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Dear mappers, please be aware of this decorative light option introduced in upcoming 2.10 It aims to highlight the light volume and produces something like the existing fog particle with the intended effect of better speed and arguably better visuals It looks like this in game The test map we have been testing recently is courtesy of Bikerdude: download To enable this effect you will need to mark your light material with the volumetricLight keyword, like this lights/test_mansion01_window04_vol { description "volumetricLight for mansion01 window04" volumetricLight { map lights/mansion01_window04 colored zeroClamp } } Volumetric lights use projection and falloff textures to generate the volumetric effect. With shadow maps on, they also take shadows in the account. There's also an optional parameter after volumetricLight that toggles max speed vs decent look mode. Credits: @peter_spy for the original test map and direction @Bikerdude for great support during the reintroduction effort this year @stgatilov for taking the implementation on a completely different quality level @all for being cool and awesome

I think we should deprecate parallel lights. The way they are implemented in Doom 3 only works intuitively if it is fully contained in a single visportal area, which is rarely the case. Otherwise, there are huge issue with area-portal graph and shadows. For something global like moonlight, the new parallelSky light should be used. If it is contains the whole level in its light volume, then the behavior should be well-defined as long as portalsky material is used to seal levels from the sky (not caulk or something similar). The light is supposed to come through the portalsky surfaces into all areas in this case. Are there any other usages of parallel lights?

When you press Escape to see the main menu, the sound effects from nearby electrical lights, like buzzing and crackling, will keep on playing. Doesn't seem to happen with gas lamps and torches. I don't know if this has been reported, but it has been around for a long time. (I'm on version 2.12)

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.

The latest TDM dev version (dev16650-10157) appears to contain broken definitions for ambient cube lights, breaking lighting on any FM that uses them (I have several in progress). I noticed the path got renamed from "ambientcube" to "ambientCube" (c became a capital C). Even if picking the new path however, DarkRadiant shows a "shader not found" error, whereas in-world the light is no longer visible and functional. Can this be fixed for the next dev snapshot please?

When volumetric lights were officially supported, I was blasted away on how good the Screenshots looked. So I tried to implement some in the update of my FM. But actually I always ended up with removing them because it looked rather strange with many small dark dots appearing in the areas of the light or when NPCs walk through them. As I read that many FM authors already implemented them into their missions, I wonder what setup did you use? Which colours and density worked for you? My plan was to use a volumetric light for the fireplaces in this mission. But no matter how ai played around with density and colour, I always endet up having those small black and grey tiny dots around. Also the rest of the room looks out of place if the torches on the wall DON'T use VL but the fireplace does. I can't find another way but to listen to your experience with VL. Thank you!

EDIT: This mod is now part of the TDM Modpack. --------------------------------------------------------------------- OLD EDIT: You can find a demo in this post (v0.7) ---------------------------------------------------------- Welcome. Feel free to participate but I ask you to restrain from discussing whether we should or should not do it. We are going for it in this topic. For the practical or philosophical debate please head to: Should small static oil lamps be extinguishable up close? ---------------------------------------------------------- THE IDEA: To have the ability to extinguish small lights with a swift but quiet blow. THE VISION: When no item is selected in the inventory, and upon pressing the use key, Corvan performs a swift but quiet blow that can extinguish small lights located within the radius of the blow. EDIT - Potential side issues to take into account in the future It shouldn't work under water It shouldn't work when carrying a body It shouldn't work when holding any object ---------------------------------------------------------- OIL LAMPS: When I started playing TDM I was frustrated to find out I could not extinguish small oils lamps located right in front of my face. What the? Candles yes but oil lamps no? It turned oil lamps where created during a time the development of the game had a big momentum and oil lamps where offered to mappers without a second thought. Mappers started using oil lamps - under the assumption that only water arrows can extinguish them - and by the time people started wondering why oil lamps could not be extinguished with the fingertips or with a blow the matter was deemed "too late" for any change. I believe that having the ability to easily extinguish ANY small light can improve the experience in the long run and I am set out to change course in this regard, regardless of how some members of this community feel about it. Wesp5's Unofficial Patch offers a workaround that I am not fan of because the moment you put a light out the oil lamp remains frobable thus making the implementation inconsistent. Besides, oil lamps could perfectly trigger an action (ie: unveil a hidden secret) but since all oil lamps are frobable players don't get the required feedback. THE FLINT: When I started playing TDM I was impressed by AI. I clearly remember the moment I put a candle out but moments later I found it was lit. What the? I put the candle out again and waited in the shadows. A builder comes in, puts a flint out a relights it. I was amazed. I need to get one of those flints, I thought. A few missions later I finally got to have one. The flint was the key: I started toying with the flint and I realized at its core the flint basically is a stim of fire. I changed the stim of fire for a stim of water and voila, I could extinguish lights with the modded flint. The problem now is that the modded flint extinguishes all lights and fires, large and small but hey, things are heading in the right direction. I am not yet ready to publish any files but I already need a lot of help from experienced modders and developers. Here is my main concern at this point: Do you think it would be possible to detect if a stim is colliding with large lights? Or Do you think the impact of a stim can be limited to certain entities? Or Any other ideas to limit the impact of a water stim to small lights only? Cheers!

Following the release of my first FM I wanted to offer a little surprise to the TDM community. I've implemented a little feature I wished to have for a while: Colored flame lights! This covers all fire based light entities, meaning all torches and gas lamps get versions with colored flames. They work the same way as the normal flames in terms of functionality, meaning you can move candles around and water arrows put them out and the player can relight them with matches. Colors include: Red, green, blue, pink. The implementation is very flexible: Each color variation inherits its original entity and only changes the light color or particle definition, thus changes to the base def will automatically reflect to the colored versions during development modifications. The colored entities replicate the same DarkRadiant tree structure as the normal lights directory except in their own subdirectories. I'm eager to hear what you think and if you like them! My goal is to offer this submission for vanilla TDM, ideally as a new feature for 2.09... I think they would look very nice for many fantasy setups! And of course, here are some screenshots of how each color looks in-game (red, green, blue, pink): The pk4 is attached to this post as it includes only particle and entity definitions so it's ridiculously tiny. You can install it in one of two ways: Either unpack its contents inside the directory of your fm, or copy the file as is inside the darkmod folder next to all the other pk4's... both should work just fine. color_lights_1.0.pk4

Since I saw many good missions with foggy and dusty areas, I was checking the wiki for advice. However there's scarce information about how to achieve this (if you don't really know what you're looking for at least). So I wanted to kindly ask the people who know the engine far more well than me and the ones who maybe already created a dusty indoor area. My goal is to create a cellar which has torches in it that looks foggy / dusty. I already have that cellar which consists of multiple rooms with their torches and some decal patches on the surfaces. Still it looks very bright and clean. How would I implement a foggy area here (also in terms of performance)? I tried volumetric lights, which results in a really good looking result, however I notice a performance drop (because of the unnessesary shadow calculations I guess) I tried a func emitter, but it seems to be emitting the fog even when the player isn't in that area (again, performance reasons could apply here if I would place multiple emitters there I guess). Also the particles are not bound to that area, so you can see them in the rooms above the cellar sometimes I guess in the end it can be a mix of multiple methods. What's your suggestion? What technologies would you choose?

Myself and Baal have extensively used BounceLights in our WIP, the problem is that while they create superior lighting mood they effect the LG when we would rather they didn't. So my question is: Is there an arg or a script that can be applied to these BL's to stop them effecting the lightgem..?

These have never worked for me, but I installed TDM 2.0.9 and DR 2.11 and was looking at maps and all the lights work. I've done a lot of experiments with my own materials, and nothing ever worked so far, so I wonder if it's because Quake 4 is the set game? Is this only for TDM or should it work for all supported games? Or maybe it's my materials or my lights?

I have bumped into an old issue about glitches with directional lights: 3818. At the same time, I have recently fixed a bug in interaction culling, which happens when light source illuminates many portals areas at once. If we are lucky, that bug could be the only one It would be great to check it on some test map. But creating a testmap from scratch would be a horrible waste of time. I wonder if someone had experimented with parallel lights and vast outdoors areas and saw shadows randomly disappearing. If yes could you please share your test map?

Not so long ago I found what could make a pretty good profile picture and decided to try it out on these new forums. But I couldn't find a button anywhere that would let me change it. I asked on Discord and it seems Spooks also couldn't find anything anywhere. So I logged into an old alternative account and, lo and behold, that account has a button. This is on the first screen I get when I: 1) click on my account name in the top-right of the browser -> 2) click on 'profile'. Compared to my actual account: Are you also missing this button on your account? It'd be very much appreciated if that functionality could be restored to any of the affected accounts.

Hi, I need to know what the code is to use Spoiler Tags. I am using my tablet and I don't have the options to use anything, like spoiler tags, quote tags, text changes etc. Thanks

I've recently updated the game to 2.07. I'm having a few problems. The menu Flickers and glitches when i move the mouse cursor over the words, this is not too concerning but it is a bit annoying after a while. The other problem I'm having is that during game-play there are some glitches that i think are to do with the light sources. They begin to glitch after a few seconds. Triangles where torch is: Random pale glitch in corner and flame in 2d: Inventory object not the correct image for split second. It's supposed to be a book: My computer stats are:Operating System: Windows 8.1 64-bitCPU: AMD A10-7700K, Kaveri 28nm TechnologyRAM: 8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 669MHz (9-9-10-24)Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. A88XM-PLUS (FM2+ )Graphics: N20WB (1680x1050@60Hz), 1024MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 5500 Series (XFX Pine Group) Any suggestions and help will be appreciated.I can get more screenshots if it helps.

As per Duzenko's request here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19650-glsl-custom-shaders-a-mapper-wanted/page-2?do=findComment&comment=427749 Currently we can't use bloom with lights as efficiently as in other engines. Blend add mode, along with emissive texture does not allow the light to be bigger than actual bounds of a model, even with high bloom intensity settings. Example: Now in other non-PBR engines like UDK, you have Emissive slot in your material definition, and you can use that texture with multiply operation to achieve this effect: In TDM, you have to fake this effect with transparent particle, which takes more time to make, adds resources and needs more processing power. It would be great to have this effect only through post processing, as in image above.

Is it something we want to add to the engine? https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/forums/filedata/fetch?id=343728 If so, does it need to be per material or per entity?

Hello! I just upgraded my 2.06 Darkmod to 2.07 and have experianced following issues. Bottom half of the main menu flickers when moving mouse. When playing Tears of st. Lucia most of the lights are not lighting up anything. You can see the model for the light is lit but no light is emmited. I just returned to Darkmod and am unable to play at this point. Couldn't find any similar post, checked FAQ. I uninstalled the game and installed it again fro scratch, as well as removing anything from %appdata% and the problem remains. Please help! Thanks, Neux

Hi I have a weird issue with playing the mod. All lights except for the ambient lights are not working. See attached image. This happens in all the missions I tried today. The light gem doesn't light up and guards cannot see me if i move closer to a light. If I use the lantern the light gem becomes bright but there is no light in my surroundings from the lantern. So I reinstalled tdm completely and I updated my nvidia geforce drivers but the issue remains unfortunately. Anybody has an idea what causes this?

Of course I'm not talking about the flames, but the electric/gas lights or whatever they are that always remain lit. It can have balance like attract a guard from the break sound or require a special tool. I just find the fact that they're impermeable yet the fire lighting is so easy to take out a bit of an odd thing.