Xolvix

Some people seem to define their personality/self-worth from their knowledge and skill at something that's niche (in this case, Linux). I've been there, I grew up. Some people don't and they're incredibly exhausting and infuriating to talk to. However I feel like as Linux has become more and more palatable an option and genuine improvements have been made in usability and utility, other people are finally starting to stand up towards these obnoxious types and tell them to give it a rest. It's still a problem unfortunately in certain areas of the Linux community who wear such behaviour as a badge of honour, but in many places it's now considered poor form.

OK, after further investigation I think my GPU either has a problem with it, I've got a dodgy setting in my TDM config, or the engine just scales poorly when it has to render at 4k. Which isn't that surprising, it's quadruple pixels compared to 1080p after all. But I've seen commercial games using say the Unreal 3 engine rock solid at 4K without any need to tweak too much if at all. Admittedly it's unfair to compare a AAA game to a community effort so it's worth keeping perspective. I loaded an older FM (Penny Dreadful 3) and found that in certain areas I was getting less than 50 FPS in certain interior rooms when my render scale was still at 1.0. LOD had no effect here because I don't think newer effects were implemented at higher LODs in this mission, or at least in the areas I were testing. Shadow quality definitely has an impact (I use Maps). But it's hard to tell if I'm GPU bound or CPU bound at this point. The Doom 3 per-pixel lighting might be killing it or it's something else. In any case if the GPU is being dodgy I might be in a position to get something newer, but I wasn't expected to do so for The Dark Mod of all things! Oh well.

OK, so you're basically saying that with higher LOD values you actually include non-object specific details like that lighting you see. Hopefully you can understand my confusion, I don't expect the lighting to change on an Object Details (LOD) setting. Maybe that setting needs a name change so it doesn't sound like it's just about the poly count on distant objects.

I feel a bit out of the loop. Isn't LOD (especially on a setting that's specifically about object detail) just a determination of how close you need to be before the game swaps a low-poly model for a high-poly one? Why do map designers need to consider LOD, isn't that just an feature handled by the engine? Or this this more about tailoring for performance?

OK so this is what I found. Run the Training Mission (nothing special, just what's bundled with TDM 2.14). Open the door to the "Jumping & Climbing" section and go outside, through the hole in the wall. Staring at that wooden structure in the middle I had a bit of an FPS drop, so I used it to test various settings. This is where I discovered the LOD quirk. Hopefully this is fully reproducible for anyone to check. Object Details (LOD) set to High: Object Details (LOD) set to Normal: See how in normal the background areas have darkened. In particular some of the cast shadows don't seem quite defined or are even lost, even though I didn't touch any direct shadowing options. I have the max FPS set to 144. Note the major drop when set to High (which I'm fine with if it retains the intended visuals).

It's a 4070. I used to run with 4x antialiasing at 1080p, I know it's that necessary at 4k but still wanted some AA so I left it at 2x. Most other settings I left because I liked them the way they were, but I absolutely had to leave Object Details (LOD) at High. Better would have probably worked, but anything less and I noticed in the training mission that some areas lost lighting detail for some reason, even though I didn't think LOD should have affected it. All good though. With this card I'm a bit worried about running future games at 4K, but then again I'm kinda burnt out on a lot of newer AAA titles these days. Plus I've got plenty of older stuff to catch up on with far less time as an adult, so meh.

Finally got me a 4K monitor (Gigabyte M27UP). I had to upgrade since the previous 1080p monitor had developed a visual defect that couldn't be fixed, so figured I'd jump to 4K since the GPU was reasonably capable and 4K is the way things are going anyway. It's quite nice, although it's one of those things where after a while you get so used to it, you almost think 1080p looks the same (it doesn't, but you acclimate to changes in your environment after a while). Tons of games look nicer without doing anything different due to the extra details, and fortunately I play a lot of "older" titles such that I don't need to worry about performance issues... except with The Dark Mod. For some reason the training mission was showing slowdowns in certain areas when 1080p was fine, and I wouldn't have thought such an old engine (despite the upgrades) would have such issues. That said I found the "render scale" option to be quite useful and setting it to something like 0.8 eases things just enough that I don't need to drop more important settings like LOD or shadows. Plus 0.8 of a 4K resolution is still a rendered resolution of 3072 x 1728 which is miles better than what I had before. Saves me from having to buy a new GPU at least. The cost of a decent GPU these days, seriously.

In Kubuntu I disabled snap entirely. Never needed it, and simply replaced Firefox with a mozilla PPA (and a blocker to prevent the snap version from being installed accidentally). Avoids multiple reported issues with the snap version of the browser. As for the store I never used it, always figured it was not as useful as synaptic. I'm guessing KDE's Discover is the base Ubuntu equivalent. Guess my point is the distro (and especially desktop environment) you spend time experimenting with can radically change your perception of Linux a LOT. If Gnome was all I was exposed to, I'd never have switched. But others think otherwise so I'm not going to say they're wrong. That said, when you spend your life in Windows you can easily ignore the rough edges in that OS as well, often without even realising you're doing it. So long as people don't insult one another for their OS choices however.

GLIBC 2.42 (Ubuntu 25.10) As for Linux being a bunch of bullshit at times, that's absolutely true. But then again, Windows can be a bunch of bullshit as well. You just have to settle for which bunch of bullshit you can live with daily, and unfortunately I'm just tired, so tired of Microsoft's abuse of its userbase that I'm done. I had to move, but it took years of learning Linux until I was at a level I was satisfied I could maintain it comfortably. Not everyone is willing to do that and I get it.

I liked it, pretty cool for a first mission. Sad to say I also got the foyer lights bug, but I figure it's something which should be solvable even if it requires a different light implementation. Can't think of many other things to say except that (and I get it's needed for gameplay) Sally must really be bored if she insists on checking an empty (as far as she knows) dining room on a regular basis. Maybe give her a chair in the kitchen or something just to break up the actions she takes.

Got around to playing this mission. I enjoyed it for the most part, although I did have to deal with some pretty terrible frame rate issues as already mentioned before. I was a fool for trying the expert difficulty with all 16 cheese locations - should have left that for a replay and tried something easier, so that's on me. I did enjoy the dynamic hostility system and appreciated how it was clear when it started and ended. But yeah, those frame rate issues were very annoying. Still liked the exploration though, just wish I chose an easier skill level first.

Maybe. I'd think to think it's more that Wayland has matured to the point where enough of the essentials work, that the larger desktop environments like KDE and GNOME can now simplify matters and streamline their work on supporting just one session type. There's still plenty of things that need improvement (remembering window positions without workarounds being an obvious example) but it seems like the idea is that if people are only using Wayland from now on, improvements should come around much, much faster compared to when it was optional and people weren't using it because X11 was more mature. KDE's announcement certainly motivated me to move to it for example. Interesting. The Sneaky Upgrade was basically all I needed with the installer defaults. But anything that improves Linux supports is always welcome, since I've only tested it a bit so far to make sure it works.

It took absolutely ages of puttering around until I was comfortable but I think I can finally say I've moved to Linux for good. My current distro is Kubuntu 25.10. I was using 24.04 but when I heard KDE was going to be moving to Wayland exclusively I figured I should experiment with a newer version of KDE and get used to how Wayland works as well as its quirks, which I've mostly got a handle on now. It really does help that I only play singleplayer games these days which Proton handles really well. I use https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher so I can run anything including GOG games without needing Steam along with my own game launching scripts, because that's how I roll. And of course native TDM works great. EDIT: For what it's worth the old Thief games (via GOG installers) along with their respective fix patches work really well without any issue.

I'm getting older and more conscious of this fact. Stupid muscles. Oh and my experimentations into Linux for a primary OS have been rather productive. Oh and somehow I've been so absent from TDM that I literally didn't notice the return of certain members... which is good! (that they returned, not that I've been neglecting my TDM).

Yeah dhewm3 is probably the definitive way to play Doom 3 on modern systems these days I think. The high frame rate build is still under development (https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/pull/585) but even with occasional glitches it is so much nicer on a high refresh rate monitor than being stuck at 60 Hz. Also I never played the BFG edition so I'm not in a position to compare audio, but the switch to OpenAL in dhewm3 did at least improve the audio from the original game which had an issue in occasionally skipping playing a sound sample in certain situations (e.g. firing the machine/chain gun).