peter_spy

That really depends on the case. I'm not far into animation, but AFAIK, doing this properly would require bones, springs and such. It's not like you can jump in, quickly make it, and move to the next task. You'd need to have some background in animation for games, understand the workflow etc. If you do, and it's just something you can get to by extrapolating what you know and doing some research, then sure. But if not, then no, it's not worth the effort. Not yet. And if this is completely unknown territory to you, making someone do it won't help you much, as skipping your 101 in any discipline never truly does. I don't know how Biker's animation knowledge holds up, so it's really only up to him to decide.

It's just my opinion, but setting up such complicated mechanism isn't worth those two seconds during which player will say, 'oh, cool', and move on. I'd make it simple: two pieces, one static (probably with some of this geometry on alpha) and one horizontally sliding behind it.

That's sad news You've set very high bar for yourself. Always been super friendly and helpful to new mappers, beyond highest expectations, really. It's only natural to take a break in a situation like this.

I remember trying to make a custom surface definition once, it was a snow material, and while I was looking at values in other surface types, I was shocked there were no values for crouching. [Edit] Yup, just checked in St. Edgar's. Also, you don't make any footstep sounds while carrying a body.

Sorry, I didn't mean to criticize the sound pack itself, but the "realistic" approach. Btw. TDS has no crouch footsteps

Loud footsteps are for the player so he's always aware on what surface he walks on, and it's a balancing act for the AI. Invisible, inaudible master thief – where's fun in that?

It might be the fact that I used Export selected instead of just Export, which is a difference between exporting one mesh and the whole scene in max. Haven't tried that yet, but exporting one mesh as a scene (without splitting anything) should work as well.

Yeah, we talked about this on Discord yesterday. Placing a just a few shadowcasting objects brings the framerate down, and the number lights goes down to 18. Which is still a lot, but I won't be using that much anyway. The idea is to try to pinpoint general scene complexity, both in terms of lightning and geometry, and to get stable 60 fps on my desktop, and at least 30 fps on my old laptop. As for good lighting, it requires either fake GI and lightmaps, or using multiple lights to simulate light bounces, so that's mostly what those tests are for. In "real-life" situations, on my laptop fps goes down to 45 with just two overlapping lights, so I'm trying to find something in-between.

Ok, I did one more test on my desktop PC to see the hardware gap between it and my laptop, in terms of number of overlapping lights. As I expected, it's huge. GTX 1060 can handle 32 36 overlapping, shadow-casting lights, + ambient + fog, before framerate goes below 60, in 1440p. Definitely not going to exploit that in any way, although that hardware is going to be cheaper someday, which means more freedom for mappers. For me it's more freedom in lighting design now, and making some adjustments later.

This might help you: Custom textures have to go to fms/yourfmname/textures (for tga) or dds (for compressed dds textures). Pk4s in root TDM folder are core mod assets, not mission-specific stuff.

Kind of suspected some of this was rubbish. I'm worried about section 2.2 a: (not permitted) And yet I am permitted to: Do they even know how models work? Unless it's an asset pack, model is geometry, shaders and textures are separate things. You can't "incorporate" anything in .ase model.

Hmm... I'm not sure if I understand it correctly, but it seems you can't use these in mods in any way, encrypted packs or not? https://www.textures.com/terms-of-use.html

FYI, Unreal, CryEngine, Unity etc. engines all have been using asset packs for years, for both AAA and free projects, and their communities do pretty well, regardless of free spirits and their sense of irony That said, if you work with quality content, or use hi-res commercial textures as part of your materials, you can always scale the whole thing down to make it less attractive for asset flippers and all the like. I have a "proof of concept" which uses 2k textures everywhere, but I could always scale that to 512 upon release. People with older hardware would probably appreciate that.

That's definitely a waste, if you have multiple light models (like candles) in a small area, they should just be models, and you should use one source of light for them all. Model + light combo is useful when that source of light is one of the major ones in the scene.

We discussed this some time ago. While methods like PPMd are much more efficient than standard deflate, they're also super slow to decompress. Since we already have very long initial loading times, it's not a good idea to implement this yet.

Maybe I did something wrong, because I could never resize SEED brush after I created the entity. Nvm, tab option works. Also, you should use SEED at the very end of your mapping process, because if you start cloning meshes within it, weird things can happen. At some point I cloned the lamp mesh in my map, it wasn't even linked to SEED, and when launched the game, I had over 21M tris worth of lamps at my ceiling.

I didn't understand much of it either. I actually used the watch entities option. All you have to do is surround your scene with brush,right-click, create SEED entity, create link from SEED to one instance of a model and put the seed_watch_brethren 1 property in it. It reduces drawcalls a lot, shadows and model tris go down too. It probably could do wonders with things like grass and forest missions. I agree on 80-100k, those test don't involve AI and other calculations, so having more overhead is always a good idea.

Ok, so it's a bit more complicated with my laptop. While I can have pretty high number of drawcalls and triangle count: it's the shadows that bring the hardware to its knees, just like Steve said. I will most likely hit the shadow limit before any triangle or drawcall limit, so all I have to do is to stay below 130k per scene: Which seems like a a pretty generous limit. So far my scene has around 15k for shadows. And this is all without SEED, so there should be some room for improvement as well. All in all, that's definitely good news

Last game I played which had a toggled run button was Morrowind, but TDM isn't open-world RPG...

IMO the best option would be to be able to launch missions and use assets under DR, without entering any passwords or keys, but without being able to extract assets from pk4 package. Players can play missions as usual, mappers can use assets too, and they can ask the author to send them source models or textures, if they want to modify them. This way authors have a bit of control over how their work is distributed and used.

Oh, and just for fun, I wondered how many of these lamps I'll be able to stack with SEED on, before dipping below 60 FPS. Over 1300

Ok, so another experiment, testing limits on my desktop PC, i7 3,5 Ghz, GTX 1060 6 GB, running at 2560 x 1440. Ambient light, omni light (shadow-casting); 500 tris per object, duplicated 688 times before the framerate started to go below 60 FPS. So, to round it down just in case, it's 3000 draws / 1,6M tris / 230K shadows. This is without SEED and watch entity. Results with SEED on: Kind of pointing out the obvious, but if you work with loads of meshes, you have to use SEED. I encountered one peculiar bug though. Maybe it has something to do with shaderparms 3 and 4, because this lamp uses table to animate the glow texture in the material, and I have a similar light material to sync the pulse with actual light. When I don't use SEED everything works ok, but when I include the model in the SEED, the light pulse increases its speed. This is the table: table cor_light01_pulsetable1 { {1, .75, 1, .65, .85, .75, 1, .8} } And this is the animated glow in the material: { blend add map textures/do/mesh/cor_lamp01_em_blu rgb ((1 * cor_light01_pulsetable1[(time * (.1 + parm3) + parm4)]) + 0) // max value, speed, min value // parm3 - speed, parm 4 - offset // define shaderparms in light and model! } Both the light and the models have shaderparms 3 & 4 set to 0 for the slowest pulse. The light works as intended, the animated glow on the model is several times faster. Anyway, next step would be to check performance limits on my laptop.

Yes, it works! It's active right away in main menu screen.

By the way, is it possible to make r_showprimitives 1 command to be read from autoexec.cfg and not crash the game? I put as many useful debuging commands as I can in my cfg file to avoid typing it every time I start the map.

Thanks for all the info. Yup, I've seen that rise of triangle count with console open, but I've been using r_showprimitives 1 and con_noprint 0 to avoid this. My map is basically 99% meshes surrounded with caulk, so I wanted to know where this high tris count comes from, as I'm pretty anal about keeping polycount as low as possible. So far it's not what brings framerate down (overlapping lights are more important to watch for). As for optimizing draws, I found the SEED system and watch entity function to be very effective. In my corridor scene, the number of draws went from 650 to 400 just like that. I don't post any screens yet, because I want to show you the final "eye-candy" version, and that will take another few weeks. But I'm getting there