Gildoran

Where exactly is Kanda? A quick google search of wikipedia mentioned a district of Tokyo, though I'm assuming you were refering to a country?

As long as we're describing our own fantasy histories, I think I'll describe mine: (note that this is NOT official TDM history, just my own crazed ramblings) What if long ago, The City was part of a larger continent-wide empire... Probably as a southern trade-port city at the very edge of the empire. Then during the alignment of planets or some such, a doomsday cult succeeded in performing some sort of catastrophic ritual. Plagues spread throughout the land, the dead rose to unlife and even darker, more powerful abominations came to inhabit the wilderness between towns and cities. Armies were overwhelmed, farms were left unprotected, famine struck and the empire collapsed. However, the epicenter for all this was at the heart of the empire, and the larger cities at the very fringes were just barely successful in keeping control over their own lands. Fast forward a millennium, and The City is "flourishing" (well, ignoring the prevalence of abject poverty )... It's sprawling with new smoke stacks popping up everywhere, and little organized resistance to the Builders exists within the bounds of the city. There's plenty of high-class merchants and banks and museums and such. Outside the city is far more wild and unsafe due to pagans, but they also keep the nearby forests clear of any undead, inadvertently shielding the city from the full impact of the horrors that lurk to the north. To the distant north lie numerous ruins, still filled with untold riches and lost knowledge, for the dead roam the wilderness and the area is too treacherous for most treasure hunters... not that they don't try. Locally, in The City, the land is still "tainted" so the dead often reanimate, but people have built countermeasures... Cemetery gates aren't for decoration, and sarcophagi have heavy stone lids for a reason. Except during plagues, the city is under control. What does this mean in terms of what the player experiences? In old books there might be occasional vague references to the Old Kingdom or the Great Catastrophy or some such. But more usually it could provide an easy excuse to have as many tomb-exploring maps as mansion robbing ones, and it allows any random cave or catacombs to be haunted, should the mapper choose that. Perhaps there could even be a campaign about another doomsday ritual on the millennial anniversary of the catastrophy.

I agree with Domarius. Actually, I'd like to see body-awareness. I think you can't correctly do reflections or player shadows without it. (expect to see glitchy reflections in TDM water and possibly problems with shadow clipping if player shadows are turned on) IMHO, the reason TDS felt so bad was because they prioritized 3rd-person appearances over first person feel, when designing the player's animations. I think body-awareness could feel perfectly natural if implemented correctly and without the need to "look cool" in third-person.

Denial could very well be "I'm sure that the minds of my loved-ones haven't ceased to exist, and I'll meet them again one day". There's a favorite quote of mine from Alpha Centauri, which I think does of a good job of describing religion and why it's not so different from denial/escapism:

@Nyarlathotep: You're not the only one with such predictions... As soon as Bush was elected, I predicted that he'd find some reason to go to war with Iraq. On 9/11, I predicted he'd abuse the tragedy as an excuse to declare war against Iraq. When he was talking about WMDs, I predicted there would be none, and furthermore I predicted that when we didn't find any, Bush would try to sweep the issue under the rug and claim that his goal was to "liberate" Iraq all along. It drives me bonkers that Bush is squandering the lives of those sworn to defend our country. Furthermore, rather than admit it, he keeps trying to put more and more of our troops in harm's way... To me, it has an ominous parallel to the fable about the lady who swallowed a fly.

It seems to me that same argument could be used to defend escapism and denial as beneficial.

The (IMPORTANT!) difference between a belief in religion and a belief in science is what it would take to get you to change/update your beliefs.

I believe that is planned, yes.

Just to clarify... Macsen, were you talking about the vice president of the Future Forces project?

Fool! Do not doubt the power of the UNDERWEAR GNOMES!

My two favorite FMs are Ominous Bequest and Keyhunt, both by Eshaktaar. He does exactly all the sorts of things I like in FMs, lots of puzzles and secrets and attention to detail; on more than one occasion, I'd think to myself "if only he had done this, it'd be brilliant", then I'd go check, and he had done it. Eshaktaar's maps are heavy on puzzles, which seem to be carefully tweaked to just the right difficulty - whenever there's a puzzle I might not figure out on my own, there's usually a hint somewhere in the map. Also, Ominous Bequest gave me perhaps the biggest scare of any game I've ever played... Monsters jumping out of the dark in D3 isn't shocking or scary. Mother's Room is. I also really enjoyed Into the Maelstrom, Old Friends Old Comrades, and The Focus. Into the Maelstrom was beautifully constructed. I really enjoyed the cramped, comfy feely of Old Friends Old Comrades. And the AI of the The Focus was great, both in terms of placement and behavior.

While I don't have a problem with you having your own personal belief, I don't entirely agree with being unable to draw a conclusion either way. Consider the argument of Russel's Teapot; you cannot disprove it and it's even physically possible, but the only sensible conclusion is that it doesn't exist unless given reason to assume otherwise. This is especially true in the case of a classical perfectly-moral omniscient omnipotent god (though I'm not suggesting whether you believe in a classical god). The fact that so much evil exists in the world and prayers and such seem to have no effect beyond the placebo, and a wide range of other things, gives good reason to believe there is no god, and theologists have to do all sorts of silly philosophical gymnastics to dance around the inconsistencies between the bible and the real world, not to mention holes in its plot, when the simple obvious answer to so many theological conundrums is that the bible is just plain wrong.

If you can do a good job with mapping a mars base, we accept that as proof of experience too, so don't worry if you don't have medieval textures.

I second what Sparhawk and Orbweaver have just said. I'm very much against deleting the original TGAs, even if I'm not necessarily for keeping them in the main TDM repository.

That looks good and seems to illustrate that you can effectively stack textures and use trim. Why don't you submit an application to New Horizon to become a beta mapper? I'm sure you'd be accepted.

Everything in videogames is made up of triangles. If you see a "curved" surface, it's just made up of enough triangles that you don't notice the flat segments. I should mention that high-poly things are only expensive to draw if they cast shadows or are animated, so if you're going for a separate shadow mesh, you may be able to get away with something high-poly. However, I highly recommend going with what Crispy said - in D3 low-poly things can look very high-poly if you properly utilize smoothing groups and normalmaps.

Actually, I don't think the number of AI/items is the primary way many videogames alter difficulty (though many have the ability to do that). For example, I remember HL1 altering things like the amount of ammo in a clip, the amount health restored by a medkit, the amount of HP monsters have and the damage they do. I believe most other FPSs do similar things. (since D3's performance limits how many monsters can be on screen at once, they probably just jack up monster health/damage rather than adding more monsters on higher difficulties) This way, a mapper doesn't always need to differentiate between skill levels (though it can be a good idea), and all players can have the full experience of the game even if it's tailored to suit their difficulty level.

Last time that happened, we trampled all over UnskilledLaborer's arguments and scared him away.

I was under the impression that the reason D3 went with RXGB, was to somehow store things in the alpha channel to improve the quality of the normalmap... Unfortunately, I don't know what RXGB means (I assume it's some sort of twizzling), so I don't know how true that is. In any case, I don't think D3 is capable of using DXT1 for normalmaps. (though admittedly I haven't tried) That's exactly my point - with DDS files, we can go with higher resolutions, which usually outweighs the problem of artifacts.

To illustrate why I think we should go with DDS rather than TGAs, and to try to dispell the notion that DDS compresses things badly, I'd like to present the following example of TGAs/DDSs with equivalent file sizes: For this screenshot, I used TGAs (with no RLE compression) as the source images, turned off all compression and restarted D3. The diffusemap is 769K (512x512) and the normalmap is 1537K (512x1024): For this screenshot, I used DDSs as the source images, turned on all compression and restarted D3. The diffusemap is 683K (1024x1024) and the normalmap is 1366K (1024x1024): Despite the DDS files having slightly smaller file-sizes, they're clearly higher quality and the artifacts are not significantly noticable. (in fact, does anybody here even notice them?) IMHO, for a given file-size, you get more bang for your buck using DDS. Note: Though the JPGs have different filesizes, I saved them both with exactly the same quality settings, and the difference in visual quality was also shown by the original TGA screenshots.

As for the wikipedia article, see my post above. My understanding is that the problem with JPGs is that D3 has to decompress them. They don't use much disk space, but it takes D3 more time to load them (because of decompression), and they take up the same amount of space in memory as a TGA, so they don't give the benefit of being able to use more/higher-res textures. JPGs might be fine for cases where DDS compression looks bad (or to replace the TGA normalmaps that we currently have in case the graphics card can't read RXGB DXT5), but I think we should opt to use DDS by default. (however, I have more recently been using JPGs for editor images, since DDS files can't be used for them and at least a JPG will save some disk space unlike a TGA)

Yeah, it was cranial in DX1.

After writing that about DXT5 being designed with normalmaps in mind, I realized I had misread wikipedia - it was talking about 3Dc (a variant of DXT5) being designed with normalmaps in mind. However, I stand by my claim that RXGB DXT5 normalmaps look just as good as uncompressed images in the vast majority of situations; with the textures I've made, the compression usually isn't noticable, and is worth it given the higher resolutions that can be used.

I second this. I disagree with this statement. Without a doubt TDS's normalmaps were made ugly by compression, but that isn't the case in D3. Although DXT1 is known to create artifacts in normalmaps, DXT5 usually looks better by compressing the images less. All D3 normalmap DDS files are stored as RXGB DXT5. Though there may be some cases where DXT5 normalmaps aren't preferable, I typically don't notice the difference in quality between the DXT5 normalmaps and the original uncompressed versions. (the one exception I've seen is the window testmap I've made) Usually a DXT5 DDS looks better than a TGA of the same file size. And in the few cases where it doesn't, there are per-stage material keywords to avoid compression. By far, currently the biggest cause of ugly TDM textures isn't DDS files, it's people not comprehending how to properly use normalmaps. Many people bake lighting into the diffuesmap and many use bad judgment about the intensity of the grain versus the overall shape of the normalmap.

That's a shame... although the enemy spawns and hidden items remain predictable (the enemies are always behind you and the items are always under the stairs), the game gets better once you pass the initial slump in the beginning. Doom 3 even has a several genuinely creepy moments (such as the thumping thing behind behind the door), and a couple of places that gave me a real scare! (including an ingenious yet completely natural monster spawn involving a trite and a computer) I just wish they made better use of the possibilities that GUIs give to the creation of puzzles. The first time I play a game, I usually play it on normal, and then increase the difficulty if/when I later replay it. I don't see anything wrong with difficulty levels, though I think there's usually no need for more than 3 levels. In particular, I'm convinced that a "very very easy" difficulty is necessary, after trying to convince my father to play a few games.