account so I couldn't answer him, but you may want to let him know.

 

I don't have an account either, but also let him know it works on MacOS, too :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Guess it's a good thing I'm pulling in Wulfen's lovely remade textures right about now

Wish we could import the maps from wolfen' 2009 and remake them tdm style..

 

I don't have an account either, but also let him know it works on MacOS, too

Who is our resident linux fan, he/she should get over there and spread the word!

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Among the team, that should be tels I guess, but nbohr already has an account there, so he could just go for it.

 

AFAIK I am the only (active) developer using linux. Where is that forum, anyway? I didn't see a link in this thread.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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The forum is here:

 

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?58313-Doom-3-Source-Code-To-Be-Released-This-Year#post221431

 

I know a little Linux but if someone has symlink questions, library issues (etc) it would take me a little reading to recall any of my old knowledge.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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We, over at Hexen, are most interested in the prospect of standalone over anything else. Most of our team is not driven by features, but instead who can get access to our work. Removing the requirement of Doom 3 would be a huge step to a wider audience!

 

Then we'd probably look into any enhancements down the line.

 

 

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We, over at Hexen, are most interested in the prospect of standalone over anything else. Most of our team is not driven by features, but instead who can get access to our work. Removing the requirement of Doom 3 would be a huge step to a wider audience!

 

Peronally, I am interested in this as well. (One could say that, by extension, our team is also interested in this). Of course, new features are always nice to have.

 

In any event, different people have different goals, and we have to see what we can accomplish. Manpower is short these days, sadly :(

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Removing the requirement of Doom 3 would be a huge step to a wider audience!

 

Absolutely. If you guys are going to be making open replacements for the D3 assets, etc, that would be great for us! I understood that was one of the biggest hurdles for us, since a lot are built into our mod. If there are any other big Doom3 TCs out there, or just going to the D3W community, maybe there could be a divide and conquer strategy for a lot of the shared Doom3 stuff to make a standalone base that we can all use.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Absolutely. If you guys are going to be making open replacements for the D3 assets, etc, that would be great for us! I understood that was one of the biggest hurdles for us, since a lot are built into our mod. If there are any other big Doom3 TCs out there, or just going to the D3W community, maybe there could be a divide and conquer strategy for a lot of the shared Doom3 stuff to make a standalone base that we can all use.

 

It's surely a possibility. We are relatively strong in the nature of coding, textures, particles, gui, etc. Luckily most of our maps use zero Doom 3 textures/models but we do have a small collection of made particles using doom 3 textures as the source(stuff like some fire, smoke, etc). Most immediate that we can think of are replacements for all /common materials, lingering guis that doom 3 had hardcoded, and many base scripts/defs that we've inherited from fairly commonly.

 

 

Sharing info would surely be of benefit between us when it comes out.

 

 

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They also posted

on Youtube. He hasn't mentioned anything about Doom so far, but apparently Rage will require Steam.

 

UPDATE: He talks about the Doom 3 stuff at the end.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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UPDATE: He talks about the Doom 3 stuff at the end.

 

Specifically 1:23:30. "The Doom 3 source code will be released this year."

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It looks like Tr3B is preparing to look at implementing some of the GPL wish-list stuff.

 

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=232437#p232437

 

 

I agree with most of his ideas except I don't think Crytech style realtime ambient GI is practical from a performance perspective. I would instead use Sparse sample (low resolution) Volumetric Light Maps with interpolated gradients.

 

http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=47

 

You can even do any interpolation approach that blends two or more 3D textures so some dynamic effects are possible. Of course, adding a semi-offline renderer to that with a feedback loop gives you Frostbite 2's (Battlefield 3's) GI approach but that is too heavy on the hardware as well. I say that only the "real" lights should account for dynamics. (Though the ambient lights can be faded up and down of course). A volume light map that just contains the ambient effects from the static illumination would work fine and look great (and perform great). Especially if Cubemap lighting were added as an option.

 

For specular, in addition to dedicated Gloss Map support, it would be cool to have a HL2 style ambient cubemap setup.

 

I also would (obviously) stick with OpenGL in spite of his (and many others' ) frustrations with it.

 

He has already implemented many of the things he discussed in Xreal so it should be easy for someone to port over. So things are looking bright for render-side improvements from the community at least. Even if nothing else can be optimized much further (doubtful), the reclaimed CPU from a better renderer should grant some more head-room to beef-up the AI behaviors etc.

 

A bright future ahead any way you look at it. ^_^

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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It looks like Tr3B is preparing to look at implementing some of the GPL wish-list stuff.

 

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=232437#p232437

 

Well, lets see when it goes GPL and what people come up with. And of course afterwards we need to integrate it into our mod. Lots of work ahead for us.

 

Plus, it is important that we use OpenGL - Linux (and Mac I believe) do not have D3Dx (9, 10 nor 11). A rewritten renderer that runs on Windows only is worthless to me.

 

Edit: I am no expert, but the "use shadow maps" doesn't ring right to me. If they are so much better than stencil shadows, why didn't D3 use them? Was the technique simply not possible back then?

 

A bright future ahead any way you look at it. ^_^

 

Guess we need to tone down the ambient level again :D

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Shadow Maps in this sense are a structure that contains a precompiled projection such that it will look physically correct in any projected direction. John Carmack was going to use them but they took too much video memory at the time or would look too low resolution. Even then, the OpenGL drivers at the time were so bad that Shadow Maps performed worse than his CPU based stencil calculations.

 

Newer shadow map techniques like Parallel Split Variance address the memory issue by having an LOD mechanism of sorts. And OpenGL has improved it's VBO structures etc.

 

Blurred stencil shadows still might be a better way to go with their very low memory foot-print. Plus, DX10 level hardware (Open GL 4.0?) can do the shadow volume calculation in hardware.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Edit: I am no expert, but the "use shadow maps" doesn't ring right to me. If they are so much better than stencil shadows, why didn't D3 use them? Was the technique simply not possible back then?

 

Carmack mentioned the reason in one of his earlier Keynotes, iirc it had mainly to do with memory constraints on the graphics-cards back then - but afaik he almost went with them.

As with everything, they do have their own pros and cons.

 

Edit : Blah, wheres the delete button.

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I'll just be happy when I can see the before & after screenshots & FPS hits so I know what the punchline is of what you guys are talking about.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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I am far less interested in seeing graphics enhancements in TDM than I am in seeing some real improvements in terms of tightening up performance.

 

Top of my list would be.

 

1.Loading times.

2.Lightgem optimizaion

3.Integrating ambient light fixes directly in the renderer to avoid the current hit.

4.Optimizing the stuff Tels has been doing with SEED.

5.Some extra features to give us more flexibility with the sound code. Currently the vis-portal system doesn't allow us to set a sound portal to still decrease sound if the portal is open...the example I think of is when there is a window or hole in the floor that goes down several floors. If a noise happens three floors down, there is no sound loss because the portal must be close for sound prop to work.

6.Feature parity between DR and DoomEdit. We should be able to integrate the D3 renderer directly into Dark Radiant now, should we not?

7.General fixes here and there to further enhance our AI optimizations.

 

There are probably tons of things that would be beneficial to improve performance. Graphic enhancements are the last on the list for me. :) Especially if they remove Linux and Mac support as T3Rb plans to do.

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I am far less interested in seeing graphics enhancements in TDM than I am in seeing some real improvements in terms of tightening up performance.

 

Top of my list would be.

 

1.Loading times.

2.Lightgem optimizaion

3.Integrating ambient light fixes directly in the renderer to avoid the current hit.

4.Optimizing the stuff Tels has been doing with SEED.

5.Some extra features to give us more flexibility with the sound code. Currently the vis-portal system doesn't allow us to set a sound portal to still decrease sound if the portal is open...the example I think of is when there is a window or hole in the floor that goes down several floors. If a noise happens three floors down, there is no sound loss because the portal must be close for sound prop to work.

6.Feature parity between DR and DoomEdit. We should be able to integrate the D3 renderer directly into Dark Radiant now, should we not?

7.General fixes here and there to further enhance our AI optimizations.

 

There are probably tons of things that would be beneficial to improve performance. Graphic enhancements are the last on the list for me. :) Especially if they remove Linux and Mac support as T3Rb plans to do.

 

Oh yeah, what he said!

 

There are tons of small "problems" we have due to the closed-source nature of certain parts, and/or because the game and the DLL are split apart and run in their own little sep. worlds. This creates needless overhead, and also problems like the "allocate in one heap, release in the other and then crash and burn".

 

Likewise, running the "SEED modelgenerator" in the graphic card would allow a lot more updates (instead of one every 0..7 seconds), allow much faster rendering due to instancing, save a lot of memory etc.

 

And there is the Normalmap compression thing. The list is practically endless, guarantueing us work for the next 5 years ;)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Sure, I just brought up that example to show that there is already early talk of engine improvement.

 

If the "CPU stuff" is removed or reduced in the renderer then you have more CPU to do "whatever else" with.

 

Many of those graphic enhancements reduce both CPU and GPU utilization compared to what Doom 3 does, especially a Deferred Render approach.

 

Though, admittedly, I would not be unhappy if all that extra CPU were spent on bigger and prettier maps with more open spaces (forests etc).

 

My main concern is the longstanding belief that Doom 3 should have traditional 2D Light Maps. While it is possible, Baddcog brought up a lot of the negative issues that they may cause over at TTLG. 3D light maps only have issues with shadow casting but if you only use them for low level ambient light that is not a problem.

 

My secondary concern is that Lights of all kinds should have 3D texture support. Not just so that the Ambient can use a Volume Light Map but also so that light projections can be more realistic in general while requiring less lights in each scene (thus better performance).

 

If general 3D texture support is added certain particle effects can be replaced with lower cost 3D texture versions such as this demo:

 

http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=48

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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