nbohr1more

I wrote this big ole note about how this would be perfect for evaluating things that are "entirely GPU bound" like HDR then I remembered the Light Gem and promptly erased 20 minutes of ranting...

Cool stuff. I love all this period specific stuff. 50's retro, 30's retro... I can't wait to see the results. (As a Gamecube owner, I am eternally jealous of PS2 owners with their "War of the Monsters" "Destroy all Humans" ... Godzilla just didn't do it for me )...

Yeah, I was having a look at the Downloads and Addons sections for the Doom 3 game presence at Moddb and was thinking of uploading stuff there as well...

Yeah, unless you want to do some toon outline shader then maybe a green tint would help. I would love to see some giant B-Movie style, city stomping monsters on a level and some ant sized people running around (particles?) (I wish they would make a decent sequel to War of the Monsters on PS2)...

The "Internet II" is coming folks. They will use this as an example and as justification to "lock-down and censor". It's no coincidence that Intel (part of the DARPA group) has been trying to push for all application code to be signed and all CPU's to be uniquely identified and tied to a user...

It would be cool if you could post-process an old black and white CRT look and have a vintage suspended tube border:

I thought that was a benign error and just a normal part of the optimizer's task.

That has sparked my curiosity further I'm afraid... Time to read more about Boost Threads... Thanks!

Yeah, the bot idea is probably too much work given how close GPL is. That boost.thread thing OTOH, looks like it can obfuscate the threads in a function so the core executable won't even know it's calling threads: (there has to be some gotha to this though...)

I like it. It reminds me of Zaxxon for some reason... I presume it's not possible to turn all the way around yet (or that this is sorta on rails)?

That would be one of many questions... The main one being, "Can a single-threaded application running in Windows call a DLL that spawns threads then returns the result "serialized" or does the core application always need to know how many threads are invoked (or some other syntax restriction that prevents parallel threads from touching a single threaded application)? Would the above require another executable in addition to the DLL? If it is possible to do such a thing but AI path-finding is buried in the closed source portion of the code, then could you bypass this path-finding and make the AI think they are seeing a simple path by externally solving the path-finding then modifying the AI path perception with the result? If it's not possible to thread as above could you still create an external AI Bot that interacts with Doom 3's multi-player net-code and has all the capabilities of a native AI? I have always thought that SMP was currently impossible but there a things like that D3W link that are making me reconsider my assumptions. Just curiosity... Edit: This document makes it seem so tantalizingly possible... http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_37_0/doc/html/thread/thread_management.html

Rather than have the AI all sharing time-slices of the same CPU core, you might be able to grant Bots the same AI and have them run on separate CPU cores. They would access the game as if they were human players in a multi-player match. (Edit: mangled sentence fragment...)

I've been pretty well behaved these days and my foolish speculations have not veered too far into the twilight zone but I have recently become more interested in the topic of Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) and it's future implications for Id Tech 4. From my understanding, The Dark Mod uses "Boost" libraries to take advantage of an existing body of work with regard to C++ library support. When I began to delve into some of the newer Boost features I stumbled upon "Boost.Thread" which is apparently a special case "Thread spawning library". This has sparked my curiosity about whether there is any way to "farm out" threads through invoking this library or invoking another DLL that contains this library. After a little Doom3world searching, I came across an old thread where soon after Doom 3's release a modder had decided to "Fake Client Bots" http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=9940&st=0&sk=t&sd=a 1) Is this still possible? 2) Could this "Bot spawning" be pinned to different CPU cores? 3) Is it even possible to use the Boost Thread library to avoid such a cumbersome workaround? So... I'm probably so short of clues here that my progeny will be in "clue debt" long after my passing... Commence with the scolding

While searching Doom3world I stumbled across this: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=12642&view=next http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/xcode.html (Just in case this somehow slipped through the cracks...) (Hopefully this isn't outdated and useless...)

This post deserves it's own thread. (Or possibly even a Moddb article...) To me a community lead effort to create a Dark Mod campaign is the best gift and thanks that we can offer to the TDM Team for the work they do. I was thinking of the complications of a collaborative process when Sotha explained how he felt that it would lead to "too many cooks in the kitchen" for a single mission project. This was my naive fantasy about how this would work for a single large mission: 1) Two authors create small maps with a connective cave 2) When the maps are completed each author is given license to change aspects of each other's map 3) The changes are reviewed and the the agreeable ones are kept at the discretion of the original mapper for each map 4) The maps are connected then refined, tweaked etc. In my dream world pairings like Demagogue (with his knack for clever cerebral puzzles) with Jesps (with his pure universal joy-of-play scenarios), would lend missions interesting contrasts and tensions. For a campaign, the above could be six small/medium maps made into 3 mega maps. OK, I'll come down from my cloud now... But it sure would be fun to see something like this happen.

I regularly update threads at Quake3world (those guys are ROWDY if they aren't calling each other homo or telling each other to "fuck off" then it's a weird day there... One guy has an axe to grind about the window construction in Sotha's map because "the window intersects a support beam" he's holding his moddb vote till this is addressed )... Also Rage3d and Beyond3d. I would really like to post at HardOCP but they are too good to accept my yahoo web-mail as proof of my humanity... (I've been fretting over the idea of finding my old Road Runner address and installing Thunderbird but I am having trouble getting over my fear of mass-mailer exploit infections). Letting your communities know will definitely help though.

Argggh! The wait for this mission keeps getting tougher with every screen-shot

Yeah the RGB keyword method would lead to Material definition bloat unless a programmatic method were used to say "affect the RGB if this this and that"... A bit tricky. (shaderParm can be distanced checked so it's possible..) What you are describing with having an Ambient tied to a real light is just about the same concept that I was talking about for having Six projected ambient lights (with envshot textures) accompany every light to have realistic faked radiance contributors.

I am grateful for any mission made through any design philosophy that the mapper desires. I am just a devil that wishes that (for example) Bikerdude would just completely unauthorized go out and spiff-up Sotha's maps with a little extra sparkle and then just hand it back and go "what do you think?" Then have Sotha tinker with the AI patrols in a Bikerdude map as retribution. I think that the contrasts in design style sometime produce something that is better than the singular experience. I just have this John Lennon\Paul McCartney, Roger Waters\David Gilmore mentality... Again, I must stress that I love missions from both authors...

I have yet to see a mission that I've found to be awful in either appearance or game-play but I suppose the converse could be true as well. A mission author who makes fun maps could go back and tweak and refine the appearance to improve the overall experience to perfection. Perhaps if you wouldn't mind, someone super fastidious about details (like Fidcal) could go over your maps and touch-up things according to your artistic taste. That would save you the tedium of that kind of minutia and would make your missions more appealing to folks who (wrongly) judge by screen-shots... (Again, I still think your missions look fantastic so this is all relative of course ).

Yeah, I was thinking about my experiment with the training mission where some of the wall architecture had the same kind of problem and after reflecting a bit, maybe just using RGB keywords in the material definition for the more distant parts of the wall to dim the texture would be an easier solution than projecting that hard-to-align ambient texture... Maybe the new distance-based stuff in 1.03 could be exploited to manipulate RGB brightness levels based on "distance from the light source AND the player" for mapper specific areas of interest... (or maybe they have a better built-in solution anyway... )

True AH, there are real world examples where the lighting might give you some trouble distinguishing surfaces (especially in a still 2d shot). AO just reduces the number of scenarios where this occurs (and looks pretty). Sure, clever light sizing and placement will help as well. The primary objective is to make things playable so if any method makes things easier to distinguish then it is welcomed. Someone with really good knowledge of optic behavior might be irked by the inaccuracy but most folks would also find carefully crafted shading to be visually appealing. (BTW... Those after shots look great to me Fidcal )

I am not sure what other tools are available to help with this but I have taken a portion of one of Sotha's "The Knighton Manor" screens to illustrate why AO sometimes needs to be faked for sheer playability reasons. The area surrounded by the blue outline is a transition between a wall that is close and one that is recessed. Because the lighting does not occlude slightly, it is very difficult to distinguish the depth difference and the wall boundary. I can imagine scenarios where lining up an arrow properly could be problematic when this visual cue is not present. If not grime decals, perhaps SneaksieDave's fake shadows (gl minus one) approach? (And, of course, Strombine style enhancements to the ambient would help but I don't want to sound like a broken record ). Needs_Grime.zip.txt

Fidcal's "Manor Royale" images are up at Moddb: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/images