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damn this was hell to put together... the be quiet case only has space for a 240 aio up top and mine is a 360 so i had to pull the front fans and mount the 360 there. my dev machine i actually had to move to the lian li lancool III which was my gaming machine due to the front panel connector being the new type and i dont have a breakout cable for it. so now my gamer is located in the be quiet case my dev machine was relocated to my lian li gamer (luckily the 2080 ti fits fine in that one) and the old lian li PC-B25F is in use as my retro gamer. had to muck about with the ssd's so i left one in my dev machine for a few games together with two mechanical harddrives and one nvme. the be quiet case got fitted with 2 nvme's and 2 ssd's. i had intended to use an old kingston ssd for the retro setup but the connectors broke so it's thrash sigh... instead i had to use a mechanical harddrive as the system disk with an usb stick for ready boost (still far from ssd speeds). i also replaced the 3070 rtx in my streamer and moved it to the be quiet case, the streamer now uses an amd rx 5700 xt (works fine for that). so next project is getting a 240 aio for the be quiet case and moving the 360 aio back into the lian li lancool III case. getting the damn thing of the ryzen 3700x was rather harrowing as the cooling paste glues so tight that you literally rip the cpu out of the socket (the liquid freezer II model i have can not be wiggled so there is no way to avoid it) luckily no damage but ouch. then ill need a few more ssd's to max out the lancool but with prices as they are atm this might take some time.

How you can help depends a lot on what skills you have. I can Record Video Recording "Let's Play" videos or simple walkthroughs of existing missions and posting them to Youtube is great exposure for the mod (see example .) Be sure to let us know so we can link to them. If you have some editing ability, Video tutorials, where you explain how the mod works, or how to use specific tools, would also be great. Video trailers, showcasing interesting places and features, are also great for publicity. An example is . I can Write Writing reviews for missions are always nice, especially if they include good screenshots. Not only does it give us something to post on other forums, but it makes mappers feel good when their mission gets attention (especially if it's positive). We have a collective thread to post reviews in: http://forums.thedar...s-walkthroughs/ Writing reviews of the mod as a whole, targetted an an audience that doesn't know much about TDM, is also very useful. You could also try offering your services to mappers to create interesting readables, or to proofread for their mission. I can Act and Record Audio We are always on the lookout for good quality audio recordings for vocal sets. If interested, you can pick a few different lines from this script: http://wiki.thedarkm...t:_Average_Jack and send the recordings to Springheel, who then writes a script based on the type of voice you have. I can Translate We could always use translations of our menu/hud into more languages. Also, only a few FMs are aavailable in more than one language, so there is a lot of work there, see the I18N Translator's Guide in the Wiki. I can Model Great! Take a look at the model request thread:http://forums.thedar...-requests-here/ and pick something that interests you. Or just post a, "Hey, anybody want a model?" thread in this forum and I'm sure mappers will get back to you. I can Animate Fantastic. We can always use more good animations. Our current character rigs use a Maya skeleton. PM Springheel for more info. I know C++ Have a look at our coding section in the wiki, pick an issue or feature from the bugtracker of the mod or the leveleditor, download the recent sourcecode release (or better ask for an SVN checkout) and get cracking. Make sure nobody is already working on that specific issue and feel free to ask questions. I can Edit Images We can always use completely new textures and/or improved versions of older textures. How to get started and how to import them into the mod. I can Take Photos Good quality photos of useful textures (medieval-ish building facades, dirt, rocks, wood, etc) are always welcome. The fewer directional shadows and higher resolution, the better. I don't have any skills Even if you can't do any of the above, you can still help out. Talk about TDM in other forums; share your (preferably positive) experiences with other gamers you know. Last, but not least, compliment people when you like their work. Saying "thanks", to a developer or, "I really enjoyed your mission" to a mapper will make their day. -------------------- I'll update this further as more things occur to me.

In pursuit of a long-sought secret, the key to life everlasting lies deep within the recesses of an ancient athenaeum. Dragofer, Bikerdude, and I proudly present our FM for the Christmas Connections Contest titled "Written in Stone." Notes - TDM 2.10 Beta 5 or later is REQUIRED to play this mission. However, it is recommended to play using 2.10 Beta 6. You can get the latest version here. - This FM is a sequel to The Elixir. While it is not vital to play that before playing Written in Stone, there are some story connections. - This FM may be more hardware intensive than normal. LOD settings can be set below "Normal" to improve performance on low-end machines by disabling certain features. - Various areas will look better with shadow maps enabled at the possible expense of performance. - This FM implements the func_peek mechanic, allowing players to peek through any door that has a keyhole on it by leaning forward. PLEASE NOTE: This function has been known to cause crashes for a small number of players in the past, likely due to using the 32-bit version of TDM. At no point in this mission is it required to use the func_peek mechanic; it is purely optional, so feel free not to use it. As an entry in the 2.10 Christmas Connections Contest, the new features and assets used by this FM are: Download Version 1.1 This FM is available for download here: Google Drive Simply place the written.pk4 into your darkmod/fms folder and you're ready to go! Promotional Screenshots (via ThiefGuild) Credits A big thanks goes out to Wellingtoncrab for making a beautiful city map, Narrator for their wonderful voice work, nbohr1more for creating the original story premise as well as a few readables, Goldwell for animating the introduction to our briefing video and Duzenko for making certain glasses work as well as they do! A huge thank you also goes out to our beta testers: Goldwell, Wellingtoncrab, Kingsal, noodles, Krilmar, Garrett(Monolyth-42) ate0ate, and Mike_A. Thank you all very much for your keen eye to detail and great insights! Asset Credits Kingsal's Killer Assets Wellingtoncrab's Wonderful Furniture and Book Skins ***PLAYERS BEWARE*** SPOILERS lurk in the depths below. We strongly recommend playing this FM first so you don't spoil the fun for yourself!

edit: TL;DR: I've tweaked the .lwo exporter to preserve autosmooth angle Ahem. When I started writing this post a couple of days ago, it was supposed to be a "please help me, models won't smooth" kind of thing, but as I started taking screenshots and such for a comprehensive view of the problem, the question morphed into a "is there a hack to get .lwo's to export the way .ase's do", then to "how to get the same surface smoothing from Blender as you can get from Lightwave" and eventually to "does anyone around know python and blender enough to fix the export plugin". But then I fixed the addon myself, so it was almost as if there's no point to the thread. However, while googling around for a solution I stumbled upon a whole bunch of incomplete (1,2) or outright wrong (1,2) information, and whenever the question came up the issue was never really resolved completely. That might be because the problem isn't obvious, since a lot of exported models will actually end up correctly smoothed on export, leading one to believe wrong shading in rare cases is due to modeling mistakes / bad shadowmesh / etc. Point is, having the definitive .lwo smoothing post seems useful. Identifying the problem: Here's the mesh. I add an 'edge split' modifier (I use sharp edges while modeling the low poly, so I can uncheck the 'edge angle' option). I can now apply the modifier(s) and export to .ase (triple the mesh either in export options or in modifiers beforehand). The .ase looks alright in-game: Now I'll export it to .lwo using this script. Depending on export options, here are the results: If I also check "remove doubles", I'll lose all of the split (sharp) edges: (recalculating normals on export can be unpredictable as well, so clean up the model beforehand instead) Right about this point I start searching for a solution online, stumble upon this and try the renderbump hack. However, all it seems to do is weld all of the vertices back together at runtime and attempt to smooth the whole surface, similarly to "remove duplicates", but with no upper threshold. (to anyone possibly reading this in the future: don't forget to revert your changes to the materials!) Source of the problem: At this point I still wasn't sure if it's even possible to get .lwo's identical to .ase's, so I installed Lightwave. Naturally, it took some time to eventually stumble upon Surface Editor (F5), and the "smoothing threshold" contained therein. But then I just had to crank it up to 180 and export to "LWO2". That fixes everything in-game: So the issue is trivial, I just have to find a way to somehow pass on a smoothing angle through the exporter. However, the "auto smooth" option on the object data tab doesn't seem to affect anything regardless of angle. Long story short, after some hex-comparison magic, I home in on SMAN block in the exporter script: So what it actually does is set your smoothing angle to either 90°, 86°(??), or 0°, depending on whether you've chosen "idtech compatible", "smoothed", or neither. The solution: Now, I don't know Python and I don't know Blender scripting, so I can't say with full certainty that I didn't break anything. But I did cobble together a version of the script that seems to do the job. Here it is, mirror / do whatever you want with it. If your mesh has autosmooth enabled, and you've checked "idtech" or "smoothed" on export, your chosen autosmooth angle will now transfer to the surface in .lwo: I took the liberty of changing the default export options to what seems to suit TDM the best, you can just open the script in notepad and edit them to your taste. Wrapping up, there are still some mysteries I didn't solve, such as "idtech compatible" models taking up only half the size of models exported otherwise (including from Lightwave itself), there doesn't seem to be any visible difference in-game, at least in TDM. That "1.5 radian" in the code still makes me scratch my head. And I still don't know if the 4-8x size savings over .ase matter for in-game memory at all (but at least I know I won't have to edit the *BITMAPs manually anymore). Even after all this, the .ase still has just slightly better shading, but since the outputs of the exporter and Lightwave itself are now identical, seems safe to say it's as good as it gets.

Hello and thanks for checking out this post. I'm delighted to announce that version 1.1 of my fan mission "Cole Hurst 1: Eaton" is now available to download and play. This post is spoiler free, so please don't avoid digging into the details below if you are interested. I'm just using the spoiler tags to organize this post a bit. Let me start by saying "thank you" to anyone who has either previously played - or is considering playing this mission. It really means a lot to me. I have been away for a while, but following a round of beta testing that took place some time last year, I've only just recently managed to finish this update. I'm slightly embarrassed by how long it has taken me to complete, but I wanted to make sure that the valuable feedback I received was all properly addressed. Mission description "Tonight, Eaton's wealthiest citizens will gather at Lord Mayor Zelmer's estate to celebrate the city's founding. Nobles, dignitaries, a famed musician, and even the Queen will pass through its gates. While the guests celebrate Eaton's future, Cole Hurst is looking for a way out." For those new to and/or curious about this mission: I guess I would describe it as a traditional heist-style mission - although with a couple of major plot twist along the way. It's a very large map and I think it should take most players at least a few hours to complete. Screenshots Changes in version 1.1 Countless additions and a large amount of smaller tweaks and changes have all made it into this release. I may have already forgot a few things, but here are what I consider to be the main highlights: * New secrets & optional side quests * Story tweaks and reworked readables * Subtitles * Difficulty tweaks and related changes * Stability fixes * Various cosmetic changes * Audio tweaks * TDM version 2.13 now required Contributions and acknowledgments A special thanks to all of those listed below. I'm sincerely grateful for all your contributions! Mission testers and technical support @nbohr1more, @stgatilov, @duzenko, @Acolytesix, @Dragofer, @JackFarmer, @Shadow, @Cambridge Spy, @wesp5, @madtaffer, @prjames, @suzy8track, @datiswous, @boissiere and @Bergante Story Kelly Hrupa Voice actors twhalen2600 (AKA @Benny_the_guard) and Kelly Hrupa

Looks like it's the same old script updated for latest Blender version. Just so you know, this vibe coded script below exports smaller files. It always bothered me that .md5anim files from Blender are three times bigger than they should. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22528-md5-format-importer-exporter-for-blender-36/#findComment-508957

============== -= IRIS =- ============== WELLINGTONCRAB TDM v 2.11 REQ Ver. 1.3 *For Maureen* -=- "Carry the light of the Builder, Brother. Unto its end." -Valediction of the Devoted "What year is this? Am I dreaming?" -Plea of the Thief Dear Iris, I am old and broken. When we were young it felt like the words came easily. Now I find the ink has long dried on the pen and I'm as wanting for words as coin in my purse. I can tell we are nearing the end of the tale; time enough for one more job before the curtain call... ============== -Installation- Requires minimum version of TDM 2.11 **Dev build dev17056-10800 (2.13) fixes several visual effects which have been broken in the mission since the release of 2.11. For that reason playing with that version or later is currently recommended** -Iris does not support mods or the Unofficial Patch- Download and place the following .pk4 into you FMs directory: Iris Download ============== Beta Russian Language Translations by @kalinovka Mirror #1: yandex.ru Mirror #2: Google Drive ============== *Thank you for playing. Iris is a large mission which can either take as quickly or as long as you are compelled to play. I hope someone out there enjoys it and this initial release is not completely busted - I tried the best I could!* *Iris both is and isn't what it seems. If commenting please use spoiler tags where appropriate. If you are not certain if it would be appropriate a good assumption would be to use a spoiler tag* *Support TDM by rating missions on Thief Guild: https://www.thiefguild.com/* ============== WITH LASTING GRATITUDE: OBSTORTTE - Whose gameplay scripts from his thread laid the foundation which made the mission seem like something I could even pull off at all. Also fantastic tutorial videos! DRAGOFER - Who built upon that foundation and made it shine even brighter! And whom also provided immeasurable quantities of help and encouragement the past couple years on the TDM discord. ORBWEAVER & GIGAGOOGA - For generously offering their ambient music up for use. EPIFIRE - Who lent me his fine trash and trash receptacle models. AMADEUS - Who was the first person who wasn't me to play the damn thing and provided his excellent editorial services to improving the readers experience playing TESTERS AND TROUBLESHOOTERS: AMADEUS * DATISWOUS * SPOOKS * ALUMINUMHASTE * JAXA * JACKFARMER * WESP5 * ATE0ATE * MADTAFFER * STGATILOV * DRAGOFER * KINGSAL * KLATREMUS - What can I possibly say? Playing this thing over and over again could not have been easy. Deepest thanks and all apologies. -=THANKS TO ALL ON THE TDM DISCORD AND FORUM=- ==SEE README.TXT FOR ADDITIONAL ATTRIBUTIONS & INFORMATION== HONORABLE MENTION: GOLDWELL - If I hadn't by chance stumbled into Northdale back in 2018/2019 I would probably still be trying to get this thing to work in TDS, which means it probably would not exist - though more details on that in readme. ============== Boring Technical Information: *Iris is a performance intensive mission and I recommend a GTX 1060 or equivalent. I find the performance similar to other demanding TDM missions on my machine, but mileage may vary and my apologies if this prevents anyone from enjoying the mission.* *Iris heavily modifies the behavior of AI in the game, how they relate/respond to each other and the player. So they may act even stranger than they do typically in TDM. Feedback on this is useful - as it can potentially be improved and expanded upon in future patches.* -=- This is my first release and it has been a long time coming! If I forgot anything please let me know! God Speed. 2.10 Features Used:

I once did a quick test like this: But cubemap reflections would be more useful if one could use image masks like in modern metalness / roughness materials. Currently if you want to use a mask a) part of the material becomes fullbright, which is not useful, b) you can use negative rgb numbers which is a dirty hack.

I don't think I'd want AI-created material in TDM at all. It gets a bit murkier when people use it to, for example, upscale human-created textures to higher resolution or a non English speaker to use AI to translate things they wrote themselves. The more the use resembles photoshop or GIMP filters the less I'm bothered by it, but outright generation of graphics, code, and voices is not something I'd be on board with. And aside from these considerations, AI's theft of human artists' work and awful toll on the environment present big ethical difficulties for me as well.

Hi everyone! My name is Brams, and I’m a Cuban map creator. I’d like to share the first two missions I created this summer with the TDM community. Fun fact: I first had to learn how to use the DarkRadiant editor, which was quite a challenge for me. I hope you enjoy them! Any comments or bug reports are welcome. Download links: - Mission 1: [A Cornered Thief] -> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bdeE6TL_qDZa9-idvNnuY3z75xTS1Im0/view?usp=drivesdk - Mission 2: [A Protected Country House] -> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UCSQhkxM7zKZAdnP-rVCdVeCN8UgFrSy/view?usp=drivesdk (updated) (August 30, 2026) I should clarify that my username is "brams2" because I tried to create two accounts, thinking the first one—where I used the name "brams"—hadn't been set up correctly. So, I created another one, only to realize the first had actually been saved. That meant I had to create yet another account under the name "Brams 2," which is the one I used to make this post. Thanks, and enjoy the stealth!

The still ongoing Windows 10 topic sparked my curiosity why people do not just switch to Linux. But users of other OSes are also allowed to vote.

hmm come to think of it i might actually install the stuff from my dev machine in the new cabby instead. reason: the old setup might still have use for cd or dvd based installs and the old lian li i have it in has a dvd burner (also fits the theme a bit better). the lian li cabby is also well ventilated so the grillforces should be happy enough. and i still game occasionally on my dev machine (handles modern titles well enough also due to the 2080 ti). downside is that the dev machine only has one nvme and no ssd's (4 mechanical harddrives 2 1tb and 2 3tb) so only older games will run will run ok on these. with ssd prices atm it will be a long time before i can fit it with something a bit snappier unfortunatly so ill nick 2 of the drives for the retro machine where it does not matter as much and keep 2 for the new be quiet case.

That AI gen case was someone re-releasing Lady Rowena's FM with the textures AI gen upgraded (or anyway that was the case that generated strong opinions; that guy is doing it for other things too), and you might know she passed away a few years ago so can't consent. I mean it's one thing to put AI gen art in your own FM. I think that should be allowed as long as the use of AI is reported, although I'm sympathetic with zero-tolerance people (& I personally disapprove & wouldn't use it), but I think labelling it helps with that. But I think should be uncontroversial that it's unacceptable to do anything to any other person's map without their consent, and AI art just makes it worse.

Hey all - So, I have done a cursory look at some things in the engine, and I have to say that it is amazing that Carmack and Romero created this thing. What Epic has done with the Unreal Engine is nothing short of miraculous, but they have an entire army at their disposal. These two guys developed this on their own, and it is very impressive for the time. The code base is actually quite well structured. There is s definitive object hierarchy, albeit simple by today's UE standards. But, you couldn't expect anything else considering the timeframe of when it was created. There are some a couple things that really stand out to me. The first is that there is zero distance culling on the camera's view. That was a total shocker to me, and actually explains why the engine dies a horrible death in open areas. Without any distance cutoff, even if something isn't even on screen because it is so far away, it is still processed like it is because the camera can see it even if we can't. This is compounded by the design of having to search through open portals. Because the camera can see all, an open area with many lights and surfaces becomes a giant bottleneck because the engine has to process them all, every frame, even if their relevancy is near zero due to distance. This would actually be a great use of a CVAR in my opinion so that the distance could be adjusted to accommodate different hardware. The second thing that shocked me is that portals are automatically traversed, regardless of their size. A portal that is far away and only 2 pixels on the screen is still traversed and everything through is computed. This is actually the other side of the coin for distance culling. Adding in a size constraint on how big a portal needs to be to be traversed would also help greatly because it would keep a ton of worthless calculations out of the pipeline. So, I saw a couple posts about what I think is not user friendly about Dark Radiant for newcomers. One of the things I specialize in is UI. As a general rule, naming conventions and usages internal to the software make poor userland terminology. Case and point - func_static. From an editor standpoint, the terminology should be simply called a "Prop" or in my world, a "Static Mesh". As a new designer, I had no idea what a func_static was or why it was called that. However, if I had seen the term "Prop", that would have been immediately identifiable. Same for func_mover. From a user perspective, it should be called something friendly like "Moveable Object". In a similar way, "worldspawn" has become synonymous with things that seal off the void. That naming should be changed because in today's vernacular, "spawn" means to instantiate something in the world. Maybe a term like "Structural objects/geometry", etc. Note that this is only for the editor presentation. Under the covers, the tool still builds the map using all of the standard naming because it has to. There are other things that I am thinking of as well but verbiage is the big one. It matters, and when you are a newbie and just want to make a map, you shouldn't have to know anything about the internals of the engine. These are some of the things I have seen so far.

my retro setup runs well so i decided to buy a new case with better airflow for the grillforces . settled on a be quiet pure base 501 which also allows me to mount an aio for the old broadwell (gets toasty when overclocked to the roof). the 560 ti came out about the same time as intels nehalem (i know cause originally mine were mounted in msi's first xpower board which used it). the nehalem core i7 models were quite good and the xpower board is pretty much impossible to get your hands on today and if you do expect to pay more for it than a top tier modern board. the haswell based x99 is a worthy successor with more cores more pcie lanes and quite a bit more power. it runs better than i expected on the win 7 setup (not much idea hooking it up to win 10 as the gfx cards do not support dx12 anyway "no vulkan either"). xp did run on this board but was hell to setup properly (needed to slipstream AHCI drivers for it to even install) took me days to get it fully updated via legacyupdate, and some drivers did not play nice out of the box so i had to use hacked ones which were not allways the most easy to find. also it does not support > 4gb ram due to 32 bit limitations unless you hack the kernel to enable PAE support (which is not allways stable).

Hey Brams2! Welcome to the dark mod! And you're coming in with two lovely missions to play, as well. Great work on these! One quick note: before these missions get added to the mission downloader, it's usually a good idea to get them beta-tested first. I also played the second mission and fell out of the map: But yeah, I suggest you start a beta testing thread here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/59-tdm-mission-beta-testing/

For the people eager to play with the latest state of development, two things are provided: regular dev builds source code SVN repository Development builds are created once per a few weeks from the current trunk. They can be obtained via tdm_installer. Just run the installer, check "Get Custom Version" on the first page, then select proper version in "dev" folder on the second page. Name of any dev version looks like devXXXXX-YYYY, where XXXXX and YYYY are SVN revision numbers from which the build was created. The topmost version in the list is usually the most recent one. Note: unless otherwise specified, savegames are incompatible between any two versions of TDM! Programmers can obtain source code from SVN repository. Trunk can be checked out from here: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/ SVN root is: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src Build instructions are provided inside repository. Note that while you can build executable from the SVN repository, TDM installation of compatible version is required to run it. Official TDM releases are compatible with source code archives provided on the website, and also with corresponding release tags in SVN. A dev build is compatible with SVN trunk of revision YYYY, where YYYY is the second number in its version (as described above). If you only want to experiment with the latest trunk, using the latest dev build gives you the maximum chance of success. P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

I think what is being referred to is I have an upscaler I purchased in May of 2021 called "gigapixel ai" which we used to upscale a very old skybox texture and maybe some other textures. It has nothing to do with the generative ai models that would show up soon, as that hadn't really even materialized yet. This is kind an issue with the "ai" label being used pretty willy nilly. It has of course never been used on anything that posses any sense of intelligence. That was just a "dumb" upscaler that said "ai" because in 2020 that meant something that is gpu accelerated instead of what it means today. Upscaling in general is not something I have seen us even typically do all that much, as every method still just produces fake pixels that is hard to say is qualitatively better. I think the skybox we did was like 256x256 maps with huge macroblocking in them, so it was an improvement. I recall trying out stable diffusion in like 2023 for potentially upscaling things, but the generative tech always took too many liberties to be useful for that use case. I have used generative ai image models and tried to see if they were useful in a texturing workflow, but I have not really tried or touched one since maybe late 2023, because even being pragmatic and ignoring the ethics of it (which you can't) you run into the limits of what these things can provide in practice quickly, and the "quality" was only getting worse as everything got more and more averaged out into into essentially identical and bad looking outputs. It was always still more efficient to just go and find the piece you need or something “close enough” from the public domain, so I ultimately just do that still. It's frankly pretty embarrassing to hear people say that this is a that is technology is good enough or will be good enough to the point of replacing a human at all.

Are you going to supply all the future art assts, so we don't have to use ai? That would be great. I might actually do this if I ever do a painting course..

IMO using AI generated artworks is like dumping a bucket of shit on your work. I remember playing Seeking Lady Leicester, it has phenomenal level design, but as soon as I saw those ugly AI generated portraits the whole FM was almost vomit inducing to me. I once said that for an artist to use AI is like a self-insult and level designers are also artists but the true artist would never want to cover their artwork in shit like that. Also this.

maybe shader based ?, i think duzenko created that one but i might be wrong. EDIT: Restores the old functionality for cubicLight setup or other ARB\GL shaders that use traditional OpenGL cubemap orientations. so no.

Well you can use it on textures where you would normaly add specular to make them shine a bit you add a vague cubemap efect that reflects the suroundings a bit. But it's so vague that you don't notice it directly. It just looks better. I've seen it used in some missions.

I certainly can't either. Converting existing assets to metalness / roughness model would take a lot of work, but I wonder if it would be possible to use PBR and old Blinn-Phong materials at the same time. I imagine introducing PBR in any capacity will result in change of the look of the entire game? I can imagine some improvements to the current system. For example, you can do a pretty decent polished metal by blending in a generic cube map: Problem is you can't mask parts of the cubemap properly using an image mask. By the way, purely theoretically, some maniac could code-in a probe system, where during dmap or maybe even in real time an environment map is captured for each room, and then dynamically swapped in the material based on proximity Using cubemaps with blend add could be useful for non-metallic reflective materials - like eyes, or other wet surfaces. However it makes materials glow in the dark, which is a detriment in a game like this - although most maps don't do 100% black shadows anyway. You can't add fresnel effect to cubemap reflections, which is also important for non-metals. Fresnel effect could also be used for velvet or dusty materials. We don't have subsurface scattering shader. And there are other engine improvements I can imagine, like adding more screen-space effects (we have AO). Or new mesh formats, that for example support multiple UVs.

Maybe something to bring up for collaboration ?. i can easily live without raytracing while a cool technique it is not what makes a good game (as seen with HZD and forbidden west which does not use it at all). i mentioned the vulkan backend for performance sake mostly . what kinda shaders would you like seeing ? (mind you i cannot make them but maybe someone else wants to pitch in ?).