Baal

Test the performance of the trainging mission on low end hardware, I guess. We are the potato force.

Are you aware of the pointfile feature? Dmap writes these .lin files into the maps directory. Display them with File->Pointfile and look for red lines that visualize problems like leaks and visportal problems. Which faces of a brush are sealing depends on the material assigned to the face. I don't know exactly which ones seal and which don't.

I made an entry on the bugtracker with the a savefile attached.

In the same mission , under the certain circumstances, when using a health potion another item is used immediately after (like a spore bomb or mine). I can provide a savefile.

Volta 2 crashes to desktop on mission completion before the "mission complete" screen appears. Edit:

That is interessting. I also do not find hungerian notation helpful in any way. Exactly the opposite in fact. I was doing a lot of functional programming recently, where code is very short and concise. Maybe that's the reason. It is simply not needed there.

Playing Tears of St. Lucia, I noticed really bad framestutter in the church. It seems to happen around the builder guards. The game starts to micro freeze at a short interval (every second roughly). I don't know if this a beta or a mission issue.

Congratulations on the release! This is a very nice looking, small mission. I really like the layout of the street and back alleys. Well done.

New version is up. Here's what's new: A high quality version of the intro video Subtitles made by datiswous Kingsals new footstep sounds (from his excellent Volta missions) are included (with his permission) Background image and ambience (music by Gigagooga) in the main menu The climbable vines were made more noticeable Removed the absence markers from all the loot. Guards wont be seemingly randomly alerted anymore Better textures in a few selected places Some model updates/improvements made by Bikerdude 3 new hidden loot items A lot of unnecessary files where removed from the package A lot of smaller fixes

Hello, Bikerdude and I updated the mission. The new version is ready for testing.

It is probably the shadow maps for VLs that cause the performance drop. But thanks for the advice. I decided to not use them in the update, but will try them out in the future.

I am considering to replace the fake moon beams in Sir Talbots Collateral with volumetric lights. But I need information on some issues: Do you they work well enough now? Are there issues with stencil shadows? I remember early posts mentioning that. What performance/quality options are there? I use a weak notebook a lot, and want to keep the mission running on it. Can I turn of volumetric rendering without disabling lights? Any other things I need to be aware of?

The new system is great and, in my opinion, does not need changing. But just for the sake of this discussion: what if the default action for bodies (drag or shoulder) could be chosen with an option? A simple checkmark that switches these around (either short frob = drag and long frob = shoulder or the other way around)? Both variants would be ok with me.

Yes, but I am talking about explictly NOT overriding core files. This is about only overriding specific decls. If you package your own version of a file in the base mod, you will override EVERYTHING that is declared in there, thus reverting updates that might have or will happen in the core mod.

It actually is possible to override single declarations without touching the core files. I just got it to work with a footstep sound replacement. At least I think so, I am not a hundred percent sure yet.

Is it possible to override a single definition (from a .sndshd file for example) instead of whole files? I want to replace some footstep sounds. If I include the sound shader defnition files, I'll have to keep them up to date with the base mod, and I don't want to do that. Instead, I just want to override single definitions in a separate file. Is that possible?

I'll give it a spin.

I replaced the moonlight setup in Collateral with a global parallelSky light. It seems to work as expected and is much easier to setup. Cool. @stgatilov The moon light entities had "nodiffuse" set to 1. I don't remember why. What effect does this have? "nospecular" was also set. Does this have a noticeable performance impact?

This is something I'm working on currently. I'm having isues with stencil shadows (beta212-03, maps work correctly in this case). The left edge does not cast a shadow, while the right does. Edit: The problem went away after further work on the map. But I guess I need to look closely for issues like this. They are easy to miss.

Must have been rats.

I'm fine with the new mantle animations. The only difference I even noticed is the increased speed. I didn't mind the old, slower mantling, but it is good the way it's now (my opinion of course). Concerning the view roll: In my experience, when moving around in real life, I do not really percieve small head roll movements. So exaggerated rolls "feel" off to me (that also concerns leaning). A default mantle roll of 0.5 seemed best to me.

I did play a little with the last two betas (stencil shadows) and did not notice any lighting/shadow issues. I did not look that closely, though.

I like the new frob system. It does work on rats, too. Imagine the thief slinging a dead rat over his shoulder... I haven't tested this extensively and I don't remember which fm it was. Someone should look into it.

I also sometimes wonder what would happen if someone decided to put crates in narrow doorways or in front of doors to block guards. Would that break the patrol routes? I never tried it.