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Might as well post the two other videos I recorded a while ago.

There are a few IP, legal & security issues I have to think about for what I want to do with it. But here's a tutorial about getting a G*ogle maps scene into Blender, and once you get it into Blender it's trivial to get it into UE5. The stuff I've been doing is more or less just like this. (Except the process also gives you the real world textures, which he didn't take in this video.) The few technical points I'd add is you should just do your own clip brushing & be close-up for places the player would be, and for the background you just leave the clipping off & keeping it lower res isn't so bad for really distant stuff. Also you want to break it up in Blender into increasingly large chunks going outwards, and it'll be a little more failsafe in the import, and I imagine it helps with the framerate, but I haven't tested it. Edit: Oh what the hell... Here is a quick demo without the bells and whistles yet. This is what you can do in literally 15 or 20 minutes once you know what you're doing. And it doesn't take much to imagine what you can do from here to make it even more lifelike... Well, you'd replace the trees with UE's foliage tool. Things like cranes & utility poles should get replaced with models. Throw some procedural traffic & pedestrians in. For the nearest buildings you'd want to rip them individually right over them to get the maximum resolution. You'd also want to focus on the city center where the resolution for every building is highest, etc.

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Interesting. I've known of DXVK and other wrappers to get DirectX games running on WINE, but it never occurred to me that you could use it to get DirectX 12 games running on Windows 7 by passing it through to Vulkan. That's quite clever I guess and makes perfect sense, but maybe it never occurred to me because Windows 7 went end of life at the beginning of last year so no-one's talked about this solution much. I still appreciate the technical methodology though.

New Supreme Ghosting video:

In the latest build dev16256-9358, the code for holding objects and dragging unconscious bodies has been changed. It is possible to switch between the old and the new code (e.g. to compare them) using cvar: "tdm_drag_new 1": use new code (the new default). "tdm_drag_new 0": use old code (was the only option in TDM 2.09 and before). With the new code, there are three modes of dragging/moving objects: Moving items (candles, apples, crates, etc.) around in normal/"messy" mode. Moving items around in "silent" mode. Dragging bodies (ragdolls = articulated figures). The long-standing problem with moving items was that it was very hard to stay silent. An object could instantaneously reach high velocities from minor mouse movements, colliding with surrounding objects, sending them to fly all over the room and produce noise. Regular noise from bumping into the table/wall when you push an object into it was also a problem. As the result, grabbing something from a table was risky and required a lot of concentration. The new code keeps item velocity bounded, so even if it collides something, it should not cause too much chaos. Also, if you push an item into floor/table, it won't cause continuous noise anymore. The silent mode is the radical solution to the noise problem. When you move object in silent mode, it does not produce any noise and does not push surrounding objects at all. So you can be sure you won't attract nearby guards and won't topple nearby candle. However, there is a cost too: if the manipulated item is blocked by something, you won't be able to move it. For example, if a crate has a candle on it, you won't be able to move crate vertically unless you remove the candle. So while this mode can be very convenient, it is not intuitive. We have not come to conclusion about usefulness of the silent mode yet, so there is a cvar which controls when silent mode is enabled: "tdm_drag2_rigid_silentmode 0": never use silent mode. "tdm_drag2_rigid_silentmode 1": use silent mode if creep button is pressed. "tdm_drag2_rigid_silentmode 2": use silent mode when run button is not pressed. "tdm_drag2_rigid_silentmode 3": always use silent mode. Feedback is welcome As for dragging bodies, this is an entirely different mode. The new code should make it a bit smoother and more natural. For example, if you try to push a body into a wall/floor, you will see horrible convulsions with the old code. The new code does not have this problem. Another issue happens when you try to lift the body up. With the old code, it feels as if the body is stickied to the floor with magnets. The new code is more physics-based, and you won't have problem with lifting torso, head, and arms off the floor, although you will never have enough force to lift whole body and keep it in air.

I've been playing with this, as UE5 has already been released in early access. It's really cool. You can rip an entire city off of Go*gle maps, like a 10km x 10km chunk of terrain, get it into UE5, maybe throw in a little fog and light rain, some lit windows in the shaders, make the sea a realistic sea shader, then pick a really high building and model a posh apartment in the penthouse using all the free & amazing arc-vis assets out there, give it massive windows with rain streaking down, and take in the urban landscape. For someone that started building with dromed, which originally had like 1000 poly limit after which objects would just stop being rendered, it's literally awe inspiring to look over an entire city of 1000s to 10,000s of buildings or so, chugging however many millions of tris, and it still be fluid at 40 fps or whatever. You shouldn't take that too lightly. It really feels like were at a new stage in gaming. And the quick demo I made up like that is still only about 1.5 GB. The geometry you can rip off of Go*gle maps is already optimized so it's highest poly closest to the place you take it and falls off. Then you can add higher poly geometry to some distant places by hand. If you were smart about it, you could keep a game under 10 or 20 GB and still look pretty amazing.

Wow, seems like a lot of missions have a broken cart in the starting area. Almost makes me feel dumb for putting one at the start in my next mission Oh well, maybe it can just be a TDM meme.

Thought I'd post some teaser shots for CoS 0: To Catch a Thief. Still WIP of course, but I'm thinking release before the end of the year. It's going to take place just east of where CoS 2 was set, and a few months earlier.