HMart

Normally the shaders used for water are the heatHaze ones at lest in normal idtech 4. But to be sure, you can see what material is on a surface by opening the console and typing r_showSurfaceInfo 1 that will display the name of the surface the player is currently looking at, be mindful that this detects invisible materials as well, like nodraw, shadow, collision surfaces, etc, so you may have to move the view around, until the ray hits the required surface. By knowing what material the surface uses, you can search for it and see what shader it calls, or if it calls a shader at all, many materials don't call a shader they get processed automatically by the engine internal rendering system.

Personally I totally agree with New Horizon you can make a retro looking game look has fresh has a modern game with clever art direction. Case in point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgrLN9Wl4xU and

I'm not totally sure but I think that is just the case of getting the depth information, from the depth buffer, but like I said I'm not a shader guy. If is the depth buffer and if I'm recalling well, TDM has that exposed to the material system, to solve some of the water shaders bugs, like the old case, where the player was looking in some direction and the weapon happened to be on top off some water, from far away obviously but we could see it reflected on the water as if it was in the water itself. But I will not fall in the same trap again, perhaps he just doesn't know how to access the depth buffer, neither do I or the code he found, uses some other technique, if he can't he can't and that's fine.

IMO Thief was certainly not successful as HL, for example I never heard of it before thief 3 came out, while I knew about HL very fast and early because all my friends talked about it and passed it along. About making a new thief game on the old dark engine, imo is totally possible, I don't believe will ever happen but is possible, but some graphical updates most be done to the engine, if not even old school gamers would look at it funny. None of the retro games that I know use the pure old engine and graphics, they all implemented modern stuff in the render, is just not realistic to expect a large number of modern gamers, to accept a new game, looking like a pure game made in the 90's. For example look at Solaco is retro and modern at the same time but still this developers don't expect to sell to the level of AAA games, is a nich market game, is retro but still add to update the engine to be able to realisticaly sell and gain support. Another example of a old school retro game that still looks "old" but is modern at the same time. https://www.moddb.com/mods/wasteland-gentek/videos/wasteland-smith-wesson-model-29-part-2

I certainly don't know enough about gl blend modes, the most I use is blend, add and filter, so if is hard to do that forget it. I'm just saying that imo using a simple name, is better to understand for a artist, even if is just a vague descripting than gl_src_one, gl_dst_one (aka add), photoshop soft light maybe vague but imo gives a better idea of the final effect (or intended effect) than any gl blend keyword. And for those that don't know english (that i assume are few here) the small name becomes a association with a effect, even if they don't know what the word means, and that is true even for the gl blend keywords but at lest the name would be shorter. So based on this discussion, perhaps the custom blend modes should be considered advanced? IMO only someone well versed on gl blending really knows how to mix and match the gl blend keywords, if not is a "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" thing (but to be fair that is true even for the photoshop blends... ).

To me is not easy to sugest what the basic section should have, because people using this tool, will be using it in diferent versions of idtech 4, with diferent basic requirements, so to simplify things it should support only the basic requirments of original idtech4 and obviously TDM. So imo yes blend modes, should be in the basic tab but if I may suggest, instead of using the OGL low level keywords, like gl_zero, gl_one_minus_src_alpha, etc, I suggest that they should be named in a more user friendly way, something similar to what photoshop does, you already have, add, blend, modulate and filter, that imo doing exactly the same thing is redundant, the engine has to support both for backwards compatibility but the material editor could force the usage of only one, perhaps filter?, then maybe invent names for other blend types that we may find in TDM materials or even Doom 3 materials that don't have a "name" assigned but use the low level gl keywords. based on this discussion this maybe the equations for photoshop blend modes (didn't tested them), also don't know if idtech4 supports all this blend modes using the gl blend keywords multiply a * b screen 1 - (1 - a) * (1 - b) darken min(a, b) lighten max(a, b) difference abs(a - b) negation 1 - abs(1 - a - b) exclusion a + b - 2 * a * b overlay a < .5 ? (2 * a * b) : (1 - 2 * (1 - a) * (1 - b)) hard light b < .5 ? (2 * a * b) : (1 - 2 * (1 - a) * (1 - b)) soft light b < .5 ? (2 * a * b + a * a * (1 - 2 * b)) : (sqrt(a) * (2 * b - 1) + (2 * a) * (1 - b)) dodge a / (1 - b) burn 1 - (1 - a) / b next to blend mods the following imo are also some good candidates for the basic section; surface type list: wood, rock, grass, etc (any way to assign custum surfaces?) editor image : optional? perhaps use automatically the diffusemap? description: this one is totally optional in normal idtech 4, I didn't used it at all in my materials, but afaik it is required for TDM? turn on or off shadows/selfshadows: alpha on off translucency solid surface or not two-sided or not The rest of the global material keywords could go into the advanced section, or have a toggle next to the list that says "show all global keywords"? Just my two cents.

I know that your intention was good and to help improve the tool but imo you need to control your temper. No one wants you to go away from this type of threads, just be calm and in the future accept that others don't take things as seriously has you may take. or may take things seriously but not in the same way, all this debacle would be avoided if you just did that. Please lets all calm down and help improve the material editor.

That is a very good idea afaik not even the Doom 3 included material editor does that.

greebo please don't let peter_spy get on your nerves, he can be a little obtuse but he has sometimes good advice to give, we just need to separate it from his way of giving that advice. Please continue working on the material editor and work on what you want to work, do continue posting here for us to "critic" constructively and give our input and also our kudos imo you and OrbWeaver deserve more praise than what is giving. Now I believe many here don't care much about the look of the tools, if we did, we wouldn't be working on idtech 4 and would be working on any other modern engine, where the tools looks, in some way, are more important than the engine itself.

No problem, is in the past already.

I agree that it could be divided into a basic and advanced section, if is not hard to do the seperation, in the basic section you cant do much, just apply diffuse, bump and specular textures and say what surface it is, wood, metal, etc, just a way to create fast basic materials and on the advanced tab, you have the real deeper material editor options, where a advanced user will work on stage effects and apply ARB/GLSL programs etc.

I like it, seems to be very complete even at this early stage, it doesn't look hard to use but is obviously geared to people that already know the TDM/idtech4 material system and not for those just starting but with a good help system I'm sure anyone will pick it up fast. I know is still WIP so perhaps this is already in the TODO, but if it is not, I also agree about configuring the lighting, on the doom 3 material editor for example, you can create any amount of lights you want and give them the color/material you want, you can also move them around. Also besides the flat plane, cube and sphere models you can also import a custom model to preview the material on it, imo seems to be a nice feature. Btw greebo the Doom 3 material editor, writes a comment saying that the material was made by it, so if is not already, I think yours should do the same, personally, I think is a good way to detect what was written by hand or by the editor, good for detecting when the editor bugs out when writing the materials.

totallytubular do you know a Doom 3 mod called Sikkmod? Is a mod that implemented a bunch of modern advanced shaders, in Doom3 but unfortunately written in ARB assembly, I'm asking because if you don't know the mod, you could look at it and see what you could transplant into TDM GLSL. I know the shaders are in ARB but I'm almost certain that a good shader guy like you, even only used to GLSL lang can very easily decipher the ARB code. One shader that I would love to see in TDM is the parallax occlusion mapping or the relief mapping ones, TDM coble stones roads IMO would gain much with it.

I really don't know for sure but maybe, because every text in a GUI, including the gui keywords, are seen by the c++ gui parser has strings and making them enclosed in quotes, perhaps helps the gui parser? For example I've seen in Doom 3 gui's floats defined has: float somefloat 0 float "somefloat" "0" both versions work but the bellow one could be "safer" to parse? I really don't know, this does shows that the gui scripting language is not very strict.

That happened to me once at lest, something similar happens when a entity lacks a material defined has well, but in this case they also get translucent. Btw not that is any useful today, with shaders and such but that could be a "poor mans way" to create a highlight effect, just hide the duplicate and unhide it when you frob the item, that is exactly how idSoftware created the (not used) item highlight but they do the duplicate dynamically in the c++ code.

Like I suspected that is way more complicated than I thought but I will try it none the less but to tell the truth, I don't think I will ever need such large amounts of entities.

stgatilov I'm right to assume that to increase the entity limit to 65536 is just the case of setting the GENTITYNUM_BITS to 16? There's no need to change anything else in the engine to support that amount of entities? I want to do it on my version of the dewm3 engine if is not too complicated for me.

Afaik by using the global material keyword "blendLight" in the light material and disabling specular and diffuse you turn the light into a very cheap light, this lights have no real interaction with surfaces this is what iddevnet said about them:

I saw this in the Doom 3 main menu. onTime 0 { if ( "SGC1Title::text" "!=" "" ) { ... } else { ... } } so perhaps if("string" "==" "string") may work, try it.

Yes that would be awesome, specially for foliage, grass and such, I still don't know why alpha blending is such a problematic thing but i'm not a graphics coder. Curious how they solved that on Quake Wars, I think it uses more than alpha testing.

Update 2 found why my sprites were not getting surfaces, I was using a nodraw material because I wanted the main sprite to be invisible but its geometry still accessible, (long story) but the code that creates surfaces, skips those mapped with invisible materials.

ah that explains it thanks.

Update on this, second question is solved and it was very basic, was expecting something more complicated but it was not, just set the sprite "weaponDepthHack" (despite the name works in any model) bool value to true and it works... :Z Still didn't solved the first question but based on the second, perhaps I most be failing to see something basic again.