Xolvix

As others have said it is most definitely possible for the AI to relight torches. It is a bit unusual for it to be the mapper's choice whether the AI can relight a torch or not, rather than the player being able to force the AI to do so (or not) under all circumstances with a menu option somewhere. It's certainly a surprise when it happens though, and definitely increases the difficulty if you don't knock out the guards (or are restrained from doing so due to the objectives).

I'm 38, don't feel like it though (feel much younger, but who doesn't I guess). First computer we had was a Commodore 64, then later an Amiga 1000 and then 2000. The Amigas made quite the impression on me in my formative years, but unfortunately it didn't last forever and we finally moved to the PC era in I think 1994-95.

Looks good, can't way to play it! Quick question though - those soft shadows are some of the nicest I've seen in TDM screenshots. Which shadowing settings were they set on (stencil or maps, shadow quality) and is it playable or requires a beefy machine? I've been sticking with hard stencil shadows (i.e. Doom 3-mode) for ever so I'm wondering if it's time to take the leap.

@randomoneh Can you provide any more info about the screenshot? I assume it was saved with a filename somewhere, so maybe the filename is a clue? If you can find out when the screenshot was taken it might help narrow the timeframe as well.

I was bored and tried searching for the image, but an image search using both Google and Bing failed to find anything directly matching it. It could be a developmental image that's on a site that's not being crawled by search engines or blocked because it's only open to donators/fundraisers. I even tried looking at many screenshots of various retro-flavored games but still nothing. There's some similar-looking retro stealth games in development, but not a single one has that distinct lighting icon at the bottom left that would confirm it.

Still rocking my GTX 970. It's old but it certain has legs, and for the stuff I play it's normally quite good since I'm still on 1080p. The only game that's been able to brutalize it even on low settings has been Cyberpunk 2077, but my enthusiasm for that game has gone a bit timid at the moment so it doesn't bother me that much. I will eventually upgrade, but this isn't a good time for such purchases. I just hope it doesn't blow up and I need to purchase something quickly to replace it (knock on wood). That being said, I still run TDM using stencil shadows with no soft shadowing because things will start slowing down if I bump it up. But if I'm honest, the other reason I don't bother with soft shadows is because I can't for the life of me decide whether to use stencil or shadow maps! Stencil + hard shadows is classic Doom 3 which I like. If I'm gonna move to soft shadows though, I may end up waiting until the TDM devs decide which shadowing tech they want to solely rely on.

https://www.gog.com/game/shadow_warrior_complete This game has been free for a while actually, it went permanently free since the preorder of SW2. I hadn't bothered with it though because I had played it in DOS/DOSBox back in the day and wanted to use a source-port similar to EDuke32, but while there were a couple of ports they all had issues and/or were abandoned after a while. Well it turns out the EDuke32 folks were working on their own engine variant called VoidSW, and it appears that it entered public beta at some point in the sysnthesis builds of EDuke32: http://dukeworld.duke4.net/eduke32/synthesis/. All you need to do is downloaded the latest build (which will have a new voidsw.exe binary), dump the Shadow Warrior files into the directory you've extracted the build into (after installing the GOG game somewhere), and run it. It's not perfect (some issues with the menu for me), but it feels pretty robust and with the EDuke32 people working on it, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that it works well.

@Gadavre, please understand that despite what I think are genuinely good intentions, when someone come into a forum and their first posts are them beating their chests, boasting about their programming experience and shows an adversarial tone towards the project by calling it a beta when it's not and using phrases like "Only a competent programmer can help", do you really think is a good-faith means of eliciting help? You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. I hope you are able to resolve your problems.

What version of OBS are you using, is it the latest (26.1.1)? Also is OBS encoding using whatever AMD's GPU encoder is called or is it using raw CPU? Might be worth logging CPU and GPU utilization when recording, maybe when the slowdown occurs something obvious will crop up on the logs. Maybe RAM as well, in case there's a leak somewhere. Also: I know some people don't like reinstalling Windows that often but damn!

Perhaps I'm just seeing this from the viewpoint of a player and not a content creator. I wasn't going to speculate on what artists think of contributing to an open-source project, but it seems like projects such as TDM have done pretty well so far for what is a niche game to begin win. Is there any evidence that someone has wanted to contribute assets to TDM but stopped short because of the lack of encryption? It appears this is all in relation to a Discord discussion which I haven't been following so I'm probably missing some context, but still.

TDM is an open source project, and as such there are certain ideological aspects that tend to come with such projects. Not everyone cares about that of course, but the idea of copy-protecting resources in an open source project doesn't really go down well. It's the kind of idea that tends to be a part of corporate/proprietary software, not a free and open project. I'm not sure how widespread the abuse of freely provided assets in different projects is, although I've definitely seen it happen. It's something of a balance between the interests of the artists and that of the project. If you're worried about assets you created been taken later, reused and possibly modified out of your control, the only practical option is to not put such content out there. The good thing seems to be that, while it does sometimes happen that someone go nuts and forgets even the basics of asking for permission before messing with other people's content, it's generally quite rare that this happens. A project such as TDM doesn't survive unless people have the confidence to create assets for it without worrying about post-release manipulation.

To be fair, the fact you're checking the Linux version of tdm_installer also makes for a strong suggestion of the technical type. In any case, play TDM, it's a good way to deal with the (hopefully short) lockdown...

Well I tried it out. Did some comparison between 2.08 with my customized settings and 2.09. It inherited my settings and looked identical (as expected), so I renamed my config and allowed the game to recreated a fresh one for comparison. It was brighter until I remembered gamma was still set to 1.2 by default even though the color correction was now disabled - setting it to 1.0 made it look better and similar to what I had set before. Which leads me to a question - the default in 2.09 are now as per this post (which is also where I got the idea to reduce gamma to 1.0). I don't have 2.08 anymore to test, but if hypothetically I applied those same values to the settings in 2.08, would that have also resulted in the same 2.07 look? If so... what was the point of those colorCorrect/desaturation settings in the first place? I always assumed it was due to modifications in the renderer that required such compensation. Again I apologize since this seems like I'm obsessing over colors too much, but I just want to know how things work. EDIT: Well well, seems like tdm_update has been dropped in favor of tdm_installer, which can install an old version of TDM for reasons such as this. All hail tdm_installer!

I apologize but I'm still a little confused. The changelog suggests the color correction stuff has been disabled in 2.09, yet you also say the menus in 2.09 may look blown out if the "color curve" post process settings are modified (i.e. color correction). As for sharpening, I'm curious to see what it'll look like even at 100% render scale. I just hope the default scaling setting isn't too dramatic and doesn't cause artifacts.

I'm tentatively excited about doing this update, although I will have to wait until I get home. Only reason I'm tentative is due to the massive number of under-the-hood changes, but I guess that's what the beta testing is for. Couple of questions though: (1) As per the changelog, "The additional color correction that got included into 2.08 has been disabled". What is the reasoning for the reversal? I'm fine with how 2.07 worked and I'm happy I won't have to tweak postprocess settings again, but I'm curious what the official reason is for walking back the code. (2) There's a sharpening feature available now and it's enabled by default. I figured it would be useful if one's render scale is 100%, but if it is at 100% then does the sharpening still have value? Normally games that use sharpening are doing so because modern shaders and AA often cause blur that requires sharpening to compensate, but I wasn't aware that the Doom 3 engine (even with enhancements) suffered from this. Anyways, should be all good!

Having followed this mod/game for roughly 8 years or so, I have to say that the general quality of first-time submissions from new map authors is really, really good. I don't know if the increased availability of tutorials and other resources has contributed to this, improvements to the editor, or maybe just a desire to keep standards high, but I am impressed with almost every new author's release these days. If I don't like a map it's generally due to the gameplay not being my preference rather than the quality of the map itself.

Another trick I read somewhere - if you want to know whether a game's FOV is comparable with the FOV you expect, you can try this technique (only for first-person games): (1) Set the game's FOV to 90 (2) Find two relatively long walls that join into a 90 degree corner and back yourself into the corner, facing out (3) If the game is correctly using 90 horizontal FOV, you should only be able to have one of the walls on the screen at any given moment. At a listed FOV of 90 in the menu, The Dark Mod fails the test which means it's not actually 90 degrees. I've also found that GZDoom, EDuke32, Quakespasm and Yamagi Quake II also have this "issue", except that their FOVs are either intended for a 4:3 base and scaled in the engine, or there's a config setting that auto-scales the FOV as intended for the new resolution. In most cases the "correct" FOV is 105 or 106, but not all games support such FOVs and often stretch too much, whereas these source ports seem to work fine.

The only issue I have with upping the FOV in some games is that it can narrow the things in direct sight, which may or may not "cramp" the main areas of interest even if you are getting more peripheral imagery. Having said that, it seems like different engines can have different effects when high FOVs come into play. I have found that I need at least a 90 FOV (actual, horizontal 90 FOV) at a minimum before I'm happy, but even then I've noticed some games with an FOV of 90 seem fine while others feel like I'm too zoomed in. For example, Deus Ex 1 has a default FOV of 75 intended for a 4:3 monitor. When running on 16:9 the various FOV calculators will suggest a new FOV of 90 to compensate, which is correct. But for some reason in Prey 2017, 90 FOV feels a little too claustrophobic whereas Deus Ex seems OK. What's more annoying is I didn't give a shit about running Prey with 90 FOV, but now that I'm aware of how FOV can differ, it's starting to annoy me! Ignorance really was bliss, so I upped it just a bit to 94 until that feeling went away.

I'm just looking at the news of all these new graphics cards, and all I can think about is how to get better at OpenXcom. I don't think I'm currently the target for this hardware.

This is interesting because I recently felt that there was something off about the FOV. By default it's set to 90 but the actual FOV seems more like 105, at least from visual comparison to games like Quake 3 when set to such FOVs. In the bug report linked above, @stgatilov has a comment suggesting the FOV is based off a virtual 640x480 screen (so a 4:3 resolution). This makes sense since in Doom source ports it's convention to have the FOV specified by the user mapped to a 4:3 display as well (reference), so while the default in GZDoom is 90, the rendered FOV is also more like 105. An actual FOV of 90 feels much closer which can be seen in modern games with FOV sliders that tell you the specific horizontal FOV (e.g. Dishonored).

But that also includes Chromium itself, which Chrome basically is but with a few extra things bolted onto it + branding. So even Google's own browser won't be able to use the APIs if I understand it correctly. It seems to potentially impact Linux users more since Chromium is FOSS. According to this guy, distro makers (or the people bundling Chromium for the distros) were given access rights to the API via keys back in 2013, so this is basically pulling the rug. Personally it doesn't affect me much since I only use Firefox on the desktop and Chrome on Android, but I can see why some Linux users who like Chromium because it's completely FOSS but still has Chrome sync features will now be annoyed.

I'd be curious to see if piracy levels rise because of this, if sellers up their prices in response. Of course if piracy is already rampant then it might not make a difference, I dunno. The people who actually pay for games instead of pirating them are probably doing so for other reasons so they may just at worst change their buying habits (e.g. wait for more sales).

That's under the assumption management care. The larger a group gets the more spread out the hierarchy becomes. When NMS was released Hello Games were a fairly small dev group (actually it still is, only 26 employees apparently) and presumably management is fairly close to the devs, so when the game was released to major criticism I guess heads like Sean Murray took it rather personally, but more importantly, maturely. After a couple of tweets they basically went radio silent and worked on improving the game without any media coverage (at least until the major updates were ready). Now No Man's Sky is quite improved from the original release, but that's because they put actions ahead of words rather than releasing silly PR that we've all seen before but don't trust. CDPR is starting to remind me of Bioware. They haven't got quite the same reputation hit because, well, CP 2077 isn't a flop and there's still a lot to like even with its half-baked systems, but the stories of crunch, devs leaving during development due to management not listening to their concerns, the idea that they had some sort of "magic" that would make everything work at the end, and management seemingly not concerned about major issues with the final product and just putting out PR regarding prev-gen consoles... I have my doubts. They got rich from the game, how much more do they want to really work on it if they can move to something fresh.

Thought some people might be interested in this. A fellow by the name Psych0sis recently did a Thief II speedrun for the Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 online event, but he also did a Thief 1 run in 2018 for the summer version of the event. If you like to see classic Thief games broken in style, maybe they'd be of interest:

Probably the original Deus Ex (wow what a surprise, see avatar/sig). The good thing about the game is that it's enjoyable enough to replay on its own given the variety of playstyles as well as just finding new things here and there, plus the GMDX mod gave the game a new lease on life since so many little things were changed and improvements were made. But you can't forget the mysteries, the surprises, the twists, and I'd love to be able to experience all that from the beginning again.