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A little "No Honor Among Thieves" v4 preview. Not too revealing. See if you can spot the new texture I created...

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

Wanderlust: Transsiberian https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/get-a-free-copy-of-wanderlust-transsiberian-on-gog-with-their-publisher-sale https://www.gog.com/giveaway/claim

As I already wrote above, I don't see any use for this. In fact it would be the third item with a flash effect while we have only one with a non lethal effect, the gas arrow. As I belong to the sort of player knocking out everyone I would rather have another means to do that, like the electrical mine I created...

@datiswous The Tielman Brothers, holy shit. I'm ashamed to say, but I didn't know this band. Impressive performance and somehow prophetic (considering the things that came about 20 years later). Will investigate and search for more, thank you for that!

...And to give you some perspective on that: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/LOD https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/WorkingWithContent/Types/StaticMeshes/HowTo/LODs/ http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/LOD https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LevelOfDetail.html And in general: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OptimizingGraphicsPerformance.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/TestingAndOptimization/PerformanceAndProfiling/Guidelines/ These guidelines^ can be applied to idtech4 as well. As you see, there are performance optimization tricks for lighting, but there's literally nothing there on using LOD for lights. By the way: Perhaps in the old days, but having a few thousand of LOD entities in a scene costs CPU next to nothing, while providing substantial savings for the GPU. It's more likely that you'll run into any other bottleneck much sooner.

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.

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.

Symphonia free on GOG https://www.gog.com/game/symphonia