peter_spy

That's what I had set already. Another one is A Night To Remember, recently being restored by Biker: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19376-fan-mission-a-night-to-remember-beta/?p=419831

It happens with FBO on and off.

I just noticed that with some missions, e.g. with Grayman's Sir Taff's Sword, I'm seeing a sort of "matrix effect". It's hard to capture a screenshot of that, but there are flashes of letters, like font textures maybe? Either on full screen, or in places where lightgem or where inventory icon is. I should probably record a video for that.

Most of this stuff is useful for archviz projects, e.g. when you neen to nail down the look of your interior quickly, so you can do that with tileable textures. For games, you need optimised, unwrapped models, and materials made from scratch. You might use those textures e.g. to desaturate them and use their pattern as one of the layers. All stuff like color, detail pattern and dirt has to be done separately anyway, either by hand or procedurally.

I'm making a cutscene, and in order to hear the sounds as the camera flies through the environment, I needed to bind the player to a mover. I managed to do that with $player1.bind($mover1); but for some reason I can't unbind the player from the same mover at the end of the sequence. Using $player1.unbind($mover1); results in "too many parameters" error. Is there any other way to do that, or am I just doing something wrong? Edit: oh, I found the solution, you don't need to specify the entity the player is bound to. You need to use just $player1.unbind();.

I actually found another instance where this could be useful, i.e. in cutscenes with long tracking shots or flybys. Currently, if you use a camera on a spline, the sound is captured where player stands during the cutscene. If there was an option to bind player ear to a camera, or to the same mover the camera is bound to, that would be useful (although that's adding to an already complicated setup...)

One other thing is, that we often think the general population in our countries is so decent, enlightened, and full of good will, almost as if the cities and universities were the center of the world. Well, they are, but only for some of us, and we tend to forget that there is a world beyond those. Small towns and villages full of frustrated, uneducated, easily-manipulated people, who feel cheated by whatever current system is in place. And they vote out of impulse, spite, desperation. They are the world, the majority, not the folks with master degrees in capitals. That's why it's possible for USA to elect Trump, UK to do the Brexit, and Poles to witness the rise of neo-fashists, even though their country was one of the biggest victims of WWII. People don't learn, or forget history too easily, and younger generations repeat the mistakes of the old.

Even the paid stuff seems like much better value than e.g. CG Textures / Textures.com. Great find.

Yeah, the main part starts slowly, and it ends with gathering partial evidence and returning to your room. There's a bit of explaining here and there, and actually I had impression my character knows more than I do when it comes to the world and what to do. That definitely whets the appetite for more, at least for me

That's good news, the prologue feels almost too low-key, it begs for the next part to happen right away

These hobo symbols would look quite obscure to players, I guess. I don't think having all of them would be useful, making them on "per map" basis should do. Same goes for text, otherwise you might end up with situation a la Dishonored, the same "Blood from the eyes!" decals everywhere.

For me, "open-world" and "amazing" doesn't go together (it might be impressive, but only for a few minutes). I prefer meaningful experiences, and these don't fall into e.g. 120 hours of roaming and busywork. That goes for much better games than Ubisoft's too. Witcher 3 is probably awesome, but I'm not even starting it. Heh, I barely touched Dark Souls 3 because of its length, and I love the series

Firearms is a whole another topic IMO. There's huge difference in mindset on this in USA vs. rest of the world. In Europe, we are aware we had to give up basically any violence and killing as part of social contract, a pillar of modern democracy. We rely on external bodies, like police and attorneys, to react to violence, catch, and sentence those who breach that contract. So far, along with very restrictive gun laws, it seems that this approach has more pros than cons.

While TDM engine is limited, e.g. it probably uses like 10% of your hardware capabilities before going down from 60 fps, there's still a lot of room for improvement. For example, most materials are underdeveloped (you can get a lot of lovely effects with basic diffuse/specular/normal combo which isn't hardware-intensive, but you need to know e.g. how and when to use color speculars). Also most framerate problems are caused by how assets were created. They are clogging the CPU-GPU pipeline, which is the weakest link, regardless of your configuration or engine used. (I'd wager you'd see similar problems with UE3 or Unity.). While raising the limits would always be welcome, I'd still argue that there's a lot of untapped potential here anyway.

Yup, as it is with rendering static images for archviz now.

Good thing this will soon end, at least in EU. Once GDPR is in place, all those practices will be banned, and all companies that continue this will be fined. Fines are really high, so it will hurt their profits badly.

I use FXAA in my drivers all the time anyway, so that helped, thanks! One other thing, changing Anisotropic Filtering settings in menu during play either disables all shadows (FBO 0), or makes the screen go full white (FBO 1).

Does anyone still get garbled pixels from lights on some surfaces? I vaguely recall that might have something to do with using soft shadows with AA, but I'm not sure.

IMO things like that are worth investigating, e.g. this view looks simple, but there is more rendered than player actually sees. In this case it's still below the DC limit, so the framerate doesn't go down, but it's worth watching, as low fps would make those climbing sections harder for players (as in any case of more "arcade" activities).

I just started playing it, and there are places where drawcalls are ineed too high for what's being drawn on screen. When you go out of the apartament on the balcony, you get like 4600 DCs, even though you're looking at a plain wall. There should either be portals that would seal this properly, or LOD system for objects. The scene doesn't look complicated, and there are no AIs around, but for some reason it demands a lot from the hardware.

I didn't like Limbo, it looks great, but it's puzzle design is frustrating. Inside is great in basically everything it does, from presentation to movement and simple puzzles.

AFAIR, you don't need two texgen declarations. The difference between skybox and wobblesky is that the latter can be rotated to around a given axis (x, y, z). If you don't need to translate your skybox, just use texgen skybox.

That's actually Unreal Engine 2, which is even more impressive. But I can't say I liked the game overall.

That's impressive overall, although I must say there are elements that kind of drag down the new high quality of the presentation. Like the "Powered by The Dark Mod" animation is awesome, but TDM logo and its appearance looks like pasted quickly from elsewhere, and it's weak by comparison. IMO, it's also kind of redundant, since you already got the Powered by TDM message (a flash of light and transition to next part would be enough). Mission Title looks amazing on the other hand, as well as those ice-like transitions. It's Lord of the Rings quality, but then we get same old oilified, unsharp-masked sepia shots. I know it's tons of work, but if you can get those elements to be on par with all the new high-quality stuff, you will really knock people's socks off