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nbohr1more

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Everything posted by nbohr1more

  1. I have updated the thread with poll options. Please vote I even though I have given-up on the connections part of this, it might be nice if authors used Corbin as the protagonist to at least pay homage to the included missions.
  2. Go ahead and fix them if you want. The purpose of the wiki was to attempt to resolve as many leaks as possible prior to 2.12. If a map contained too many leaks, there is a map-wide workaround that reverts to 2.11 mode at the cost of reverting to 2.11 performance. It's up to you if you want to clean-up the leaks and retain the optimizations or just use the easy-button and set the mission to 2.11 mode.
  3. @snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.
  4. @Hugo Lobo may I upload this to moddb ?
  5. @snatcher can you upload this to moddb ?
  6. @MirceaKitsune can I upload this to Moddb ?
  7. Looks like the new link is private? ( needs and invite )
  8. Wiki is updated
  9. I'll try to get more of these added to the wiki tonight unless someone beats me to it: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Add-ons
  10. I think the default gamma was raised to 1.2 to reduce banding and color precision artifacts at the low end of the brightness scale. There are probably some confounding factors that make that a questionable decision. 1) At the time of this discussion, I believe TDM's bloom settings were generating extra contrast and thus lowering gamma 2) By the time that soft gamma was implemented, we also were using a new bloom system that does not tie the bloom effect to other post processing effects 3) There was some attempt to make TDM shaders compliant with industry gamma defaults but that attempt to adhere to standards may have caused problems because most games are much brighter than TDM so using calibration established for use in brighter games may cause unintended results. These days, I normally set gamma to 1 ambient gamma to 1.1 and set my postprocess color curve to 0.2 or 0.3 which darkens gamma back to something similar to 1. Maybe someday I'll purchase a monitor calibration machine and try to sort out the ideal default state.
  11. I was quite surprised by: Many have compared this to: Regardless, I think this stands on it's own merits as a very high quality mission and easily rivals great missions by veteran authors.
  12. This is currently the largest campaign pack ( 3 missions ), highly recommended.
  13. Yes this is the trajectory. By the way, have you tried the "No Honor Among Thieves" campaign?
  14. The Dark Mod v1.0 was released on October 17th 2009 https://www.thedarkmod.com/posts/october-17th-2009/ Knowing that many current mappers are participating in the TDS 20th Anniversary Contest, I intend to bring the final proposal to Moddb to see if we can get either some old dormant authors or new authors to join in. If we even get one mission to celebrate the 15th anniversary with that would be enough to count this as a success.
  15. The Numbers don't lie. It has been 15 years since the release of TDM 1.0 in 2009. I think we should consider a contest to celebrate this. Further, the contest goal should be with the intention of motivating the completion of a campaign that can be deemed official. Here are some possible ways forward: Proposal 1: Middle mission(s) Authors are asked to create a mission that expands the story between "A New Job" and "Tears of St Lucia". This can involve escaping the heavily guarded city perimeter, stowing away on a ship or caravan, attempting to recruit a partner for St Lucia and failing, getting caught by Builders before arriving and having to escape their compound, getting lost in haunted woods on the way there, etc. Any interesting way that the connection between the two official missions can be expanded. Points are awarded for making explicit references to Corbin, St Lucia, and any story elements in the two official missions. If the resultant mission is of high enough quality, it can possibly be made into an official mission. If we get a number of excellent submissions and they do not cause logical inconsistencies, we might even be able to add two or more to the official list. Proposal 2: Intellectual Property distinct approximation of TDS missions Over the years, many have asked that we recreate Thief 1 \ 2 in this engine. Obviously we cannot do this due to copyright law but we could create similar missions and stories that approximate the Thief 1 or 2 designs. That said, I think that most of our audience has played these missions to death so it may be underwhelming to see them arrive in approximate form anyway. What might be better would be to develop a similar story to TDS and make missions that resemble what T1 \ T2 players were dreaming would arrive when TDS was announced and the first screen-shots were shown in gaming magazines. So take any TDS mission you like, examine the story arc and wildly re-interpret something similar but on a much grander scale. Since it's possible that two or more contestants will choose the same mission to re-interpret, we have a slot system were authors need to claim their preferred mission and if it is taken then they must select another one or lose some story points. The slots represent a sketch of what the mission author might try to do rather than a blueprint. If authors can come up with a mission that has almost no resemblance to any TDS mission but would make for a compelling story development in a similar story arc then that can be claimed as an alternative to a slot. Proposal 3: Same as proposal 2 but we stick with Thief 1 rather than TDS. Wildly re-interpret T1 based on what you may have dreamed of when reading the gaming magazines or playing the demo. Slots system to prevent duplicate submissions. Maybe with either proposals 3 and 4, we still require the use of Corbin as the protagonist and a connective enough story that they could also be adapted as middle missions for the official campaign if the team agrees on it. Proposal 4: Another "Connections" Contest. We just allow authors to connect any two missions with each other or expand the story of an existing series or single mission. So those are my thoughts. I'll leave it to players and mission authors to suggest other proposals and if we have some sort of consensus about the most popular proposals then we will make a poll. Realistically between now and October we may not be able to hold a contest with any strict guidelines ( and tricky issues with maintaining a distance to Thief IP ) so proposal 4 may still be the easiest option.
  16. Congrats on the release! Hopefully the first of many!
  17. Both mean basically the same thing. Stencil is incapable of shading anything other than geometry so if you want textures that have transparent parts to cast shadows from the non-transparent part of the texture you need to accept that stencil mode will look different to maps mode. Likewise if you want shadows to render onto the semi-transparent part of textures.
  18. Feel free to add it. I think it might be good enough for 2.13 now ( pending team approval).
  19. I have resolved 99.9% of the glow-bleed issues with this mod at a small sacrifice to the amount of glare. It should now look great in all missions. https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/flame-glare-mod
  20. Yes, but there are qualifiers to that statement. Stencil is more CPU bound ( and fillrate bound ) and Maps are more GPU memory bound and rely more on texture bandwidth. If lighting mechanisms were perfect the hybrid might not be so bad but both systems often overdraw and waste resources on unseen geometry so you end up with significant amounts of scene duplication. Maybe moving to a deferred model would reduce that duplication but then you end up with having to pack data into buffers and the inevitable quality loss and artifacts of compressing everything into a buffer. Trade offs in all directions.
  21. I think the short answer is "it is possible... but" with the "but" meaning that we have some serious performance challenges. The first RBDoom3BFG release that supported Shadow Maps only applied them to transparent surfaces ( which stencil cannot do ) but the use of both systems in the same scene carried a heavy toll. As I recall, hybrid stencil mode was eventually dropped there too. Still, stencil can look so much cleaner than shadow maps for large volumes and large casters it's a shame to lose them. And hybrid stencil \ maps rendering is still much cheaper than ray-traced shadows or penumbra wedges so it might be worth it to expand the hybrid mode anyway as a sorta "ultra quality" mode.
  22. I think this will always be a divide. Engine coders will want a universal behavior that acts the same way across all missions. So if we want to offer the additional benefits of Shadow Maps, we will need to break lots of missions and then work to fix them. Mappers will probably want material or entity flags that force these behaviors so that they can force usage where they prefer. I think defaulting to consistent with Stencil rules is a good idea. Maybe this is a good case for using mission.cfg and have it force the cvars to enable the features?
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