peter_spy

I play with lightgem on, all the time. I expect new players will do the same, and the last thing I'd want to do is to discourage them.

AFAIR, you don't need to inherit anything in your model for LOD to work, but you need to have certain set of spawnargs, otherwise it won't. I'll check that on Monday, since I'm away from home, but AFAIR you have to include at least hide_distance (can be set to -1, if you don't want to hide your model), dist_check_period, and lod_1_distance.

That's true, you can get away with more triangles than with transparency, even TDM engine allow for several milions of polygons per scene, as long as other things are relatively low.

Isn't that the other way around here, actually? Everything was fine untill we started discussing high framerates like 300 fps. But that's where most games break, noone is introducing fixes for that in other games. Most miltiplatform games are 30-60 fps locked on consoles and PCs, multiplayer titles have caps for like 120 fps on PCs, but that's it. If I understand this correctly, there was no need to introduce this fix in a first place.

I know, and you don't have much choice with tiling textures and DR as a building tool. You should really get a hang of any modeling program, especially with your skills. That way of making models would kill even Unreal 4 in a long run. Hell, even for static shots and architectural rendering this would be considered really expensive.

I can't say I understand specifics of that solution, but you shouldn't have to make changes in the engine to facilitate movement. It's the mapper or modeler, who is responsible for that, either by turning off collision for smaller objects, like Biker said, or by making proper collision for a model, whether it's stairs, ground or anything else. Also, most people play games with Vsync on, and from what I understand from that bugtracker thread, you made a workaround for really high FPS like 300, so with Vsync off.

AFAIK, you don't have the control over smoothing, and that is necessary for this trick to work.

If you mean stretching, that's not a bug, you can see that pincusion distortion in 2.05 for every FOV above something like 70 or 75. It's not even subtle. The engine just doesn't seem to use proper correction for 16:9 ratio (separate V and H FOV ratio values).

Nine? Jesus F. Christ... If this is just one model in the scene, it hopefully won't be a problem. But right now you have 9 meshes instead of one. Multiply that by ambient light + any lights that hit the table in the scene, and you know how this will end. Ideally the model should have one material, just one diffuse, normal, and spec texture. But that would require making it in Blender or other modeling program.

Filter/modulate works just like Obs mentioned, which means it's basically Multiply mode from Gimp or Photoshop. It might be useful for stuff like dirt, maybe dry blood, but IMO not much else. As for viewing, you could still use decal_macro or polygonoffset to help z-fighting and related problems, although for best results you should have the whole table surface on one unwrapped texture. How many materials does this table use now?

For distant art, sure. But for something placed nearby the player you'd be better off with 3d cables. But instead of cylinder, you can use 4 sides (square/rectangle profile), just give them one smoothing group. You'll save a ton of polygons, and nobody will see the difference. Old modeling trick.

I haven't used blend filter for ages, but in my notes I see that "white color is transparent, and alpha is ignored". That's why you see those textures inverted. Proper material for such alpha would be: { blend diffusemap map texture/with/alpha_d alphatest [value] }

Decal macro should work, but why do you use blend filter? Edit: also, it looks like the second texture is missing closing curly bracket (the blend filter stage).

Alpha masks look correct in Gimp. I assume noshadows, noselfshadow, proper alphatest value, etc. is in the material?

Textures look fine to me, how the material looks like and how it behaves ingame?

IMO you just need to use either DR's measuring tool or export two boxes that would represent both ends of a cable. Modeling in DR is inefficient, and since you're using Modo, which is great, you have superior level of control over the way it's done. Also, if the cables you want to make are relatively thin, making them with cylinders is an overkill.

I've been trying to reproduce that stutter in St. Lucia run on 2.05 and I wasn't able to. The ground can be uneven and everything is still smooth.

... Or a man can get a modeling program which features all those things

I haven't got to that point because I feel nauseous when using VR, but I've heard 90 fps is when things start to play real nice. That said, it might be the moment when Steam stats are worth mentioning:

You can add blue for breath meter, and magenta for invisibility meter, and we'll have a complete package:

IMO, it would be wiser to create a hardware poll here (or on TTLG) first, and then make such changes. It seems like one person had a problem, another one said "ok, I'll fix it", and you broke the game for everyone who plays games with Vsync and in 60 Hz (so I'm guessing basically for everyone else).

I understand that competitive multiplayer games may need higher refresh rates, but TDM is on kind of opposite side of the spectrum. Besides, in the current state of the engine you actually got the opposite of what higher framerate does i.e. higher chance to see an enemy with fast turning or at the sides of the screen. Right now it looks like the middle of the screen runs in 60 fps and the sides in 30 fps. As for the stats, I wanted to cite Steam hardware survey, where 1080p was slowly giving way to 1440p and 2160p, but with fucking PUBG being so popular, the 63% of Steam users is now Chinese, so these stats don't mean anything anymore. That only means new monitors for new users. How often do you change monitors?

That might be interesting, although I had a weird problem with that effect, both in Thief reboot and in Dishonored. For some reason, it made me feel drowsy during longer sessions, not sure why. I think they dialed it down in Dishonored 2, at least I don't remember having that problem.

IMO it's safe to say that this is still in far tech enthusiast area, there's even no hardware that can run newest games in that framerate yet. I think monitors with higher resolutions (1440p, 2160p) are more common among gamers than higher refresh rate ones. So it's no use to turn things upside down for like 1-2 people in the forums who have those monitors. (Lower framerate in 1440p vs 1080p in the same missions will be a bigger issue IMO.)

About comments on that bugtracker issue: problems with how the game works in 300 fps or more are really, really irrelevant. In most games, all physics and animation is tied to framerate, and nobody cares what's going to happen over 200 fps or so. Most games are unplayable. This stuff has to work up to target fps, which is never above 60 fps for multi-platform games. Don't bother with solving issues where there are none.