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  1. Alright, so, I'm a Texture Artist myself for more than 20 years, which means I know what I'm talking about, but my word isn't law at all, remember that. I've worked (mostly as mods, I am a professional but I much prefer being a freelance) with old DX8 games up to DX12. When it comes to Detail Textures, for my workflow, I never ever use it except rarely when it's actually good (which, I emphasize on "rarely"). This is one reason I thought mentioning that I worked with DX8 was logical. One of the few times it's good is when you make a game that can't have textures higher than what would be average today, such as, World Textures at 1024x1024. Making detail textures for ANY (World, Model) textures that are lower than 128x128 is generally appealable. Another is when the game has no other, much better options for texturing, such as Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping. Personally, I think having Detail Textures for The Dark Mod is arguably pointless. I know TDM never had a model and texture update since 2010 or so, but most textures do seem to at least be 1024x1024, if there's any world texture that's lower than 256x256, I might understand the need of Detail Textures. Now, if this was a game meant to be made in 2024 with 2020+ standards, I would say that we should not care about the "strain" high resolution textures add, however, I do have a better proposition: Mipmaps. There are many games, mostly old than new ones, that use mipmaps not just for its general purpose but also to act as a "downscaler". With that in mind, you boys can add a "Texture Resolution" option that goes from Low to High, or even Lowest to Highest. As an example, we can add a 2048x2048 (or even 4096x4096) world texture that, if set to Lowest, it would use the smallest Mipmap the texture was made with, which depends on how the artist did it, could be a multiplication of 1x1 or 4x4. One problem with this is that, while it will help in the game with people who have less VRAM than usual these days, it won't help with the size. 4096x4096 is 4096x4096, that's about 32mb compressed with DXT1 (which is not something TDM can use, DXT is for DirectX, sadly I do not know how OpenGL compresses its textures). I would much rather prefer the option to have better, baked Normal Maps as well as Parallax Mapping for the World Textures. I'm still okay with Detail Textures, I doubt this will add anything negative to the game or engine, very sure the code will also be simple enough it will probably only add 0.001ms for the loading times, or even none at all. But I would also like it as an option, just like how Half-Life has it, so I'm glad you mentioned that. But yet again, I much prefer better Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping than any Detail Textures. On another note...Wasn't Doom 3, also, one of the first games that started using Baked Normal Maps?
  2. DarkRadiant 3.9.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Add "Show definition" button for the "inherit" spawnarg Improvement: Preserve patch tesselation fixed subdivisions when creating caps Improvement: Add Filters for Location Entities and Player Start Improvement: Support saving entity key/value pairs containing double quotes Improvement: Allow a way to easily see all properties of attached entities Fixed: "Show definition" doesn't work for inherited properties Fixed: Incorrect mouse movement in 3D / 2D views on Plasma Wayland Fixed: Objective Description flumoxed by double-quotes Fixed: Spinboxes in Background Image panel don't work correctly Fixed: Skins defined on modelDefs are ignored Fixed: Crash on activating lighting mode in the Model Chooser Fixed: Can't undo deletion of atdm_conversation_info entity via conversation editor Fixed: 2D views revert to original ortho layout each time running DR. Fixed: WX assertion failure when docking windows on top of the Properties panel on Linux Fixed: Empty rotation when cloning an entity using editor_rotatable and an angle key Fixed: Three-way merge produces duplicate primitives when a func_static is moved Fixed: Renderer crash during three-way map merge Internal: Replace libxml2 with pugixml Internal: Update wxWidgets to 3.2.4 Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.9.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep creating Fan Missions! Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Keep on mapping!
  3. The new behavior is available in the latest dev17026-10712. If you set cvar s_overrideParmsMode to 1, then you get the new behavior. The old behavior is under value 0, which is default yet. Also there is "debug mode" if you set value to 2. In this case the new behavior is used, but console warnings are posted when a sound being started shows difference in behavior (i.e. the engine computes both behaviors and complains if they are different). Right now you'll see regular warnings about various AI sounds: they have wrong effective volume in TDM 2.12 and before due to this issue. As for modifying the missions, I think the main blocker is the new DarkRadiant behavior. @greebo @OrbWeaver, could you please comment why DR automatically sets s_minDistance and s_maxDistance spawnargs since recently?
  4. Interesting! Does it update all default textures so it's used on everything in the world? I should replay it and check that out: It would give us a good view of how the effect will feel in practice. Looking at the page, they seem to do it the conventional way I was thinking of trying out, which is currently supported by the engine but more limited than a proper implementation. It also looks like they're only doing it for the albedo channel, to be effective detail should be applied to all maps... the normal map is where the improvement should be most noticeable as it responds to lighting and modifies everything else. The implementation I'm thinking of should be universal like all effects and work on any FM new and old. It would be controlled by a menu setting, no one needs to enable it if they don't like how it looks or it impacts performance. Each detail pass should fade and be hidden with distance, we don't want to stress pixel lighting by having it compute thousands of dots on distant surfaces each frame. Just like the TDM ambient method, we'll likely need a special segment for materials meant to indicate what kind of detail each texture wants, then based on settings and camera position the renderer must modify each surface accordingly.
  5. I'm happy to present my first FM, The Spider and the Finch. There may be a spider, but no ghosts or undead. It should run a couple hours. It's now available on the Missions page or the in-game downloader. Many thanks to the beta testers Acolytesix, Cambridge Spy, datiswous, madtaffer, Shadow, and wesp5 for helping me improve and making the mission to the best of my abilities. This would not be have been possible without Fidcal's excellent DarkRadiant tutorial. Thanks also to the many people who answered my questions in the TDM forums. Cheers! 2023-12-13 Mission updated to version 3. Fixed a bug where the optional loot option objective was not actually optional. Updated the animations for Astrid Added a hallway door so the guards are less likely to be aggroed en masse.
  6. Yes. Sure, I will change it, but I do mind. In addition to changing the forum title, I have also had the name of the pk4 changed in the mission downloader and the thiefguild.com site’s named changed. It's not just some "joke". The forum post and thread are intended to be a natural extension of the mission’s story, a concept that is already SUPER derivative of almost any haunted media story or most vaguely creepy things written on the internet in the past 10 or 15 years. Given your familiarity with myhouse.wad, you also can clearly engage with something like that on some conceptual level. Just not here on our forums? We can host several unhinged racist tirades in the off-topic section but can’t handle creepypasta without including an advisory the monsters aren’t actually under the bed? (Are they though?) I am also trying to keep an open mind, but I am not really feeling your implication that using a missing person as a framing of a work of fiction is somehow disrespectful to people who are actually gone. I have no idea as even a mediocre creative person what to say to that or why I need to be responsible for making sure nobody potentially believes some creative work I am involved in, or how that is even achievable in the first place. Anyway, apologies for the bummer. That part wasn’t intentional. I am still here. I will also clarify that while I love the game, I never got the biggest house in animal crossing either. In the end Tom Nook took even my last shiny coin.
  7. I wanna play Doom 3, but fhDoom has much better features than dhewm3, yet fhDoom is old, outdated and probably not supported. Damn!
    Makes me think that TDM engine for Doom 3 itself would actually be perfect.

    1. Show previous comments  3 more
    2. datiswous

      datiswous

      So it's like going back.. But still, could be interesting.

      Would be interesting to make an immersive sim kind of level with Doom 3 assets using the TDM engine.

    3. The Black Arrow

      The Black Arrow

      I didn't think about that, but...That's actually a great idea, datiswous!

      Hopefully someone reads this status and gets inspired to make a "Doom 3 for TDM" fan mission, heh.

      I would think of it as either during the invasion or after the invasion, just a few hours in, where you play as one of those scientists or office workers, you got no weapons and you'll have to avoid the possessed Humans (zombies) and Security Guards, maybe even some Demons. You'd mostly go through offices, warehouses and some industrial complexes.

      I can easily see the Security Guards being implemented as redone Haunts that use Security Batons instead of rusty swords.

    4. datiswous

      datiswous

      I think it's actually something that regularly comes up. I've seen a similar topic at least once before.

  8. The Dark Mod 15th Anniversary Contest! To celebrate our 15th year, we are holding a fan mission contest! The Dark Mod project trundles onward for it’s 15th year in a row. In that time we have improved our game engine in countless ways and have grown to over 170 missions! To celebrate our perseverance and the years of improvements to come, we are hosting a contest to mark 15 years since the 1.0 release! Now is your time to demonstrate the mission design that best exemplifies your personal style and capabilities! Please consider entering this event! Unlike most recent contests, there is no defined theme and we are simply going to score based on our standard metrics of Story, Gameplay, and Visuals with our standard weighted scoring: Max Possible = Total Votes * 5 (Outstanding) TotalMaxPointsPoss (TMP) = AllCategoryVotecount(ACV) * 30 Full Weighted Score (FWS) = (Gameplay score*3 + Visual score*2 + Story score) / TMP Contest Submissions should be provided before October 16th so that players can start playing and celebrating on the 17th! The players have been keen to relay that they would like really creative missions so it may be worthwhile to examine our “Community Unusual Contest” to get an idea about the wild range of possibilities we offer to designers. Also, since the contest submission is in October, there will probably be an increased desire for Horror themes. The Dark Mod 2.12 was just released so including new 2.12 features is strongly encouraged. Finally, it might be nice if authors name their protagonist Corbin to match the included missions. ( None of the above suggestions are requirements for the submissions. ) Please post your intention to enter in this thread. Thank you! The Poll on this is to demonstrate the intended design used in the mission release threads.
  9. I've seen fun workarounds like that in other game modding as well. Years ago, maybe even a decade, some fella who was making a mod for Mount & Blade over at the Taleworlds forums revealed that he put invisible human NPCs on the backs of regular horse NPCs, then put the horse NPCs inside a horse corral he built for one of his mod's locations/scenes and then did some minor scripting, so the horses with invisible riders would wander around the corral. The end result was that it looked they're doing this of their own will, rather than an NPC rider being scripted to ride around the corral slowly. Necessity is the mother of invention. I don't know about the newest Mount & Blade game, but the first generation ones (2008-2022) apparently had some sort of hardcoded issue back in the earlier years, where if you left a horse NPC without a rider in its saddle, the horses would just stand around and wait and you couldn't get them to move around. Placing an invisible rider in their saddles suddenly made it viable again, at least for background scenes, of riderless horses wandering around, for added atmosphere. First generation M&B presumed you'd mostly be seeing horses in movement with riders, and the only horses-wandering-loosely animations and scripting were done for situations when the rider was knocked off their horse or dismounted in the middle of a battle. Hence the really odd workarounds. So, an invisible NPC trick might not be out of the question in TDM, even though you could probably still bump into it, despite its invisibility.
  10. Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.
  11. There's a cool trick that is making what you have on your "hand", very small, or at lest smaller enough to not get out of the player collision mesh, so it can never reach a wall, the player collider prevents it. And then move the object very near the camera "lens" and it will look big and normal despite the small size, is a nice trick that I learned a few fps games use. But I don't think is the one idTech 4 uses... Unfortunately I don't recall what that trick/hack is anymore, I just remember something about the engine code having what idSoftware called "weapon hack", probably just looking at the engine code and searching for weapon hack, will give some results, thou like I said, right now, I don't recall how it is used.
  12. Inn Business It's business, at an inn, over three nights. Development screenshots: Download: https://drive.google...dit?usp=sharing Update 1.48 uploaded March 8th, 2014, one change: patches key rarely not being frobable in one of its possible spots Big thanks to my beta testers: Airship Ballet, Kyyrma and AluminumHaste! Development supporters of note: Sotha, Springheel and Obsttorte. Also thanks Sotha, for urinating in my mission. ;-) And thanks Kyyrma for the title screen! My appreciation to all forum/wiki contributors, without whom, this wouldn't exist. Thanks to positive commenters on my previous mission too, extra motivation helps! :-) Note this uses campaign features, what you use the first night, impacts subsequent nights. And to quote a tester, "...the level is maybe best experienced in more than one sitting". If you do pause between nights, please be sure to save, you can't begin partway through effectively. (If you accidentally start a night you already completed, just fail the kill objective to switch to another night.) If your frame rates are too low facing the cemetery, please reduce your "Object Details LOD" setting. It was designed with "AI Vision" set to "Forgiving", to be able to sneak through with minimal reactions, if you want more/less, adjust your settings accordingly. There are several random, conditional aspects, and ways of going about things, so others might have slightly different experiences. Post here if you discover hidden objectives for extra points! My condolences to loot completionists, I made a bit on the third night hard, you've got your challenge cut out for you! Speaking of which, there's a TDM bug that mission complete totals too high, here are the real amounts per night: 2026/970/202. Oh, there is something that in the U.S. would be rated PG, in case you play with kids in earshot. I hope you enjoy playing it, feel free to let me know you did, and I'm glad to respond to inquiries (like how stuff was done, nothing was scripted). (Note which night you are referring to if it's something specific.) (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] Developed for TDM 2.01. PS: Thiefette, good news, no spiders! Springheel, if you find an optional objective you can skip...you might find it immersion breaking. Others, no undead! There are a couple other interactive critters though. :-) Edit note: Some posts below were from users of an unreleased version of TDM 2.02 which broke several things, they do not reflect regular game-play.
  13. I was just giving this another go, and it seems neither fs_game nor fs_game_base set the actual engine's path. This is the problem I was having before. Looking at other game types in the drop down menu (in the Game Setup window), some of them show that fs_game sets the "Mod" (Mission ) and fs_game_base sets the "Mod Base", and not the "Engine Path". (fs_game is actually useful for Dark Mod mapping, though, for working on multiple projects. Thanks a lot for that. ) What I really need is to launch DR with an engine path (and no Mod or Mod Base at all). Is there a parameter to do that?
  14. Ah, pity I wasn't reading the forums back in February. I'm fond of that game, along with Bugbear's other early title, Rally Trophy. I was never too good at FlatOut, but it was always a hoot to play.
  15. This was overall an enjoyable FM for me. Thanks for making it. Thoughts/spoilers: Also, there were 2 minor issues undoubtedly due to engine or asset shortcomings:
  16. The Numbers don't lie. It has been 15 years since the release of TDM 1.0 in 2009. I think we should consider a contest to celebrate this. Further, the contest goal should be with the intention of motivating the completion of a campaign that can be deemed official. Here are some possible ways forward: Proposal 1: Middle mission(s) Authors are asked to create a mission that expands the story between "A New Job" and "Tears of St Lucia". This can involve escaping the heavily guarded city perimeter, stowing away on a ship or caravan, attempting to recruit a partner for St Lucia and failing, getting caught by Builders before arriving and having to escape their compound, getting lost in haunted woods on the way there, etc. Any interesting way that the connection between the two official missions can be expanded. Points are awarded for making explicit references to Corbin, St Lucia, and any story elements in the two official missions. If the resultant mission is of high enough quality, it can possibly be made into an official mission. If we get a number of excellent submissions and they do not cause logical inconsistencies, we might even be able to add two or more to the official list. Proposal 2: Intellectual Property distinct approximation of TDS missions Over the years, many have asked that we recreate Thief 1 \ 2 in this engine. Obviously we cannot do this due to copyright law but we could create similar missions and stories that approximate the Thief 1 or 2 designs. That said, I think that most of our audience has played these missions to death so it may be underwhelming to see them arrive in approximate form anyway. What might be better would be to develop a similar story to TDS and make missions that resemble what T1 \ T2 players were dreaming would arrive when TDS was announced and the first screen-shots were shown in gaming magazines. So take any TDS mission you like, examine the story arc and wildly re-interpret something similar but on a much grander scale. Since it's possible that two or more contestants will choose the same mission to re-interpret, we have a slot system were authors need to claim their preferred mission and if it is taken then they must select another one or lose some story points. The slots represent a sketch of what the mission author might try to do rather than a blueprint. If authors can come up with a mission that has almost no resemblance to any TDS mission but would make for a compelling story development in a similar story arc then that can be claimed as an alternative to a slot. Proposal 3: Same as proposal 2 but we stick with Thief 1 rather than TDS. Wildly re-interpret T1 based on what you may have dreamed of when reading the gaming magazines or playing the demo. Slots system to prevent duplicate submissions. Maybe with either proposals 3 and 4, we still require the use of Corbin as the protagonist and a connective enough story that they could also be adapted as middle missions for the official campaign if the team agrees on it. Proposal 4: Another "Connections" Contest. We just allow authors to connect any two missions with each other or expand the story of an existing series or single mission. So those are my thoughts. I'll leave it to players and mission authors to suggest other proposals and if we have some sort of consensus about the most popular proposals then we will make a poll. Realistically between now and October we may not be able to hold a contest with any strict guidelines ( and tricky issues with maintaining a distance to Thief IP ) so proposal 4 may still be the easiest option.
  17. Subtitle capabilities available in 2.10/2.11 are described in the wiki "Subtitles". For info about one new project using these capabilities, see the thread "English Subtitles for AI Barks". That project includes development of a TDM subtitle style guide. The thread here is mainly focused on ideas that would require future engine changes to implement. A. Automatic Switching Between Subtitle Languages Based on Settings This is a follow-on of a forum discussion between datiswous and Geep. It is desirable to have a standardized method for: subtitles to be authored in multiple languages, and so packaged and distributed as part of TDM and its FMs a gamer to dynamically select subtitles in a desired language The subtitle language choice might be controlled by the existing TDM language choice within Settings, or a separate "Subtitles Language" setting. B. Other Possible Improvements Requiring Engine Changes Most of these involve allowing the subtitle code to know something about game entities, and convey that to the gamer. Examples of useful knowledge: the ID of the speaker (or other source) the location of the speaker, relative to the player, the player's view, and other speaking AI. This type of information helps to disambiguate when there are multiple voices present. There are lots of ways such info is visually conveyed in other subtitle/caption systems, and might be added to TDM. C. Providing Subtitles for Existing FX These would have the "verbosity effects" subtitle tag. Beyond 2.11 capabilities, some of the location aspects of (B) would be pertinent.
  18. When talking about a possible libre version of TDM (https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/) it seems we believe all media/gamedata included in TDM is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. I am not familiar with how the process of adding new media/gamedata works today; I have seen files uploaded to the bugtracker which developers then commit to SVN, but I don't know if there are other ways. It may be a good idea to implement a process that when new components (media/gamedata included in TDM) are added, the contributor is asked to be explicit about the license (a choice which may defaults to their previous preference, for usability). It won't fix the past, but it may help in the future. This will make it easy for contributors to add future data under a more permissive license if they choose. Libre media can be added and its license can be tracked, rather than assumed to be CC-BY-NC-SA. I suggest looking at how Wikimedia Commons has implemented this: the contributor state the source and license at the time the data is uploaded. This can be done either by providing urls or by saying "It's my work and I choose this licsense". The first step could be to add a way to keep track of each filepath in SVN, author, license, sources. Start by setting the value for each file's license to "(default/legacy CC-BY-NC-SA)". Possible implementations for a user interface for new additions are: * Use our own wiki, which runs Mediawiki (same as Wikimedia Commons). I see several benefits of this, but we also need a way to accept uploads of batches, not just single files. * Look at how other open source projects have solved this. There may be more appropriate solutions available. ... but I'll leave the implementation open. Suggestions are very welcome! If the author of each file already in SVN can be tracked, then it may be possible that the author is willing to give a blanket permission for all their past files in one statement, and all their files in SVN can be updated in one commit. A productive contributor willing to release some of their work under a more permissive license could make a big change. If Dark Radiant would support letting mappers search media/gamedata by license (does it already?), it would make it easier for mappers to create a completely libre mission, which would help facilitate a TDM-libre release. If I understand things correctly. This post does not address all details and it may contain misunderstandings or assumptions, but it's a start. Also relevant: * Is there a compiled and maintained list of recommended or deprecated resources for mappers to use? * https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20311-external-art-assets-licensing/
  19. It's okay! I'm down with any option hence why I asked. But I agree: Most players would likely not approve of such a change being done retroactively and affecting all old FM's, so it would likely be best as a derivative entity for mappers to use in the future based on new or existing lamps that can provide one. In any case it would likely require engine changes, not something you can currently do with a script: Lights already use their own hardcoded script classname which can't be overridden. Even if it weren't for that I don't think there's a way to intercept broadhead arrow collisions and check what kind of surface they hit, even with the Stim / Response system. There should probably be two new spawnargs: A breakable boolean enabling the feature on an entity, and a skin_broken to specify the skin used when a light was smashed.
  20. Could it be anything to do with the shape of the geometry? Is a curved staircase looking at the images. Or the thickness? Thou by that image those stairs are anything but thin. Is just that I have seen thin walls leak light, while ticker ones do not and I have seen this, in more than one engine even in lightmapped ones. Also is that brush geometry or a imported triangle mesh? You will correct me if wrong but afaik the engine treats triangle mesh's, a tad differently from brush geometry, like it doesn't automatically inline the triangle mesh geometry, into the overall baked brush geometry (unless your force it), so it leaves a invisible "gap" there where the mesh connects with the brush wall? Could be floating point accuracy problems, like you recently talked about?
  21. Oh my gosh, thank you for this! After reading what you just said, I realized I've in fact noticed the same thing in another program, but assumed it must be something completely unrelated: I've been working on creasing a CPU based voxel raytracing engine in Python, for which I settled with using PyGame. When the time came to implement first person camera control using the mouse, I noticed it did not work initially... however if I told my code to hide the mouse pointer first, locking it in the center of the window started working. It must be the same thing here in some form, Wayland likely has some very particular expectation on how the mouse pointer must be set in order to be locked. In fact just a few days ago, I tried a virtual worlds software called Vircadia / Overte again to see how it's been progressing. I activated mouse look mode and guess what happened: The exact same behavior of the view spinning endlessly as the cursor drifts away from the center due to lack of locking. So it's clearly happening to many things and not just GTK / WxWidgets related... but no all of them, most games (including TDM itself) work perfectly fine and mouse control never breaks. I'll try your solution later and mention the results, likely tomorrow as it's late now and I need to head off. If it works that would be incredible! At least as a workaround, we could simply not hide the cursor on Wayland, which will look ugly but at least allow using DR without needing hacks until they can solve whatever is happening on their end. Also Plasma 6 was just released, my distribution (Manjaro) will likely be getting it a couple of weeks or at most months from now. I'm curious how that will affect it: Hopefully it won't make the issue worse, but just in case I'd be happy to have a solution in Radiant before then.
  22. We had extensive discussion of why our license is the way it is, especially when we were going standalone. There are reasons it's CC-NC-etc., and one of the big ones is that anything that tries to link the mod with money and formalization has been trouble for us, like team-breaking trouble. Well the asset license was settled long before that just in dealing with the contributors (and the engine came with GPL3 from the start of course). There would be asset creators that would (rightfully) riot if money were able to flow to some creators and not to them, because they didn't spend 1000s of hours on this mod for some knucklehead to spend 2 hours for some crap whatever and get paid for it. But the debates happening during the run up to 2.0 validated it. But even before that, we've talked a lot about the basic principles for how the team works, and avoiding entanglements with money and formalization are like two of the central pillars that most of us (I understand) wouldn't like to open back up to debate. What I see from this whole line of discussion is that you want to make a branch project with the engine. That's fair by itself. The engine license let's you do that. But it's something that should be a true branch, like you ought to make your own forum for it and develop it there. Then I think it's fair for you to let us know it's happening and even ask if anyone is interested in joining you there, and some people may want to do that. But I think it's best if you branch off and develop it separate from this forum and team if you're going to drop one of our central organizational pillars in what's gotten us this far.
  23. As everyone know, right now we have both stencil shadows and shadow maps in the engine, and the player is mostly free to choose whichever he likes more. Due to the reasons I provide below, stencil shadows will most likely be dropped in some future, but that future is definitely not here yet. Unlike shadow maps, stencil shadows do not support: Alpha-tested shadow occluders. Shadows on translucent surfaces. Volumetric lights with account for shadows. Soft shadows with contact hardening. Point 4 can be ignored, point 3 has an automatic workaround by forcing lights with volumetrics to shadow maps. Points 1 and 2 result in major difference in behavior between the two modes. For the reference, we have one more technical difference: Front faces cast shadows in shadow maps mode, but don't cast them in stencil shadows mode. I recall how initially volumetric lights had their shadows disabled in stencil shadows mode, and mappers were not happy because that's a big difference in behavior. One issue was that every mission has to be beta-tested in both modes. That's why right now I mostly follow the same strategy: Alpha-testing is disabled when rendering shadow maps (since 2.12), unless you enable r_shadowMapAlphaTested. Shadows are disabled on translucent objects (since today's 2.13 dev build), unless you enable r_shadowMapOnTranslucent. I wonder if this is still what majority of the mappers think is best?
  24. @snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.
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