HMart

Oh yes i forgot about that particular trick, but imo you are not really overlapping totally different and unique uv islands, you are just overlapping the same UV information on top of itself, so there's no real conflict, but you are right, this "rule" is really for those that like me paint the normal map and the diffuse texture inside the 3d tool and want unique normal mapped/painted texels throughout the model surface, that requires non overlaped UV's. But i'm sure you know that.

Even tho i totally agree with that, for example i'm slowly removing the multiplayer code from my version of fhDoom, i personally don't like multiplayer games and i'm working on a single player game so no need to maintain that part of the code. But on 3D GUI's, IMO you guys didn't weighted well the benefits or not on maintaining or removing the functionality, IMO the problem with no one using it for TDM missions was, thief add no such thing so people looking for the thief look, don't turn to 3D GUI's, lack of a example and specially good tutorials, almost all GUI tutorials for idtech 4 are 2D based, what is unfortunate. IMO that ability is fantastic to have, with it you can do some really cool stuff, like being able to interact with 3D objects in the GUI's, rotating them or zooming in to see hidden messages on them or something like that, etc.

I only worked with skins briefly and that was some time ago, so my memory is rusty but afaik skins have nothing to do with multiple meshes, skins only replace a material name/link for another. About what i said about ASE, i pretty much only work with LWO and MD5 exclusively, so i could be indeed wrong about it, but i did made some ASE models in the past and unless idtech 4 treats 3DS Max ASE exported files differently, as the ones exported by my Modo ASE plugin (is possible), the ASE file should be a single model ingame and in DR, having said that, lwo and ASE indeed support multiple meshs/layers, but afaik idtech 4 does not, when you export your mesh for this engine, all of your geometry needs to be on a single layer, and i mean even if your model is made of separate objects, you need to put them all in a single layer, in blender parlor you need to combine them, for TDM for example this means, the visible object, the collision mesh hull and the shadow mesh, need to be grouped into a single layer/ object, you can only differentiate surfaces in the engine by material id's, this means a single model can have multiple different materials on it, but like Judith said be carefully with that. About UV's, idtech 4 require's a single non overlapping UV map per mesh, so no second UV layer, that doesn't mean you can't blend textures in a single mesh in idtech 4, for that you use vertex weight painting AND OR different material stages. I hope what i'm saying is clear.

No is not possible to export multiple separate layers/objects in a single lwo or ASE file, at lest not to be used in idtech 4, if you want separate models you will have to export them has separate lwo files and assemble them in DR, fortunately idtech 4 respects the blender placement of the objects ingame, if you want them to be exactly where they were in Blender, you just need to freeze the transforms and zero the values, and when importing them into DR, just zero the origin values in DR and the model will snap to the same place it was on Blender. About advantages, yes there's advantages and one is automatic camera occlusion culling made by the engine, if your mesh is a huge single object then it will never be culled by the engine, because no matter where the player looks the object would be visible, also portals will be unable to cull the object has well, even if one single vertex is visible throught a portal ALL the mesh get's rendered and depending on the number of lights illuminating that mesh, every surface on it can be rendered more than one time per frame. Also if the object origin gets into the "void", that means outside the confines of the rooms/world made by DR brushwork, then map will leak and not compile, even if the visible object is inside the world and this kind of leaks can be hard to find.

Yes like Destined said you can pose ragdolls, but is only complicated if you want to stick the ragdoll to something or you don't use the AF editor (articulated figure editor) and use the ingame (mouse drag) interaction system instead, with the AF editor you can easily attach a joint to the world, this pretty much makes the ragdoll be stuck in mid air by that joint, is how i made flags before, the editor is not user friendly tho and very crash prone, so save often.

Unfortunately i don't know of any text based tutorials in how to animate characters/objects for idtech 4, but Brian Trepanier youtube channel has helped me with that, specially the below video series, is mostly for 3Dmax but the concepts work for blender has well.

"game changer" was a figure of expression, it was like saying, even tho it doesn't change the core gameplay of the game (and never did i said such thing) it does change the feeling of the game and specially the future way in how you work on TDM missions, that what i'm referring to. How graphics and sound updates change game play? Graphics can indeed change gameplay, imagine that you have no shadows in a game, i know is not the case in TDM but just imagine if it was, with no shadows, obviously you couldn't hide in those and you only have the direct line of sight or sound cues to detect threats, but with the existence of shadows you can see some threat coming just by the shadow it casts, this imo is a gameplay changing act, a shadow can also be used to cause fear to a player by making it larger and menacing than the object casting it, etc. In the case of TDM, when shadow maps get enabled for all, you will be able to hide in shadows that didn't existed before, because they are being casted by alpha transparent surfaces, for example hiding in the shadow casted by a tree canopy, etc. With EFX sound is not really gameplay changing, but is really immersion changing, but i can't really tell you, you need to hear it, wait for them to solve the problems and learn how to implement EFX well and you will see what i'm talking about, in the mean time see this video bellow. Is not really the full power of EFX effects but shows how nice even a small amount of it makes the sound, well sound better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM5S7uRZ_5w&t=140s

Source Engine uses havok physics so unfortunately is not relevant for idtech 4, this last one uses a custom made physics engine, this is also pretty much the standard way in the industry to conciliate physics time with the rest of the game time and prevent inconsistencies, unfortunately the faster the game runs the less reliable the physics calculations become, one way that i think could help is to make the physics always run to max 60fps, even if the game runs at more, this will have their own problems tho, like objects moving slower than expected compared to the rest of the game, afaik is not a easy problem to solve. btw one of the most prevalent problems of most old games in modern systems, is not because of windows compatibility problems, or because we have modern GPU's with modern API's, many are almost CPU based anyway, the fact for most of them is, they run faster then they should, one recent example i add was Soul Reaver 2, on my new windows 10 PC was only able to play the game after, one forcing it to run on one CPU core, two finding a way to make it run at less than 60fps, used reshade to force post process effects and make it run slower (and prettier ;P ), before this, some controls didn't work, i couldn't change worlds, would become stuck in one place, etc, pretty much unplayable.

No need to start a fight because of something i said, that was not my intention, grayman you are right and the fact that shadow maps are already working is a fantastic news, i'm in no hurry for them, soft stencil shadows are also nice and a welcome improvement thanks you all for the work. Btw I hope those bad things you guys are saying is just frustration talking not something real.

teh_saccade... Look man i comprehend and sorry if a sound arsh, if you think TDM is improving to fast, stick with a version till your mission is made, and if you need to update it later do it, if not release the mission and put a warning saying your mission is for a particular version of TDM, i'm pretty sure some will play it, and if the mission is any good i'm sure some other mission maker will help you update it to a new version of TDM, for example, i still work modo 601 and with DR 2.2.1 for my game, because i don't need to update, you should do the same. Asking the TDM team to stop or slow development is not a good thing, this is not a paid endeavour, people work on the engine and tools when they are motivated to do so, this is not a constant thing, there will be a time where TDM updates will dry (i hope that's a long way away), and then you will ask why they are not updating anymore. Also very important, The TDM updates are made to your and our benefit, they not only improve the game to gamers like me but also to improve the tool set to mission makers, working on the engine removes from it limitations that prevent mission makers from making better stuff and better looking stuff, why there's no forests areas and complex terrain for example? Those are engine limitations preventing people from making those, i'm not saying 2.06 will bring that, if ever, but big changes like those for 2.06 bring very welcome, IMO updates, that not only improve graphics, improve performance but also the tool that is the engine itself, some breakage of backwards compatibility should not be feared but welcomed, if not stagnation sets in. IMO 2.06 for TDM is a game changer, literally, One, Soft stencil shadows for example, improve shadows visually dramatically, but specially shadow maps, if those were implemented, they not only improve the look of the shadows as well but permit, alpha textures from automatically cast shadows, this would permit new effects for TDM and remove from mission makers some manual work, right now if someone wants to make a texture cast a shadow they need to manually fake it, in a time consuming manner, i know some on the TDM team are against shadow maps, i know, because the existent shadow map implementations on idtech 4 are very hit and miss and not very performant, for example the fhdoom shadow maps are not perfect but imo they are also losing with that, pretty much everyone on the industry gave up on stencil shadows years ago, but i digress. Two, EFX sound, this tech improves the sound for everyone, not only those with old Creative sound cards also gives a incentive to mission makers to improve sound on their missions, on a game like TDM where sound is a important part of the gameplay, EAX/EFX effects are a icing on the cake, you can play without EFX effects but after playing with them you really miss them (when the effects are well done). Three OpenGL 3.2 render, more importantly GLSL shaders, this is the greatest game changer of them all, massively improves the graphical tool set and possibilities for TDM, at the same time, massively diminishes the difficulty to make new post process effects, like god rays for example, the possibilities are endless, working with existent ARB shader language is very hard and is pretty much a dead tech now(only a matter of time until modern GPU's stop supporting them fully), making things even worse there's hardly any online tutorials on ARB shaders but on GLSL there's tons, also GLSL shaders are written in a much human readable, C like language and there's plenty of GLSL and even HLSL shaders (very similar language) online to learn from. My two cents.

There's no way on idtech 4 to see witch peace of logic eat's the most memory? A profiler of sorts, without one the only way i know is to disable all the new major stuff included in 2.06, then enable one by one and see when the memory leek happens.

And still problems, now my class works fine, it is detected in game and i can interact with it BUT any model i assign to it with the model key, never renders ingame, even models that work in other classes, no obvious error in the console that i can see, no black box or black model, just no visual model at all ... edit: With a hint from greebo, this was solved, i didn't do everything id software did like i thought above, apart from having to include my own show() and hide() functions and calling idEntity::Hide() and show respectively from inside them i also needed to include inside my class think() method a call to idEntity::Think(), after this the model rendered ingame.

Just for future documentation, and if something like this happens to someone else, after making my new classes they were not being recognized by the game, even tho i did everything id did, after some head scratching and testing, found that some of the problems I was having, was because Visual Studio reset my project post-compile settings (for some reason) and so when i was compiling the project, it was not replacing the .exe in the game folder.

Good Dammit this forum really need a "like this" button for Admins!

No wonder the "but can it run Crysis?" Meme is still a thing, even 10 years later, IMO Crysis 1 hasn't age a bit, still looks fantastic and Cryengine 2 still makes good looking scenes, from what i've seen the modding community of Crysis do. edit: haha has i posted this jaxa used the Meme, funny coincidence.

I'm using MSVC 2015 and the project was created with CMake. GUI actions you say, will need to google that, is the first time i'm doing such a thing but that info should be enough for me to carry on, thanks man for the help, this was driving me crazy. edit: Thank you this really helped! Not only was i able to find that Visual studio was saving the files in the wrong folder by default, i also found that i add to include my classes inside the CMakelists.txt for them to finally work. Once again thank you.

Ok good news and nice to now that at lest ARB shaders are supported, in that way you guys can apply some nice effects to full screen videos, in real time, if that is what you want, thanks for the info. btw...can you help with my question on the of-topic section? I will if you really want, but i just asked for curiosity sake, i don't work with the TDM engine but fhdoom, i'm stuck with ROQ, but for now it has not been a hindrance to me.

To not clug the testing thread with of-topic questions i ask here. I'm curious is the new video code capable of being integrated into complex materials? I'm not talking about using the videoMap keyword only to call videos, i mean can you apply, for example, to a mp4 video the same effects that you can to a normal texture? For example alpha transparency? GLSL Shaders?

Hello guys, I know this is not the TDM engine but is based on idtech 4 has well so i hope you guys can help me. I'm trying to create a new class of object in a separate file, for that i created a new .header file and a new .cpp file for my class, i then tried to copy what idSoftware has done for their own classes but no matter what i do, visual studio never compiles and gives me a bunch of errors but what really confuses me is that the errors point to the original engine code no my own code!? Is if my files are breaking the id code not mine. This is what i'm doing: header class myclass : public idclass{ public: CLASS_PROTOTYPE( myclass); myclass(){Init()}; // constructor ~myclass(){Init()}; // destrutor members vars methods / functions } ///************* cpp file #include "../idlib/precompiled.h" #pragma hdrstop #include "Game_local.h" // myclass header is called from inside here CLASS_DECLARATION( idclass, myclass) END_CLASS void myclass::Init(){} etc. I did the same thing using structs instead (afaik they are just like classes) but directly from inside the player.h and player.cpp file and that worked fine, but now i wanted to make it a separate class and i'm having a bunch of problems, i most say that i'm a beginner c++ and OOP so i most be forgetting something basic, or i'm forgetting to declare my class in some other id file, any help would be appreciated.

Fantastic work Bikerdude and you as well ERH+ your mission looks very original congrats.

Are you guy's under some agreement to not disclose this info?

nice work on the shop Goldwell the shopkeeper made me laugh. would be awesome to be able to rob the shop, but then whats the purpose of having a shop where you can buy stuff if you can just rob it? Thinking about it, perhaps it would be possible to rob the shop, but the difficulty of it would be so high that majority of players would prefer to shop on it instead.

Imo the only way SteveL's work is "worthless" to TDM, is if this new soft shadows code has zero code copied or even inspired by his work, and even if that is true, Duzenkos work is totally separate and new, if you guys release SteveL work to the public (with permission if possível) it maybe useful to someone else, imo is the lest you guys can do, discarding his code even if incomplete would be a waist. Btw not trying to diminish Duzenkos's work at all, for the contrary kudos to him, i know this stuff is not easy.

Very nice Goldwell, but your map does remind me that TDM needs a better snow material (perhaps a shader), i just hope that after the GLSL render is done i will be able to donate one (no promises), i'm learning GLSL shading for my game, for example one that "sparkles" a little as the player walks around, also those roofs need something to break the edges perhaps some ice spikes/ ice stalactites. I would also use some deformed patch's with the snow material applied to break the flatness of the snow along the roof surface, like we do to ground surfaces. something like this: Just my two cents.

Nice work nbohr1more glad to see someone is continuing the implementation of, you know what.