MirceaKitsune

Shaders and engine changes are almost always retroactive, which is a very good thing in my opinion: Such settings can be disabled in the main menu if anyone wishes, when enabled they should work in any FM new and old. I was just thinking about parallax mapping in TDM but didn't expect it to actually happen: This is a wonderful surprise! Still wishing Depth of Field could be added to the list, could provide a more realistic and cinematic field, who knows Unfortunately my main internet connection is down due to a power outage in the hallway of the apartment block, I'm using a limited mobile connection and can't download a lot of stuff. Once it's fixed it will be a pleasure to update and try out the parallax, hopefully it works well on the Linux / amdgpu driver. Edit: We have OCCLUSION based parallax mapping with self shadowing?! I thought it's just the simple distortion at first. My god, this will be glorious

Finally getting to this one now; I suspect I'm still less than halfway through despite being at it for days. This is by far one of the most unique and interesting missions! I suspect the first moor themed one too, I only remember another Arab themed FM years ago where you had to ride a mine cart but it wasn't as urban and stylized as this. It's absolutely something else, TDM but doesn't feel like the TDM we know, it really is like taking a trip to a foreign island The map is pretty huge, so much so that I'm having to check for places with noclip / notarget and reload once I understand the layout. Only found a handful of small issues, will share if of interest.

Very beautiful and inspiring shot! Working on one or two mountain maps, wanted to make something a bit like that, that does give me a bit of extra motivation for some designs.

Yeah, we don't live in the TDM universe. This does come with a few perks such as no undead or giant spiders, but also the inventors guild replaced with a not always better kind of technological culture. In my country the kind of music that would get blasted is worse than hip-hop, think something like Indian party music but often far more annoying. If only we had fire arrows

Thanks, that hint helped. Very good FM overall! Loved the city building and simplistic but detailed layout. Also wanted to note something funny that happened...

Trying out this lovely FM. I thought I must be missing something, but now I think there may be a bug with the key setup.

I tried to make day and dusk as different as possible, the goal is for day mode to be fully bright. Personally I like how that looks given how different it is from standard TDM for a change. Tone mapping would definitely be nice, and I have indeed been hoping for Filmic / AgX support but never asked about that; There are some settings to tune the color curve but I haven't messed around with them, as well as a desaturation filter which can make things look a little more grimy and realistic.

Finally got around to this one. Definitely an interesting FM, congratulations on making something so big and complex! I found it a bit of a mixed bag: Graphically it looks simplistic and undetailed in places, though for something so unique and scaled I can fully understand why... you also get stuck in a few places but I figured out most solutions or found the rest of them here. On the plus side the puzzles are top notch, unique and intuitive level design, and I just loved the voice of this player and their commentary! I also found a few bugs like chests with missing lids, didn't record them all but let me know if you need more info.

Dusk lighting and skybox, first change you get after using the bed then comes night. The lightgem is slightly lower but still high; Guards will remain non-hostile at this stage, I may add a few AI that attack if you get too close since you can sneak around at a distance if you avoid sunlight. Totally wish volumetrics for parallel lights could be fixed to make this even prettier.

Thanks! If you mean through the window not easily, I'd need a custom window texture and for now I added a lot of complexity as is. I do wish the default trees and grass would cast alpha shadows though: Their materials have always been set to noshadows, but in the meantime shadow maps with support for transparent shadow casters were added, despite this the default grass was never modified to allow them which I'm definitely in favor of changing.

I tried changing the team of the ragdoll at first, it didn't work. I then tried setting a different AIUSE like marking it as a door or light, that didn't stop the alerts either.

Added sunlight shining through windows for the player's house. This was a bit more complex: You need a set for each daytime and window which all have to be toggled in order, thankfully I only use a sun during day and dusk but still. There are two lights, one for the sun shining through and one for ambient lighting around the window meant to represent sky light instead, for the best realism you have to check which windows are hit by the sun and not shadowed then only add the sun light for those.

I found myself making what will likely be the first FM to feature a daytime cycle. Not a smooth one where you see the sun go down, that might be doable with a rotating parallel light but difficult and costly on performance: Just objectives toggling the skybox together with the light cubemaps and sun lights. Won't spam too many screenshots here beyond the technical data I'm bumping this for, if anyone wants to see the rest check out this post: What I've observed: First of all parallel lights are very performance intensive even when using parallelsky. Between one sunlight covering the whole map versus some 10 lamps and torches visible at a time, the later is more than 30 FPS faster! I got a lot of FPS back by using the LOD models for building modules as well as noshadows on every module from a low distance, you do see shadows snapping a lot when you navigate but it's gotten close to +90 FPS everywhere so I'll take it. None the less if their performance can be further improved I'd gladly take it! The only real limitation is parallel lights don't seem to support the new volumetric lighting for god rays, which I was hoping to use were it an option. I tried but volumetric_light and volumetric_dust don't seem to mix with parallel and parallelsky and there's no volume. At the most this should be documented on the wiki page so everyone knows they don't work together yet, but is that possible to fix at some point? Beyond that sky lights seem to be working as intended: You must remember to give them the texture lights/tdmnofalloff else the sun dims close to the map edges which I think is intended behavior. I do wonder if scripts have access to the origin vertice of lights and can modify the center, just in case I'm ever crazy enough to attempt a smooth daytime cycle with a rotating sun.

Instancer entities could be distributed by seed entities if nothing stops that from working. They are ultimately different things the way I envision them though: Seed requires a brush and is used to scatter copies of an entity in random positions, versus combining structured components with support for both entities and brushes.

I have two questions about lights. For the first I know the answer will likely be no but asking to make sure: Do parallel lights support volumetric lighting for sun god rays, and if not are there ever any plans to fix it? I tried but volumetric_light and volumetric_dust don't seem to mix with parallel and parallelsky. At the most this should be documented on the wiki page so everyone knows they don't work together yet. And something else since I can't seem to find an answer on that page: What are the spawnargs to make a light slowly fade in and out when triggered? I think most flame lights and some lamps that can be frob toggled use this, but I can't tell what settings they use to make the light slowly transition on or off rather than changing instantly.

I only remember one that was full daytime and had sunlight: Very old roughly 10 years ago, the action took place somewhere in a network of barns I think. I remember I didn't enjoy it as much since it wasn't too detailed: This was well before building modules and more existed, the brush work was rough but the result was unique in its way. But yes mine may end up using time advancement with 2 or 3 or 4 modes, I've considered making it rain / snow in one. The setup is ridiculously simple too: I didn't even use a script just a few triggers, sun lights and ambience can be toggled like normal lamps while the skybox cubemap can be converted to func_static and use the "hide" spawnarg to be targeted the same way; Kinda surprised no one's done it yet given how easy it is with just a couple of entities, only limitation is you don't want the player to see the sky when the skybox switches so the triggering objective must be indoor. Parallel lights are very performance intensive sadly: Between one sun light covering the whole map versus 10 lamps and torches visible at a time, the former is more than 30 FPS slower than the later! I got a lot of FPS back by using the LOD models of building modules as well as noshadows on every module after a low distance; You now see shadows snapping a lot as you navigate but it's consistently close to 90 FPS now so I'll take it.

Only a little... you can't do anything as complex as whole buildings with defs alone. In DarkRadiant there's no way to even preview the full result of a def, hence why characters don't have a head in the editor for example... let alone edit it from the map and export instead of guessing from a text editor, you can do that with prefabs but those become unique so you can't maintain universal copies nor randomize which are spawned. Most importantly there's no way to include brushes and visportals in defs, the idea is to support instancing and potentially randomizing even map geometry used by dmap to compile the end result.

Thanks: The previous one was 10844 which doesn't seem to contain any savegame changes up to 10869, the force-load option seems to have worked fine. Absolutely appreciate the mission menu filters and title sorting option!

So I may become the first mapper crazy enough to not only make a full on daytime FM, but the ever first TDM level to have a daytime cycle. Not a smooth one where you watch the sun go down, the system for that would be far more complex and the rotating parallel light would wreck performance. Instead there's going to be a day a dusk and a night that switch when the player completes key objectives. I'm using 4 global lights only 2 of which change: The ambient world which I may want to remove, and fog which is constant since that seems to have issues with being toggled... the actual ambiance is achieved by using cubemap illumination which was recently fixed, and of course a parallel light sun. All torches and street lamps are off during the day and dusk and come on during night... for performance sake more than anything, even without other lights a single parallel sky will still wreck the FPS. Kinda tragic that volumetric lighting doesn't work with parallel / parallelsky or else it would be even prettier... rather tempted to ask about that. Don't worry about the lightgem: The goal is to only have guards turn hostile at night... either the player must do something to upset them before the sun goes down, or I might go with the classic curfew so they're only enemies at night. I thought of making it cyclical so you can use the bed to endlessly advance by 6 hours, but I doubt it's worth the extra complexity for an already complex setup, I may leave it for my open world concept if that ever happens. In the meantime, if anyone's wondered what a detailed daytime level looks like in TheDarkMod, here's a glimpse into something more unusual!

Added an arch to make the bridge better, also lowered the railing a bit and fixed its texture: It's going to be a nice view both when on it and from afar! Hoping to work on the outside forest a bit next. As for the guards I actually pathed the entire road system with a common circuit: You can see a bunch of them together like that when they happen to clump together from different parts of town, which personally I think is more random and natural. There will only be this many of them on the last difficulty: I now set them to Easy = 4, Normal = 8, Hard = 12.

I keep forgetting: If when editing a patch you accidentally put a green or pink vertice over the other, how do you separate them again? Clicking on the spot where two vertices are located always selects both and drags them together. I believe I tried that and it didn't fix it, the armature falling over sometimes still alerts everyone around it.

I was wondering what mappers and developers alike think of supporting dynamically instanced groups in some form. This means DarkRadiant and TheDarkMod would be able to instance prefabs on the run similar to models: Currently prefabs may only be used to import an entity group once, each set is permanently stored in the map and becomes unique. An alternative would be instancing other map files from the main map, where child maps may contain a building (entities, brushes, visportals) which the parent map can place and rotate as easily as they would a func_static. The main motive is the ability to replicate complex components where changing one copy affects them all. Take mechanical/machines/steam_engine_* which is a complex machine with various movers / rotators / particles / sounds / etc: Its setup may be improved in the future, maybe to allow turning it off which hasn't been implemented... if the original prefab is ever improved, none of the maps that added it will get the update, the author must delete all their steam engines and import the prefab again. The way mappers could use this is equally interesting; Cities can be built from component buildings where each structure is maintained independently, the instancer may mix structures / furniture / inhabitants to produce unique rooms from compatible sets. This would likely need to be implemented as a new entity such as atdm:instance, which is given the paths to prefabs or maps that must be placed at its position and rotation. The entity should allow multiple sets that can be mixed, for example the spawnargs "group_1 = prefabs/room_64x64_worn.pfb" and "group_2 = prefabs/room_64x64_furniture_old.pfb" will place the worn out version of 64 unit room with the old furniture for it. Groups can even be randomized so some are optional while others pick a random prefab, this would allow producing entirely unique buildings including map geometry (per dmap). Both DR and TDM would need to learn the new format: DarkRadiant: Changes needed to display / select / move / filter the contents of maps or prefabs as single entities like models. Since they're unique resources like all assets editing them on the run isn't possible and prefabs must be re-exported, DR can instead offer a shortcut to open instances as maps to make changes. TheDarkMod: The engine must unpack each prefab during dmap. Instances may contain brushes and portals which need to be permanently baked into the map, this wouldn't change other that instead of being read from the main map they're read from a reference map or prefab. Consequentially if brushes or patches are modified in an instance the main map will break until you run dmap again, just as it would if you added or removed brushes then ran the map without recompiling it... entities and their spawnargs should be alright to change freely. When randomization is used dmap picks different prefabs to compile the map from; The seed must be baked in so the map and proc don't mismatch each time you start the FM... random buildings are only possible once per compilation rather than per play, unless we also add a special flag to dmap each time you start such a mission.

Did anything breaking saves change from the previous dev version? I didn't update yet since I didn't finish a FM I was playing... I disabled the setting that forces you to have the same TDM version to load old saves, but if save compatibility was affected loading would still cause a crash. Definitely appreciate the improvements for the mission selection menu, which hopefully means not just the download page but also the FM selection screen: An issue for me has always been that once a lot of FM's are installed, it's hard to tell them apart and know what to look for to play something new. An old proposal I remember making was a favorites button to pin FM's you really liked at the top, maybe that will happen too in the future.

I did those with patches, always love the flexibility that offers compared to more fixed models. Wasn't sure how that bridge would turn out but it ended up alright. Same as the river that flows down in steps, waterfalls are tricky to do but it's a challenge I figured I'd go for and it looks acceptable in the end.