peter_spy

Yup, it's a linear story, I haven't seen "a lot of cutscenes" though. It's mostly walking around while listening to exposition, simple puzzles, and a bit of combat. Not sure how it plays out, but so far it makes sense.

That Kotaku article shows that they made a lot of costly mistakes. Big ambitions, smaller team, lack of precise scope, changing project directors, difficult engine, switching tech during the project, etc., etc. I guess they only shipped it to balance the production cost, so it isn't a total loss. It if was a smaller game, they'd probably cancel it.

Not really, but somehow reviews ommit the fact that the game is way too formulaic for its length. First hour or two, those are pretty scary, but by then you know all the patterns and tricks the game throws at you, and it does so for another seven hours. There are better ways to invest your time IMO, like Soma is one of them. I recently started playing Hellblade, this has horror vibes too, and it looks like something quite fresh.

People who really know what they're talking about, can do that in concise manner. It's not about ADD, it's about efficiency and respect for other people's time. So far, you have no idea what library and encyclopedia by Eco is, so you're trying to dismiss it. Hint, you may not find it in wiki. You're not above social contract either, unless you're going to a stateless island of some sort, but you sure take great lengths to convince yourself otherwise with weak sophistry, while talking everybody else here to death. On any other forums you'd just be banned for hate speech.

I was a bit assumptive while talking about meds, but this wall of text actually proves I was right. You just need an outlet, a platform for your philistinism, which is less interesting to read than you may think. Nobody wants to respond to you with similar walls of text, because of the roughly assumed, more or less common knowledge required to post here and to be the part of this community (similar to Eco's concepts of library and encyclopedia), as that allows mental shortcuts and gnerally faster communication. As for concrete arguments, this is what you missed in your education, and at least in European system, this is taught on secondary / high-school level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism In short, while talking about somebody's work, literary or otherwise, nobody gives a fuck if the author was gay, ugly or miserable. The most important is what you can say about the work, based on it's contents only; then in relation to other works of the same author; then related to other autors and works of that era, conceptual predecessors, successors etc. And then you may add, that despite his/er work, the author was misreable in life, but this is an equivalent of scientific gossip (and definitely not in the way you put it above). As for your "natural law" you should know that if you're born in democracy, or in any type of juristidction for that matter, you forfeit that law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract How come you're a grown-up and not know this is beyond me.

If anything else fails, you can try deleting all the map files and writing them again. With your map opened in DR, delete all the mission files in maps folder, save map in DR, and then run TDM and dmap it.

Soma is pretty good, although Talos Principle had come up with more original thoughts on similar topic. First Dead Space is good as well. I found Amnesia a bit tiresome, DNF.

You can easily skip Outlast. It's geniuinely scary at first, but you'll see throught smoke and mirrors soon enough, which is after an hour or two. After that, it's the same formula untill the end. I don't even remember what was at the end.

What is not fine though, is drawing conclusions based on simplistic, stereotypical, and sexist assumptions, related to author's look, background etc. Not only is it rude, it's also the least interesting part of talking about any work, whether it's literature, film, games, or other. It's even more pointless than the "what autor wanted to say" conversations.

If you want to learn a bit more about troubled ME:A development, here's a decent article: http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428

This is Tony Tarantula's Sunday School of Cheap Psychology for the Frustrated kind of thinking. The reality is much more nuanced and complicated than that, and both TTLG and TDM forums' folks are too smart to get dragged to a level of discussion that low.

*Sigh* somebody's forgot to take meds, again. May I say that we don't need that kind of shit here?

Looks like the controller support is back, not sure how they did it, since there was no official patch. That said, I'm becoming a bit tired of the game itself. I got to the life support and I'm about to reboot the reactor, and for last few hours I've been moving around the same pipes, walls, and walkways. Givng players additional hours of gameplay with recycled content isn't always a good idea, especially that the game seems to be long enough already. I have 35 hours clocked on my Steam library page, so that's where I'd expect things to wrap up, but I feel like I'm nowhere near the end.

IMO current version od TDM engine is pretty sensitive when it comes to normalmaps. Other non-PBR engines like UnrealEngine 3 require stronger normals, and often you have to use the Multiply node in Material Editor to make them more visible.

That is a common problem. I’ve found out solutions to many of my problems by myself, and I feel like I could explain that in more straightforward and user-friendly way, than it is presented in the wiki. But, with my time limited as it is, it’s either that or trying to make a mission. So, unless it’s something critical, I’d rather focus on the latter. Plus, getting help on the forums is what's keeping it alive, isn't it

For a long time in games LDs have been using mesh tilesets for all major pieces, organic or otherwise. Then they use decorative meshes to break the obvious patterns, and unique "hero mesh" to distinguish a location from other areas. Creative re-use of the set pieces made by modelers is the key.

I'd also vote for making an interior-based mission first, and then carefully trying to expand it, while watching performance metrics. There are 3 main tools which should become your best friends: the FPS meter (com_showFPS 1); triangles / portals view mode to see whether visportals work and what is actually being rendered in current view (r_showTris 1-3, r_showportals 1); and the real-time stats (r_showprimitives 1). Even if you have like 3-4 year old hardware, aiming for constant 60 FPS is a good idea. Players won’t notice occasional 10 FPS dips, but if your mission goes from 60 to 20 FPS or lower on a regular basis, it will be distracting and immersion-breaking. Using rendering stats and performance guidelines should help you avoid poor performance. The “tris” value in your stats can be pretty high, like 2 million per scene, but “draws” (drawcalls) will start impacting your performance when around 3000 and more. The same goes for “shadow” stat, keeping it around 80k-100k per scene is generally a good idea. You might want to see this page later for more details: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance:_Essential_Must-Knows

It's very nice of you to say that I remember how I hated writing materials, so I expect more or less the same while learning scripting That said, when the holiday season is over and the temperatures go down to a reasonable levels again, I should have a fresh head and enough patience to go through that

Also, making AI go everywhere player can go makes the level design quite difficult That said, I'll need help with some prop animations sometime later. Hopefully I'll be able to have a proper 3dsmax workflow.

Also, since then I managed to learn a bit more about TDMs performance problems. While I’m all about using every polygon in as meaningful way as you can, that’s not the biggest problem for the engine. You can waste polygons here and there, and you’ll be fine. And, if the shadowmesh triangle count is too big, you can always use a simplified substitute. IMO it’s the drawcalls that are much bigger problem. Number of tris per scene scale nicely with better graphic cards, but DC rely on CPU -> GPU pipeline, which isn’t something you can upgrade just like that. The thing is, number of DC rise quickly when you use meshes with multiple materials. Actually, I read somewhere that’s the “easiest” way to clog the CPU->GPU pipeline. Now, TDM relies mostly on tiling textures, and TDM models use like 3-5 materials per model, on average. Some use like 8, 10, I think the highest number I saw was 12-15. That is generally avoided in other games, mostly because any model that uses multiple materials is split into smaller models, as per material, before rendering. So you might think you’re using one mesh, but you actually use 5, every time. Now every model uses DCs, every material uses DCs, every additional material stage in curly brackets uses more DCs (and increases the model triangle count). To avoid this, models have to use as few materials (and textures) as possible, 1-2 at best. Making mesh tilesets, mesh varations that use the same materials, so the number of meshes used is higher than the number of materials is a good idea too. There are big compromises to be made here though. One is simplifying the surface sounds: if you have a model that is part wood, part metal, you have choose which surface is more “important”. It also makes modding more difficult for others. Only the original author knows reasons behind particular UV island placement on textures, and if someone uses mirrored UVs, the whole mindset and reasoning becomes too complex to recreate by anyone else. Personally, I’m all for unwrapped meshes and using all low-poly tricks we know to save on performance, but, as you see, it’s not that simple, and it takes a lot of time. And it’s not like we’re going to see a major switch to that technique in TDM’s assets, for the reasons stated above, and because it would render a lot of current textures and materials obsolete. But that’s probably something for another topic

I'm down for some scripting 101 as well. I don't need it yet for the mission, but even if I did, I wouldn't know how and where to start. It looks even more intimidating than writing materials.

Yup, there's no reason to re-ignite this discussion. Spring and I kind of represent two sides of a spectrum, and he’s right, I can’t help being a perfectionist, which has its major downsides as well. (We're talking about things like spending a week obsessing over materials for a background prop. A. Fucking. Week.) The thing is, both approaches can happily coexist and influence each other. Ultimately, it will be mappers’ choice to use whatever models we provide, either as a core package, or in an optional download. Learning from each other is what’s really important — and encouraging people to get to modelling. It’s fun, it gives you more control over your content, and there are tons of cool things to learn.

I never had GPU/performance-related problems with Prey, but the last patch seems to have broken the x360 controller support. I wanted to finish the game after a long break, but so far it's completely unplayable for me. Looks like Steam forums have been raving about this for like a week, and devs still didn't do a thing.

Typically letters need quite many triangles to look good, while a transparent cube- or cylinder-like shape with texture costs next to nothing.

Is it just me, or you used actual 3d letters instead of transparent plane?