nbohr1more

See even Sotha is a Thief 1/2 fan. Sotha's blunt language ("primitive" ) may sometime lead to the wrong impression but we are now clear that there was really only ever one Thief antagonist at these forums. When Bikerdude brings up Thief in any critical way, it's always T:DS and not T1\T2. The same as any hardcore Thief 1/2 fan. And even there Biker has admitted that some of the T:DS FM's are well made and rival TDM. So that should settle things.

I just downloaded the 7-zip (*.7z) file for "git-N-28849-ga82cfad" and it had an ffmpeg executable in it. So I imagine you can just look at the dates and choose the latest file with a 7z extension. It also appears that this is a CLI only tool unless there's a frontend out there that I'm not aware of (I never even knew ffmpeg was available for Windows so what do I know...)

Glad to hear your off to a good start! I have to go back and finish the A to Z myself.

I have no problem at all with the visual fidelity of Thief or Thief 2. I am pining to have the free time to play everything Thief I can get my hands on. I liked my first taste of the game long ago and now TDM has made me appreciate the game style even more. I know it seems that I have completely written-off Thief in favor of TDM but my main interest here is the wonderful ways that these developers continue to stretch the Doom 3 engine. Even if there weren't any big technical achievements here, it's truly wonderful to see TDM's art assets show-off the varied visual possibilities of Doom 3. Don't mistake these fascinations with a foolish disregard for the past. I am actually more archaic than you would realize. I am still getting over my 8-bit gaming era compulsion to play and replay missions without ever using "saves" which have always felt like a crutch to me from my arcade era background. So putting down the "old" Thief games (1998 still sounds futuristic to me ) is not really my intention. Someday, my wife will get off my back and my kids will be more self-sufficient, and I'll have more free time to dig through the old Thief Fan Missions and you'll see me raving over them. Until then I will be silent on the topic but don't mistake that silence for a disrespect of the game. Also, don't mistake me for Aidakeeley or Aprilsister. I may post like crazy around here but I have never advised that anyone abandon playing Thief fan missions in favor playing TDM. Since Aprilsister appears to be gone, the last person here that has been openly critical of the Thief 1/2 platform is Sotha. He has earned the right to be critical though. Think of it this way: You might love the sound of a Stratocaster guitar in the hands of someone like Eric Clapton. But then some new guitar sensation might come along and find ways of squeezing new sounds from a Jackson guitar. This new wunderkind might say "Stratocasters suck" because he cant get it to make the music he likes. Even though it's a matter of opinion, the new player has some validity to criticize the old Stratocaster because it can't help him fulfill his musical vision. Sotha could probably make some great Thief missions but that platform just doesn't hit the right tones for his style of music...

I wish RailGun would stop back and visit these forums soon. I really enjoy his work.

So maybe it wouldn't be so crazy to consider adding a Cubemap Light interaction shader as a special option for new missions made past yada yada version 1.0x (etc). The improved appearance and practical performance benefits of reducing light counts would be available in the interim while we wait for Doom 3 GPL and you could build-up a library of cubemaps and light shaders for the future when this is considered a ubiquitous method.

Welcome to the forums Dr. TD! You might need to back-off on the resolution and settings a bit but that Laptop should play the mod fine. The graphics chip is pretty close to an nvidia 7600.

I think the big performance hit, no matter the method, is that all that foliage is light reactive. If the leaves were blend-blend material then you could pile-up the numbers. Maybe fake some illumination via a simple low-poly underlying mesh with an alpha-ed diffuse stage to blend with?

Trees are just plain hard to get "looking good" I recall a couple of years back some university setup a cluster of 100's of PC's with AMD 64 chips to render a fully volumetric tree with branches leaves and all... It was still dog slow. I am curious about using an animated texture that scrolls to different frames that represent different view parallax positions. It could be kinda like the simulated view parallax for the oncoming cars in games like Outrun. It wouldn't be good as the real-deal but it could look better than the current choices...

I was tempted to cite Stumpy or Serpentine or Springheel or Sotha or... even SneasksieDave... but I figured it would be more obvious that I was joking if I brought-up kindly ole Solarspace as the "aggressor"

LOL.. Don't worry Johnannes. Shadowhide has already praised your work so you won't need to protect your ego from his "strong opinions".

I know! That rascal solarspace can never stop criticizing the work of TDM mission authors... ( ... ... )

Yep: Use seta image_useNormalCompression "2" and see if that helps. Edit: Ninja-ed by Sotha

@Melan: It doesn't sit well with human understanding but the general figure is to group 500 to 1000 triangles to a texture. So that OpenGL state changes don't happen every few triangles. Again, if you want more texture variety in a scene you can fool Doom 3 by creating a texture sheet that includes all the textures in a scene. This is all to help CPU performance. The other thorny issue is that if you batch too many triangles to a texture that can hit GPU too heavily. So you have to try to reach a happy medium ~~~ After again re-reading Lunaran's "Strombine" article, I have hit another clue: What I think Lunaran is saying is that EVERY light invokes a unique GL state change. The light projection textures don't batch together...? I wonder if that is the case? Does that apply to BlendLights as well? Since Sikkpin was able to make the interaction shader accept a Cubemap could you also alter it to accept multiple translated textures and thus improve batching? Hey, can lights have multiple projection images applied to them via material stages...? If so, rather than build paint a complex texture like Lunaran you could composite via stages that use the same texture... Maybe that would batch better as well?

It failed on a Malloc Error. I apologize if I've asked this before but are these values present in your DoomConfig.cfg ? seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "1" seta image_useNormalCompression "2" seta image_useAllFormats "1" seta image_useCompression "1" seta image_preload "1"

Oh God Johannes! That is FANTASTIC!

Thanks. ~~~~ Let's put it this way: If you were on a team that creates sand sculptures and you passed by a home that had a terrific snow sculpture in the front yard, would you then wonder about inviting the snow sculpture artist to join your sand sculpture team? Of course you would. Dark Radiant was designed to be an interface that is welcoming to Dromed veterans in comparison to Doom 3's editor. I can guarantee that almost any seasoned TDM fan will spend at least a few moments of idle speculation about the arrival of their favorite Thief FM author to this scene. It's not a slight against Thief, it's just a desire to see talented folks push TDM to it's furthest potential. Sure, there's a chance that the skills wont translate. Someone may be a master of distributing visuals over low-poly architecture or can paint static lighting in ways that don't fit in Doom 3's high-poly dynamic world. But that will never stop the imagination from wandering to the what-ifs of seeing an old master try out this new tool-set. If just one more TDM mapper of Fidcal, Komag, or Melan caliber is found amongst the Thief mappers then we would be tremendously fortunate. Of course we should never put-down the works of active Thief mappers. But that asking Thief mappers to try TDM is never intended as an insult to that community or their work. It is merely a natural curiosity about what TDM could be like if supported by the best of the best. Do we need any more Thief veterans? Hell no! The existing stable of authors are TERRIFIC! It would really just be an extra bonus to see any old Thief masters arrive here to boost the numbers. ~~~ As much as this mod is built on the FM tradition, I think the true goal should be to attract NEW authors. Simply scavenging from the TTLG crowd is not a fruitful way forward. We need authors who have an affinity for the subject matter but may come from different gaming backgrounds. TES is a good starting point... Are there any other realms of players that fit this affinity? I am dread to check-out World of Warcraft forums but it's certainly possible that they would like the pseudo-historical setting of TDM. What about Guild Wars, The Witcher, Dragon Age, Age of Conan, Everquest II forums? What about The Hitman series forums? ~~~ Rant (as if the above weren't one ) One place that I know that has been positive about The Dark Mod is nvnews.net. (Likely due to Doom 3 having a reputation for working better on nvidia...) I was planning on reminding them about the progress of this mod but it appears I've been flagged as someone who is unworthy to post in their forums. This is likely due to my long-standing membership at Rage3d.com and my outspoken criticism of nvidia's dirty tactics in the GPU business. I find it doubly reprehensible that nvnews has added me to the banned list for my opinions when I consider the fact that Rage3d openly accepts amongst it's ranks die-hard nvidia fans. If anyone meets the requirements to enter their little "censored walled-garden nvidia utopia" , please find the old "The Dark Mod" thread and revive it with current news. Thanks. Rant over

The last thing I read over at D3W the Light Carve reports were like: Up to 3X the number of polyons (thus map size in MB) for 10 to 50% boost in FPS. Contrary to Orbweaver's statement, the other mappers (at the time) were all advising manual splits as apposed to lightCarve but Modwiki's current word on the subject is that light counts don't matter much anymore (waste of time... just as Orbweaver stated) so just focus on shadow casting. Quake3world seems to be of the opinion that noshadows light overlaps are less important than texture batching. Still... GPU resources aren't unlimited and optimizing light counts is still an option to squeeze more prettiness for less impact. I am just curious how well some of the mappers fare against lightCarve and whether even HUGE maps still perform better if it is used. I'm pretty sure that since Baddcog has already extolled the virtues of manually splitting lights that his maps or ones that he's helped with probably wouldn't see any boosts. I would also be tickled to see some super-duper hardcore "Brush Carve" mapper that uses ALL of the techniques including "noFragment" and "discrete" materials to bend the map compiler to his\her will. Just out of curiosity: If you make brushwork Func_Static the map compiler will NEVER cut it, correct? If so, then if you carefully arrange Brushwork seams between Func_Static's you could let LightCarve cut them up without worrying about too many polygons being generated? Best of both worlds?

For old times sake I will evoke my previous devotion to "the free side": GNOME FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Apparently "Gournal" is the closest thing on that side of the fence.

That's a big 'effing castle\fortress there Biker Can't wait to visit

Looks great. A pedestal for some valuable loot?

Thanks for the update! I'm glad you've got it working and hope to see you participating in the vote for the Seasons Contest 2011. See ya 'round the forums!

Glad that worked Biker. Using a BlendLight would've been a pain because you'd need to modulate the opacity with the projection texture.

Hmm... Fog distance is calculated from the player... I wasn't sure if a portal-sky camera would count but it looks like it won't... You might need to use a BlendLight instead...

This is a portal-sky...? If so, how big is your skybox? Maybe you need to change the ShaderParm3 (fog distance) ?