HMart

Can you give me some points on how to use that exporter? I installed it on Maya 2009 and it shows and the shelf works but i just can't export with it, don't know if i'm just not using it well or it does't really work on Maya 2009. This is the error i get "// Error: No skin cluster found!" i'm just trying to export a simple .md5 without animation.

I don't know but to me the gameplay seemed way to easy and the AI way to dumb, even compared to the old thief games, oh well it seems TDM has spoiled me.

Try the new 14.8 beta drivers perhaps they improve things, the problem with AMD was always OpenGL support and coupled with new cards, problems are more probable to arise, that's because they need time to mature their driver support.

Shadow maps solve that problem easily, that is why shadow volumes (not to talk about supporting alpha surfaces) are not used anymore on modern engines.

What? Where do you eard that? Any links? OpenGL is fully dx11+ compliant by now (OpenGL 4.5) and was always fully dx9 compliant before and with extensions it was even more advanced than DirectX in some expects (but some only worked on a single GPU vendor for example Nvidia). You can say bad things about OpenGL, driver support being one especially from AMD, being a convoluted mess with so many backward compatibility paths another, but being behind even dx7 support is not one of them, at least that is not what i learned about it.

The problem with deferred rendering is that shadow casting lights are as performance heavy and have the same limitations (8 shadow casting lights per frame, is a hardware limit) as normal rendering, and coupled with the much higher memory requirements for it, some if not all limit shadow casting to a single light, for example that is how Amnesia does it, a bunch of no shadow casting lights and a single (hero) light casting shadows. This can also be accomplished with the normal idtech 4 forward rendering, also deferred rendering only wins in the number of small (not shadow casting) lights 100 or more per frame, that is why all deferred rendering demos have small lights moving and jumping around and afaik idtech also claims to gain performance with small radius lights. Deferred Rendering also wins on scene complexity (number of polygons per frame) but if levels continue staying as simple as they are now then any performance gains will not be notice and it can even be worse because of the memory requirements. Deferred Rendering is supported on any dx9 shader model 3 and up GPU's, does are considered very old cards by now, and any dx10 card can be bought by less of 50€ nowadays, no reason to lock a engine progress because of ancient hardware. Btw Tr3B's shadow maps aren't more performance heavy per ce, is just that because Doom 3 was not made to support shadow maps it is not optimized for it, and so for example many lights that were not casting any shadows on the vanilla engine become shadow casting lights with the shadow maps, for example all lights behind alpha mapped surfaces. Is totally possible to have a performante game with shadow maps if you know how to optimize them. Implementing Deferred rendering is still a good idea and if well used (lead to more scene complexity) can indeed improve performance.

I speak only for myself but the problem with my "not excited" stance is that i know how a checkpoint game feels like, i have played hundreds of them, none of them felt better because of it and some like i already said many times even became worse. But again include them if you want i will play your mission nonetheless you can be sure of that.

I totally comprehend your point and i'm not against the inclusion of checkpoints that's why i voted the second option, but from all my years of gaming they were never something i liked, they never made a game better or more fun imo, save anywhere is and will always be the better option to me, a badly implemented checkpoint can lead to frustration and ruin the fun, i have experienced tons of cases on the games i played, some even made me stop playing the game entirely, that never happens with save anywhere. But if you want to implement checkpoints do it but please be careful on where and how you put them. I have recent example were not being able to save when i wanted made me stop playing a game. I was playing the Stargate mod for Crysis the Starcry mod and it was very hard even on the easy option but they add save anywhere so i continue playing, them i got to the first boss where i add to fight with a tank and they disabled save anywhere and put a checkpoint at the start of the fight, the first minutes it was a reload fest before i learned the boss weaknesses, then i was able to stay alive for longer but again the difficulty to even control my tank was brutal and the constant reload at the start was making me very frustrated, one time i was very low on health but was almost killing the Boss, for what seemed many minutes, when because my tank was not able to move faster (because of low health) he was able to strike me with a rock and kill me, that made me rage quit the mod and just give up on it.

Deleted my initial comment because was repeating stuff already said by others. "facepalm" Is what happens when you only read the first comment. Is there a way to delete a comment?

The links are all in the same page link below. http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=MayaImportx86_versions

Are you asking me if i have the full paths to the links? If yes then i'm not really understanding your question, does it work on your end? What i'm doing is clicking the link and it gives me a 404 Error page not found. I'm using Google Chrome btw, i appreciate any help on this, thanks. Tested with Pale Moon (a firefox derivative) didn't worked. Only Maya 4.5 to 6.5 worked all the others seem to be down.

Ah ok thanks that makes sense. Is what happens when you live almost all your life in the same space i know my village and the roads to nearby towns and villages like the palm of my hand so never really needed to improve my navigation skills, ;D but i will at least try doing what you said.

Was searching for a md5 importer for maya 2009 saw the links on the DarkMod Wiki but unfortunately it is dead, can a working link be provided please?

Don't know if this was already discussed and if some conclusion was arrived against it, but i will ask none the less, many times i would take the map out just to stare at a drawing and not really know where i really was or how could i reach my destination reading it (it seems i'm really bad at that stuff), so my question is, is it possible at easy settings or with a choice for the map to tell us where we currently are, i don't care if it doesn't tell where we must go, but just gives us our current location on the map would help.

Afaik not but the file size for maps seem to be very small even on big maps i wouldn't worry about that.

Idtech 4 already disregards no visible faces on dmap process automatically no need to use the chaulk texture anymore for that purpose, but it can be used for invisible geometry that needs to seal the void, no_draw can't do that. Patches are one sided so you can only apply textures for a single side of it. You can intersect func_statics with visportals just fine, but remember that if a visportal closes but a portion of the intersecting func_static is still visible to you the full func_static will still be rendered, so don't make entire rooms of a single func_static.

Hello Paralytik i'm not really a TDM mission developer but i have some knowhow about the idtech 4 engine, the one TDM uses, this is what you need to know if you want to go out of the squared and angled look. Blockout your map using Brushes on DarkRadiant like normal, this is necessary for the Visibility, Sound and AI system to work well, you can test basic gameplay at this stage if you want, after that is done them is just a matter of populating the map with models (func_statics) to hide the squared look, you can rotate them how you like and make them the crooked and broken has you want, but remember AI cannot navigate on func_statics if theres no normal brush geometry below it for the AAS system to work. Btw this is how maps are done on all engines using the BSP system including Unreal Engine (Don't know if 4 still supports BSP system) and Source.

Oh i didn't thought about the inherited spawnargs, that does take care of the manually part.

That is nice indeed but manually setting them imo should also be a option, for custom models if desired.

For the LOD system it would be nice if DarkRadiant separated the lod models from the original models in a separate tab perhaps called LOD or by using some color coding on the models name, this would be possible only using the LOD folder idea because lod models would need to have a distinct naming scheme from the original model, for example modelname_lod1 or lod_modelname_1, this so not brake past missions like Springheel said. Don't know how you guys work with lod's but this is how i envisioned a eventual LOD workflow in DarkRadiant 1 - select your static model/entity using the create model/entity option 2 - put them on the map 3 - select them 4 - go to the entity tab 6 - click the assign lod stage button 7 - browse for the respective lod model (inside the LOD folder) and click assign, chose the view distance click OK, repeat for the other stages.

Sorry but you are wrong Doom 3 does support OpenAL (the Creative one without EFX only EAX 4.0) i have it enabled on the .cfg i think is not enabled by default tho. this is what i have on my Doom 3 .cfg you can do the same with Darkmod. seta s_useOpenAL "1" seta s_libOpenAL "rapture3d_aol.dll" // This is the commercial Rapture3D software that enables HRTF sound on OpenAL games.

Played now using 2.02 and A night to Remember mission add faces missing from the dead bodies.

Bikerdude is this quote that i got from your link above about OpenAL on Darkmod true? Doom 3 supports (creative) OpenAL natively did you guys removed that from the engine? Is strange if true because why would you guys do that! And also i've used Rapture3D to play Darkmod and it seemed to work and it is a OpenAL only (unfortunately) audio software.

Dismemberment for the vanilla Doom 3 models will be very hard, but possible, the only way that i know for it to work more or less, is like this. Open the md5 model on any of this tools, 3DMax, Maya, Blender, (you need the correct versions that support the necessary md5 plugins) edit the models to include geometry inside them, for example on the arm put some geometry inside it so when the arm gets cut (hidden) you don't see a hole, apply a material to this new geometry that looks like meat, divide the rest of the model "hit" areas by different materials id's (head, leg_1, leg_2, arm_1, etc, don't know if md5 supports multi_material, tho) btw with this hack i recommend that you permit only one hidden part per model, they can be different tho, on one model a leg on another a head, etc (you can hide more than one at the same time if you make extra materials but that will make this hack to much complicated and laborious), this will prevent that a hidden part will suddenly reappear when another is hidden. Make extra skins were the necessary parts are hidden and then use the idtech 4 skin function to change them at run time, NPC dies with a hit to the head, swap the skin for one where the head is hidden (made invisible) the interior geometry will then be visible showing the meat. Of course this will only work realistically if you make some script (don't know if possible with script) or custom C++ code that divides the model geometry by sections (head, leg, etc) and also detects that the NPC died by a shot to that particular section, then use that detection to chose the necessary skin. BTW this is only a ideia i never tested this stuff, so i don't really know if this particular hack will work at all in the way i described it.

BloodRayne that developed the Grimm Quest for the Gatherer's Key mod made a nice ingame dynamic decal system