Hugo Lobo
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Posts posted by Hugo Lobo
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Hi all!
First of all, since the "News and Announcements" section is read only, let me congratulate all Dark Mod team for keeping improving this amazing game. You are all incredible and, if i may, a little bit crazy to ster on Id Tech 4 c++ code.
Now for the question. It looks like TDM Updater is still not picking the new version. Looking a little bit closer, i think the mirror list seems not to be working (any of them), because the tdm_version_info.txt content does not have the package data (versions, crc, file size) but instead have 404 not found messages. I tried changing the mirror priority and all of them seem to return the same.
So my question is, you are aware of the problem? If so, do you have any estimation of when will we able to update the game.
Thank you in advance.
EDIT: nevermind... tdm_update.exe is deprecated. We should use the new installer.
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On 2/4/2021 at 12:23 PM, Anderson said:
Yes, have mercy on your eyes. They don't grow back.
As HMart's video explains, you are probably confusing CRT monitors with CRT TV's. They are not the same. Playing console on a CRT TV was indeed a pain. A CRT PC monitor is another this all together. Put a standard flat 17'' CRT Monitor side with a 17'' LCD and the CRT will probably win terms of refresh ratio, resolution (multiple resolutions vs 1 native resolution) and colors. -
16 hours ago, nbohr1more said:
We are sorta at a middle point between cutting edge games that use dynamic resolution scaling and traditional resolution management.
(Someday) What I would want is a holy grail option of being able to use "integer scaling" so that you can have crisp square pixels for lower FBO resolutions but with AA pixels also scaled to exact integer ratio pixels. It should make lower FBO resolutions look native resolution on a low resolution large LCD screen.
Of course you could also do what some modern emulators do and have off-kilter (non ratio) block-pixels use sub-pixel filtering at the block-pixel boundaries to ensure a mostly crisp look and smooth motion too. (Ultra holy grail )
That would be the ultimate solution and it is gaining popularity in the gaming community who have been pushing to make it available on the driver side but there is obviously a conflict of interest there. GPU sellers differentiate their tiers of hardware by what resolution they render to. If players can easily choose a lower resolution and get still get a crisp image it lowers the incentive to upgrade to the next hardware tier. It will take one vendor giving in and offering it to break the stalemate.
Details about the current state of things:
Yeah, integer scaling is a great way to play old games on full screen without blurry images, but you can only scale up a window whose resolution (width and height) is at least half the resolution of your screen. For instance, my native resolution is 1680x1050. I can scale games that work on 640x480 but not games that work at 800x600 or higher.
I miss the days when we all had a CRT's. Since they support natively multiple resolutions, we had no issues with this back then. It's ironic. We are in 2021 and still have to find software workarounds to do this.
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New version 2021.01.08
* Around 170Mb of textures processed
- Some tree barks enhanced
- Stucco change
- more enhancements on doors, paint paper, fire places, ground textures, curtains
- .. and much more
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Amazing FM! I actually got 3 phases while playing it.
Phase 1 - holy crap! This is amazing! Look at how many places i can go and how many ways i can do it! Look at this gigantic map!Phase 2 - ho no! Another door that can be opened! And another window... I can't keep track of it all. This FM has too many divergent paths. I hope this door can't be opened. Crap.. it will open. I will be lost and never finish this FM.
Phase 3 - oh yeah! I'm starting to understand this map. This city is mine!
So, to sum it all, this was quite an experience. One of those FM that will keep on your mind forever. As far as i know, this IS the new gold standard for FM's of this category.
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16 hours ago, nbohr1more said:
See here:
for a reason why we might "not" want to bump the VRAM budget for all texture assets...
Thanks for the reference nbohr1more. I just want to add that although probably not related, we have more of a problem on the post processing optimizations than maybe a texture size one. I give you an example. On the current version of TDM, turning anti aliasing ON will put my machine on hits knees. I actually have to disable the game AA and use Reshade to add SMAA. No performance loss with this method. My machine is capable on running Witcher 3 with almost everything on maximum, Deus Ex MD with some things on max and other on medium and Dishonored 1 and 2 on max.
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18 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:
Judging from the screenshots, I honestly feel this one should be merged into vanilla TDM and replace the originals, or at least some of the textures in it should. Occasional low-res textures are an annoyance and such a patch is super welcome IMHO. I'm kind of afraid to try it because I might get too used to it and not want to give it up if an update ever breaks them
Thank you for your kind words MirceaKitsune. Have fun with the mod! And don't be afraid of using it. It is not likely that some future version would break it. That said, i am monitoring the new pk4 versions every time a new version of the game comes out, so we don't get funny stuff while playing.
On a side note, after some months playing other things, i returned to TDM and so my quest to enhance more textures. I will upload a new version with more screenshots in a near future.
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Just finished this mission. What started to be a below average heist mission turned to have a really nice and unexpected finale. I really like games and movies that makes you think and wonder even after we finished them. This FM was one of them.
SpoilerAlthough the theory that we live in a simulated reality is nothing new, this narrative was presented in a refreshing way here.
Thanks for making this MirceaKitsune! I really hope that this is the first of many FM's.
EDIT: I just want to add that i had some fps drops outside, when facing the mansion. I suppose that it was because of the number of NPC's, because making a "g_stopTime 1" using the console made the issue almost unnoticeable.
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I just finished it and i must say that this is an amazing mod. The mod transpires professionalism. audio, music, attention to detail on building the environment. It was a pleasure playing it. The only thing that makes me sad is that since 2017 we don't have another Volta mission.
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Looks like we have a demo now. And a preview.
Bottom of line, its a good homage to T1 and T2, but there are things missing in order to attract the thief community in a sustained way. At the moment there is no pacifist game play (the only option is to kill everything). Also, there is no story, no character building and of course, no mission editor. But then again, this is still a demo and no release date is announced.
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I just found a nice 40 minutes documentary by GVMERS, released 2 April, about Thief history and thief like games. It's called The Rise and Fall of Thief, and you can watch it here. Yes, it's considered old news by internet standards (
10 days1 month old) but i thought that if you are like me and consume everything thief related, you would like to know about it.-
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18 hours ago, LDAsh said:
Yeah, there are some emulators that already attempt to do this kind of stuff with textures, but the results are never pretty when weighed against the performance hit. It's interesting to toy with, but usually get turned off for long serious play sessions.
It's a matter of personal taste. I use upscaling filters all the time on dosbox and some console emulators - mostly xbrz - and i am happy with it.
18 hours ago, LDAsh said:A human being is always going to bring better and more significant details into the scene than a computer program ever can. A human already has all of the filters and effects the computer can use, and infinitely more. The real question is speed, time and money - that's the only reason for considering these approaches.
Are you sure about this? Search for "ai created paintings" or "ai created textures" and you will be surprised.
Also, it's a fact that more and more, artists (be it texture artists, game developers, ....) will rely on AI to make their works. For instance, the process of creating a game area (lets say a city and its details) manually is very time consuming. AI is helping with it.
18 hours ago, LDAsh said:Here's a comparison of Gigapixel in use, it's basically like using a median filter and sharpen/soften combination, much like the HQ*X/'SuperEagle' filters you can find in modern emulators, which FYI many people think makes games look ugly:-
https://media.indiedb.com/images/downloads/1/191/190440/F.png
Judge for yourself, if it's worth 4X the video memory demand or not, compared to what dedicated artists could do with the same demands. Once again, quite a huff made over AI that doesn't pay off on closer inspection quite as much as the runaway imagination of it. The thing is - why not batch-process every texture in the game, if humans are never going to do it.Ai neural network upscaling has little to do with "median filter and sharpen/soften combination" or HQ*X/'SuperEagle scaling algorithms. Please check you facts. I could post a link or two about the matter, but you can easily google it. But i agree with you about that screenshot. That is really bad upscaling right there. Be it because of the software itsef, the upscaling algorithm or that the machine did not have yet time to learn how it should upscale a particular texture material, i don't know. I never used Gigapixel.
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56 minutes ago, LDAsh said:
I see a future of a lot of wasted HDD space for very little discernible improvement. We already have texture filtering since ~1997, any software that attempts to take those sharp original texels and blur them into each other is doing so in the face of that. That's what folks need to understand. Any 'upscaling' is inevitably going to take artistic effort and the same skills as it did to originally create the asset.
There will be a time in the near future that you will not need to AI upscale textures manually. The engine will do it for you while playing. Currently, the process is too heavy and slow for this to happen, but give some some years and it will become common.
When you say "Any 'upscaling' is inevitably going to take artistic effort and the same skills as it did to originally create the asset. " i suppose you are talking about human effort? It this is the case, my opinion is that to make a statement like that, you first have to understand what art is and if it can be replicated by computers. The answer is yes, of course. We already know this. Specially because "art" is such a subjective thing.
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8 hours ago, Springheel said:
Some of them seem like they've been upscaled to 2048x2048, which certainly will look better, but will do a number on loading and performance.
That is always in my mind when i change some texture with another (bigger) one. Specially if it reaches 2048x2048 or more. I didn't notice any performance issues with them, but i didn't benchmark it. From my experience on multiple FMs, the lags that are there also happen with the original textures and result from the lighting system, not from textures. My rule is simple: if i don't notice performance issues and the new texture quality is noticeable ingame compared to the original one, i allow it to be 2048x2048. You can see one example in the guard screenshot.
6 hours ago, VanishedOne said:By displacement, do you mean heightmaps (the ones with filenames ending _h that get invoked with heightmap() to convert them to normal maps at runtime)? If the engine supports displacement mapping that definitely passed me by.
I stand corrected and will update the post. There is no displacement maps in this mod. Only normal and spec maps.
5 hours ago, peter_spy said:Btw. I hope you remember that normalmap is not a bitmap in traditional sense, so you can't apply traditional 2d image techniques to it (e.g. sharpening).
It's certainly not advisable
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Thank you @Dragofer for you tip. I didn't know that. I will see if i can make them work that way and re-upload the modded pk4 files.
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Thank you @freyk! Tree reasons i did not offer the pk4 files:
- the download size would be much bigger
- sharing as i did will allow you to see what was exactly changed by me
- i think it is not fair to the original texture authors (or legal, probably?) to just replace the original textures with my textures and just deliver the modded pk4 files
About the 7zip files... its open source and pretty much everybody can use it (windows, linux, mac, ...). But i will take that in consideration in the future.
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Hi @peter_spy!
Please note that i never said that this was mean to replace (upgrade) the original textures and as you surely read from my post, this was just for fun, not a professional work. I just shared this because i think it's better to share than to be only on my disk forever. So, about the workflow, more that what i already pointed in "What changed and how", i really can give you more.
About the screenshots you mentioned, I personally like the my versions better but this is a matter of taste (you can go as technical as you like about it, but in the end, its always a matter of taste). So if you want, install it and see the real differences (like i said, screenshots are screenshots), Another thing is that as you know, the textures are shared by multiple meshes and so, what looks perfect in one mesh could not look that good in another. Your are right about the marble texture though. My idea was to have a cleaner one (the file name is called "smooth_marble_greenish.dds" for god sakes... its supposed to be smooth
).
About the floor you mentioned, the issue is that it does not use the original or an upscaled version of the normal map, but a new one. You can check the old vs new floor here. Why i did not use the original or an upscaled version of it? Because of this. I really don't think that is how a wooden floor should look like in the real world. Too much details.. it looks like plastic to me.
Again, thank you for your reply and feedback peter_spy.
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- Popular Post
- Popular Post
After playing various Dark Mod FM’s, I become hooked to the game, like I was with Thief (and its FM’s). So, like I do to all games I love, I tried to find ways to improve it. Since my first contact with DM and after playing T1 and T2 with the fantastic “HD Mod”, it became apparent that graphically, TDM struck me strange. Of course, it is clearly a BIG improvement over T3 and it’s not worse then Thief 2014 -- if you remove all those post processing effects, the textures are actually very bad for today standards – but it could be a little bit better. So I started to change a texture here, a texture there, whenever I found a texture that could be improved.
Initially, I made this for my own amusement, while i was playing, but as the changes increased, I started to think I it would only be fair to share it with the community.
As a note, I really appreciate the amount of work done by the contributors to TDM. It’s amazing how an open source project of a game whose genre is unfortunately condemned to target a niche player base could attract so many talented people to work together and create what essentially is the Thief 4 we never had. So this is in no way a mean to disrespect the contributors and their work.
What changed and how
Currently, around 530 files were changed. The changes end up in one of the following categories:
NOTE: “texture quality” noted below is subjective and represents only my point of view. Again, It is in no way a mean of disrespect for the original author and its work.
- The texture is good but is in a low resolution – upscale it using AI image enhancement methods.
- The texture is poor and low res, with poor AI upscale results – try to replace it using various free PBR or raw Image sources (1) or create my own. If necessary, adjust the image using (colors, saturation, contrast, …)
- The texture has a good resolution and its not quite good but can be improved – improve using gimp (ex: on textures with bur, use sharpen, noise reduction or/and other features) (2)
- The texture depicts an horrible stew – change it to a decent and delicious stew, because my Portuguese roots forced me to do it.
Additionally, specular and normal maps were added to some textures.
(1) Free textures and PBR sites already discussed on this forum (texturehaven.com, 3dtextures.me, cc0textures.com and so on).
(2) Finding the right texture is not always easy. I always tried to follow the same “feel” and appearance of the original image, but i confess that this is not always the case. Again, very subjective.New version 2021.01.08
* Around 170Mb of textures processed
- Some tree barks enhanced
- Stucco change
- more enhancements on doors, paint paper, fire places, ground textures, curtains
- .. and much more
Screenshots and Comparisons
It’s obviously undoable to show the comparison for all changed textures, so keep in mind that the following screenshots are just a very small example of the whole project. Also, very important, keep in mind that there is so much you can do with screenshots and in game the differences are much more clear than what is shown below.
Sir Talbot's Collateral
https://imgsli.com/MTI2NDE
https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzY
https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzc
https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzg
https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzk
https://imgsli.com/MTI2NDA
WS3: Cleighmoor
https://imgsli.com/MTI1OTEWS1: In the North
https://imgsli.com/MTI2MTY
https://imgsli.com/MTI2MTcWS2: Home Again
https://imgsli.com/MTI2MjM
https://imgsli.com/MTI2MjQ
https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjc
https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjg
https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjk
https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzE
https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzMNew (version 2021.01.08)
Briarwood Manor
https://imgsli.com/MzUwNDY
https://imgsli.com/MzUwNDg
https://imgsli.com/MzUwNTE
https://imgsli.com/MzUwNjcThe Builder's Influence
https://imgsli.com/MzUxNjM
https://imgsli.com/MzUxNjQNo honor among thieves: forest
https://imgsli.com/MzU0ODE
https://imgsli.com/MzU1NTQ
https://imgsli.com/MzU1NTkHow to install
1) download the pk4 file from here
2) drop it on your TDM game folder (where all the other pk4 files are)
3) Play!
Uninstall
Just remove z_TDM_HD.pk4 file from your TDM install folder.
DisclaimerIf you are a purist, please don’t use this texture mod. Don’t bash it for not being “exactly the same as the original ones but hires”.
If you find some texture that is copyrighted, please let me know and i will replace it.
Fell free to suggest changes, but please don't make requests. Understand that i am doing this while playing and if i start feeling that i'm working instead, i will probably start to loose my interest.
PS: I really don't know if this is the right thread to make this post. Let me know if i need to change it to another thread.
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I just finished this FM and i am quite impressed. The level design is very good (although sometimes confusing -- that is, until you get used to it) and after i finished this FM i was amazed by how big it was.
Spoilerspecially considering that the whole level is just one house.
For me, a good FM should have a good amount of lore (i really like to read) and this FM didn't disappoint me. Sure, most of it was not important to finish the game, but it is what makes a FM a good thief game.
I also appreciated that touch at the end of the mission - you don't fell an abrupt end with the default (and immersion breaker) "mission completed" screen and gives us a smoother experience.
So i really enjoyed it and i must thank grayman for the time i spend on it.Next stop: WS2.
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I really liked this FM. The music was well chosen and contributed to the dread and sadness feeling of the mission. The areas were always great to look at and that denotes an attention to detail that sometimes is lacking on other FM's.
The only improvements that i noticed that could be done, at least in my opinion, are in the following two areas:
1) the number of npc's should be higher. Although the ambient was done well, I personally never felt a sense of danger through the mission.
2) maybe a more elaborated background and lore couldn't hurt, both by extending the text of current books/scrolls and by adding new ones.
On a side note, i don't know how it was done, but for the size of the map, the loading time of this FM was very fast, compared other FM's of the same size. And that is always a plus.
Thank you for a work well done, Jesps!
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The Dark Mod 2.10 Availability
in The Dark Mod
Posted
Thank you for the info @thebigh. I figured that out meanwhile. We really could use this information on the release log. I could be wrong, but i found no info about this. I edited my original post with this information, so it could help other people.