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20% is for the bottom of the Ryzen range. For $98 a Ryzen 5 5500 is over 70% faster and goes up to over 200% faster in some scenarios. There are probably a spectrum of inexpensive options between the Ryzen 3xxx and Ryzen 5 5500. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html Still, finding an old workstation is not a bad way to go as a general practice but a lot of them are Intel based so the CPU upgrade path longevity might be more limited. At least the current gen Intel is socket compatible with the previous gen so you can get a last gen workstation and if there is a cutting edge low-end Intel CPU that beats the in-situ CPU in the workstation you can add that to the upgrade cost and probably recover a good chunk by selling the older CPU.

So a Ryzen 3 3200 is about 20% faster than that CPU. Anything reasonably inexpensive in the Ryzen 3xxx to 5xxx series would still be an upgrade for you.

Supposedly AM5 is going to support at least 3 cpu generations so if you are switching from Intel to AMD then that is probably the wiser move unless your Intel CPU is so old that a Zen 2 chip can beat it. If you do have a weaker Intel CPU and don’t mind waiting a long time then get an AM4 motherboard and a cheap Zen 1 or Zen 2 generation CPU then wait for the price of X3D AM4 CPUs to drop in a year or two. Basically just pretend it’s a few years ago and treat X3D as your final upgrade path. What Intel CPU do you currently run?

I believe that it was decided that the slow match should showcase our object manipulation features and is also designed to increase tension because real world use of a slow-match is sort of clumsy. Not sure if anyone currently on the project really cares about preserving this behavior and whether any missions rely on it since I don't recall any missions where lighting a fireplace (etc) put the player at risk beyond the risk of being illuminated anyway. This fiddly way of doing slow-match is probably something mappers like @Melan might prefer ( given his preference for other "retro" manipulations... eg. the big auto-unlock discussion for "The Rat's Triumphant" )?

The fix is in the mission database. Thank you Daft Mugi !

Re map_of.tga vs map_of_icon.tga ? The whole thing started because of an attempt to clear-up errors caused by a core file referencing a missing image. Some mission authors must have used this same path correctly so the attempt to fix this must have broken that and then the revert also broke something? @Dragofer ?

This should be updated in the mission database. If not, I will update the mission when I get a chance.

I'll upload the old Dungeon of Doom demo to Moddb so anyone interested can play around with it. I believe BloodRayne back in the Doom3world days also made a procedural map generator, I'll see if that is up anywhere where I can post it.

Make sure to use the version here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-211-unofficial The most dramatic place to check this out is in the start area of the mission "Caduceus of St Alban". That said, any mission with large amounts of flat ambient lit surfaces that have the same texture over vast swaths of the scene will see dramatic improvement. The Vengeance for a Thief ( really, any Sir Taffsalot ) missions are particularly improved by this one.

I’ll bet it performs way better than stated in the article. When I saw the YouTube video it looked like they were using capped FPS which has horrible performance on Linux and even dips below 30 fps on the training mission with capable hardware. Uncap fps on the same setup and you have over 100fps everywhere in that same mission. Window works much better in capped mode but still has issues

Looks like it would be a good fit for "Swift Mazes":

The big improvement to load times was in 2.10. About a quarter of the time to load missions ( or lower ) compared to 2.09 ( which also had a few load time improvements). FPS improvement might be around 2x with Anti-Aliasing at 4x or higher. There were beta missions that saw a massive 150 to 200% improvement in performance but in both cases the authors fixed their performance issues through changes in map design or scripting. The project is now more resilient against some pathological performance issues if the map authors don't address them but no in-the-field map has any dramatic issues like these. We are future-proofed for bigger missions though. One mission "Scroll of Remembrance" still has very poor performance and the optimizations between 2.10 and 2.11 have had no effect. Likely the only way to address it is having the author or another team member examine visportals and other options to close off rendering.

The shadow map algorithm tries to jitter all the samples and increasing the softness radius causes the samples to spread out instead of being jittered on top of each other. The only way to improve this currently is to increase the quality which increases the number of samples and makes the gradient smoother over a larger area.

As I recall, when JC-Denton did the HDR-lite implementation he made the following changes: 1) Increased the default specular response and added a simulated light bounce per the Doom 3 Brilliant Highlights mod by Maha-X https://www.moddb.com/mods/brilliant-highlights 2) Added a glancing angle fresnel response 3) Added a small default specular amount to materials that have no specular so that some of the lighting effects would work better 4) Mixed in some of the diffuse color into the specular to slightly approximate radiosity effects As of 2.11, 3 and 4 are no longer applicable but 1 and 2 still happen.

I guess the best image-to-normal conversions I've seen here in the forums are via njob. I am curious about this AI thing though: https://github.com/HugoTini/DeepBump has to be installed into Blender as a plugin?

Yes, it looks like the specular might almost need to be inverted so that all the holes and divets have less specular than the broader surface areas. ( not that this will help with the blow-out effect )

Yeah, the behavior here is what we have seen since JC Denton's "HDR-Lite" shaders were introduced. Once the glancing angles amplify the light response above the rgb threshold for bloom, you get the blow-out. It looks realistic in some scenarios such as near a fireplace or torch but is not quite convincing with area lights or large bright lights whose light center is further away from the surface of the affected material. Example of the benefit of the effect ( ceiling fresnel effect ) : I guess the workaround is to darken the specular and diffuse a little further, maybe add a blend filter stage ( faked AO, etc), and maybe add an alpha channel to the specular to tone down the gloss response.

Still a bit curious, I wonder if the texture is somehow inheriting from another material in one or more of the stages ( all it would take is one of our other core materials defining a mirror or cubemap as a template image with the same name as the target DDS in the affected texture ). @AluminumHaste please post the results for r_showSurfaceInfo 1 to the thread. Thank you!

Does the tile texture have a mirror stage or cubemap stage? The glancing angle effect may be amplified by those. That said, while the Ambient Shader does not have a Fresnel effect, the light shader does so you will get some glancing angle amplification for all materials under standard lights.

Now that The Dark Mod 2.11 is out, please share any thoughts, issues, or well-wishes here. Thank you!

I will be uploading a full download package when I have time ( hopefully tonight ).

I believe this is called "Functioning as Designed". If authors override core def files in their missions, then the missions will not incorporate new changes to those core files. The authors may choose to modify the def files as described if the new blackjack helper doesn't conflict with their intended design.

We are proud to announce the release of: The Dark Mod 2.11 ! The Dark Mod 2.11 is primarily a bug-fix release. The majority of development time was dedicated to fixing or improving long-standing bugs or problem areas with the project rather than focusing on new features. That said, some of the improvements that were introduced to address these issues could very well be classified as new features in terms of the amount of changes required to bring them to life. A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include: Major gameplay improvements! For players, Stealth Score and AI alert behavior has been improved to better detect tactile contact with AI and proximity. An older TDM release introduced a grace period feature that was overly broad and made some AI ignore players that were right in front of them. This has been substantially improved so stealth scoring and AI reactions should be a lot more consistent and logical. Players will also have a new Blackjack experience with better cues about whether a blackjack attack will succeed and improvements to the way that the blackjack attack is executed. Players can more smoothly transition from climbing as the player is now permitted to be crouched during the climb. There is a new multi-loot feature which allows you to pickup multiple loot pieces by holding down the frob button! Performance Improvements! The new volumetric light feature has been improved via a new blur phase. This means that you no longer need to increase the samples to reduce or remove banding and performance should be substantially improved. Before 2.10 ( dithering and low sample count): After 2.11 ( blurred and higher default sample count ) : Soft Shadows now utilize scissors and tile-based evaluation in stencil mode so that Anti-Aliasing no longer need be applied to the entire shadow buffer. Shadow Maps have improved mipmap, LOD and texel utilization. There should be fewer artifacts and better performance. Large models are now evaluated via a BVH structure so that they can be split for lighting and culling optimizations. AI think cycles have been optimized and perform less work per-frame. GLSL programs have been rewritten to have better performance on AMD graphic cards. Included mission improvements! Mission 1: A New Job now features subtitles! Mission 2: Tears of Saint Lucia has been improved with EFX reverb and a few bug fixes! Asset fixes and additions! Dragofer has fixed hundreds of assets that were missing setup definitions or other components that would cause the console to flood with errors on TDM launch or on the launch of missions. In addition, he has added hundreds of new and old assets from both TDM team members and members of the TDM community. Improvements for Mappers! The Engine now supports Obj model format Material Shaders no longer require you to add frob stages. Frob is now auto-generated. You can still add custom frob effects to materials if preferred Missions can now include decls that override those in the core TDM without using an override file to replace the entire core file. GUI scripting has been overhauled with better syntax and error reporting Dmap precision has been increased and Dmap T-junction performance has been optimized Please see our Moddb article for the full developer blog entry: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/the-dark-mod-211-is-here To update, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder. Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don't have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.11, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!