peter_spy

This is a very good observation, but kind of an afterthought. Why don't you use r_showtris 1 command, take a look at these modules, (both in the warehouse and in the living quarters) and take some screenshots as well? And try to tell us that these are good models.

There's no sense in releasing your work if you can't deal with criticism, especially if it's valid. That's part of the fun, and the opportunity to grow. I can only guess you're used to constant praise and noone in your circles is able to fairly judge your work. Sure you can throw a tantrum like that, it's both funny and sad. Those models will snowball on you and us players later, unless you plan to include 2 SLI GTX 1080s and SSD drives as a requirement for a game that doesn't even look 2010. Getting back to good work then

You released these models to the public, and for others to use. This is a responsibility. I'm not bitching about one extra polygon you could save here and there. This is a really simple level, it doesn't need mesh LODs. We're talking about a real problem here. Just to check whether my concerns were valid, I opened the map and deleted some of those wall modules. Before: And after: As you see, this is not the result of speedbuild, but this might: I'm genuinely curious, what was the rationale behind throwing so many polygons and edges at these walls, if you can't even see some of them? I'd never do anything like that, and no other mapper I know wouldn't either. I showed those screens to two of my friends, and I can't even cite their comments, because they were mostly the wtf material. Making so many meshes is a tremendous effort, I get it, but TDM team really needs to have some QA on this, as this will impact other players, hard. Something is seriously wrong with your workflow, and if you don't believe me, try posting any of these meshes and textures on sites like Polycount, you'll get a great feedback there.

Unfortunately, my initial reservations about the quality of those models were grounded, as they impact the overall performance. At this state, game can't maintain even 50 FPS in the warehouse area. We're talking about 6 gig GTX 1060, that thing can handle Dishonored 2 on Ultra settings in 1440p.

IMO it's a balance between believable story (who put it here and why?), and players wanting to be rewarded for looking under every rock and searching every dead end. Thief reboot had us steal tons of cutlery and scissors. It's more like being kleptomaniac. I prefer less loot, but with backstory. I'd rather have 3 pieces of special loot, TDS style, over tons of forks, knives and scissors.

Actually no, that's how it works in most editors: ortho views don't detect brush sides/faces, so you can only do that in 3d view. This is helpful because it prevents you from accidental selecting and moving your brushes. And the wire frame has a certain radius around the edges, you don't have to click it precisely, at least that's how it worked in Unreal engines. With all the shift-clicking system, which I thought was designed to prevent accidental movement of your stuff on the map, this solution always seemed like undermining the whole effort. Good thing entities and meshes have first priority in the ortho view though.

Is it possible to change the way brushes are selected in ortho view? By default, you select a brush when you click inside it in the orthographic view. Is it possible to change that behavior to e.g. brush edges only?

I think we're mixing a bit too many factors here, and in essence we all agree. By happiness and fulfilling our personal potential I meant, somewhat idealistically, what we know and discover, that is good for us, from a purely intimate perspective. Not what your mum thinks is best for you, or what society perceives as a success in life. That's relative and redundant (although it is very present in culture and comes with a certain social pressure, no doubt about it). Possessions and money become, either with age or when you're financially stable, less and less important. Being a part of certain community, being respected, making this planet a better place, making at least one person on Earth happy, those things start to occur to you if you pursue money as a goal for too long, and realise it's irrelevant.

Yeah, it's mostly because a lot people devalue themselves, they act like they don't deserve happiness, settling for jobs, partners, and relationships below their true potential. Starting basically anything that you could file under "...of my dreams" category is scary, because you can always fail. And because of that, people don't try it and settle for less. Happiness is definitely a skill and you have to actively practice it. I see a lot of potential in my friends for example, but they often settle for less, because they don't see that they're that awesome, and with some courage they could be anyone and do anything. A lot of my relationships are actually based on helping other people improve, and this one of the biggest pleasures in life for me. But, you have to be careful, since not everyone actually wants that kind of help

I think it's not that difficult to identify those things. In a very short period of time, something around 10 years maybe, people have been exposed to gradually increasing stream of information. We are being bombarded with data, and our brains have not yet adjusted to that, in terms of biology and evolution. Maybe that will change in next generations. What is worse, even in our spare time, we seem to be addicted to processing (mostly irrelevant) information, just for the sake of it. That's why we visit "infinite scroll" websites like soup.io, tumblr, or facebook, even after a hard day at work. No wonder people have serious sleep problems, when their brains are constantly working. What you did was getting back to more natural conditions for a human body, with less information to process, more sleep, and more getting around your environment. As for a good life, that's a very uncomfortable question for most people, because if you ask them, "are you happy with your life?", most of them will say "no" (at least if they're honest). Getting distracted with entertainment moves that question, and the scary bigger picture, away from us.

Windows 7, 372.70 here (gpu reference drivers). I remember seeing that kind of bug, but without green light, when I messed up something in material definition. That was long time ago though, I have no idea how would I reproduce such error.

In my case, with no vsync it was 230-300 fps in-game and 1000 fps in menu With vsync on everything works well so far. Leaving it off is probably a bad idea anyway, usually stuff like physics is tied to the framerate cap and acts weird if that cap is removed or bypassed..

That was weird. The difference between vsync on and off was basically that when it was on, it looked more or less as if it was off, just without screen tearing. Only when I used com_fixedTic 1 command, the movement was smooth again. That helped, thanks.

Actually, this was recorded with seta r_displayRefresh set to 60 in autoexec.cfg

Not sure what's the source of this problem, but lately I've noticed this a bit jerky movement every half a second or so, especially while running. I reset (deleted) the darkmod.cfg file to see whether I messed something up in the settings, but it looks the same with default values too. This is how it looks like, in a bit exaggerated way:

I thought about something similar just for randomising purposes, but it would be easier to achieve it just with switching visibility of meshes, walls for doorways or unfrobable/frobable doors. I wouldn't worry about splitting map into parts if the design allows for having transition zones reached only by player, i.e. with ladders. If you'd use the same textures, materials and models across your maps, loading time should be relatively short.

Looks good, you might want to put it on Sketchfab to show off the materials a bit more

A small update: slightly reworked trims made big difference without raising triangle count too much. Straight modules have 26 triangles, corners are joint together now to decrease unnecessary extra drawcall for left and right side, so they have a bit more, but still, 127 triangles is nothing these days

Healthy criticism is fine. You just need to know when to stop refining your work, because at some point it's diminishing returns. It's important to take breaks or ask for feedback, because that really contributes to quality of your work. I see that especially with textures and materials, the first version is rarely good. 3rd, 4th iteration is where I can say: "now we're talking!". I don't think speed should be a relevant factor in modelling until you're confident with your skills, when you know your workflow is solid, but could be improved. Actually, speed and ease of use is more important while placing models in your map, so it's better to spend a few extra hours on careful planing in that department, especially if you want to release your models to the public.

Oh, so there's a reason for it, like e.g. in Dark Souls, where catacombs could go completely dark to scare the shit out of you? I just started playing, so I didn't see a point to it yet. Maybe it would be better to use zones and change ambient for interior locations, while leaving it a bit brighter for locations where you can see the sky then.

Thanks for the kind words. You're right about the model, of course. At first I was thinking about giving the middle section some more depth, while it's the trims that will look better with some more polygons and variety in angles. Also, it's the fastest and easiest way to improve the look of the model, while it still will be very low-poly. There's no need to keep the higher-poly version of those trims, especially that this shape has polygons that are 1 or 2 units wide. Without proper texture they'd look almost invisible anyway. And, you can easily fake it with proper diffuse and normal textures, and just get something in-between on geometry level. The goal is to keep a healthy relationship between mesh shape and final (possibly just one) material, so the overhead can go for other uses, like AI, physics and such. I've been using the r_showtris command a lot lately, it's been very useful for studying both meshes and brushes. Also, I have my autoexec.cfg with seta image_downSize command ready, so I can see how the artwork holds up when scaled down for optimisation. I must say I'm quite pleased with the results Well, that's not the worst thing I've seen lately, take a look at this: "You think anyone will notice?" "Nah, leave it."

My only complaint atm is the ambient brightness setting. It's almost pitch black. I had to crank up gamma all the way up to see anything.

On somewhat related note, the way this engine handles parallel mesh surfaces is amazing. Typically you need two adjacent mesh walls to use some kind of angle, because you'd see dots or shadowing problems where the two mesh edges meet. Not in idtech4: Meanwhile in UDK:

Good find, I also just found this: https://simonschreibt.de/gat/renderhell/ but that requires a longer reading session. All in all, industry moved away from brushes almost completely, using it only in prototyping stages. In UE3/UDK and later engines you can have your level geometry built entirely out of static meshes.

Btw. I'll have to do a little more reading on that, since my knowledge on ins and outs of rendering pipeline is pretty fragmentary, but aren't brushes actually consuming more drawcalls than meshes? I remember reading that with CSG, every face is treated as a separate object. And also, the multi-material meshes are bad, because such mesh is split into smaller meshes, per material, before being fed to the GPU, thus more drawcalls?