Crispy

Yes, great feedback post. Cheers.

No pinky demons, no, but plenty of more subtle things. You would need to do at least the following: 1. Obtain an unencumbered open-source version of the Doom 3 code. (Expected late 2010, or sometime in 2011, or maybe later. Depends on Rage's release date, and on Zenimax's approval of the open-source release.) 2. Merge TDM's code changes (of which there are TONS) into the open sourced Doom 3 codebase. 3. Test it thoroughly to make sure it works, and make any code changes required. You would then have standalone code for TDM, but it still depends on D3-derived assets, so that's not very useful until you also: 4. Do a sweep through all of TDM's assets to check for ones based on Doom 3 or requiring Doom 3 assets. Off the top of my head, this includes at least: zombies, some textures and material definitions, some sound effects, probably a lot of things that I've omitted. 5. Delete all those assets. 6. Package the standalone code version of TDM with the remaining assets. You would then have a "TDM Lite" which is freely distributable, but is missing a lot of assets and is basically unusable. It may not even run, since some of the missing assets could be required regardless of map. 7. Make drop-in, non-copyright-infringing, replacements for all the missing assets. This is a huge job. 8. Update all released FMs to use the replacement assets, and make any other changes that might be required for compatibility. After all that, you would finally have a standalone TDM. Did I miss anything, guys?

You're welcome, and thank you! I would definitely encourage anyone thinking of doing some mission creation to give it a go. DarkRadiant is a lot easier and faster to use than certain other level editors I could mention.

14

There are industry awards, and there is innovation if you know where to look. My favourite example of a modern innovative mass-market game: Mirror's Edge. This from a company owned by EA, and best known for Battlefield 1942 et al. No argument from me about space marines. Consequence of the limited diversity in some development studios, I reckon. We're already starting to move away from that, I think, and will continue to do so as the industry matures (quite literally). Protagonists who don't talk - I grinned a bit at that one. Gordon Freeman anyone? Apparently this was a deliberate strategy on Valve's part; make the main character a blank slate so the player can project themselves onto him and become more involved in the game. This is one of those things that can be argued both ways. Amnesia - Yep. Lazy storytelling device, but what do you expect in a world of bad plots. There's a substantial bunch of hardcore gamers who don't care about plot and will hate developers for making them navigate it, so plots are stripped down to accomodate them. "You have amnesia and must regain your memory" is one of a handful of stock-standard plots which are braindead simple to understand and therefore get used a lot. On the subject of stupid plots, this is worth a read: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17531 (Link contains BioShock spoiler) Niche games can avoid the plot problem, but if you're making a modern big-budget game then it has to be mass-market, or you'll go broke. Hence the attraction of indie games; there are tons of niches that aren't well-served by mass-market games and which indies are much better suited to fill, if you don't mind making some budgetary compromises. As for short games, this is increasingly a trend in an industry where consumers demand more content, more high-end content, and lower prices despite the already thin margins of the game industry. It was all well and good to have long games back in the day, but the fact is that a lot of people got bored of them before finishing them. Better to have less content, spend more time crafting it, and ultimately provide better value to the majority of customers. I realise it can get annoying to pay full price for a short game, but unfortunately the economics of game development only barely add up in the first place. That's another reason why you often see generic games; innovation is risky, and you just can't afford to be risky when you're only just breaking even. Look at all the innovative studios (LGS!) that have gone bust over the years.

To be picky (because I love being picky), Crayon Physics is the original, Crayon Physics Deluxe is the commercial sequel to the original (made by the same guy), and Numpty Physics is a somewhat-different free clone of Crayon Physics. Edit: If you like 2D platformers, check out Aquaria and Braid. Both are very good indie games. Aquaria is probably my favourite, and of the two is most similar to ye olde 2D platformer (despite being set underwater and thus having no 'jump' mechanic, or platforms as such). Braid is more of a puzzle game. BTW, you can play Streets of Rage on Wii and iPhone now.

Try checking out some indie games. They tend to be more diverse than the mass-market titles you see on shelves. There are way too many to list here, but check out http://www.igf.com/ for some of the cream of the crop. Or I can recommend specific ones if you tell me what kind of games you like. For casual games, you're not limited to Flash - check out basically anything developed by Popcap. Or, look at portals/aggregators like Reflexive, Big Fish, etc. (they're called "portals" since they don't develop many games of their own - they're sort of like publishers, except their developer agreements are usually non-exclusive, so you'll often find the same game on multiple portals). Finally, there are enough mass-market games coming out all the time that you can probably find something you like if you look hard enough. Waiting for the prices to drop is definitely a viable strategy. Mirror's Edge and Bioshock are two "old" but still recent (and very good) games which I've picked up for cheap recently.

Heh. Well, it is a smallish church.

1. You're referring to the It's been a long time, but IIRC I could be wrong though - might be thinking of another area. 2. Yup. There's at least one I'm thinking of that's epic.

Make sure there's a config.spec file in Doom 3/saintlucia (or Doom 3/thiefsden, if you're playing Thief's Den) as well. Do you have your visual quality set to "Ultra" in Doom 3? If so, dial it down to "High". "Ultra" forces the engine to never use compressed textures, which is exactly what we don't want. If that doesn't help, here's a workaround: Try putting those settings into Doom 3/saintlucia/autoexec.cfg (or Doom 3/thiefsden/autoexec.cfg) instead. If that file doesn't exist, create it - it's just an ordinary plain text file, with extension cfg instead of txt. That should force them to take their correct values on each startup.

Is there an empty file called config.spec in your Doom 3/base folder? If not, try creating one.

Sometimes portmanteaus can be funny, clever, or useful. This is not one of those times.

Ah, OK, that's a bit different from what I thought. That's an annoying exploit, for sure.

Make that four, sort of - I'm pretty much inactive now, but I did do some TDM development on Linux back in the day (including making the lightgem work on it). Linux is definitely supported.

Inventive! I like it! It doesn't have any greater effect than putting the torch out with a water arrow does (except that guards won't be able to relight it), and it's harder to pull off, so personally I'm not too concerned. Maybe one day someone can change the collision models of the torch brackets so that their top is pointy or sloped (so you can't balance objects on them).

Well, as far as I know there are two. Now that you've started, that is.

Very pretty, nice work!

I bet people would definitely find that useful, please do. Yay, another D programmer.

Might as well call it a marathon and watch the whole series... you've got time.

Buy a solid-state drive and put TDM on it. That'll speed your loading times right up. (I'm assuming that the loading time is IO-bound. I haven't actually tested that assumption, but it seems like a reasonable one.) I'm fairly sure that most of the portalising process is done at compile-time. That line may simply be referring to the need to read the portal information out of the file and turn it into a data structure. Can't be sure without seeing the engine source though. *shrug*

Dude. Not cool. Chill out a bit please? In the grand scheme of things, this really isn't such a big deal.

It's not "broken". You just don't like it. That's not the same as "broken". All decent browsers scale "pixels" these days anyway. And the gap above the content div is not a "bug". It's clearly a deliberate move to create a gap, adding a bit more whitespace to make it look better. You personally may disagree with that decision, but calling it a "bug" is a bit rich. Riiiight, because the forum theme changes every week. This is the first time it's changed since I joined the forums, over three years ago. And it would take you literally about 15 minutes to update your custom style each time it broke. 15 minutes in 3 years is hardly an onerous time burden. But whatever. You'd obviously rather whine about it than do something proactive about it, so I'll leave you to it.

After the initial period of adjustment, I have to say I like this. Apart from the colour combinations already mentioned. @Tels: Maybe you can use a user CSS file to make everything look smaller (or hide it entirely). Probably wouldn't be too hard. In fact, here's a starting point for you. It pretty much destroys the visual appeal of the forums in the name of ruthlessly squashing everything down, but them's the breaks. It also needs more work; there are plenty of opportunities for more space-saving. ul.topic_buttons {font-size: 80%;margin:0;padding:0} ul.topic_buttons img { height: 1em; margin:0; padding:0 } ul.topic_buttons a {padding: 0.5em} div.topic_controls .pagination {padding:0} #header #branding a:first-child img {height: 70px} #user_navigation, #user_navigation .logged_in {margin:0} div#header div#branding {height:50px} #primary_nav{font-size:80%;height:20px} #primary_nav ul li, #primary_nav ul li a {padding:0} #content{padding-top:0} .post_controls li a{padding:0;margin:0} .post_wrap ul{padding-top:0em;padding-bottom:1.5em;margin:0} div .rep_bar {display:none} div .author_info .user_controls, .user_fields {font-size:90%} Your other option is to set font-size:80% on everything, and then override it for post content so you're not squinting to read.

No, it'll be in use all the time (for objects that use it). Basically instead of modelling directly in polygons, modellers will use some kind of fancier system like subdivision surfaces or NURBS surfaces (actually most professional modellers do this already, at least for organic objects). Models in such formats can be converted into polygonal models with arbitrary polygon counts. The models get sent to the GPU in their original fancy format, and then the GPU converts them into polygon models dynamically, at runtime, with the detail level depending on how far they are from the camera. So really distant objects will be displayed with only a few polygons (thus speeding up rendering when the extra polygons aren't visible anyway), and really close ones will get extra detail (so objects don't look obviously low-poly when you get up close). Fully automated level-of-detail. (Level of detail is where you use low-poly models for far-away objects, but use high-poly models for close objects. Without tessellation, you have to manually create your low-poly and high-poly models separately. Tessellation lets you have one model, which gets converted into lots of lower-poly and higher-poly variations at runtime.) I think you left out your link, Tels.

Yeah, looks like speed and flexibility are it. As far as I can tell, it sounds like you can feed descriptions of curved surfaces (patches) straight into the GPU and it will turn them into polygons at runtime depending on how close you are to them. Fully automatic and freely scalable LOD, in other words. Good overview here: http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2008/09/17/di...what-s-coming/3