HMart

That is immersion breaking in my opinion, is enough already to have a moving bright spot below on the screen (the light gem), do not make it even more obvious with a extra glow. Why would the developers spend resources (time) on a feature that only a handful of people would play with. The majority i bet play on easy or medium only a few play on hard imagine a ultra hard. If is not a feature to be used even on low difficulties then imo is not worth it. Yes it would be challenging and frustrating imo, if i'm on a shadow i'm on a shadow i should not worry about bright spots behind me, it is enough to worry about, my mission the loot around me the sound i make and the guards vision cones and patrols. Also this desired feature of yours was not even on the original thief games, so many thief players even the veterans aren't used to this. If you want more challenge then try to play the game without any knock outs or killing anyone even if you have that options.

We are going off topic here this is not the C4 engine forum, but if you have to know his engine is not widely used because people are looking for shine graphics and not a very well coded and structured engine, his demos were always very simplistic and not very appealing, full of coder art, Eric also takes his time implementing features he still lacks HDR lighting on his engine and SSAO was also implemented only recently, the tools were also not very artist friendly.

Yes he did if you read the Release Notes for the engine version 4.0 you will see that mentioned. Yes, he is a fantastic coder and also a very good mathematician, he even wrote a book about that subject. http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Programming-Computer-Graphics-Edition/dp/1435458869

That paper was made by the guy that makes and markets the C4 Engine, a fantastic coder, he even invented alone a better replacement for the collada mesh files, called OpenGEX , about the shadows, on his new engine, version 4.0, he removed Stencil Shadows for shadow maps. Stencil shadows were faster in the old days, but nowadays shadow maps aren't that much slower, plus shadow maps have so much benefits above stencil shadows that the small hit on performance is worth it. About the benefits, shadow maps don't need closed models, Stencil do, shadow maps can be made softer easily, stencil don't, shadow maps support alpha mapped surfaces easily, stencil don't, shadow maps can simulate near contact shadows (shadows that become softer and blurred by distance from the caster), stencil don't.

Happy Bday guys you should be proud of what you accomplished, i've seen many ambitions projects start and go without anything to show, but not you guys, what you did is not short of astounding, long live TDM!!

No tool is hard or complex if enough time is put into it, and DarkRadiant is no more complex than say Unreal Engine editor, Source Engine Editor, Cryengine editor, etc, what editors have you used in the past? About the missions quality, this are fan missions made by a single person like you, something like you want needs many man hours (years) by a team of developers, you will need to wait for the TDM campaign in the making (will come when done) for that in the mean time enjoy the fan missions they have more juice in them then just stealing.

idtech 4 has some nice tools, that you guys lack on the DarkRadiant, and that would help imo, first they have a visual material editor, no need to write materials by hand (but is not hard), this tool is a tad buggy just like the UI editor, and has a tendency to screw up materials if done by hand first, but if the bugs were removed, then it would be very usable, a Ragdool editor or the AF editor like is called and you know about, then theres ones that exist on DarkRadiant and are just tools for quick ingame editing, theres a sound and light editor i especially like the light editor, especially because lights on DarkRadiant don't look 100 percent like they do ingame, you can just walk on the level put a light/sound change parameters and see the result instantly, removing this tools is foolish imo, except the id Radiant of course. No he is talking about the ragdoll making tool, that command is to save ragdoll's that you put on the maps to the map files, the AF editor is to make the ragdoll's themselves. Totally and ragdoll's can be used for more than character bodies, like you said they can be used for a saddle, a chain a flag or banners/drapes like GRIMM used, etc, removing it again would be foolish imo.

Realism should never get on the way of gameplay imo, and also imo it is not fun to be in a shadow and be seen just because theres a bright texture behind me.

I'm of the same opinion as AluminumHaste, that does look like the moder of the shader tried to simulate chromatic aberration or caustics.

I don't use AA at all in any game. So my FPS's aren't affected by it, but even so i enabled it just to see the difference, here it is, 32 to 34 FPS, so some impact but nothing of notice.

Why not use the free tree generator called tree[d], you can find it in the link below. https://web.archive.org/web/20130915030534/http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=treed.about

Update on the frames for second, decide to update my drivers to the new 14.9, gained minimum 4 fps and was even able to reach 38 fps's sometimes, with or without crossfire.

Crossfire HD5770 (not sure if crossfire is enabled in TDM) Fps - 32 System - Radeon HD5770x2 , corei7 860 2.8GHz, 8Gb DDR3 dual channel NBF 2407.5MHz, ASUSTeK P7P55 WS , SoundBlaster Audigy 4, Win7 X64 Driver - Catalyst 14.4, w/stock settings. Sreen res - 1920*1080 Settings - ASx8, VSYNC-off, Ambient Rendering-enhanced & Interaction shader-enhanced.

They aren't that slower, and cubemap lights can be used to do more then lighting a scene, even tho that is the primary reason to have them, but they can also be used to simulate shadows (and colored shadows if necessary) that need to be casted 360º around the player, like a static point light inside a cage in the middle of a room and also be used to improve ambient lighting, having the option to use them is better then not.

If you guys didn't removed the oficiall tools from your version of the engine then theres a ingame sound editor, you just write editSounds on the console and a editor pops up, with it you can interactivily edit and put sound sources in real time.

Sorry to be replying so late to this, but GRIMM has hanged ragdolls, not humanoid based but he used them to simulate cloth drapes, perhaps you can ask the developer how he did that?

That looks fantastic congrats, i hope you find the help you are looking for because i can see potential on that. One thing that i still don't understand are you modifying the original TDS assets to work on idtech 4 or are you modifying idtech 4 to read the original TDS formats?

Yes that was how i manipulated the camera in Darkradiant ever since i started using it, but with 2.0 it is not working anymore. P.S- I take this back deleted both editors plus all the xml files on AppData and installed 2.0 only and now it all works.

Don't know if this is a bug but i was playing with the md5 animation viewer in DR 2.0 and my PC complained of low memory and asked me to close programs. Only had DR and Google chrome open and i have 8GB of RAM, this never happened with Chrome before so i suspect DR is the culprit.

Thanks man that worked

Yes the idtech 4 based wolfenstein has fantastic soft stencil shadows. Question for Revelator, i downloaded your latest engine source but i can't compile it, it says it has a VS 2010 solution on the read me but when i try to open it with 2010 it says it was made on a new VS, found you made it with VS 2012 but i only have VS 2010 and VS 2013. Will you make available a VS 2010 solution?

Fantastic work Steve and Revelator guy, if SSAO gets finally implemented then TDM will definitely win with this, not only on visuals but also potentially on performance. New Horizon with SSAO in, you guys could reduce the amount of real shadows to a minimum and gain significant performance without loosing anything on looks, SSAO is very good at grounding objects (making them look has if on the ground) even when there's no shadows, so small and non important objects can have their shadows disabled and still look fine. About soft shadows i don't think the Skippin ones are a good option (not trying to take from his fantastic job), for example with RBDoom3BFG soft shadows i can run the game just fine with all on maximum but with Skippin soft shadows on vanilla Doom3 performance is all over the place, the only way for TDM to have good performing soft shadows IMO, is if they are closely integrated into the render engine, and not something hackd in.

I can see your 3D video using the crosseye trick and the scene plus the character look very good. About the copyright i find your idea of using the original TDS assets (in their original file format) like the OpenMW guys are doing the best, do you have the knowhow to modify idtech 4 to do that?

Yes the AI code could be useful for a SS2 clone, but other then that no other assets could be used, they are just from totally different ages. The Doom 3 assets on the other end could indeed be a good match for a SS2 look alike but having said that i must also say that SS2 can be done on any engine, theres nothing on it that could only be done on the thief or TDM engine.

Hum i don't know if i'm understanding this suggestion well but i think TDM is open enough already, there's nothing preventing people from taking the engine/tools and do what the hell they want with them, for example if you wanted to make a driving game you can, there's already driving code for idtech 4 out there.