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Lately it's mostly level design stuff and trying to find interative workflow that is good for me. After hours of blocking out and discarding stuff, I finally got the first draft of a hub location that may actually work. Just finished gluing one of the other locations to it. Now onto designing the third one.

Ok, that's quite enough now. I don't want to hear another word on light entities and LOD unless someone has an actual showcase demonstrating the usefulness or absurdity of the feature. This "discussion" is getting nobody nowhere fast. What's done is done.

Now is a great time to disengage

I can now confirm that on my Intel UHD machine, the BC5 normalmap shows up ingame and without artefacts. And the "bindless handle" console error no longer shows up. My cvars are r_useBindlessTextures 1 and image_useNormalCompression 1.

A bit more percussion from today with one of the best percussionist (60 years old)

I know BMG, as in that they exist, but I don't think I ever heard anything from them. That track was pretty good. Mayumana not as much. I'm not necessarily into purely percussion music, but taiko just has that massive, epic sound, especially as an ensemble. Also, that Fever Ray song is fire. I checked her out years ago, but sadly didn't really enjoy anything else.

Yes, some members are German, but the band in general is not, apart from if they are dedicated to Nordic music. Well, this happens with any style and genre, it always depends on the moment and the mood. For me, the scope of the music I listen to goes from the thirteenth century, Renaissance, Baroque classical and symphonic from the 19th century and today, things like the ones I put on to melodic death metal. The only thing that excludes from the list is reggeton and summer hits, these I can't stand.

Oh nice, shamisen. Just watched an anime about it. Loved all these scenes with people playing. I'm not sure I'd really listen to this stuff casually, but it was fun in the confines of the show. Also, taiko is the best percussion in history.

Heilung is actually mostly German (at least the home country of the band members is), but the themes and languages they use are ancient European (and mostly northern). I like them, but it is a kind of music I cannot listen to too much. Especially the poems and spoken passages are quite strenuous at times.

Moving on: I did in fact find another glitch with the spawnargs, which I reported a few days ago but forgot to share here as well. noshadows_lod_1 will not work unless you also set hide_distance, despite the two being separate LOD functions. This seems to affect every func_static model, it won't stop casting shadows unless you also give it a hide distance. Edit for clarification: This refers to lod noshadows on model entities, it has nothing to do with those lights! I was setting lod parameters on func_static models and noticed the noshadows property wouldn't work on a window mesh until I also set the extra parameter, the window was still a shadow caster after the given range. https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5691

Okay... let me try putting this in a different way. hide_distance was created with the idea that mappers should be able to set a distance limit on all entities that have a visual component, particularly ones that can affect performance. This can include meshes, particles, lights, AI, etc... anything except worldspawn for obvious reasons, or objects in the skybox. This is the normal and intended functionality for this feature, to hide whatever you set it on. Right now you're essentially upset because a limitation was lifted and a bug was fixed. As this was never a desired limitation, no one at any point said "we mustn't allow the hide distance to work on lights"; It's just that no happened to add those few lines of code that preform the check on light sources as well. duzenko was awesome today and provided a bugfix closing the gap. Indeed I highly support the change... not because I have nothing better to do, but because now I know I finally have the ability to customize my map and optimize large spaces to the best extent possible as I see fit. I believe this is a good thing and we should move past it. With light hiding now working and out of the way, we should see if LOD remains broken for any other entities. The hide distance seems to be working almost perfectly right now with only tiny side issues, I'll further investigate those that I find and share them.

It's a double-ended stick for sure Arguably it makes more sense\more useful to hide the light entity while retaining the interactions for everyday mapping (with a special spawnarg to override) With enough mapper votes I might revert that commit so that _all_ lights remain ON even when their entities are hidden But at any rate the standalone and team lights should behave similarly

I hide most of the stuff up there already, but I do still want the lanterns themselves to be visible from a distance, since their purpose is to eventually attract the player's attention to this part of the map, despite their small size, thanks to their surfaces' high luminosity and their swinging motion. (They're quite far away - and .jpg compression makes this worse - because of how huge the geography is, but that's a misjudged scale problem common in first missions). As you can see the illumination itself is almost invisible. The cost of the light is probably very small, but probably no less than that of the crates and packages on that platform. If, as duzenko's earlier post suggests, hide_distance for lights is pretty much implemented already, it can just as well be used.

I've got some lanterns near the top of a mountain in a large outdoor scene. When you look up at them from the foot of the mountain it's almost impossible to see what they light up, given their surroundings. With the way how the mountain path is made, you have to get quite close before you can properly see what these lanterns illuminate. For this scene an option to switch off those lights beyond x distance could be used. Yeah, hide_distance for lights has strict limitations because in most cases the switch is glaringly obvious, but it's still a tool in the toolbox that has situations where it's suitable. Another such situation could be lights inside an apartment that has an open window to the streets, where you know it's not possible to get a clear view inside from further than x units. @peter_spyWith modern workflows, you probably mean an alternative implementation of the LOD system compared to what TDM has?

Very cool!

Wonderful! It's finally there at last. Thank you I think this is the best way in the end: Light hiding as a feature is good to have, especially when we already got it for meshes and all other entity types (it even seems to work on AI which is great). Then it's up to the mapper whether they feel this improves performance without being too visually disruptive, as it depends on how the map and lights are set up.

Completed: At revision: 9528 I hope it's not too breaking a change? @stgatilov @Springheel

This cramped appearance usually indicates that the the parent-child relationship of widgets is messed up. Your code in the constructor to load the XRC-defined panel returns a wxPanel* reference, use that as parent to the indicator: GameConnectionDialog::GameConnectionDialog() : wxutil::TransientWindow(_(GameConnectionDialog_TITLE), GlobalMainFrame().getWxTopLevelWindow(), true) { auto* panel = loadNamedPanel(this, "GameConnectionMainPanel"); //could not find activity indicator in wxFormBuilder auto* ConnectedActivityIndicator = new wxActivityIndicator(panel, wxID_ANY, wxDefaultPosition, wxDefaultSize, 0, wxT("OMG")); replaceControl(findNamedObject<wxWindow>(this, "ConnectedActivityIndicator"), ConnectedActivityIndicator); ... }

No worries. If me providing some basics to test this is okay: Open any working map in DR, in which the player can spawn and is large enough to test distance. Right-click in any 2D viewport and choose "create entity". In the menu go to "The Dark Mod 2.0 (Standalone) - Lights - Model Lights, Static - Torches - atdm:torch_gothic02_wall" then click add. Click-drag the entity around in the 2D viewports so it sits against a wall. With it selected (Shift + Left-Click in 3D viewport if it got deselected) press the N key to open the entity inspector. In the two editable fields at the bottom, set the spawnarg at the top and its value at the bottom then press enter: You should see it get added in the list just above. Save the map and open TDM. In the console use "dmap mapname" followed by "map mapname".

Speaking of old games, Hidden and Dangerous Deluxe Edition (Tactical Shooter from 2003) some years ago was released as freeware (abandonware) and you can download the full game from several sites, f.Exmpl from here (Windows only) https://www.gamepressure.com/download.asp?ID=3756

Serj has some good songs, like Harakiri. The chorus is so good. I remember checking the album out back in the day, but determined it wasn't good enough. Since summer is still going, here is some more summery music. Both some form of chamber pop. I don't care about Sigur Ros, but Jonsi's Go from 2010 is one of my favorite albums. Didn't even know this song had a video. So fun and catchy.

This might be redundant, because I reckon this thread was intended for newer games or giveaways, but Bungie's Marathon trilogy is freely available via the Aleph One open source project. https://alephone.lhowon.org/ I played these this past decade, just because I'm a fan of Halo. If you're looking for prehistoric, labyrinthine and fairly challenging first person shooter action, look no further. I'm not from the Doom-era of gaming, but I enjoyed Marathon for what it is. Durandal is a cool character.

I've been optimizing my map to boost fps from in a lot of cases 25-30 to 45-65, doing this systematically. I have a newbie perspective, this being my first FM - so .... be kind. First off, when building the .map I began by dropping in shadow/no_shadow lights with zero care - just looking to light the areas being worked on. Same for entities, dropping them in with little care except for aesthetics and creating shadows for the player to hide in. That procedure made for a very unoptimized map. So, what's been the optimizing plan? First, clean up the geometry. Second, go thru' the map section by section, setting shadow/no_shadow on entities. There's a tradeoff: complexity of geometry multiplied by shadows gets out of hand, so a lot of care needed here. With a first pass on that done, redo the lighting. I eliminated all the small ambients I'd put in, whether shadowcasting or not, leaving just those lights attached to fixtures of some kind, which I wanted to be in general shadowcasting. I reset these shadowcasters to not overlap so far as viable. I was amazed to find that this made for a much much better looking map coupled with much more acceptable frame rates. I use hide_distance on entities sparingly as I don't like the pop-outs. Not at all! My map has a lot of transparent windows/doors. I use func_portals with hide_distance set on every one of these. Controlling pop-outs caused by func_portals is fairly simple. The func_portal pop-outs tend to be marked by abrupt lighting changes. These are very ugly and getting rid of them or making them unobtrusive is a priority. I cant see using any kind of light pop-out/pop-in spawnarg. Rather, I could see using a shadow/no_shadow hide_distance setting, which could be used more universally and quite unobtrusively. If that's possible now, please tell me how! Also, I could see using a fade-to-black hide_distance on lights, so there'd be no lights a popping.

I just tested the latest version and couldn't find an option to disable the new bright frobbing outlines. Can this please be added? I think there were several people here not liking that and it could be a simple toggle option besides the Frob Helper for example...

Am playing The Bakery Job with dev16330-9508 and I seem to have stumbled across an interesting bug: on the upstairs door (which requires two lock picks) if I look away from the door between the first and second pick the door becomes completely unpickable. Haven't investigated elsewhere, other doors, saving and reloading etc, but imagine this might be a more general issue with this build... Edit: Have confirmed this is a problem in the training mission. To reproduce: Pick up the picks, go to the second door. Pick the first tumbler. Look away and change picks in the inventory (I have mouse wheel bound to my inventory) Picking no longer does anything: there is a green or red flash on the lock pick, but no sound or other action.

I still cannot really see the need for an arrow. If the guard is so far off that you cannot throw the flash bomb in front of him to blind him, it seems to me that he would also be too far off to require blinding at all. The only advantage of an arrow I could think of would be more preicision, but I think if you practice throwing the flash bomb, you should also get the precision you would need to blind a guards.

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

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

New dev build is available: dev16330-9508 And I forgot to announce the previous dev build too : dev16325-9462 Note that subtitles support should work now, but the way how subtitles are specified will most likely change.

Because SVN is used in gamedev, but git is not. Anyway, I'm sick of this question already. Yes, there are plans for official mirror on GitHub for the engine.

Having followed this mod/game for roughly 8 years or so, I have to say that the general quality of first-time submissions from new map authors is really, really good. I don't know if the increased availability of tutorials and other resources has contributed to this, improvements to the editor, or maybe just a desire to keep standards high, but I am impressed with almost every new author's release these days. If I don't like a map it's generally due to the gameplay not being my preference rather than the quality of the map itself.

Pretty proud of myself to have finally contributed to this number Hopefully I'll be able to get another one out this year too

2021 should be quite a good year, as a glance into the betatesting forum and various other places on the forums and Discord would suggest.

You don't see a reason because you lack experience and knowledge, you're so focused on "me me me, I want this, gimme!". I'm focused on the big picture, i.e. not being in a bubble, using the common knowledge and language, and working with what has already been established in gamedev, so the engine uses known workflows and isn't weird and insular for anyone coming here from outside. Not sure, but if you use hide 1 on an AI, it stops patrolling. It is there e.g. playing random barks, although it does not appear on the showtris view