nbohr1more

Thanks Tels. It should be possible to replace the light model with the same model with different attributes (like noshadows) so the request to make that part of the LOD system might be excessive anyway. (I'm pretty sure Crispy's comment showed that setting noshadows to lights already has a script event too). So the options are probably there for lights... Thus far Portals are an unknown... Edit: Yes, you can already do a "set shader" script for lights: float lightstatus; void main(){ lightstatus = 1; } void changelight(){ if(lightstatus){ //this is the shader the light will change to $light_1.setShader("lights/ambientLight"); }else{ //this part is for toggling the light back to flicker , this should be the same as the shader set in the editor $light_1.setShader("lights/round_flicker2"); } //toggle lightstatus lightstatus = (lightstatus * -1) +1; } So just choose a light shader with noShadows in the Global section of the material. Alternately, I think this might work: $light_1.noShadows = true ??? From rebb's code for frame-based shadow removal: for( int i = 0; i < gameLocal.curLightEnts.Num(); ++i ) { light = static_cast< idLight * >( gameLocal.entities[ gameLocal.curLightEnts[ i ] ] ); light->renderLight.noShadows = true; light->PresentLightDefChange(); }

Of all the things you've posted with some intent to illicit humor, this one is the winner

I agree. A speed-build contest might be a good way to encourage a break. 1 month seems a little slim though... 2 months maybe? I won't spend a lot of words defending my maze idea. I have been reading Atlantis studies again and the Minoans have been on my mind so I showed my son the Minotaur and he was really excited about that monster. A maze can work as long as it's not a "hard-core maze" where everything is featureless and identical. Lots of texture variety, scripted events, broken walls, puddles, moss, etc. As long as you don't make a yellow-brick road to the goal it will still be challenging to remember land-marks and navigate. I think it could work. (But the needed variety does contradict the idea of a speed build so... )

Location System, Portals, and SEED? All these things can or do use proximity checks. Are all those proximity's managed in the same place in the code? Or is there some redundancy? Could you just add Location System spawnargs to SEED then remove the location system?

Try disabling save-game compression in your DoomConfig.cfg seta tdm_savegame_compress 0

Glad that helped. You're welcome.

Contest Concept: Minotaur's Maze Size restriction: No Time restriction: January 1st release? The idea is to have some kind of maze present in the mission with treasure in the center. A tough Guard, Were-beast, or other threat will be patrolling the maze. I was hoping for a Halloween contest this year but the prolonged contest development phase meant that that would have been back-to-back with the previous contest. If we get the concept and participants nailed down soonish, we could have a Christmas Contest Part II. Do we have any other contest ideas? I will wrap-up this thread by the end of this week (if possible). Do any Team Members wish to step forward and mandate the contest type rather than live with the (possibly sub-par) results of a community vote? The last contest was a little short on participants but most of the entries were rated very favorable compared to previous contests. I hope that more participation will happen this round and I hope that my oversight of the last contest was not a detracting factor for participation. Of course, the last contest was essentially populated by superstar mission authors (ringers). I love seeing the big-guns competing against each other but I am concerned that other authors will throw-in the towel in the face of such competition. OTOH, many of the newbies didn't bat an eye at the prospect of competing against a master dromed builder like Melan in the first contest... and the second contest had two team members in the roster. Just to informally judge the interest, who would like to participate? Are any authors out there reluctant to join if our regular master authors are in the mix? Would a separate judging for veterans verses newcomers be a way to encourage both types of participation? (Meaning, one award for newbies and one for old pro's... maybe a cross comparison if the newbies challenge the scores of the pro's... etc) Any thoughts?

To remove any installed missions: Delete the currentfm.txt file located: doom3\darkmod\currentfm.txt Your Gamex86.dll should be in: C:\Program Files\doom3\darkmod

I think it would be too expensive to have a particle entity detect it's bounds withing a room (etc) and automatically resize itself. That's probably also tougher than the challenges that Tels is working with to setup 3D entity distribution for SEED. Maybe Stgatilov can cook something up? (I think this is something that might be more practical with renderer access because you would have object coordinates rather than having to "detect" them.) Maybe more prefab sizes for particle entities?

Yes, it looked too generalized at first but then I re-read the description and realized that it was all there. I added a section on Entity Management to the performance wiki with a link to that section, along with an overdue nod to LOD and SEED which I was having trouble finding the right place to fit in.

Delete post please...

AFAIK, Sotha used Hide-Distance for his rain particles in a couple of his missions. Yes, an occlusion based approach would be better but you get what you can... for now.

After a Doom 3 Desura feature was posted one of the regulars at Moddb jumped out and all but insulted TDM's update feature but then, remarkably, our resident Doom 3 junkie Argoon stepped in and defended TDM's way. I posted a little about our conflicting agendas and also raised the point that HL2 has an updater that could conflict with Desura in similar or worse ways than TDM's. After that... the article was deleted :laugh: (Edit: It's back now... http://www.moddb.com/news/more-mods-for-doom-3-on-desura ) It's a hollow victory though. Desura is Moddb's bread n' butter and I can already tell the non-Desura mods are in the the Moddb ghetto. Exposure is low, super-users stop by to shit on news updates, etc. I've said it before, Moddb's "business model" can only last so long. Hosting those huge multi-GB mod files for Advertizing revenue is a losing game. They may eventually force mods to choose Desura or leave. I think TDM has a chance to use the launch of a "Desura version" as a promotional event. It would really be mutually beneficial for both groups. TDM is a small community with a hugely ambitious mod, Desura is a relatively small and new product trying to expand it's presence. TDM, as a "total conversion mod" defines the very maximum caliber of product that Desura could possibly offer to end-users... "a free and totally new game for owners of a commercial title". It must be a real sore spot to have the most utterly ambitious total conversion example rejecting their new deployment (but OTOH they have virtually ignored Doom 3 modding 'till now). I totally get that Greebo doesn't even want to think of removing his (baby) updater and also has concerns about providing support but Desura claims that mod support would also be handled by them. It's the developers' prerogative to chose how TDM is distributed but I fear that we will both miss big opportunities for gained exposure and, in-fact lose exposure due to where Moddb's marketing priorities now live. Now if someone can name another well-managed site that promotes Mods and hosts downloads (etc) then I'd be all for jumping ship. Right now Doom 3's second biggest mod resource is effing Filefront and it's a damn mess there. You will just as easily be bamboozled by the sight of hundreds of crappy "shader mods" which are invariably just mixes of other shader programmers' work than to find any good mods at that site. I wish Rock Paper Shotgun had a mod download section...

Here is a GDC video with one of the developers that has recently been made public. He goes over some interesting ideas for the design of a horror title: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014889/Evoking-Emotions-and-Achieving-Success

I thought perhaps the repair shop re-installed your OS (etc) to "fix" your system as they often do. If not, I would recommend making sure that no other mods are in your base directory and clear your Save Games. Finally, delete your gamex86.dll (in the darkmod directory) and let the mod rebuild it. Oh, and check your video driver version. The shop may not have reinstalled the correct video drivers.

Is a specific mission installed? Did you apply the 1.3.1 1304 patch after re-install?

Polycount has a list of cubemap editors but the easy looking ones appear to be commercial rather than freeware: http://wiki.polycount.com/CubeMap (see Software at the bottom)

Biker, If you wanna poor man's way of converting that picture to a cubemap (skybox). 1) Create a large sphere or hemisphere in DR 2) Convert that picture to a TGA texture and create a custom material with just "map" not diffusemap (etc) 3) Stretch the texture so that it looks like a skybox on the sphere (or hemisphere) 4) While in-game adjust FOV and perform an envshot 5) Now you have your 6 images for your skybox A big pain and there's probably a tool that does this better. Just a thought. BaU v2 is lookin' great!

All I can say is boiling this thread into a Moddb story will be tough. Do we have any screen-shots of Aprilsister protecting Shadowhide from unfair forum treatment? What about screens of Shadowhide writing scornful remarks with a quill on a piece of parchment that hangs from his neck while an angry mob gathers around. I know I don't have any pics of myself crying then smashing-up CD-R's with FM's that cannot be played on my weak PC.

No crashes or bugs seen yet. Windows XP SP3 32bit

I figured someone would get a chuckle out of that. Seriously, I'd hang on to this anyway. You never know what Doom 3 will be like after it goes GPL... this might not be the performance nightmare we see it as now.

Hilarious impractical suggestion of the day: Use that model for a bunch of normal maps on a lower poly version. It's the Doom 3 way. That was your hilarious impractical suggestion of the day. Tune in later for the "advice" to setup better water behavior via scripted FUNC_PENDULUM's (etc )...

EA has openly admitted that they have considered entering the console race. Making a universal platform like Steam means that they can ensure that users see EA as the place where they game rather than PC, Xbox360, PS3 (etc). If they then create another hardware platform where "Origin" lives they can call that the premium version and already have 3rd parties tied-in to it. I understand their aspirations and reasons to hitch their content Origin but they need to be cognizant about how PC gamers feel about intrusive DRM methods. Steam may not be perfect but they knew where to draw the line. EA seems to be doing what Sony did with Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD. Sony claimed that Blu-Ray was WAY more secure and piracy proof than HD-DVD and won the format war (then Blu-Ray was cracked the next day). EA are shouting from the hills "Origin is more secure than Steam! Get your games off of Steam and onto Origin so they won't be pirate-fodder. Hell, even if you aren't on Origin we will keep tabs on users who do pirate... we can provide those details to publishers if it's advantageous for our objectives..." It's all posturing to charm like-minded publishers. I hope it backfires... but the money men who run the publishers seem to ignore the negative publicity that DRM brings. They just count it as "free-loaders who don't like our anti-piracy". Bad times.

Yep. The modular expansion industry (cough Graphics market) essentially rebuilt the old Amiga\Atari computing model from the outside in. (And continues to do so... AMD are betting the farm on OpenCL). We now all have aggregate collections of different DSP's, CPU's and other specialized processors in our "PC" Desktop platforms (even if only the meek stuff on the motherboard). The sad thing is all the hardware inefficiency of all that modularity combined with all the specification overhead in the hardware and API overhead in the OS. If it were designed to like Amiga\Atari to begin with, we would have much more processing muscle at our disposal. All that said, I am looking forward to the "Haiku OS" project's completion and it's razor sharp focus on Desktop experience and performance. Ubuntu was a hopeful candidate for a truly great Open Source Desktop but they have lost their way and have moved priorities towards their Server business (and Shuttleworth's fickle GUI preferences.).

Well... At least Microsoft and Intel's "Trusted Platform Module" concept didn't take off. Otherwise your OS would be scanning your drives and tattling to Companies and Governments... Though, wait till "Windows Live" does what EA's "Origin" does and comes bundled with the OS.