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This last month, I've been exploring TDM's font situation, and improving the documentation as I go. In the wiki, "Font Conversion & Repair" was rewritten, with parts broken out and expanded as: Font Files Font Metrics & DAT File Format Font Bitmaps in DDS Files ExportFontToDoom3 Q3Font Refont As announced earlier, that last item is a new C++ console utility for revising font metrics in DAT files; essentially another alternative to Q3Font and Font Patcher. It now has additional functionality that provides font-coverage analysis. A summary of current results across all TDM fonts is reported in the forum thread "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts". Also, refont allows its human-readable outputs to be decorated with an annotation for each character (out of 256 codepoints). Associated with that, I've just created and released 4 annotation files: 1 Cyrillic version for TDM's russian map 3 variants for TDM's custom english/european char map. One of the variants was derived from another new mapping file that is now available from existing wiki article "I18N - Charset". Within that file is a list, in a standard format, of the 256 TDM bitmap codepoints mapped to the corresponding Unicode U+NNNN value and name. This may be useful in defining TDM's mapping to TTF font editing programs. For all these wiki pages mentioned, I imagine there will be additional cross-links and tweaks. But pretty much done.

There's been talk over the years on how we could improve texture quality, often to no avail as it requires new high-resolution replacements that need to be created and will look different and add a strain on system resources. The sharpness post-process filter was supposed to improve that, but even with it you see ugly blurry pixels on any nearby surface. Yet there is a way, a highly efficient technique used by some engines in the 90's notably the first Unreal engine, and as it did wonders then it can still do so today: Detail textures. Base concept: You have a grayscale pattern for various surfaces, such as metal scratches or the waves of polished wood or the stucco of a rough rock, usually only a few highly generic patterns are needed. Each pattern is overlayed on top of corresponding textures several times, every iteration at a smaller... as with model LOD smaller iterations fade with camera distance as to not waste resources, the closer you get the more detail you see. This does wonders in making any texture look much sharper without changing the resolution of the original image, and because the final mixture is unique you don't perceive any repetitiveness! Here's a good resource from UE5 which seems to support them to this day: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/adding-detail-textures-to-unreal-engine-materials Who else agrees this is something we can use and would greatly improve graphical fidelity? No one's ever going to replace every texture with a higher resolution version in vanilla TDM; Without this technique we'll always be stuck with early 2000's graphics, with it we have a magic way of making it look close to AAA games today! Imagine being able to see all those fine scratches on a guard's helmet as light shines on it, the thousands of little holes on a brick, the waves of wood as you lean into a table... all without even losing much performance nor a considerable increase in the size of game data. It's like the best deal one could hope for! The idTech 4 material system should already have what we need, namely the ability to mix any textures at independent sizes; Unlike the old days when only a diffuse texture was used, the pattern would now need to be applied to both albedo / specular / normal maps, to my knowledge there are shader keywords to combine each. Needless to say it would require editing every single material to specify its detail texture with a base scale and rotation: It would be painful but doable with a text injection script... I made a bash script to add cubemap reflections once, if it were worth it I could try adapting it to inject the base notation for details. A few changes will be needed of course: Details must be controlled by a main menu setting activating this system and specifying the level of detail, materials properties can't be controlled by cvars. Ultimately we may need to overlay them in realtime, rather than permanently modifying every material at load time which may have a bigger performance impact; We want each iteration to fade with distance and only appear a certain length from the camera, the effect will cause per-pixel lighting to have to render more detail per light - surface interaction so we'll need to control the pixel density.

In the latest dev17026-10712, GUI debriefing is supported. It works exactly the same way as GUI briefing. It would be great if someone tries it For the nearest future, I'd like to support passing information from game script to GUI debriefing. So that you could show different things in debriefing depending on what player did in the mission.

No, the 192-bit RTX 3060 12 GB came first. The cut down 8 GB model came over a year and a half later, and probably in small numbers because nobody talks about it much other than "don't get it, it's 20-30% slower". 3060 Ti had 8 GB from the start, and always has, although it looks like they made a GDDR6X version. They would have to change the bus width to accommodate 12 GB. There were rumors of products like 3070 16 GB, 3080 20 GB and so on, but they never materialized outside of engineering samples. If you think things are confusing now, just wait until 3 GB GDDR7 chips materialize within a couple of years. We could see 12 GB cards on a 128-bit bus, 9 GB on 96-bit, and so on.

Ok I added info about this in on the wiki page: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Creating_Multiple_Skins_For_A_Model

I have just released a new utility, "refont", as an open-source, partial-successor of the traditional "q3font", used to tweak the spacing and placement of TDM's bitmap font characters. For the whole story, see the new wiki page Refont.