New Horizon

By software lightgem are you referring to tdm_lg_weak? If so, that was the original attempt at implementing a lightgem back in 2005,but there was no SDK access to the game renderer back then. It would be great to have something that was less performance intensive.

Even after the explanation further up, I still don't really get what the benefits are of having this working. lol

Yes, NewDark has no relation to The Dark Mod. To elaborate on what nbohr1more said, NewDark was created by someone who had access to the original Thief 2 Dark Engine source code. More than just a patch, it's a completely new build of the Dark Engine. It has loads of fixes and additions, such as native support for modern screen resolutions. They were also able to make the New Dark Engine backwards compatible with Thief 1, so it too could reap the rewards of modern hardware.

Tried this out on my laptop tonight. I had to crank up tdm_lg_interleave_min up to 50 to eliminate the stutter. I couldn't detect any real performance increase when interleave kicked in, but tdm_lg_split easily gives me a 3 to 4 fps increase. I also lowered tdm_lg_interleave_min to 30 to see if I could better identify a performance increase and it might have squeezed one more fps but of course the choppiness was reintroduced at the lower setting. tdm_lg_split for the win!

Sure, that would be great!

Yeah, I was only talking about testing with 1px on the current system...but over 12 points on the player model it would likely pretty accurate. By the way, are these tests supposed to be done with the SVN build? I was just testing on the release build as I don't have SVN setup anymore.

During the early light gem testing we tried reducing the render down to 1x1 but it wasn't very accurate. I can't remember the current render size...32x32 perhaps? It should have all geometry cropped out since the captured image is of the top and bottom of the white prism model, taken from the inside of the prism model. I'll poke around this evening to refresh my memory.

I suspect not using the camera approach at all would be even cheaper, but I have no idea how difficult it would be to flesh out the weak light gem in order to make it equal to the camera based setup. The weak light gem is just a traditional trace from the light to the player. It was the first attempt, but had to be abandoned because Sparhawk didn't have access to the renderer to allow access to different types of lights...which is what lead to using the camera instead, and that's a lot more costly in terms of performance. The original Thief only takes one sample from the players feet and the rest is done with modifiers, however the NewDark releases have added a second trace to the head and averages both traces for the final result, although I don't think it's on by default. I tried it out once and you could now lean into light...or lean into shadow just like TDM. Yes, I know. Sparhawk was the one who coded the interleave back in the day. I was helping him test it...oh so long ago. haha

I'm having trouble understanding the benefits of what you outlined above...probably because I only had 3 hours sleep last night. lol I'm just thinking out loud though, doesn't it just make more sense to only do split at all times, since it's balanced, and instead see if there is a way to make the whole light gem system calculations cheaper to perform? I wish I had a more firm grasp on what the whole system does. The gem calculations in T3 don't seem to be as power hungry as our system. From what one of the T3 developers told me, the T3 light system takes a sample from 12 points on the player model...spread out over 12 frames. Each point has a weight to it, and the final result is an average of the weighted 12 points. Something like that...I can dig up the old email. Ahh, here is the relevant bit - So even though they're grabbing 12 bone points, it's still just one point per frame....smaller manageable chunks I guess.

The threshold is likely going to be different for people depending on their hardware. My point with interleave though is that it's creating an unbalanced load. The processor is going to be spiking and dropping if anything above 1 is used...unlike tdm_lg_split, which maintains a balanced load. Increasing the interleave also 'decreases' lightgem accuracy. So again, I wouldn't mess with that. If it were possible to take advantage of modern cpu's and their multiple cores, it would go a long way to improving TDM's performance. My laptop is dual core, but idtech4 only uses 1. It's a shame we can't use the whole processor.

I finally had some time to test this on my laptop. I had tested the interleave settings years ago and the results now are the same as then unfortunately. My suggestion would be to not mess with tdm_lg_interleave at all. Interleave creates an 'unbalanced load', which causes a type of jerking issue as the processor is hit with a light gem load every second frame (if set to tdm_lg_interleave 2). People with higher end machines may not notice the jerking, but then again they will likely not see much performance improvement from increasing interleave either. tdm_lg_split 1 is fine, as it maintains a balanced load. The gains were modest on my system, and older i3, at around 2 to 5 fps in some scenes. Better than nothing. Ideally, it would be helpful if we could offload some of the lightgem work to a separate core..or some such thing. So yeah, tdm_lg_split 1 is good, tdm_lg_interleave above 1 is bad. Just my two cents.

Setting interleave too high can cause choppiness and will also affect lightgem accuracy, which in turn will affect the accuracy of the AI. Don't get too crazy.

Gas arrows were a problem I recall.

Probably the best idea.

Always so cool to hear an interview with him, they're so rare. Amazing the voices that come out of that man, his own voice is so far away from Garrett.

Can you describe what is happening on auto? It should remove the need to interact. The pattern will repeat a couple of times and then unlock by itself.

Do these types of lights offer any type of performance improvement?

Pretty sure the jpg and PNG files are only for dark radiant.

That sounds pretty cool!

It's open source now according to the website. Couldn't someone add a batch conversion option?

It's the TGA files that really kill overall though.

Ahh, I was going to suggest it might be something like that. I had boards that had to be configured that way.

Hmmmm. Perhaps we could chat with Freyk about having a slide show in the installer, just like with T1 and T2, that has tips on the most commonly misunderstood features in TDM.

Please see the images posted earlier. If the shape, origin, or orientation are changed in any way...then there will be problems.

Reinstalling an older version of TDM isn't something I would recommend. That could just cause issues with playing missions... especially newer ones.