Spooks

vid_restart seems to break ambient light, or at least ambient_world. a lot of the world is pitch black after it. That might be on 2.10. I'm having to do vid_restart because every time I alt+enter to change from windowed to fullscreen, the game graphics break. I think that's just something getting broken from the side of Nvidia's drivers though, I used not to get it in 2.09 but then it started happening there, too... If anyone has that problem, shout out but, well, point being, vid_restart kind of fixed it but now that's useless.

Hey, sorry! This was written before the forum software update, so it figures there was some weird formatting left over. Thanks for pointing it out, it's fixed now. (Although there wasn't even a button to set the text color when editing the first reply on dark theme, it seems that's still not fully cooked).

I don't think the volumetric light cost too much, granted i drop from 60FPS to 30, and to 20 if the samples go up to 32 or so, but I'm hoping there's more optimizations on the way. Couple of things I wanted to point out. Number one is that there's a lot of overbrightening when the area of the volumetric light is big. Combine this with the bloom and you can get the game to look pretty ridiculous. The light in the first screenshot is only at about 40% max lightness. Turn it up to 80% and you can see that it just looks like white void. This is the same problem with the layering of the haze particles, and it's why I usually set my haze particle colors to something that's nearly black. Could there be a separate color spawnarg for the godray part of the light? Or maybe just some "intensity 0.0 to 1.0" kind of spawnarg, for further control? To prevent this kind of thing happening. edit: Basically there's a disjoint where the color is controlling two "real life" things: the intensity of the light and the thickness of the presumptive atmosphere through which the light is traveling. These shouldn't really be coupled together. Number two is the obvious and old thing where the skybox doesn't get affected by any of this. Wish that that could get sorted at some point since it's handicapping a lot of outdoor scenes with particles, and now with this.

I think there is something wrong with looping sound shaders that have a playlist of sound files to go through. They may play something from the playlist at first but then they'll get stuck looping the very first item in it and never randomly choose another. This obviously wasn't the case in the last version of the game. Please corroborate, you can test with a regular speaker with 's_shader' set to 'animal_dog_distant' or 'frob_instrument_victrola', and 's_looping' set to '1'. If the dog bark/ditty is always the same on your end too, then it's a bug. edit: I've submitted the bug report.

I downloaded the portable version from this link and the X/Y zooming is broken for me - it zoomes out to the left and zooms in to the right, rather than on the cursor or to the center. I'm also on Win7. The zoom speed seems about the same to me, no complaints there. edit: holding shift while zooming is working fine btw. PS. I notice that at least that build doesn't have bilinear texture filtering in the 3D view. Is that intended? I don't mind but it's not the same as the old version (I'm still back on 2.11). EDIT 2: Haha, guess what? The zoom-to-cursor looks to be working correctly on the Dockable Window Layout, when the orthoview is on the left side of the screen or when it's fullscreen, with the camera and entity pane undocked/floating. Please test it with different Window Layouts and drag it to different parts of your monitor(s) if you have multiple. The problem's gotta be connected to something there, that's my hunch.

As I leave my crimbo vacation and return to my work duties I can feel that my time may be severely cut for mapping, so I may as well have you guys take a look at what I've been working on (you know, per the thread title and everything): I really wanna finish this one but RL is a bit volatile atm! Fates be kind!!!

First spiral staircase I've made. It do be lookin fresh doe.

Thanks a bunch for the fixes!

double post, what is the name for the "arbitrary transformation" widget (Modify > Rotate and scale...) in the shortcut list? I had it assigned to "A" but now the aforementioned crashes have also deemed it necessary to reset my keybinds as well so "A" is back to CameraMoveUp or however that goes. I would check the non-beta version but I don't want to destroy my camera mouselook move shortcut keys again...

Cheers, greebo. I come here with another report of a crash. It is scarily easy to replicate. Pressing Ctrl+C prompts DR to SAVE (even though I checked the bindings and it's clearly set to Copy) and it crashes the application in no time. Just in case here's another dumpfile, but if it's replicable on your end I figure you may not need it. I'll create a bugtracker entry in a bit. edit: created

Indefinite app hang seemingly out of nowhere. I was in the process of making a foglight and probably pressed the light inspector button, L, while still focused on the entity pane rather than the orthoview. Or at least that's what I think was my last action. Here's the dumpfile.

Alright, so I did some more testing and it's just a bug fix for a very old glitch that I've encountered a lot as well, I thought it was going to be an ease-of-use feature but I suppose you just do the same sky light setup you would've before without having to deal with glitching shadows.

Hey, so, how does parallelSky work? I can't get a light to shine through the portal_sky texture on a fresh 2.08 installation. "parallelSky 1" with or without "parallel 1" also in the spawnarg list do nothing, I've tried it in two different FM WIPs and the result is a regular parallel light. Does it have to be sized as big as the ambient_world light (covering the entire map)? That feels very counterintuitive to what the new feature is purported to do.

Nope, it's been off for the whole beta test phase. It must be something on my side then, maybe some leftover file I tested for cabalistic... Let me delete my glprogs folder and run the updater again, see what happens. Yeah, what do you know, the problem's no longer present. I completely forgot I had to put up custom shaders when we were testing the parallax corrected cubemaps/ssao. Phew.

Yeah, that didn't seem to fix it.

It's not specifically that water shader, I originally saw this on one of my window surfaces. It should be fragmentProgram heatHazeWithDepth.vfp, but there's no depth now. Just checked some of the windows in king of diamonds and it's the same.

Hey i've not been testing, RL is too busy. I fired TDM up with the latest patch to take some screenshots and noticed a warp bug. checked the last two pages the bug tracker but I haven't seen it mentioned: It's the old "stuff rendering in front" bug, even those curved posts in the background are because of it. I don't think any of my cvars have changed in any meaningful way for this to be on my side, at any rate if someone could check for themselves I'd appreciate it, it should be easy to spot.

Things are pretty hectic over here, I wasn't on the forums for a week so even that ping might've not been a saving grace if I didn't log in to divert responsibilities from other things I gotta do... Anyway, yeah! The command seems to work alright, reloading the game properly resets the materials, but reloadModels all doesn't reset material changes on brushes, aptly enough. I'm not sure that's that important, though.

I had the temporary solution more in mind, in that case, but I don't mean to imply that there'd be a constant cursor update - that is to say that the texture on surfaces would change as you look around. I meant more like how r_materialoverride does it, if you want another surface under the cursor to get replaced you have to look at it and input the new command again. Just clearing that up in case there was misunderstanding. I do agree that another opinion would be valuable, how I would use it is not general enough to be extrapolated, I can see the use-case of this command being comfortably exhausted without the mapper having to reload their map again but I might be unduly generalizing. How I see its use is the ability to test one surface (a building facade, road, wallpaper) change against the context of others you already have put down in DR. Replacing multiple brush surfaces in-game might be extra flexible but like you said it would be harder to do and I think it overlaps into regular DR functionality at that point.

Hey, here is a little note-to-self/funny tidbit of note. Nbohr1more alerted me earlier to the presence of r_testSpecularFix in the beta thread and I've been checking out the differences intermittently while testing for other stuff. Overall it does look a bit poorer, there's less fresnels to go around, but it's definitely better math, metal is actually shiny now more often than not. Anyway, point being I was going through some of my old WIPs for testing now and I noticed a very stupid trick that the fix broke that I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing. I was making a glass material a long time ago that was basically a heathazewithdepth.vpf stage with a blend filter for the color of the glass afterwards and no need for a diffusemap. Consequently, I seem to remember that I couldn't make regular lights reflect off it, it seemed to need a diffusemap for that purpose. I ingeniously set up this code block: { blend diffusemap map _black rgb 8 } What it did was miraculously make specular work without the need of a specularmap keyword to be defined, and upping the rgb (to 8 and above) made it factor the lights more strongly. I loaded this map tonight and I saw that the specular practically disappeared between r_testSpecularFix 0 and 1. I dug in and realized that the mere rgb factor on the diffusemap used to bump the specular and that furthermore that was the reason I couldn't get the specularmap keyword to work without a diffusemap in hand. I reformatted it like this now and it works the same: { blend specularmap map _white rgb 1 } Here are screenshots of the difference that having a specular makes on this particular surface, for illustration: I managed to notice it now and I don't think anybody else uses this trick in their maps (even I don't anymore), but I think it's a very good abject example of exactly how this got fixed

I was going to recommend Awaiting The Storm too, spent a good 10 minutes clicking on FMs on the mission page randomly because I couldn't remember its name, lol.

Update: I'm now fairly sure that it's another .dds vs .tga issue. TGAs actually work with the makeAlpha keyword, but the thing is I'm 90% certain I've made it work with .dds textures (spec maps) before. I don't know if something's changed or I'm crazy, but at least I've narrowed the issue down to file formats.

Hello, yes, specularFix 0 seems to do nothing with regard to the problem. Epifire's cubemap testing map could be a useful testbed (cabalistic posted about parallax cubemaps in his thread), provided one inverts the "Marble_Wall_001_mask.tga" texture so the mask is more clearly visible.

Hey, the alpha masking material technique that I found about circa 2016 doesn't work anymore, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure what's causing it, but the map makealpha() or the gl_dst_alpha, gl_one blending mode doesn't seem to do what it did before. Something about the change from ARB to GLSL? Dunno. Can somebody who has an earlier version of TDM (2.07, 2.06) test this one for me? Put this snippet in a material definition that's used somewhere in a map: { maskcolor map makealpha (textures/darkmod/stone/cobblestones/flagstones03_shiny_s) //here I use the specular of the texture alpha 1 } { blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one maskalpha map textures/darkmod/stone/brick/blocks_large_whitestone } In theory it should overlay a bricks texture but modulate it by the specular map of some flagstones. If it doesn't work try { maskcolor map makealpha (textures/darkmod/stone/cobblestones/flagstones03_shiny_s) //here I use the specular of the texture alpha 1 } { blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one maskalpha cubeMap env/gen2 texgen reflect } That one is a cubemap stage that I've personally used before, so I know it should be masked... EDIT: This isn't a purely personal whim, Epifire's materials use this trick so I don't know if any of them with this thing have made it into the mod; if they have they'd be broken in a way that's very hard to spot but is important for them working correctly.

Hello! That @ apparently did not catch me at all, so here I am almost 3 months later checking the thread manually. Yes. I still think it's useful. Can you elucidate how temporary "temporary" is? Does it disappear on map change/reload?