https://www.dsogaming.com/news/we-may-be-one-step-closer-to-a-doom-3-path-tracing-mod/

https://github.com/jmarshall23/DoomRTX

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4200960/Thief_The_Dark_Project_Remastered/

 

Let's get this started...

The End Is Nigh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DUps2QKA0

The End Is Nigh is a sprawling adventure platformer where you die a lot, but that's ok because you are probably already dead anyway.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/the-end-is-nigh/home

ABZU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9d8YjpJgiU

From the art director of Journey® and Flower®, ABZÛ is a beautiful underwater adventure that evokes the dream of diving.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/abzu/home

Intel's Broadwell-E flagship enthusiast CPU, the Core i7-6950X, is expected to have 10 cores.

AMD Zen mainstream desktop CPUs could have 6-8 cores. The architecture has moved from Bulldozer's Clustered Multithreading to Simultaneous Multithreading, which is closer to Intel's design and has two threads per core. Zen desktop CPUs will be released before laptop CPUs. There could be a 16 core APU in 2017.

AMD's 14 or 16nm Polaris GPUs will apparently be cheaper and cooler, rather than trying to compete with the GTX 1080's performance. The Radeon R9 490 could cost $300. The Polaris GPUs will not have High Bandwidth Memory, which will instead be added to 2017 Vega GPUs as successors to the Fury series.

Sony could launch a "PS4K" console using an AMD Polaris GPU and faster Jaguar CPU capable of playing the current PS4 games in 2160p instead of 1080p. It could also boost frame rates for the PSVR.

I recently came accross this brilliant analysis of the rendering pipeline of "Rise of the Tomb Raider". I would love to see something like that for Doom Eternal, but so far, I could only find this rather superficial (but nevertheless interesting) review by Digital Foundry.

Epic revealed Unreal Engine 5 today, which looks absolutely stunning. That Nanite-Technology will probably save game developers quite a bit of time. I do wonder, 'though, how the actually do it? Do they dynamically generate LOD-models? Also, does their Lumen technology require RTX?

To my shame, I must admit that I never played the game, more than the occasional "Let's check what it's like", and then realized that the controls are a bit too ancient for me. But, I think I will give the game another try with this engine, and the more modern controls.

On a lighter note (and because my holiday started today, oh yeah!), let's have a new thread for music, that you just enjoy and probably is not so well known...or somehow obscure but does not sound as strange as the songs we report in @STiFU's progessive music thread.

Here is one of my new favourites, a similar recording of this track by other artists  has been used in an US show broadcasted last year ( @Amadeus: What is the name of the show? )

http://youtu.be/4p0DsVPkyZg

FxSound (formerly known as DFX) is a high-fidelity digital audio processing program. It brings you booming bass, crystal clear audio and high fidelity by optimizing your music in real time. That means you get a studio quality listening experience without the need for overly expensive headphones or speakers. FxSound simply runs in the background. Just turn on your music and enjoy an improved listening experience. Its features include:

• EQ: Balanced your sound with 9-band graphical EQ with customizable center frequencies.
• Visualizer: Built-in audio visualizer to feel your music.
• Effects: Boosted bass and volume to improve your music and movie viewing experience.
• You can also enhance clarity of audio or add ambiance and surround effects.
• Presets: Presets professionally designed for music, gaming, movies, transcription, and more. Additional presets can be found here. You can also make your own presets and share them.

https://www.fxsound.com (FOSS AGPL v3.0, Windows)

Similar for Linux EasyEffects

Indie Game - Window/PS/X-Box

I am not native English, but for my German ears the English voices sound very German. The voice acting in the German trailer is much better though...and ends with a much better statement!

Anyways, looks promising and since @chakkmanintroduced me to the genre with "Arx Fatalis" (which I am currently playing), I think I will give this a shot. 

Also, the new version that is just about to come out (2.70) will increase cycles rendering speed on the CPU by about 30%. That is pretty awesome.

I'll begin:

http://www.dailytech...rticle33998.htm

I never imagined people pissing in an elevator. Of all the strange ideas I've had in my life, that was never one of them. Personally, I suspect the thug.

... and this comment cracked me up.

"Why in the world would someone pee in an elevator?

Also, when the system catches someone, they don't have to call the police. All they have to do is lock the elevator doors, engage the heaters and shaking motors, and get paid ad money on YouTube for the footage. "

Found this neat project in development by the dev on twitter, called Gloomwood. I'll let the screenshots speak for themselves:

http://gloomwood.com/press/

The dev's twitter: https://twitter.com/Jollyrogers99 . I'm surprised there isn't a topic about it yet here, because he's most definitely part of the thief community! 

Anyway, I really like it. It's cool to see people embracing dated visuals as if it was by design. It wasn't, we know, but it has its merits besides nostalgia, in my opinion.

I made a site full of level design articles in hopes of breaking into the industry. I began with google sites, but now I've migrated to mediawiki. I still want something better than mediawiki, but for now it was the easiest solution to publish text and have more freedom to format than google sites. My plan is to work in the industry. My long term goal is to make that site a professional resource and refactor everything. But that won't come until after some years of professional experience. 

For now I've stopped adding more articles because it's a futile endeavor. The reason is pretty much this article of mine: https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/Environment_Art_x_Level_design_x_Writing._Ego_made_me_blind

https://www.henry-ym.org

I made this: https://www.moddb.com/members/frost-nova/addons

I have made maps for Open Arena before. If you ever seen maps called Lego + something. Plus, a colorful map with too many colors at the same time, circular arena style, called RGB. I made it too. I deleted them from moddb because I was going to rename to remove the "lego" trademark, but I guess I forgot to upload them.

"Erasure" — Civil War period drama, Shenandoah Valley, winter 1864-65. Three Confederate women shelter a Black stranger named Elias; their husbands return from Mosby's command at the end. About 64 pages. Restrained period prose. Has an unusual element late in the runtime that I'd most value people's read on.

https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ94qiZHE2hjDl8iCRI24ixDlfcehrikpxV

If you read any of it, I'd value the read. Most useful: did it hold you, and if you finished, what do you think happens at the end. If you stop somewhere, telling me where is also useful data.

No obligation. Whatever you give back is appreciated.

Zain Shah, Eddie Jiao, Drew Carr

Every "page" you land on is an image. Click on anything in the image and you will get a new image exploring that thing in more depth. What you see contains no HTML, no code, no specific links or fields. The entire web is just generated pixels on your screen.

https://www.sketchapedia.com

(The game itself is for Windows, but can be played on Linux via Wine, the info in this topic is still useful mostly for Windows users as well)

You know what drew my attention? Around 1:10 he says something similar to "it's mission based but at the same time it's very sandbox in nature. Every mission you are given a huge map to explore and no particular path is forced". Does that ring any bells?

Looks like a nice game

The poll does not allow too many choices, so I had to reduce the selection to the core aspects. If you feel like, you can add specific info here - such as, "I switched to Ubuntu" and you can also provide additional remarks like "because my neighbor's dog ran away with a washing machine".

If you tried out Linux, but left because of cruel or supernatural experiences, then you are welcome to share your pain with us here.

Video came out in 1994. It was directed by Samuel Bayer who also did "Smells like teen spirit", among many others.

Recently I've been mildly obsessed with the idea of high definition remasters of old music videos. When I saw "Alien" movies for the first time on Blu-Ray after watching them for years on vhs tapes recorded from television, it was like seeing them for the first time. I'm of course talking about proper scans of 16mm or 35mm film. Youtube recently has been uploading many upscaled music videos advertising them as HD. Some people have been attempting to upscale videos using machine learning, but results aren't good.

Some music videos from 80s and 90s are true pieces of art. A lot were made by acclaimed directors like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Anton Corbijn. Hell, even Michael Bay.

Of course original film needs to still exist for a proper remaster to be even possible. If any special effects were originally done in post production in low resolution, those would have to be redone from scratch, which would be expensive. More on the subject by Tom Scott,

Some other examples:

Directed by Dom and Nic; premiered in 1997. At 2:49 you can see people cloned in post production.

Not an MTV era, but definitely worth seeing. Directed by Peter Goldmann (1967):

Vampyr