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HMart

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Everything posted by HMart

  1. It detected my CPU core count correctly, 12 physical 24 virtual. Btw just curious but what's the reason, for the cpu core data to not be printed at the top? Next to the cpu name and features like AVX and SSE stuff. Not complaining, critiquing or anything, if is like that, it most be because of a good reason. I just found it odd that's all, because I add to travel down a bit on the console before I saw the cpu core count and thought "why? when there's CPU info already at the top?".
  2. There's a cool trick that is making what you have on your "hand", very small, or at lest smaller enough to not get out of the player collision mesh, so it can never reach a wall, the player collider prevents it. And then move the object very near the camera "lens" and it will look big and normal despite the small size, is a nice trick that I learned a few fps games use. But I don't think is the one idTech 4 uses... Unfortunately I don't recall what that trick/hack is anymore, I just remember something about the engine code having what idSoftware called "weapon hack", probably just looking at the engine code and searching for weapon hack, will give some results, thou like I said, right now, I don't recall how it is used.
  3. What do you mean? Btw I don't want to continue with my "complaint" or push the subject further, I've said enough already and is your guys decision. I'm just genuinely curious what do you mean by that.
  4. Not to start a discussion on this but just for correctness, that is not true at all, unless you are using a really low polygon shadow mesh, if you see a pixelated shadow with stencil, then that is a shadow map or a mix of both stencil and shadow maps. Stencil shadows are crisp and well defined, they have no resolution setting or quality setting (besides turning off shadows), because they are literally geometry (triangles) being projected unto surfaces, while shadow maps are pixels (textures) so you can control how sharp they are. TDM has a mix shadow system, where some effects even in stencil shadow mode, will use shadow maps, for example volumetric lights shadows, are shadow maps. Stencil shadows Shadow maps
  5. And btw I'm not against using both shadow systems, I just think that supporting two systems, is more work, but if the TDM engine team is okay with that, then go for it they have my full support, for what is worth. I just personally don't like that shadow maps are being pushed back is all. But you guys do what you want, this should be a mission makers decision, I'm just a "customer" I will have no choice but accept what you guys decide.
  6. And those pics that Daft Mugi posted do show the problem with TDM maps, but I also have to say, that is a problem with TDM shadow maps, not with maps in general, I never seen such ugly issues in Stalker for example or Call of Juarez and many other games. Perhaps those shadow maps issues arise from people not thinking of shadow maps at all, when creating their lights, shadow maps do require a little more tweaking to look good, specially at grazing angles, because they are literally textures, so perhaps moving the lights a little solves those problems or even increasing the shadow map res. Just think about this, if shadow maps where that ugly, the gaming industry would never deprecate stencil shadows and we would still be seeing a ton of games using them, but is totally the contrary, games with stencil shadows, are the minority, even idSoftware removed them, I think since Rage (i'm not totally sure about Rage...) and up (besides obviously Doom 3 BFG). For example: Wolfenstein II Dishonored 2 Evil within 2 (this particular shot is impossible with stencil shadows, because of the blood that is a particle effect with alpha) etc. For obvious reasons TDM fans have a good opinion of stencil shadows and I comprehend that, they do look very good, TDM and Wolfenstein 2009 are the games with the best soft stencil shadows that I haver seen, but maps can also look good, if given the chance and used to their full potencial. another game with good stencil soft shadows Thou tree shadows on this game seem to use something else or literally stencil shadows because sometimes they look like a blob on the floor instead of seeing the individual leaf.
  7. ok fair enough but you have still not seen TDM using shadow maps to the full potencial, so I would wait until then before making a final decision but ok. Also unlike stencil that looks crisp at any quality level shadow maps only look good at res beyond 1024 and up and also dependes on the tech used, some have noisy edges by nature, because of low res penumbra effects. But to me today they look good enough and the fact they may look less than equal to stencil, maybe the particular TDM implementation, with all respect for those that implemented them. I have played a ton of games with shadow maps that look good at lest to me. Stalker for example: Metro 2033 Dead Space Call of Juarez Arkane Prey made on Cryengine and many many more.
  8. I know you didn't asked for non TDM mappers opinion but man this decision makes me really sad, imo after so many years, with both shadow systems and still deciding to hard limit shadow maps, to only stencil can do, is like cutting the wings of a bird. Has a player, I can't wait for the day you guys finally decide to remove stencil shadows from this engine. EDIT: Ups I didn't saw the poll at first so my comment was a tad precipitated sorry about that.
  9. Could it be anything to do with the shape of the geometry? Is a curved staircase looking at the images. Or the thickness? Thou by that image those stairs are anything but thin. Is just that I have seen thin walls leak light, while ticker ones do not and I have seen this, in more than one engine even in lightmapped ones. Also is that brush geometry or a imported triangle mesh? You will correct me if wrong but afaik the engine treats triangle mesh's, a tad differently from brush geometry, like it doesn't automatically inline the triangle mesh geometry, into the overall baked brush geometry (unless your force it), so it leaves a invisible "gap" there where the mesh connects with the brush wall? Could be floating point accuracy problems, like you recently talked about?
  10. Ah yes all of that makes sense, I just forgot that BFG didn't came with dmap and people add to transfer the original tools to the new engine.
  11. Perhaps id didn't cared for that loss on accuracy, at lest for Doom 3, is hard for me to believe they did that for lack of knowledge or something but who knows. Is this code still in BFG?
  12. First I need to say sorry for keeping this of topic subject going, I promise this is the last comment from me on this. Now I also got surprised but Frictional Games still does, at lest in HPL1 and HPL2 engines they do, I assume they still do it on their latest engine as well, only them know why.
  13. Orbweaver said all what I thought, I also hardly always follow programing "rules", mostly because "basic naming conventions in programming" change with times and as the languages evolve and change. So imo no one should get to much hung up on those, specially when some rules aren't even evidence based but some famous coder thought it made the code "cleaner" and people just followed. For example Hungarian notation, so many coders use it but to me it can crash and burn. I played around with Penumbra HPL engine for a time and it is riddled with such notation and not once, I felt it helped me understand better the code, for the contrary.
  14. Why? Can you explain? Personally I see nothing wrong with that, looking at that function is obvious that they made it to not return anything, it just writes a float value to a file, and in C any function that doesn't return anything returns void. And those inner write functions may have error handling of some kind, so no need to return a bool for success or failure by the main function. The only potencial problem I see with it is they pass the file handle by pointer and there's no guard there for a eventual null pointer being passed to the function and it will crash if that happens but the fact this worked for years tells me they made sure that never happens.
  15. Doing that without permission from the author/s is frowned upon, saying this because if I'm remembering correctly, caused some stir in this community in the past, including a ban. And telling the truth, if I was a mission maker (that I'm not), I personally wouldn't want anyone to mess with my mission without my permission.
  16. Ak ok my bad, I didn't read all the discussion so I missed that.
  17. It is possible to override "core" files in TDM, without messing with the original files, from the beginning. This is a feature of the Doom 3 engine and obviously transitioned into TDM. In Doom 3 and TDM, you just make a copy of a def, mtr or any other file inside your mod or mission folder, respect the same virtual file path from the originals and the modified files will take precedence over the files inside the .pk4's. This could be used by mission makers to for example override the "noshadows" from some alpha materials, for example to permit trees, grass, banners, etc, in their mission to cast shadow maps, something the core materials can't do because they are limited by the need to support the old stencil shadows. But a brave mission maker, could recommend players to only use shadow maps on their mission and say, if a player wants stencil shadows they will have to accept that trees will cast ugly shadows. (I'm sure there's ways to automatically disable shadows for trees and such, when a user sets stencil shadows on, but it may take a bit of scripting madness...)
  18. HMart

    Risen 2... ARRR!

    Indeed sad times.
  19. I agree with @OrbWeaver, IMO DR is not the right tool to make models for Godot or any other engine using triangle mesh's only, if anyone wants a simple and relatively easy 3D tool (but still very powerful in the right hands) to make models, I personally recommend Wings3D instead, is free as Blender, way less complex (no animation/bones support) and it supports obj, collada, and other formats.
  20. This is what I personally know about it: No diffuse means "skip the diffuse path code for this light" essentially means don't add/mix this light color/texture color info unto the surface, only use it as a simple b&w light. No specular is essentially the same but for specular textures, it skips the specular component/code/calculation and makes the light less heavy by removing the specular effect. About performance impact, for today GPU's, I don't think is as important as it was in 2004, but still, I'm sure it does have a small impact on performance, for the better of course, specially if done for many lights, but will also make them way more unrealistic. Btw lights with both no diffuse and nospecular, were used for the "projected shadows" or lights used to project fake "shadows" unto surfaces, this was used in Doom 3 to simulate basic, shadow mapping, for rotating fans and grid materials that use alpha textures, all because stencil shadows ignore those. Now that TDM has real shadow mapping, IMO such lights are less necessary and I wouldn't recommend their use for such effect. Thou lights with no specular and no normal mapping, are still useful for some effects, like simulating casting colored light from painted glass, like something bellow, and they are faster then normal lights:
  21. HMart

    Risen 2... ARRR!

    Is all a matter of opinion and tastes but to me, Risen 1 was awesome, with its indie Gothic feel, I'm even replaying it today. Risen 2 was cool for many hours I most say but I reached a point, got bored and never finished it. Risen 3 somehow I never played more than 10 minutes of it, it just didn't get me.
  22. What do you mean? If you are talking of the second par of brackets then in my experience, materials are done like this. [material name] { [global material options] { //material stage 1 or draw call 1 [local stage1 options] } { //material stage 2 or draw call 2 [local stage2 options] } ... } So those brackets are used to define individual material stages or "layers".
  23. Oh that makes sense! I didn't thought of that, it was just that "ai_see" keyword throwed me off, because to me implied more "object is or not visible to AI", so I wondered why not put that in the object .def file or mark it in the editor with a spawnarg? But, yes now I see why, you may want to mark some individual surfaces as see through for AI, but still imo the keyword could be made more descriptive, for a material, like "aiSeeThrough" for example.
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