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Apologies, this is where I went wrong. It happened to be a volumetric light shadow I was looking at

I'm seeing the weirdest thing on my map, not public yet but I have the case for testing: Not only does the light leak, and it does so even as I've textured the walls with shadowcaulk... a light actually leaks only while the door is closed, once I open it the undesired light goes away. It's the glow on the left side of the door and little triangle it casts on the floor in front of it. I think it might be the light at the right shining through though, not sure if it's the light in the newly opened room. The interesting thing is opening the door makes it go away, also using shadowcaulk over mere caulk doesn't seem to matter which is quite odd.

Normally the aiSee property is set on the light entity, and in this case the property has been set on the light's material. The property sets whether the light makes things more visible to AIs, so its not meaningful to set this property on model materials. If you want to stop AIs from reacting to an object you need to disable its visual stim, and if you want AIs to be able to see through it you need to give it a material that doesn't contain visual clip. Id say we can be grateful someone had the foresight to implement this as a material keyword, too, in cases like this one where you probably can't set spawnargs.

Thanks. Linux user and I play TDM at least weekly: Never noticed any physics issues myself, whatever happened in the FM must be a relatively rare scenario... that's a FM I haven't revisited so I was lucky to miss the bug then. There is in fact a little problem in latest Beta, though it's so small I didn't bother to document it carefully, but I'll share the idea of it at least: If you climb into a tight space between an object and the ceiling and turn on the flashlight, jumping may cause the light to phase through the floor and disappear temporarily. Say you have a crate pressed against a ceiling where you can only climp and go in while crouched... if the surface is high enough to allow a jump but just low to force you to be crouched, you'll see the light source of the lantern disappear temporarily in mid air. Think I saw it in The King Of Diamonds, if it's important I'll boot it up again and noclip to get a viewpos. Just to make sure you've seen my mention: Please check my message a few posts above where I attached a log, we have a crash where killing AI with a broadhead arrow can cause the engine to go down with a "tried to free uncached trace model" error... not even a main menu crash but one to the OS. It's pretty rare but if you fatally shoot AI often enough it will occur eventually.

I think there is no problem with noshadows parallel lights: they are well-defined in the current engine. It can be used as local light to brighten the window, as @HMart does. I hope there is no reason to have shadows in this case? The parallel and parallelSky are almost the same thing, except that parallelSky traces light beams from areas containing portalsky world surfaces, while parallel traces light beams from the area where light origin is located, which is never what you need for a global parallel light (like moonlight). There are many missions where this issue is hacked around, and all of them result in issues like double lighting if door is open, or lack of lighting in some outdoors areas. And there is no way to fix the engine to make these missions work properly --- the maps themselves are wrong. If you want to do a global parallel light, the parallelSky is surely what you want to have, and parallel is most likely not. But note that to make parallelSky work you also need to follow some rules. The issue with local parallel light is that objects outside light volume can cast shadow over objects inside light volume. This is pretty weird by itself: you move object closer to light volume, and at some point its shadow instantly turns on. The engine determines whether object intersects light volume approximately (using bounding boxes and such stuff), so whether you get shadow from an object close to light volume or not is implementation-defined. Today you have no shadow and it looks nice, tomorrow culling is changed and the scene gets unexpected shadow. So the bottom line is: Global parallel lights should use parallelSky and follow some rules. Local parallel lights should be noshadows. All the rest is not well-defined: you'll avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding it altogether.

Though this is related to PBR as a component in getting it done right (like reflection probes) I thought it's an improvement of its own that's worth discussing. I don't know if this is implemented or estimated in some form, but working with light entities in my own FM's I haven't seen any spawnargs for it so I presume it's not. At the moment lights in TDM act as zero-scale points, light sources have no actual radius. I know what you might be thinking: Of course lights have a radius, it's the box that decides how far a light shines and what it affects! What I'm referring to is not the range but the emission radius, representing the scale of the bulb itself: Think of it as a minimum radius... at the moment lights only have a maximum radius, the minimum is currently a point. In modern engines this affects both specularity and shadow softness as well as how the light is distributed. Like most engines we shouldn't need anything more than a float describing the size of the bulb, a simple sphere ought to be enough... given we already work with radius boxes, we could instead use a separate box which would give us better control with unevenly shaped bulbs. Every default light entity should of course be updated to use this: Torches / candles would set it to the average size of their flame particles, gas / electric lamps should have it represent the scale of the light bulb or the lamp head. If done right this can greatly improve our graphics and add more realism, but as with most things it's not going to be that simple. Also this would create changes to the lightgem in all FM's but very minuscule ones that shouldn't even be detectable. There's 3 different components I presume we have to tackle independently. Soft shadows: Shadowmap softness is probably the easiest, just add the average bulb radius to their value. Specularity: At the moment all lights seem to produce specular orbs of the same fuzziness on shiny surfaces. What we probably want is for lights that keep their min radius 0 to produce a fully sharp orb or dot, softness is added to each light's ball based on this radius. Light projection: The biggest aspect is changing how light is distributed, the projection texture / falloff material would emanate very differently. Everything inside the bulb would shine at the intensity of the center pixel and should start fading from the min radius toward the max, the projection texture would get slightly inflated like a balloon. The best solution (which also accounts for blur) seems like a 2D shader that copies the light texture onto itself at slightly different offsets to make it fuzzy: There's already a blur filter that does just that when you're underwater for example, we could to get away with doing the same thing to light textures using the min radius as the offset parameter. As lights typically don't change scale, this should be possible to do only once at map start rather than every frame including for moving lights like torches, this way we should have no performance loss.

Changelog of 2.13 development: dev17035-10724 * Support passing information between game and briefing/debriefing GUI via persistent info. Also changed start map & location selection, added on_mission_complete script callback (6509 thread). * New bumpmapped environment mapping is now default (6354). * New behavior of zero sound spawnarg is not default (6346). * Added sound for "charge post" model (6527). * Major refactoring of cvars system to simplify future changes (5600). Known issues: * Bow does not shoot in some missions: thread dev17026-10712 * Nested subviews (mirrors, remotes, sky, etc.) now work properly (6434). * Added GUI debriefing state on mission success (6509 thread). * Sound argument override with zero now works properly under cvar (6346 thread). * Environment mapping is same on bumpy and non-bumpy surfaces under cvar (6354 thread). * Default console font size reduced to 5, added lower bound depending on resolution. * Added high-quality versions of panel_carved_rectangles (6515). * Added proper normal map for stainglass_saint_03 (6521). * Fixed DestroyDelay warning when closing objectives. * Fixed the only remaining non-threadsafe cvar (5600). * Minor optimization of depth shader. * Added cm_allocator debug cvar (6505). * Fixed r_lockView when compass is enabled. dev17008-10685 * Enabled shadow features specific to maps implementation (poll). * Auto-detect number of parallel threads to use in jobs system (6503). * Improved parallel images loading, parallelized sounds loading, optimized EAS (6503). * Major improvements in mission loading progress bar (6503). * Core missions are now stored uncompressed in assets SVN (6498). * Deleted a lot of old rendering code under useNewRenderPasses + some cleanup (6271). dev16996-10665 * Environment mapping supports texcoord transforms on bumpmap (6500). * Fully disabled shadows on translucent objects (6490). * Fixed dmap making almost axis-aligned visportals buggy (6480). * com_maxFps no longer quantizes by milliseconds on Windows 8+. * Now Uncapped FPS and Vsync are ON by default. * Supported Vsync control on Linux. * Added set of prototype materials (thread). * Fixes to Stone font to remove stray pixels (post). * Loot candlestick no longer toggle the candle when taken. * Optimized volumetric lights and shadows in the new Training Mission (4352). * Fixed frob_light_holder_toggle_light on entities with both skin_lit and skin_unlit. * Now combination lock supports non-door entities by activating them. * Added low-poly version of hedge model (6481). * Added tiling version of distant_cityscape_01 texture (6487). * Added missing editor image for geometric02_red_end_HD (6492). * Added building_facades/city_district decal material. * Fixed rendering with "r_useScissor 0" (6349). * Added r_lockView debug rendering cvar (thread). * Fixed regression in polygon trace model (5887). * Added a set of lampion light entityDefs.

why not go al the way up and give the ambient light a screen space reflection term, so the fresnel affected pixels would reflect what is behind them (at grazing angles) instead of a static term? this means that if what is behind them is way darker then the fresnel won't reflect anything, and if what is behind is is way lighter then the fresenel would take a portion of that reflected light, i guess you could use the specularity term of every texture to derive how much those fresnel effects do gather from the SSR term.

I am pleased to announce the release of our new fan mission, The Hare in the Snare: Part 1 Mission type: City Missions + Inn/Tavern Description: People are being abducted off the streets and a Watch Captain requires the services of a thief to help him find out why. Download link (v1.0.2-release): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HYvM_u56wDB16uIlb7qgS_q3P24V69MO/view?usp=sharing Credits: Mapping and original characters: @Frost_Salamander Story, readables, custom models, voices and cinematics: @Kerry000 Menu title track produced and mixed by @JackFarmer with selected gigagooga sound samples Beta testers: @Cambridge Spy @Zerg Rush @Amadeus @Acolytesix @Lzocast @wesp5 @nbohr1more @Kerry000 @ate0ate @Wellingtoncrab @prjames Additional thanks: @Dragofer, @nbohr1moreand @peter_spyfor technical help @Springheel for the modules and tutorials @kingsalfor allowing @Kerry000to abuse his manbeast everyone else on Discord and the TDM forums who offered assistance Requirements and notes: This mission requires TDM 2.09. Earlier versions will probably work but you might see one or two missing models. You may experience some FPS drops in some areas with lower-end hardware. Mid-range and above should be fine. If you have issues, I highly recommend you use shadow maps instead of stencil (settings -> advanced -> shadows implementation). It makes a big difference. For 'Hard' and 'Expert' the light gem sensitivity has been increased by '1' (meaning easier for AI to detect you). Screenshots:

I'm afraid the light leaks persist even in dev16854-10518 with a change I understand should fix them on old maps. Just replaying Chronicles of Skulduggery 3: Sacricide and found an area where they're even worse and a light in another room shines straight through the wall. A view from the back of the light shining through: Even from this angle you can see it light up the room through the door.

big problem with that is that we are nearing a point where the electrons cant travel safely anymore (something to do with things on the quantum level), i guess they need to speed up development of light based computers or get smart with autoreconfiguring gateways internally in processors.

Was playing the first FM that makes use of X-ray glasses... seeing them in action inspired me to write about an addition to their idea. This is likely a feature suggestion, I've played most FM's and never saw it done nor found any script / material features that would allow this result, but presume it's possible with a tweak in materials or the renderer. I'm thinking of ultraviolet lamps that can uncover hidden decals or items: The object is invisible if not lit by a specific lamp, only when the light of an UV source touches them they start to show up. A blue-light can be offered to the player as an inventory item or replacement to the standard lantern, a lantern you can pick up and move only in the world, even come in the form of a candle since why not? The player or the environment must move specific objects and / or light sources to the correct positions to uncover secrets such as codes. Some examples: Next to an UV lantern you find a note hinting there's a secret code in a particular room... you must pick up the lantern carry it to that room then place it on a support, illuminating the number-wheel combination or hint on the secret entrance you must go to. We can even reverse the process and have a static UV lamp on a wall, the player picks up an inventory item and must drop it under the lamp to see what's written on it... we can even have a hidden symbol on an AI which will shine when they walk under that one streetlight. They could also reveal frobable objects which can't be touched unless illuminated... maybe a hidden lock to open a door which becomes available when lit, or a readable note which normally appears blank but can be read or contains additional text if there's an UV lantern next to it. So many fun ideas we could do with this given our usual theme and ideas for secrets! At a technical level, the logical way seems like separating the lightmap of light sources marked with the UV spawnarg, then multiplying with its intensity the alpha channels of all material components marked with the UV material flag. This might mean UV lights have to be rendered to a separate pass which could break some performance optimizations? Would be great if an index was possible instead of one flag, that way different secrets can be revealed by different lamps... even an universal UV lamp / material set would do though.

The devs didn't title this thread, and @datiswous said they're attempting to mislead people by using Russell's name and a retro style to make it resemble Thief, which is cynical. I grew up on forums like I'm sure anyone who likes a game from '98 did. I actually left the Discord immediately after joining it because it was more off-topic doom-posting than anything relevant to the mod. I thought the forums might be better, but it's mostly just grown men yelling at clouds and telling strangers how mature they are, and a few brave souls actually developing anything. Depressing place, I'll just stick to enjoying new missions every 6 months without an account.

True, but, 1. this thread is called "Western stealth FPS with Stephen Russell", and, 2. nothing you said changes anything for me. The gameplay still doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. And, if you really think this forum is cynical, then you don't visit forums much. Actually, the majority of the users are are pretty mature, unlike in other forums.

I also see 9 FPS in room "Keys & Lockpicks". It appears to be caused by the light from the windows.

I replaced the moonlight setup in Collateral with a global parallelSky light. It seems to work as expected and is much easier to setup. Cool. @stgatilov The moon light entities had "nodiffuse" set to 1. I don't remember why. What effect does this have? "nospecular" was also set. Does this have a noticeable performance impact?

I've idly wondered if you could have a monster that reverses the light gem. That is, it can see you in darkness better than in the light.

When setting r_volumetricEnable to 0, I see some light disappear and FPS increases by maybe 2-3 FPS, but does not come close to the previous values. I run on a computer with 8 CPUs and none of them goes over 50%. I tried enabling the menu setting "Frontend Acceleration" and restarting, but that seemed to make no difference. For r_volumetricEnable set to 1, I tested the following: * beta 1: 33 FPS and 24 FPS * beta 2: 32 FPS and 24 FPS * beta 3: 33 FPS and 24 FPS * beta 4: 33 FPS and 24 FPS * beta 5: 17 FPS and 9 FPS

We didn't make the holidays (such a busy time of year) so here's a New Year's gift, an unusual little mission. Window of Opportunity Recover an item for a regretful trader out in a wilderness setting, and discover more! Available within the in-game mission downloader or: Download: http://www.thedarkmo...ndetails/?id=79 Alternative: https://drive.google...WTMzQXZtMVFBSG8 Some unorthodox gameplay on regular/ghost difficulties. (Arachnophobes might prefer short mode...) Please expect to need your lantern in regular and ghost modes! Short ("easy") mode is a smaller map, so if you are looking for areas others reference below, or 100% of the loot, you'll need to play on another mode. I wanted to create my first mission before I became influenced by too many others' ideas, and limited myself to what has been done before. As such, this mission is not set in a city/town, and has some features that are likely to be provocative. There's a section some really like, which others don't, either way I kept it short to not last too long. That being said, I hope you do find it fun! :-) Special thanks to those who provided valuable testing and feedback: Goldwell, Kyyrma, plotzzz, 161803398874989, PPoe & Bikerdude (who also contributed a sound). (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] If you are having trouble finding the main objective, here's what to pay attention to in the mission for hints: There is a spot it's possible to get stuck on the ground in the corner by the cliff/rockfall where there's a rope laying on the ground, please take care if you poke around there!

Can you double-check and see if the performance loss also impacts beta 5. I believe that a volumetric light was added to the skylight. You can also try setting r_volumetricEnable 0 and see if performance returns to normal.

I suppose option 5 would be to edit the mission itself to patch the caulk. Something like this was done to In a Time of Need to fix the LOD on some torches that a TDM update had turned into game-ruining proximity detectors. I'd be very wary of making changes to other peoples' missions though. Does the stray light in WS1 affect the light gem if you walk on it? If not, I'd say just leave it. It's a minor cosmetic issue.

In my mission, there is a script that is supposed to display a message if a player is damaged by an explosion. It didn't work because health stays at 100 even when the light gem shows damage was taken. at the start of script I did this; PlayerHealth = $player1.getHealth(); sys.print("Start health = " + PlayerHealth + "\n"); and it reports 100 (or less if player is damaged already) after the explosion (more) damage is taken per light gem, but this; PlayerHealth = $player1.getHealth(); sys.print("health now = " + PlayerHealth + "\n"); Still shows the value recorded before damage was taken. So how do I test for actual health?