HMart

Ok fine enough but that is not what the HL2 system is. Plus have you ever tried to do a ragdoll for TDM? I did and let me tell you is not that straightforward and the AF tool is very finicky, tends to crash, but is possible to use it.

Yes but not in DR that was my point, you can create a straight line right now in DR with the func_beam this would just be a extension. It would do more or less what HL2 does minus the physics ability, that IMO with current idtech 4 physics, is just very improbable that it will look and function well. And your idea for a HL2 type rope system is to be implemented how if not on DR? The last time I messed with ragdolls was a year or so ago, so sorry if this is not totally right, but I seem to remember that you can bind a bone to the "world" when making a ragdoll and I think you could do that to more than one bone, but again i'm not sure.

green and blue flames are totally able to be made by natural means. But I get what you are saying. I've asked for this same ability for DR before, remember what you said about it? http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/3499-wishlist-for-darkradiant/page-26?hl=%2Bcable+%2Bsystem&do=findComment&comment=418958

Stencil shadows like zergrush said are calculated on the CPU, so is not surprising they take less GPU power, why shadow maps take more performance out compared to soft stencil shadows only the team can explain. But I can guess the engine was optimized to run stencil shadows, so perhaps there's more stuff under the wood making them faster. Shadow maps were implemented relatively recently so perhaps still need more optimization? It also depends on the technique used, some shadow map techniques are more heavy than others, the heavy ones are also the ones that look the best tho. Btw about performance, yes the TDM team can help by optimizing the assets but nothing beats a mission maker, knowing how to well light a scene, for example you don't need to have every light on the scene cast a shadow, in Amnesia and Soma, they make one or two "hero" lights on a scene that casts a obvious shadow, then small fill lights that cast no shadows at all but light up the scene, I don't remember ever noticing the lack of shadows on those games, SSAO perhaps helps on that. Btw this works for stencil shadows has well. About static light maps, forget it, the engine, tools and mesh's would need to be changed for it (second uv set for example), is just like implementing PBR it will perhaps never happen, plus IMO is old tech.

Yes that is a real concern especially with old missions, where the original maker didn't expected alpha textures to have shadows, but they wouldn't be adding anything, the capability is already there, it just needs to be turned on. Btw in new missions if the mission maker knows not to turn on shadows willy nilly, performance can be controlled well and on past missions that depends on the number of alpha textures that get the "noStencilShadows" keyword but afaik there's few missions with trees and bushes all over the place. Just for kicks I decided to modify a bunch of alpha materials on my side, to see if the shadows worked as expected and found some things, first I found the "nostencilshadow" keyword is still not implemented, second it was so cool seeing trees and stuff casting shadows, so they definitely work, didn't see much diference on performance, but only a few materials were changed. Third some materials don't cast shadows even if you disable the noShadows keyword, this is because they use the "translucent" and the "twosided" keyword, those disable shadows automatically, so some alpha objects don't cast a shadow even if you remove noShadows, those keywords made sense in the case of stencil shadows but in the case of shadow maps I think they should let shadows pass (unless the same stencil implementation problems apply to maps as well...).

Cryengine does make everything look awesome, petty that based on the movement on its forum, is losing the engine battle.

Yes you guys are right I just didn't thought this very well, now I see, noShadows disables both stencil/maps and the noStencilShadows disables only stencil.

So IMO the noShadows material keyword should be marked deprecated and the wiki updated, so people making missions now start using the "nostencilshadows " keyword. The old missions will just have to stay has is if they use custom materials but the stock assets should be relatively easy to fix. Btw decals should not cast shadows even tho they are alpha mapped, so be careful, in fhdoom engine that is solved by ignoring textures inside the decal folder. edit: Btw this will indeed change gameplay on the old missions and new, because there will be shadows where none existed before, IMO is a small price to pay to improve the look&feel of the game even further. Also this gives mission makers more options, now someone will be able to put a big tree in the middle of a courtyard and its shadow will serve has a place to the player to hide in. Also just occurred to me, what if you want to disable shadow maps? Will you guys also implemented a "noMapShadows" keyword?

Was that on a new material made by you? If not then see if it has a noshadow keyword but you should know that. Also try to force the shadows with "forceShadows" material keyword, that is to force nodraw materials to cast shadows but perhaps works on maps has well? If none of that works then the TDM engine is blocking the shadows and needs to be changed, I would look in the material.cpp file to see if some material parsing function is setting the material flag MF_NOSHADOWS for the shadow maps when it should not.

This would be solved if you used shadow maps! JK That does look like something John Carmack didn't bother to solve as they decided to just turn off selfShadows for characters, because if he really wanted to solve that IMO he could, is not like the Ion Storm guys were better (or worse) coders. btw not a graphics programer so no help from me, sorry...

Amnesia and Soma are pretty dark games and imo SSAO is noticeable on them, plus even tho is still a heavy effect is not so heavy as we see here, perhaps the injection process takes a big toll on the frame? Can you show one with AO on and shadows totally off? Just curious how it looks versus the performance.

I think you mean static light maps (light is just baked into the textures), TDM engine doesn't support light maps out of the box, is totally possible to make light mapped scenes in TDM but requires a bunch of manual work and to render&bake the light maps in Blender for example. Is also totally possible to use cubemaps to do static light maps, just search for Quake 4 Strombine but also requires a bunch of manual work, it does look cool.

How does it look normally? I've tried that mission right now and I can't see any obvious problem.

Normally you don't need to do anything, shadow maps make transparent textures cast shadows automatically, unless the engine prevents that and this is the case currently with TDM.

Windows 10 is to blame in many things but in this case is not its fault, that is a know "problem" with TDM engine, I think idtech 4 was made to run on a single GPU and made at a time where people were not using laptops with dual GPU's from totally different vendors, so it does not detect automatically the faster GPU in the system but it should do so in the 2.08 version, based on the road map. In the meantime users with laptops using dual GPU's can chose manually like you discovered.

Personally would love to use RBDOOM3 because of the nice features it has and also being a more modern idtech4 base but because the engine fullscreen gui's are based on Adobe flash and uses the Adobe deprecated/defunct actionscript 2.0, I just can't use it, specially when I know almost nothing about using Adobe flash and there's no tutorials on how to make flash guis to BFG. Btw lowenz are you messing with the BFG code to see what could be transferred into TDM engine or are you thinking of making a game or mod with RBDOOM3?

What VanishedOne said, dmap is a game console code not a DR console. Btw you can use in the game console "testmap" to test a map even if it has a leak, not recommended for final release. Try this, put it inside a .bat file or a .cmd file in the TDM folder then just make a shortcut for it and double click it when you want to test the map @echo off TheDarkModx64.exe +set developer 1 +disconnect +set com_allowConsole 1 +set r_fullscreen 0 +set r_multiSamples 0 +set r_mode 6 +set r_gamma 1 +dmap mapname.map +map mapname.map REM Anything in a REM line is ignored good to make comments REM I also use it to store map names for fast switching when testing: mapname2.map REM mapname3.map Btw not sure all of those commands still work in the TDM version of the idtech 4 engine has i'm not a TDM developer but the dmap and map one's should work. +set com_allowConsole makes it so you only need to press one key to open the console instead of the default three.

I will certainly, because personally I will not buy a raytracing GPU anytime soon (unless the one I already have supports dx12 raytracing) but that is 5 years, where many TDM users, would be unable to experience the game, raytraced, with good performance or at all (AMD/Intel users), at the time of this comment you still need a very expensive Nvidia GPU to play the few available games at 60 fps at 1080p forget 4k, so I ask, are people really willing to go to console like speeds, just to have better lighting in games? Personally I'm not, I love my 60fps. I certainly expect AMD and specially Intel, the ones pushing for raytracing with Larrabee to get on the raytracing bandwagon soon, is just inevitable, I still think it is not something that will benefit TDM gameplay BUT a do concur that it would be a big publicity push for the game, there's so few raytracing games out there that if TDM add it, we would have a bunch of people downloading it fast.

What I love about AO is that it really grounds objects and if you want to improve FPS's then just disable shadows on small non important objects and they will still look planted in the ground, instead of looking like they are floating. Frictional games used this to great effect on Amnesia and Soma. Also imo this stuff should be implemented internally on the engine and not be applied has a post process, that way the effect could take better advantage of the scene info. Also what you guys think about large scale AO first used in Crysis?

Is for duzenko and the other engine coders to decide, because they will be the ones doing it but IMO forget ray tracing, at least for now, is still way performance hungry. IMO the engine team could implement other stuff, at least to me equally visually augmenting like HDR, AO and improve the new volumetric rays performance so it gets out of the "high end" space and perhaps someday implement PBR, just this stuff will make TDM look modern for years to come. Of course also the stuff Epifire talked about. Not to mention DR, it could be improved even further making its internal render really "WYSIWYG". Of course this is stuff you guys already know.

Really? I use Blender for mostly rigging and animation, so I don't know what it fully supports but normal map baking, is such a basic thing that was available in Modo at least since the Modo 501 days!

Ok thanks for the info, didn't realized that he add retired years ago, he was still posting on the forum, sporadically but still posting, but nice to know he is ok. DR is a nice tool so you and Greebo can be proud of the work. Even if it doesn't evolve further but really I hope that never comes to pass...

Sorry for hijacking the thread but where is Greebo? I hope he is ok and just decided to retire. And has DR stopped development? I don't see a roadmap for it anymore.

Me neither to tell you the truth but here is a reply from Unity team to a developer it could give some light to you. https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001276723-Fullscreen-options-Exclusive-Mode-vs-Fullscreen-Window-Borderless- That explains why I can't see the overlays. But I add a brain fart, I can also alt-tab with fullscreen 1, never add the need to do it, so, I just didn't try it, I assumed the op inability to do so was general, sorry for that.

Does that enable borderless window mode? It makes alt tab work very well but I still can't see overlays show over the TDM view? (unless those only work over D3D games and I never noticed it, very possible...)