Serpentine

Which TDM texture are you referring to?

BD <3 Hope he's keen, took a longer look during a tea break... Very tempted to open krita + ssbumpgen :/

Perhaps we should just mail him and get him to give us permission to use them under a different license. Since they would need to be moved to CC-BY at least. However I think that since they would be integral to the project that would be fine by his wording (sadly, its a bit too vague to know if we can really re-license them to CC). The author is in the games industry (prev. level design for Crytek, founder/lead mapping for Creoteam), so he might very well be interested in being asked.

The author is a pretty legit guy - interesting Loads of potential there, given some time making nice normals.

This. Very much this. I think it also places undue pressure on the player to avoid it, by offering a discrete 'you done made a mistake!'. ... Sure I'll often load when I get noticed in a really dumb place, but it's those times when you turn that into a chase and get away, that's when you get that feeling of 'whoa that was pretty awesome' (specially when there's some nice jumping going on ) Not to mention that music can easily distract you from the information you get from listening to subtle footfalls and such. Directional hearing is important, I even get annoyed with normal mission music getting in the way sometimes (and other times it makes me feel all 'ooh'). Just my take on it.

I had a little idea, which I haven't really looked at the feasibility. But something like a hold-down toggle that expands the right hand side inventory upwards, showing the other items along with their bound key (if any) in a little bracket or something. Just so that you can get a quick overview without having to cycle. But also not making it into an interactive menu that just gets annoying and design-y.

Meh

Lights in the skybox work just fine. Passing that light into the map however, does not. i.e you will get the cloud illumination, however the skybox can never act as a light to cast shadows and illuminate a gameplay area.

Considering the number of people who have complimented us for *not* going the traditionally useless route of a tutorial route, and rather going with a *training* map. I think we can be extremely happy with not trying to make it a tutorial. (There are a few bugs with info popups and the like, clearer writing which need to be fixed) If people want a tutorial, I think it would be a great showing for the new players and editors, to work towards something like that. It's something that suits multiple authors and teamwork (you can just construct mini-maps and merge it all later on). I'd be very happy with that, but I think for the official intro, the training mission is a really nice bit of work

It's possible, but TDM supports linking maps together. For performance reasons it'd be better to split up a huge potential map into a few maps. You could however make sure that AI is fairly limited and do large static areas, and make a fairly large and complex map. Lastly, the further away from the maps origin you are, the more likely you are to encounter strange errors in the map compiling process. This is not normally a huge problem, but it's been reported in other projects that things can get pretty strange when you push the limits.

There's a button on the toolbar which controls how rotations are handled, i.e you can disable it from rotating each part, and treat it as a whole. Models are models, they are no longer brushes. You 'import' them by placing the model files in the correct location and then adding them as an entity (the add model context menu). Obj models are not used inside TDM, technically they can be.... but it's not supported. Use ASE/lwo for statics

DoF doesnt make sense in FPS titles, I'm not even talking about personal preference. It makes the assumption that your eyes are entirely focused on the center of the screen. Having the focus correctly isolate things is also a bit of a nightmare to get right. Much like motion blur, your physical eyes and brain take care of all of this, adding an extra layer of it to a game only results in blurry details. What would improve graphics, is spending the time on actually improving the assets. The engine itself can pour out tris like no ones business, improving the performance of shadowing and such should however allow mappers and content guys to push the quality up. But hey, I guess the quick fix is to just sweet things under a carpet of ~modern~ graphics and forget gameplay relationships at home This post may or may not sound like it was written by a prick, heh Oh no, I totally agree with what you're doing Sorry if it sounded like I was saying that!

The shader is still included in the files for Blackheart Manor iirc, if it's the cell shading-like one I think you're referring to. As for adding other effects, I think this is a topic for a later date. For now getting the code into better shape is more important than adding useless effects (I would strongly oppose motion blur, DoF would also be fairly silly.). But there are tools to add these effects to games without needing to modify the game itself. If they work with TDM, I have no idea Moving the hurt stuff is a good idea tho, that's always been a little bit odd. Water too could use some reworking. Sadly the guy that was working on the d3 GLSL port ahem passed away :/ But perhaps one day we can look at something like that, to make shaders a bit more modern (not a real performance advantage, but yeah - would be nice)

You're all wrong, the blame lies with the Bilderberg Group. Their conspiracy has, in recent years, taken a turn for the worse. Their new target is destroying popular western video game IP through over-funding and demanding huge profits. I am fairly sure the Illuminati are also plotting to remake TNG in 3D with every role played by Seth Rogen (hand-puppet to our Judeo-Masonic overlords).

NVidia and AMD dont work with opensource projects really. Only the big ones and only if there are specific ok'd development from management. Intel would be far more realistic. BFG code might be used, but only in really small parts, on the whole it's a completely different beast and not exactly a nice one to deal with. But it might have a few take-away sections that we could use. I don't think that putting much hardware-specific stuff into the base is a good idea at all. Specially ones with closed SDK's and not open libs. For now, work goes into the dhewm3/sdl2 port from my side. All of these other things are just distractions.

It's being worked on, it'll be done hopefully for the next major release. It will not be in a minor release however.

Try running it windowed, then set it to fullscreen in your WM. Should also be able to move the monitor that it is on then.

PPC doesn't imply Mac really, I guess people might like the challenge or something. Where possible the code uses generic stuff which is portable (as opposed to the faster but more annoying assembly). So it's possible someone could want to run it on a ps3 dev kit or something. No idea how well it'd run on ppc64, but it doesnt really make the code much cleaner by removing 100 lines or so of endian handling. You never know, MIPS and ARM stuff will require similar support anyway, a few hints wont hurt.

I don't know if you read the bit in some reviews, that the game doesn't allow you to jump whenever you like, it restricts you to only jump 'when it make sense'. I haven't seen people jumping in the open either, so I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't exist ;/

My work is only for the next major release, it has a lot of hurdles to get through before then. I'll be branching in the repo sometime soon, but dont expect to be able to use it for a fair bit. I've repaired my old port, so that I have something to compare the code to this time. So hopefully I can make it a cleaner port and not have too much trouble getting it accepted. I'll make a thread about my work once I have got through the engine portion (technically, the mod code could be hacked to work on it at that stage). But I'm fixing a netbook that an 18 month old managed to find, turns out SSDs don't like power trouble. So there goes another night.

Mapping is pretty much entirely about speed, the faster you can do things -- the more detail you can put in without going mad. Once you've figured out making things fast, you also end up needing to learn how to deal with performance, which ends up teaching you a bit about how to think of the map in a modular way, which in turn makes you faster, and you get into swing of making large changes. So for a long time you need to experiment and get used to what you want to get out of the process, then later on you learn to accommodate all of that into early planning. That said, I'm hardly someone who maps often

Yuuuup

Sounds good - I agree on the rsync side of things too. Been thinking of it for my few boxes that are helping out too. If you'd like to quickly grab a tarball or something of the files, shout at me in irc (freenode / #thedarkmod). I don't have access to the mirror list but I'll take care of making sure that happens in the next day or so. And then we'll look at rsync or something for the future. Will get that slow mirror removed, had another two people mention it in irc last night.

I think I will try and preserve the PPC stuff, I actually made the endian handling a bit more robust... I wont be testing it however as I don't have any PPC hardware (Hard to get Effika etc locally, I have looked ) Started doing the porting again, its just slow and boring, specially since its the second time I'm doing this. So timeline is a bit 'when it gets there'.

I've found that audio-books which can be divided nicely into tea-break sized segments and pretty good way to sit still while letting the brain keep busy on the content. Work a for a while, take a 15 minute break, think a bit about things. It has a nice rhythm to it. Marveling at just how little has changed in two thousand years. Otherwise I'm all out of series to watch - perhaps that is justice in itself? That said, DR is now working, so I've been putting a few of those breaks into making pump rooms and cargo areas, woot.