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Since I have more forum time than experiment time, I thought I would pose a couple of questions about lights with the AmbientLight keyword applied to them. When I first broached the subject, it was to understand Lunaran's "Strombine" map. I took his liberal use of Ambient Lighting to mean that these lights have much lower performance impact than standard lighting. What we know about Ambient Lights: (According to Modwiki) Now if we add our special Ambient_World to the mix: 1) Rebb's fix locates where ambient lighting should be applied 2) Either a simple brighten blend is baked into the materials at map load based on this detection 3) Or a more detailed blend which include normal mapping is baked So if we gather the above detail, we can presume that any other ambient lights will be detected and applied with the same process. Once detected, these should be baked into the ambient stage as well. Potentially meaning that an nearly unlimited number of ambient lights can be overlapped without the normal light performance penalty because they are all baked-down at map load? So, have any mappers tried overlapping numerous Ambient Lights? If this has been done, how was the performance compared to regular lights? How does a scene with lots of Ambient Lights compare to one with lots of grime decals? If the performance is acceptable, the why aren't more mappers using lots of small ambient lights for subtle radiance effects?

Had a problem with the web server yesterday that led to a crashed table in the forum database. This has now been repaired and things seems to work again. I was on travel so it took a while before I was able to fix it. Merry Christmas!

I can get on the main forum now but still get an error when trying to load posts. Anyone else?

Yes, you are still viewing The Dark Mod Forums I've just finished the upgrade of our IPB Board Forums to the latest release. Packed with new features, rewritten code and all that. Have a look around. The skin is currently the default one, but will sooner or later be converted to a darker skin, to fit the Dark Mod universe. Also note that the forums have been moved from http://modetwo.net/darkmod to it's own sub-domain: http://forums.thedarkmod.com - all forum links will still work tho, thanks to Apache's rewrite-plugin. Please report any bugs, requests and comments in this thread. PS: The forums will run a bit slow the first hours as the cache is being rebuilt.

I'm trying to achieve an effect and I'm hoping someone might know a way to do it. Say I have a model of a sphere. If the sphere is being hit by a light from one side, the bright side will be bright and the dark side will be black (or whatever the default ambient is). What I'd like to do is have ALL sides be equally bright when hit by light. I don't want the sphere to glow in the dark, however. So I can't use an additive blend material. I want it to be lit only when there are lights nearby, but I want ALL of it be lit, not just the side facing the light. Essentially, I'd like the sphere to behave as though it is being hit by an ambient light. Noselfshadow won't achieve this affect...additive blends won't...anybody know of a way to do it?

Just a heads up that the header images are now missing from the top of the forum. I suspect due to domain forwarding or something like that?

Have I been hacked or is the site being rebuilt or hacked?

Does anyone understand Dynamic Ambient Lights. Please comment only if you are *sure* you know how it goes. If you only *THINK* you know, commenting will not help as I need to know exactly how this thing works. http://wiki.thedarkm...c_ambient_light Few questions: Does this mean if my location has 10 lights, the dynamic part of the ambient_dynamic_light will be 10 x "0.01 0.01 0.01" = "0.1 0.1 0.1" ? This is on top of the ordinary ambient_light. In this case if I had an ambient_light of "0.05 0.05 0.05" the end result would be "0.15 0.15 0.15." Does it count only lit lights or are all lights counted regardless are they on of off? So basically does this mean that the dynamic part scales based on player distance on any light present. So when the player goes closer to a torch, the shadows get more lit because the dynamic part scaling increases? The closer the player is to any light in the zone the brighter the ambient light gets (as allowed by ambient_dynamic_light_cap). The example pictures talk about "rooms." Does it really mean "zone?" (as in location system zone, separeted by location_separators and having a unique info_location?) All these have big ramifications. For the dynamic light system to work like it should, every single room must be encapsulated into a separate location. If a bigger location is a separate location (like "1st floor", "2nd floor", etc) all the lights are counted on the WHOLE FLOOR causeing the ambient_dynamic_light being capped at all times. Is this correct? Please, someone clarify. Because the dynamic lights are enabled by default everyone are affected by this and if they aren't following strict location encapsulation, their maps dynamic portion is maxed at all times. Or maybe I just don't undertand how it works. It is not feasable to use the location system to separate every single room into its own location zone.

Just wanted to say, Hello! From reading through various posts in the forums it seems like a great community and I hope to become a part of it. So I got the hankering for some Thief as of late and stumbled on TDM through some googling. After purchasing Doom 3 through Steam and instaling TDM, I have been nostalgiacly playing through many of the FMs and have also decided to d/l the Radiant editor and start making a mission, maybe many, we'll see. As it turns out also, I just started (today!) my 1 week vacation from work and intend to dive in to the Radiant editor and am currently going through the A-Z wiki on it. A bit of background on me, I 'used' to work in application support till the economic crash a couple years ago and was laid off and am now running a machining center at a local machine shop, using Mastercam daily, 2D/3D stuff and have always wanted to make a mission/game, and decided since I've always enjoyed the Thief series and stealth gameplay so much, this is where I would start. After getting to my third year in Mechanical Technology I changed my major to Information Technology (should have went with straight Computer Science but ahhh hindsight). I've always loved building things and designing things and also really enjoy computers, art, audio, and the entire visual experience as presented to a user. I have created a couple playable maps before using the older source engine editor so I'm vaguely familiar with 3D modeling, skyboxes, lighting, AI pathing, etc. That's been over 10 years ago though. I got familiar with 3dsmax, ProE, Autocad, and Mastercam in my first major during school so that helps a bit when familiarizing with a new editor and as previously mentioned I've dabbled around in the Valve Source editor. I'm also very much looking forward to the Crucible of Omens campaign created by the marvelous talent at TDM and would like to help in any way I can once I'm familiar with the Radiant engine. I can also do many many voices, I've often thought about moving out to Cali from Indiana and finding work in voice-overs, voice acting, etc. All this started as a youngster with little friends, time on my hands, and imaginary friends. Wow that's hard to admit. So anyway, I've been working on a shadowy Garrett voice, and can do guards and some women characters with old, old english, gruff, slippery, sneaky, terrifying, voices and personalities. Just thought I'd mention that as it may be a way that I could contribute early on and would also enjoy. So anyway, too much about me and not enough A-Z wiki, back to the tutorial! Glad to be here and hope for good things to come.

TDM has separate audio volume sliders for ambient and sound effects. How do I tell TDM that this specific speaker should be an ambient sound and should be affected by the ambient volume slider?

Hey everyone, just wanted y'all to know that I am in the process of recording ambient background tracks for mission creators to use. I hope to create a wide variety over the next few weeks. I have never recorded ambient tracks before, but I am finding them very fun to experiment with. My goal is to make a couple of tracks for each "occasion" - indoors, outdoors, city streets at night, inside mansion, inside cathedral, haunted areas, dramatic and suspenseful moments, woods, tavern,... I could go on and on. If any mission designers out there have a unique setting in mind for their mission and need a track that is appropriate, I would be more than happy to see what I can do! I have started a SoundCloud profile to post my tracks for all of you to hear and hopefully provide feedback. So far, I have posted 4 "practice tracks". I would greatly appreciate all of your thoughts, opinions, criticisms, requests, etc. Here's my link: http://soundcloud.com/scarridale/sets Thanks! --scarridale