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LDAsh

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Posts posted by LDAsh

  1. Been getting into this stuff lately and thought I'd chime in.

    Blender can bake any animations and attach bones automatically.  It can even assign bones to each vertex for very complex and detailed morphing that uses rigged armatures (MD5) instead of embedded vertex animations.  It's all possible, but the problem is that it's very expensive, so you need to manually optimise everything and think carefully about the actual end use-case.  For example, you might get away with having 1 object doing a very complex morph in a cutscene, alone in a room with a fully curated environment, but not a warehouse full of hundreds of them all dynamically animating and interacting with the player.  I believe the MD5 format can probably handle a lot, but still have some hard limits in terms of number of joints and vertex assignments per bone, so that needs to be determined.  Ogre has a limit of 256 bones per object and 4 bones per vertex, which is normally more than enough but quickly gets challenged doing this kind of baking.

    A very low-tech solution is to decrease the "resolution" of the keys along the timeline.  Default is 24 fps so baking will add a key to each one of those frames.  Simply scaling everything in the Graph Editor 0.25, then again at 4, then optimise ("Clean Keyframes/Interpolation Mode") can quickly lower the density of the keyframing and save a lot of memory.  When baking physics to animation, you want to keep a higher density at the moments of impact and lower density when the objects are falling/flying and coming to a rest at the end of its timeline.  Different optimisations with different properties (even axes) can be done to minimise the keyframes without sacrificing the finer details of animation too much, with a little more effort.  You can easily reach a point where it becomes quite useable by today's standards, if you're willing to put in the effort.  I didn't even get into addons and scripts yet.

    In terms of having a character, like a werewolf, that would do a full morph in a particular sequence - it sounds like you want 2 entirely discrete characters with a 3rd morph-sequence-entity that only occurs during a self-contained scripted transition, basically so that the character itself isn't lugging around 100s of bones and MBs of keyframes.  Anything more complicated would require a more robust animation system engine-side, like ability to blend animations of specified bones while allowing the influence of others - animation-blending.  IdTech4 doesn't have it.  Doesn't mean you can't be clever and invent some workarounds, though.

     

    eDgZ5.png

    (500+ bones, already too much for my comfort.  Working on ideas to solve that...)

    https://www.blendersecrets.org/secrets/copy-animation-from-one-object-to-another

    https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/68907/add-a-bone-at-each-vertex-location

    https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/168241/setup-bones-on-cloth-sim-so-that-you-can-transfer-it-to-unity-via-fbx-export

     

  2. Great news, it's not crashing on me now!

    I can also confirm the material stages aren't z-fighting themselves anymore.  Detail-mapping and additives now work properly.  Reflections, alpha-blends, GUIs, flares and some other things are still broken.

    Reflections show blue/black checkerboard missing texture, despite that not being the case.  Alpha-blends are showing up as white, sometimes harsh black/white, fullbright and opaque.  And there's still some "rogue geometry", see the shot below.  Some things are showing up as black and I'm not sure why.  Some things are working only on certain viewpoints and appear/disappear depending on the view angle, see the shot below.  I can't tell if this is the shadows or the lights, such as in the shot of the intro, the light is affected but I don't know if that's because there is some alphatest material blocking it outside somewhere.

    Anyhow, despite all of this it's a impressive progress and keep up the great work!

     

    DRD3pre4test1.gif

    DRD3pre4test2.gif

    DRD3pre4test3.gif

  3. Yeah, this build does fix the "dark maps" I was talking about.
    I tested again, it took ages to swap the view, but I said "wooooow...  aaaand it crashed."  But for those few moments, it looked like Doom3 in Radiant.
    There were these infinitely stretched pieces of geometry flying through everything, that only appear on certain view-angles, I only ever saw that stuff with GPU glitches, like heat-death.  Something is very wrong.

  4. Projected lights seem to work fine and cast shadows.
    I also noticed that the 'common/shadow' materials don't cast shadows.  This doesn't explain why maps loaded wholesale seem darker, as if every second light is missing.  If anything they should be brighter with more light.
    I also noticed that alphatested materials cast shadows of their alphas.  This is really cool, despite not being engine-accurate?  At least, I don't remember vanilla Doom3 being able to do this.  Again, it would explain brighter results, not darker.
    'No_diffuse' flag on lights doesn't seem to work, nor does 'no_specular' or 'parallel', but I don't recall ever using those anyway.
    It's possible that parallel lights were used a lot and they are now just rendering as projected lights and not "filling-out" as much as they otherwise would?  Just a guess.

    I think someone who is very intimate with TDM is going to need to do A-B comparison tests with this.  I used Doom3 and by now I'm even a bit fuzzy on how that's supposed to look, given that it came out nearly 20 years ago now.

     

  5. This is really exciting.

    I gave it a decent whirl and noticed that only some lights seem to work, or lights aren't as big as in-game.  I tested this on Doom3 marscity1 and it's not as bright as it should be.  I also noticed that any material with a filter stage or additive stage will z-fight with itself, although filters and adds seem to render well on their own.  Cubemap reflections seem completely absent.  Alphatest works fine but alphablend seems always broken.  I did try it with latest TDM to be sure, and while I'm not as familiar,. it did seem to display the same behaviour.

    This was on a GTX660.

  6. I remember ~10+ years ago when everyone was saying everything would be made out of voxels by now.  By and large, realtime 3D "local" graphics are still done the same way, with triangles and textures.  For the AAA latest big titles, they all are.

    I can see how this might be a thing for streaming, one day, if and when that even becomes mainstream enough - I don't see it ever keeping up with what a local system is capable of, those hardware bottlenecks never quite seem to become a dealbreaker.  When streaming finally hits a stable clean 1080p, everyone will be well beyond 4K locally, and so on.

    Having literally millions and millions of triangles (half a billion?) for one piece of scenery, and 32/65K+ textures on everything, even if it were possible to magically render all of that at decent framerates, where is all of this data stored?  How much data would that be?  100TB?  It's funny how gamers whine even now with games easily hitting the 100GB install size and current-gen consoles launching with 500GB storage as standard.  Those sizes are an order of magnitude higher than previous gen, but not exactly providing the jaw-dropping visuals everyone has come to expect from a leap forward on paper.  I still see sloppy texels in modern games.

    Even if you could heavily compress all of that (source) data and uncompress on-the-fly by requiring a thorough thrashing of the latest (huge and fast) SSDs, that seems to me to equate to just replacing one set of overheads with another.  Still, it's really interesting and I look forward to learning more about it and seeing it in action, with something more dynamic and destructible.

     

     

     

  7. You can easily take the reflection texture (rfl) and drain the luminance out of it to create an alpha channel for the diffuse, if you want a simple transparent blend.  If you mean 'casting filtered light through the glass' in a literal way - not in these engines.  However, you can fake that by using a lightshader with the luminance (lmn) texture casting through it.  There are a few approaches one could take to cheat this effect.  A more sophisticated engine is required to literally do what I think you have in mind, though.

    I forgot to mention - everything in that ZIP retains the CC0 license, so anyone can use it for any project they wish.  Thanks goes to Paul Wellauer for the original photos and they are the one who should rightfully be credited.

    • Like 1
  8. Happy Halloween, taffers.  Here are the textures from 5 of the photos I selected from that collection of photos.  Hopefully some of you mappers will find this useful.  I apologise for not making this idTech4/TDM-friendly out-of-the-box but honestly, it's been well over a decade since I dabbled with that engine.  I figure you guys won't have any problems getting that done, since the DDS files should be compatible, and the highMaterial file (you can open with any text editor) can be translated to an MTR file pretty easily.

    There are 3 thin windows and 1 wide window that are supposed to be decorated with geometry, and 1 circular ceiling material consisting of many smaller windows that would probably be used as is, decorated with circular geometry around it, since it would be fairly high up on the ceiling.  Just wanted to mention that to clarify why some of the textures are the way they are.

    So anyway, hope they're useful and happy mapping!
    https://www.violationentertainment.com/temp/paulwellcrchstndwndws.zip

    https://www.violationentertainment.com/temp/paulwellcrchstndwndws.jpg

     

    paulwellcrchstndwndws.jpg

    • Like 3
  9. Well I'm sure Norway is as full of stinky-mouthed empty promises just as much as Australia is, but I think you're bringing politics into the wrong thread.  You're looking for one of Kurshok's gems.

     

    I posted the video for all that wholesome Chuck Norris goodness.

    • Like 1
  10. Russia's economy is still in the toilet and I don't see it as a threat.  And China, while a threat, is literally growing money on trees and trying to export its inflation to developing nations, which isn't really working anymore.  I'm not sure who told them they can just incessantly print money and fudge their numbers, and think there won't be any consequences to that.  Every day China's list of friends grows ever smaller and smaller, to nobody's surprise.

    The west is in the grip of what I consider largely a trend, when it comes to "woke culture".  If anyone actually wants to look at the world clearly or maybe even do some travel, they might realise how USA is actually one of the LEAST racist countries.  You can't say "China and Russia isn't racist because look, they all get along great with the dozen or so black people who are actually there", while comparing them to a country that just had a black president, for 2 terms!  It's likely just a generational thing and people will grow out of it, and new batch of fledglings will arrive and see it for what it mostly is, a steaming pile of bullshit.  I'm not 100% against most of the ideas but, typical of human beings, we want to push everything to the extreme and all the extremes are blown out of proportion by a vocal minority, and exploited by mass media.  People who live in their grandma's basement and see the world through this outrage-culture lens are going to think everything is worse than it really is.  I'm optimistic that common sense and rationality will eventually prevail, regarding these particular cultural fads, as the coming generation filters it all, taking what is useful and discarding the stinky fluff.  Mainly because they will have even bigger actual problems and can't afford to distract themselves anymore.

    Ultimately, this all falls under the umbrella of divide and conquer tactics used by the large corporations to get people fighting each other over what colour of socks they wear, instead of trying to tackle the real issues that really will see us lining up for thimbles of roach milk.  We're all distracted and acting like children, especially politicians, while facing very real problems that require intelligent adults to solve.  Even something like Covid vaccines have become so highly politicised and business-centric, and the scientists doing the actual work behind the scenes are muzzled by NDAs and you'll never hear from them in the media, even if they weren't.

     

  11. 2 hours ago, datiswous said:

    I guess they were just waiting it out in the mountains..

    And with no welfare from a certain somebody's Belt & Road Initiative...

    of-course-not.jpg

  12. To anyone honking the M$ horn and saying their built-in solution is marvelous, well, I would be willing to (privately) share a file with you that, as I've already mentioned twice, it does not detect with the current definitions.  I keep seeing it ranked highly on top-5 AV webpages, but in my personal experience, it fails time and time again.

    (*not entirely sure how legal that is, so no, won't actually do it...  would really like to, though!)

  13. 3 hours ago, SeriousToni said:

    I don't know what you guys do on your computer but I must say I'm totally fine with the windows standard solution. I guess if you don't rip games or visit pr0n sites or even open up spam mails that's totally fine and saves a lot of money and system resources. 😛

    How naive.  I just posted exactly why that is, and it has nothing to do with wares or porn.

    If you scan with Windows Defender and don't find anything = does NOT mean you have nothing to worry about.

    You can easily find nasty stuff on places like SourceForge and even Google Play.  Nobody is safe.  Ever.

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