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This appears to be the function which calculates the texture values for Q3 export: https://gitlab.com/orbweaver/DarkRadiant/-/blob/master/radiantcore/map/format/Quake3Utils.h?ref_type=heads#L56 It's largely based on legacy GtkRadiant code and means absolutely nothing to me.

sadly the upcomming 8xxx series from amd will only be for midrange atleast according to leaks (grain of salt maybe ?). well it would be something quite different thats for sure not sure if 32 gb vram would actually help (what is the max texture size today ?), it might help if they really go nuts with the detail level in upcomming titles but i suspect this might take longer as the game companies dont want to alienate players with less vram. ofc it will come at some point but i dont see it in the near future. the 2 and 3 gb vram chips might actually make a dent in the bus width war. what the hell happened with hbm memory ???, the old fury cards could actually do 4k no problem with only 4 gb vram because the hbm memory was so blazing fast.

@The Black Arrow That's a good analysis. I don't disagree but we're referring to different time periods with different quality aims: In the early days of 3D and low-res CRT screens when we had 256x256 textures, detail textures were used to make surfaces appear as if they have 1024x1024 textures... today in the age of 1080p monitors such texture can appear blurry from up close, we want to make 1024x1024 textures appear of 4096x4096 quality. Back then the goal was to get at least a little bit of perceived sharpness, today the goal is to see those microscopic details on every surface as if everything is real... while the concept of detail textures is old it scales to cover both aims. As you correctly pointed out, the ideal solution would be upgrading the actual textures themselves. Sadly there are two big problems with this that will likely never be possible to overcome: Someone must create or find identical textures to replace existing ones, which have to retroactively fit every old FM. That would be a huge effort for so many images, and will not look exactly the same way so people would complain how "this wall used to be made of small red bricks which are now larger and yellower which isn't what I intended and no longer line up". An advanced upscaling filter may be able to bump the resolution with good results, this would be a lot less effort and retain the exact appearance of textures. The even greater issue is storage and memory use would go through the roof. Imagine all our textures (from surfaces to entity skins) being 4096x4096 which would be the aim for decent quality today: TDM could take over 100 GB of drive space, you'd need at least 16 GB of RAM to run it, and the loading time of a FM will be 5 minutes. Detail textures are a magic solution for both problems: They're overlayed in realtime on top of the standard textures without changing their base appearance. This means you see pixels several times the scale of the image without requiring any image to actually be at that resolution, no vRAM or loading time increase. And if detail layers are disabled with distance you also don't lose FPS in per-pixels calculations when distant lights update.

yeah its a jungle out there but a 12 gb card on a 128 bit bus would only be viable with dlss and then only just . but there will probably be plenty of options as you mention though id still go for something that would atleast be able to drag the ammount of vram without workarounds. strangely the old amd R9 390 had a 512 bit bus and could probably have accepted 32 gb vram but the card is to slow to do 4k in modern titles. even so the 8 gb model actually ran quite nicely in games such as the first horizon in 4K but would probably choke and die on forbidden west . minor wtf moment is crysis remastered it runs it at 4k in can it run crysis with a gazillion fps looks quite purty to but i suspect this is a bug.

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?

No, the 192-bit RTX 3060 12 GB came first. The cut down 8 GB model came over a year and a half later, and probably in small numbers because nobody talks about it much other than "don't get it, it's 20-30% slower". 3060 Ti had 8 GB from the start, and always has, although it looks like they made a GDDR6X version. They would have to change the bus width to accommodate 12 GB. There were rumors of products like 3070 16 GB, 3080 20 GB and so on, but they never materialized outside of engineering samples. If you think things are confusing now, just wait until 3 GB GDDR7 chips materialize within a couple of years. We could see 12 GB cards on a 128-bit bus, 9 GB on 96-bit, and so on.

3060 has 192-bit bus (cut to 128-bit for the maligned 8 GB model), and the gimped cards (like 7600 XT 16 GB 128-bit) can definitely use the extra VRAM in some scenarios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_30_series#Desktop

aye the rtx 3060 was another weird one, it only has a 128 bit bus which is to low to effectively handle 12 gb so it did not really help with the extra vram in higher resolutions. sadly they decided to continue with the same eh "mistake" with the rtx 4060 16 gb model . id call that deception to make users pay more for a card which is not even rated for 4K... sadly. the 16 gb 3070 model was scrapped by nvidia because it would be a contender for the much higher priced 3080 non ti i guess as it has a 256 bit bus and hence would be a capable 4k card. the 3060 ti 8 gb was a much better card sadly. https://www.techradar.com/reviews/evga-geforce-rtx-3060-black-xc

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.

There's been talk over the years on how we could improve texture quality, often to no avail as it requires new high-resolution replacements that need to be created and will look different and add a strain on system resources. The sharpness post-process filter was supposed to improve that, but even with it you see ugly blurry pixels on any nearby surface. Yet there is a way, a highly efficient technique used by some engines in the 90's notably the first Unreal engine, and as it did wonders then it can still do so today: Detail textures. Base concept: You have a grayscale pattern for various surfaces, such as metal scratches or the waves of polished wood or the stucco of a rough rock, usually only a few highly generic patterns are needed. Each pattern is overlayed on top of corresponding textures several times, every iteration at a smaller... as with model LOD smaller iterations fade with camera distance as to not waste resources, the closer you get the more detail you see. This does wonders in making any texture look much sharper without changing the resolution of the original image, and because the final mixture is unique you don't perceive any repetitiveness! Here's a good resource from UE5 which seems to support them to this day: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/adding-detail-textures-to-unreal-engine-materials Who else agrees this is something we can use and would greatly improve graphical fidelity? No one's ever going to replace every texture with a higher resolution version in vanilla TDM; Without this technique we'll always be stuck with early 2000's graphics, with it we have a magic way of making it look close to AAA games today! Imagine being able to see all those fine scratches on a guard's helmet as light shines on it, the thousands of little holes on a brick, the waves of wood as you lean into a table... all without even losing much performance nor a considerable increase in the size of game data. It's like the best deal one could hope for! The idTech 4 material system should already have what we need, namely the ability to mix any textures at independent sizes; Unlike the old days when only a diffuse texture was used, the pattern would now need to be applied to both albedo / specular / normal maps, to my knowledge there are shader keywords to combine each. Needless to say it would require editing every single material to specify its detail texture with a base scale and rotation: It would be painful but doable with a text injection script... I made a bash script to add cubemap reflections once, if it were worth it I could try adapting it to inject the base notation for details. A few changes will be needed of course: Details must be controlled by a main menu setting activating this system and specifying the level of detail, materials properties can't be controlled by cvars. Ultimately we may need to overlay them in realtime, rather than permanently modifying every material at load time which may have a bigger performance impact; We want each iteration to fade with distance and only appear a certain length from the camera, the effect will cause per-pixel lighting to have to render more detail per light - surface interaction so we'll need to control the pixel density.

Hm after testing: This does actually work fine. Both in DR and in tdm. I guess there's no point in specifing the model path, because then it only works on one specific func_static.

ok so after getting myself a rtx 3070 im left with a bit of a wonder about all the fud on the net. elitist users claim the 3070 cant do 4k (debunked it handles 4k just fine but you need to lower the texture resolution in some titles to not overshoot the frankly rather low amount of vram -> 8 gb). some back and forth on the 2080ti some claim that the 3070 is faster while others claim the 2080ti is. (from my own experience the 2080ti is a bit faster in 4k while the 3070 is a bit faster in lower resolutions). if you play exclusively in 4k go for the 2080ti -> reason it has more vram 11gb vs 8gb this might not sound like a huge deal but the extra 3gb helps a lot with ultra high texture resolutions. debunked (claims that the 3070 uses newer dlss features, it does not. the 2080ti supports the exact same dlss features that the 3070 does, it even supports dlss 3 minus the framegen feature. some claims the 3070 uses newer tensor cores which are faster, well is they are i dont see it... the 2080 ti has 4 times the amount of tensor cores compared to the 3070 while the 3070 has around 1000 more cuda cores hmm ???). the real reason i think the 3070 got so popular is that it delivered close to the same performance of the insanely overpriced 2080ti, i cant fault people for that choice but i would like some realism in the comparison and not something based on just the price. the 2080ti was a highend card back when it was new while the 3070 is a mid range card at half the price of the 2080ti with at least comparable performance but lacks enough vram to play all titles at 4k with everything cranked to the max. playing hzd forbidden west on the 3070 atm in 4k with everything on max except texture resolution which i have on high and i get > 80 fps with the framegen mod and around 45 fps without it (dlss is flaky in this game though), the 2080ti in the same game in 4k gets around 100 fps with the framegen mod and 55 fps without it with texture resolution at the highest setting).

Skins don't require a model path, that's just a convenience feature to allow the skins to be associated with the model(s) in the editor. However I have no idea if an unassociated skin can be used on a func_static. I suppose there's no reason why it couldn't work, but it's not something I've ever tested and I wouldn't be surprised if it fails to do anything (either in the editor or the game).

Is it possble to make skins for brushes/patches by conferting them to func_static? Models are func_static when you add them in DR, but in the skin file you reference them with the model name instead of the entity name. When you convert a brush/patch though, it converts it uses a model with the same name as the entity name, so in this case func_static_1 for example. Would it be enough to use that in the skin file? Allthough the wiki article states it's important to add an extension.

Actually I think I found what's causing issues with my textures: DR changes the texture's Horizontal and Vertical Shift when a face gets slanted. E.g., my test door is facing -Y and sitting flat on the ground, which is at 0 in Z, so the v-shift is 0. When I move the bottom vertices of the door 8 units forward, and then re-fit the texture, the v-shift turns to 4 (3.97241). If I do the same but backward, the v-shift turns to 90.7035. But these values depends on the distance the face is from the world origin, and sometimes if I move the top vertices instead, the values don't change. I can't make sense of it... The other editors don't do this, so the plugin's import code doesn't account for it. Do you think you could help me understand the logic behind this? If I could understand it, maybe I could get the plugin working with it.

I'm not using the Quake 3 engine, I'm using the Godot engine. The results seem ok, except when faces are slanted, but I'm not sure why it happens. I'm trying to find out. I don't know anything about the Q3 engine, so I'm not the one to say what's correct and what isn't about the map format. When I said "correct", I just meant that it's the same value that is displayed in the editor. But there are differences between the Q3 format from DR and from other editors I've tested, like TrenchBroom and NetRadiant Custom. They keep the texture values as they are in the editor. One other difference is that DR exports entity brushes with coordinates relative to the `origin` spawnarg, for example. Though DR is also the only editor that enforces the `origin` spawnarg. (I know there are two Q3 formats, and I'm using the equivalent one on all editors.) I'm importing maps into Godot using a plugin. I've made some changes to it to accommodate for the differences in the map format and some editor specific stuff (e.g. DR uses "rotation" matrices instead of euler "angles").

So..., texture issues are being the only road block I'm having so far in trying to use DR with Godot, but I'm not exactly sure why yet. However, I've noticed when exporting maps in quake3 format, that the texture values don't match the ones in the editor. This is the door face in the map file: hs vs rot hscale vscale ( 24 64 0 ) ( -24 64 96 ) ( 24 64 96 ) darkmod/door/wood/board_brown_nails_hinge 64 256 -180 -0.375 -0.375 0 0 0 The horizontal shift is the only correct value. Is this a bug?

It's strange this is not mentioned on the wiki page.. I do find it logical in program logic. Cool, didn't think of that. I wonder if it's possible to do something like this: skin one_brick_teal_blue { model models/title_models/walls/wooden_frame/straight_frame/* textures/darkmod/plaster/plaster_01 textures/darkmod/stone/brick/blocks_tealblue_dark } So you can make folders of specific models that you can skin in the same way.

AHA, you're indeed correct! Changing the skin names so they start with "a1"' did the trick! This was actually a successful experiment I was trying out! The wiki goes into some detail about making "general skins" that can affect all models. My hope was that, if I made two models using the same skins, then I could just write a single skin file that would change all of them! For example, since "Straight Frame" and "V-Frame" models both use plaster_01 as their main background... ...all I have to do is make a general skin to change that specific plaster texture... ...and then any of the "V-Frame" and "Straight Frame" models can have different backgrounds! It's not a perfect system, as some skins just don't contrast well with the wooden beams, but I should still be able to get a LOT more out of my models now!

Your skins don't have a model specified in the skin code. How do you think it works that way? Edit: The reason this happens (I think) is that the skin name cannot start with a number. skin one_brick_teal_blue { model models/title_models/walls/wooden_frame/straight_frame/straight_frame_wall_128_x_128.ase textures/darkmod/plaster/plaster_01 textures/darkmod/stone/brick/blocks_tealblue_dark }

Alright, new problem with making these skins (or should I make a new thread about this?) Why are my skinned models coming up black? Here is my updated code for a simple skin. And here is the model in the skin editor, changed to its creamy, plaster version. Yet for some reason, all of my skins are pure black. The wiki says this is caused by the editor not finding the skin definition, and that there are spelling errors somewhere. I am not sure what this means, though, since all of my directory paths are spelled right (otherwise, how would the skin editor display them perfectly fine?) Does the name of the file have to match the declared skin name?

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.

Well, it looks very good! I tried generating some textures with AI, and it look quite good but the free model(s) lost the option to generate images and I'm too cheap to pay for it : P

Walked through the mission. As everyone else here had some problems with the books puzzle. Also, opened the secret entrance to the laboratory through the wall, with the lever on the other side. Had to replay to open it with a prober books alignment. Otherwise, a very interesting short mission.

Did you set Windows to show file extensions? Otherwise a file named blabla.skin.txt shows in Windows as blabla.skin Edit: Nevermind, the screenshot shows it's a SKIN file. In general I would recomend using Notepad++ as text editor instead. I use these problem cases to (re)learn how to do things, but after copying the file and folder structure from your example with an other model, in my case the skin showed up fine.. Although putting the skin in a subfolder doesn't work for me.