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The Death of Mods has nothing to do with the momentum towards "indie" as Robert stated. The Death of Mods is more about new kids wanting to mod on new engines and finding that these "new engines" reside within games that are protected by draconian DRM. Look at the GTA IV modding scene, you essentially (and ironically?) have to break the law in order to add any of the mods to the game. I believe I read that Bulletstorm has an encrypted config file such that you need to use hacking tools to change the damn FOV values. Should these kids instead look to older engines? Yes. Unfortunately, many cannot look past the limitations of older engines and simply don't feel it's worth it to put the effort in. Then, of course, is the fact that many modders use games they have in their library (economics alone will cause modders to gravitate to what they own). The new generation "own" games that cannot be touched without violating DMCA.

Hey I think I figured out how to use that "Print Screen SysRq" key you were discussing: Nudge nudge wink wink

I'm calm... But my soup is not getting any warmer over here

Plus... My soup is cold! Not enough salt! And and and... what? No breadsticks?!?! This is a travesty! GET TO WORK!

LOL. The guards awaken behavior is not realistic but how could it be. You would need to model a real nervous system and muscles and skeleton (etc) to get close. The perception of slowness is due to the fact that we would expect a rapid and chaotic sequence of flinching then scrambling before the guard composes himself and gets off the bed. What is needed is a larger library of custom animations for awakening the guard not a speed adjustment. TDM better hire more animators with all that revenue they receive I suppose...

Thanks all. Less confusion every day

Well that settles it. I was hoping that people less mechanically precise than Lunaran could pull-off something close to his look by applying gobs of subtle ambient lights. Instead we are left with "you need to be just as razor-sharp precise as Lunaran to pull that off". I guess the only magic there is conservation of texture use which would give you a little more performance head-room to add more lights but not much. So great art-style, precision, and technical knowledge... there is no trick to make it easy. BTW blendlights can be isolated to specific materials via the spectrum keyword just like regular lights... correct?

Since I have more forum time than experiment time, I thought I would pose a couple of questions about lights with the AmbientLight keyword applied to them. When I first broached the subject, it was to understand Lunaran's "Strombine" map. I took his liberal use of Ambient Lighting to mean that these lights have much lower performance impact than standard lighting. What we know about Ambient Lights: (According to Modwiki) Now if we add our special Ambient_World to the mix: 1) Rebb's fix locates where ambient lighting should be applied 2) Either a simple brighten blend is baked into the materials at map load based on this detection 3) Or a more detailed blend which include normal mapping is baked So if we gather the above detail, we can presume that any other ambient lights will be detected and applied with the same process. Once detected, these should be baked into the ambient stage as well. Potentially meaning that an nearly unlimited number of ambient lights can be overlapped without the normal light performance penalty because they are all baked-down at map load? So, have any mappers tried overlapping numerous Ambient Lights? If this has been done, how was the performance compared to regular lights? How does a scene with lots of Ambient Lights compare to one with lots of grime decals? If the performance is acceptable, the why aren't more mappers using lots of small ambient lights for subtle radiance effects?

Added this thread to the "Performance: Essentials Must-Knows" wiki. Another related thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11530-avoiding-sudden-framerate-drops/

The only thing I could imagine would be safe to remove are the map files. I don't recall which PK4 holds them though...

I thought about that scenario a bit more and realized that the post-process (even if batched together) would still be too expensive at the LOD transition ~~~~~ After going back over the batching concept on-whole I to understand it further, ended-up right back at the Ground Zero thread at D3W. It seems the amazing screenshots of foliage they are showing are also using "noDynamicInteractions": (eg. They "cheated" )

It appears that you can gauge your batching via "r_showbatch" in Quake 4 (not possible in Doom 3) so it might be worth it to pickup that title to help diagnose portal loads. Old D3W gem: http://www.doom3worl...9&view=previous Related: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20800&view=next

After those steps you would need to install "Radeon Pro" to force Catalyst AI "off"... Thread: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33963638

It is the visportal that seals, the caulk would simply be an anchor to attach the end of the visportal into... ? If you can see through it, it is rendering the scene and thus is not performing the visportal duty... If you want an approximate of the effect of seeing through a window without rendering the scene behind the wall you could create a func_portal with a texture that approximates the scene through the window and blur-it-up real good with a window or heat-haze shader.

Your desire for continual mission releases conflicts with your aversion to small contest missions. Big missions take time to produce. If you are looking for TDM team member missions then usually that would be quite a wait as they are tied-up getting the mod working as well as they can (with as many features as they can build). However, you will be fortunate to see that Springheel is pending the release of his mission "Showing Some Respect" this summer!!! Also remember that not all FM authors are forthcoming about the missions they are building. For example a member "CampaignJunkie" posted screens of his WIP mission in 2009 but didn't return to the forums 'till late 2010 to provide updated progress (under his new id "RadiatorYang"). I think a similar span of time was the absence of Garreth who is now regularly asking editing questions regarding his mission. I have compiled a wiki of "Upcoming Fan Missions" to track these "Work In Progress" missions so you can gauge how many missions may be arriving some time in the future: http://modetwo.net/d...ng_Fan_Missions

Yeah, that makes sense now. Group your decal patches into a single FS or use SEED to selectively group 'em depending on distance... if you want to go for hardcore optimizing... Though I think more distance parameter tweaks or occlusion parameter tweaks will be needed for SEED show reasonable gains for that effort... Now this has me wondering "If seed_combine could group differently depending on which visportal view or view-direction you are seeing, then we'd probably be as low to the metal for view optimization as you could practically get with this approach..?"

I know that v1.05 is right around the corner but, again, if you don't want to wait till then to play those missions I have posted versions that play in 1.04. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/12428-crash-with-the-thieves/page__view__findpost__p__250582

One thing I've been wondering about is whether grouping func_statics is how you "batch" texture calls. Those Quake 4 mappers like Method and Lunaran keep mentioning batching in their optimization discussions and I can't for the life of me understand how you can tell Doom 3 to "process these textures together, then process this other set next" other than to group FS...? Quote from Lunaran stating that batching textures gained enough performance to run as if the polys were cut to a 3rd of the amount:

No crash in 3D mode for me... P4 3.0GHz HD4650 1GB AGP 2GB PC3200 (DDR400) XP SP3 Did you make sure to disable "Threaded Optimizations" in your nVidia drivers Fieldmedic?

From the pathfinding wiki but the warnings are in language that indicates that these are not fully confirmed issues...

Mortem Desino's upcoming mission is using portions of the community map: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/10003-so-what-are-you-working-on-right-now/page__view__findpost__p__229285

I recall that Sotha found that if monsterclip intersects with any visportal anywhere in your map the AI will not pathfind correctly. Other than that... make sure some world-spawn is where the AI need to traverse the visportal? (Caulk wells, etc?)

THANKS! Thanks for the update Demagogue. Please don't hasten the muse if she isn't ready to dance. I just like keeping tabs on where my favorite authors stand. Sotha is perfect because he posts progress percentages I'll bump this thread in a couple of months if I succumb to this compulsion again

Melan and Biker's RTTC v2 currently holds my top spot for released missions... Demagogue's "Patently Dangerous" is a very close second. (My top list is very internally contentious with my mood changing daily... I will probably say RailGun's "Trapped!" is my fave tomorrow...) All the best missions have so many great qualities it's difficult to play favorites... Do you love chocolate mousse more or gourmet carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting more?

Hey Demagogue! I recall a couple of months ago you mentioned that you have a mobile computer capable of a little DR editing. Have you had a chance to build anything substantial? Have you been too busy? Are you afraid you won't live-up to your first blockbuster mission? Some of us are filled with idle imagination and wish to fill it with hopes of a new Demagogue mission, should we continue this line of futile speculation or move-on to speculate about a new RailGun mission (etc)? Nag, nag, nag, nag, etc...