peter_spy

Going through a whole map might be a bit long, but talking about creative process and sharing tips on creating stuff, like some particular impressive effects in your map or general ideas, that should be handy. Any technical advice for other mappers would be a good idea IMO. I feel like there's not enough knowledge about making models, materials, and that kind of stuff in the community, and I'd be happy to share that knowledge too.

I'm not sure if this is particle editor bug, or just me not using i correctly, but it looks like the editor preview and the ingame version require different values. In my case, I needed two particle cards, intersecting each other, like here: But to make them look like that, I actually had to create something like this in Particle Editor: Particle definition, in case I did something wrong: { count 1 material textures/do/fx/candle_flame01 time 999.000 cycles 0.000 timeOffset 0.000 bunching 1.000 distribution rect 0.000 0.000 0.000 direction cone 90.000 orientation y speed "0.000" size "2.500" aspect "1.000" angle 90.000 rotation "0.000" randomDistribution 0 boundsExpansion 0.000 fadeIn 0.000 fadeOut 0.000 fadeIndex 0.000 color 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.000 fadeColor 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 offset 0.000 0.000 0.000 gravity 0.000 entityColor 1 } { count 1 material textures/do/fx/candle_flame01 time 999.000 cycles 0.000 timeOffset 0.000 bunching 1.000 distribution rect 0.000 0.000 0.000 direction cone 90.000 orientation x speed "0.000" size "2.500" aspect "1.000" angle 90.000 rotation "0.000" randomDistribution 0 boundsExpansion 0.000 fadeIn 0.000 fadeOut 0.000 fadeIndex 0.000 color 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.000 fadeColor 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 offset 0.000 0.000 0.000 gravity 0.000 entityColor 1 } }

Pre-recorded answers to questions may be an idea as well, although a talk is always more dynamic than an interview. For our podcasts we used Skype, with everyone recording their track locally (we did a "sync clap", like in movies, to facilitate mixing). I've heard Google Hangouts aren't bad for that purpose as well. I've seen your videos Obs, and I didn't have problems understanding you. Sure, like most of us non-natives, you have accent colored by your mother tongue, but that's how it is. Guys from Flipped Normals are Danish and Swedish, AFAIR (they live in London though). There are people with far worse accents giving GDC lectures: Mappers from all over the world shouldn't be afraid of taking part in the podcast after seeing that I only thought that the host could be English native, but I guess that's less important than e.g. being on the TDM Team (with additional perks of knowing what's going on behind the scenes right now, giving the audience a sneak peek etc.)

If you're collecting images of citysections, you'll actually be better with google maps and street views, as you can get inspired by real-world thing, and not somebody's interpretation of that. Still, games are good to look for modeling tricks, gameplay ideas, or e.g. interior layouts, as those are harder to come by.

I was thinking more about general model fidelity and texturework, than differences in style, but it's true: Carnaca is more "exotic" setting (Latin America, etc.) than Dunwall, which is only present in first and last part of the game.

I have a folder like that as well, but IMO those assets aren't that impressive anymore. Quite a few years have passed, and stuff like Dishonored 2 happened

I don't know about you, but I like listening to people while modeling or mapping. I recently found out two very nice channels, Flipped Normals and Environment Art Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_3bpU4AlXIJJS7KhIQcOgQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQQFz2LkJMoqSFTas-oozOw They're directly related to making content, and you can find lot of interesting points there. Also the people who make those are pretty enthusiastic about what they do, and I must sat it's quite contagious. They effectively make my mapping time better. Now that got me thinking, how about us having some sort of TDM podcast? It doesn't have to be super frequent, an hour once a month would do. A host (Springheel, Spooks, Biker?) would invite different mappers to talk about what they're working on: design, gameplay, and content creation aspects. A commentary on recent TDM releases would be nice too. If there aren't any new ones, we could talk about older missions, other stealth games, or just games we're playing right now; or things we've watched lately, and possibly related to mapping ideas. I've been recording podcasts for several years, so I'm familiar with tech side of things, but I doubt I'm good enough to speak fluently in English (would need some practice, otherwise would stutter a lot). Still, I can help with mixing or making stuff for background videos, if this was to be released on Youtube. Apart from having something nice and informative to listen to, wouldn't that help to advertise TDM a bit more?

That might be the case, I had 60 fps at all times (vsynced, triple buffering).

I used the stopwatch app in my phone. Haven't checked all arrow types though. Yup, I can confirm this for Volta II, 1.8 sec or so. In intro missions (New Job, St. Lucia) it's around 2.6 sec again.

Not sure how you measured the bow draw time, but for me it's 2.4-2.6 sec for both builds (rope arrow).

+1, my material library is mostly 2k textures, and I don't have time to create preview versions. Imagine the delay, if I had to load them all...

More of a gameplay inspiration than visual. Discussion under the article is actually quite interesting: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/03/what-works-and-why-unfair-intel-in-stealth-games/

A fuckton of skills, from modeling and anatomy to rigging/skinning etc. Usually that's a job for more than one person. And to do old/fat people, it takes more than swapping textures or changing sliders. Actually all TDM characters could use a little revamp, as they are looking outdated, especially when put in new environments, better models, textures etc. But a character artist is a rare thing to have in projects like this.

Don't mean to undermine your effort, but yeah, that's like a drop in an ocean of things needed to make a good texture, not to mention a material (so +2 other textures that need to be tested in-game). Links will do, thanks. Also bear in mind, that photos that have overblown highlights, pitch black shadows or generally shadows from intensive directional light are not good texture candidates: you can't do much with those, unless you have a RAW file.

Taquito, we all appreciate the effort, but it's only like 1/10th of an effort needed. These are just selected images, not ready for anything. Anyone can do that. It takes much more to make textures out of them, not to mention that we need materials, not just a diffuse texture: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Texture_Creation_-_Basic_Tutorial Edit: btw., if you can't make textures and materials out of these images, that's fine. Just do what Aosys did, providing links will be enough. You don't have to package these images, especially since the service you're using asks for our emails to download stuff (I don't know about others, but I don't like that).

Not sure what you mean by "ready to use". None of these is tileable, a lot of them have shadows from a strong light source, and none of these is power of 2 textures, which makes them unusable by definition.

That collection of links is good alone, I could use some of these paintings for background stuff, characters that are part of the map, but aren't physically there, etc. Nothing major, but always a nice touch, I think.

If you know a e.g. a Witcher 2 character artist, we'd love to have someone like that on TDM team

Reload models works for me, but reload images messes things up (already in bugtracker).

I know, that's a matter of preference mostly. IMO they both impact performance too much, and they show weakness of thief animations, as they're not suited for button input. Just try to strafe repeatedly, or jump in front of any of those mirrors. The immersion goes to hell with that kind of moves

IMO it shouldn't be the default setting. There are only a few missions with this problem. A Night To Remember uses realtime mirrors a lot, maybe that's the culprit, aside from looking ugly and degrading performance?

Mission doesn't load on 2.06, the .efx file should start with Version 1 in the first line to work correctly.

It would be good to see models based on this.

I may have found a solution. If you see that kind of font flicker, leave r_useMapBufferRange = 1, but set tdm_lg_interleave to something higher than 1. I set it to 6, and the flicker effect is no longer there, while the framerate is higher. Edit: nope, for like 3 mission starts it wasn't there, but it is again. I guess the r_useMapBufferRange = 0 + tdm_lg_split = 1 and tdm_lg_interleave = 3 or higher is the best solution.

I can confirm that both methods solve the problem, but decrease performance on older hardware.