Gildoran

Using the clone tool to draw over highlights might work. Another possibility is doing what Crispy said with the color picker tool and brightness/contrast. You could also go into Layer > Colors and play with some of commands. My favorites are curves, hue/saturation and brightness/contrast. Another possibility is to create another layer over the background, and change the blend mode to "brightness". You could then mix the resulting image in various ways with the original. However, it's usually hard to get rid of lighting information by editing an image; it's far better to try to start with an image without a lighting bias.

Looks good! If I may make a suggestion for future textures... You may be able to improve textures by not having the diffusemap be so independent from the normalmap. (eg, in ornament_006, 007 and 008) Assuming that such protrusions would be made from different blocks of stone, it may be a good idea to have the diffuse texture be discontinuous at the edges of the protrusion. Another possibility would be to consider how water might pour off of large protrusions... You might get stains near some of the edges.

Yeah, the clone tool can be used to achieve the same effect, though it's manual rather than automatic; the clone tool allows you to "paint" an image instead of a single color. The example images that were given looked pretty good, and I'd probably be willing to use such a filter for a first pass, but I'd want to later touch things up using the clone tool, to fix distorted objects (I noticed a lot of mishapen fruit) and remove things that stand out (to make tiling less noticable).

The only thing I've ever "hacked" (and I use the term loosely) were protected map files for WarCraft III... On WC3, people like to make multiplayer maps with passwords so you can save your progress between games. Of course, I take offense at the notion of storing important multiplayer information client-side, so I would bypass the map protection and edit the JASS scripts to give out passwords for maxed-out heros, then distribute the maps to anybody who wanted them. I also once had the chance (though I didn't take advantage of it) to take control of student unix accounts at college. It was due not to any skill on my part, but rather to complete idiocy of whoever setup the accounts. I was taking a class on unix, and each student had a web account and a unix account. The web account's username was the student's name and its password was the last 4 digits of their social security number. The website contained a bulletin board from which you could find out other student's names, and the username/password for your own unix account. But the username for each student's unix account was their initials followed by the last 6 digits of their social security number, and it was possible to list the users logged into the unix machine... I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

It looks like something that automatically applies the clone tool and image offsets. It may be useful as a way to save work, but the only way I intend to stop using the clone is when it's pried out of my cold dead fingers.

There's a part right towards the beginning/middle of D3 where the gameplay stagnates with no apparent end in sight. But when you finally reach the monorail, the game really starts to pick up again, you can see yourself progress, and things start to get very interesting again.

I played through D3 without cheats first on normal, then again on hard. What I found creepiest was the bloody cancerous growth spreading and taking over the base. I just wish that they had done more with it to make it seem less static and more menacing. It would have been cool if on a few occasions it started to crush a hallway you were walking through. Actually, I really enjoyed D3's storyline. I always looked forward to getting a new PDA. Hearing about the accidents and how the base seemed haunted even before the catastrophe really helped get me immersed.

I may be misunderstanding what you mean, they they did this in the course of the game... When you first start out, there's battles all around, but as you progress through the game, there's fewer and fewer, until the bravo team gets blown up and you stop hearing other people fighting, and scientists start being few and far between. By the time you get to the delta complex, you realize it's pretty much just you and the demons left.

Possible? Yes perhaps, but the evidence doesn't suggest it's the case. First off, your notion that traveling to new environments and facing new challenges is connected with increased cognitive capacity and technical advance is inconsistent with reality. For example, native Americans evolved from Asians, and have explored more new and challenging environments than either Asians or Europeans. And yet I haven't heard of studies to suggest that they're smarter than everybody else, and their technology certainly wasn't as advanced as the Europeans who invaded America. Similarly, Australian aborigines have traveled to one of the most harsh and remote places on Earth, and coped with a wider range of new challenges than any Europeans. By your logic every single native Australian should be a veritable Einstein and they should have been colonizing Mars before Europeans ever discovered Australia. But the lack of technical knowledge on the part of native Americans and Australians is consistent with the notion of inhibited trade and disadvantageous continental shapes and climates. You point to Africa's lack of technology as proof of limited brain capacity. While limited brain capacity would result in limited technology, so would the vertical shape of the continent and the fact that it's tropical. Thus one cannot reasonably conclude that the limited technology implies limited brains (affirming the consequent). Furthermore, though I'm not aware of studies comparing African and European intelligence, my own personal anecdotal experience from programming projects is inconsistent with the notion of African people having lower intelligence. Climate and geography provide an explanation for Africa's stagnation that is more consistent with my experiences and knowledge, so I'm more inclined to believe it.

I think you're missing the point about the shape of the continents: The rate of technological advance in a group of trading societies is largely dependent on the number of people in that group. If you have a small isolated society, it will languish and be slow to advance. If you have a large number of societies that can engage in trade with each other, ideas will easily spread, reducing redundant work, and allowing their technology and understanding of the world to advance far more rapidly. In the past, trade and spread of technologies tended to occur east/west rather than north/south, due to how the climate tends to change with latitude. For example, advances in farming tend to be only applicable to the same latitude that they originated on; if you find a better way of growing wheat, it's only applicable to climates (latitudes) in which wheat can grow. Combining these two ideas, continents that are east/west oriented will have larger trade groups, and thus faster advances in technology, whereas north/south oriented continents will have stagnating technology, due to inhibited trade. Thus it would be expected that people living in Eurasia would have more trade and thus experience more rapid technological change than people in continents like Africa or America. In the case of Nigeria, you see modern technology facilitating new ways of spreading ideas, often bypassing latitudal barriers. When added to a larger trade group, Nigeria may be able to advance just like anybody else (assuming they aren't held back by the higher disease potential of the tropics). You say that they just get the technology with contact from us, but we got the technology faster than they did because we were in contact with many more civilizations.

Ok, I'm getting to work on adding these now... If you like, I could send you the PM I sent SneaksieDave that lists the things I try to ensure. If you follow them, then I probably won't have any problems with you adding your own textures. Be warned, however, it's a bit long...

The point is that parrots have the intellectual capacity of a human 5-year-old child. Human intellect isn't necessarily the result of a fundamentally different paradigm; rather it's the natural and continuous extension of facilities that most animals have. I'm not talking about the quality of their eyes and ears. I'm saying that, like humans, they're able to comprehend sight and sound, which is no small task compared to deductive logic. Consider that we have plenty of programs that can do a wide range of mathematical theorem proving (though arguably that's not true deductive thought), but no machines that are capable of navigating environments nearly as well as a lion can. Visual and audio comprehension, navigation, concepts of objects, pleasure/pain, and all the other basics that you take for granted, are NOT easy - they are very significant mental functions. I would argue that the same features that allow us to plan and logically deduce also exist in lions, but are merely not as developed. Saying that a lion is closer to a rock than a human shows a profound ignorance for the multitude of difficult tasks that a brain - human or lion or parrot - must accomplish.

For a slightly more objective example of that, parrots are capable of abstract concepts such as color, size, shape, counting, and differences/similarities between groups of objects. They can answer questions regarding these concepts and can create new combinations of words to express new desires. (for example, they may give a physical description of a desired object) I would argue that the difference between a lion and a rock is enormous. The leap from inorganic compounds to self-replicating molecules with the complexity of DNA is large enough, but even in terms of mental capacity, lions are far closer to humans than to rocks. Lions are capable of performing visual and auditory processing. They have a concept of their environment, and are able to figure out how to maneuver through it effectively. They have some forms of social interaction. They do all this thousands of times better than even our most advanced computers can. Humans rely on much the same mental infrastructure as lions, and have merely extended and improved certain aspects of it.

With what I was describing, you could use the hardware to speed it up significantly. For example, you would be using the graphics card to render the shadow images. I'm pretty sure that's an oxymoron. The whole way stencil shadows work is that each pixel is in shadow or not. There's no notion of partially in shadow. Also, since it's each pixel, not texel, I'd be skeptical that blurring would work well. What I was describing was pretty much per light. The pseudo-code would be: foreach light { clear the scene shadow image to white foreach object in the light { clear the object shadow image to white render the object from the perspective of the light to the object shadow image, drawing it in black optionally apply blurring project the object shadow image onto the scene shadow image, drawing it with modulation } render the light additively, modulating it by the scene shadow image } Did you have something else in mind? Being able to do indirect lighting in two passes per bounce sounds too good to be true... I guess I should go read about it. @Ishtvan: Dispersion is what usually limits the length of fiber-optic cables, right?

Thanks... I'll most likely start uploading them on Tuesday.

Those are looking great! There was just one thing that I didn't feel looked right... For stone/wall/rough_ornament_001, the cracks don't look natural. They appear to be made up of straight segments that have a bevel, which makes it look like somebody chiseled some cracks into the wall for decoration. If the cracks branch and waver the way they do, I think they shouldn't be made of perfectly smooth straight segments. With this kind of cracking, there are no straight segments. Or if the cracks are made up of smooth straight segments with even beveling, it looks like the rock has fragmented rather than cracked, so it would look better if the cracks were completely straight and didn't have endpoints, like this photo.

Ok, I'm downloading the file, but I probably won't be able to look at it until tomorrow, and I may not be able to comment much until Tuesday. (due to homework) What we're planning on doing with regards to DDS, is have DDS usage turned on by default. (however, TGA versions of normalmaps are also included, because some hardware has problems with DDS normalmaps) However, it'd be nice to also have the TGA versions for all images for the hires repository, so please don't throw away your original images.

Oh, I didn't realize you didn't have uncompressed images. If you'd just be converting the DDS files into TGAs, then there's no need to put them on the hi-res repository.

@SneaksieDave: I really like these textures, though I'd like to make a couple of suggestions... As for the plaster, it's clearly lit from below... However, it's only really noticeable at the corners of the center-piece. If you could lighten the two upper corners... As for the bricks, the texture looks like it repeats twice as often as it does... It looks almost kind of like the top and bottom halves were made from the same image. Perhaps it would be less noticable, if either the top or bottom half were offset horizontally? Similarly, if you could get rid of the vertical stain, the horizontal tiling would be less noticeable. I also wanted to say that I really like the quality of the texture-work... My two favorites are the brick and tile textures. They look like photographs with good diffuse and normal maps. It's cool being able to even see the ribbing of the bricks, and the plaster-work for the brick texture is some of the best I've seen. The tile texture looks perfect for a Thief-esque kitchen! I also really liked the stone and antique door textures as they remind me a lot of TDS, except that they don't have crappy compression. PS, please upload the uncompressed diffuse/specular maps to the hires repository.

I mean it would be possible with scripting, without using SDK support. And I don't think scripting would take any longer than the SDK.

It's certainly possible from scripting... For example, if the hammer is a separate entity, you could write a FadeTo script function which starts a thread to fade the hammer's shaderparms over time. (you could even have it check if there's an already existing thread to do that)

Using shadow buffers... For example, you start off a scene shadow buffer at white. Then for each object, you project it into an image from the perspective of the light, where the object is black and everything else is white. Then you could apply some kind of blur based on the depth buffer of that image to obtain distance-based blurring. Then you could project that image onto the scene the way D3 projects lights, but write it to the shadow buffer using modulation. Repeat this for each object, and when you're done you can render the lighting taking into account the shadow buffer. However, there are some tricky problems, such as what to do if an object encompasses an FoV of more than 180 degrees for a light... (for example, if you place a light in a bird cage) I guess you'd have to project it onto multiple textures, like a cube map of some sort. But then there'd be issues with getting the blurring to cross the boundaries of the multiple projections, which seems hard to do. So you'd probably end up with graphical artifacts where the boundaries of the shadows projection images meet. One of the things I really like about the D3 engine is how it gets direct lighting and shadows "correct" for opaque objects. In TDS, it was easy to get glitches if you didn't set the shadow projection distance large enough, etc. In D3, that sort of stuff doesn't happen. I'm not keen on introducing features that would result in graphical artifacts.

Wow... that is absolutely gorgeous. That looks like the sort of thing I'd see in an art book.

Adding soft-shadows would probably require a complete overhaul of the core rendering engine to do, at which point we might as well write everything from scratch and not use the D3 engine.