peter_spy

Well, not exactly, in the second shot the number of subviews is higher, number of draws and tris is a bit lower, but the video memory is higher. That would imply that something else is being rendered too, as it uses more textures/materials. No idea why that would bring down the fps so hard. Out of curiosity, what would cause so many drawcalls and such huge triangle count in this simple looking scene? Are these pillars and grooves made with geometry?

First of all, these counts are super high for what's visible on screen: 3k draws, million tris, 156k shadow tris for simple geometry. Also, the number of views increases from 3 to 5, so it might mean you have a material with cubemap or a mirror? Just a guess.

Also, if you use shadows with stencil, these will pop in and out at fade distance; only maps with fade in and out smoothly with the model (which kinda makes sense). According to my notes, stuff like lod_x models should work correctly, but things will get wonky when it comes to skins for different lods. It seems like the model will always switch to lod_0 skin when going between hide_distance and lod fadeout range.

Sorry I didn't prepare a test map, just grabbed what I had from my stuff, as I don't want to be distracted much from the level design exercises I'm doing right now. But you can imagine this being applied to stuff like distant trees or grass, or perhaps even buildings (you could couple that with some distance fog, etc.). In general it should be pretty versatile and work with almost every object.

Not sure why it would be bad for LODing, it kinda depends on what you put in the alpha channel of the texture. It can look a bit like the reverse monster fade out in Doom3, and from a proper distance it looks good; it beats an object popping in and out of a thin air.

@kingsalIt might be Tels' work, no idea either. I did some experiments with it and I have some snippets in my notes, but I must have discarded that test map. We can use Discord and try to recreate it though.

There is alpha fade in and out, it needs alpha channel in the texture and particular material setup. I wasn't able to blend between lod stages though, only fading out from nothing to fully rendered object.

He speaks for me. Because of you, the forum view looks like this: The forums look like a news site because of you, and I don't have any way to ignore it.

I meant an Ignore function on a thread level, not just single posts. I check forums using the Activity tab, because that's the fastest way to see all the recent posts. Right now all posts are from the taliban thread which I'm really not interested in but have to navigate through, to see TDM related stuff.

An option to ignore the whole thread would be very appreciated. Just ignoring a user is not much of help when the activity stream is filled with responses from other users.

If I'm working from home, I either work in silence as well, or have something fairly generic and relaxing in the background, e.g. one of the chillhop playlists. For creative stuff I can actually focus with a podcast in the background, or I use something that matches the mood of what I'm doing, yeah

There already was a feature request to extend LOD to other entities, I believe there was more than one. So don't expect anyone rushing to fix this for you, because it's not that simple.

Bear in mind that LOD system is very old, IIRC it was designed by Tels and never improved upon much since. Ideally, every entity except worldspawn should be able to use LOD, but it's not an ideal situation. And yeah, performance is still your responsibility. Either you get to know the engine and design maps to leverage its strengths or you will see players complaining, whether you like it or not.

Oh yeah, sound design is also fantastic. I have no idea how they pulled it off in the Ashtray Maze, but the way music changes there is awesome, it's like the song was split in parts that overlap dynamically. Similar goes for the regular combat music, the tempo gets faster when there are plenty of enemies around and it slows down when there are 1-2. No idea how they did it, but I'm pretty sure it's not a real-time effect, since that reduces audio quality quite much.

If anything's convenient, it's sitting on your ass and being a facebook warrior. This is obvious but nothing beats gathering people and doing something positive together, and seeing a change in the world, even if it's slow. Also that's how change of mind is also being perpetuated, by regular participation and doing. If anything, poorly phrased/targeted forum topics like this are doing more harm to the cause than not.

Forums is hardly near. And actually doing something, like raising a fund, or joining people who are already doing something for a cause is 100 times smarter than yelling at strangers on niche forum. World doesn't need internet warriors or facebook revolutionists, there are plenty of them already, and it does nothing.

Couldn't you refuse it elsewhere? You're not really reaching anyone with your, ahem, message, interwebz warrior. Not on a stealth gaming forum, where there are maybe like 20 active people at best.

@STiFU You know what, I actually finished Control today, and you were right, it's not as bad as I thought. In general I found the combat boring in the long run, as enemies are bullet spongy and generic in look. Although maybe the scale is the problem, this building is enormous and enemies look like small figurines in comparison. The best bits for me are the ambiance and level design. The latter is basically a metroidvania, and exploration is very rewarding. I wouldn't say the game is the im-sim, but it kinda hits these vibes sometimes. Also, writing fortunately gets better, Darling is a great character. Ex-director is basically Max Payne who did a career change, but it's always nice to hear (and see) Mr McCaffrey in another role. And the Threshold Kids show is just bloody fantastic But all in all, the mechanics and some mission types are very AAA-gamey. Go kill X monsters here, Y monsters there, collect Z things there; these "alert" missions are taken straight out of a typical Ubisoft busywork simulator. And a funny thing in general, at some point you get to talk with Dylan repeatedly, and one of his dreams is that this whole story is a videogame. That is of course a nod to the first Max Payne, but what one thing was very particular in that monologue. "The whole thing was a video game. And it was fucking boring. But you couldn't stop playing it." That's one of the best and most haunting summaries of the AAA industry I've ever heard. Still, it comes from AAA developers who are perhaps convinced that they managed to escape that description? I'm not so sure that they did. Oh, and one more thing Control does brilliantly, and I wish more developers would do, is a quite nuanced Assist menu. You don't like shooting much or have injury that prevents you from playing fast-paced games? Or perhaps you just want to enjoy the story? Sure, here's faster recharging for energy and ammo. If that's not enough for you, sure, here are one-shot kills. Still having trouble? Just make yourself invincible and have fun exploring. Now this is how a modern AAAccessiblility should look like. I hope more developers will take notice.

It's also worth mentioning that when you switch from this^ 512px material with 0,125 scale applied back to 2048px, this happens: So DR is really inconsistent when it comes to switching between materials with different texture sizes, within the same texture scale.

Perhaps I'll try to make this more clear with another example. 1. This is a 256x256 DU brush with 2048x2048 px texture applied using 0,125 scale. The texture tiles once as it should. 2. Here I selected the brush and then selected gen_dark_rusted01 from the texture browser. This material uses 512px textures. As you can see, it also tiles once. 3. When I select the brush and click Natural, this happens: I think that LDash argues that this^ should be a default behavior when applying another material, and not what happened in the 2nd image. I'd expect that kind of consistency too, as I set this option in DR preferences: But again, I think more mappers should speak up.

Hmm, so it's kinda like tile vs. clamp behavior for brushes? When I make my tiling textures, I always have a certain pixel density in mind, e.g. a 1024 px texture would cover a 128x128 DU plane, so my default texture scale in surface inspector is 0,125 (1:8). Would I like it to be used as default most of the time? Yeah, I guess so. Note that I work almost exclusively with my own assets, and I do have means to be fairly consistent with pixel density. Not sure how that relates to mapping with TDM stock textures and materials, which come in all different sizes. That said, I don't think this will make me use the Natural option in Surface Inspector that less often. For example, as I line up different wall and floor brushes, I have to select them and use this option to align the tiling. I know that when you are creating brushes e.g. side by side, DR maintains the "continuity" of the tiling between them, but often I clone a brush from elsewhere and move it, so it has a different tiling anyway. So all in all I'd say that this isn't such a big deal in practice.

@Destined To make myself clear, I'm not for shutting down all political discussions here (as you correctly noted, this is offtopic after all). Nor do I believe in "keep politics out of our games" crap, (quite the opposite, actually). The last paragraph was just my opinion on such discussions, that's why I prefer to read them (from time to time) rather than take part. I do object the level of discussion Kurshok sets in his topics though (and, this is not the first time this happens). In my opinion, he's not that far from e.g. Outlooker. I guess they are being banned elsewhere rather quickly, so at some point forums like these remain their only place to post.

First of all, there is no "we, the gamers" as a defined, coherent group. It's a myth that was dispelled decades ago. "Gamers" are as smart and coherent as "book-readers" or simply, people, so not really. And, by pouring your panicked and hateful thoughts over the forums, i.e. wishing someone had their throats slit, you made this discussion not smart from the get-go. Last but not least, long rants about current politics are like talking about the weather. It's something we have almost no control over, and by definition, i.e. by living in the current times, we have the least information available. Talking about past history is interesting, because e.g. academics and researchers made certain facts come to light, and politicians or other groups that have tried their best to keep some facts secret are long dead. Ranting about current politics is more like old man yelling at clouds. Again, why don't you choose some news site or forums as an outlet, instead of a niche hobby-based forums?