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oneofthe8devilz

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Everything posted by oneofthe8devilz

  1. It looks as if realtime RayTracing might truly be the ultimate solution to resolve the decades long "shadow precision dilemma" battle between Stencil Shadows and ShadowMapping...
  2. Hey Jack, I also never understood what all the thief community fuss regarding the "optional" third person mode in DS was about. I for one really enjoy being able to see Garrett's physical body sneaking through the environment which undoubtedly increases the immersion for me. The good thing with optional settings is.. well... that they are optional... so every FirstPersonView Thief fanatic is/was able to play through the entire game in FPV if they just so desired. When I introduced an optional Third Person View for my MCS project, I also faced a small but very vocal minority that rejected that addition. It's funny how people keep trying to dictate to others how a franchise is supposed to be played. Same goes for all the people that claim that Thief DS is supposed to be the worst release of the trilogy. I remember watching friends play the first 2 games (before the third was released) digging the game mechanics but ultimately being too put off by the appalling graphics/visuals to start playing them myself. To me Deadly Shadows still remains the most immersive Thief experience visually and audio wise within all 4 released games. I was very disappointed (and again put off) to witness all the static baked lighting & shadowing in the Thief 2014 game. IMO Deadly Shadows with its unified light & shadowing system (with Non-Poly-Popping-SelfShadowing) is able to create amazingly precise "shadow-casting situations", especially when experienced in VR with an HMD. It's nice and encouraging to meet other people within the community who think likewise.
  3. Since I don't have access to the internal thread I did a quick replication test within TDM (version 2.07) and can confirm that I am able to replicate the Stencil SelfShadows Polygon Popping. A few years ago I managed to get in touch with one of the programmers from the Thief Deadly Shadows engine tech team, so this is an excerpt of some of the things he replied to me: I contacted him recently again and will update this thread in case he replies with more information about this topic
  4. I personally believe it is still a way of offsetting the stencil shadows but in a slightly different way than the idtech4 default CVARs currently allow us.
  5. I see and understand. Still thanks for the exchange. Just for the record... I am no stranger myself being victim to assets theft without crediting from my own idtech4 mod projects. It happened multiple times in the past and while admittedly not being the most pleasant thing in the world to experience I regarded it as the price that I'd eventually have to pay when working with an open source text-readable file system format as (thankfully) idtech4 is. Also I try to take comfort in the thought that usually people tend to steal things they find of worth. Therefore in a somewhat twisted way with a bitter aftertaste, it could be regarded as a "compliment" when people like your stuff enough to actually go through the hassle of ripping/stealing it from your projects.
  6. Well as I replied to Jack... all options are on the table. For just a moment I took your arguments and bounced them back against the current state of reality. I mean come on... even you wouldn't be able to deny the irony if following game news article were to circulate the gaming news portals across the globe: "Modder gets sued for stealing assets from a game that's essentially about stealing assets !" What a priceless PR stunt that would be Just lighten up a little. ***Update*** If I am not terribly mistaken this is Garrett from Thief4 available on Steam for Skyrim: Now we all know that Zenimax/Bethesda are no strangers to quickly sue people (those bastards sued even John Carmack and Oculus for half a billion dollars) and yet I don't see any action taken in this case with this mod being publicly available on Steam for almost 5 years (September 2014). Maybe then you'd care to explain why the author of that Garrett-Skyrim mod gets to have his fun working on such a mod project (even receiving praise and encouragement from the community) while I shall be denied the very same request.
  7. Okay then let's think this through for a moment. If a gigantic corporation like Steam (a multi-billion-dollar company with an army of lawyers) lets something like GMOD (a commercial product that up to this day generates daily commercial income/sales) slide for more than a decade and officially provides those Steam WorkShops where such Copyright Protected content can be officially downloaded via the Steam Client, then why should an "Everyday-Joe-Modder" like me be concerned at all to face legal consequences for releasing a free of charge modification, having less than a thousandth or even a millionth of the internet exposure footprint compared to something like GMOD ? I mean if that really is the case, we talk about probabilities here, where it would be significantly more likely that I could get fatally hit tomorrow by a car crossing the street (with my project being terminated/halted in the process) than me having to face legal action against me from a publisher and developer of a game that originally ceased to exist more than a decade ago. With such odds why should I let a hypothetical technicality like this ruin my own fun working on a project like this. Life is too short to be a KJ to oneself, isn't it ?
  8. Not speculation but rather a simple look at the game's wikipedia page. Especially the sections Reception and Sequel: 5 years after the game's release and the outlook to a sequel has never looked more grim. Especially in today's megalomaniac game industry business not releasing a successor for such a long period of time can be taken as an indicator of a brand's popularity and net-worth. But again those may be just conflicting opinions. About getting a C&D letter on the other hand: I am virtually certain that as long as I don't make the build that I am currently working on publicly available I could write letters to Square Enix all day long without having to fear to ever receive such a letter as such work/activity is covered by the liberty to do whatever pleases me as a private person in my private time on my private space as long as I don't violate the rights of other individuals and/or organisations. But please feel free to correct me (preferably with empirical proof). In the case of my current Venture build, replacing the Garrett playermodel with a legally bulletproof one literally is just a mouseclick and a few seconds of re-rigging away... so not really even worth the mentioning. On a side-note: It would be interesting to see how such huge and commercially popular projects like Garry's Mod handle the massive Copyright Infringements that are being committed on a dialy basis with the industry's largest Copyright Protected IPs: I am seeing all kinds of assets from all kinds of games for GMOD made publicly legally available on steam workshops that are clearly much much bigger in terms of value and protection compared to Thief Deadly Shadows while the title itself is being sold commercially in the millions on Steam as well: (Screenshots of Workshop Assets of Game IPs like Doom3, Gears of War and Halo for GMOD available for download on Steam) The point I am trying to make is that there obviously seem to be means and ways to legally handle that topic.
  9. Arguable IMO... Thief 4 sales and its success were bad enough to make Square Enix at least open for discussion. Further more the whole deal could be limited exclusively to the Deadly Shadows brand, source code and assets. Provided enough community interest and/or investors can be mobilized, I don't see Square Enix having much to loose in such a deal about a game and technology released 15 years ago... Plus we are not really sure what exactly happened to the tech and IP rights (it is something I plan to research/request in the near future). Quite some bizarre cases have happened in the past regarding Game IPs that wound up in similar situations.
  10. Hey Jack, technically multiple options are still on the table to realize a thief themed coop mode project: Option 1 would be to port everything from Thief3 DS to idtech4 (that includes later replacing all copyright protected assets with free or licensed counter parts to avoid copyright infringement) Option 2 would be to get in contact with the current Thief3 DS source code and IP copyright owners to implement a coop patch by pulling off something similar to what the Nightdive Studios are currently doing with SystemShock 1 (minus rebuilding the game from scratch but instead focusing on a coop multiplayer and VR output patch) Option 3 would be somewhat of an hybrid approach where an installer could be released that checks whether the user has genuine copies of Thief: Deadly Shadows and Doom3 installed on his PC. Providing an installer that can extract and copy assets from the "Thief: Deadly Shadows" game folder and place them in the according Doom3 mod folder in an automated fashion to not violate any Copyright as the installer itself would only ship with the mentioned instructions (without any of the copyright protected material included). Btw... thanks for your question allowing me to steer this thread's discussion content back on track
  11. Of course we did... countless times actually... but the admin of the page for whatever reason was reluctant to take action against either side which only kept fueling and growing that conflict mess over time.
  12. Would you mind quoting the two users' concerns as I seem to have trouble making out exactly what you refer to. Also do you find it appropriate having to apologize for something that was not initiated by me and that I tried to prevent myself right from the beginning ? Users here requested clarification about exactly what I was trying to prevent. I can't follow your logic, believing it would be me having to apologize but I'm open for explanations from your point of view (even at the cost of still extending this off-topic discussion far beyond diminishing returns)
  13. It's sad times when basic conflicts between community users generate more interest, clicks and views than the primary reason why we all decided to come together... namely to discuss, share and cooperate on community based projects.
  14. That's interesting... On a first quick glance I am unable to spot any difference within the tanget space normalmaps used in both games/engines... (Garrett's Hood NormalMap)
  15. That point in time was at the peak of toxicity and after years of tolerance (or ignorance on my end) and after observing many valuable members ceasing activity on the forums I admittedly too lost my patience (we're all human after all) which also was the reason why I stopped frequenting the page for almost full 3 years. Again it was one of my threads (mind the ironic title of it "Growing the community" in a futile attempt to discuss how more users could be acquired) which got once again overrun (those were just the posts that ended up in the "Haunting of Deck 12" area and quite rightly so). IMO frequent events like this were pretty much the deathblow to that community. And now after almost 3 years of inactivity on my side on those forums, after simply updating my thread with the latest 2019 Venture progress (with only the few trolls remaining in an inactive/idle state) the trash posting seamlessly continued. Goes to show that there simply is no reasoning for me with that kind of unprecedented stubbornness/resilience.
  16. The last footage I would like to showcase is from within the Thief3 Editor where I am dynamically moving a pointlight-light-source around so the algorithm can be observed in detail... especially pay attention to the low poly bucket in the center foreground of the scene and how the selfshadow casting is always offset proportionally to the distance and position of the light source ensuring that none of the objects ever experience any kind of "Stencil Shadow Popping In and Out" but instead the SelfShadows smoothly slide along the objects geometry surface... I am very curious to find out whether someone from TDM's Engine Development team might have an idea how the Thief3 engine manages to prevent "Stencil Shadow Polygon Popping" without severely affecting the SelfShadow volumes/sizes within the player's view proximity... I play both games/engines in VR and having something close to Thief3's solution would be amazing as that game is still my supreme immersive VR experience and finding a way to port that to idtech4 would be a dream. Thanks for you attention. [ I had to split this thread into 2 initial posts as it seems these forums limit the maximum number of linked youtube videos to "5" per post ]
  17. Addressed towards every idtech4 aficionado @ the TDM forums and in particular towards the TDM Engine Development team... Both engines use Stencil Shadows but the devs at Ion Storm IMO came up with the significantly more elegant solution to the "Shadow Polygon Popping" issue that comes with the Stencil Shadow rendering technique... I remember back in the days around Doom3's release (August 2004) how John Carmack mentioned having added "noselfShadow" material flags specifically to combat the problem of "Stencil Shadow Polygon Popping" which would appear on Characters and Monsters when selfshadowing would kick in which resulted in my first mini-mod "UEQ" basically just commenting out all "noselfShadow" flags for all Doom3 Character/Monster material shaders... I have recorded some footage to illustrate why I think Thief3's solution is indeed more elegant in the hope that some of the senior GFX engine programmers like duzenko and the rest of the TDM Engine Development team might point me to a direction of implementing a similar solution within idtech4... The Problem (within idtech4): When a character in idtech4 is rendered without disabled selfshadowing in the material shader, quite some noticeable "Shadow Polygon Popping" can be observed (In this sample scene you can see it happening around Garrett's Hood and Shoulder area). The more elegant Solution (within Thief3): Notice how the character still casts and receives selfshadows without any "Stencil Shadow Polygon Popping" occurring. The shadows rather "slide" across the model surface instead of harshly popping in and out of existance... Now of course idtech4 is highly configurable by default so I started tinkering with the stencil shadow parameters. In particular I would change the value of the CVAR "r_shadowPolygonOffset" from the default value "-1" to "-2000". Now that still doesn't look as "clean" as in the Thief3 sample footage but at least the self shadows stopped harshly popping in and out of existence and instead (similar to the Thief3 footage) now slide smoothly across the model surface. Mission achieved you might think and wonder why I am still flagging this an issue... Well the problem becomes apparent when we start to move around the environment with these new settings ("r_shadowPolygonOffset -2000"): Watch the shadow on the right side of the Windowframe increasing in size/volume as I approach it and decreasing in size/volume as I move away again from it: This now happens with every selfshadow in the world around me (within idtech4 with "r_shadowPolygonOffset -2000"). On the other hand, within the Thief3 engine a similar behavior but much much more subtle in scale/resize of SelfShadows can be seen: When you observe the shadow at the left side of the door... (it actually might be difficult to notice) but you can see that that shadow also changes size/volume depending on my distance to it but like I mentioned the change is way more subtle in scale compared to the idtech4 showcase.
  18. I honestly would appreciate your move to cease commenting this thread as I shall stop addressing you as well in case you keep your word (even though your involvement in the escalation of the conflict back then seems to have been conveniently left out in your last statement). And for anyone that wonders what kind of toxicity I am trying to keep away from this place/thread click here at your own risk...
  19. Oh ... then I clearly must be mistaking you with the LDAsh back from those forums being one of the few but ferocious supporters of those forum's biggest troll... Surely it must be another user just accidentally bearing the same nickname and couldn't possibly be you ... could it ?
  20. It shall be up to the mods/admins to decide whether to allow you and your associates to pull off the same devastation as you guys did a few years back. I for one try to prevent it. It's a fact that I move to new threads and you keep following. You never find me posting in any of your threads it is always the other way around. And by the way... what is wrong with being a one-man-team ? What are you trying to imply ?
  21. The reason I PMed you was a gesture of courtesy to actually spare you public embarrassment and to reach out a hand. I fear you mistake disappointment with rage (exploding). In fact I actually missed your original post until Destined put my attention to it. Call it natural interest in human psychology but I just tried to make sense out of what makes people post such posts. Imagine my surprise. It's a little disappointing though that you felt the need to first edit your public gofundme.com profile description before coming back at me with more bad intended posts forcing it into public space. P.S. If the moderators/admins find this reply too personal feel free to delete it for the sake of a friendlier discussion environment.
  22. Oh boy it seems like we really have to do this... "sigh" So lets address some points to hopefully shed some light into this and structure things up (I really wanted to avoid this cause all it is going to do is costing me time that I won't be able to invest into modding). I am modder. It's what I have been doing for quite some time now with various game engines and to various degrees of project completion. A modder by definition is somebody who takes existing assets and/or code and modifies it into (hopefully) a new and interesting context which he (and eventually other players) enjoy to play. Now let's take a look at what footage I recently have "shared" with the community that sparked this discussion: Video Description: At no point in time have I claimed to have been the original creator of the map or the assets shown in the video. It was strictly a showcase about multiplayer clientside network replication (a topic very dear to me as I personally consider multiplayer game development the supreme discipline within game development). But it doesn't matter since again, I am a modder and my job is to put existing code and assets into new context and in the best case to create an (for me personally) enjoyable experience. I produce several videos a day when I do modding related work to document the progress with the vast majority of those videos never getting publicly shared. Due to time constrains most of those videos contain very few (if any) details about the source art/code used especially when they are in a WIP unreleased project state with plenty of the assets & code still being subject to change. Do I read the feedback in the community forums about the footage that I post ? Absolutely ! Does other people's feedback about my shared footage morally or legally oblige me to take it into consideration when working on my mod projects ? Absolutely not. I always have, am and will create mods for my personal satisfaction first and foremost. And even if you told me that the strong contrast in my footage melted away your retina and blinded you permanently I would probably shrug it off and ask why you kept watching it then in the first place... You don't pay my time/work on the mod nor my monthly bills so your opinion's impact could be described as "mild" at best (especially when I quote users multiple times to the optional client setup showcase without getting even a response/reply to that). The reason I share my work/footage with the community is because I firmly believe that I am not the only person longing for stealth-medieval-fantasy themed games WITH online cooperative multiplayer functionality. I always gladly will answer questions (about asset origins for example) but in this specific case and in this specific thread since the question about the map origin was already self-answered before I was able to read and reply to the question there was no point in re-answering the already answered question. Now about the "taking the drama with me from another community page": This is the demented level of commenting I have to deal with on a regular basis on that page (I specifically picked a fresh and mild one to not give that person more attention than he/she desperately seems to seek from me): I stopped posting updates on those community forums for several years now but when I updated my thread about my project with this week's footage the same trolls crept up and started again instantly trash posting. This is the plague that I wanted to avoid taking with me over to the TDS Forums because I witnessed how (also because of that constant trash/trolling drama) plenty of valuable users/modders left that community over the years basically leaving it a dead place of trolls. Some of the toxic trolls from those diseased community forums I see now commenting in my thread here at the TDS forums (hence the wording "toxic stalkers"). I really hope this post contributes to explaining the entire background so that in case similar questions by other users come up again in the future I can then simply link to it while at the same time keeping the discussion content topic related.
  23. Exactly... and I would prefer to keep it that way. Obviously you are unaware of the common history that I and some of the recent posting users have on other sites.
  24. It seems like I am unable to shake the toxic stalkers from the past... I strongly would like to avoid re-igniting that useless drama/confrontation on a new site, especially seeing how this page seems to already have enough of their own drama going on. It is obvious how those comments have no other intend but to start another conflict which is why I won't reply to such and if necessary will report them to the responsible moderators/admins. I personally regard all my projects as common community efforts and upon public release of any of my projects I make sure I have permission of every single original creator of assets and code used in the project and also make sure everyone is being credited appropriately. In the specific case of Venture, the project is still in an early phase with no public release yet available and all elements still being subject to change.
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