ungoliant

ooo, my first DR tutorial vid made it to moddb TDM page, yayyyyy. Also nice to see that TDM headline on front page again, awesome stuff. Stand forth and be recognized!

saw some of the new stuff posted up at eidos forums. looks like broadheads and sawtooths can be perma-upgraded into moss-broadheads and moss-sawtooths that make no sound on impact. that upgrade should really require a game clear to unlock.

Whoops I was wrong about something. I was looking at the wrong fencing during my last tests that were using vanilla textures, not the custom. scale with a real image file works as intended. I can modify the values and it behaves as expected. Still doesn't look all that good though. using rgb with image file does not work at all. I think it actually looks better to leave out the spec stage entirely and let the default values in interaction.vfp when it finds no specmap take over. Well, spread the word, using _white doesn't really work, and it sucks even if you use an image file and scale down the colors. just leave out the spec stage entirely if you don't have a spec map and don't feel like making one. thats my conclusion, but you guys can test it out for yourselves and see which way you think looks better. I guess one thing we can take away from this is that if you want to ramp up or tone down your specmap, use scale and not rgb. There, something practical came out of this

i dunno, you want me to run through all the stuff in TDM with _white specs and just change the values randomly? is the team going to implement that dirty fix to the mod? i guess i can just do it for my stuff, but people are going to run into that problem more than once. i'm sure its already happened and nobody commented on one weird overly bright spec past a certain distance in maps before. if there is a vfp fix that can make _white not look like garbage, its probably the best thing to do other than make spec maps for everything that is missing it. the problem is minor, admittedly, but real.

alright so I did some more stuff. scale(_white, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1) = error. leaving out alpha or changing alpha to anything else, still error. create 256x256 white tga, scale that instead. works. yields same result as map _white rgb 0.1. use white.tga with rgb keyword, same results as _white. I dunno, maybe using _white, or any flat color for spec map just yields garbage looking stuff, and theres nothing you can do about it? but that just can't be right, because when the interaction shader is turned to default and it assigns an arbitrary uniform spec value, it looks fine.... i dunno, i dont get it.

its big. and its being overhauled into project form atm. and its supersquirrelsecretsortakinda. i think an easier route is to just make a room with a white light and a decal with texture: textures/darkmod/metal/grate/fence_iron_01. It looks worst when you are about the distance shown from the screenshot from a position tangent to the center of the decal. If you get up close and personal with the texture, it looks better, but not great. If you change the viewing angle, it starts to look a lot better as the decal gets closer to just being a thin line. the rgb theory makes sense, and it doesn't make sense. how could it obtain a proper value when it makes the check for a specmap, but screw up when trying to display it?

well now you've officially lost me, my knowledge of specular contains nothing about power vs intensity. i guess i'll do some reading.

if it simply uses the existing specular map value, then how does the arbitrary value it decides on look less crazy than a user-defined value of .002?

yeah with that code snippet, I'm going to go ahead and assume you are correct on the rounding issue. So now issue is what the heck is this thing doing when "there's a specular map for this material"? Most of it looks like gobbledegook to me.

It could be a rounding issue, but if that is the case, the problems start at a much lower value. I'm getting washed out issues starting at 0.001111, not 0.111111. after all the default value supplied is 0.1. So the acceptable tolerance on precision here is at least at the 1000's decimal place, and i have also seen it turn the snowblind effect on/off at .00111112 vs .00111111. My guess is that rounding is not an issue here. And yes i'm going to try the scale thing, but i'm not very hopeful on it. I think serpentine replied about the randomness of using that technique a couple years back

The only offender in the shot is the metal fencing. Things like the wood panels on the staircase have their own dedicated specular image, in this case, textures/darkmod/wood/boards/polished_shiny_large_red_s is the specmap used. some unlucky materials like the iron fencing do not have such images, and used a scaled version of the _white image produced by d3. these ones seem to have the problems with the enhanced interaction shader.

OK, problem being specular totally washes out the entire diffuse when viewed from a head-on angle at a moderate distance (15m-ish?) or more. With interaction shader set to enhanced: with interaction shader set to default: so "full blast" here basically means it doesn't even look like specular, the stage just completely washes out the diffuse with blinding white. So a typical spec stage in a material that has no dedicated specular image looks like this: blend specularmap map _white rgb 0.1 playing with the values, I've discovered that anything below "rgb 0.001111111111111" yields the same result as switching interaction shader to default. It's not quite off, but it looks much more reasonable. However, if you go above this number, even 0.001111112, you get the snowblind effect pictured above. There is no middle ground here. I don't think serps advice here works, as i suspect using any flat image of some monochrome color yields the same result, but with a different rgb value as the threshold. its either snowblind or muted completely. using a black spec stage looks the same as turning interaction shader to default with any rgb value (actually i haven't tested default setting with something like rgb 1 or rgb 0.9 yet). Soooo, i guess the point is, it would be reaaaally nice to have a middle ground between off and snowblind when using textures that don't have a dedicated specular image. they are few and far between, but they are out there. also, i had assumed that the ambient rendering option used ambientEnvironment.vfp, and the interaction shader uses interaction.vfp, but thats a guess, really.

so, back to work. Referencing the specular stuff from page 3-4 of this thread, i went back and played with the specular values when using the enhanced interaction shader on materials that use the _white map for their spec. I still haven't found the cause, since i can't read ARB very well, but playing with the values yields a conclusive number. The specular goes full blast when using values "map _white" and any value above "rgb 0.0011111111111" repeating forever. any value under this threshold and the specular yields the same visual results as if the interaction shader was set to default. If Obsttorte is having any luck working through ARB i might throw this issue his way and see if he can pinpoint it. Its very likely located somewhere in interaction.vfp, interaction_102.vfp, or interaction_direct.vfp, depending on which of these files is being utilized by the enhanced interaction shader.

This is exactly what I wanted them to do, for the most part. Problem is, I was hoping all the source material came from Thief games. Few and far between on that, though.

trying to get back into the game. looks like startmap wiki page hasn't been updated in a long time, so i figure i'll just ask here. It seems if i want a project based editing workspace, I can now just dump all required files into darkmod/fms/mymission folder, TDM will install and run mission this way, then when done editing, zip up the necessary stuff as is to pk4 for distribution? Also doomconfig.cfg no longer required? Anything else new or interesting about editing setups i'm missing since 2.0?

So glad I read this. I don't think I can play this game now. Like, ever. I could put up with a lot of nonsense and trudge through it just to see how bad they mangled everything, but I have a zero-tolerance policy on this sort of thing after I dealt with it in Far Cry 3. It just ruins... everything.

careful with those exterior floodlights, i've experimented with them as well, and found big performance drops from shadowcasting and multiple lightsources falling on the things that are inside the house on the other side of the wall. noshadowing those floodlights isn't much of an option if the inside is a playable area.

First it was "who has time to read" when you can see the movie. now its the big red arrow. I guess its a hallmark of the age of information, where all marks of "progress" relate to how quickly information and experiences can be processed, and the sheer volume of that content / data that you can fit in and store in as few brain cells / bytes as possible. more content that takes less time to process or experience is always better. right?

i will trade you choke arrows, focus, and all swoop functionality for the digital preorder ass rape edition in return for the bank mission and freejumping in the vanilla version. 3 for 2. good deal, yes?

exactly right. the only ships i destroyed were the stupid cylon auto-scouts. However, with lv3 teleporter, you have enough time to get in and out and destroy 1 system with melee before they asphyxiate. nice for those 3-shield scout douchebags since their evade is high as hell. Also, i didn't mention it, but I was lucky enough in my last run to pick up a crystal crew member who was a backup boarder, and would seal off their medbay so they couldn't get into it

Got back into the game recently. Finally unlocked the rock cruiser, only need crystal now. So my biggest finding with the rock cruiser is that the fire beam KICKS ASS. I finally got one of the hardest achievements, "some people just like to watch ships burn". The Type B ship starts off with a Fire Bomb and a shield piercing laser(not beam), and a large stock of missiles, which is basically a free ride through Sector 2 even in "Normal" mode, which is a big economic boon. Also you start with 3 rock crew, which is, quite frankly, the best starting lineup in the game. The extra health lets them fight on par with a mantis, no repair nerf, and they are immune to fire. 3 of them. So about that fire beam. Priority 1 is purchase a Crew Teleporter for 75 scrap at the earliest convenience, which is pretty easy since you can freeroll through sector 2 without a ship upgrade (except maybe a weapon slot). With the fire bomb you can now start wreaking havoc while you wait to find a fire beam, at which point, its pretty much game over as soon as you find some kind of shield-busting laser like burst II, and even then maybe you don't need it if you can destroy the shields from the inside. The key here is to use fire from the fire bomb / fire beam as an insertion point for your 2 rock crew. Your crew never puts out enemy ship fires, and is invincible to flame. Enemy crew always fight your crew before putting out fires. So they spread faster, and makes it almost impossible to defeat your boarding party. So usually, situationally dependent, i start a fire in either shields or weapons, insert crew, and wait for that system to be destroyed. Shields and weapons rooms are always 4 squares, so if you can defend the room, when its said and done, you've got 4 fire squares and 2 rock crew in the most important room on their ship. At any point when their shields are down, continue to punish with firebeam to spread more fires, especially to things like medbay. avoid arson in the oxygen room, it will put out your fires, and enemy crew will rush to fix the 02 as soon as its clear of flame, essentially putting out all that beautiful fire. Once you get some nice lasers, a fire beam, and a crew teleporter, the game almost plays itself until the last boss, but its sure as hell fun to watch.

if it were mine, I might even scrawl my name into the hilt texture in some fancy script thats hard to read.

should be able to retrieve them as long as you don't fire them into stone or metal. ....or that white plaster stuff everything seems to be made of. i hate that stuff. i guess rope arrows would be too beefy if you could do that, but i think noise and broadheads should stick or not break.

ah, well that is a relief then. never liked those mspaint lookin things.