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MirceaKitsune

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Everything posted by MirceaKitsune

  1. Thanks for clarifying, and I agree with most of your points. I'm aware the effect doesn't look too realistic as it's still a 2D illusion and doesn't pop out of the actual geometry, though I do think it often looks better to have it than not. Especially with the self shadowing which can make all those highlights more realistic, that's the part I was excited about rather than the deform. I think the difference is I'm thinking of it more along the lines of shadow maps or ambient occlusion, where once they were added they worked everywhere... those are post-processing shaders not material shaders so it's indeed a different matter. The reason I say is it won't be used at large is that at no point will a FM enable it on every single texture: That would require turning it on for every brick, wood, metal, AI skin, etc used on the map meaning dozens of copied material / skin / entity definitions. Using it on everything like that is what I initially hoped would happen, but if there's really no way I understand, the devs who actually know the code and shaders have their reasons for the limitation. And yes, feel free to move this to another thread if that's more appropriate, though I think your point clarifies it.
  2. I keep wondering if nothing can be done to let everyone benefit from the new parallax shader, for FM's both new and old. Apart from those of us who want to not being able to enjoy them on existing missions, the biggest issue is this great feature will almost never be used at large: No author will copy hundreds / thousands of materials from brush textures to skins applied on entities just to enable the effect. It feels like wasted potential for something that's already there and could look so amazing. Regarding the lack of height maps for existing textures, I suggest testing something if anyone knows how and has the time, I'm not familiar with the new system and trying to get a quick FM done while busy with several things at the moment: Extract the blue channel from the normal map and use that as the heightmap, maybe share some images of how that looks. From my experience with other texture sets in Godot, that provides accurate enough parallax and I'd to know if it looks good in TDM too. If it does we have a solution for applying it retroactively as a choice: The setting can have two modes... one to enable parallax only for materials that explicitly specify a heightmap, the other to generate an estimated heightmap from the normal map otherwise. As a bonus we don't increase the size of TDM by adding hundreds of new textures either! Edit: Here's an image from the test project I was working on in Godot. The Philipk texture set doesn't have heightmaps, I had to generate those and invert the specular texture to turn it into roughness: I automated an ImageMagick command to do it for all images and generate PBR versions. The parallax was extracted from the normal texture, it worked fine and looks exactly as I wanted it to.
  3. I'd like to know what's currently the best way to make animated grass on a windy map. Since it's better looking than particle grass and I'm placing a lot of them using seed entities, I plan on sticking with the default grass model set. Should I just make them custom entities using a func_pendulum? Or is it currently possible to add a sine to the vertex shader of the material for a better result?
  4. Delving into a small FM since I want to actually get something done instead of endlessly working on open worlds. Copied the church from another project I posted previously, I'm using some base architecture between missions to save time albeit with each one modified and made more unique. Amazing what projector lights can do when used right.
  5. That's very weird: I'm on Linux myself... Manjaro / KDE Plasma / Wayland (DR runs through X11 to avoid the mouse capture issue)
  6. Just tried and it doesn't work for me: I left click on the vertice once to select it, let go of the left mouse button, then click LMB again and this time hold it to drag the vertice... sadly it still moves both for me. I tried both in the 2D and 3D viewports, whether I select first or click-hold-drag from the start it's always both vertexes getting moved.
  7. Picked up an old mountain FM, I decided to scrap the original idea and repurpose the town I made for my multiple city hub idea which required expanding it. This is a new area I added, the large structure in the last two shots is meant to be a castle that may not look as I originally envisioned but I'm happy with the result none the less.
  8. Oh my, this was quite a FM to try out. Possibly the tiniest ever made, I can think of one more about a bread shop who's name I long forgot. Found all loot and secrets and played all 3 difficulty levels. Something tells me more effort went into the intro video than the FM itself, it was tastefully uncharacteristic of anything TDM!
  9. I still need help with an issue I never found the answer to: If I accidentally drag one vertice over another while editing a patch and place them at the same position, how do I select only one to drag it away? Sometimes multiple green or pink points may end up overlapping, till now I had to leave them like that since I couldn't separate them.
  10. Finally finished it! Beautiful yet difficult FM, both in terms of navigating and finding objectives. Took me precisely a week, had to noclip and look for hints to get many things done. I have one big curiosity though...
  11. Oh, I understand now. That is a bit sad: I was hoping it would work everywhere like ambient occlusion. As for new maps I thought the shader found a way to extract the information from the normal map, it makes sense that a heightmap would still be needed. I recently worked with generating height maps for a texture package in Godot, and found that just extracting the blue channel of the normal map into a grayscale image worked for me. There are some tools to automatically produce better results, but if the decision isn't to patch all existing materials everyone will have to use those independently.
  12. 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
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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
  16. 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...
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
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