peter_spy

Yup, that's exactly how it looks like.

This is with FBO on, I can't test it switched off as I have nvidia card where it's forced to be on.

Btw. speaking of other debug commands not working properly in 2.06, r_showTris 1-3 displays glitches and artifacts when looking through visportals. Weird thing is that this bug doesn't appear on screenshots.

IMO, you'd really spend that time better by making props or missions, instead of writing huge walls of text. While anti-intellectualism and general distrust towards science might be very common in USA, it's just one influential power in the world. In Europe, the structure and mechanisms behind studies and grants aren't so commercialized. In many countries, universities are public and free, and it's the independent bodies that decide who gets grants. Sure, there are always some favored groups, or even political influences, but everything isn't about commerce and corporations, and that's how the state should work. It's not always about immediate profitability and business, that's not how majority of public life works. Thus even graduates of "less marketable" faculties like philosophy will get their grants. That's even more true for art faculties.

Yeah, that was weird to me too. I also liked SS2 much more than e.g. first Deus Ex. Btw. I'm probably repeating myself, but Alpha Protocol, while it often feels clunky, is probably the only true spy game in the world focused not on action and killing, but on gathering intel and using it in meaningful way in conversations. I had great moments with this game, especially towards the end, where the amount of info and completing dossiers really mattered.

Wrong choice of words, it doesn't have to be version-related, as the brushwork is error-prone when looking like that. It's just a rectangular wall, it should have 2 triangles. Maybe 2.05 is more precise in calculating complex brushwork? Not sure what changed there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning

It depends on how much control and creative freedom you need, learning modelling is more like a long-term inverstment. BSP tools are bit more advanced in idTech4, in comparison to other engines, but there's only so much you can do with them.

It's much better to model these, here's a simple trick to get the basic shape right:

Yup, it's a brushwork problem. It's neither very weird, nor version related. You will get these problems with BSP. Touching or intersecting brushwork will cause splits. That's why it's better to keep BSP as simple as possible, using models for everything else.

If the stairs and the wall were BSP, and stairs were touching the wall, errors probably were there due to geometry splits. You should investigate such problems with wireframe turned on.

While the code and software is different case, it's not like companies selling "real" goods aren't tying to exploit that tactic. Some time ago, I saw Bose license agreement, which explicitly stated that you can't resell products you bought in USA; only Bose authorized resellers can do that. IMO that kind of attitude is a good enough reason never to touch anything they make.

They really don't, speaking from experience, 2k textures for everything. And they're not slowing down the editor as it uses quite aggressive mipmapping. +2 seconds to loading time is nothing in comparison to time and space wasted for separate preview textures.

There is no point in using separate jpegs for editor preview, it'a waste of time since Dark Radiant needs only a few seconds to load diffuse textures used for the same purpose. Even with 2048 textures it just takes a moment, and the editor handles them well during mapping, no slowdown or anything like that.

Yup, definitely jpegs shouldn't be used as they cause a lot of problems due to their compression format. You should use either uncompressed .tga or .dds with proper compression mode. And you should always keep original files in your app native format, like .xcf for Gimp, so you can return to it later. If you save your file as .dds and then make changes to it, and save it as .dds again, you'll be stacking compression and lose detail with every such change. Also using levels to get the texture output to pure white or something close to it is better, because then you can control it with light intensity in DarkRadiant. If you leave your white level at e.g. 128 and setting the light to RGB 256 will still be too dark, you'll have to make changes in the image again. At least maintaining some workflow consistency here will help you with more predictable lighting settings.

True, in this case it would be faster simply to adjust the input levels to increase the contrast. You played with that for a while, but then switched to the output levels, and then gave up because you didn't get the desired effect.

Hah, I wasn't literal, if that's the case that would be like 20 seconds Anyway, this is a time-consuming and inflexible method, imagine painting over something like this:

You don't have to struggle like that, at least in Gimp there are two options for simplifying colors: Threshold and Posterize. You can use either of them to have black and white image, and then you can blur it a bit, for projection. And it will take you like 2 minutes instead of 12.

IMO the weirdest thing is that it actually impacts performance on 2.05, which uses only one core. That would mean changing the option messes up the cpu>gpu pipeline somehow.

Yup, I used com_fixedTic for TDM 2.05 as well. IMO it would be great to ask other forum members with Nvidia cards to toggle between Auto and Off for Threaded optimization, and to note their results (using com_showFPS or other frame rate meter). By the way, it seems that newer Nvidia drivers (my version is 398.36) don't have Multi-display/Mixed GPU acceleration option available any longer.

By the way, this section http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks#.28Nvidia.29_Disable_Threaded_Optimizations seems plain wrong for my new configuration, for both TDM 2.05 and 2.06. When I disable threaded optimization, the framerate in Briarwood Manor tanks to 25 FPS again.

I think I have some good news in terms of CPU scaling. Until recently, I had an old 1st gen i7 950@3.02 GHz, paired up with 16 gigs of RAM @ 1000 MHz, with GTX 1060 in 1440p native resolution. Any mission having more than 3500 drawcalls per scene made the framerate go down below 60 fps. Other factors scaled up pretty well, perhaps due to relatively new GPU (300k of shadow tris seemed impressive, where the recommended value is 80-100k). A few days ago I built new Coffee Lake-based rig, with i7 8700 CPU @ 3.2-4.6 GHz (Auto preset), 32 gigs of 3000 MHz RAM and the same GPU as above. Results have improved a lot, and demanding scenes from FMs like Briarwood Manor or Northdale Act I run in 60 FPS now:

Not sure why you're moving from Unreal then, with almost everything UI-based and with blueprints you need less programming background than ever before. Idtech4 isn't super 3d artist-friendly. In ideal situation you'd want to pair up with a programmer, as stuff like shaders, scripts or defs have to be written manually with the notepad.

It's the same as with textures and materials; textures don't work by themselves, you need material file with definitions to tell the engine how to make a surface out of them. Same with sounds. If you want to replace anything there is in TDM, you need to mimic TDM folder structure and file names in your fm folder. You can see how paths look like either in editor or inside p4k packages. Or, you can unpack them all to have direct access to all assets and directories (remember to delete pk4s afterwards).