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A little study in metals: copper, silver, gold. Tried to use as much as I know from the PBR workflow.

As for the frame rates, something doesn't add up. Bloom has a constant and fairly cheap cost (depending on render resolution), and there is no way that adding many lights could possibly be cheaper. However, looking at your screenshots, your first shot without bloom (setup_e_8_noss_bloom_on.jpg) shows NO SHADOWS from the panels, whereas your direct comparison (setup_hdr_8_noss_bloom_on.jpg) does. Most likely, something went wrong when you took that first shot, and shadows were not rendering. That easily explains the framerate difference.

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, Boy Lag has started playing through all of the WS missions and is currently playing WS 3. I think Boy Lag found the right words to describe the situation.

Just one sneak peak from mine for the time being.

An encounter with some rather unsavoury types is taking shape...

DarkRadiant Video Tutorials wiki page I made some changes to the DarkRadiant Video Tutorials wiki page. I added missing descriptions to some of the video's and more video sources. https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=DarkRadiant_Video_Tutorials Just wondering if people might disagree with some of the changes, especially the added video's from different makers. Or people have suggestions. If not, then good. Edit: I removed the link to Bikerdudes video's again because in them he talks of reusing parts of maps from other missions (in this case I think mission A new Job). I didn't check out all of his video's in that playlist, so I didn't spot it before. The reason I removed them is that I don't want people to show the wrong example of building. Also, I think that the video's (although very informative), aren't great purely as instruction. Edit 2: Added dates of video submissions.

Wicked. You'll get PM.

For one thing, modern != powerful. FSR is usable on APUs, for example. But it does go all the way back to RX400 cards, and I've seen people experimenting with it on GT 700 cards, so it does work on older hardware. In all likelihood, the GPU needs to support compute shaders, and you're probably limited by VRAM. As for whether or not it actually makes sense for TDM, that remains to be seen. Tests generally conclude that it works better at higher resolutions, so that may limit its use for lower spec systems. But it could help e.g. if you have a higher-resolution screen than your system can realistically power, because it should produce better images than our current resolution scaler alone. I do think that there is a decent chance FSR could work pretty well for TDM, though. From all my impressions so far, FSR's strong point is upscaling of edges, whereas small detail in textures or e.g. foliage can end up blurry. But TDM is usually fairly low on such details, anyway, so there is not much to be lost to begin with. We'll see.

Soft shadows are definitely the number 1 frame killer, especially if you set the quality too high. However, AO is *far* from being free, it has a very significant impact even on strong GPUs. It does depend on your render resolution and AO quality level, though.

I know this was already solved, but for the record the standard solution to this, the standard practice period, is that you need to always put down invisible clip brush (with the right material to get the step-sounds correct) for all non-brush walkable surfaces, bridges, uneven patch-made floors in caves and natural terrain, even uneven brush work if it's disjointed enough, etc. Just get into the habit of laying down clip brushes for anything like that every time, then AI will always be able to traverse it.

This sounds like something I could knock out in an evening or two using a Python script. I've got no decent blocks of free time at the moment, but if nobody beats me to it I'll give it a go sometime. I've also been thinking of a script that would work something like the blender "array" modifier for easy duplication+offset of your selection, optionally combining the result. That might make the carpet placement a little faster once you drew one step's worth.

My condolences to you and your family. Your father was a great coder, mission author, and a great overall human being. (He seemed to act like our grampa here too, and always called TDM AI his children.) He had labelled "William Steele 6" as "Release Candidate 2" so that one is probably unquestionably eligible for release given grayman's extremely high standards. I will open a discussion on this internally and I have copies of the last missions added to the beta forum.

Hi this is Graymans son My father was a poet, a painter, a writer, and a giant nerd. He studied nuclear physics, aerospace engineering, and AI. But all he really wanted to do was play video games. He recently lost a very long war with Cancer. My dad has a little plaque you all sent him hanging on the wall next to handprints from his grandchildren. Whenever my children would call him he'd talk to them about "his boring video game stuff" according to my 8 year old... who never really understood why Grayman didn't like Pokemon as much as he did. I found a file on his computer stating that the last few levels he was working on 95%, 95%, and 50% finished. He also said working with another dev would take up too much time that he wanted to spend with his family instead. To be fair I worked with my father my entire life on random things (including Doom mods back in the day) and he never thought anything was finished. So I'd personally consider the two 95% missions to basically be done. If whoever he sent them to to Beta test wanted to share them with the development team I don't think he'd really mind and you shouldn't feel guilty if you do. I'll leave that up to you guys, but I will not be uploading them and they should not be posted publicly. The final mission will remain unfinished though. I will mention that it was going to be pretty damn good from what I read in his notes. He did ask that two levels that weren't related to the Steele missions do get uploaded to the abandoned level archive. I am in the process of doing that now. Thanks

What horrible news. RIP grayman. I shall include a small tribute in my next mission.

https://streamable.com/r4iqt1

Yeah, that's fair enough, although so far I haven't found an instance where HDR actually has a significant overhead. Just for fun, I tested it on my GPD Win 2 with its dual-core M3 and an HD615, and the framerate difference between 32 bit color precision and no bloom to 64 bit color precision with bloom was something like 35 to 32 fps in the beginning of "A new job". Not that that's an exhaustive test or anything, and as you say, there could be scenes that react more strongly. But my impression is that even the low end of the current hardware generation is pretty well optimized to handle floating point buffers.

The cost of bloom itself is pretty low, but the cost of HDR is not so evident. It increases size of framebuffer color image by 100%, size of the whole framebuffer by 50%, and total memory consumed by framebuffers by 33% or 25%. If a particular scene is limited by memory bandwidth or size on particular hardware, it might be noticeable. Don't forget about integrated GPUs, which use ordinary RAM. I don't think fake bloom has considerable performance cost. Moreover, you don't need to create particle for the halo, a transparent func_static is enough. I thought light flares are created like this. UPDATE: Also you should take into account that some people won't want to enable bloom in its current form, regardless of whether HDR is enabled or not.

Bloom is a screen-space effect, it has a constant cost independent of the number of lights (or bright spots). That cost is very low; I think it was below 0.5ms on a GTX 1050Ti mobile. I don't know how many fake halos you can render in that time (probably quite a few), but compared to the total cost of scene rendering, you are unlikely to notice this one, except on really old hardware perhaps

So there's an inverted fps finding: with NO soft shadows or ambient occlusion 48xlight&emitter 71fps bloom shader 59fps with YES soft shadows and ambient occlusion 48xlight&emitter 16fps bloom shader 22fps (Ambient occlusion doesn't seem to have much of a fps impact - esp compared to soft shadows. Soft shadows in TDM brings my pc to its knees.) Note that the hdr bloom shaders at the yellow end of the spectrum look different in photoshop and DR than they do in game. At the top end of the spectrum, red-magenta-blue-cyan-green are more true to photoshop. The soft yellow bloom most resembling my light/emitter panel is actually a yellow-green, rgb=43,78,9 and emits a greenish glow, which isn't too bad. FYI the colors in the panel array are: yellow-green 43,78,9 orange 94,30,0 yellow 255,242,0 red 255.0.0 magenta 236,0,140 blue 0,0,255 cyan 0,255,255 green 0,255,0 dark-yellow 100,94,0