Sotha

But there are certainly a lot of experiments which start from a random educated guess! Usually they fail. But when you get it right, you can progress from there with the next experiment.

This is also what's starting to be visible in Finland. Globalisation spreads it, I suppose. Politicians and companies demand patience in salary raises, but simultaneusly get themselves bigger and bigger cuts. It's all about the powerful/wealthy grabbing more loot for themselves. There seem to be several echelons in the society. At around my level and below, you have to fight for every single penny. At the higher echelons money seems to pour in from doors and windows. The good side is of course, that these wealthy people are taxed more, and the money goes to all sorts of good stuff (like politicians rerouting tax money to their own election funds). The problem is that the legislation allows the really wealthy people to circumvent portions of taxes entirely legally. I can't help feeling that the system was deliberately designed such way. Oh, and the tax money -> politician's election fund -thing was described as "standard state habit" by the politicians... The net effect of all of this is that the wealthy minority gets even more, while the poor people's situation gets even worse. This will result in all kinds social problems. People are frustrated and angry, which will most likely mean that populist parties will be quite successful in the coming elections. And nothing good will come out of that, I think. At any rate, we've gone far from broken wrists now. But hey, politics is a nice topic.

Finland is probably a socialist country by american standards, but the US should learn a thing or two from us, at least in some things. We have public and private healthcare. Private is expensive, but it has low waiting time. Public is cheap for the patient, but you have to wait longer to get the treatment. Everyone is entitled to this care. Of course the system is not perfect, but US system sounds even worse. If I've understood correctly, the US is the only western country without a common/general healthcare system available to everyone. And that's quite weird for the 'land of liberty.'

I will prepare a voodoo doll of the person in question and stuff it full of poison needles. P. Jones is gonna be in the world of hurt once I get the doll ingredients. Hmm.. *unfolds an ancient scroll* Let's see now: a piece of their clothinga bit of their hairan internal bodily fluida piece of one of their ancestors' bodies.This might take a while... Black Magic Humor aside, I really appreciate the efforts to get to this guy. The insolence of using free material and selling it as their own is intolerable. I hope he gets what he deserves...

Heh.. Thanks guys. Aren't we all? We spend a lot of free time on this stuff. Still much better, constructive and rewarding than spending that same free time watching TV.. That shot was taken simply by noclip floating in the level of a card playing AI in a way that the hands show nicely. When I took the shot I (lightheartedly) wondered whether current TDM assets and scripting could be used to make a mini game of blackjack. Player could frob the game desk to start playingPlayer is immobilized on the seat, he can look around, sees cards in front of him, frobbing the chair/desk ends the game.Hands and cards could be decals that are teleported in and out. EDIT: note that this is not a feature request or anything. Just lighthearted-fun-thinking-out-loud.

Time to give this thread another bump... TDM World Poker Tour! Enter for a chance to win a seat at the champions table in Bridgeport Old Quarter Broken Drum Tavern and win 1000gp cash prize! No taffers allowed! Fine beer and wine for cheap prices!

Well I am a scientist and I have to say that random experimenting would yield wonderful results. I'd love to be a able to focus on things freely. However, the problem is -as always- money. Nowadays, when everything boils down to money and making quick profit, research funding is quite application based. You research only the kind of stuff, which has directly some kind of commercial application coming out of it. There is not much possibility for free basic research. The quality of finnish research has drastically diminished in the last few years because of this trend. Our universities are soon governed by businessmen who have no interest in the science! Professors spend 80% of their time fighting bureucracy and running after funders. Brilliant minds go to waste for petty and meaningless administration. While commercial application research provides profits in the short run, basic research would lead to more groundbreaking innovations, but research "dead ends" are also more possible. Back in the good old days, researchers were 'seeker of truths' trying to understand the universe around us. Nowadays we are more like workhorses laboring for the company stock holders to gain maximum profit in the minimum amount of time. Or that's more the direction we are heading. Sad.

DR is pretty excellent the way it is now. My issues are: Readable editor crashes! When I started working on the Thomas Porter map series I wanted to have Thomas carry his diary the player would be able to read. I wanted that the diary gets updated with the mission so in the 3rd mission the diary would contain diary entries for the 1st+2nd+3rd missions and in the long run generate a diary-story of its own. However, the readable editor started routinely crashing after 10-11 pages, so I had to abandon the idea. Unfortunately I don't remember which DR version it was. I still hear some people are having difficulties with just basic operation with the editor.There is a new crash, which has occurred with the current version. Sometimes, when I right click on orthoview to create an entity, DR crashes when the selection window appears. I mean the selection window, which contains the options like "create entity," "create light," etc. It's very rare, but annoying nonetheless. So far it has occurred just after saving, luckily, so I have not lost any progress to it.The only new feature I'd like is, as you know, the player loadout/equipment editor. I know you asked only for two (2) issues, but I'll give these three issues, since I cannot figure out anything else to complain about. Sorry.

Sounds good! Are these gonna be the mentioned player voices or AI vocal sets? Oh and in plural? Many new AI vocals?

Ouchie. Anti-Nietzschian remark of the day: "what doesn't kill you, cripples and weakens you." Get well soon!

Thanks a lot Spring! I'll wait a few days to see if I want to make adjustments to this and then I'll send them your way. *** As in entirely other topic. I just had a long session of monsterclipping in my map. After that my AI buddies' pathfinding was totally shot to hell. It turned out the AI's could not pass a certain visportal. The portal was open at all times (like it should have been) and if the AI was chasing me they would turn and try to get me the other way. The portal was like a wall to them. Also normal path-finding behaved erratically and AI's seemed to ignore monsterclips, waltzing to areas that where forbidden and getting stuck on func statics. I did delete all map related files, except the .map and dmapped again. Did not help. I almost had a panic attack since everything was working perfectly before and I had no clue what was going on. Luckily I realized that the monsterclipping session must had done something since I hadn't done much anything else. It turned out that the visportal in question was penetrated by a monsterclip brush, ie. the monsterclip went through the visportal. When I cut the monsterclip into two parts, each on their own sides of the visportal, everything started working normally again. Is this generally known? Knowing this would probably help some poor mappers avoid anxiety, since it's relatively easy to accidentally surround objects with monsterclip in a way that a visportal gets penetrated.

Okay, this sounds more reasonable. Also, I made a scale 10 normalmap and it looks better than the 3. Scale 20 seem total overkill.

It already has a rather strong scale 3.0 normalmap. Oh no. This looks exactly like the stuff I want to avoid. See, I'm using winXP as a gaming 'console.' I'm avoiding installing anything else except games, bare minimum stuff and nothing extra. Can I manage simply by installing somekind of FTP/SVN program and upload stuff without syncing everything? I'm not contributing that much assets to see the trouble of having an alternate TDM installation and some custom hardlinks.

Thanks! Here's the non-darkened version ingame: I definately agree with the darkening: the logs shine a bit too much, especially seen in the non-lit stack. I'll darken this a tiny bit and them make also a even more darker version. Nope, I guess now it would be time to get it I suppose. Can I set it up so that I only upload stuff there without downloading? I think I want to keep my tdm-version the official released version.

Oh, I didn't know about this texture tool. I always align with surface inspector. Good to know, thanks! While mapping yesterday, I realized that I want to make a firewood shack. We do have a firewood model, but I don'w want to put hundreds of those to ruin performance. Thus my little sunday texture project started: I decided to make a texture firewood stack. Gimp has this nice plugin called texturize, which does not need particular expertise to get things stacking. I played with it a little and got this: It should tile in every direction decently. It will have normalmaps and everything. Ingame shots later. EDIT: oh, I'm trying to figure out where to save these without the need to change paths later. This certainly isn't /wood/boards and it isn't /wood/panels Or is it /nature/foliage? Or should I create /nature/wood or wood/natural EDIT: after thinking this, I'm going for /nature/wood for the time being.

Thanks, nice if they're of benefit to the mod. If someone insists on working on this, here are the source tga:s. http://www.mediafire...8cq0blm4em46yav Just make sure it's fairly easy to get the objects aligned without parts of other objects being visible. If the alignment is too difficult, the texture will be rather useless. That screenshot of yours look really really dense. I'm somewhat sure *I* would have difficulties getting several patches correctly aligned with that texture. There is not much room for error: the patch has to be of EXACT correct size and that's takes a lot of time for me. EDIT: yeah, but then again once the mapper has twiddled and finally gotten the buildings exactly aligned, cloning and placing the patches is rather trivial. But getting a few patches aligned is going to be major pain in the ass.

Thank you! The black space is intentionally rather big. Imagine the situation where the mapper has a decal patch. Then he applies the texture on it. Then he sets the scale so that the object he wants fits roughly the decal patch. Then he has to align the texture so that the patch presents only the object the mapper wants and not fragments of the next object. Having this somewhat large black area saves a lot of mapper nerves, since the alignment is much more merciful. When this point of view is taken into account, the black areas are not so large after all. I'll gladly sacrifice a some texture size for fellow mappers convenience. So no. I'm not changing that. (Also I would then have to recreate my skybox for the fifth time and that's not happening.)

Okay, done. It's been quite a sidetrack but I think I'm finally finished with these. I decided to NOT put normalmaps in these, because they're supposed to be backdrops so far away that the normals are not needed. If someone else wants to do this, please go ahead. The textures are collections of building and vegetation models like this: The mapper can use these on decal patches to create illusion of surrounding world. They work the best in skybox rooms. Results might be something like this: Everyone is welcome to use these. FOR NON-PROFIT applications only. Please feel free to add them to TDM assets if you wish. Get the textures here: http://www.mediafire...tmcbq76bq696r1c The file contains dds (one vegetation and two sets of building facades), DR previews and the material file. Enjoy!

I'm no specialist in this field, but sounds simple and brilliant. However, does this means that the mapper cannot manually choose LOD models? It's a rare occurence, yes, but might be useful at some situations like skybox backprops. Or if the mapper gives spawnarg "model mytree_01.1" instead of "model mytree_01.lwo" does it work?

Interesting discussion. I urge everyone to keep their cool. If I'm understanding this correctly, we are going to have intelligent model-entites, which switch the model depending on the distance to the player. So the mapper chooses this entity and no longer the models from the models-list? The mapper is going to access the model listing more seldom so it's more important to have the entitylist in perfect order. If the mapper is placing a static model, I suppose it's most likely the real-model. Manual placing of LOD models would probably be somewhat rare. Therefore it would be rather tedious to have the LOD models in the same list as the real models. Is there any performance drain for the entity checking it's distance from the player? I'm trying to grasp the magnitude of this thing: will even all simplest objects be LODified in the future. Even a basic cooking pan and other objects would have the LOD entity placed rather than the simple static model? Or is the system saved for only outside vegetation etc.

What a nice document. Well done! Sorry. I'm probably an idiot, but after this part I do not understand anymore. How having a bigger texture reduces drawcalls? The model still consists of two patches perpendicular to each other, each patches now using this bigger texture? And that takes one material, just like the smaller texture requires one material. I just don't get it. Are these the LOD models which are going to be used by the LOD system? Also, howsabout AI's? Are they gonna get lowpoly versions when they're far away? Current AI's are zillions of polies, having the poly amount reduced when they're far away would probably be useful. EDIT: zillions tiny edits here and there to help convey confused thoughts.

Hurrah! Thanks a zillion. Tested it and it works! Obviously I do not understand at all how the TDM path referencing works. editor image is at: darkmod\textures\decals\building_facades and dds image is at: darkmod\dds\textures\decals\ building_facades They are in different paths physically on the harddisc. And still both editor image and the dds are referenced in the material file by: textures/decals/building_facades This is the thing which caused my inability to solve this. Must remember this when I'm going to dds:ify my model textures. Again, thanks a lot for everyone trying to help.

I have the files in the following folders: darkmod\dds\textures\decals\ vegetation\forest_trees_d.dds darkmod\dds\textures\decals\ building_facades\city_buildings_d.dds I copy-pasted that material file you provided (and fixed the wrapping) but it still does not work. This problem has WTF painted all over it. EDIT oh, and the editor .tga's are in: darkmod\textures\darkmod\textures\decals\vegetation\forest_trees_ed.tga

Okay. Now material file looks like this: The compressinator generated image still says couldn't load image. The GIMP dds-plugin generated image says unknown token 'diffusemap' in mat textures/darkmod/decals/building_facades/ city_buildings

It's the program, which is recommended for this task in the texture dds creation tutorial in our wiki. I just tried the GIMP's dds plugin to create the dds. Even this alternative dds-file does not work for me! Could you please check the files provided that is the dds broken somehow. I've checked my material file ten times already, but I've no clue what is going on. Okay. Thanks for info, I'll do so in the future.