peter_spy

You just uninstall the current version and install the new one. User settings are kept in appdata directories, so you don't have to backup your shortcuts or anything.

Potions are a different thing. They have saturated colors, self-glow textures, and fresnel outline, they're very distinct. Other objects — not so much. try finding a key, switch or a document in places like these: Note that devs had to put this huge lamp to point to the Outsider shrine and the rune, that's kind of design failure. Maybe it's easier to sort out on something like 52" TV, not so much on desktop monitor. Although I have 27" model, so it's not exactly a small one.

Yup, it's more "go to this location marker" than "find this location". As for visual density, I had this problem with Dishonored 2. Game looks gorgeous, but without interactive object highlight it would be impossible to find objects like keys or coins. With this ammout of clutter, your brain just switches off, for there's too much to process in every scene.

Yup, this is more like Bioshock / Dishonored kind of frob, only not that super shiny. I don't have any interactive objects in my FM yet, so I use what I can This is my electric lamp model. It's a good example of an object with high specularity. Notice that standard TDM frob highlights mostly the shiny parts, while contrast remains similar. Cubemap frob looks more like a layer put on top of the object, that's why it's more distinct.

Lately, I was fiddling with TDM frob shader, because often I find it too subtle for my taste. Don’t get me wrong, it works as intended, but it looks best in complete darkness. In more lit rooms, e.g. while putting out candles, it’s a bit hard to see whether you’re able to interact with an object or not. Modern games use Fresnel-based shader to achieve this, so an object gets a bright outline. This is very in-your-face and something more like the “atomic-blue frob” from Thief Deadly Shadows we all hated back in the day. That said, I think you can achieve some middle ground here. I couldn’t get the proper fresnel program to work, since I’m not that good at shaders, but I don’t think I will need it. Instead, I created a “fake Fresnel” cubemap, which looks like this: You can easily make it in Gimp. It’s a 256 texture with radial gradient from black to white, and offset of 50, so the color transition starts further away from the center. If you just want an outline, use pure black as starting color. I wanted both some highlight and an outline, so I used RGB 32. Now you have to save it 6 times with _back, _down, _forward etc., so it gets recognized as a cubemap. Then you have to go to your material definition and put this instead of standard frob code: // This is the code required for frob highlighting this texture { if ( parm11 > 0 ) maskcolor map makealpha (_white) alpha .2 // modify it as you wish } { if ( parm11 > 0 ) blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one maskalpha cameraCubeMap cubemap/path/here texgen reflect } Cool thing is, you can tweak the cubemap intensity with alpha parameter, so you’ll get more consistent look when you need different values for e.g. wooden and glass objects (the latter typically require more visible frob). This effect also looks a bit different on .ase models and on brushes / func_statics made in DR, so you can tweak it to look the same across all materials and types of surfaces. Small comparison:

Main talk starts around 15-minute mark. While I never liked Halo games, they use some pretty decent tricks to maintain target performance. IMO you can achieve most of this in TDM as well, with proper LODs and e.g. func_portals.

Cool screens Destined. As for contrast, in-game screens are taken with gamma 1.0, regardless of your in-game settings, so you might want to set it to something like 1.1 or 1.2 before uploading.

Christ on a bike. I mean, if you're talking game assets. Stock TDM assets are below 3 GB in total. Yeah, while a lot of things in T3Ed were broken, scripting included, I liked the system itself. Scripting was pretty simple but versatile logic syntax with bunch of options to choose from, enough for most cases. And the major advantage of interface is that you can try out and experiment with everything at your disposal. When you have to write scripts, you're limited to what you know. And in the beginning, you know nothing. Edit: I had T3Ed running on Win 7 without aby problems, I had to run 3dsmax 5.1 on WinXP vmware though.

I had no filename on the OneDrive screen but the download button worked. Here's the Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/je9v6ycn6ra0d01/clut.pk4?dl=1

You know, you can actually configure your keyboard shortcuts and use WASD for 3d camera, it's much more convenient than arrow keys.

Yeah, that's me. But I haven't touched T3Ed in months. I don't have it installed, or have any T3Ed-related resources on my HDD right now. IMO it's better to stick to TDM. While the editor isn't as easy and UX-oriented as in Unreal engines, at least the stuff you do work 99% of the time. While things like coding or writing shaders and scripts can be frustrating, once you learn it, it works, and you do it much faster. That’s better than constantly thinking of workarounds for something, and that's what you’ll be doing in T3Ed most of the time. Btw. why do you keep all the files? If I want to track progress, I make screenshots, otherwise I keep files from last two months or so.

Nope, decreasing LOD only gives like 3-5 fps more, and the lowest setting makes the fog disappear and makes all things look ugly, which is exactly opposite of what you wanted to achieve here. Typically SEED is used to scatter clones of models within defined area, but it also can be used to link models in some way. I don’t know how it does it in strict technical terms, but it seems to do what other engines do automatically: treating all instances like translation operations (moving, rotating etc.) on one model, which, as you’ve seen from the stats, reduced number of DCs and helped performance. It’s not as good in the starting point, which is around 30, but still much better than 17. On more general note, in our community we like to talk immersion, while most mappers doesn’t seem to be bothered by stuff like huge framerate drops and low framerate in general, which is super-weird for me. And, whether you like it or not, awfully immersion-breaking for the players, especially nowadays. Sure, we played games back in 1872 in 15 FPS and it was okay. Unfortunately, the year is 2017 and we’re not living in a bubble. In modern action games, occasional dips into 50 FPS territory will go unnoticed by the players, but that’s basically the all buffer you have. Even if we assume that stealth games are more forgiving in that regard — since they’re slower paced — a difference of more than 20 fps is still very jarring. That’s particularly evident in ranges below 40 FPS. As mappers, we really should adopt higher quality standards, like 40-60 FPS everywhere, and teach others how to achieve it in deliberate manner. Players would enjoy higher framerates, and it’s an opportunity for mappers to learn more about the engine. “But it works on my machine” approach hardly benefits anyone. One more idea: since framerate consistency is what’s most important, maybe it will be possible to introduce a “half v-sync” option for TDM, so the game could run in locked 30 fps. That’s a question to TDM team.

Allow me to present few things (or rather possible concessions) to consider in the future then: 1) Using SEED reduces high DCs due to multiple clones of models, leaving some overhead for other things 2) Torch-bearing, shadow-casting guards decrease performance substantially, at least in this scene. Deleting their torches improved framerate a lot. 3) So did setting no shadows for most background models and lights. 4) Long view distance and ineffective visportals are a factor too, e.g. using more S- or U-shaped building exterior would hide the shed entrance from players view and allow for better visportal placement. A quick proof of concept:

Sometimes AAS or map errors occur without any particular reason. If that's the case, it helps to rewrite all the map files. Just remember to have your map open in DR first, then delete all its files, hit Save, and run Dmap in game.

Art direction and graphics, that was done well, and I liked it. IMO level design was quite flawed in Thief 4. Dishonored did much better job here, because it stuck to classic rules of mission building: multiple ways of entry and exit. Apart from the city hub, Thief 4 felt more like “on rails” experience, with points of no return and focus on cinematic look. That would be fine if used in moderation. For me, it was used way too often. If I was to rate it only on its own, T4 felt like an average / competent game. Story was a bit rubbish, and stealing bucketloads of cutlery was a snoozefest, but the atmosphere was mostly there, and (gamepad) controls + body awareness were done right. Unfortunately, in comparison to the whole Thief legacy, it felt like a big step back.

It is not, all modern games run fine on this rig in 1440p. And the difference isn't that big, it's like 5 FPS more in 1080p. With this graphical fidelity, you should have 60 fps everywhere, easily, and people will expect that. It's not entirely your fault, however, you just used stock models. And that's something for another discussion, i.e. why making models with multiple tiling textures is a dead end and not a viable solution.

So we have similar level of performance: you're playing at 1080 and my native resolution is 1440p, that requires more power. Yes, I am worried about performance more often than not, mostly because I assume that if someone asks for more computing power, he/she has a solid grounds for it, like eye-candy models, or hi-res 2K-4K textures. But you've made your decision, that's fine. What is more important, the interior has solid 60 fps all around, and that's where the majority of gameplay takes place.

Where's the like button when you really need it Thanks a lot, that will do. You can also assign whatever shortcut you like to that: in Keyboard shortcuts menu look for SelectAllModelsOfType command.

Yup, that works for textures. But the idea is not to replace them, but to select all the instances of a static mesh in a map. Some editors also allow selecting all copies of a mesh only in a given zone, which is useful as well.

Neon, the problem is we're not talking about low-end PCs. My PC runs Dishonored 2 in 1440p with all settings on very high, with TXAA. It's not a low-end PC. As FM makers, we need to have some perspective. Players will be frustrated with things like that. It's not about artistry either, more like honest down-to-earth craftsmanship. it's not like visual quality TDM offers right now is something of a 2017 or even 2012 title. It's somewhat above Deadly Shadows, while system requirements for scenes like that are many, many times higher. Ultimately it's indeed your decision, but IMO we should do our best to avoid that kind of gaps, or at least to bring them to more reasonable level.

It's mostly a matter of texture scale-down (pixel density) ratio you want to assume, and it pays off to be consistent in that regard. 2048 texture covers an area of 256 x 256 units pretty well, and you should be able to unwrap an object that fits inside a 128 unit cube. That's basically what I use for my textures and objects, a scale of 8:1. Higher res textures give diminishing returns IMO, mostly due to screen resolution and anisotropic filtering – you won't be able to appreciate that level of detail until you glue your nose to such surface. Maybe if the engine allows, and resolutions like 1440/2160p will be more common, 4K textures will be more useful in the future.

Very cool, and very important feature as well. It would be great to have a step-by-step tutorial for this in the wiki

I'm not sure whether there is such an option in DR (please let me know otherwise ), but it would be great to have an ability to select all instances of given model, and all instances of a model with particular skin. This is very useful when you have 30 or 40 clones of a model in your map, and you have to delete them all (e.g. because you want to import a new version, and you changed pivot placement).

Neon, here's a screenshot along with the stats: From my experience, if DCs go above 3000, the framerate starts to go down, at least in most cases. And it applies both to my (decent) desktop PC and old laptop, so I guess it's not a problem with GPU hardware, but rather with high number of instructions clogging the CPU>GPU pipeline. My desktop PC has Core i7 3.05 GHz CPU and my laptop runs on Core i5 2.5 GHz, and they both have similar "DC threshold". Both are capable of running much more demanding titles as well. Edit: I guess high number of DCs is mostly due to multiple fog emitters? (or massive transparency impacts general performance) Maybe changing those to static planes (or regular fog) would help? This area is probably too small, but if you wanted to have something like Silent Hill 2 fog, it would be better to have one emitter attached to the player (with proper offset, particle sources, etc, etc). I did something like that for TDS years ago, but with snow blizzard effect; it looked cool and used much less resources than multiple emitters set in the scene. You'd have to switch it on and off with scripts when player enters and exits the building though, that might be hard to set up to look convincing.

It isn't for the higher-end PCs either. You have over 6500 drawcalls at starting point, that's like twice too much. My GTX 1060 PC slows down to 20 FPS. The interior seems to be fine though.