Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

cabalistic

Development Role
  • Posts

    1579
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    47

Posts posted by cabalistic

  1. Have you enabled multi-core enhancements in the options? That's the one option that would give you the most immediate jump in performance compared to older versions. But that is a 2.06 feature, so if you've had it enabled from the start, there were no other major improvements from 2.06 to 2.08.

    But yes, the GPU does matter, particularly if you enable features like soft shadows.

    • Like 1
  2. 7 minutes ago, OrbWeaver said:

    Presumably this part is the problem? If the lighting interaction shader cannot be compiled, a black screen is likely to result.

    No, this shader is only needed by an experimental feature, and even if it were enabled (which it is not if the Darkmod.cfg file was deleted), it would only affect actual ingame rendering, not the menu.

    • Thanks 1
  3. It's going slow, but steady. Since Valve finally published on OpenXR runtime, I decided that I would go the OpenXR route for the new VR version, which I think makes the most sense. Unfortunately OpenXR is, like every Khronos API before it, an absolute pain to use, particularly compared to the simplicity that is OpenVR. So it's taking longer to learn and implement :D

    • Like 2
  4. According to the gpuinfo database, the HD4800 should support OpenGL 3.3, so it should be able to run TDM 2.08 and the upcoming 2.09, at least. Chances are this is either a driver bug, or we're doing something wrong on the coding side. It would be great to find out the cause, and then perhaps we can fix or work around it.

    Unfortunately, I don't have any immediate ideas right now, will have to think about it.

  5. 5 hours ago, SuaveSteve said:

    Would it be feasible to set r_fboColorBits to 8?

    No, there is no matching format, and even if there was, it would look horrible.

    Although I wonder if what you actually mean is what r_fboColorBits 32 gives you, anyway. The bits are a total number, not per channel - so r_fboColorBits is 32 bits for RGBA, meaning 8 bits per channel. Perhaps that's what you wanted, anyway?

    • Like 1
  6. 6 hours ago, OrbWeaver said:

    It wasn't released in the last few weeks, but Left 4 Dead 2 was criticised as "racist" because a few of the zombies were black (despite the story being that the whole population had been infected, which obviously would include people of all races).

    Let's try not to mix different things together, it only muddies the argument. Far as I understand the story from Wikipedia, one guy in an article critized the game he'd never played, and the developer called him on his bullshit. Nothing was censored, games to this day still have black and female zombies, and I'm not aware that anyone then or now has been trying to raise that particular argument again? Sounds to me like a non-issue - you'll always have some people speaking nonsense, that's just par for the course.

    Quote

    The "last few weeks" thing refers to the frenzy of censorship and corporate virtue-signalling that has occurred across various types of media since the start of the BLM protests, including the removal of Magic cards, the renaming of Git branches, and the deletion of decades-old TV series. I don't know if it has yet affected video games, but given that it is affecting all kinds of other media I doubt that video games are somehow going to be immune.

    I'm inclined to agree with you on the TV series. I don't know that particular show, but even if you have legitimate issues with its contents, I'd argue that pretending it doesn't exist is a poor choice and a missed opportunity.

    For the magic cards I lack a bit of context, not knowing the history of those cards and not being a Magic player myself. The one card that the article shows I can immediately understand why it's a controversial card, although in the right context I'd also accept it as a brilliant satire. Though from what little is in the article it doesn't sound like it's satire, so...

    As for renaming technical terms: the move from Github at this particular moment in time is virtue-signalling and activism, for sure. To be fair, though, this debate has been ongoing for several years and precedes the recent protests. Some projects already switched terms a while ago after long debates. And given that it's been public and controversial debates, I don't find fault in that. Eventually, any decision taken will displease someone :) But even if you find the renaming unnecessary or downright moronic, I don't see that anything is being censored or oppressed here.

    • Like 1
  7. I'm sorry, what are you talking about? What zombie game was released in the past few weeks that sparked outrage about its zombies? TLoU has sparked plenty of outrage on different things, or did I miss something here?

    • Like 1
  8. Annoying bug. There's a subtle dependency of the order in which certain objects get deleted because they can reference each other, but it's so implicit that you basically can't see it in the code.

    I hope I fixed it, but I can't be 100% certain. Would appreciate it if you could test this executable, and let me know if you do find more crashes: https://ci.appveyor.com/api/buildjobs/q614b4ojrmat3umc/artifacts/TheDarkMod.7z

    • Like 1
  9. Then I'd suspect you're testing the wrong scene, or your other settings are too light. Setting FBO resolution to 2 (which means 4x the pixels!) takes twice as much GPU time for my RTX 2080 Ti at the Briarwood Manor opening, for example. It's already impressive that it doesn't take 4x as much time, but it *is* by far the most expensive graphical option there is.

    • Like 3
  10. Some people will try to set every graphical setting to its maximum if they have a decent system, but for something so ridiculously expensive like supersampling, that might be deceptive. I'd argue that it's an advanced setting for people who know what they're doing.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  11. I walked your test map through a graphical debugger - this has absolutely nothing to do with the vertex colors, themselves. I can comment out their contributions to the shading, and it still looks wrong. The problem stems from the vertex normals/tangents/bitangents not giving a smooth interpolation over the model with vertex colors, resulting in the underlying tris being visible in the specular term calculation.

    So, to me it looks like the model with vertex colors has gotten its vertex normals/tangents/bitangents messed up. Whether that happened during export or during load by the game, I'm not sure.

  12. Before anyone spends any significant amount of time on getting TDM to run natively on macOS again, remember that Apple has deprecated OpenGL on its platform, and the version that is supported has not been updated in a while. Since creating and maintaining a full Metal port just for the macOS platform is not feasible for this project, I'm afraid a TDM native executable may soon be impossible to do at all.

  13. I think we'll have to consider shadow maps an ongoing experimental feature.

    One significant hurdle (in my opinion) is that not all light types are implemented in shadow maps, which means that the engine will fall back to stencil for some lights and thus still generates stencil shadow volumes even when you select shadow maps. So in a way, you currently get the worst of both worlds with shadow maps :D

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  14. Nvidia's SAO isn't really specific to Nvidia cards. All the techniques it uses are in some way also present in the FidelityFX implementation or Intel's ASSAO, those just add a couple additional advanced optimizations :)

    Reasons for SAO: it was well documented, had an OpenGL sample implementation, good license, was reasonably simple to implement in a reasonable amount of code (definitely much less than the afore-mentioned ones!) and offers reasonable quality at reasonable performance - not fully state of the art, but also significantly better than some basic implementations that you often find in tutorials (and which I started with in my first attempt) :)

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  15. 47 minutes ago, lowenz said:

    I've seen it, but there's only an implementation for DX12, and given the sheer size of the shader file, that would be a monumental task to port :) Also, it's using compute shaders, which we don't (yet) support in the engine. That's also what stopped me from using Intel's ASSAO, which seems conceptually similar, and going for the older, but simpler SAO.

    • Thanks 1
  16. AO exclusively affects ambient lighting - if ambient is weak or overlaps with direct light, you won't see much of an effect. Also, a few missions have some AO already baked into the textures, reducing the difference.

    If you really want to see SSAO in action, I can recommend William Steele 5 :)

  17. Not exactly a regression, no. Gamma/brightness were completely reimplemented and are no longer changing the desktop/OS gamma, but instead handling it ingame as an image post-processing step. Unfortunately, the consequence is that it no longer affects the menu. In all likelihood we'll remove the popups for this release, as it'll take some effort to make them work with the new implementation.

×
×
  • Create New...