SteveL

I tried #3 -- secret graffiti lit only by moonlight etc -- but it looks like spectrum 2 lights cast shadows only from spectrum 2 surfaces. Which makes the feature much less usable, at least for this purpose We would want the glyph to be shadowed by all objects from all lights, so that moving a box to let the moonlight through could reveal a glyph that was invisible by candlelight or the player's lantern.

So no pattern to it that you've spotted. And no error message, presumably. It's really hard to diagnose something that happens only on one machine. This isn't a common problem, in case you were wondering :-/ All the usual advice applies about updating video drivers etc, but probably won't fix it if TDM is the ony game that's giving you a problem. Do run tdm_update.exe again too in case you have a bad file.

That's right, lights using a specific spectrum will generate zero draw calls for any surfaces that they hit that don't use that spectrum. (I just checked in interaction.cpp to be sure). They don't have to be filtered off during the drawing phase: those mismatched light/surface combinations simply don't get added to the draw list for the frame in the first place.

That's right, non-square is fine as long as the individual dimensions are powers of two. So 256x1024 is good, for example. Edit: and yes we do have a few textures that break the power-of-two rule, in which case they'll be resized either by the engine (single-layer textures) or the gpu (DDS textures). Sometimes that looks ok, which it does on the one existing texture where I've seen it, but I've also seen some horrible results when I've let the engine resize my own images.

As long as we can get direct flights from a nearby airport it's all pretty much the same. Some cities seem to be much more expensive to fly to though. I fly to Italy pretty frequently, and for some reason it usually costs about 4 times as much to fly to Pisa as it does to Rome, for example, but that might just be a quirk of my local airport.

I never even heard of this series. One to keep an eye on.

This is the first report I've seen for this problem. There's a problem with sounds popping occasionally that'll be fixed in 2.04, but that's unrelated. You'd never come across it in an empty test map. What's your setup in that test map? Are you using a simple speaker, or the location system?

Wow, modelling is magic! And that's a simple but genius idea.

Here's the example, how the F5 key causes a quick save. The other key bindings probably use the same method.

Fair enough, and like you said you could tie the auto-use feature to the hotkeys instead of scrolling. The keyboard actions are one of the harder puzzles in the code by the way. The keys push commands onto a buffer, and a completely separate part of the code reads the buffer, so there's no easy trail of functions to follow in the code. But I can dig out an old pm that spells out an example if you want to see it.

Doh! Yes of course, that'll be how it works. I was forgetting lights have a material too. I couldn't find any light property using spectrum, just a material property, and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Time to reattempt #3

I've not done (3) yet because it looks like ID never got round to implementing "spectrum" and neither have we! It's a material keyword, but there's no corresponding setting for lights, so unless we decide we want to fix that, it's unusable. Here's a look at 1 and 2, and I'll post the mtr definitions too. These all use Bob's maps above without any tweaking (except that I re-saved them as tga. I'm not sure whether that was necessary or not). All can have their color adjusted using the "_color" spawnarg. 1: The easy one, glowing symbols unaffected by light or shadow. Lots of games use these of course, but it's not very TDM. Perhaps useful for occasional magic stuff: 2: Here's a material shader I think we'll like better: a filter blend that stains the wall behind: The shaders:

That looks ok syntactically but where did you put it? In idPlayer::Think, or the inventory switch code, or elsewhere? Ah I see you already answered that. I see a potential problem or two though. Players might get unexpected events when scrolling through the inventory, and there are plenty of maps out there with custom inventory items, and we can't predict what would happen in all those spots :-\

Just to let Bob and everyone know this hasn't been forgotten, now that it dropped off the front page. I did #1 and #2 last night. #3 should be a lot simpler than #2, so although I have very limited tdm time the next two days (travelling) I'll be back with results soon.

I'd be up for it obviously. As for where, somewhere with cheap flights and interesting stuff to look at would be a bonus. But let's see where people live.

The aim was to give mappers the option of controlling flame based lights without having to use scripts. It doesn't have to be a literal switch that they use: it could be any kind of trigger.

They all can nowadays. Obs added a stim response to the script that responds to activation and calls the Toggle function in the script.

They should certainly be extinguishable. To be completely realistic, they'd be extinguishable and not relightable, but that might be going too far for existing maps. Gas lights like that have a cloth mantle that spreads the gas and provides the surface where the combustion takes place. After they've been lit, that cloth mantle becomes a delicate structure of ash that'll keep its shape for weeks as long as it's not touched. But if it's touched, even by a human breath let alone a drop of water, it crumbles to dust and needs to be replaced before you can relight the lamp. My childhood holidays were spent in a succession of cottages in the middle of nowhere that had no electricity and so were lit by those things, fed from butane or propane canisters outside the premises. I couldn't resist experimenting at that age and often got blamed for broken mantles.

I agree about not really wanting a shadow that isn't connected to anything. We already have one weird effect like that: if mappers place a reflective puddle and then you stand on it and look down, you see the soles of your invisible boots reflected. The shadow is already an optional extra for those who want to see it. I guess someone could try attaching some of the more detailed AI shadow models to the player to see whether any of them looked better.

I might be wrong but I thnk the use key works only on inventory items, which can then optionally check whether you have something in front of you for them to be used on. So you might need to be holding a specific item to get scripts to go off using the use key.

I have no theories to offer either, but glad you got it sorted

Most weird! I'd love to know what happened.

Same here. I see the tiny sig.

I'd like to have a go at it later, after my renderer experiment this evening, if it can wait a bit. If you want to use them right away I can post an untested guess at what the materials should look like :-)

Come to think of it, this is a problem I've noticed occasionally, not consistently. @nb: I can't believe we'd have to use a post processing effect in a shader! Well maybe to do it completely safely, but that feels like overkill. Re the first link on SetDeviceGammaRamp, I do sometimes see error messages on the console about that, so I guess that's worth following up.