HMart
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Posts posted by HMart
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23 minutes ago, Zaratul said:
We have 2.11 version now. TDM has a long history but no auto loot bodies function like in Thief 1\2? Rotating bodies its not really fun or immersive so please add this feature.
Nothing against implementing such a choice for auto loot, I'm always for player choice.
But I most say that I disagree that rotating the bodies to loot them, is not fun or immersive, to me is totally the contrary, plus is a tad more realistic than just "frob body press button" and stuff happens. IMO It also adds to the gameplay, is like a mini-game.
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On 1/23/2023 at 7:53 PM, stgatilov said:
As far as I remember, the engine drops smoothing information from LWO file and applies automatic determination of smooth groups depending on some hardcoded angle.
So I'm not sure these smoothing settings will help in TDM or Doom 3.What?! That is news to me, I use .lwo for all my static models and smoothing imports to idtech4 just fine!
Thou I most say, I don't use Blender for anything but MD5 models and still use old Modo 601, the same tool Seneca Menard a idSoftware artist uses, and also use his custom Modo plugging's, that he made public, exactly to streamline making static models for Doom 3 and Rage.
In modo you can set smoothing angle or edge smoothing (hard or soft edge) and it works in idTech 4, perhaps blender and other tools handle .lwo differently? After all modo was made by the same people that created lightwave 3D, so they literally created the .lwo file system.
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21 hours ago, motorsep said:
I can. In fact, I just set flag "solid" "1" on ASE model and it gives me collisions. I just figured maybe .cm collision file might have some benefits over direct per-poly collision with the ASE model. So I wanted to give it a try.
After I asked original question, I did a lot of tests and I think it's just physics of AFEntity that give me issues and whether it will be .cm or material key or entity key, it wouldn't matter.
Solid 1, if no collision surface is available, will use the model geometry itself for collisions (search for combat model in the code also), so yes is not the best approach, doing a custom collision model is always preferable for performance, but doing it on DR is something I personally don't do and IMO is at most, best for simple box like collision models.
Like I said the best is to create the collision surfaces in a 3D Tool like blender, you can use the shadow model for it, just change the material from "shadow" to "collision" or even the lower poly LOD model, can't be easier.
Btw isn't AFEntity for ragdool physics? I thought that was only for skinned MD5 models not static ASE or LWO models.
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On 1/19/2023 at 8:02 PM, snatcher said:
... args on the fly for some reason, as if all ammo args are permanent and need to be "reloaded" for changes to apply.
Sorry if this was already explained but this was something I also doubted for a time but then I realized the answer was there all the time, I just didn't noticed, is on the name of this args, they are called entity spawnargs by the engine for a reason and this reason is, they are updated at entity spawn time only.
What made me so confused for a time was that script has functions to read and write into spawnarg's, so I thought, if I can write into them, then they should update immediately and when I read the spawnarg again the value is updated but like you found that is not what happens.
So imo If you want to keep some special state volatile/updatable, during a entire gameplay section, use a global variable in your script instead.
And if you need to save this state, to pass it on to a next level for example, then save the value on a entity spawnarg, you then read it at next entity spawn and it will work. just my two cents.
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Afaik yes .cm files (means collision model) can be used as a separate collison model, for a ingame entity, I think that there's even a special func entity for that but the fact is, it was hardly used by idsoftware for that purpose, majority of Doom 3 models have the collision surface incorporated in the model itself (like the shadow model) they did it on Maya, 3DS Max and Modo.
So motorsep I ask, why would you want to make a separate collision model in DR? Can't you edit the model in Blender for example?
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18 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:
You could have a project worked on by multiple people at the same time, and be able to load up the master file to see the total progress. That sounds really interesting, but not really something that DR was designed for.
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Ok that does sounds very interesting and now that you talk about it, I think C4 engine add that ability but I could be mistaken.
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peter_spy is right that is total overkill, for grass at lest and imo the wrong approach (specially with such high rez textures), thou I know is the "easy" and only approach for those that can't use shaders. The right approach but harder to those that don't know shader coding, is to create a vertex shader that moves each vertices of the grass plane.
Btw this is possible to do, more or less realistically, even in the original idtech4, without making a new shader or using frame animations.
textures/nature/grass { nonsolid noimpact noShadows noSelfShadow qer_editorimage textures/nature/plant_ed.jpg { blend diffusemap map textures/nature/plant_d.tga rotate .003*sintable[ time *.2 ] } { blend bumpmap map textures/nature/plant_local.tga rotate .003*sintable[ time *.2 ] } }-
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9 hours ago, peter_spy said:
It's not about layers. It's a more modern approach where you have a 'master level' and there would be sub-maps streamed in and out as necessary. Unreal engine supports it since version 3.0, IIRC.
To me that sounds more game engine specific and not something for a separate level editor like DR. What use would be to DR to have the ability to stream in, map files into other map files? IMO sounds good for real time gameplay in a game, not while working on a map in a editor.
Thou I recall the entire prefab system of the dead indie engine, C4 engine, was based on this concept, a map file was a collection of other map files but afaik they were not streamed in.
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6 hours ago, Nighthound said:
I am pretty sure there is a good reason for using the DOOM 3 engine,
This game started has a Doom 3 mod and even thou I'm not on the team, I bet idTech 4 was chosen at the time, because it's real time per-pixel lighting and shadows, strongly resembled the look of Thief 3 and also the engine itself was very mod friendly, afaik more so than the heavily modified Unreal 2 engine used in Thief 3.
6 hours ago, Nighthound said:but it does make me wonder for how long this project can remain active if it doesn't get transferred onto a modern game engine eventually.
IMO this game will be active for years to come, at lest while there's people willing to work on it and making new missions, players will come.
And also the current TDM engine, is not the original Doom 3 engine, it got updated by the team through the years and as surpassed the original in many ways and will keep on evolving, while there's good c++ coders in the team, like currently they have.
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4 hours ago, datiswous said:
Off-topic: Is it possible to show fake warning messages in a mission? Could be cool as easter eggs or something.
Like a console warning? If yes, first personally, I don't see any use in it, because IMO console messages, are meant for developers not players but if you or anyone really want to do that, then use the script printLine function for a fake console message.
But remember, they will only be visible, in the console, hidden to players that would need to toggle it to see it, unless you force con_noPrint to zero, this will show all console messages, no matter if the console is visible or not, that I don't recommend at all for something meant to players.
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Merry Christmas to all.
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On 12/13/2022 at 9:51 PM, stgatilov said:
What's the point of instancing?
Ask yourself: how often you see many objects with exactly the same model in one view?Instancing may not be necessary for TDM dark and relative small spaces, but afaik, before UE5 nanite tech, was the only way using conventional polygon rasterization, to be able to render large open scenes. Scenes filled with large amounts of vegetation and other stuff, ala Crysis and others, those games are filled with cloned/instanced geometry all over the place and personally, I don't remember people strongly complaining about them felling very repetitive.
That's because there's ways to break the repetition and make the scene feel more unique/varied, even if they are just rendering hundreds or millions of the same geometry/model.
Just look at this IMO fantastic in-game forests scenes, in the medieval simulator game, Kingdom Come Deliverance. These are made in Cryengine 3.x, using instanced geometry and Imposters.
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On 12/4/2022 at 2:25 PM, MirceaKitsune said:
making a func_static go to different rotations
Func_statics are the wrong entity for that, those are optimized and used for static objects, meaning objects that don't move at all.
What you want is to use a func_mover, these don't move unless you script them to move but they are specially handled by the engine and have dedicated script code that func_statics don't have, for example func_movers have special rotating functions called RotateDownTo, RotateUpTo, RotateOnce, etc and special moving functions as well, those should be defined in TDM_events.script.
Btw don't confuse with func_movable that is for rigid body physics objects only.
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14 minutes ago, kano said:
Thanks for the improvement to stencil shadows; any and all improvements are always appreciated.
That being said, I'm actually surprised that the team isn't preparing to kill stencil shadows entirely. I know it would render the game unplayable on old hardware, but hardware that old will struggle to play the game anyway. And with a full transition to shadow maps, more pretty graphical features can be implemented (like the volumetric shadows and hopefully eventually transparent materials casting shadows), and manpower can be focused on improving one shadowing method instead of two.
Not only do I think it's a great idea to drop stencil shadows, but I also think it would be cool to have a checkbox/option in the editor to allow materials that make use of alpha textures like leaves and grass to cast accurate shadows. Making this into an option that must explicitly be switched on by a mapper would avoid screwing up existing missions that were designed without said functionality in mind, as someone else pointed out, while simultaneously opening up new options for mappers who are creating new content today.
However, the biggest downside to what I am proposing is that shadow maps really tax the GPU and tank performance hard, especially if you crank the quality. It is probably the most impactful performance setting in the game.
I agree and I remember saying something similar before and the answer if I recall correctly was, stencil stays in, that was a few years ago, and they add (and still have) very valid reasons, one was because maps in TDM, was still in its infancy and not well optimized, but it has improved much since (stencil also with the soft shadow option).
Thou I know this is not a easy decision for the team, you can't just delete the stencil shadow code and everything will be fine, TDM age and success, is also a big problem for the way it handles shadows, because of how old and popular it is, it has hundreds of assets and missions made, with stencil shadows alone in mind, changing those assets today (materials mostly), in particular those with alpha enabled, will require free work, from someone, and will also with no doubt, break shadows in all missions made until now and not forget, decrease performance, by the simple fact that, more stuff that didn't cast shadows, trees, grass, banners, decals, etc, now will and some of them shouldn't, so the missions will have to be updated, and it may never happen if the mission maker is gone. Is not a easy problem to solve.
SpoilerBut having said that, to me, not removing stencil shadows, will forever be "a torn in TDM feet", why, because of its existence, shadow maps, the better tech IMO, will never be the main focus for shadows, condemned to be a after thought, so never used to its full potencial, mission makers will forever be forced to make their missions, with stencil shadows limitations in mind, meaning alpha mapped materials, will never cast shadows. (unless they are willing to go to the trouble of modifying the assets themselves and override the default ones from TDM in their mission, afaik is totally possible)
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56 minutes ago, MirceaKitsune said:
Thanks, that was it. Set the model to it directly as that's easier and seems better than creating a fake brush.
One problem then however: Some signs swing in the wrong direction. Seemingly there's no way to override the angle... the entity suggests an "angles" spawnarg, I tried setting it to either "90" or "90 0 0" but neither affect it. Any thoughts?
(250.86-306.53182.09).thumb.jpg.d8467baeb7ba21461d8e2b5d47e3ca50.jpg)
Looking at the func_pendulum c++ class, shows that it doesn't care or use angles var for anything. So the only thing I can think right now, to solve this, is to bind the visible entity, to a invisible pendulum mover, moving in the direction you want the visible one to follow, its own axis doesn't matter (visually but do matter to the pendulum movement), you can even make it a brush box. Hope you get what I mean.
Also here is a old Doom 3 pendulum tutorial that I found, I didn't bother to search in TDM wiki, so perhaps there's one there as well, but just in case see if this helps.
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To add to frost_salamander reply about performance, game objects/entities, created by native c++ code and used in editor, through the entity definitions func_* whatever, imo should be faster than a custom pure script based object, for the simple reason that like I mentioned, they are made/call directly from a c++ based class, and c++ is objectively faster than DoomScript.
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On 9/6/2021 at 10:33 PM, Dragofer said:
The question is, would it be possible to store these LOD distances within the model file?
Sorry for the extremely late reply to this.
First not that any of this matters, as I don't think LOD's will ever be done in this way, but for academic reasons, you don't need to save LOD distances in the model, just hardcode in the engine c++, reasonable default distances for each layer and give the ability to change them later if necessary, like always editor entity spawnargs, but if the defaults are well thought out, you the mission maker, probably wouldn't even need to mess with the distances most of the time, everything would be automatic for the mission maker, like the shadow and collision model.
And please to everyone reading, even thou this may sound cool, don't think any of this is easy to code, because is not. Many times making life easy to the end user, requires a ton of work and knowhow from the coder.
But the answer to the question is yes, how to do it, does depend on the format you are exporting.
SpoilerI personally only use lwo for static models and I know by reading the c++ code handling the lwo, that how it is used by the engine, is very underutilized, many of its information capabilities are ignored by the model parser, only caring about the required info for the static models, but the parser, as is written, is still capable of reading more from the file, than is used in the end.
For example, it detects all extra layers in a lwo file and goes to the trouble of saving them into a list for later use, but the following code reading the list, only cares about and handles the geometry info in the first layer and skips the rest, but even so, there's some Doom 3 lwo models, with extra layers, but they were obviously only used, as save/store slots for extra geometry, for the modeling software, info that the idSoftware artist may wanted to use or not later.
The lwo parser, also detects and saves into a list, extra polygon tags but ignores most of them, only caring about the smoothing group info and is this polygon tags, at lest as used/done in Luxology Modo, that imo could be used to encode the LOD distances. Polygon tags is a lwo powerful feature, for example there's a modo plugin/tool to create user GUI's for custom tools, a tool made by Seneca a idSoftware artist and it uses polygon tags (strings) to create GUI cards from geometry from within Modo itself, imo the guy is not only a excellent artist, is also a good programmer!
Another way would be name each LOD layer, with the distances range in it and parse the name string, for example that is how Frictional Games made Penumbra, using only Maya to make the levels, all their models used special layer/mesh names and sufixes/prefixes.
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11 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:
It seems that there is a reverse engineer group ( Amernime \ Nimez ) who are back-porting newer AMD drivers to older GPU versions. Terrascale 1 support is currently a "work in progress" :
If you are interested, they might have beta versions up on their terrascale discord. The downside is that these are community created drivers rather than official ones by AMD.
Maybe AMD will release some sort of maintenance for terascale like they did for some of their other old GPU's.
That's cool,
I remember when i was a kid installing modded GPU drivers on my ATI GPU, the same with my Audigy Creative sound card that enabled stuff that they only add available in more expensive models.
But personally today, I'm not sure if i would do that, call me paranoid but with all the cripto and nft bs going around, I want such software to come from a reputable source, at lest one that has much to lose if caught doing bs. But that is just me.
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Sorry if I felt a tad sensitive also, today was not a good day on the job, a tad stressed. But you are not to blame.
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32 minutes ago, stgatilov said:
Good story, but it does not explain why they copy/pasted the whole section of C++ code instead of adding second string comparison with OR operator in the condition for the existing section.
Don't know if it was your intention but this reply makes it sound like I'm lying or something! Or I'm just reading it wrong? If I am, sorry for my reaction, but is hard to detect intention in text. If I'm not, then I'm not asking for you or anyone to believe me and I even said that.
Why they copy pasted the entire C++ code instead of reusing? Only the original programmer knows that, but perhaps they were to be different in some special case that never came to happen? Just assuming here.
And yes they totally could just have parsed the same keywords in the same c++ code, and in the Quake4 editor (made by Raven software) that comes with Doom 3, they do that.
else if ( !token.Icmp ( "definefloat" ) || !token.Icmp ( "float" ) ) { idToken token2; idStr result; if ( !src.ReadToken ( &token2 ) ) { src.Error ( "expected define name" ); return false; } idWinFloat var; idUserInterfaceLocal ui; idWindow tempwin ( &ui ); idStr out; src.SetMarker ( ); tempwin.ParseExpression ( &src, &var ); src.GetStringFromMarker ( out, true ); wrapper->GetVariableDict().Set ( token + "\t\"" + token2 + "\"", out ); continue; }I Just know for certain is that Quake4 removed definefloat (at lest is not discussed in their wiki) and QuakeWars removed definefloat and definevec4 entirely, for float and vec4 respectively.
And what about what I asked about supporting vec4 keyword in TDM guis?
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On 11/13/2022 at 4:10 PM, stgatilov said:
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I don't understand why two keywords "float" and "definefloat" exist.
In the code, there are two identical pieces of code for handling them.I don't have a link and don't take my word for it but I remember this being discussed in the old Doom3World forum and I clearly remember a idSoftware dev saying that definefloat keyword came early, while the script and gui language was being developed, later they decided to support the keyword float alone but because many in world GUI's, were already made with the older keyword, to not waste time converting things that already worked they decided to let it stay, despite doing the exact same thing.
Why they made "float" to replace "definefloat" but not "vec4" to replace "definevec4", is something that I always wondered why.
What would be your opinion and doing that yourself? Meaning instead of "definevec4" users can write just "vec4" in new GUI's, just like in QuakeWars, thou this last one also supports, vec2 and vec3 but not sure if those are something useful in TDM case.
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4 hours ago, datiswous said:
I guess you could also use this for different colored animals for example?
Yes it could but wouldn't using the skin system be better for that?
I know that using the colored system, permits to do variable colors very easily, good for carpets, flags, cloth, etc and also only have a single material, but if your idea is to make more varied looking characters, with a single model, I think the skin system is better, it means more materials need to be created but it also means more flexibility and power.
The skin system is very powerful, was designed exactly to make different material variations for a single model and it does way more than just swap colors, you can have characters that look somewhat different geometrically, by hiding or showing hidden peace's on a model, etc.
On a animal for example you can have a model with fur and another without it by just hiding the fur geometry, or one with a collar on his neck and another without it, without swapping models, just the skin.
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10 minutes ago, vomoc said:
I can play thief 3.And i can play doom 3 with lowest graphics setting.But i cant run doom 3 BFG edition.
The fact that you can't play Doom3 BFG explains why you can't play modern TDM, afaik both use more or less the same OGL system, thou TDM has since surpassed even BFG graphics.
Also if I'm not mistaken Thief 3 is not even a OGL game but a DirectX 8 game, it uses Unreal 2 engine, Doom 3 is a OGL 1.4/2.0 game that came out in 2004 and you already have to play it at lowest graphics settings!? Man that means your GPU is just to slow, I assume is a laptop?
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9 minutes ago, vomoc said:
Radeon HD 3000 support:
OpenGL -- 3.3
Direct3D -- 10.1
Shader model -- 4.1
So?can i play this game?any solutions?
The fact you really can't update drivers and not even OGL 3.2 seams to be fully supported, the only solution for now that I can think of, is to play a older version of the game, one that still has support for the original Doom 3 render based on OGL 2.0, but I don't remember which one, others may help better.
Playing a older TDM, does means you will be unable to play the more modern missions, but even so, your GPU is very old anyway and would very probably suffer with the more heavy modern missions and there's still plenty of older ones that are very nice to play.
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Make levels using Blender?
in TDM Editors Guild
Posted
nbohr1more already said most of it but if I can add anything, is that the AI traversal system called AAS (Area Awareness system) also requires brush's to work.
This is what I know about it, others may correct me if something is wrong, AI will walk fine on a complex floor model made in blender but bellow the model, you need a brush for the AI to be able to traverse the space, the brush doesn't need to be accurate to the floor mesh and the AI doesn't need to contact the brush at all, so you can just put a flat brush a few units bellow the floor model, the AI just needs it there to know where to go next, because its AAS system (navigation system) totally ignores mesh's, is like they aren't there at all. This means AI afaik will also bump into mesh based static models in it's path, like headless chickens, if you don't enclose those, in a brush using the special monster_clip texture. My two cents.