chakkman

The LOD setting shouldn't brighten up things so much. Object detail is object detail, not lighting.

What happens if someone has set a higher LOD, but the map author has NOT set several LOD levels? Default to normal LOD level? And why does the thing @Xolvix posted happen? Bug? That's particularly bad as that mission is supposed to be used for setting gamma and brightness...

To be fair, it's very complicated, very hard work, and very hard to make a living of it (I guess). I think you can be proud of what you achieved with your game.

Doesn't change anything about it being deperessing.

Not quite. It's a very small team, and creating such game worlds takes ages indeed. Gloomwood was first announced in 2020, and, it's safe to say that it already was in development for some time at that point. Now we have 2026, and the game surely will be in development for another 3, if not 4 years. How long will Bethesda take for the next Fallout? How long did Rockstar Games take for GTA 6? And, those are monster multiple hundred devs studios. You know what's deperessing for me about modern game development? That they have to put 90% of the work in visual fidelity. Seeing that a shiny surface is so much more important than gameplay depth is very depressing indeed.

There is no player shadow in TDM. You can add one via the console, but, AFAIK, it has no effect on A.I. And, in the past, some developers have pointed out that having it, and A.I. reacting to it would open a whole new can of worms, and would be too complex and complicated for the player to figure out. See this thread, for example:

I think the big difference is that Gothic 3 was a final release, and this is an alpha test.

Did they work on performance?

To be fair, it's an alpha playtest. I don't know how much more development time they planned, but, I would think they will still put a lot of work into it. The biggest problem is performance.

It's still very rough, as expected from an alpha... Performance is absolutely abysmal. Even on medium details, I get, like, 15 FPS when you can look very fair into the landscape. The game has a lot of potential though. The Gothic feeling is there, the game world feels hand tailored like in the Gothic games. Lore seems interesting, there's crafting. Combat is a bit weird, I have to get used to that. Kind of unpolished and rough, like the rest of the game. Can't say much more after about an hour of playtime. It's quite an ambitious project for an Indie studio... hopefully they keep at it, and put polish and optimization in it, then they might have a winner here.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3892510/Asterfel/ By former CD Project Red and Piranha Bytes developers... Not sure why I never heard of it until today.

TDM performs pretty good IMO. Sure, the engine has its limitations (as far as I know, especially outdoor areas have to be arranged carefully to not become too demanding), but, all in all, especially with the updates which improved performance, and the multicore optimizations, it's running pretty well now. No complaints here, and, I don't have a high end rig (RTX 3060 Ti and a i5-11600K). In my experience, especially antialiasing set to 16x was a massive hog. If you use 8x, which is more than enough, TDM runs well.

In case you need more Star Trek. https://www.gog.com/de/games?query=star trek&order=desc:score Especially Elite Force and the adventures (e.g. 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites) are great.

Starring the LCARS menu system - nice.

Does the game run on Windows 11? Looks interesting, and, I'm a fan of Star Trek.

Well, mine doesn't pop up in my library either. Weird.

It can take a bit for the games to show up in your libary.

I can only guess here. Björn Pankratz (the guy who singlehandedly developed Cralon) used to be a game designer, creative director and project manage for Piranha Bytes former games. I didn't even know that he can program. On Cralon, he needed to do everything. He already created the soundtrack and sounds for Elex 1 and 2 (which aren't very good, by the way...) and he did the same for Cralon. My guess here is that he's just not competent enough in all regards. As already has been mentioned, the assets seem to be licensed, and, the prgramming/scripting he did himself seems a bit layman-ish. Even if you take his work as part of the Piranha Bytes team, it seems to have sufferend in recent years. There's some stuff in ELEX where I wonder what they've been smoking, in terms of setting (factions with advanced sci-fi weapons against barbarians with sword and bow, and the sci-fi faction hasn't wiped them out yet?), story and characters. The graphics were rather a step back compared to Risen 2 and 3. The game world was, untypical for Piranha Bytes, rather sterile, empty, and didn't really feel hand made like on their other games. The quest were a bit boring, and so on. Maybe it wasn't the best idea to go one-man-army now. Anyway. we still have Monomyth to look forward to.

The Gothics and Risen 1 and 2 were great, but, the games certainly saw a decline since Risen 3. Elex simply wasn't my cup of tea, and, there were actually things on the technical side which were rather worse in Elex than in Risen. IMO, you could already see how they cut corners in Elex.

Doesn't look too promising: https://www.metacritic.com/game/cralon/ With Gamestar, you have to substract th 10% ex-Piranha Bytes bonus. So, rather a 55/100 kind of game. Also backed by the reviews on Steam. Well the demo was bloody shite, as the English people say, so...

Cat = Stray.

Google Lens said Stray...

TBH, I was very disappointed by the demo... Best to try it out yourself, but, it seemed unfinished, uninspired, and, frankly, pretty amateurish. There's something very strange with the animations of the enemies as well, as if they would move in 10 frames per second. And, the item handling is none really. Can turn the items in the world around in your hands, and that was it. If you want to play a game like this, better play Arx Fatalis. Or wait for Monomyth.

More like survival/action games. Well, Alien Isolation requires some stealth.

It's been out for a while. It's great.