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OrbWeaver

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Everything posted by OrbWeaver

  1. There is no quick and easy way to determine if an object is visible at all to the player. In order to accomplish this, you need to render the object with full occlusion by other objects, then determine how many pixels from the object make it into the final render. What I'm suggesting is that once this screen-space render is done, the resulting image is then used for the highlight processing, so only the visible parts of the frobbed object become highlighted. As a consequence, an object which wasn't visible at all would not be highlighted at all. That's just a consequence of the way the highlight is rendered (it brightens the object's own texture then renders it in 3D space as normal). As far as I know there is no specific test for whether a frobbed object is visible. Most likely the invisible frobbed objects are being highlighted, but you can't see it because brightening the texture of an occluded object does not make it shine through other objects.
  2. What would happen if you: ignore Z depth entirely render the frobbed object occluded by other objects into the colour buffer, then performed the image processing operation on the visible portion ? Would this not solve the problem of the highlight making things visible that should be invisible, because the image processing effect would only be applied to the part of the frobbed object which was already visible? The downside I suppose it that it might look weird to have just part of an object outlined.
  3. Crafting in TDM would suffer from the same crippling limitation that purchasing items with loot currently has: no persistent inventory between missions. Just as loot has no actual value beyond checking off a mission objective, crafting materials found in game would have no use beyond the mission they were found in. This means the mapper would need to manually place all of the resources needed to craft in-game items, in which case, why not just place actual usable items instead and skip the entirely pointless step of crafting the materials into an item? Crafting makes sense in RPGs where player characters exist for a long time (either on a server or in a long single-player campaign) and can accumulate a large quantity of materials and recipes. It is not a mechanic which makes sense in isolated, one-and-done TDM missions.
  4. Isn't GOG for commercially-released but old and abandoned games? TDM is neither of those things, so I'm not sure it makes sense to approach GOG unless they are transitioning into a general platform for open source and indie games as well.
  5. Having a larger community comes with downsides of course. There is no guarantee that TDM would end up with a high rating on Steam, given the quality of feedback and comments that you often see on there. i downloded this game it only has 3 misions wtf lol u guys are stoopid!!!!! DoEsN'T WoRK On WInDOW XP The player is far too weak and the weapons don't do any damage. I can't even win a 1-v-1 with a single enemy. Uninstalling this junk. no proper campaign all the missions are completely different you people need to improve your quality control The graphics look the same as the original Thief game. when are the graphics going to be improved? [someone actually posted that on our forum] You should have warned me this mission was crap so I wouldn't waste my time playing it [someone posted that too]
  6. Indeed, that is the primary purpose of a limited company: to allow people to carry on some kind of business without being personally liable if the business fails (so they won't lose their home, their car etc). Setting up a limited company isn't necessarily difficult, and it can be done by a single person (at least in the UK). But it still requires some time, commitment, cost (in administrative and lawyers' fees) and decision-making by one or more specific people, who in this particular case don't stand to gain much personally from the effort. So it's not too surprising that so far nobody has volunteered.
  7. Like Peter, I would personally prefer for Ignore functions in forums to work more like social media — when you ignore someone they're gone. Every piece of content they post is invisible, without any placeholders or "Are you sure you don't want to click this link and maybe be annoyed?" prompts. But for whatever reason, forums tend not to go that far.
  8. Intel HD 3000 officially supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.1, according to Intel. This should be enough, surely? I thought we required OpenGL 3.0.
  9. So, who's volunteering to do all of this on behalf of the Dark Mod team?
  10. Notice how both of those list a single person/company as a publisher on Steam. Battle for Wesnoth is published by Wesnoth, Inc — an incorporated company which has paid a lawyer to register their trademark. However it does appear to be a fully GPL game, which indicates that Steam does not have a blanket policy forbidding all GPL content. Red Eclipse 2 is published by a single person Quinton Reeves. This is not a GPL game; the code is Apache license and the assets are Creative Commons but importantly not NC-only (their EULA even calls out the fact that they won't accept NC-only contributions, presumably for the reasons I mentioned earlier). So the questions are: Is there somebody willing to be our "Quinton Reeves" and take individual personal responsibility as the publisher of TDM on Steam, or alternatively set up our own Dark Mod, Inc to be the publisher (which will cost money)? Does the presence of NC-only CC assets present an obstacle to publishing on Steam (this is up to Valve to decide, not us)? If it is a problem, then publishing on Steam is completely impossible for us unless we replaced all NC-only assets with our own assets under a more permissive license.
  11. If I understand correctly, the advantage of doing RGTC compression in software is performance, because it can be done in parallel rather than image-by-image on the GPU? If so, I guess any testing should focus on performance (particularly the time to load a new mission from scratch), rather than GPU memory usage which should be the same whether RGTC compression is done in software or by OpenGL.
  12. No he doesn't. He says he wants the ignore function to work, and might leave if it he can't get it to work correctly. At no point does he mention you specifically, give any details of which person he wants to ignore, or imply that he wants anyone kicked off the forum.
  13. I agree in some cases — I certainly don't side with RMS and his belief that closed-source software is immoral and should be banned by law. However there are good reasons why NC-only licenses aren't considered free: One of the principles of free software (and free content licenses more generally) is that it is not restricted based on fields of endeavour. A copyleft free software license such as the GPL says "This software is available for anyone to use for any purpose, provided they keep the same license and don't make modified versions closed source.". It doesn't stop you from using it do certain things like genetic modification or hosting pro-abortion websites; it doesn't restrict usage by particular groups ("No Jews are allowed to use Linux"); and it doesn't restrict you from using it just because you are Microsoft or some other commercial company. The idea is that it must be free for everyone, not just free for people the authors like. "Non-commercial usage" is actually surprisingly difficult to define precisely, and therefore leads to potential legal minefields that might restrict usage far more than intended. Clearly you can't sell something if it's NC-only, but what happens if you post it on a blog which is supported by adverts? Some lawyers would argue that this is commercial usage. Can a computer magazine which is sold for profit include NC-only content on their cover disc? They're not selling the software but it is still being used in a commercial context: to make a magazine more attractive to customers. For these reasons, licenses such as the GPL are incompatible with NC-only restrictions, and distributions like Debian consider such restrictions incompatible with their own free software guidelines.
  14. That doesn't seem to be the reason given: "Non-commercial only" restrictions are generally considered non-free by the open source community, which unfortunately excludes TDM from collections which require a full free-software license.
  15. The frob helper is an aiming helper that makes it easier to correctly aim at small objects, either to frob them or in other circumstances like throwing objects (e.g. knocking the key down from the window ledge at the beginning of St Lucia). It doesn't provide any benefit when you've already highlighted something, but I don't think that's its intention. I hope the frob helper is not removed, but it might be appropriate to rename it to something like "Aiming helper".
  16. I agree with @cabalistic — it's a fair bit of coding and configuration by the user for almost no gain. The user would have to take time testing and adjusting his microphone levels, which is fair enough when you're using Discord or in-game voice chat, but who's going to spend time doing this just to potentially punish themselves for breathing or sneezing during a game, which most of the time they're probably not doing at any appreciable volume anyway? If there was an actual gameplay reason to use voice, then adding an extra feature to take noise into account when hiding might make sense, but adding a whole microphone infrastructure just for this seems like a waste of development effort and a feature that most users would never see the point of enabling.
  17. Ignore user means you don't receive DMs from them, and their posts will be collapsed to a single line "This user is ignored, click here to view the post". I'm not sure if it affects the Unread Content page; if you're using this as your main forum view then perhaps it appears that the ignore function doesn't work. But it definitely works in normal threads. I just checked in Unread Content and it does work there too. You get a line saying "You've chosen to ignore <user>; click here for options" instead of the post. Note that when you ignore someone you need to click on the four checkboxes controlling what to ignore: Messages, Posts, Signature etc. If you don't click on any of these then presumably the ignore does nothing.
  18. I agree entirely. I'm never sure whether I'm supposed to stand, crouch or lean, in order to get a decent vantage point and frob ability. I think chests are another aspect (like blackjacking) which could do with a bit less physics and a bit more game design. E.g. making it so you automatically pick up loot within a chest when you open it (like the original games did), rather than needing to move around and frob each individual loot item. That fits my recollection too. I think it was @Ishtvan who implemented it years ago, and I remember him talking about making a virtual box at the end of the line-of-sight ray, and using this box to discover any nearby frobbable objects. This certainly makes it easier to frob items without requiring a precise sniper-level mouse alignment, but does seem to introduce the possibility of frobbing items through a solid surface. To be honest I have no idea how you'd even fix this. Presumably the problem occurs when the virtual box expands through a thin surface and captures a frobbable object on the other side, but you'd need a lot of additional line checks to make sure that some part of the object was actually visible to the player, which would complicate the code and probably impose a performance cost.
  19. You were never required to use DDS for custom textures, but DDS is still the most efficient choice for many textures. PNG compression is not particularly effective on high-frequency content such as rough stone or brick, since it is lossless and has to preserve every pixel of detail. With these sorts of images you will likely only see a very modest reduction in size between PNG and RLE-compressed TGA (which was always supported). DDS also has the advantage of being directly usable by the GPU, whereas a PNG image has to be decompressed by the PNG loader, then re-compressed for upload into the GPU if you have image_use[Normal]Compression enabled. What PNG does well is compressing images with smooth gradients and no fine detail, such as light falloff textures. If you have any such images and they were previously in TGA (to avoid compression artifacts), you might see a considerable size reduction if you convert them to PNG.
  20. Do you mean that there are loot objects which are designed to be frobbable despite never being visible, so the player just has to keep right-clicking in the hope of picking them up? That still seems like a bug to me. As far as I know, being able to frob "through" solid objects was never an intended part of the design, and would not be good design in any case — it just encourages players to keep spamming right-clicks everywhere in the hope of finding something interesting. For all we know there could be dozens of broken missions out there right now, in which players can get through locked gates by frobbing switches through solid walls (unless the line of sight check is working differently for brushes vs models).
  21. Yes they can, but it doesn't solve the problem. The restriction isn't with our license¹, it's with the Steam legal requirements. The person who publishes the forked TDM on Steam would need to sign a legally-binding contract that says "I, <name> residing at <address>, am the legal entity responsible for the content of this game, and Valve or a third party can sue me if they suspect that the game contains some misused asset". Nobody in their right mind would sign such a contract to cover a project which they just forked, without first having their lawyers go through every single asset and line of source code to make sure it was 100% legit. ¹ Actually I don't know if there are problems with our license as well. It wouldn't surprise me if Steam simply won't allow any game with a "non-commercial only" CC license, since Steam is a commercial platform and the precise legal extent of such restrictions is unclear.
  22. No it doesn't. It was only recently that it gained support for PNG at all; previously it was just TGA, JPEG or DDS. Somehow I can't see a full SVG parser making it into the engine, although perhaps it would be an interesting way to design resolution-independent GUI elements.
  23. It seems like the highlight has exposed a serious bug in the line-of-sight check. That switch should not be frobbable at all through the top or rear surfaces of the desk. But perhaps the line-of-sight check doesn't (or can't) calculate occlusion by model surfaces?
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