RPGista

Oh, its just that Ive noticed that really fine surface details, specially on smaller texture sizes, usually look better with a good specular and a detailed diffuse map, rather than a normal bump, which (again, when the resolution is not that high) tends to make them look very rough, very coarse. IMO, a lot of situations where you need subtle details can be solved without a normal map.

I was looking into cinematics and shall use that (thanks grayman for the tutorial) - but was wondering if its possible to take over control of the player's camera, as well as the HUD models animations, in a similar manner as you would a scripted camera scene. The difference would be that in theory you would still be able to see the players hands and weapons, even control those models, along with the looking around or moving about. And then hand over control to the player. Has anyone tried this before?

Very good work and very informative. I quite like that the information is extensive but it is always centered around how it will look in game, and talks about ways of doing that systematically. "There are materials in stock TDM that use only _d and _n textures, but the other way around will be more beneficial to your materials. Specular complements diffuse so closely, that it should be included every time, while normalmap doesn’t always look right. Sometimes the surface is very smooth, and details from the diffuse texture may look ugly or blocky when transferred to a normalmap. If that’s the case, it will be better to make a material without a normalmap, rather than without a specular." I really subscribe to that. Looking foward to the next section.

Sure, but I gotta point out that the overly serious and preachy nature of the "advice" is what I consider to be the most counter productive part of any critique. Im sure its a common aspect of our educational environment in general, but in a community based effort, we are doing this for fun and to make other people happy. High horses here are a big problem in my view - saw something wrong, just help out, give a hand. Dont want to? Whatever. Errors are gonna get fixed as knowledge increases, or when someone else more experienced comes along and help out. As for the tutorial, thanks mate! But I do have a challenge for you - why not go further and look into Obs' method of blending materials in game, bring that to the tutorial somehow? Or, failing that, why not complete the information by letting whoever is following the tutorial know how to put the results in game? And sure, if you can take on board some of the points brought up, that would be cool. The more contributions, the merrier.

I shall be testing these with some moderately heavy tree models Im working on, and Im grateful you were able to reduce ASEs size, since it was always my favourite format (maybe because it was my first, and is always reliable). Sadly, they have a tendency to become exponentially big when the tris count increases, so going for LWOs was basicly a necessity (they seem to create smaller files). Never thought about a performance difference between them. I wonder if its a noticeable effect... Either way, thanks a lot for your work and the care you are putting on those normals issues.

Thats brilliant, man. A much more versatile system, will make it a lot easier to design briefings now. Even if you can create a sort of stop motion intro, using images and text, with the current "bookpage" system in place, I reckon even those would be preferable as videos, as you can control the timing of the stills and use sound on several layers. A question, though: could this system be used inside missions, as video cutscenes? Maybe applied to GUIs?

These are so nice... Lovely work all around, my friend. Sorry, but did you mean these scenes are setup in the download files? If not, please share them, would be lovely to see this in someone's map one day. Somebosy really needs to do a new pandora's box - like mission, this time on a regular ship like yours, cruising a foggy, depressing sea...

Great work, man. Put it on Arcturu's water and off you go...

Not quite a hardcore simulation game, but I absolutely loved the concept of this one, made in a 3 days (!) by Sebastian Lague. Simple, elegant and charming:

Wonderfully done. Thanks a lot guys.

Indeed, plus I would also recommend Obsttorte's lets map series, which goes into some really advanced stuff and is pretty amazing as well (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrQt-qjh-krYU2kpnJJRHUO8P4xPG5I9X). As for the channel, thank you very much for that my friend. You can really see the care that went into the research and in fleshing it out. Its really great seeing all those resources collected like that, under the cool logos and banners... It feels right. Im loving this. A couple of suggestions from me would mostly revolve around perhaps thinking of ways of simplifying the playlists page - What do you guys think about joining all experimental and test footage, for example? Also, what about (and would it be possible to) having the lists sorted from most relevant to least, and also by "type"? In a way that tutorials would be sorted next to each other, say. You could have trailers and what is the dark mod sort of videos first, and other stuff that pimps the game, and leave things like legacy features and older trailers a bit further down. Another possibility would be to have a video playing right at the home page, something that showcases the game or explains it a bit for newcomers? Anyway, great job so far!

We have none of that. Like you pointed out, this is not about rebranding other peoples lets play videos. Its about linking to them. RIght now we have little material in the channel, and most important TDM related videos are scattered. If we can have somewhere where we "collect" all the major video series on TDM in one place, specifically tutorial series, that would be really useful, and this is probably the only realistic scope we are gonna have for this, imo.

Let me try to put it in simple terms: When you model for the game, the only thing that will be exported from blender apart from the mesh are the material name and the UV mapping. What you have as texture layers inside the blender material doesnt matter, only the name of the material will be used. You still texture it because you want to set up the UVs and test how it looks with all its texture maps applied before it goes in game, obviously. Notice that one unit in Blender is the same as one unit in DR/TDM, and it means an inch, so scale it accordingly before exporting. Once you have the ASE file, you edit it in a text editor and replace whatever was in the BITMAP path for the material name you are going to be using for that mesh (if its a LWO file, then the material name inside blender should already have been the material path). For static meshes, you need 3 folders - materials, models and textures. You put your model inside its folder, and the texture maps inside their folder (you can come up with your own strucutre or use the suggested folder trees). Inside the materials folder, you need a .mtr file with all the characteristics the material will have. The best way to do it is to find an existing material, copy it, rename it and replace the all the paths in there with your own texture maps'. Or, you can simply use an existing material and skip this stage. Download this model here and check it out, you will see how the files are structured and you can use it as a base for your own (just replace files and rename existing ones). http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/13926-rpgistas-mapping-and-modeling-thread/page-12?do=findComment&comment=407573

You mean the model is showing up in DR right? But with no texture applied to it. That is most likely an issue with the material paths. When you say "//base\models\darkmod\props\textures\*texture name*" what this refers to is actually the material name. Inside the .mtr file you can have several materials, so in your "models\darkmod\props\textures\*texture name*" material, thats where you define where your texture maps are actually in (among other things). Your material would look something like this: models\darkmod\props\textures\*texture name*{ stone qer_editorimage models\darkmod\props\textures\*texture name*_ed bumpmap models\darkmod\props\textures\*texture name*_local diffusemap models\darkmod\props\textures\*texture name* specularmap models\darkmod\props\textures\*texture name*_s And etc... You can use an existing material file and just replace the texture map paths inside.

Hey, thats pretty sweet, man. Thanks! Will definitely be trying it out. I was aware of the LWO smoothing issues and is great to know this has been worked on.

I quite like eigenface's suggestion for auto-closing doors (in general, not just for the zombie thing) - a slow, accelerating arc fom a door closing itself on its own weight. That is much more subtle than the current implementation, where the opened door suddenly decides to close after a few moments, with an unnatural, quick push. As for the polite zombies, yeah, I think care must be taken to avoid the situation as much as possible, you dont really want to see zombies, werewolves, revenants or ghosts walking through doors, at all. We dont have the animations for anything else (banging, or forcing them open). And I guess theres the problem of the direction (which way they open)?

So cool!

You would probably want to make AI ko'able from any direction (even from the front) when you are in total darkness and they cant see you at all, theres no reason then for the blackjack not to work from any direction (as they are relaxed, not alerted). PS: Also, if you hit them on the head/face with a brick, thrown from the shadows where they cant see you, that would do it. But I dont know if KOs from object physics work the same as the blackjack mechanics. If the blackjack wont work head on in a fight, than I guess its ok, some people might like it that you can still get the jump on a guard that is searching for you, if you can stealth your way and surprise him from behind.

Yes, I think in general this might be more of a theoretical discussion rather than something we'll need to create rules for, since I dont really believe people would spend their times going over other people's missions, trying to fix them or expand on them. Its a small community of mappers who all pretty much admire each other and want to do their own thing and contribute. I can think of one exception to this, and this might be a sensitive moment to talk about him, but it was Bikerdude. He went through a number of missions, specially his own, revising and expanding on them. I believe this was all done with the original author's permission, he partened with a lot of people, but it can be a tricky thing when someone goes over your work like that. I still remember making a call to keep the original version of Shadowhide's Winter Harvest available, because I really appreciated its unintentional charm and minimalistic aproach, and disagreed that the revised version had to replace it completely, even if Shadowhide did give permission for Bikerdude to do so. Hopefully this wont be taken as being critical, I know the intention was good, but this instance would probably have been a good time to talk about this issue in the communty, weight the pros and cons. Obviously theres the temptation to cut and paste parts of someone elses mission and just use stuff as "prefabs" to further your own. I did this myself, back in the day grayman, springheel, many people helped me by pointing out sections in their maps where some mechanics I needed could be found and studied, used as example or simply taken and adjusted to my own map environment. This was invaluable to me. I think this should be common practise in a true sharing community and is the norm around here anyway, I dont think anyone would ever have problems with that. It would be troubling for me to see things going in the direction of restricting access to assets and intellectual property, when we are sitting and basing all our work on a huge pile of free stuff, that took a lot of people a lot of work and dedication to build. The way to honour that effort is to contribute and keep the generosity and sharing going, imo.

Oddly enough, the same effect could be achieved before with the sword, a single blow to the head would take out most enemies, so you had a fighting chance even when you were being bested by an elite guard, or against those damn builders and their thick armor. The damage values have since been modified to make it harder to kill alerted/fighting guards, demanding several hits. So this moddification would actually make the little blackjack more powerful than the steel sword. Is there a place we can post, advertise TDM addon mods? It would be good to take Destined's research, the edited config files and post it as an addon pk4 people could paste in their folders and enjoy if they wanted.

AluminiumHaste can show you the way.

I like it!, definitely release the sound as an addon for the community once you are satisfied with it, mappers could pick it up and replace the original with this mod, in their mission.

Brilliant! I was literally coming here to comment on just how great springheel's tutorial series is (was checking out some videos yesterday) and it will be fun to have all this content (and all the other material from Obs, Sotha, Biker, etc) in one place, getting views.

Definitely. Would be a great way to start.

Very strong architecture. Love the monumental scale of it, the creativity in the forms. Brilliant, man. Same for goldwell, but in the opposite direction, love the detail work to create that intimate passgeway, really like the blue and the patchwork going on.