Epifire

Glad to see a Thief mod getting good exposure. Nice to know there's still an apatite for some good immersive sims yet.

I think people have just been busy more less. I know I certainly have been. Certainly taffing around from time to time though.

Excellent, thanks for posting!

Well I mean it was based off System Shock initially, so I think a lot of that design comes straight back to gameplay. It's funny because I'm the weirdo who vastly preferred the last game. I like the style of Bio1 but something about it always struck me as it feeling like a chore to complete every time I've played it. You get YouTubers like the Act Man who treat it like it's an untouchable legend but I never had that kind of admiration for it.

I can agree the level design and overall layout, definitely lends a hand to this sentiment.

Virtual or otherwise, it makes for a feel-good moment. 

Happy Birthday!

I keep getting knocked down... A LOT. So mine is, "Back On My Feet Again" 
 

Yeah, I actually have an Epi-art thread just for numerous art related questions I had. The goal was more so having all my old thoughts and community responses in one convenient place for me to go back to later.

For responding to dead threads, we're pretty good about that here. Especially if it's your own topic you're just adding info to. Tagging and quoting an OP from a topic of ten yrs ago to a member who hasn't been online since, might be overkill though. 

I'd say so. Honestly I think a lot of the chat trend moved over from forums to instant messaging. So this is something that highlights the trend difference. I remember back when a dedicated, random chat thread would have 3k+ messages on a web page forum. I think my big advice to keep in mind here is thread/topic spamming. It tends to bury the recent threads bar, so that might piss some people off if they feel your messages or discussion could be greater condensed. But I see nothing wrong with just being very active and engaging here, so as long as it's relevant.

Well that's why I mentioned Discord. That way you don't feel like you're just constantly unloading here. I've been really good friends now with several other TDM members, so that's where my personal stuff goes. That way you've got your trusted friends who are okay with the informal aspect but keep it professional on the threads here. Cause I totally agree, it's nice to have an outlet for that. My advice is just to have dedicated avenues for the conversation, vs all your eggs in one basket. Best of all, you can still talk TDM in both of those circles; it's just filtered differently. 

All good! I'm on our Discord more than I'm here on the forums but I'm always happy to talk dev strategies within TDM. Once I land a good studio position, I'm wanting to crank out my very own FM (finally). But these days I'm busy trying to get the professional portfolio in order to make that happen. 

Very happy to see new blood arriving to the forums though. Keep it up and don't stop asking questions! Source Engine mods kept me interested in development and The Dark Mod later on helped me mature in finding good working balance. If you ever plan on going further with this kind of thing, mods are a fantastic way to learn and find what you do and don't like.

OH and one last thing! I've not yet been able to dive into this feature but I was let onto the concept of a  spawnarg that allows you to attach models onto an area being loaded. This is extremely useful when you're pushing details (brush based or model app based) to static mesh. They're not going to seal against the void or other meshes. Large meshes will usually have a yuUUUUUuuge bounding box; one that can overlap into other, unintended spaces. So with this method (such as a lighthouse) you could attach the exterior mesh to the outside area portal and the interior to it's interior space. 

This will then force load/remove of those flagged assets, so that a 12k poly asset isn't chewing up the performance budget when it's not even seen! Building for this kind of thing ahead of time is also very helpful. Then you just have to divide your static meshes based on the plans you already made. Nothing sucks more than having to rework an area because it was a visportal nightmare.

You can throw a lot more at TDM than you used to. But believe me, if you're working on large spaces, you still want to optimize where you can. In big areas (such as my lighthouse point I did with Goldwell), you'll want to combine based on asset type and shared materials. Have a bunch of grass? Combine them into no more than ten or so models. You don't want one huge mesh loading/unloading off a portal in one go, so layering them in sections to ease that a bit is wise. Otherwise that noticeable frame spike on transition points can be noticed.

But in this case you can have a massive scene with only 800 draw calls because it's pushing all the details into usable GPU vram instead. If you keep CPU bottlenecking to a minimum, this engine can handle way bigger scenes than people give it credit for. Admittingly that's much easier to do with modeling than it is brushes. As static meshes aren't fretted over near as much as BSP geometry is at run time.

That's outta 5 (highest possible) right? That doesn't sound terrible tbh. I've never ridden in any kind of taxi in my life but just from a quick search 4.6 is a sorta passenger average. So if that's true, you're .11 above average!

I like how it stands out but I probably wouldn't do so at the expense of how choppy it makes the smooth menu/font elements. EDIT: This was me assuming the left one was getting a sharpening pass.

If you spent any length of time skateboarding initially, I think just getting that muscle memory back in action will help a lot. Just depends if the rest of your body is as compliant 

Oh awesome Greebo, you're the man!

Thanks fellas!

@NeonsStyleYeah I see CA's listings pretty frequently on ArtStation. Certainly making some cool stuff, however I just wish they had a branch state-side. 

@nbohr1moreHonestly the job situation is what makes this possible for me. If I'm living within my means, unemployment benefits will keep me afloat while I make this a full-time endeavor.

I need to nab the DLC for it. Considering I only played through it on release, I could probably replay the whole thing and enjoy it just as much as the first time. One thing that stood out to me was how the central (home) hub world slowly keeps getting taken over/corrupted. The game was fantastic at building up the player's confidence in a location, only to slowly erode it with every successive chapter. Amnesia the Dark Descent did that too, another favorite of mine for atmosphere and story telling.

I couldn't read that without an accent. xD

I'm pretty tight on time trying to wrap up modeling projects, else I would. But I'd be interested in hearing about the roles in any case.

Personally? No idea. I was just curious what everyone thought of that kind of rendering power somehow laced into our dated/beloved engine.

I'm still certain that parallax corrected cubemaps with updated material implementation (considering RTX is Nvidia exclusive) would be our safest bet for good reflections. Not real time but the usage would be a tremendous upgrade from stock cubemaps.

Well I feel like the site is a bit of a dead giveaway at that kind of writing with, "oneangrygamer.net"

Not gonna lie at this point there are very few super-duper difficult games I will slog through to the end.

Because then your CPU's physical condition is teetering on the edge of total burnout when you pick it up. So yeah, big gamble there I'd say.

Only time I bought used PCs was from a friend who fixed me up some older units to run XP off of for compatibility backaups.

Sorta a shady affair to buy just straight out used from the consumer base though (especially for laptops) never know if they ran the fans into the ground by never cleaning it up and letting it cook. That tends to be the worst, easiest oversight in users not taking care of laptops I find.