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Today finally I got the first book of the Feynman lectures. I have books on the backlog of about 1000 Euro, but unfrotunately I cvan't afford to buy them all at once. Well, that Feynamn books looks quite good. What I consider the coolest part about it is, that I looked into the relativistic math and I'm pretty sure that I should be able to understand it. 20 years ago, when I looked in such a textbook, I didn't understand a single word, because I was lacking the math skills, but now the situation is quite different. Not that I'm as good in math as I want it to be, but for now it should suffice. I also ordered a book about math for engineers to brush up the more advanced topics, as I already got a bit rusty on that. At least now I have something to study. The popular science books, become a bit unsatisfying already.

As recently mentioned in the public forums, there is a small popup window appearing when loading a map: I need a design suggestion for this popup, maybe some small, centered parchment on the clock background or something. In principle, I can come up with something myself, but I better leave this to the artists for consistency reasons.

Btw, the progress is tracked here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...st&p=153102 Currently I am teaching the Games::D3::Parser to correctly parse material definition files. Once it can do this, it will be easy to extract the diffusemap/specular/bumpmap for each material and then figure out the DDS vs. TGA file from it. (That's the theory, anyway

Good question Ishtvan. That's certainly something we hadn't anticipated, and I think our coders should be reprimanded for not having their thinking caps on straight! We'll settle this issue in the private forums!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!! I'll try that! The pillar wall type thing next to the wall touches the wall and is a patch. @Orb: There's a lot of crap that i made custom for it, including textures models etc so the download would be ~100mb which means it'd take years to upload. I'll try changing that patch to a brush and see how that turns out.

Whoa, have'nt been in this thread for a while. Anyways, I always make a lot of my brush work into a func_static and it did actually increase my fps when there was a lot of brushes - from around 24 to 28 or so (the map was badly optimized, in spots 5 lights hit a surface). In regards to making maps in a modelling app - I only make things like arches, fences, gates, and pillars in it as patch meshes don't look as good when making a rounded pillar base. But otherwise all of my walls are brushes and patches. @Orb: Gimme sec I'll go take a screenie of a bsp hole that is currently driving me crazy and it is aligned to grid.

I check it out. But I'm not looking for yet another popular book, even though I still like to read them. Hmm ... The last books that I read about math and physics were pretty exciting. But my wife also thinks that this is boring and dry stuff. I can see her eyes going glazy by just mentioning math on an extreme high level already. I definitely take a look at it. If you are interested in such stuff, then you can take a look at Brian Green (don't know the english title of the latest book). This was really excellent, and it was the first time, that I managed to understand some aspects of relativity, which I always found abstract and didn't understand. Funny thing is, that working on the darkmod helped me as well, because it forced me to brush up my math, and the understanding I gained from this book is a direct consequence of this. Which one was it? LOL. I can imagine that. I was reading a book from Roger Penrose many years ago "The emperors new mind" and there was a lot of math in it that was over my head. Still, even without understanding the math, his arguments didn't convince me. It was about trying to find an explanation of consciousness by using quantum mechanical effects. Ah. From your description I thought so, so this is not exactly what I'm looking for. The problem is that the equations alone will not help me anyway. I guess I can find the equations quite easily also on the internet, so I'm looking for something that can lead me to an understanding of such equations.

Yeah. That's what I heard as well. Fortunately I have collegue who has graduated in particle physics, and even worked in scientific research for some time, before he turned to programming. Now he is working under me and I'm kind of his boss, even though he has the much better education. Crazy world. That's what I want. I have some background in math, but not that much. Of course we learned differentiation, integration, functions and all that stuff, but it was a long time ago, so I have to brush it up. I'm not afraid of that though. Quite on the contrary I want to understand it. Hmm... Of course I want to understand it. I just read a book from Brian Green, which was recommended in the latest issue of Scientific American (the german edition) and it was quite good. Of course it contained no math, but the author was explaining a lot and he piqued my interest (again). Actually I read some books which were higher level, but this was 20 years ago, and I want to get up to date, and maybe a little farther. Farther in relation to what I understood last time, not in relation to current physics.

the texture window is showing textures in use, since you have not applied any to your brushwork there will be none shown yet, you need to select the texture you want to use from the materials window.. select the brush/face you want to texture and browse the material window and you can see where the textures are. after you picked/applied one it will be shown in the textures window, and you can use the texture window after that to apply the texture to any further brushwork since it will be there. in gtk/qeradiant the texture window always had the textures/materials there... its been changed for doomed.

I've mostly used Cubase earlier, but have switched to Reason for it's midi capacities. I was wondering if any others use Reason, and maybe if you have any general or specific advices concerning making ambient music in this program? Let this be a thread for us (I presume there are more than me) who use Reason and who want to share our thoughts, tips and tricks about it with the other contributors/team members. Since I believe most people that make ambient music use Reason, I thought this thread justified in the DarkMod forums. One thing in particular I would like to know is recommended patches for bass ambience, like the one in 'Outside the Mansion' and 'Defiled Church'? I've tried a lot of patches, but can't find any that really has the right Thief-sound, not necessarily like in the aforementioned tracks mind you. (I may just be picky, but that's better than sloppy methinks) /K

So....how many of the changes I just finished making to the mesh two weeks ago are now obselete? http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=151102

I think there is some misunderstanding about my problem with the entity list size in my post @ http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...st&p=142541 It's not the panel size (though that needs saving as well) but the entity list itself (see the image of waste space in the picture in that post and the tiny entity list.) So this problem is still present in the latest snapshot. I only see 2 or 3 lines of entity properties with a very large empty panel. Does nobody else see that?

That caught me. So, if I set a brush or brushes to be func_statics, are they treated as models or patches, that is, they don't complicate the BSP tree? Or am I misunderstanding? Does it have any other effect, good or bad? You've got me wondering if I can get more FPS by simply making battlements into func_statics.

Please do. As I said in my follow-up to the earlier comment, everthing should always be aligned to the grid. Otherwise you get floating point errors which result in sparklies (which I guess could be seen as very small BSP holes). No problem. I've never seen one in ordinary mapping, although as I mentioned I did get something like that when using the vertex editing tool to make a brush into a weird shape. Maybe yours is a similar situation.

They did this in Thief 1. In Thief 2 they carved out one huge honkin' space and built the entire City within that. Not saying you should do that in DoomEd--definitely not saying that--just pointing out how they did it in Dromed 2. In my own project my City has rooftop action and ground action. You have NO idea how hard that is to plan out until you actually attempt it. Rooftops that are fun to be on make for dull buildings on the ground (due to the need to restrict the line of sight mostly, but other reasons too). Interesting attractive buildings on the ground make rooftop action a lot less fun. Basically the best rooftops are on top of tall square buildings with wide flat roofs surrounded by even taller square buildings. VERY boring from the ground. I can't do the tunnel thing but settled for a City divided into rather large cubical segments with creative passageways from one to the next. I have to draw each one on paper (GRAPH paper I found out to my dismay) and pretty much spend days planning it out before I even begin to place a brush. Then usually I have to trash it and start all over from scratch.

ambient and projected lights are achieved by selecting a texture in the drop down list or making your own. You have to be careful with ambient lights though, because they ruin the normal and specular maps. If you are using them, use them on a very dark setting, almost black in fact, is enough just to raise the shadows from 0,0,0. THat vis portaling is all very simple when applied to a couple of connecting rooms, but how the hell do you use it for a whole outdoor level, because the portals have to be sealed off right up to the sky brush, and it's a lot more complex geometry than a flat ceiling in a room, and anyway, if the portal goes up tto high, you'll be able to see it from almost anywhere anyway, so it'sll be open, and then there's all the static meshes which I guess the renderer will look straght through anyway, so the portals will be open behind them.

It merges coplanar adjacent surfaces with the same texture at compile time. This means that if you were to split up a floor brush into several brushes, it would not honour your splits when compiling to triangles, but would aim to produce the fewest tris in any case.

I read that the problem is that doom merges brushes that have the same texture, so if you have a whole building all with the same brick texture, will it merge it all into one big brush?

Fidcal also has been working in this, you can see his thread in the member forums below

K. there is a huge thief comunity. and its sade what eidos did with thief. all i can say is that if this mod does realy well and i mean millions of people Downloading it. its in mags for #1 mod. and all that BS. who knows maybe eidos will see people realy like thief when its good. not shitty like thief 3. or maybe another company such as Id, or a smaller company will pick up the label cause of the potential. also could the thief 3 brush's be copyed from T3ed to D3ed?... is there a way. i would like to put the game to gether with out loading points and with a way better thief look. even if it is for my own use.

nononono, what i mean is that one mapper may use models for buildings while another uses brushes and another uses patches and brushes. Get what i mean? You can tell a model from a patch or brush like a cheesburger from a french frie

Yeah water is in the current build, beta mappers can have swimmable water right now, AI will even drown in it. The only thing missing is the water overlay and sounds, and the physics of forces being applied underwater to AFs needs to be modified a bit. You have to put in a water brush, give it surface common/clip (I think), and make it a func_liquid entity.

Well true, but you can put a clip brush there to imitatie it. Of course, it still means that you can't rescale moveables.

The FPS is low, this is mainly due to the total lack of visportalling and the fact that the entire map is illuminated by a giant shadowcasting light. I believe the physics for the water is done via a volume brush, the surface is in fact two flat patches - one to do the reflection and one to do the distortion. This is no longer necessary now somebody (I think pbmax) wrote a combined shader that does both.

I've just played it. The water looks good (from the outside). Yet it is very buggy if you swim (the sky is switching etc.). And the fps is really low. I hope it's not because of the water. How was it done? Is water some kind of a brush?