STiFU

Cities Skylines is free on Epic today. It's the best city-building game since Sim City 2000!

FYI: Ubisoft is giving away something each day, too. Today is Starlink, which I got for the Switch. It get repetitive after 20 hours or so, but until then, it is quite fun. https://www.indiegamebundles.com/ubisofts-happy-holidays-2020-free-games-and-content/

They did that last year too, giving away a game each day. Those titles look awfully recent, though'. So, not sure if that list is legit. In the Epic Launcher, the games are not yet revealed.

Consider changing this to an opt-out rather than opt-in? It should be deleted by default to avoid support problems.

As a first step, though', we should try to achieve feature parity between the material-hack and the new GLSL implementation, so we can finally get rid of that hack. That means 1) to create the same look as the one created by material defs and 2) make sure all attachments (hinges in screenshot) are also highlighted. @duzenko, did you maybe just forget about the attachments? I would love to see a cvar for choosing from multiple frob highlights as there are some thief fans that don't like fancy frob highlights, so I would like to retain an option for them to keep the original frob highlight. Something else to consider is a rather simple TDS-like frob highlight. It utilized the normalmap to add a blue-tint from the left side of the object. I know back in the days it got a lot of hate, but it actually worked well in many lighting situations. I can also see a mixed brightening and darkening with this approach, as @stgatilovsuggested.

Peter_spy just sent me a PM:

Yes, that too, of course. I already outlied above how the current frob highlight is problematic.

That would be the ultimate goal, yes! https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5428

You don't have that "Heroic Coder"-Title for nothing... I have to say, I am really looking forward to that podcast! In my perception, TDM is the most incredible community achievement ever: The jump from mod to standalone; Continously adding new graphical features; Still being developed further even after 15 years and many faithful mappers over all those years. It's an incredible story to tell!

I don't get it. Why should the MAPPER decide how the frob highlight looks? It is basically a GUI-feature that communicates to the player whether an object can be interacted with or not. With regards to accessibility, it should totally be up to the PLAYER to pick a frob highlight that works well for them. Also, if frob highlight is changed, it should definitely be changed globally and not on a per-material level. Imagine one door having our old frob highlight and another having a new crazy TDS-like frob highlight. That would be totally unprofessional and every player would ask "WHY? Just Why?" Frob highlight is not something artistic, but a GUI-Feature that must be consistent. The current frob highlight also has severe problems, as @peter_spy also said himself: In a bright scene you cannot (or just barely) see if an object is highlighted. That's the main reason, why we need a customizable new frob highlight. To my knowledge, there also have not been any customizations of the frob highlight other than making it brighter or darker, to account for this exact problem I just described. Custom-Materials in FMs etc. can be handled by simply ignoring the frob highlight stage in all parsed material definitions. It can be identified via the parm11 reference.

I hope it has been implemented in a flexibel manner so we can swap frob highlights during runtime!

Quake Pro League Finals are on this weekend, if anybody cares for that... @Xolvix @peter_spy maybe?

Definitely, but maybe hold back with that until we moved Frob-Highlight to GLSL, so we can also delete that darn frob-highlight hack from the material defs?

Which ones? Honestly, I feel like CP77 (on PC) is the most beautiful game right now, dethrowning God of War.

I got myself a 3060 Ti OC for this game, just to find out, that even a 3090 cannot run it at highest details. I am running the game at high preset with Raytracing on medium and DLSS on balanced and get around 60 fps. Without DLSS it is absolutely unplayable with Raytracing enabled, around 15-20 fps. Feels like playing God of War on the basic PS4. So far the game is fun, I am not really far, yet, though'.

So, TLOU2 won pretty much the whole show. Considering the controversial reception of the game by players and game journalists alike, I think the Game of the Year award is definitely not deserved. Best direction, maybe even best narrative, ok, but Game of the Year? There we multiple better games in my opinion. I am also a bit disappointed that Doom Eternal didn't even win Best Action Game, leaving Doom with no Award at all, which is outrageous in my opinion. Such an excellent game! Hades won this category instead, which is a bit understandable when you look at the Hype this game generated, but I still think Doom is better overall. Also, Hades won (deservedly so) Best Indie Game. I am also a bit sad that Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order did not win Best Action Adventure. I guess both Doom and Star Wars share the same problem that they just have been release too early in the year, so peoples minds are not buzzed about them anymore. Here is the list of winners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2020#Video_games

Is there some newsletter so you get notified about free stuff from humble bundle? I only get mails from them for regular bundles etc. Anyway, good game. Definitely go get it, everyone.

I just ordered a Lego Technic set because I was feeling blue and wanted to look forward to something fun. I figured, I'll build the model, disassemble it again and put it all back in the box, so I can give it to my son in 10 years as a present.

Actually, my cousin is handling all that stuff and he is in fact an architect.

We're considering building a house in my father's back-garden, which as of now had not been planned as a building area. Now, one would think, hey we'll just quickly ask the city whether we are allowed to build something there, but nooooo, I forgot about german burocracy. We apparently have to to hand in an detailed inquiry with a description of our planned construction and that inquiry costs 500 €. That's a lot of money when there is a legitimate chance that they simply say "no, you can't build there"...

Still loved "Call of Cthulhu", 'though. So it seems, the sinking city is gonna be perfect for me. Thanks for the brief review.

It's very likely the same publisher that caused them problems, as "Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter" was also published by BigBen.

I'd definitely also add a wiki page with forum links to all posted ressources.

I know a lot of people here like lovecraftian horror, so you probably have heard about the game "The Sinking City". I had it on my radar for quite some time, but I recently learned that it had been removed from the Steam-store and I only now found out why. There was a statement by the dev studio Frogwares describing how their publisher BigBen/Nacon basically tried to rob them of their interlectual property and owes the studio more than 1 million € in royalties and also a couple of months of contract payments for development milestones. This in the end lead to Frogwares having to pull the game from quite a few major stores. This story shows once again how publishers can be utter capitalist evil... I usually wait until games are cheaper, but after reading this, I want to show my support, so I am going to get a DRM-free copy from Gamesplanet now. I am also really curious for this game, so I am happy to pay the retail price.