OrbWeaver

What are spawnArgs exactly? Are they another kind of keyval added to an entity? This sounds a little more involved than a standard Property Editor, maybe a separate GUI will be required. Would this be more or less of a priority than a proper model selector with preview, which is what I intended to start working on once the 0.5 bugs are ironed out?

That will solve the problem of it being invisible from the back, not the side. A polygon will appear invisible from the side because it is infinitely thin.

If the curved parts are an alphamap, won't parts of the model be invisible when viewed side-on?

_s has always stood for specular, there is no change proposed in this regard. I suppose for self-illumination an additive stage could be named _a

I have done, but didn't really like it because 1) I am not spectacularly good, and even with appropriate ratings tended to get my ass kicked, and 2) I much prefer the face-to-face social setting. Without the psychological cues the game loses a lot of its appeal. Fair point. I only ever play on God mode and spend most of my time looking at the models and textures to see how it was done, so it's debatable whether I actually "play" the game at all.

Are you referring to your experience with D3Radiant or GtkRadiant?

I take it you are referring to contributions by FM authors who create and distribute Dark Mod missions, not the core mod code itself? Obviously with the core code being under the GPL there can be no restriction on using it for something non-TDM-related.

Actually it makes a lot of sense - activities that are repetitive and intellectually undemanding are often used for relaxation purposes. I enjoy the mental challenge of chess, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "relaxing".

Don't count on Doom 3 being able to handle dots in filenames, in all cases I have tried it has stripped or ignored them.

True, although it's best not put up a gallery at all until you have something substantial to show. Still, the stuff they've got is a whole lot better than the crap Unforeseen Consequences was calling "official screenshots".

I wouldn't want to see _diffuse and _specular, that is just making the names too long and harder to read. _n instead of _local sounds fine, although I don't think there's much in it either way (Doom 3 mappers will be used to _local even though its meaning is not obvious).

I take that back. The game doesn't even have to be released. Not that I have any doubt that they will go a long way with their six untextured models and basic concept art.

It is one of the laws of the universe that as soon as a new game is released, somebody has to suggest making a Thief mod for it. This has to be done based purely on the visual content of the released game, not through any technical analysis of its capabilities. It is especially important that somebody does this by "announcing" such a mod on TTLG and trying to recruit large numbers of programmers and artists to implement their amazing idea.

No it isn't

The GPL is a source code licence, it doesn't really make sense for textures (what is the "source" of a texture? The Photoshop/Gimp original project?). It might be an idea to release the code under the GPL but use a different licence for the art resource, such as one of the many "artistic" licences or Creative Commons.

That's one kitchen I won't be eating in.

Interesting, although there is obviously a disk space issue there, unless the end user recompresses the uncompressed PK4 on his own machine. OK, that's what I was nervous about. As long as there is scope for allowing TGA if it works better for a particular texture then I see no problems with using DDS by default.

Perhaps a bit late to chip in to this discussion, however a couple of points: 1) RLE-compressing TGA is a waste of time since the thing is going into a PK4 anyway. Based on some testing I did, zip-compressed uncompressed TGA reaches a smaller final size than zip-compressed RLE TGA, so the RLE-decoding/reinflation need not be an issue. 2) Although I see the point in using DDS in order to increase resolution, one needs to be mindful of using the right tool for the right job. Although DDS can look fine on noisy, detailed textures it can look ghastly on very smooth textures with diagonal lines, for example. In the latter case it might actually be better to use zip-compressed TGA rather than having to add noise before DDS compressing in order to avoid the artifacts, thus defeating the point of compression in the first place.

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Texturing#Comp...nd_uncompressed There is no advantage in using DXT5/3 if you don't have an alpha channel, these formats have no difference in how colour is stored (AFAIK). RxGB should be used for normals, as DXT can lead to horrible blockiness that only shows up at an acute lighting angle (look at TDS for examples). EDIT: according to kat's tutorial (http://www.quake3bits.com/htm/tutorials/create_dds_ati_compressonator.htm) it sounds like RxGB might actually be a form of DXT5 after all. EDIT2: This does indeed seem to be the case, from http://www.lucasforums.com/showpost.php?p=...mp;postcount=31

I hope they sort it out soon, without my regular dose of CommChat banality there is a real danger I might start noticing how dull my job is.

They may well have been writing that, but that doesn't change the fact that Doom 3 is demonstrably not a remake of the original, taking place in a different setting, with a different storyline and different characters. It is no more a remake of the original Doom than The Empire Strikes Back is a remake of Return of the Jedi.

I think oDDity would be a good example of something that appears and behaves like fire but isn't.

Doom didn't actually get a remake, it got a sequel. A "remake" would be copying the entire map set and storyline into a new engine, which in my view would be very boring.

True, but it would pretty stupid to assume that it wasn't going to. That is the difference between pure logic and rationality.

Err...what? In order for something such as a gas to emit light, it generally has to possess rather a lot of internal energy, i.e. heat. In the absence of any other explanation for the emission, you would be well advised to consider something that looks like a fire to be hot.