peter_spy

All the examples you mentioned don't need movie files, all this stuff is made with scrolling textures and tricks in materials. Using video files for that is actually an overkill.

Wonder why he calls it level designs, when these are environments, and it’s not meant for gameplay. Also, while he uses quality models (often made by someone else), IMO there’s not enough intention in his work. Alchemist shop looks pretty decent, but I wonder whether this is just because it’s set in a daylight, and most of the work is done by the lightmass engine. That throne room was made later, and has barely any lighting design or intention to guide viewer’s eye in whatever direction.

Pyre, a new game from SuperGiant studio is out. And it's amazing. The concept, art style, characters, the world, everything.

Yeah, weird. I turn off my monitor too.

Yup, but I think this is still more like a tech-enthusiast perspective. It’s 2017, and, according to Steam poll, the biggest group of gamers still use video cards with 1-2 gigs of VRAM. My guess is that they won’t jump on a new CPU platform so readily and easily.

But there's no reason to switch to 8 cores or more if games aren’t using them. Also remember that changing CPUs is not like buying a new GPU. You need to buy a good motherboard, fast compatible RAM, stable PSU, good cooling, etc. That will cost you a lot, so people make that purchase once a 6 years or even more, to have a solid foundation for GPUs they buy every 2-3 years or so.

I had blackjack to be picked up as a mission objective once, but I deleted it from player's inventory. The player had to follow an NPC, who was leaving it for another character, but all I did was two scripts: one making invisible blackjack visible in pre-determined spot when NPC was performing an animation; second one made blackjack model disappear after frobbing and the proper item was added to player inventory. That assumes you need a scripted and controlled event though. More systemic approach might be more tricky.

No and no. At least for games, it's mostly unnecessary, as they still use 4 cores, and that won’t change much until next generation of consoles comes along. It’s still hard to say when that happens, as Sony execs say there’s PS5 in the works, while MS execs state that “console generations are over” and it’s time to switch to incremental updates, as with mobile hardware. I’d be switching to some better hardware mostly due to better Mental Ray performance, and video encoding. Since that’s a hobby, I can wait long after prices drop. If gamers are really moving to 8-16 cores, we'll see that in Steam hardawre poll sooner or later, but I don't think so. Edit: link to steam hardware CPU trends: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ It looks like only recently users with quad core CPUs made more than 50% of the total.

I'll set up my tracker account eventually. But I agree that if such change might break something or will be ignored by the engine, it's not really worth implementing. In the meantime, I'm off to check the final release Edit: there's a sort of workaround for that as well. You can use a scaled-down _ed texture in DR, so you'll be able to use values with fewer digits. The engine will match the high-res texture in game accordingly.

As of now, the engine uses old RoQ format https://modwiki.xnet.fi/ROQ_%28file_format%29 There are plans for including .mp4 in the future. The question is, what do you plan to use it for? Both video files and gif-like animations for textures are extremely inefficient when it comes to large surfaces and tiling textures. In shaders, it's better to fake animation with instructions like panning, zooming or waving/distorting.

One minor thing that I just noticed: texture scale in surface inspector is limited to 3 digits after the decimal point. With big textures like 2048 you need precise scale values like 0.125 or 0.0625, and the latter gets rounded to 0.063.

Adding optimised assets will help a lot too, but that will take time. Or maybe someone will make VR-focused missions, that would be interesting to see.

The idea is great, but many missions aren't optimised to run in high FPS. And it's not as much a GPU problem, but CPU -> GPU bottleneck, so you cant just offset that by buying a modern card.

What about Sneaky Upgrade? I managed to run Thief 3 on Win7 with it.

I admit, I don't have refined taste in whiskey. I like JD or Jameson for my weekly needs, I also tried a few finer brands like Greenspot or Yellowspot. But even my plebeian nose and taste buds can sense ethanol in red label. It almost reeks of it. Maybe that's a regional thing, and this is one of the cheapest whiskeys on the market, so I shouldn't be that surprised.

Right now, our fog uses light to define its area in the map, we also have "fog end" parameter (shaderparm3), so we can extend the fog range beyond the light area. This very useful, if yo want to use subtle fog to show depth in your map or simulate a little haze in the air, that is always present to some extent in the real world. There are a few problems here though. You need a gradient image to simulate fog, and by limits of 8 bits per channel in images, we can only have 256 steps in any gradient, which causes banding. To simulate haze, you need to use high values for shaderparm, and that increases banding even more. It's less obvious when you have many objects in your scene, but you can easily see this with caulk: My question is: can we have additional "fog start" parameter, so the fog would start further away from the player? Is it possible to decrease banding this way, by having shorter distance between fog start and fog end?

Thief 1-2 should be on both GoG and Steam, so it's not that hard to find. And with NewDark, hardware compatibility issues are minimal these days. As for the whiskey comparison: to me, Thief 4 is like Johnny Walker Red Label. Some people call that whiskey, sure. I think no human being with minimum amount of self-respect should ever go below Jack Daniels

I just found out that Fraps includes both gamma settings and con_noprint data while capturing screenshots, awesome.

Yeah, sceenshots are taken with gamma 1.0. Not sure why that would ruin anything though. If anything, you should get more contrasty look, but that's all. I just add gamma in IrfanView before saving the image for web.

Just make what you want to make, and post ingame screenshots when you're done with textures and materials. That will speak more than walls of text.

Dammit, it looks like the problem still persists. I fired up TDM today and the old path still shows up during loading. I deleted all the files, saved the map in DR and then dmapped it, and that old path is still there. Maybe I should delete the .ase model and export it again. My mistake, I pasted old code in my material file, it still had the previous texture name in // TDM Ambient Method Related section. It's all good now

Good find! That did it. I opened all map files with notepad and searched for the old path, but it wasn't there. Looks like it's a good idea to delete files generated with dmap and gnerate them again, if you changed texture path or model name. Thanks again!

This is an unwrapped texture, so it can't be used on brushes or other meshes. I searched the map files, but there are no traces of the old name here. Same for the model. Actually you can see many errors like that during loading, for many FMs, while everything is fine, so paths must have been replaced correctly. Wonder where game keeps getting that information from.

I had con_noprint set to 0 for quite some time now, both for use with r_showprimitives command, and because it displays helpful info during loading. It also displays many path errors, both while TDM main menu is loading and during FM loading. Lately I’ve changed a name and textures/material names for one of my meshes. Everything updated correctly, I but still see a warning about textures with previous name missing. Looks like that information is still stored somewhere. Is it possible to get rid of it? I’d like to keep my log clean so I don’t miss anything important.

Well that more complicated actually. Let's take a look at example that works. This is a wooden + metal surface, diffuse texture: If you use B&W spec, it will look like something between plastic and metal. But if you use something like this: It will look like this ingame: The light source is white, reflection on wooden panels is white, and metal reflection is a bit colored, as it should.