I.C.H.I.

This reminds of the DarkPlaces engine. At first people were very enthusiastic about all its features but later they realized that all this gloss simply kills the artistic appeal and unique look of the original Quake. And then someone made Quakespasm and it became the standard for all new mods. Same story about Doom. Remember that abomination called Doomsday and especially all the graphics mods for it? Ugh... That was something else. So I wonder how long it will take for a new fork of The Dark Engine to appear that would be much more strict about changing the vanilla experience.

Having stats is always good even if they don't look good for you.

Last time I checked Audacity it had telemetry and even though you can turn it off some users may just not understand its purpose and leave it on. There is a spyware-free fork called Tenacity which I personally prefer. https://tenacityaudio.org/

Romero has nothing to do with this engine. More to that, he left id Software shortly after Quake 1 was finished.

And before the invention of this AI nonsense games couldn't be made? You don't need to be an artist for that, real artworks are available for free and it was never hard to find them.

IMO using AI generated artworks is like dumping a bucket of shit on your work. I remember playing Seeking Lady Leicester, it has phenomenal level design, but as soon as I saw those ugly AI generated portraits the whole FM was almost vomit inducing to me. I once said that for an artist to use AI is like a self-insult and level designers are also artists but the true artist would never want to cover their artwork in shit like that. Also this.

Are you sure this is a bug? Brushes aren't made of polygons, they use planes and vertices in the editor aren't actually real vertices. It was like that since the old days but some modern level editors(like NetRadiant-Custom) can autosplit faces when you drag one vertex.

On release Stalker could use both static(baked) and dynamic(real-time) lighting. There is a mod for Shadow of Chernobyl called Oblivion Lost Remake 2.5, it significantly improved weather presets and it looked even better with dynamic lighting enabled. Under the hood X-ray engine uses deferred shading but I'm sure it's possible to achieve the same result with forward renderer, for example, Godot uses Forward+ renderer and some people do wonders with it. Here is Oblivion Lost Remake 2.5 with dynamic lighting enabled.

This was more than enough for 2003. Try doing the same in Doom 3 engine, that is my main point.

Really? Dead Island 2 (2023).

Sure about that? Stalker: Oblivion Lost (2003).

No, it isn't. For good lighting shadows are not enough. When I say lighting I don't mean shadows at all but the response of the materials to the light projected onto them. In this regard TDM does a terrible job and nothing is even remotely close to photorealism. And you don't need PBR to make it better, because even before its universal adoption games still managed to looks photorealistic.

Hell no! One of the ugliest engines ever made IMO. It never looked natural and didn't even try to look natural that's the worst thing about it.

IMO the most of all TDM needs a better lighting, Doom 3 engine never looked great in this regard but such is its legacy.

Yes. Usually I K.O. everyone if possible. This is my favorite mechanic lol.