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I have decided to start experimenting in the world of ambient music. Eventually I plan to create a whole album and release it to the thief communities. But for now here is a taste of two tracks I created http://youtu.be/Yvy9Ajys1Ro

TTLG? That's Through the Looking Glass Forums. A looking glass fan community. Has been around for a long, long time. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/

In the respective sound shader I see the following code: hum01 { editor_displayFolder ambient/ambience description "Made by Dario D" looping no_efx sound/ambient/ambience/dd_amb_hum_1.ogg } Maybe this is an old method because it seems that looping forces the looping, so it can't be set in DR. If I comment it like this: hum01 { editor_displayFolder ambient/ambience description "Made by Dario D" // looping no_efx sound/ambient/ambience/dd_amb_hum_1.ogg } Then I can set the spawnarg correctly in DR. Best is to copy this sound shader to your mission folder and then change it, I think.

I think the reason the dev forums exist is to provide a place where the implementation of features can be discussed without getting mixed up with other debates when someone believes what the devs are doing is wrong. We often post public discussion threads for features with subjective elements like the frob outline, because community feedback is very important. But there will always be vocal defenders with strong views for or against certain features, or how exactly it should be implemented in their opinion. At some point a decision has to be made and be carried through, which is what the dev forums are for. Almost all of the threads are very technical, basically explaining and discussing recent or potential code changes with other devs. Its hard to say. Its a hobby the devs do in their spare time, so people come and go when they're in the mood and when they have the time. The team page is mostly accurate except for some relatively newer additions like myself.

Im using info_location entity to raise the ambient light level when outside in the street, but when moving from one viz leaf to another where said viz leafs are in the same info_location zone the ambient light level keep changing.. Can anyone remember if there was ever a fix or work around for this? as its bugged me for years.

Thomas Porter is back in a TDM FM called... LQD is a medium sized FM, made for the TDM unusual contest 2013, where Thomas Porter sets out to get rid of the Lich Queen once and for all! Will he succeed, or will the evil Lich Queen get her sinister revenge on Thomas? The mission was created by me, Sotha. Betatesters: Bikerdude, nbohr1more and Obsttorte are thanked for their efforts on improving this work. Big thanks to TylerVocal for excellent voice acting. Thanks to freesound audio artists: Amliebsh (39222), Steveygos93 (80401), Jackie4ever (83095) and Klankbeeld (133100). Immense thanks for the developer team and everyone contributing to the mod. Release notes: *This mission has player character narration. There is no way to control the volume of the player lines in TDM 1.08 and they are at 100% volume at all times. For optimal experience, be sure to set SFX and ambient close to 100% volume in the in-game audio settings and fine tune the volume to nice levels from you operating system's mixer. That way the world sounds match the player voice in volume and your gameplay experience is not reduced by very loud player narrative. *This mission involves using objects with other objects. Normally objects are used like this: push R to drop the item into your hands, move the item where you want to place or use it. *This mission has a video briefing, so you have the habit of skipping the TDM logo which is visible before the briefing, do not skip it or you will miss the briefing. Download link: Use the ingame downloader to get it. As always, it is not recommended to read the thread further before you have completed the mission. Someone will fail to use spoiler tags. [spoiler] This will be hidden [/spoiler] Enjoy! Please remember to give comments and vote! -Sotha.

v 0.79 minor tweak to direct fake spec to brighten it up a bit made "darkerunder" only impact fresnel on ambient again, because it was darkening ceilings and such too much when it impacted diffuse & specular specular BRDF added back in with a toggle (#define BRDF_SPECULAR 0/1) to let you switch it on/off The "darker under" thing was culling light too much on ceilings when applied to all ambient light. It's because there's no way to tell what's an object (like a canvas package) vs a ceiling or such. So, I just have it culling rimlight again. I started staring at PBR again. Trying to make sense of it is a learning curve, because sources talking about it either go into very high-level math / comp sci / academia / white paper discussions about it, or they discuss it piece-meal with code chunks without really showing how everything fits together. But, it breaks down into a diffuse lighting model (eg: Lambertian) mashed up with a specular lighting mode (blinn/phong, schlick, ggx, etc). I was staring at the learnOpenGL PBR page again, and followed the link to the Unreal team's paper talking about their work on PBR into UE4. They said they looked at Disney's stuff, and ignored certain things b/c the cost/benefit wasn't worth it. EG: they ignored using other diffuse lighting models (like Burley model) after doing some tests and realizing Lambertian was good enough. The real benefit comes from the GGX, etc specular stuff. So, I ditched the diffuse stuff in the "interactions.pbr" file, and trimmed down to just some basic specular functions for visibility (geometry), distribution & fresnel. (Mainly GGX, since that seems to be what most folks focus on). I got stuff working, and have the fake spec map doing double-duty as a roughness map as well. Ambient & Direct light do their own thing from there... I forced Ambient light to use 1-fakespec as a roughness to prevent glossiness. For some reason the specular distribution term wants to barf white pixels everywhere when glossiness is high, and the glossiness on real spec mapped surfaces sticks out like a sore thumb. So, I forced it to do rough surfaces. Direct lights... if it has a real spec map, I have it doing glossy. If it has fake spec map, it does rough. This allows shiny surfaces, like the pillars on Training Mission, to look like mirror-finish polished marble, reflecting the torch light more. The results of all of this are ok. The specular seems to even out in ambient lighting better. Metal pipes and such have more body to them as they reflect more light. But, some surfaces look wet. Some surfaces look like they have a bunch of white pixels washing over the place like dust. I think this is the micro-facet algorithm going full-steam with "every facet is reflective". To make it vary in color, it needs like a noise algorithm to go with it. I was reading some coding lab web page where folks were doing monte carlo sims to statistically vary their micro-facets (*cough*).. but they were doing rays and stuff. I'm trying to get a noise function to work, b/c I'd like to use it to tone down the gloss on NPC faces and such. But, I can't seem to get GLSL's built-in noise() func's to work, nor ones I bolt in from other sources. I think I'm missing a random value generator to ensure the seed value changes? I'm not sure. I've hit a dead end with noise generation. Anyways.. here's some screen shots... The pillars have real spec maps, so the fake spec map acts as a gloss map instead of a rough map for them. The BRDF specular obstacle course creates reflections of the candle as if it's polished marble. The metal stands out more with speculars, but in ambient light I use the fake spec map as (1-fakespec) for a roughness map. So, they don't have heavy reflection. But, if you turn on the lantern, you will see the lantern reflect light off the pipes more (like with the marble pillars). The spec brdf hugs the curves of the objects more, creating crisp lines. Invasion of the white, speckly pixels. The spec distribution function loves to over-bright things. I had to hackishly tone down it's results in the glossy brdf branch. Even then... I toned down the specular on the ground, but the ground has a real spec map, so it's using the glossy brdf branch. It has a nice shine, but it's a bit over-done. And, the white speckly pixels start to look like static as you move sometimes. The issue with the PBR is it feels like it needs to get tweaked per-level. On one level the specular shines are too much. On another, not enough. Etc. The idea of the BRDF is that it makes more decisions on things, like spec power, rather than having to fiddle with variables. But, still stuck fiddling with some variables. glprogs.stages.interaction.079.zip

I just read@motorsep Discovered that you are able to create a brush, then select it and right click "create light". Now you have a light that ha the radius of the former brush. Just read it on discord and thought it may be of use for some people in the forums here too.

Thanks! Sounds good, will look at it when I try the base concept. I take it multi-floor elevators also used a script or Stim / Response all along then? Didn't think about it before. Another gimmick I wanted to attempt... this is something I always wanted to try out in TDM, now that I'm working on a small FM with just a few ambient songs I figured it would be a good time. I like how in similar games the music changes when a guard is attacking you which also helps you know you're being attacked: How would I do this? If scripting is needed as will surely be the case, how do I check the highest alert level of an AI then stop whichever song is playing and play a fixed one instead, afterward when the AI calms down go back to the ambience defined in that zone? I noticed that in my first FM (and somehow still the only one I finished and posted to this day) I'd use $atdm_location_settings_1.setKey("snd_myarea","nosound") to clear or change the music in a place. I could do this whenever a guard changes alert level I guess, but I think the ambient music is only applied when the player enters or exits an area so I'd also need a way to refresh it. What are your thoughts?

@snatcher did you play the FM? @computertech82 Your review is almost identical to that of the other review bomber, neonstyle, who didn't play the FM for even 5 seconds but who noclipped to an area where he airdropped before the same door which confounds you. How did you get to that door if you didn't use a rope arrow in the vents? If you were a bit observant and were actually trying to play the FM you might've noticed that the building with that confounding door has two floors, the second of which is ringed by a wooden balustrade where a well placed rope arrow (!!) allows the nimble or even not so very nimble player an entrance to a hall where there's a shooting gallery of open windows to use the water arrows (the player should have 20 or more of them by now) to extinguish the confounding torches. There's also a keyed (!!! how awful !!!) door up there where the thoughtful player might expect a key might be snagged from off the ass of one of the guards sitting up ahead playing poker. That allows the easiest entrance. But oh what the hell. Once targeted by bombers ever targeted and there's nothing to do about it. In a post above I appended an edit to a response to vozka that, since it was an edit, probably went unnoticed so I'll repeat it here since it's really my last word for the time being, given my circumstances of having to learn how to edit all over again (yes, I found myself in a situation where I lost the ability to do even basics like change the ambient light setting! and a lot of the necessary fixes are difficult). @vozka I can now give a more coherent reply and I'm recovering nicely. I agree with every point of the critique and I'm in a quandary about how I should go about applying fixes. I think your preamble to the actual critique shows an exact understanding of what I was attempting to do in the FM. You understand that it is story driven. You understood the main elements of the story, that basically a farm boy of pagan background entrusts himself with a mission. His village needs help. Because he's earned a certain bad reputation and fits the bills requirement for having daring and a certain amount of cunning, so the mission is a natural fit; also amongst other things he wants to earn himself a good name. He has friends to help him along the way, and makes friends of friends along the road of the pagans. The FM uses devices to distinguish the pagans from the enemy they face and divides the space into distinct enemy and pagan areas, and areas in between. The pagans are opposed by corrupt nobles and their army of fundamentalist Builders, as corrupt as the nobles they serve. It's very black and white. Then there's the city guard who, being ousted from real power by the Builders are resentful and won't help the Builders and will ignore the player unless attacked or the player is caught trespassing in their inner court. That's about it. The critique mentions some gameplay elements that detract from the story and I agree about those. It also mentions gameworld failings that interfere with enjoyment, with gameflow and immersion. It seems to me that to fix these flaws will require a total rewrite of the FM, rebuilding the entire thing. For example, I understand the problems mentioned w.r.t. the lighting and know how to fix them, or at least bandage them over so technically there's no apparent problem. But I have a notion that the not so apparent problem here is in what's being lit. That there should be a rearrangement of things so light can be more focused and contrasted with the dark. I'm only starting to think through ways that I might do this. Needless to say anything like this would take time, probably a year, and I'm not sure whether I'm up to it. I've been playing a new mission by Kingsal and know I haven't anything near that level of skill. IMO the FM is unplayable right now. Actually I had asked that it be removed from the TDM database. I don't like the idea of leaving a blot. Thank you again.

So i've met a bit of a crossroads as i'm doing the final tweaks on my map and I can't decide if I like the look of a cool blue ambient over the entire world or not. I've set my ambient_world entity to have a little tinge of blue to it and I like the look of it but at the same time it feels a little too much. With the blue tinge the _color is set to "0.01 0.06 0.10" and just regular is set to "0.1 0.1 0.1" What do you guys and gals think of this? which looks better to you and why? I picked the scene below because the lights in the warehouse are by default blue and this is the most blue area of my map so with the ambient light and the blue warehouse lights this is the most intense color mixture i'll get throughout the rest of the map if that makes sense. Blue ambient: Regular ambient: edit: here's another more normal scene for comparisons sake Blue ambient: Regular ambient:

v 0.57 fixed issue (I caused) on TDM's original ambient rimlight.rgb stopped mul'ing ambient rimlight by inverse diffuse / specular map mix Been a while, but finally had a chance to circle back to the shaders. For ambient light, I have the fake spec map multiply by inverse diffuse color to help dull the shine. I also applied this fake spec / diffuse mix to rimlight to dull them, too. But, while playing some missions, I noticed it made the rimlight look like a monotone, uniform oily or smudgy color covering textures, covering up the underlying texture color. So, I removed the inverse diffuse / spec map mix from ambient rimlight. But, I kept it for ambient specular, because the dulled specular does blend nicer with shadows. I also farted around, and found out the clamp I used on the original rimlight rgb (that gets added at the end of the ambient light shader) was causing the water to disco light. For some reason the var_Color and clamp did not play well together. So, I commented that out. I added that clamp to keep dark textures from neutralizing rimlight / fresnel too much. So, I created a replacement rimlight rgb function. I chucked in the code from the light dot rimlight that uses the diffuse color luminance and light color luminance to enhance rimlight amount as either / both get darker. I tested it on The Ravine, and it did enhance dark areas a bit. Then I tested the water on Training Mission to make sure it wasn't spazzing out.. and it seems to be fine. There might be a more elegant way to do this, but this is what I came up with. glprogs.stages.interaction.057.zip

Whatever you're doing keep it up, man what a performance increase. 2.11a: Latest SVN version: +100 FPS in this scene is an insane increase. EDIT: just noticed that I had min ambient turned down and increased FOV by 5 degrees in the second shot. So there's even MORE for the SVN version to render and it's still 100+ fps over.

Yeah, being able to differentiate between footsteps can be justified. Actually, now that I think about, I'm pretty sure some of Thief's alert lines even lampshaded this; pretty sure it had lines like "Is that you, Sir?" I don't think it would be a more obscure mechanic than eyepatch/hooded guards having reduced vision. Or that drunk people are less observant. Imo loud background noise muffling noises would be a very natural and perspicuous, unless you are already heavily geared towards arbitrary/abstract game rules. But you did gave me an ideas there, kudos. After thinking about it a bit more, you wouldn't have to do actually have to do any more super serious calculations, just need to be able to apply a sound loss multiplier to player generated noises within a certain area. Since ambient sounds are set up by the map's designer in static locations, so there wouldn't be any need to calculate the loudness dynamically. Locations already have 'sound_loss_mult' attribute, so you could actually use that simulate muffling, right? The issue, if I understand it correctly, is that if the zone is bigger than the s_maxdistance of your noise generator, then the player's noise will get unjustly muffled even when far away from source of the noise. Or if it's smaller, than crossing a portal will remove the cloaking. Also not sure if 'sound_loss_mult' can be adjusted on the fly. If not, then it can't be used for dynamic distractions (like turning on/off a generator), only static noises. Could be optimal for heavy rain on the streets, maybe? Hmm yeah, this could be another approach. If you can change an AI's sensory stats on the fly then you could probably script dynamic muffling. Add some location based culling to it, so the distance is only calculated while the NPC is in relevant zones, lowering the impact of the calculations?! I do kinda want to do some cooking now and see if I can come up with something fun. Hmm, actually, just had another thought. I remember seeing a recent thread about how Noisemaker arrows are kind of redundant, since broadhead arrows or throwable items can also be used to lure guards over to specific spots. So maybe this could be a smallish buff to Noisemakers: temporarily lowering the aural alertness of guards in its vicinity a tinsy bit?

I just found this thread on ttlg listing Immersive Sims: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151176

My impression playing through is that there never was “total darkness” really - the ambient world light is bright enough there is always some response from the light gem. Could be wrong there, as I haven’t looked in DR, but I don’t recall ever feeling like I could navigate to a spot where I was truly concealed. This in effect made line of sight to the ai always as important as the light gem value. While it was tricky I could at least pull it off on the easiest difficulty. Since a lot of attention was given to the atmosphere and lighting, if there would be a change to consider in a future patch instead of doing something like lowering the ambient light level, I would personally set ai_see on the ambient world light to 0 if it isn’t already - while not “realistic” I think it is preferable to giving the already well advantaged AI even more of a chance to spot the player and it would allow the player to safely conceal themselves in the darkest portions of the missions.

Well, here's some teasers for a haunted house mission I'm hoping to get done by Halloween. For the second screenshot I increased the gamma just so you can see what's going on- I'm really trying to avoid that milky grey look you get with high gamma and ambient. This is also a self-imposed challenge: the whole mission fits inside a 1024x1280x1024 box, including the skybox and playertools. Lights and speakers can have radii that protrude outside but all the geometry has to fit inside the box. It's amazing how much you can squeeze into such a tiny area. Showing any more screenshots would unfortunately spoiler the mission.

Recently revisiting the forums after a longer period of time I wanted to check the unread content. I don't know if I am doing this wrong since.. ever... but on mobile (visiting the unread content page on my smartphone) you have to click on that tiny speech bubble to go to the most recent post in a thread. If you don't click correctly you'll hit the headline and end up at post 1 in the beginning of the thread. It's terrible on mobile, since not only the speech bubble is really small and was to miss. But also the thread headline is just millimeters away from it so you go right to the first post that was ever made instead of the most recent ones. Am I doing it wrong? I just want to go through u read content a d the to the newest post from that topic.

A@datiswous Ah yeah, well sorry, I was quiet busy and only visiting discord. First time here on the forums since months now I think.. Thank you for the subtitles. I encourage everyone who is interested in using them to download it from here as I'm not sure when I'll be able to implement them myself into the mission. Again, thank you for your work.

I don't recommend changing the volume of ambient music in a specific mission, because this is something that is supposed to be under the player's control (as chosen by the volume slider in preferences). If you change the volume in the map itself, all it means is that the player will adjust their own volume slider to compensate, so you're just annoying the player without really obtaining any "artistic freedom" for the effort. Ideally all ambients would have a carefully matched volume level, so players would know exactly how loud the music is going to be based on their volume control setting. However we are a long way from that ideal. It is very easy to add a custom ambient and make it far too loud, particularly if it's music you like and/or your own in-game ambient volume is set to a lower level than default.