peter_spy

Again, similar to Kingsal's stance on this, I'm curious about practical application of this, because: 1) if you're not the model creator, you have no idea how a model was made, so the potential to make it look worse is IMO rather substantial; 2) typically in FM package you get textures in .dds format, so if you plan to rework them for your mission, you'll be applying heavy compression upon compression, again reducing the overall quality of the model. In both cases it's better to ask the original creator to get better results. Separate asset packages definitely are additional effort, but e.g. could be released with all textures in uncompressed tga format, allowing further modification without losing quality.

I think that's more complex than that. You might want to just give the community a mission to play. You can prepare a separate package with assets for mappers later. That's how it worked with T3 missions. Plus, there are awesome free and paid assets (that goes in particular for music tracks), that you could use in your mission, provided that they're not editable / accessible. You don't have to always deal in absolutes, not everything has to be a contribution to the core mod that can be disassembled and modified forever. There was one person who was banned for the practice mentioned and was still defended by the most zealous fans, just because they map a lot and people have stuff to play. As for the most recent example, see my post above. I was casually asked to share an unfinished and unreleased mission by an author who's not been around for quite some time. That doesn't sound like respect, does it?

There's a history of making unwanted changes to maps and copy-pasting portions of one map to another, yes. And players not giving a crap as long as they have something new to play.

Out of curiosity, how that actually contributes to any workflow? I get that you can whip up something with DR brushwork and add details in Blender. But you don't need to export models from DR, if you have model source, and if it's not your model, it's safer to ask the original creator to make changes, as they know how a model was made.

Sure, if someone is a real bastard, they'll find a way to rip anything, but that's not the point. The point is, some basic protection / encryption that asset packages provide has been a standard thing in other engines for ages now. The demand that models be fully opened and ready for infinite modification is what is rather outdated and entitled attitude, not the other way around.

FYI, I just got asked via Discord whether I could share the unfinished and unreleased mission by Ubermann: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19045-merchant-by-the-canal/page/2/&tab=comments#comment-456963 Not sure whether this was a player or mapper, but yeah, that's the decency and trust. As long as we have new maps to play, everything fucking goes

Hey, that GUI editor looks really nice and clean. http://cegui.org.uk/features

I'm really against wording it like that, as "locking away". It almost sounds as you or community were the victim here. You do get to play a mission with these models, and you can also use them. They're not locked away from you. You just can't do whatever the hell you want with how they were built. The author decided they're finished. That's not your decision to make anyway. But I agree that this is no longer DR-related talk.

Apart from believing or not believing in the community's sense of decency, this isn't about locking a work away. With locked packages, you have the work, you can play the mission. If the author decides to do so, you'll also get a separate package with models to be used in your work. It's about decision on when and where the model is finished. It's the same as with decision to finish writing a piece or a book. With current system there's no such thing.

I sure don't expect that kind of commitment from anyone Just found that link on another Discord server, thought would be worth to share.

Making assets or designs is different from coding, this is not joint iterative effort, where working in groups and having code review obviously makes sense, as it contributes to better code. This more of a personal investment, and at a certain level of fidelity, takes a lot of time and work. Similar thing to making music, really. That's why creators want to have at least some level of control over what they made and hold the results fairly dear. Maybe you're right that disabling DR export features wouldn't change that, although both that and locking the pk4 packages would at least limit that to some extent. There's a difference between making assets planned for the core mod and possible future modifications, and making custom content for a single FM. In context of that Discord discussion, that's especially in the context of this community. It's been time and time again, where certain community members didn't get / didn't care about what is personal creation that requires permission, thinking everything released for TDM should be up for grabs and free for all. And there were more community members chiming into the forum discussion with that "what's the big deal" attitude as well. So it is a bigger awareness problem. And if you wonder why there are so few regular modellers around here, then, apart from antiquated content pipeline, this would be the main reason – no control over the work. Even if you add copyright notice to your FM (which you can do, as assets are not code and don't have to comply with GPL) there's not much you can do but trust that people will adhere to that, which is rather naive. It's also about quality control. If a mapper rips your model from from the asset package and makes weird modifications, and the resulting model looks worse, or in general you wouldn't want your name to be associated with such thing – that's still attributed to you.

Another thing, this time about models. It seems like there are two sections for exporting models, one in File and the other in Scripts. IIUC, the latter is redundant so it can be removed. Second thing is a bit more controversial I guess, but IMO exporting model geometry should be disabled. This way you can use DR to e.g. export .ase to .obj and modify otherwise unchangeable models (ase can be exported, but not imported into any modeling software). Artists have no control over how their assets can be used, and this way they can be spliced, hacked, and bashed by mappers. Even if you copyright or otherwise restrict the usage, you'll have hard time tracking down those who don't give a crap about modellers. This is also related to use of other models, or derivative works from other models. There are many free models that are not entirely CC0, but they're free / allow derivative works, but on a condition of, e.g.: "you may not use the asset in a way that allows others to use or access the asset as a stand-alone" – this is a standard license quote from a popular 3d hosting platform. So having DR as an .ase -> .obj exporter makes such terms impossible to follow. Exporting brushwork or patches is obviously fine, if anyone works this way.

That would probably require a lot of effort to integrate, but if GUIs are such nightmare to work with, maybe they could be replaced with a different, more friendly system: https://github.com/mikke89/RmlUi This would be similar to web development then.

Yup, while the fastest sata SSDs go to like 500 megs, m2 nvme drives can go up to 30 gigs right now.

It's a significant change for both old and new rigs, when you switch from HDDs. M2 drives are even bigger blast. I can barely see win10 login screen, system is fully booted in 2 seconds. If there are no apps blocking the shutdown, it powers off in one. I need to kick the old habit of switching the computer on and going to the kitchen for something to drink, as I can just push the power button, sit down, and it's ready to work

Switched to an nvme drive for system and apps, and separate SSD for games. Guess I'm stating the obvious, but first loading time for most TDM missions has improved substantially.

About such announcements in general, I think the images they come with should have some sort of captions on where a screen comes from. Quite often in the past, you were using Spooks' WIPs, which look awesome, but these are not released missions. I imagine it's disappointing for players to think "hey, this looks amazing, where can I download this mission" just to get the "you can't" response. IMO this is much worse case of false advertising than screenshots with multisampling we discussed on bugtracker. The case above is a milder one, since it's a mission about to be released, but still, it's a bit misleading.

Looks great! And if the Media browser can be detached, that's even better

So there's not that much content, okay. 8-10 hours would be okay to me for that price.

Thanks! I've been exploring shaders and art pipeline for quite some time now; it's always been the most fun thing to me. I'm really surprised how much you can do with this engine. Huh, this method it actually works with stencil shadows, and not with shadow maps... Interesting. Yeah, but it's no big deal. Let's just pretend these are some weird magic crystals

Still experimenting with glass shaders, this time for some more complex shapes. The transparency sorting problem is quite visible here, and even with dark color, the material is too see-through IMO. Going for opaque version and perhaps some sort of glowing crystal a la TDS might be a better option overall. Edit: got a small breakthrough with translucent materials this morning. This is heavily reliant on actual lighting, so getting it right will be hard. But this is one step closer towards some nice magic glowing crystal effect Also, I had no idea you can actually get translucent materials to cast shadows

Actually, you can get a mirror that reflects a view from another mirror, if you align them properly, without multiple map scratches. You just need to make sure there's only one mirror directly in player view cone. But I agree that multiple active mirrors will give way to mapper abuse and 15fps gameplay. I've already heard questions like, "can we start adding mirrors to every fancy marble floor now".

Sure, it's nothing major though. Btw. is there a way to have embedded perspective and ortho views, but with Media browser floating or placed elsewhere, UE3 style? I ended up with floating windows because media browser made perspective window small and it wasn't exactly fast to work with, so I moved it to the second monitor, like this:

That rim / fresnel kinda seems to have a life of its own I see it on my models sometimes, even when I didn't do anything out of ordinary in terms of modeling or texturing. Oh, and also, @totallytubular sorry if you already know this, but there a few more quirks about this system. First of all, it's not just greyscale values, it uses the whole RGB range. Greyscale values are good for surfaces like silver, water and glass, and that's basically it. The rest needs to use this workflow. So in essence, for conductors, colors from diffuse to modify the hotspot color; for dielectrics, inverted colors from diffuse to make it still look white.

A small thing I noticed lately: when you use floating viewports and you minimize DR, the perspective viewport is still there: