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I got a whole lot done on the inside the past week, but decided to switch gears and try my hand at landscaping: SEED seems to do pretty well at scattering grass, but I need to tweak things to get them to floor better. I came up with a nice little trick to draw the image maps SEED can use to spawn entities: 1. Take a screenshot of the top view from DR, and import it into your favorite photo editor 2. Add a new half-transparent layer and draw your image map on top 3. Crop and export your top layer with the right settings, and apply it to your SEED entity

Note that when you enable com_automation for the first time, the Windows Firewall will ask you for permission. Most players won't have interest neither in mapping nor in having their game process to listen for connections - I think enabling this feature and confirming the firewall dialog should be something that is done on purpose, once when people start playing around with the editor. On the other ideas, I think there's nothing stopping DarkRadiant from launching the game with the +com_automation 1 parameters. That would be useful and resembles some of the functionality that was present in DoomEdit.

Starting TDM from DR would actually be useful I think. If you could hit a single button which would start the game, enable automation, compile and launch the current map, move the player position to the current camera position... this would really cut down all of the manual switching between applications, entering "testmap" etc. In this case players wouldn't need to worry about the automation feature, entering console commands and the like. The automation would just be there under the hood to streamline the process.

Actually now that I'm at it, I should share some of the first forest area too. The bandit forest... called that way because you encounter bandits who are the first foe you'll have to sneak past. And this is after it starts raining, technically halfway throughout the game. It's easy to make weather effects triggerable fortunately, which I think makes them more interesting and the FM to feel more complex.

I might port it to TDM, if I find the time. But a generic non-VR mod is actually trickier to do than for VR, and I have too many other things to do

https://www.pcgamer.com/modder-adds-amd-fidelityfx-super-resolution-to-skyrim-vr-fallout-4-vr-and-more/ Any plan for a non-VR version @cabalistic ?

@peter_spySorry for interference, but I think that's the kind of language that can get you in trouble in this forums The silent committee is watching you I personally don't mind a little internet drama, but better me try to warn you than one day you just wake up and find out you're banned. Not that it would be end of the world, but still. Let's be cool.

I'm afraid you're not. You are showing a standard scene and just hide a lot of its lights. It's very clear that this gives a performance boost, nobody doubts that. It's just also completely meaningless, because doing so alters the entire scene. And so it becomes a completely different scene and not merely a "performance optimized" scene. As such, it is *not* suitable to determine whether culling lights by distance is an actual usable performance optimization. As I already explained on the Discord, the influence of lights on performance correlates with the amount of pixels it touches, because the most expensive parts of lights are the calculations done in the pixel shader. As such, the amount of tris is not as important, so you are looking at the wrong numbers. However, this is also the issue: when a light is sufficiently negligible to a scene that culling it could actually be an acceptable performance optimization, it will invariably also be touching a lot fewer pixels to begin with. Certainly a lot fewer than in your test scene. And that changes the whole equation, because if it's touching fewer pixels to begin with, it will have less benefit to not render the light. All we are asking here is a demonstration that in a situation where a light is barely noticable (visually), it is still sufficiently impacting performance that implementing a distance-based culling system for lights would be worth the (potentially considerable) development effort.

That wiki entry reads more like a technical white paper than a feature documentation; I certainly wouldn't expect ordinary users to plough through all of that. It's probably about time DarkRadiant's own online documentation contained some instructions for using the game connection feature. I hadn't added it up until now because the feature was somewhat experimental and in flux, but now that it's been in the software for a few months and has visible UI elements associated, it should be documented. Of course we all know that users hardly ever read documentation, so improving discoverability of the feature is still important even if it is also covered by the user guide.

See my last reply, was just typing it in the meantime. It shows how even removing only the torches and leaving the electric lights on has a notable improvement. Which would count as leaving the visuals relatively unchanged, especially if we had fading as well. Torches are lower range and acceptable... we'd also have even smaller lights like candles. The lever example is the best I can use right now: I can't test a feature that isn't yet implemented. But it's close to simulating what would happen. The map is easy to edit, you can make it toggle just the torches or something and see to what extent you feel that makes a visual difference. I did my best to provide a useful test case as much as I saw possible.

But these screenshots look nothing alike. Surely that's not what a player would want to happen just by moving a certain amount beyond some arbitrary distance?! Any LOD effects are usually meant to be deployed where a reduction in graphical detail gives a performance boost without being too noticeable to the player. Those lights being turned off is as far from not being noticeable as you can get.

doubt it was intentional from the devs side though in retrospect it and many other games have similarities. Same story with books where variations of plots sometime lead you to think you read this before.

If people aren't using the feature, it is most likely due to a lack of discoverability — users don't know that the feature exists, or what benefit it can provide for them. This is probably not going to be fixed by tweaking the GUI layout or having more/fewer buttons, but there are some things which could be done to improve discoverability: Have the connection always active when the game is running, rather than having to go into the console and enable com_automation. Currently there is no way for users to even know that they have to do this without visiting the forum and reading the appropriate thread. If a user clicks on one of the camera-toolbar buttons, they will just get an error dialog and probably conclude that the feature is broken or useless. DR could dynamically detect when the game is running and automation is enabled, and automatically enable the respective buttons, rather than having them active (but not useful) at all times. This would be a clear change of state when automation was possible, which would encourage users to click on the now-active buttons to see what they did, thereby discovering and exploring the feature. There could be some kind of indicator widget in the status bar, maybe with a pop-up bubble the first time (and only the first time) automation is detected, to make users aware that there is something new they can do.

Sorry for that, JackFarmer. I would have been fine with you taking it on. I still haven't had a response so I'm going to leave it too.

So that no misunderstanding arises: I'm out, because Petike has not clearly stated here that he is handing over the project and Shadow Creepr did not want to continue without his clear consent (he did not respond to a PM from her either).

Liking how this landscape turned out so far. Just one of the areas in my new FM, in between two of the city hubs it's gonna have available to explore and do missions in. Odd as it may seem this is one of the areas with the best performance.

In much more grim news, another depressing new low for Activision Blizzard. What a fantastic chapter in the company history. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/activision-blizzard-sued-by-california-over-frat-boy-culture