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https://streamable.com/r4iqt1

My eye muscles never worked for this, so I always had to do it the crosseyed route (which as you all probably know reverses the effect, innies become outies and vice versa). I remember going through a whole book of them over like an hour or whatever, and after I'd finished, I realized my eyes just stayed crossed and I couldn't flex them back straight; even after applying some effort to it, they'd just push back crossed. It stayed like that for at least a good minute or two, and I recall a few moments panicking and thinking, "Well shit. I guess this is it. They're stuck like this for good now." Fortunately they did finally ease their way back into place, and I've made sure to practice moderation in my eyecrossing antics ever since.

This is awful news. Rest in Peace, grayman. You will be greatly missed.

Grayman was a legendary presence. I am sure that he will be missed both here and in the real world. I cannot express enough thanks to him and enough condolences to his friends and family who will undoubtedly miss him deeply. Salute to the best of the best!

I just wanted to share the sad news that grayman, long time developer and the author of the William Steele series, passed away recently after a battle with cancer. He was a pleasure to work with and did more for this mod than most people will ever realize. I am glad that his missions will live on.

As an amusing aside to this, does anyone remember those little "find the differences between these two images" puzzles that would appear in the newspaper or various magazines at times? I learned that you could do the eye-crossing maneuver on those two images and easily spot the differences in seconds. I would try to defocus my eyes to get the two images to "overlap" thus making a third combined image where the differences kind of shimmered and stood out so you could see them really easily. I never found any use for this other than nifty childish party-trick, but I thought I'd share.

Very sad news. RIP Grayman, you've been a huge source of inspiration and key part of the community. My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Just finished playing version 2 and I can happily report that fps problems have been resolved and even on my ancient rig it is perfectly playable throughout. Upgrading to TDM 2.09a has also got rid of the crash in the airlock/decontamination chamber. A couple of very minor glitches: some of the vane panels, first appearing along the entrance shaft(s), seem to lack bounding boxes meaning you can stick your head in them. Also I was stuck on geometry on a couple of occasions near/in the recreation area. Maybe something to check for v 3. Again thanks for a very enjoyable and well-produced mission!

Magic Eye! Oh man does that bring back some memories. They were most commonly bundled in a glossy print collection and sold as a book called "Magic Eye" here in Pennsylvania. They were hugely popular when I was in elementary school. I remember begging my Mother to purchase all three books each year when one came out. We had a little shop in the school that sold them and they always sold out rather quickly. I would spend hours crossing my eyes just right to make out the hidden images. Some of them were rather impressive and the effect could be quite clear when done properly. I do recall that many of my friends couldn't perform the eye movements to see the images at all and I myself struggled initially. Success was often determined by holding the book at exactly the right distance from yourself and crossing your eyes to a specific point where just a millimeter off either way meant failure. That's how it felt as a child at least lol. Sure would give you a nasty case of eye strain going through the whole book in one sitting too! That would certainly be a really cool easter-egg to see in a game somewhere but it would be rather mean to hide mission critical information in something like that. Still, I would personally love to see it. EDIT: Looks like the book had a 25th anniversary special lol. There are some pretty cool sample images here you can check out for free too and find out more about the books. Sorry. The nostalgia got me on this one.

https://gitlab.com/orbweaver/DarkRadiant/-/commit/66b3c0780c16268985b4b1f6929780ffbb297db2

This is a sad day for our community. He was a great inspiration for me and he'll definitely be missed. I got to work with him a little when I was helping out with some parts of the code. I really valued our discussions, and I actually learned a lot about coding from him. I think I learned even more about design from him. He was one of those rare kinds of people that has a lot of technical know-how but is also really creative & has a great artistic and design sensibility and knows how to tell a good story. I was somehow thinking he would be able to rejoin us soon, but now I just think that we were very fortunate to have had him as part of our community for as long as we did. Thank you for everything & clear skies, grayman.

Rest in peace Grayman. Thank you for everything you have done for this mod. You will be greatly missed!

I saw a version 2 on the updater. Haven't played it all the way through yet but it fixed a lot of the framerate issues in the early areas which were slowing down to sub 20 fps sometimes on the not so great computer I was playing it on. I did play the first version all of the way and it is a very good conceptual mission with a lot of good exploration elements and alternative routes for those who look. Good use of space. The voice acting as mentioned previously was very good and added a lot to it. Your missions have definitely improved in general quality with each new one.

That is very sad news indeed. I don't know what to say, my condolences to the family.

Having not known Grayman, all I can say is that I hope he spent his lasts moments surrounded by his loved ones. This is a sad news indeed. Maybe adding something special about him in the next update of TDM could be a good thing: in the credits, a text detailing how much TDM owes him as a developer, what he achieved, who he was, something like that... or maybe also adding something about him in the credits of his series of missions for TDM. May he rest in peace, and may his family and loved ones have the strength to bear his absence.

At the moment, only one. We could try to test a download from my mirror with artificially limited download speed. Perhaps there's a hidden timeout somewhere if download takes too long, although I didn't find anything obvious.

Oh no. Very sad news. Such a wonderful human being. Rest in Peace Grayman.

It turns out we were doing exactly this. I have removed all forced colour setting in the Entity Inspector, and instead show the inherited properties in italic text. I think this makes the distinction clear (along with the lack of property type icons) without compromising visibility in either light or dark themes.

Wouldn't the leaf plane shadows look wrong in any case, because they would just be the shadows of various squares and rectangles, with no visible leaf pattern?

I think the problem is not really with PBR itself but with how the game assets and lighting are currently done, imo trying to brute force PBR stuff into a render and assets optimized for non PBR, will never work totally as intended. But I most say, it does look better when it works, so please continue your efforts.

v 0.79 minor tweak to direct fake spec to brighten it up a bit made "darkerunder" only impact fresnel on ambient again, because it was darkening ceilings and such too much when it impacted diffuse & specular specular BRDF added back in with a toggle (#define BRDF_SPECULAR 0/1) to let you switch it on/off The "darker under" thing was culling light too much on ceilings when applied to all ambient light. It's because there's no way to tell what's an object (like a canvas package) vs a ceiling or such. So, I just have it culling rimlight again. I started staring at PBR again. Trying to make sense of it is a learning curve, because sources talking about it either go into very high-level math / comp sci / academia / white paper discussions about it, or they discuss it piece-meal with code chunks without really showing how everything fits together. But, it breaks down into a diffuse lighting model (eg: Lambertian) mashed up with a specular lighting mode (blinn/phong, schlick, ggx, etc). I was staring at the learnOpenGL PBR page again, and followed the link to the Unreal team's paper talking about their work on PBR into UE4. They said they looked at Disney's stuff, and ignored certain things b/c the cost/benefit wasn't worth it. EG: they ignored using other diffuse lighting models (like Burley model) after doing some tests and realizing Lambertian was good enough. The real benefit comes from the GGX, etc specular stuff. So, I ditched the diffuse stuff in the "interactions.pbr" file, and trimmed down to just some basic specular functions for visibility (geometry), distribution & fresnel. (Mainly GGX, since that seems to be what most folks focus on). I got stuff working, and have the fake spec map doing double-duty as a roughness map as well. Ambient & Direct light do their own thing from there... I forced Ambient light to use 1-fakespec as a roughness to prevent glossiness. For some reason the specular distribution term wants to barf white pixels everywhere when glossiness is high, and the glossiness on real spec mapped surfaces sticks out like a sore thumb. So, I forced it to do rough surfaces. Direct lights... if it has a real spec map, I have it doing glossy. If it has fake spec map, it does rough. This allows shiny surfaces, like the pillars on Training Mission, to look like mirror-finish polished marble, reflecting the torch light more. The results of all of this are ok. The specular seems to even out in ambient lighting better. Metal pipes and such have more body to them as they reflect more light. But, some surfaces look wet. Some surfaces look like they have a bunch of white pixels washing over the place like dust. I think this is the micro-facet algorithm going full-steam with "every facet is reflective". To make it vary in color, it needs like a noise algorithm to go with it. I was reading some coding lab web page where folks were doing monte carlo sims to statistically vary their micro-facets (*cough*).. but they were doing rays and stuff. I'm trying to get a noise function to work, b/c I'd like to use it to tone down the gloss on NPC faces and such. But, I can't seem to get GLSL's built-in noise() func's to work, nor ones I bolt in from other sources. I think I'm missing a random value generator to ensure the seed value changes? I'm not sure. I've hit a dead end with noise generation. Anyways.. here's some screen shots... The pillars have real spec maps, so the fake spec map acts as a gloss map instead of a rough map for them. The BRDF specular obstacle course creates reflections of the candle as if it's polished marble. The metal stands out more with speculars, but in ambient light I use the fake spec map as (1-fakespec) for a roughness map. So, they don't have heavy reflection. But, if you turn on the lantern, you will see the lantern reflect light off the pipes more (like with the marble pillars). The spec brdf hugs the curves of the objects more, creating crisp lines. Invasion of the white, speckly pixels. The spec distribution function loves to over-bright things. I had to hackishly tone down it's results in the glossy brdf branch. Even then... I toned down the specular on the ground, but the ground has a real spec map, so it's using the glossy brdf branch. It has a nice shine, but it's a bit over-done. And, the white speckly pixels start to look like static as you move sometimes. The issue with the PBR is it feels like it needs to get tweaked per-level. On one level the specular shines are too much. On another, not enough. Etc. The idea of the BRDF is that it makes more decisions on things, like spec power, rather than having to fiddle with variables. But, still stuck fiddling with some variables. glprogs.stages.interaction.079.zip

I was never really sure whether the map was too bright or too dark as everyone has a different display and TDM brightness and gamma settings. Since the first half of the FM has no lights I tried to lean on the side of having it a little brighter as I didn't want players complaining that the map is just too dark for too long. I can look at reducing the ambient light a little. Reducing to almost pitch black would potentially create a better atmosphere for some players but others might get frusted by how dark it would be

I look back on the late 80s to late 90s quite fondly. I was born in 81 so those years were some of the best in my life. I don't know if things were actually better then or if memory is selective as Zerg Rush said. We tend to forget painful things and exaggerate the good times. It is human nature. I think some of what may give the illusion of things generally being worse is the connectedness of the world now. The ease with which information flows to every corner of the earth. The internet, cell phones all make it easier for information to spread and for people to individually share their feelings or gossip to the masses. Misery does love company and people love to spread the latest bad news rather than share joyful events. We also seem oddly drawn to it in general as well if you follow internet and youtube trends. Negativity and drama get the most attention. I feel its almost created a feedback loop of sorts where many people hyper fixate on themselves and their problems since that is what they see most being shared by others. It gets attention and it just breeds more and more of it. I do think, at least in the US, that movies, games and many other forms of entertainment have been impacted by the current culture war. Call it wokeness or political correctness or give it whatever label you wish, but the end result is that offense has become taboo and cancel culture pushes all of the various entertainment mediums towards sterilization and blandness. Collectivism doesn't exactly foster creativity after all. There's also the obvious profit motive that drives games to focus on accessibility to boost sales. Get the game in the most hands possible. Ultimately gameplay gets simplified and difficulty gets driven into the dirt. I don't think a good game can possibly appeal to everyone. We all have individual tastes and prefer different games but the genres of games have decreased and the differences between genres has become less distinct. Many games attempt to be a jack of all trades rather than taking a risk on an idea that may only appeal to few.

The Penumbra series, great stealth* survival horror game *(you don't have weapons)