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After a considerable amount of time and work by a group effort, while betatesting was mostly on hold, a new beta build has been uploaded today. The FM has been improved & completed in all kinds of areas (such as overall presentation, readables, voiceovers, execution of the main story and new secret locations), and now the time has come to resume testing. Both new and returning betatesters would be very welcome. In fact, quite a few new betatesters may be needed as it's been a while since the last build. Here's another link to the Discord server: https://discord.gg/fP32yEn"

I think we'll have to consider shadow maps an ongoing experimental feature. One significant hurdle (in my opinion) is that not all light types are implemented in shadow maps, which means that the engine will fall back to stencil for some lights and thus still generates stencil shadow volumes even when you select shadow maps. So in a way, you currently get the worst of both worlds with shadow maps

Nvidia's SAO isn't really specific to Nvidia cards. All the techniques it uses are in some way also present in the FidelityFX implementation or Intel's ASSAO, those just add a couple additional advanced optimizations Reasons for SAO: it was well documented, had an OpenGL sample implementation, good license, was reasonably simple to implement in a reasonable amount of code (definitely much less than the afore-mentioned ones!) and offers reasonable quality at reasonable performance - not fully state of the art, but also significantly better than some basic implementations that you often find in tutorials (and which I started with in my first attempt)

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I think it is actually quite weird that we don't have a thread on graphics technology, yet. So, I would like to encourage you to share awesome new demos, talks, articles or papers about graphics technology here. 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?

I have a nice, 2TB storage dedicated server I can put to use as a mirror if necessary. It's US based and should be able serve everything pretty quickly. Is there a need for another mirror to host missions and game files at this time?

I just found a nice 40 minutes documentary by GVMERS, released 2 April, about Thief history and thief like games. It's called The Rise and Fall of Thief, and you can watch it here. Yes, it's considered old news by internet standards (10 days 1 month old) but i thought that if you are like me and consume everything thief related, you would like to know about it.

Fair enough. I didn't want to imply that you guys are only in it for the graphics. Just that I think there's too much focus on them these days.

We posted the same shit at the same time. Brilliant!

I am not implying that I only play games with superb AAA-graphics. But I'd still like to know how these technologies work because it is simply very interesting!!

Graphics are cool. I prefer gameplay though. I know, I'm of a dying breed.

I miss the old like, where you know who liked a post you made. Awesome bookshelf.

The number of mirrors is not too high today, and new mirror would definitely be welcome. However, we have been split on the question of whether we could use a server as official mirror when its owner has zero posts on these forums. The TDM code does not properly verify downloads, so we must be sure that mirrors owners can be trusted. Sorry.

Biker asked that I post this: “Evening, as some of you may know I have been working on a large city based mission for TDM. I am very close to rolling out the first beta so have set up a Discord server to do the beta testing on. For anyone that has previous beta testing exp and would like to help, head on over to - https://discord.gg/fP32yEn" I've seen this map, and it looks really good. Help Biker get this long-awaited puppy out the door! Thanks!

It's a really nice mini documentary and a love letter to looking glass and the thief community.

Good catch - something to keep in mind for the future I guess. -Gelo

Sure! I was just getting at the Fake-AO decals. I've seen people use such decals on every step of a staircase. That's stuff we probably won't need anymore.

Sitting home from now on because of covid-19 emergency measures. Glad there will be something from the top notch fm-makers to make my miserable life better

The following are simple facts: 1. The FPS counters in screenshots are notoriously unreliable. 2. Without knowing the hardware of the person posting screenshots, the FPS counter gives you no indication of how the map will run on someone else's machine. 3. Most missions drop to the 30s in places for my machine--this has not impacted my ability to enjoy said missions. 4. I have released several missions that have places where FPS dropped to the 30s on my machine; I have yet to hear feedback from players that they found this to be a problem, and I have yet to be laughed out of the community. And a couple speculations for good measure: 1. In a slow game like TDM, I highly doubt the average player could tell the difference between 50fps and 36fps unless the number was displayed on the screen. 2. A community that releases only a single, perfect mission every three years is highly unlikely to survive. A community that releases missions of varying quality on a regular basis is far more likely to maintain high levels of traffic.