Gaming affects your dreams

[STiFU]

So, last night, I had an (almost lucid) dream: I have been talking to a friend about developing TDM and the dream/conversation had an amazing outcome!

 

We were on a hike and talked about developing for TDM and how fun it can be at times. He asked me if I ever wanted to create an FM on my own and I answered "no". I told him the whole story of how I once worked for 9 months basically full-time on a TDS-FM and lost it all due to an hdd crash (@Judith maybe remembers). That happened more than a decade ago. I continued to say that it is a hugely time consuming undertaking which I simply cannot afford today. We continued the hike and I was to myself with my thoughts. Suddenly, I had a brilliant story idea for a small FM, perfect for a beginner mapper. I fleshed it all out in my head and told my friend about the idea who was equaliy excited as I was. Then I woke up, could still remember everything, and obviously put the whole story idea in ink. So, who knows, maybe sometime in the future, you will see a nice and small, "Love & Cruelty"-themed FM from me.

 

Once again, gaming affects your dreams!

[peter_spy]

I told him the whole story of how I once worked for 9 months basically full-time on a TDS-FM and lost it all due to an hdd crash (@Judith maybe remembers).

 

I do, I had a similar problem while we were working on The Cabal campaign. I lost the source files, and my mission ended up in rather unpolished state. The intro / outro movies had to "hacked in" by Tiens somehow.

[STiFU]

Please note that I liked your post because you still remember what happened back then and not because you also got your mission nuked. ;-)

[peter_spy]

Keeping my fingers crossed for you making that FM, by the way I really wish I could have 9 months to work on a project full-time. Making models for TDM is super rewarding, but with every piece taking like 2 weeks in-between work, sleep and family time, the progress is really, really slow.

[STiFU]

It definitely won't happen anytime soon, if at all, sorry. Right now I am way too interested in coding and improving the core gameplay experience. I currently tackle a lot of movement and sound issues and tweaks. Afterwards, I am gonna try to implement SSAO, which TDM so desparately needs!! I have zero graphics coding experience, so we'll have to see how that goes, but I have been excited to learn it for quite some time. :-)

[peter_spy]

I'm sure SSAO will look gorgeous, but I wonder how much strain it will put on the engine. I'm bit more curious about things like drawcall efficiency. I know it scales with newer CPUs, but only a bit, and it's not much in comparison to what modern engines offer. It's like 3000 vs 30 000.

[STiFU]

Optimizing draw calls is nice and all, but waaaaaaay beyond my capabilities.

 

SSAO is comparatively cheap because it is independent of scene complexity, so it doesn't add a lot of strain to the engine. And even if that slight performance hit is too bad for a player's rig, it is always an option to disable it, of course. It can furthermore be implemented in a nice an concise Fragment Shader, so I don't even have to mess around in the depths of the engine. :-) A nice little isolated task.

[Anderson]

Lucid dreaming is indeed a cool feature. But alas, the head is a dark matter so nobody knows how it works to guarantee 100% reproduction of this. But games help.