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IIUC, fresnel uses view direction and surface normal vectors. This is a comparison between simple brush cube and one with chamfered edges on geometry, both using the same tiling material: Brush cube is on the right; in the background you see a cube with chamfered edges. There is a thin line on the bottom of the brush cube, because it matches the normalmap, the mortar part of the bricks. But as soon as I change texture coordinates of the brush: While the chamfered cube has enough geometry to work with fresnel shader, even if I change texture coordinates: So it seems to work as described, it needs either geometry normals or details faked on normalmap. I think fresnel in other pre-pbr engines, like UE3, works the same or similar way.

Related to looking into the stray marks associated with Stone font characters... I've noticed that the nominal 12 pt DDS (which as discussed above only kicks in under 8 pt) has only ASCII glyphs... nothing with code points above 127. Maybe that's why the corresponding 12 pt DAT file was not distributed, as a workaround to force the engine to use 24pt instead, because tels never got around to finishing the low-priority aspects of the project. The 24 pt DDS does have the ANSI glyphs. At a glance, most are fine; a few are a bit ragged. I didn't check compliance and completeness with TDM's character map as given on the wiki. I don't feel ANSI improvement is a 2.12 item. I've got a test FM to show all the characters. At some point, after refinement, I'll post a link.

Hm, I am not sure I follow. Shouldn't the behaviour of the Rim shader be independet of actual geometric complexity and normal map based complexity? If the answer is yes, then brushes should also look fine because the applied material provides geometric complexity. Reshade is awesome. I use it all the time to improve the visuals of old classics. The Post-Lightmaps-Era games just look so much better with some SSAO...

I think you mean Reshade. I used it a couple of times, it has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve Also, maybe this will help to illustrate the problem better: As you can see with image 2 & 4, the geometric complexity, whether with actual polygons or faked via smooth edges on normalmap, does matter. And I bet when most users think 'fresnel', they mean the last example. Most TDM geometry is brushes and models textured with simple tiling materials. They won't look like the last example, until they have enough polygons.

And yes, tweaking shaders is fast and easy, and has immediate effect, thus there are many people who do that. I believe we also had some external guy recently who did the same in "Want to Help" section. Maybe we should just add these shader tweaks into addon managers and allow people switch between them as they like? Just like people can install a program (don't remember its name) and add postprocessing like FXAA to any game.

I feel that tweaking shaders visually does more harm than good in the end. Here is one example of what shader tweaking leads to, and where I'll do yet another visually-breaking change: 6354 Before that is was untweakable specular which also broke visuals: 5044 What a game engine needs is a universal model (preferably well-known) with several tweakable parameters. In fact, the very idea of PBR and why it wins today is that it models real physics, and thus it works more or less the same way in every engine and scenario. It is a well-known standard (with minor variations). We can't have PBR yet (and maybe forever), thus we stick close to Phong reflection model, which has been around for decades and is also quite standard. Artists should make assets that would result in a beautiful picture, not shaders. But they can't do it if we have some weird non-standard lighting model which changes every year. We should never tweak shaders based on how average missions becomes seemingly nicer to us! If someone decides to add normal mapping, it should behave as an approximation for how real high-resolution surface should behave in our model, not as some kind of "beautifier effect". If you want to add some effect which is outside the current model, it should be done in a way that: it does not change how the previous model works (and how current missions look) it can be tweaked by understandable parameters it is applied in all shaders and all lighting the same way I believe we already have fresnel and rim, but it is kinda hardcoded and not present in all shaders. Yet another result of someone tweaking shaders based on how it looks and not on how sound it is mathematically.

Solus, or SteamOS 3.x if Valve ever makes an official version generally available? Hey, wait a second... THREE?! NOOOOOO

Bumping this thread. I was trying to parse the code for LibreCoop recently, the multiplayer coop mod for Doom3, or Dhewm3 more exactly. The main alternative is OpenCoop, but I think LibreCoop is more developed. Anyway, it got me thinking how much work would have to go into a coop mod for TDM. It's still my biggest wish item. The idea I got was one has to basically walk system by system through the code and think about the client and server side of packet swapping. TDM has a lot more and more complicated systems than Doom3, but once you start getting a feel for it, I think the basic system doesn't change that much. In a way it reminded me a bit of a pared down save/load system, what you need to update a game state, except you're streaming it in in real game-time, and you using tricks to fill in gaps to ease the load. The other thing I noticed is that maps themselves need their scripts tweaked and anything else happening in the world. But I wonder if there's a way to procedurally do that when a map is loading, so one could just use the FM files as released. It looks like it'd take more than a year or two if one were working steadily through it, although I think one would get efficient at it over time. Like I was noticing, there's a consistent logic to it. But most of all I think it'd be worth it. I really like Thief coop, and I think it'd be great for TDM. I'm just FYI'ing about it now because I was browsing through the other coop mods. Not even soliciting opinions or anything. Just thinking aloud (avisible?) about it.

Because it's a visual tweak based on a personal preference that would actually make it harder to create maps and content for TDM. Once TDM has PBR support, such tweaks won't be necessary, as fresnel response will be calculated correctly at material level.