HMart

I know portal_sky are "portals" that is right there in the name you know, i'm not that dumb, what i meant is that by putting them in small window, it looked like prey portals where you can go through, it was just a joke.

I still don't know exactly what you did but it sounds cool, from the image it looks like you made portal_sky surfaces look like portals from Prey.

I do agree that fhDOOM shadow mapping is still a work in progress and has space for improvement, but i think is unfair to dismiss it because of that, imo is a nice prof of concept plus is open and anyone with sufficient knowledge can improve on it, that is what GPL is all about. Btw even if blurred stencil shadows are faster and on this case better looking than the fhDOOM shadow maps, like i already said they don't solve the inability of stencil shadows from casting shadows from alpha mapped textures, that to me, is the single greatest reason i don't like stencil shadows. Games are filled with alpha mapped surfaces, we lose many of the fantastic visual atmospheres that those materials could provide, if they could cast shadows, existent idtech 4 ability to manually place projecting light's is a nice compromise but is not a replacement for real shadow casting, if i wanted to make a forest scene with stencil shadows, my only option is for the trees/grass to not cast shadows at all, that not only looks totally fake but makes geometry seam like is floating in the air, including a projected light, casting a fake shadow, in all trees would be a very time consuming matter, very tweeki prone, not very realistic and perhaps even kill the performance, this is imo also the reason all modern engines don't use stencil shadows anymore. fhDOOM has cascaded shadow maps for this reason, still with bugs i know but i'm sure nothing impossible to solve.

Yes GPU skinning is more important i agree, but personally after that is done, it wouldn't be hard, i assume, to see how fhDOOM engine does shadow maps, fhDOOM is based on the original idtech 4 after all, just like TDM, so perhaps is a matter of direct copy pasting?

Those soft shadow stencil shadows look very good indeed, seams like the same tech used in the idtech 4 based Wolfenstein 2009, but they still don't solve one of the fundamental problems with stencil shadows, alpha textures, petty SteveL seems to be M.I.A, hope all is well with him. I know Eric Lengyel, from when i played with the old C4 engine demo, learn a tonne from it, C4 add a mixture of stencil shadows and shadow maps but now, his new engine, doesn't use stencil shadows anymore, is all ( imo very good) shadow maps, i hope that some day i'm able to do the same for my version of fhDoom engine and you guys has well for TDM engine. IMO stencil shadows are obsolete, even pure shadow maps will go some day, replaced by a mixture of shadow maps and raytrace shadows.

First, how old are you? Second what do you think classifies has too disturbing to you? Only blood patch's and bad language? Are you okay with representation of zombies, skeletons and ghosts? Need to ask because is hard to help you avoid something if we and me personally don't find anything disturbing about TDM at all. Also this is just a small rant and i'm not judging you at all, just telling my opinion about this subject and my personal relation with blood, fake or not. First this, i'm playing games from the age of 10 or even less now, some more bloody and crazy than anything i play today, that has not affected me has a person in anyway or form, i also don't know anyone close to me that did something crazy because they saw blood in games, movies, etc, if you know the diference between fantasy and reality and by your comments you seam to be fine on that regard, in my humble opinion then you don't need to worry about some fantasy blood and bad language, unless, you are afraid your parents will give you a hard time and that's understandable. I know that some parents can just be too overzealous, and think that preventing their kids from seeing blood or not hearing bad language will make them better people, but imo the problem is, is not games that molds a child moral system, is the behavior of his parents and the family around him, his school culture and specially the friends he hangs with. Lastly, and this is absolutely true, i can't see real blood, specially my own blood, one day i made a relatively big cut on my hand on my job and almost passed out, they needed to seat me down and give me water, i also can't seam to be able to see videos of real people injured or dead, it really messes with my guts, but on the other end i have no problem seeing "blood" in games or movies no matter the amount of it. To me knowing that some blood came from a real person with feelings and real lives, etc makes all the diference and is very hard but when i know is not real blood and simple effects or simple textures in the case of games, that i know have no connection to real blood or real people then it makes no diference at all but of course that's me.

Abusimplea for that to work you need them to release a SDK, and afaik there's no SDK available, with no way to change, implement code, assets and stuff, it will be very hard for anyone to improve the game.

Unless you born yesterday and are ignorant of what is happening in society (specially American society after that disgrace of President) i claim you knew well enough your post would bring controversy to this forum, specially when your kind of opinion has been causing controversy for decades now. Fair enough. You are just playing the victim, and being hypocritical, playing the "good boy being misjudged and unjustly attacked",will certainly gain no apology from me, your original post is and will be a sign of a mentality that I despise and think people should avoid like the fire. No you will not excuse yourself from being a male but you are certainly not special for being so. Ok perhaps bigotry was the wrong word, English is not my mother language so mistakes are bound to happen, what i meant was something like prejudice and you certainly display it, yes i also do but at lest my prejudice is against armful prejudices like, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, male chauvinism (like yours), etc. This shows how blind people like you really are, of course you don't see anything bad with what you say, if you did you would not have made your post in the first place, just like a certain Muslim Imã, inadvertedly compared a woman that was raped by 3 men to a peace of meat by saying "Of course, if you let a peace of meat on the street a cat will eat it!", not realizing how wrong that analogy was, in the same vain you don't comprehend why people are offended by your post. You are free to think anything you want, and he or anyone are certainly in no way forced to behave or agree with my views, and neither should they expect the same from me. I was just very surprised about it, i'm a very long poster (and lurker) on this forum, I've seen many discussions from him and never noticed any kind of prejudice from is part, is my fault for being a fan of this team work and sometimes, i tend to put people i admire in some "higher standard" forgetting they are simple humans like me and they will have different ideals. Bikerdude if you feel so, i apologise, that was never my intention, if you agree with this guy, i will certainly strongly disagree with both of you, but that is my problem not yours and in no way will that erase or affect my opinion of the work you did for this game.

Outlooker your post is the most stupid garbage i ever read, your male bigotry and sexism is something that any sane person should avoid and ridicule. Bikerdude i'm very surprised you liked his post, one thing is to blame the game on bad decisions, like putting their faith on automatic facial and body animations, instead of hand animations, another is blame the game problems and by association society problems on reasons of sexism and bigotry, one critic leads to improvements on future development choices and better games, the other critic leads into civil unrest and violence, specially violence against woman. No need to apologise you have no blame in the bigotry of others.

Ok, sorry i hadn't realized how old the discussion was, was tired and forgot to see the posting dates, just read the content and felt i should say something. Is the problem of not being that active in this forum, sometimes lose the flow of the discussion, but i'm glad you guys comprehend each other is a testament to the maturity of people on this community.

Nice work Springheel and i just can't praise you enough for the work you did on your modules, having said that i most also agree in some part with Judith (at lest on the part modelers should be careful with polys), I think he could had been more sensible with his critic (that i don't really know if fair, i have not tested the modules my self), because i'm sure he knows how hard and time consuming is to model, specially for free, so some modesty would suit him well. Judith, Springheel has done immense work for this mod, i most say more than you and certainly more than me, he deserves that recognition and respect, imo instead of you coming out this aggressive, and almost like has if you will teach him a lesson, that personally i find of really bad taste, what you could have done was volunteer to help him, for example create LOD's for the modules, in that way you would help bring more performance to the game (to those willing to implement LOD) and at the same time not make anyone feel has if his work is not welcomed. I'm sure the last thing you and all of us want, is to create a atmosphere that make developers, old and new, rethink the time they spend on this game. Springheel why i most agree with Judith, i most agree because with heavy modules (again i don't know how heavy your modules are, so don't take this has my critic of your work), mission makers have less freedom on how complex and vast their missions can be, specially if they want them to run with acceptable performance on older hardware. Just my two cents.

Anyone with a AMD GPU should play the game with the Vulkan render, i was never able to get steady 60fps's at 1080p with AA 4x, with this render i can and it seams it has even more performance to spare!

A low level API is not guaranty of higher frames per second, you can have a game run at both 60 fps on OpenGL and on Vulkan, the diference is that Vulkan can do more, in the same time frame that OpenGL renders a scene, so even tho both run at the same rate one has more stuff happening on screen than the other, hope this is clear enough.

Is this question directed at me?

Vulkan (not Vulcan ;D) is a low level graphics API (close to the metal), OpenGL is a High Level API (hides many of the complexities of GPU's and CPU's), is akin to using Assembly language versus C++ . Btw low level API's is what consoles use that is why they can do more with less.

Vulkan is supported in any GCN based GPU from AMD even GCN 1.0, that means anyone with a HD 7000 GPU (that is a 2011 GPU) and up will be able to play with this. I'm not sure of one thing tho, how many TDM users have AMD cards.

Personally I recommend people to start with C instead of C++, imo C is much easier to learn, i also think functional programming is easier to grasp initially than OOP. Btw idScript and in some parts the idtech4 engine itself, imo look more C like than C++ like, the engine is indeed written using C++ and OOP, but i just think that John Carmack was so used to the C ways that he still used it for many things. For example this is how you print to screen: in idScript: float someNumber = 10; string someString = "Hello World!!"; sys.println("I'm printing" + someString + "and the number" + someNumber); in C. unsigned int someNumber = 10; const char* someString = "Hello World!!"; printf("I'm printing %s and the number %d\n", someString, someNumber); in c++ (if i'm recalling well) unsigned int someNumber = 10; const char* someString = "Hello World!!"; cout >> "I'm printing" >> someString >> "and the number" >> someNumber >> endl in idtech 4 "c++" unsigned int someNumber = 10; idStr someString = "Hello World!!"; gameLocal.Printf("I'm printing %s and the number %d", someString, someNumber); Btw I don't claim i'm a good coder i started to seriously learn coding only about 6 months now, hardly any time to call my self a real programmer. I learned idtech 4 script before starting to learn c and now i'm learning idtech 4 c++ and i most say, idtech 4 scripting is much more simple, coding in the engine c++ is really not the same. Learning scripting will indeed help you gain a "programmers mind" but will not make you proficient in C or C++ or any other low level language. For example this is what you normally do on idscript to call some function: someEntity.callFunction("function_name"); This is what you do on the c++ side: const function_t *func; idThread *Thread; func = Entity->scriptObject.GetFunction("signalOn"); Thread = new idThread(); Thread->CallFunction(Entity, func, true); Thread->Start(); Thread->End();Much more verbose and complex. Without help anyone good at idScript would do the C++ version. So imo learning one is not guaranty that you will immediately fully understand the other, but it certainly helps.

Personally i would not use .roq with 2k textures as well (i don't even think roq can go that far), at lest for ingame affects but for small ingame screens and some effects i don't think 512x512 roq's are that bad, but is personal opinion. Yes is overkill, that is why i also don't recommend it to anyone, my recommendation is to use a texture strip or a roq if you need so much frames. Can you explain why changing stages on a single material causes you to multiply the tris on a model? Is the first time i'm hearing that. Ok but I don't agree, apart from the inability to tweak it after the fact (change frame speed for example) imo is a very fast and easy way to have texture animations on levels. But like i said before, anyone is free to use whatever they like, the final outcome is what matters. How much impact in performance are you saying this have? I know roq is a very old but very cpu efficient video format, personally I have not tested it, at lest not on a performance basis, i did tested it visually, for example, the .roq based caustics against the texture strip ones and apart from roq looking more blurry, personally i didn't saw any performance impact of note between the two, but the roq was 512x512, i don't know how would it behave with a much larger roq, i'm sure the larger the .roq the bigger the performance impact. That is true, if your texture animation works well with so few frames, with no noticeable ick-ups or repetitions but if you are trying to simulate, for example, rain drops streaming down windows, or a TV show (like those of Max Payne for example) or even a video communication on a screen, like those of Doom 3, etc, you certainly need more than 2 or 3 frames, in the caustics case i posted, it has 24 frames, and you are right is indeed overkill, i'm certain it can work with less, is just a test i did and the source data was made of 24 frames. Btw that UE4 tutorial is very nice thanks for posting it, but i most say his caustics do not behave exactly like mine, at lest not on flat surfaces, like flat floors and walls, on mine the caustics undulate and change shape but his is a very efficient trick indeed and i would recommend it over mine.

Oh I know that but roq is a very lightweight video format and making a animation using scrolling textures, sometimes requires a very complicated material setup (if not using a texture strip) where's with a roq is simpler: complex example: Better example using a texture strip: video map version: Quality is a problem tho using a 512x512 roq vs a 1024x1024 or larger texture strip does make a diference, but the tool i posted above solves that problem has it makes larger rez roq's. About performance i didn't tested side by side a roq video vs a texture strip, so i can't really say for sure what's faster or slower, i only know idSoftware used plenty of 512x512 roq videos in Doom 3, but imo is a matter of preference, if you don't want to use a video for a texture animation, you are not forced to and by not using roq, you also gain the ability to better tweak the animation at run time.

Nothing against implementing mp4, bik or any other modern format for full-screen videos but IMO you guys should still fully support roq, is a very lightweight format and really not very hard to do, you can indeed use modern video tools to make the frames for them, how, just export from your preferred video tool has multiple separate frames, all of them support that functionality and convert those frames to roq, with the engine console or with the tool i posted above and that's it. Other reasons why i think roq should not be deprecated, like i said is very lightweight, perfect for in level geometry integration (for example non interactive animated computer monitors), i mean it can be used in game as any other texture/material, roq supports all the idtech 4 OpenGL blending modes and alpha, enabling the ability of doing very nice effects, this without the need of, texture strips or separate texture frames ( like using various if stages and timers), for example like i said above, water caustics projecting on surfaces, or a special animated texture being projected from a spot light, for example cloud shadows moving over terrain, etc, no need for high rez videos for that. Effects for who mp4 or other modern format would be overkill imo.

No problem.

video map is a very nice way to have texture animations on a mission, what i like about it is that you can apply alpha to a RoQ video and it will work has any other texture, can be used to do caustics effects for example. About examples here are some: textures/particles/testvideo { qer_editorimage textures/editor/video.tga translucent noShadows { blend add videoMap video/fireball.roq vertexColor } } video/tvshow { qer_editorimage textures/editor/video.tga { videoMap loop video/test_1024.roq } } using the engine console you can convert multiple images into a roq video but afaik has limited resolution, to do higher rez roq's you can use the roq maker in this tools http://www.moddb.com/games/overdose/downloads/overdose-tools-set

Nice done, not exaggerated like i like it, btw while editing the fhDoom engine, i found idsoftware played with item highlight for Doom 3, but disabled it for the final game, i was able to enable it again and it was just the case of changing a bool from false to true, i also found that the material shader for it is still in the game and it also uses a cubemap. itemHighlightShell { nonSolid { blend add cubeMap env/sheen texgen reflect rgb parm4 } } Unfortunately, is a pulse based highlight (on and off) system so it looks to obvious and in your face, but was cool to find how they did it.

You can also use "testmap mapname", this will dmap the map and start it at the same time, if i'm remembering correctly this one ignores leaks so don't use it for final testing.

For now the idea is First Person, puzzle and horror based, but is still to to early to be sure of anything.