lost_soul

"Thief 1/Gold: 1" *starts crying* Have there been more new TDM mappers this year? It is cool to see a comparison between TDM and T2.

I don't have access to statistics, but I would say TDM is doing pretty well. We're seeing more new faces around here (and new mappers!) than we did back in the TDM 1.02 days. Not to be insulting, but I have always thought that TDM 1.02 may have put some folks off due to some of the bugs and the long time before 1.03 came out. The mod is a polished product now with lots of entertainment thanks to the large amount of missions and the TDM team which kept working on it all this time. Moreover, we (finally!) have the Doom 3 source code.

I would be happy to hang out via TeamSpeak, Skype, or some other service.

The funny thing is, the prices on the Phenom 2 chips are going up now. That's a pretty dumb move. One could justify a Phenom 2 because the prices were so low, but now you might as well get an I5 instead.

It seems the old bug where performance is sometimes bad when you sometimes start a mission still exists. I loaded up House of Theo on my GT440 system and the FPS was about 15-20 at the start. Then I reloaded it with the exact same settings and it was perfectly smooth (40 FPS plus).

Well, I like this mission, as my votes show. The tavern was my favorite part. I didn't encounter any lock-ups or abnormalities. Thanks for another fun (but short) mission Bikerdude, and thanks for helping others get the most out of their missions too. Hopefully you don't get discouraged from mission making because of a couple bad reviews. I knew this was a speed build and my ratings reflect that. BTW I went back in the tavern and caused all sorts of trouble. I even got the guards to start throwing rocks at the wench and other people sitting at the table. lol If you get one of the guards to attack you and then his rock hits another one, it will cause them to fight. It reminded me of causing havoc in Deus Ex all those years ago.

This is pretty neat. Haven't completed it yet, but... Also, it is nice to see some new mappers. Thanks!

Not really. I've seen fan-made AI that is superior to the official AI in some games. The players know what they want in an opponent, and (given the coding skill) they can create it.

One area where things still need to improve is efficiency. If I'm sitting here listening to music and reading articles on-line, I don't really need SIX CPU cores running simultaneously. This is one area where Intel has AMD beat. I like to have a computer on 24/7 for doing a variety of tasks and sometimes I choose my netbook because it doesn't have a 600 watt PSU and it won't use much energy at all. This is where software efficiency and optimization is key. I worked on someone's Athlon 64 4xxx system (1 GB RAM) today and you know what? The Athlon 64 3400+ I was given last week for free with a GB of memory runs circles around it. The one I was given has XP, the one I worked on today had Vista. I'm interested in a Fusion netbook. There was a video on Youtube of an AMD netbook playing Doom 3 at 640x480. In a year or two, we should see netbooks that can play TDM. That will be when I abandon my Atom N270 based one. I'll stick to playing Q3a and GLQuake on that one for now.

I too have been reading about Bulldozer. AMD is important for budget-minded people like me, because we can get a Phenom 2 955 for $115, or a 1100t for $170. Problem is, the benchmarks on Bulldozer failed to set the world on fire. It even fell behind the 1100t in a few benchmarks. This is a problem if they expect people to spend 60-70% more for the new chip. Sadly, it isn't the 90s anymore and we aren't seeing massive jumps in CPU performance with every new architecture. Those were great times. I remember playing Descent on a 386 40 and then a 486DX2 machine for example and being blown away by the difference. My backup machine Phenom 2 955) compiled Doom 3 in about 45 seconds. I was pretty impressed with that, because I was expecting it to take 5 minutes or so.

Thanks for the update folks. I particularly like the new cloth sounds and sword sounds. The AIs now seem more alive and alert than ever. Can someone with limited resources (2GB RAM) report if the re-compressed textures helped out performance for you?

Well, there is that GLSL patch someone posted above that would make shadows more efficient. Everyone has GLSL support now, unless you're playing on a Geforce 4 (2002 era, not modern Geforce-4 named cards). In my experience, the two performance stealing factors are AI and shadows. Turn these off (killmonsters, r_shadows 0) and the game flies on old hardware. Maybe the OSS community will tackle the shadows and the TDM team can tackle the AI? Even moving AI to another thread on a dual-core would probably be a huge improvement. I wonder how many people are still using single-core systems? The Steam survey would probably tell.

If I had millions of dollars, I would hire the devs to work on the mod full time. Also, I tried to compile Doom 3 with that patch someone posted above that would use GLSL to render shadows. It failed somewhere in draw_common.cpp, which is what I edited. I probably did it wrong. I just took out the section mentioning the workaround and stuck the code from the post at Inside3d in there.

Update: TDM does not crash if I set my sound to OSS instead of ALSA when I re-open the menu from within an FM. This must mean it is a sound-related bug. The console prints errors about ALSA.

What if the keyboard was one of those GUI surfaces and then the player could actually play it? It is just one of those crazy ideas in the back of my head. We could have one piano sound that gets pitch-shifted as he hits toward the right of the keys... lol This would open up yet more possibilities, like making the player play specific notes to open secret doors and the like. Thoughts?

and now someone can implement reverberation/advanced audio effects without requiring proprietary hardware or drivers. The Unreal 1 engine did this to great effect. You could hear sounds bouncing off the mountains in the distance and it was really awesome with headphones on.

Just to set the record straight, I didn't find any guards because I had previously ran killmonsters on that save game in the past with the original D3 to check out the map. It wasn't like the guards failed to show up in the open source version of D3, which is what my post kinda sounded like. **updated* Tested again with a fresh mission load. The guards walk around and patrol just fine, but the game still died a horrible death when I pressed esc to bring up the menu. I had to switch to a virtual terminal to kill it because in Linux you can't alt-tab out of games (dumb!). As for performance, it still ran okay on my GT440 at 1280x1024 with 2xaa/af. We need someone with a real old card like a Geforce 7xxx to try it. I may do this next time I go to my mom's place and report back. ... but it is great to see the full vision of this mod come to pass. We now have the content AND the source code to create a stealth game where the only limitation is the abilities of the FM author. The taffer community is no longer stuck with only making maps/script edits to a closed technology! Congratulations and thanks to everyone who has made this happen.

I compiled it on Debian. Doom 3 works great, but TDM not so much. TDM loads up (St. Alban's Cathedral). I was able to walk around and stuff. I didn't find any guards. The game hard locked though when I pressed exc to bring up the menu.

possible, but a long way off. There will likely be big performance improvements and bug fixes first.

The link doesn't work for me. I'm guessing their servers are/have gotten slammed by a massive amount of requests.

I've actually been in a car with someone who was texting... and also driving. It boggles the mind that someone could be *that* stupid. and my father has had his THIRD DUI. Face it, some people should just be banned from driving all together. They should get one chance, and if they do something like either of the above again, they should have to take public transportation for the rest of their lives. It is for everyone's benefit (including theirs).

@PranQster: Thanks, I appreciate the effort... but I don't want to deal with ap-specific hacks for audio. I play everything from Quake 1 to TDM, to UT2004 and other games in Wine. I also do some audio recording/editing from time to time.

What's even worse is that Gnome 3 requires PulseAudio. I tried to re-install gnome 3. I was ready to give it a chance.. but I play games and I will not deal with running "pasuspender" all the time or suffering laggy audio. If I recall correctly, the PA developer even said it wasn't adequate for professional use. Does this mean that professionals are unable to use Gnome 3? Are there any distros that still just use the last version of Gnome 2.32? I'm considering just going back to Windows now that people are intentionally breaking things on this side.