Wellingtoncrab

@The Black ArrowThanks for playing! This mission was ultimately a collaboration in memory of Grayman, which I was privileged to help with, so I don't focus much on the "who did what" aspects, as everyone involved contributed a lot to what you played. I do want to mention a huge contributor to this mission who was Amadeus. You can see his work across the entire mission, so if you liked this mission and you haven't played A Good Neighbor or Eye on the Prize you should check them out - as they are examples of some the best the game has to offer. Thanks again!

@The Black Arrow Thanks for playing! I am glad you came away enjoying your time with it. Regarding your questions about the story, my advice to players is always just to trust your intuition about it. I do have some hints for you though: Again thanks for taking the time to play my mission - it means a lot to me!

Imo not sure this is an improvement in terms of the metallic reflections, or why it would be desirable to have less variation and more resolution in what will ultimately be an abstraction? But always happy to have another cubemap to mess around with.

They would - just edit the skull loot def to point at your new skin and then every instance of the skull loot entity in every map will have the new material by default without having to edit the generic material. (unless the mapper has already edited this - then presumably wouldn’t want to overwrite it anyway)

Since the skull is a loot item and has a def you could probably just make a new material and specify a new skin for it? I never was able to finish these polyhaven conversions as they were pretty looking outside of PBR, but with this blend mode they still need some work but are a lot closer!

Yes I used a mask color and a custom mask ahead of the cubemap stage on many "metallic" assets, or ones with mixed materials, so they still provide some sense of reflectivity without a light to interact with the specular. I think this still work well for duller metals such a coin - but I will definitely be using your polished metal trick to update some of the ingots.

@Arcturus wow this blend gl_dst_color, gl_src_color blend mode on the cubemaps is like magic. Especially in darker scenes where it was very hard to get across any kind of metalness effect - this seems to have just the right amount of ambient reflectivity. Great find!

@Arcturus In my experience it doesn't actually work fine. Heads mostly work - but with few exceptions the bodies don't usually import correctly. I am aware of the distortion you see in a lot of models t-poses, but even after you import into blender and you move the models to their af_pose or an animation frame they will still usually have all kinds of distorted/displaced vertices and will still have these if you export them back to the game.

Thanks for posting these! Most of the md5s get completely scrambled and destroyed when you try to import them using every blender plugin and version I have tried - so even if you are not planning on doing an animations it's very helpful to have blend files of some character models which are completely intact - as well as nice shading and UVs to boot. How did you actually manage to get these to import into Blender without breaking?

These days a height map is relatively straightforward to derive from a normal map using pretty much any node based material software (there is usually a dedicated node for this). Provided the result is even physically correct, in my limited experience this will not necessarily be suitable to use as a displacement map in the game right away. There will be a lot of high frequency detail which give a noisy result (this kind of detail in a texture remains better handled by the normal map) and the black/white values will need to be adjusted to get both a good displacement effect in the game AND retain any practical versatility in the texture itself (for all the reasons I outlined above). The greater a proportion of the displacement map you get to approaching a value of 1 (white) while still keep the effect you want the better result you will get when you try to go and use the texture in a map. This is obviously very early, and I am just a amateur so consider this advice as opposed to firm guidance. If I am dealing with an existing heightmap I will usually: Level adjust to remove detail and bring the values closer to 1 Apply blur and reduce resolution to further remove detail Prep a corner wrapped material test and begin to adjust the min/max values in the material def and/or steps 1 & 2 in until you get *acceptable* tiling across the transition - this will *not* be perfect - you just want to minimize and to minimize distortion or being able to see *past* the edge via the parallax. This looks like a pretty great example of what you want in a displacement map in terms of the frequency of detail!

Yeah I would do that at this point.

@MirceaKitsune I don't want to devote too much space in this release notes thread to lengthy POM discussions (apologies in advance), as I am sure it will have it's own thread eventually as it matures in development. Just so you are managing your expectations even if it were desirable to just enable it for existing missions in the game (it's not), POM is a fragile illusion and in my experience so far it's not as straightforward as just extracting rough height information from a normal map and then flipping the "POM ON" switch. This will provide awful results and break the artistic intent behind missions for many reasons including: Parallax can really only create a relief - you need to work on your displacement values and material settings quite a bit to produce a result that is convincing as well as acceptable in terms of noise and is still useable as a typical tiling texture in the game that can achieve results like convincingly wrapping an edge or corner, allowing ai/objects to convincingly walk/rest on it, or allowing any other surfaces to intersect with it. Displacement also really makes things which are small issues with normal tiling materials look quite problematic. Things like texture alignment for example - how many TDM missions do you think were authored considering displacement when placing and aligning textures ? (Answer: 0%) The depth of relief is also influenced by things like the texture scale - what proportion of TDM missions were authored considering displacement when scaling textures? (Answer: 0%) This is something you would not just want to "flip on" for the entire game. When you have actual displacement it becomes quite apparent if/when your height information is not physically correct. Many if not most of the materials in the game have normals which were derived from the diffusemap color information using tools like “crazybump”. Convincing enough on a flat surface, but that is not going to be a given when you introduce actual displacement. Even if you addressed this with a new custom heightmap, you would then also need new normals for the parallax to be lit correctly in game. The POM looks really *really* awesome, but it is something which should be used rather intentionally and somewhat sparingly. If this feature makes it into 2.13 (keep in mind it is experimental) - it will be coming with many *new* assets which support the feature and I am sure the community will start providing even more. This may even include some classic textures getting parallax treatment, but as far as the core game is concerned these will be new materials. There is no intention of replacing existing material definitions in the game and the choice of how to deploy parallax assets should be the decision of mission authors. The idea that this does not “let everyone benefit”, or that new assets “will never be used at large” by authors has no bearing in reality in my opinion. I really don’t understand that mindset personally (I like how our classic missions look already) but if this is truly a source of disappointment for you, I suggest you pursue a mod or texture pack. I would just advise you consider the points above!

Congratulations to both of you on your first release! Looking forward to playing.

There is a lightgem_adjust of -1.75 in this mission. Additionally the spawnargs for guards are adjusted to give the player more time between them being spotted and guards being fully alerted. Really I see nothing wrong in the video or when I play the mission. In fact I think the changes are good. When you are in a direct light source you become more visible, when you move into the ambient light level you are not. When you are spotted you are given a reasonable chance to correct for it. In my missions you will see similar stacks of spawnargs on ai, and I set the ambient_world light to ai_see "0" so the baseline for the player is always they are fully concealed outside of a direct light source, which achieves something very similar. That imo has a benefit over lightgem_adjust, as it does not impact every light in the game. Balancing guard acuity is a very common point of discussion amongst mappers.

I would just agree and add this would be a pretty huge efficiency gain for new stuff. There is always a lot of understandable worry about the amount of time it’d take to get old assets updated to work in PBR - but man does it also take a lot of time to convert the output from any modern tools from PBR into bump/spec for the game. That also means we are already making PBR assets for the game - we just can’t use them. So yeah - if the time comes to go down that road the standard for converting old stuff should not be “perfectly physically correct” - it should be is it a close enough approximation of the original material - ie like @STiFUputs it - “good enough”. This is pretty much what RBDoom3’s PBR conversion math does - if you look at screenshots it doesn’t suddenly turn Doom 3 into a game that looks like it was *authored* with PBR materials - it just gets the doom 3 materials into the PBR render within some approximation of the original so that everything will render whether they were authored with PBR in mind or not. It is literally described as a “hack” in the code which uses magic math to convert the specular map into a roughness map. As far as I know it doesn’t even attempt to do something like make a metalness map. And hey - that actually looks pretty good! https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/commit/5854242d7b882d29c7e20253b29284072d6a7f74#diff-b2a7b195ed7c2c983755815d54e2f8e4fe2641b69ce37cb229fd52e545a9c409R2128 Of course Doom 3 is the product of a single art team - so things like specular maps are going to be utilized to much more of a standard than we will find in all our stuff. Not sure our math would be quite so magic. But then almost any image to material software from the last decade could take a diffuse map input and provide a tweakable PBR result approaching “good enough”: bitmap2material, materialize, etc.

Thank for your comment and appraisal. However this is the wrong thread for which to post as this is a non coin style mission. Whatever mission you did play sounds of interest though, so many thanks for your recommendation.

The bug with volumetric lights and certain particles not appearing in xray subviews has been fixed in dev17056-10800 (2.13), restoring several of the visual effects in the mission. For that reason the first post has been updated to recommend playing the mission with that version or later.

"All meat must rest to eat.... All meat must rest to drink.... So watchers and we will sees what goodsey bits they bring...." -Kingfisher IRIS has been updated to 1.3 Download via the link in the original post or here **1.3 is now available in the mission downloader** Changelog: Iris now makes use of script events which require TDM 2.11. Overhaul of the objective notification system to reduce notification spam when completing hidden objectives. Threads now have their own notification system and they are marked in the objective screen. Less weirdness when the player owns multiple pairs of glasses (though the glasses now sadly cannot be dropped). Hopefully this helps avoid them breaking. Huge list of other bug and polish fixes. New and expanded content! Known Issues: At some point all volumetric lights and alpha effects behind geometry "hidden" by the xray overlay ceased to be visible when the xray overlay is on screen. This unfortunately breaks some visual effects in the mission when using a certain item, but could not be fixed at the mission level at this time. https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6538 I could not replicate the issue with soft locking the glasses, so can't consider the bug resolved, but I made as many changes as I could think to help prevent it. Carry the light of The Builder, unto its end.

I am just happy it wasn't that breaking bug! Hopefully the rest of your playthrough goes smoothly.

Huh that is quite interesting as it doesn't sound like the issue reported above actually. When you use the "use inv. item" key on the glasses do they flash green or red?

Yes: Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the conditions to replicate this, so I am not entirely sure how to fix it. I know that's not very good news. They are not required to complete the mission, but it would likely require a mission restart to get them to work again. Can you tell me:

Link should be repaired in the main post! Let me know if you have any issues with it.

@HMartI am not sure that is correct - you can even see in your screenshot that the green or "y" areas of the normal map are not shadowed correctly in game relative your point light. They are in shadow where they should be lit and the appear illuminated from the bottom when the light source is above. Here is another example: OpenGL: DirectX: Notice in DX how light source hits the tops of the tiles and shadows the bottom - where as this is inverted in openGL which does not look physically correct to me given the light position. It is very confusing given the legacy of the game being OpenGL, but I have learned from (painful) experience that directx formatted normals are what look physically correct in the game, at least in my opinion.

Gosh you're right. As a result it only managed to snag spot #10 in terms of highest user rated TDM missions on thiefguild. Kingsal could make a mission where you crawl around like a baby in moon gravity and I might be right there with you saying it was a bad idea. It'd still be his mission so his choice.