peter_spy

It makes sense, as you can't forsee every use and evey fork mod that might or might not be in the works. Noone used 3d menu gui or PDA system in TDM missions for so many years, so it got deleted. You can always refer to original Doom 3 code to reimplement this.

You asked for Blender, so I can't say anything about that, but there aren't any problems with exporting multiple meshes as one .ase mesh (scene) in 3dsmax. Also, besides having one piece of mesh e.g. with custom collision or simplified shadow mesh, there's no advantage in either method in terms of materials. Every new (simple) material means more drawcalls + added triangle count. Every additional material stage other than diffuse, normal, and specular slot adds to it as well. Unless you have special-purpose elements like custom shadows or collision, you should strive for one mesh / one material ratio. Or even better, one material / several mesh variations, to save on texture memory.

IMO older missions won't be affected, because they don't use EFX system at all, and it only affects sounds placed in map. So actually the opposite would be better: all sounds should be set to 3d by default. That's because the subset of sounds needed to be labelled as 2d is much smaller: player VO, player grunts (hmm.. not sure about this one), UI sounds, background music for the location system — that's basically it. I agree that channels and sliders are more broad perspective and it should be left as is right now; let's work within more reasonable scope.

Yes. No. EFX is an external, third-party system for modeling reverb, and that applies to everything in a 3d space. Game menu is considered 2d so EFX doesn't apply to it. My guess is that we need some kind of invisible gui/windowDef in game that would play "2d sounds" like music, player monologue, player grunts and UI sounds. Thief 3 system wasn't bad in that regard. On more general note, as we discussed it a bit in another thread, I think the current way we use sounds is a bit messy. IMO, from player perspective, we need more self-explanatory system, i.e. channels, and volume sliders like Music, SFX, Speech, and Video. E.g. (as in Dishonored 2): So in a long run, we'd have sound channels for playing and adjusting the volume properly, and on another level, distnction between 2d and 3d for EFX. I guess there's no way around it, it will be a pain in the ass to make it work :/ Edit: that would also mean more ordered approach to how we use sounds in our maps. Things like adding music in a speaker and setting it to s_global 1 would be considered a hack, and not the usual workflow.

Thanks Spring for including me. AFAIK, EFX is affecting all the sounds, only the game menu is excluded. Edit: I don't think that's possible, as Stgatilov mentioned. EFX is just a set of parameters for modelling acoustic profiles of rooms or spaces in game levels. I have no idea about coding, coding sound included, but the first thing that came to my mind is that if sounds are affected by EFX, then they must be played within 3d space, and not on another "layer". Thief 3 called "2D sound" everything that was played in "players head", and back when EAX worked in Thief 3, those sounds were not affected. Maybe that's the problem, aren't UI sounds played from a speaker attached to the player model or something?

I kind of feel bad that we didn't do more structured tests. I focused mostly on technical stuff and show-stoppers, I didn't have more time for gameplay-related suggestions.

IGN gives AAA games 7/10 even if they're rubbish, so in my book their credibility is around 0/10. Maybe the game has all these faults, but I'd rather wait for the likes of Eurogamer to review it.

You can always limit the number of broadheads in the shop / starting inventory

Two more sound-related things I noticed: 1) On the "Please press Attack to start..." screen, you can hear sound effect from a nearby sound speaker, if the player start is close to one in a map. 2) In the windowed mode, you can hear the sound when the window is out of focus (you can't in 2.05, and IMO it was a good idea).

On second thought, maybe it will be better to do both. First, let's have enough generic presets for people who just want to put these in a map and be done.

Yeah, I'm a math dummy, I was trying to convert these values as if ranges were linear And I think they changed ranges in white to more sensible scales in later versions. Range from -100 db to 0, +10, or +20 db isn't terribly useful. I mean, on a scale from 0 to -100 db, you'll won't hear much (or anything) beyond -60, -70 db (typically, this is the self-noise floor for microphones). Since we're talking about volume of reflections and reverberation, it's safe to assume you won't hear anything beyond -50 db, because of the foreground sound sources. Besides, values like room, reverb, and reflections (gain) need to be adjusted manually anyway, either to a specific map, or just because TDM sounds seem a bit louder than in other games. Also TDM default EFX settings are not exactly "neutral". I'd say it's something close to a "medium dead room", so you have to take that into account as well. I'm not sayin these presets are useless. But, I'm trying to create something more like "EFX for dummies" guide, not "here, use these presets". Maybe like a question system, e.g.: 1) how big is your room? Use X for small rooms, Y for medium rooms, and Z for large rooms, etc. So people can take these values and understand (roughly) what they do, and they won't have problems with changing them later.

Using guide provided by Stgatilov and presets found by Xircspheroth, I made a comparison of values used in Open AL docs and in our documentation. If we take out orange ones, which are incompatible, and blue ones which share the same range, we end up with 6 parameters that need conversion from one range to another. Could have been worse

This will be helpful, thanks! Some of the ranges will be different, but I could try and use these to create presets for TDM.

http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4690 Thank you! Will it be available as part of public beta as well? It will speed up my research on EFX parameters and help us make EFX file for Biker's Elixir map.

Correction, it works, but something is different. It depends on material, but sometimes it's really subtle, like barely noticeable. I think it's also a bit more contrasty. Previous version was more like TES: Oblivion kind of Bloom, 2.06 is different.

I must be one lucky bastard, because on my system it runs like a charm on both 2.05 and 2.06. The only problems I encountered are beta related, like sound cut-off, or bloom not working.

Actually that Effect Extension Guide proved to be very useful. I went through most values in the Appendix on page 120 and further. Despite some differences in names ("room" is basically "gain" and value ranges can be a bit different), everything seems to be correct. Some values, like Reverb density, were probably added in Version 2 or later, so they don't work. Still, even stuff listed in .efx definitions on our Wiki page as "undocumented", like "echo depth" or "echo time" – they actually work. Some of these values just need to be grouped and adjusted together so you can hear the difference. Now I'll need some time to wrap my head around this, and try to decide which of these parameters should be treated as primary and secondary, as it gets complicated pretty quick.

Thanks for the info, stgatilov! This guide might be helpful. Also, I've been watching a few Twitch livestreams by proffessonal audio engineers amd musicans on how to use Delay and Reverb. Since our EFX parameters are similar to Audition's Reverb plugin, it should help me understand which values do what, how they affect each other etc. Then I want to establish a clear workflow, so everyone will know what they're doing. Yes! I almost jumped with joy when I saw that entry resolved in the bug tracker! Please, please, please include this in final 2.06 release! You'll save us hours of tedious work, seriously.

One thing I just noticed: in Volta II, if you press Esc and go to the menu during player character VO, when you get back to the game, the VO gets interrupted. It doesn't matter whether EFX is enabled or disabled. And it also happens during AI conversations. It doesn't happen in 2.05, I checked. Edit: you can reproduce this error by playing A New Job and interrupting player VO at the beginning of the mission.

+1 I'm not yet competent to talk about technical side of things, since I barely touched sounds in my WIP map, but just in terms of a reference, this is how it's done elsewhere. This is Dishonored 2 Audio menu. Master and Video sliders do the obvious. Music affects menu music and mission background music (i.e. the one played through our equivalent of location system, and not placed in a speaker in the map). SFX slider affects all UI and menu sounds, player footstep sounds, and basically all sounds placed in the map. Speech affects internal monologue, voices of AIs placed in the map, and player grunts. It sounds like a ton of work, but if we could modify our system to have something more similar to this, I think it would be more clear for both players and mappers.

I was trying to keep things too simple, my mistake. Although it's funny how you can focus on subtle differences in meaning or phrasing, while more often than not, every time you post, you sound like a passive-aggressive ass. You just can't help yourself, even when giving advice to others. You keep saying that people here ignore you or don't like you, and most people are too polite to say why. So, here you have it, your self-fullfilling prophecy. With that out of the way, I think the most viable workflow would be to stick to one version, and then try to release a mission as a standalone package, with .exe and the root files. (Does CC license allow this?) To keep the size low, you'd probably need to keep track of assets you use, and then delete all the unused packages. I've never tried it, but if it's possible to unzip all the core .pk4 packages and just delete assets you don't use, that would be great.

It was pure pleasure to test this FM. Kingsal proved again that he really understands design and aesthetic aspects that made Thief: The Dark Project unique. What is more important, he proved that you can successfully bring these into TDM and make an enjoyable mission. Volta I and II are solid proof that legacy of Thief can live on in TDM. If you want to convince a DromEder to switch to TDM, this is what you should show By the way, there should be a mission thread on TTLG forums as well.

By the way, while we have separate channels for player and narrator, we don't have something more intuitive for the players, i.e. distinction between music and sound effects. For now, SFX works like master volume, as it turns down player and AI footsteps, voices, music via location system and sounds placed in the speakers within the level, etc. Ambient volume affects both music via location system and sounds placed in speakers on the map, so it's kind of useless. Correct me if I'm wrong but for now sliders include less intuitive developer/mapper perspective on sound types http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Sound_Folder_Structure I think it would be great to have something more clear, with players in mind.

I don't think TDM team should take responsibility for whatever number of great maps that are sitting on people's hard drives but never got released. This way there won't be any updates ever. Focus on one thing and get your stuff released, so your map can be taken into account, if future changes break anything.