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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Mixed in some of the diffuse color into the specular to slightly approximate radiosity effects As of 2.11, 3 and 4 are no longer applicable but 1 and 2 still happen.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!

It's pretty bizarre to think that my GPU has more memory than the 32-bit limit can recognize.

I just tested now. A few interesting results: I was able to load all the largest missions ( Painter's Wife, Iris, Penny Dreadful 3, BCD, NHAT v4 , Northdale 1, Written in Stone ) Some of the larger missions would not render shadows in Shadow Map mode if you had a higher r_shadowMapSize value ( resolution ) than the default 1024. Painter's Wife required you to drop to r_shadowMapSize 512 for shadow map mode. Many missions loaded with AAS32 out-of-date errors at the start. Missions had AI that were properly pathing but there was an increased prevalence of AI going in circles in tight areas. Not sure how valid this is because I have a 64-bit CPU and OS so Linux may be compensating somehow when the 32-bit memory limit is reached and allowing these monster missions to load? Edit: Tested the 32-bit Windows executable under Wine. I was able load BCD with no issue and ran fine. Iris loaded but had very low FPS ( 5FPS or less ) at the start and remained pretty unstable FPS wise 20 to 40FPS. Painter's Wife provoked an emulated Windows Crash on load.

I added the improved EFX reverb changes to the mission in the mission database. I was hoping to get some final feedback, but the existing EFX was clearly "not great" so this should substantially improve things.

I believe the plan was to first get better reflections working then move towards better surface shading and finally incorporate the probes into the ambient_world ( aka probe GI ). Hard to say but it may just be easier to examine what can be ported from RBDoom3BFG and add the full feature-set in one big change. If someone wanted to examine the shaders from that project and try to make them comply with our design requirements ( OpenGL GLSL 3.3 ) that would make it easier to begin such an evaluation. For non-team members, I think that only hmart, jonri, and totallytubular ( maybe Filizitas ?) have the skill-set to do this type of thing so it will probably wait until a team member has time to begin experimenting.

I don't know where you came to the conclusion that any "plan" involved manual probe placement? If you are discussing a "probe system" you are naturally discussing some sort of automated spawning mechanism and most likely a jittered grid. RBDoom3BFG does roughly what you are describing, auto generated grids of probes. In concept, we would probably incorporate probe generation into dmap but it's certainly possible to also allow mappers to manually place probes. All this has been true of probe systems going back to (arguably) the first probe system "precomputed radiance transfer" in HL2. TDM's cubemap based ambients already allow manual placement but notably are deficient in comparison to a proper probe system and have been this way since v2.05.

The light def that datiswous identified is now in the mission database for this mission. Thanks again!

While using this to add professional voice-actors to missions is likely illegal, it may be worthwhile to see whether our own voice-actors might be OK with FM authors using this if they are not available to offer their services. For example, ERH+ has a WIP mission "Seed of the Loadstar" where he is using voice-to-text for the cinematic sequence. Rather than waiting for voice-actors to have time to assist, it might be easier to use this AI tool. Even if just for beta-testing the concept to see how it sounds in mission. @New Horizon @redleaf @Norbert @AndrosTheOxen @Deadlove @Lux @Mollyness @Goldwell @Goldchocobo @Mortem Desino @ocn @BrokenArts @Narrator @Noelker @V-Man339 would anyone in the voice-acting group allow mission authors or the TDM team to use AI to generate new vocal lines for missions or new AI characters (etc)? Does anyone strongly object to any AI usage even for beta-testing? If we get some responses we can add the voice-actor's stances to the wiki: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Voice_actors

The mission database has been updated with a new version that includes subtitles courtesy of datiswous! Thank you!

Well, we work on this project for players so I wouldn't be so quick to discount your own input. We probably need more player input because forum posters are really atypical people. I recall someone once stating that over 80% of a forum population are lurkers who just observe the discussions of others.

We will gladly accept new ambient music! Thank you! As mentioned elsewhere, Mission 1: A New Job and Mission 2: Tears of Saint Lucia are our pack-in missions and it might be nice to have a custom tailored score for them too.

We currently have, "myself", stgatilov, dragofer, greebo, demagogue, STiFU internally coordinating. Thus far I have been fielding all questions but others are free to join. Epifire and New Horizon were also planning on joining. Non-TDM members are also free to join in and answer things that are well known to regular players and the community. Hopefully we won't need to do too much moderation or correction if someone posts something inaccurate about the project.

Thank you! The mission database has been updated with this fix.