Opinions on St. Lucia Demo

[Crispy]

Yep... I'm more or less going through your list and saying to myself "fixed... fixed... fixed..." Thanks for the praise and the feedback!

 

There are a couple of issues there which aren't really feasible to fix (like having flickering shadows everywhere - it can be done, but moving shadows are much more expensive than static ones, so it's up to the mapper to balance appearance vs performance in any given area, and often that means not having moving lights). Overall, though, I think you'll be pleased with the beta release.

[Fidcal]

Candles - this is also mapper's choice but we're trying to encourage using standard candles that you can pinch out. And I have a slow match in my FM and every torch and candle in the FM that is not lit can be gently lit (no need for fire arrows to blast a candle across the room and alert the guards.) This won't be with TDM 1 but I kinda hope others will pick up on the idea and it becomes standard as it is easy to implement. Of course, no need to run around lighting torches but if they are there you would expect them to be lightable. The candles not going out in water is also a map thing. We have tdm water that extinguishes flames; possibly it wasn't ready for St.Lucia or possibly just accidentally we used the old water.

[Crispy]

Water extinguishing candle flames has been in since long before Thief's Den. Most likely it was either the old water entity, or a candle not properly set up to receive water stims. Both problems are fixed by mappers making sure to use the standard water and candles.

[Darragh]

it was great!

 

everything ran fine for me except for the watter ... the game went into seizure mode like i haven't seen since i tried to play quake 2 with out a graphics accelerator.

 

well OK maybe not that bad but the game ran fine then when i went into the sewers or got close the the sewers my frame rate dumped down to about 5. i checked through the wiki and most of the fixes seemed to be fore people who constantly had frame rates that low.

 

....

 

I've also had the same issue. The game runs very smooth normally, but whenever I come up against any sort of water it gets VERY choppy- going from 60 FPS down to about 3-4 FPS.

 

It only seems to happen when the engine thinks the water is visible. For example, if I am standing in the sewer water and looking straight ahead the game runs like crap. If I turn to look at the ceiling the framerate suddenly goes up again and everything is fine. The amount of water coverage on screen doesn't seem to affect the issue or the slowdown, just the fact that the water is there. Whatever part of the engine that is engaged when water is active seems to be causing the problem.

 

Thankfully I found a workaround that still lets you play at acceptable speeds:

 

set 'r_skipPostProcess' to '0' in the console (typo, sorry)

 

set 'r_skipPostProcess' to '1' in the console (this is correct)

 

This does away with the water effects but at least lets you play the game normally.

 

I've also a Radeon HD like yourself, so maybe this is an ATI issue ?

 

My system:

 

Intel Q9650 3.0Ghz @ 3.6Ghz

4GB Kingston DDR3 1600 Mhz

Intel x48 motherboard

Radeon HD 4870x2 (running Catalyst 9.8 drivers)

Windows Vista 64-bit (Service Pack 1)

Edited August 21, 2009 by Darragh

[Fidcal]

That's a pity. Don't know any solution for that. The most I can do is add your solution to the wiki. Maybe someone else can think of something.

[WorLord]

Water extinguishing candle flames has been in since long before Thief's Den. Most likely it was either the old water entity, or a candle not properly set up to receive water stims. Both problems are fixed by mappers making sure to use the standard water and candles.

 

On this: I'm not sure I encountered the problem in St. Lucia, so that's something to know. I'm pretty sure it might have been one of the unofficial maps, which means I shouldn't have said anything at all, in retrospect.

 

Either way, good to know its a non-issue. :-)

[Ishtvan]

Also, it'd be nice to lean into a door (like in T3) to "hear" through it...

You can. Maybe that wasn't done yet at the time of SL, but I thought it was.

 

Regarding water FX slowing things down: I also have Radeon HD 4870 x2 and haven't noticed that myself. Although I haven't looked at that specific water in SL since I upgraded to those cards.

[Darragh]

That's a pity. Don't know any solution for that. The most I can do is add your solution to the wiki. Maybe someone else can think of something.

 

Yeah I'm not sure it's something you can fix. It's either a driver issue or a problem the engine has with this particular setup; more than likely though it's a driver issue.

 

Regarding water FX slowing things down: I also have Radeon HD 4870 x2 and haven't noticed that myself. Although I haven't looked at that specific water in SL since I upgraded to those cards.

 

Might be worth giving the demo another spin just to see. I'm curious myself whether this an ATI Radeon HDxxxx problem.

 

Sorry, just to clarify- I made a typo with the previous post. The fix for the water issue is:

 

set 'r_skipPostProcess' to '1' in the console

 

NOT:

 

set 'r_skipPostProcess' to '0' in the console

 

You want to disable post processing, not leave it enabled

[Mortem Desino]

My 4850 1gb has no problems with the water post effects in SL.

 

It was also great fun seeing how many bugs fixed and features added since the Saint Lucia release. Wow.

[Fidcal]

OK, thanks. I updated the wiki.

 

Yeah I'm not sure it's something you can fix. It's either a driver issue or a problem the engine has with this particular setup; more than likely though it's a driver issue.

 

 

 

Might be worth giving the demo another spin just to see. I'm curious myself whether this an ATI Radeon HDxxxx problem.

 

Sorry, just to clarify- I made a typo with the previous post. The fix for the water issue is:

 

set 'r_skipPostProcess' to '1' in the console

 

NOT:

 

set 'r_skipPostProcess' to '0' in the console

 

You want to disable post processing, not leave it enabled

[jdude]

@ WorLord's post

 

 

Thanks for the kind words The mod has progressed tremendously since the Saintlucia release, I'm glad everyone is still talking about SL though! When the mod gets release you guys will get to see all the awesome changes to everything since then, I can't wait everyone will love it!

[Briareos H]

I know I'm late on the train, but I played through St. Lucia yesterday (only played Thief's Den long ago on a crappy computer) and I must say that I have been almost speechlessly impressed throughout. TDM nails the Thief feeling just right, and that's the point. Going through this thread, I can see that most of my issues seem to have been resolved since last year so I won't comment on them. However, there are two particular points that I haven't seen mentioned :

• The default doom 3 red mask for death (more like 'masque of the red death' right) or injury is sloppy, enormous, ugly and hurts me inside every time I get hurt :'(. Did you change it since ?
  
• I very rarely use combat at all when playing Thief, but still I tried here and was really disappointed. I voiced my opinion on the recent combat gameplay videos on TTLG with a bit of vitriol, and obviously Saint Lucia had the same problems : Animations lack inertia and there's hardly any sense of contact between a weapon and a body. I don't really know how to solve this latter point, maybe the player hitbox are a bit too big, and there should be more 'hurt' animations for the AI.
  

A word to jdude finally : very good job on this small enjoyable mission, really beautiful and fun. Enjoyed it a lot.

Edited August 26, 2009 by Briareos H

[Crispy]

Saint Lucia didn't have the new combat system that you saw in those more recent videos. The new system tests for contact between weapons and bodies, whereas the old one just did a "is enemy there (yes/no), if yes deal damage to them" check.

 

As for those videos themselves, they didn't do a great job of showing how the melee system actually works. It's not the mindless slashfest it looks like. I guess you'll just have to trust us on that point for now, until the beta comes out. It is possible that it still needs some tweaking, of course. I'm sure that will happen post-beta-release if necessary.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

[Mortem Desino]

I've been doing a little work in the combat system, and the developer's version now has much better tactile clues so the player feels the impact of a hammer or sword.

[Briareos H]

Yay !

This mod is going to be fantastic.

[Annatar]

I just finished St. Lucia for the first time and had a lot of fun. There were a couple of small technical issues, so here they are:

 

1) Game locking up. I haven't managed to pin down the precise cause, but it seems to be linked to scrolling/using tools. It doesn't happen every time, or even most of the time, but every now and then the game will freeze up completely, and can't be killed through Alt+F4, the Task Manager or anything. I usually have to log off the user account and log back in again.

Perhaps linked to this is the fact that my "[" key doesn't perfom its function of scrolling backwards through the tool list, but otherwise works normally.

 

2)Squiffy menus. This was most noticable when I completed St. Lucia. The screen went all black apart from the mouse pointer. About 5 seconds later the red background appeared, but no text. By scrolling the mouse around I could hear the little clicks which are associated with mousing over text, so there was something there; it just wasn't displaying.

There are some other small menu issues such as trying to change screen resolutions in game, which doesn't work. I saw in another post that your menus have been overhauled though, so perhaps this is no longer an issue.

 

I hesitate to pin any of these issues on TDM specifically because I'm playing on a laptop that already has problems with Doom3 (video settings not saving being one). I thought it best to mention them, if only to be assured that it's my machine. In any case they were pretty small problems in an otherwise very fun demo.

Edited September 5, 2009 by Annatar

[Noisycricket]

You have the Doom 3 1.3 patch and updated drivers I assume? What video card?

[Annatar]

You have the Doom 3 1.3 patch and updated drivers I assume? What video card?

 

Yeah I think Doom is fully patched up. I'm sing the Steam version with RoE so I assume it's all up to date. The video card is an ATI Mobility HD3450, which can run both Doom3 and TDM fine even on Ultra High settings, so I don't think it's overtaxing. My drivers are all up to date as far as I know, but I'm not even sure this card is upported anymore.

I think the video settings issue is linked to my laptop's native resolution of 1280x800, which isn't supported in Doom 3's settings. I don't know if that's a problem for TDM.

 

e: The card is supported, and I just got the latest drivers. I think I have a save near the end of the level so I'll give it another shot and see if the mission complete screen appears correctly this time...

 

e: Still nothing.

Edited September 5, 2009 by Annatar

[Noisycricket]

Not sure if its worth spending too much more time on, TDM 1.0 is coming out pretty soon, which has an updated Saint Lucia with it.

[Annatar]

Looking forward to it.

[Crispy]

To be clear, Saint Lucia is in the process of being updated to work with TDM 1.0, but the timeframe of the updated SL map is not tied to the timeframe of TDM 1.0's release. It may very well take a bit longer than TDM 1.0. It will definitely happen though.

[Noisycricket]

Oops, thanks.

[Sogi-Ya]

lol wow!

 

here i was thinking i was gonna be necroing a dead thread to comment on this ...

 

i found a pretty good solution for most of my random crashes and what not ( other games as well as TDM )

 

don't install the catalyst control center .... my HD2600 works fine with just the drivers installed.

 

i tried experimenting with this as i couldn't get a couple of oldies but goodies ( when patched ) to run longer than 5-10 min before crashing. what i believe is that its a conflict with the CCC settings and the in game setting for stuff like AA and texture filtering. ccc works wonders for things like mmos and low budget games without in game options for those settings, but with higher level stuff that has the options it seems to start a bitch fight between what the CCC wants and what the game is set to.

 

most games seem to be built off of Nvidia cards and then checked for compatibility with the ATI stuff but i can really see QA not worrying about hunting for conflicts between the hard coded FX settings and ATI's external "tweak" program.

 

i was gonna throw out that I could be a "special" case as my card is a non-standard AGP model, but you guys got other models so its probably not that.

[Annatar]

I just hit another little issue... Whenever I try to breach the surface of the water after swimming in the seewrs in St. Lucia it'd be like hitting a semi-solid surface. The camera keeps rebounding back from the surface, making splashing noises while the character loses air until he eventually drowns. It's impossible to climb out of the water or get air in any way other than by using a breath potion.

 

Once I exited the game I noticed that the brightness of my screen has also been turned right down too. No idea why that would be, but my brightness controls are cranked all the way up so I guess I'll have to reboot.

[Springheel]

The water issue is long fixed. The gamma issue should really only happen if D3 crashes; it should reset properly if D3 exits normally.