nbohr1more

You have to keep feeding those Moddb folk. They are fickle. Operation "Keep posting stuff so TDM status is visible in the ranks" has been a little hampered by my IRL work and chores... More articles soon...

Bump?

Yeah... Midnight appears to have v1.04 running on his Mac so I thought that was a lock. (Any "release" article will be a big draw over at Moddb anyway but... someone needs to release a mission concurrent to this release )

Oh duh... v1.05 will have OSX support on release? A big chunk of the remaining Melan and Serpentine textures will be added?

Sorry stgatilov. I've been puzzling over that table overflow error almost since NHAT was released. The really bad thing is that I have a feeling that there may be at least two "Interaction Tables" so the overflow error might even be referring to either physics or light interactions or neither ... I just thought you might be able to cook-up some interesting uses for the data in that table if I had correctly located it's interface.

You can also make a worldspawn brush "pseudo shadow-mesh" (with any shadowed texture) inside a more ornate worldspawn object that has noshadows (ns) texture on it.

It is my understanding that if an entity has "dynamic interactions" enabled that it checks for lighting changes at every render frame. To my mind, this means that each per-stage render-pass is drawn anew every frame incurring significant overdraw penalty for every successive draw. Frame 1: Draw Base Polys Check Interaction table Draw Diffuse polys Check Interaction table Draw Texture polys (modify by normals?) Check interaction table Draw specular polys (modify by normals?) Each draw multiplying the number of vertices in the scene, every single frame. If you set an object to "noDynamicInteractions" it bakes all those draws down the first render. If it works as it appears from the code comment it should save tons of polys and texture fill. That's why it was done for the Monorail map in Doom 3 AFAIK. I know that Doom 3 has interaction culling that should help reduce that problem but I wonder how aggressive it is? If we could control when "interactions" are allowed it would be a great saving. Mostly though, since the Interaction Table is limited, setting objects to non-dynamic might free-up space in that table. I agree that too many distance checks for proximity to dynamic-lights would probably be a loss but at least it might be a good option for distant LOD objects.

ATI demonstrated film quality Image Based lighting on their 5000 series cards for one high-poly human head a year and a half ago. If that can be expanded to the amount of AI and world geometry as in a game like Assassin's Creed then by most people's definition that is real-time photo-realism. If we extrapolate 1.5x performance jump per GPU generation per year (the performance jumps have slowed due to process shrink problems lately). And we presume that a 6970 is about 2x a 5870: 2 heads (now) then 13yrs later 519 heads (probably enough with LOD and tricks to get to Assassin's Creed world density) But this is not counting the possible double revolutions of Megatexture and Mega-Voxel foreshortening this process.

Can LOD \ SEED behavior be influenced by proximity to AI rather that the player? If so, the "noDynamicInteractions" attribute could be applied universally and only when AI with dynamic light sources appear will the models be swapped to interactive lighting...

Cool. I was hoping to make some noise about the Blackjack fixes, I didn't know if they were going to be pushed from a promotional POV. It would funny to have a live-action Youtube commercial where people in normal social situations pull out a Blackjack to solve their problems. (Then end in Dark Mod blackjack footage...). Wham! (Blackjacked!) Ocn?

The neat thing is we might get a preview of what is possible with Id Tech 4 when you can modify the renderer. I know that the original Prey broke the unified shader system a little to let certain shaders be processed only in specific scenarios. (One of JC Denton, Rebb, and Sikkpin's greatest frustrations with Id tech 4 if I recall correctly). It'll be interesting if the expand on this concept and make the system even more modular. Will they keep shadow-volumes but perhaps use deferred shading? Or will they use Shadow Maps like Wolfenstein and leave the renderer alone mostly? The big thing that keeps being brought-up is Megatexture but I have a feeling that Human Head aren't as interested in that as Splash Damage are with Brink. (Or there would be more noise about Megatexture in the Prey 2 press material we've seen thus far?)

I think that 1.04's feature spree was fueled by the left-over momentum from the 1.03 crunch added to the fact that the members had a little holiday time to dig-in. I guess breaking 5 maps must've cut short the plan for 1.05 to be a longer-term release (even though 4 of them are easily made playable via a workaround ..., Link ) I still think 1.05 could've cooked a little longer and was hoping to see more pathfinding fixes or big features like new AI types. Right now the biggest new feature I can think of is the new LOD memory manager but that is a bit abstract to promote. (I will still whip-up a little frenzy at Moddb anyway ) Bugfixes are nothing to sneeze at though. It'll be cool to see long standing bugs like tracker 1330 being fixed when they were formerly considered intractable problems. Plus, I often see "bugs" where the description is like "AI should check the clock and make sure to remember to visit their friend at the tavern to discuss politics" which appear to be "fixed" by creating whole new systems. So those are really "new features" as far as I'm concerned. Viva la v1.05 !

Also... you may want to add "noDynamicInteractions" as a LOD characteristic...

...I wonder if you could hack non-unified surface interactions by updating that table....

If modwiki's description of r_useInteractionTable is correct: Then qhandle_t looks like the SDK virtual to access this Interaction Table if I read this code segment in Renderworld.h correctly: //-------------- Entity and Light Defs ----------------- // entityDefs and lightDefs are added to a given world to determine // what will be drawn for a rendered scene. Most update work is defered // until it is determined that it is actually needed for a given view. virtual qhandle_t AddEntityDef( const renderEntity_t *re ) = 0; virtual void UpdateEntityDef( qhandle_t entityHandle, const renderEntity_t *re ) = 0; virtual void FreeEntityDef( qhandle_t entityHandle ) = 0; virtual const renderEntity_t *GetRenderEntity( qhandle_t entityHandle ) const = 0; virtual qhandle_t AddLightDef( const renderLight_t *rlight ) = 0; virtual void UpdateLightDef( qhandle_t lightHandle, const renderLight_t *rlight ) = 0; virtual void FreeLightDef( qhandle_t lightHandle ) = 0; virtual const renderLight_t *GetRenderLight( qhandle_t lightHandle ) const = 0;

Understood.

Yes, I see part of the issue... For some reason the emoticon is used in different contexts depending on the nationality of the person posting... For an American the emoticon means "yeah, whatever" or is similarly dismissive or condescending. Also... that would be "lighting" rather than "lightning" (the latter being an electrical discharge from the sky... )

Melan is not the author of "The Transaction"... you are taking a swipe at the wrong FM author...

Oh he enjoyed himself. (I just wonder if lowenz actually prefers finding glitches rather than playing a perfected mission. )

This thread is highlighting a personal frustration of mine: Music categorization. Once, I was on a big kick trying to find high-pitched harmonizing glam-rock like ELO or Queen. After exhaustive research I found a list of candidates but many did not sound anything like those bands and the comparison was so tenuous that it was laughable. It took ages to distill my perfect "cheezy high-harmony 70's rock sound" track list. I blame this phenomenon on musicians who don't admit to their actual genre affiliation and music journalists who buy their "interpretation". I wish that other genres were as organized as the electronic music scene where tiny beat variations mean you are playing a different genre. Yes it's cool when a band has genre diversity but they should cop to the fact that such-and-such song is of such-and-such genre. The Beatles wouldn't have any problem admitting that "What Goes On" is a country tune. Why should I be forced to accept some band that is clearly a Pearl Jam rip-off as "inspired by Pink Floyd" or all the other crappy meaningless genre associations that bands claim to have. I guess I also had this frustration when recruiting singers from my old band. Our posters clearly labeled the type of music we intended to make yet we got every possible permutation of genre specific singers that it was silly. Now, don't get me wrong, I like music diversity and occasionally genre blending. I just HATE it when someone claims to be playing a music style that they clearly aren't. (Though I would be mildly amused by a Mariachi band that claimed to be playing System of a Down style music or a similar absurdity...)

...as if I weren't guilty enough about my limited test time with this one (I never remember to do the patented "lowenz style" beat an AI through a mattress trick... ) I think that the AI \ Mattress issue is a mod issue in general so I think Biker is off the hook for that... The sky texture issue is likely due to the ambient baking method and it's lack of available format precision. Biker is (again?), not at fault. HUD Layout may be a mod issue as well. The ability to get inside the hammer may be due to the presumption that nobody could get there and therefore it would be safe to set as nonsolid to save on performance...

I am pretty sure that Springheel was responding to the Redneck mentality that was exemplified by comments like: "That's what those Krauts get for nuking Pearl Harbor"... ...Rather than some long held antipathy toward Japan due to the magnitude of their war crimes. (Of which, Orbweaver correctly assesses "The quake victims are not responsible for their ancestors' crimes.") (Though, if the death tolls show a strong statistical concentration of WWII generals... maybe the Westboro Baptist Church folks will have something more substantial for their "evidence pile" )

I'll host it awhile from my dropbox account: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17706561/Stac160.pk4 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17706561/Stac160.pk4

Congrats Biker!

Those changes introduce image compression. If those changes reduce errors that means that the textures were too large or the scene had too many textures for the targeted hardware. 1) It could be more new players are coming into TDM and fiddling with DoomConfig.cfg before playing? 2) It could be that TDM 1.04 ships with a different DoomConfig.cfg where those are not the default? Or..., It could be that TDM 1.04 has larger textures such that old missions now stress lower-end cards more than they used to? If Sotha's suggestion is correct, it does not exclude all of my hypothesis.