Ishtvan

Okay, latest question for sound guys: If you had to split the audible range up into a few representitive frequency bands (say 8 at max), how would you do it?

I like : Stories from the Streets: Jackin' and Shankin' to pay for my crack

Oh yeah, one pro and one con that I forgot to mention: Pro: When you KO a guard, you can hear the enemy radio operator asking him to check in, asking why he isn't checking in, etc. I thought this was cool in that it encourages ghosting, because you can tell people catch on when you KO people that are in radio contact. However, nothing ever came of it. I thought maybe if you KO'd enough people the radio operator would raise an alarm or send out a team to investigate or something. I haven't seen that happen, but I haven't ko'd that many people. Con: The stupid PDA thing on his back, that we are FORCED TO LOOK AT due to third person view. The neon green pda screen totally destroys my natural night vision when I'm playing in a darkened room (and not using the character's "night vision" option). Also, makes you wonder how he ever freakin' hides with a bright neon sign on his back.

It wouldn't run ingame, it would run once to generate your "suspicious sound" def files and "environmental sound" def files. (These are files that determine things like what volume/frequency the sound has according to out sound prop. model). You'd have to run it whenever you put in a new sound as a sound designer, but never during gameplay. Yeah, I'm afraid this isn't something for the first milestone (at least not something I have time for by myself), unless we somehow happen upon a miracle program that already does this. If we have to do it from scratch, there is probably a signal processing library or something for C++ (I can try and ask some of my friends who do signal processing all day). All we really need is a Fourier transform algorithm (people use this all the time so I would imagine it's pretty easy to find) and some way to get a "base volume" that is roughly based on the max volume of the sound, but also takes into account how long the sound is at max volume over a short time range.

IMO the breast size here doesn't absolutely have to be larger, but they could stand to be a little more shapely Maybe it's just due to the shape of the dress neckline or someting but they look a bit droopy (like middleaged woman breasts as opposed to young woman) [edit : Btw I think the face looks fine, it'll all come together when the hair is added, most likely]

So for sound propagation, a suspicious sound is approximated as an impulse sound (square pulse in 1/60th of a second (1 frame ) ). I'm going to make a "def file" for sounds, so you sound designers will provide a "base volume" and a "frequency band" (the frequency band is very simplified, it will just be one of 6 options I think: very low, low, mid, high, very high and ALL. Then when you play the sound on an entity, you can modify the base values for the sound (for example running on stone is louder than walking on wood, so if the default footstep is walking on wood, multiply the base volume by a multiplier when the player is running on stone). Now, I was thinking: Ogg vorbis sound format is completely open sourced. It would be cool if we could do an analysis of a sound automatically to get the base volume and frequency band numbers. If we did this, frequency band wouldn't have to be so simplified either: it could have the actual Fourier coefficients of the sound when it's decomposed into frequency components in those bands, rather than simple bits (this would take up a little more RAM, but whatever). So basically my crazy idea is: Write a program that takes in a list of Ogg Vorbis sounds. It decodes the sound, calculates some sort of max volume (maybe time averaged around a short time on either side of the peak volume). This is used to generate the "base volume" for the sound prop. impulse sound approximation. (ie, when the sound is propagated to AI, it just has this base volume on a square wave 1/60th of a second long). 2nd, the program performs a Fourier transform of the volume vs. time data for the sound, and gets the fourier coefficients for various frequencies. It then puts these into one of our divisions (say we divide the audible frequency spectrum into 8 bands or something like that), and also normalizes all of them such that all the coefficients added up equals 1. Do you sound designers know of a program that does something like this with Ogg Vorbis sounds? I found the Ogg Vorbis SDK here: http://www.vorbis.com/download_win_1.0.1.psp Anyway, if there's an existing program that does something close to this, we might be able to get this in by the first milestone. I'm not going to attempt to write it from scratch though, so if not, you guys might have to deal with putting in by hand, for each suspicious sound, something like: "soundname = footstep_default", "baseVol = 25 dB" and "freq = freq_mid + freq_very_high" or something like that, in a def file.

@Domarius yeah that's right, sound will travel farther before attenuating to a given level with the cylindrical model, because it's 1/r instead of 1/r^2 in the spherical. @Sparhawk: They'll be able to do this with the area loss multiplier. We're not planning to actually calculate all the bounces off the walls, etc, which is where the wall/ceiling/floor material comes in. So the mapper will approximate this by multiplying the attenuation constant in air by something greater than 1 for more loss (carpeted floor / tapestried walls case). (this system is already coded with the func_snd_area_info objects, or whatever I called it. yay!) (NOTE: I didn't talk about the attenuation constant in this thread, see the other thread in sound programming for an explanation of that. This only covered geometric spreading loss, not material loss )

The more I read, the more I'm convinced that indoor sound propagation should use cyllindrical spreading instead of spherical spreading. (spherical means sound intenstiy decreases as 1/r^2, cyllindrical decreases a bit more slowly, as 1/r). Taking a look at this reference on sonar (which is a sound wave) : http://www.npmoc.navy.mil/KBay/soundprop.htm It says that cyllindrical spreading should be used whenever sound is confined by a boundary. This would be practically every case in indoor sound propagation (hallways are approximately big cyllinders). I was wondering about this before, and it seems to make sense to use cyllindrical spreading (1/r falloff) for small indoor areas, and 1/r^2 for large outdoor areas. So my proposal is to do cyllindrical spreading by default, and have the mapper set the spreading to spherical for large outdoor areas (this is accomplished by placing an "area loss" entity anywhere in the area and setting a boolean on it like "use outdoor model" to 1.) Ideally, soundprop should be able to tell from the geometry when compiling whether the area is so large that it should use spherical spreading, or whether it's a confined hallway and use cyllindrical spreading. I'm not sure how to do that at this point though. It would have to look at ALL the geometry in an area, and know which brush boundaries are solid and which are nodraw brushes (like portals). I'll see if I can do that later, but for now it will probably work as I described in the previous paragraph. It's tempting to just use the volume of the area and use spherical if it's large enough, but again to get this volume you have to identify which of the surfaces are real collision surfaces and which are not. I'll look into this after I get the basic functionality working.

***SPOILER WARNING*** Well, just played thru the Splinter Cell Chaos Theory first person demo. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Pros: -No bullet time (it was just a slomo effect used in the trailer.. whew) -Not forced to kill anyone (in this mission) -The choke outs that you see in the trailer are actually non lethal KO's; he's not breaking anyone's neck with his bare hands. Also, you can't just run up to someone and choke them, you have to grab them and put the knife to their throat first. -On Hard difficulty, if you get shot twice you're dead, or if you're unlucky enough to get shot once in the head, also dead. -Hard difficulty guards have very good sight and hearing (the slowest "creeping" movement is still completely silent as far as I can tell though) -Guards sometimes light flares and hold them aloft if in a dark area. -Basically this means that on hard, if a guard carrying an automatic sees you, and you give him time to draw his weapon, you're dead. -Stats screen at the end is very conducive to ghosting; It keeps track of number of times spotted, enemies killed/ko'd, non-combatants killed/ko'd, bodies found, etc. It also gives you a percentile rating, and I only played thru once but it seems like ghosting (or only ko'ing people the game forces you to ko) is 100% a rating (I got a 95% because I KO'd two guards that were torturing a guy in the mistaken belief that I could save the victim, which was the original goal of the mission -nope, scripted death. One of the guards saw the other guard go down before I got him, so that was a body seen too . So the message to take away is: it's better to just sit and watch someone get tortured to death than to break ghosting rules. ) -New EMP pistol attachment is pretty cool. While not quite realistic (lights taken out with an emp would not magically come back on again after a time), it works as you'd expect, and does not work on gas lights. (lol, there will probably be some console gamer trying for hours to get it to work on a gas light and crying 'why isn't it working??') -As in the previous two games, the graphics make good use of the PC and are not consolized crap. -They SEEM to have upped the distance at which you trigger the AI patrol routines, so AI don't seem to appear in the same place every time (scripted conversations and events aside). 'Bout freakin' time after 2 games. -Realistic levels of zoom (no super-zoom) -Shooting is still pretty hard on hard setting -It still "feels" pretty realistic (minus the crazy inverted hang takedowns that would make an olympic level gymnast green with jealousy). Good amount of tension, dynamic lighting, guards notice things well and can kill you with one shot. Cons: -I still hate third person -These people do not know the definition of 'nonlinear gameplay.' I saw a dev interview where they talked excitedly about how they had listened to the fans and are incorporating more nonlinear gameplay. What this amounted to was a map that is still one huge linear track, going from point A to point B. The "nonlinearity" comes from 3 instances there were 2 separate paths to "get forward" a short distance on the track. Also, there were 5 2ndary objectives that could be completed in any order, but all this amounted to is going backwards along the linear track to complete any that you missed. Still nothing like realistic architecture or multiple entrances/exits on large buildings. (As I recall, the CIA building in SC1 had some good nonlinear play and realistic architecture, but apparently they forgot how to do that). -Game forced me to KO at least two people (one to get information from him with interrogate, and the other one at the extraction point; wouldn't let me call for extraction until he was ko'd. That makes sense in a way, because he would see the chopper and run to warn others, but I still don't like being forced to KO.) -Ghosting in the traditional sense (no 2nd stage alert) is often not possible, since you have to dim a light or something to get by someone, and that alerts them. -One of the new gadgets is pretty useless; you point it at certain objects like generators, propane cannisters, etc, and it suggests that you shoot the object, or interact with it, or something. Why someone needs this gadget I do not know. It's basically "puzzle solving for retards." -Anal realism point: You can switch hands to shoot with your off hand, but there is no accuracy penalty for using your non-dominant hand (I guess the protaganist suddenly became ambidextrous since the last game). Overall I'll probably buy the game, but I'll wait for reviews to see if it ever gets ACTUALLY nonlinear, or if it is all this 2 branches that lead you to the same place in a linear track BS. That's it. I welcome the angry responses from fanboys!

There is only ONE company Jaguar??? I was told we'd each get our own!

Yeah, I still remember the first time I saw splinter cell, I said "so it's like Thief with guns, and some Jet Li wall split moves thrown in?" SC3 is supposed to have much more nonlinear maps, but the gameplay looks so unrealistic that I dunno if I'll be able to get into it. So in GTA SA burglarizing, is there a lot of variety to the houses/occupants, or is it pretty much 3 types of house models and occupants used over and over again? Do you get any sort of bonus for not murdering the whole family with a shotgun in the process of robbing the house?

D3 also supports in-engine cinematics if you so desire.

Waiting for it to come out on PC

It used to be "New tales from an old city" right? I guess I like that one better, but it's no big deal.

Sweet! Looks really good. The indoor room has a very nice atmosphere, and the vines hanging in the hallway and all the floor/wall/trim/ceiling textures came out very nicely IMO. I'm still having one minor problem with the torch, in that I can't find the texture for it. I added it to my lights material file with the normal map, but I can't find the diffuse map anywhere. I know it exists 'cause it was in DeepO's screenshot, but I couldn't find it on the ftp. Any hints on finding the elusive torch diffuse texture? [edit - Oh yeah forgot to mention the SFX for the torch/gaslight are awesome too... pretty much ingame quality IMO]

@Oddity: One of us could probably send you the mod via PM or something too, depending on transfer rates. The copy I have which was I believe right before CVS went down (maybe 1 update prior, but nothing major) is around 320 mB. Give me a PM if you want to try to transfer, although it would probably be a much faster rate if one of our Euro members could do it. Of course if you're happy working on the model until Saturday that's cool too.

I get a leak (reached from outside) on entity #1 (light) when I try to bsp the map.

A more important question is, why replace to this thread 3 and a half months later?

In the Bugreporting forum I stated that it feels like it takes way too long to do anything after you've selected the blackjack. I believe the problem traces back to the blackjack anim being too long. The anim is 64 frames long (at 24 fps), roughly 2 and 2/3rds seconds. Now Doom3 doesn't let you do anything while this animation is playing, so this is a long time to wait. For comparison, the animation for putting away the blackjack is 17 frames. @Oddity: I see in the animation, the player brings it out at an angle, and then it kind've slowly turns to the right orientation. I think this is the part that's slowing up the animation. It looks like maybe you were trying to have it blend smoothly into the idle animation? (At least that's what Domarius was also thinking, and he said D3 already blends the animations somewhat automatically) So, I hope you don't take this personally, but I butchered the blackjack .md5 file to see what would happen. (Just in a text editor, don't have any animation software) First I tried speeding it up to 48 fps, but then the fast part of that animation (bringing it out) looked way too fast. Then what I did was just cut it out everything but the first 20 frames. The result looks kind of okay; it comes out at an angle, and then you can see D3 angle it back to blend with the start of the idle animaton. It's not a single-frame jerk, so it's definitely blending, but it is a rather fast motion (it looks believable to me, but I'm not an animator). Also this means you can strike with it or switch weapons ~1s second after selecting BJ, as opposed to ~3s. Anyway, if you want to test out the butchered file, here it is: (I guess we never changed those names from the grenade ones huh? ) To test, just back up the file: darkmod\models\md5\weapons\blackjack_view\grenade_raise.md5anim Then replace it with this one: grenade_raise.md5anim

Damn, I'm gonna need drool cleanup on aisle me! I agree for the actual shot maybe the lighting could be such that more of the face is shadowed. I don't think the sword looks out of place. If you had a sword hanging from a frog at your left hip and then turned into an archery stance with your left leg forward and hips 45 degrees to the right, the angle of the sword would probably look just like that. You could maybe adjust the frog on the belt to move the sword a little farther back (towards the back), but then you would run into problems running when it banged into the back of your leg. Maybe we could adjust the frog position back a bit just for this shot though.

Nice! One thing I might suggest, and I have no idea how to do this, is to make it look "okay" when the lid opens. ie, it should be able to rotate around some axis back there and not excessively clip the top lid into the back of the chest (or if it does it should still look relatively normal).

I asked Brian about this a couple weeks ago: He said the collision model loader will use either the .cm file, brushes with COLLISION texture or whatever it is, or if it can't find those it will use the rendermodel. HOWEVER, collision models are precached on map init. He said that when precaching, the collision model will NOT be loaded if it does not have a .cm file. So I'm not sure what is happening in our case. They obviously can't be precached if there's no .cm file; maybe it's dynamically loading some from the rendermodel, and not doing that for others. I don't know.

This is from Bloodrayne on D3World on creating collision models, in case anyone does not know this: Hopefully it also works with .lwo models.

It's cheaper to use an existing stick of wood than having to cast a handle out of iron/steel, so it makes sense that a torch may have a wooden handle and a metal oil basin/hand protector. Of course if the Builders want to mass produce some iron torches that's up to them.

I didn't play it, but 21 is Die By the Sword. Apparently you could control the path of the sword exactly with your mouse. 17. Lords of Magic (wasted plenty of time on that one ) 24. Could that be unreal 2? that would be a little recent though