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Hi, I'm messing around with patches to see what can be done with them, and I have a couple of questions. None are critical issues, as a matter of fact, I doubt I'd notice them or cared if I were playing someone else's map, but as I'm learning, knowing what can't be done is sometimes as important as what can be done. Here's the thing: is it possible to bevel a surface not parallel to one of the orthogonal axes, in other words, a slanted bevel? To be more specific: I'm having problems with snapping it to the grid; it doesn't want to. I mean, I have done the bevel, and it looks nice from a distance, but the slanted surface refuses to snap to the grid, which causes a visible, although small, seam (or at least I assume that's the reason.) And projecting the texture is also a bit of pain. Let's see if I can attach a picture... OK... [a few/lots of minutes later] messing around with it one side now looks much better (almost imperceptible seam, tbh,) but the other side still looks off. I still can't snap to the grid the four corners (interestingly, it's the main brush, the frustum, the one that refuses, not the bevel, which is perfectly snapped). I can snap three of the four corners, but there is always one that shifts on its own will, even when using the smallest grid. See the next two pictures, where I have the main brush and the patch selected; the dots overlap except that one. And if I snap that one, another will shift (clockwise? I think.) I mean, that's like... what, 1/3 of 1/8 of a Doom Unit? 1mm? Not game-breaking, really, and nothing that can't be hidden with some trim or just in shadows, but I wonder if there's a technique for this or what I did wrong. [Hmmm, after some thinking, I wonder if my issue was creating the original cube on grid X and then cutting the triangular corner for the bevel on a different grid size so the corners were weirdly placed... I'd have to test that out] And speaking of seams, is it possible to make a smooth texture transition from the surface of a cylinder (or ring or whatever) to its cap? See the third picture, which is the rounded base of a column. If it's not (or it takes a lot of effort or editing), then it's no big deal, as there are more important things to worry about. But if there's a quick & easy way (natural projection hasn't worked for me in this instance), it would be good to know. Thanks!

I think the writing is on the wall. Advanced upscaling will be adopted as widely as possible as the free performance band-aid for the gaming industry. The majority of players will probably run it automatically without even noticing. Recently we've seen rumors of Microsoft working on a Windows upscaler (which may be similar to AMD's RSR in that the game developers don't need to touch it) and Sony may include an NPU in a PlayStation 5 Pro for their own bespoke console-level upscaling solution (not an FSR 3/4, although those can be supported). The irony would be if Nvidia ended up killing the demand for gaming GPUs faster by marketing DLSS so hard, that there's less "need" for new and top-end GPUs. But they won't care because they prefer to chase more lucrative markets like AI, datacenter, automotive. I say "faster" because there is some point in the future when additional hardware can't push the boundaries of graphics, or faster hardware can't be created. We'll see an evolution of Unreal Engine 5's photorealism approach, adoption of 8K resolution, possibly 16K for VR, and a push to the 240-1000 FPS range. Generated frames could be used for a free doubling if not quadrupling of FPS to hit those high numbers, and upscaling tends to work better when your input/target resolution are already very high. For VR specifically, foveated rendering can slash hardware requirements, possibly by 80% or more if the implementation is good enough. On the hardware side, there's still free lunch to be had with a few additional node shrinks. Stacked L2/L3 cache could be extremely beneficial, think the 3D V-Cache version of Infinity Cache (Nvidia has gone with big L2 with Lovelace). We don't see adoption of High Bandwidth Memory in consumer GPUs because it is in such high demand for AI/enterprise products, but there's no technical reason it can't be used. We will see the blossoming of mega APUs this decade.

Actually yes! I am aware of the pointfile. But thank you for pointing it out. It's actually the pointfile specifically that has been giving me headaches. Interesting, I had no idea! Do you know where I might find it? Ha, and here I thought it would be better to use brushes for simple geometry rendering instead of complicated entities. Thank you for the warning. I bet the reason I'm having so many issues has to do with NoDraw textures...I'll take a look next time I get the chance. Thanks, to the three of you. It's good to know that I'm looking in the right places and have some new avenues to venture.

Something I was thinking of: Even if some assets are non-commercial, are all assets at least accounted for to make sure they're credited accordingly and can be distributed? I ask following an issue in another great project I work with called Red Eclipse: They don't have NC assets but did have a few texture packages they had to remove because they later found out their clauses were incompatible with the project. If this hasn't happened in well over a decade it's very unlikely anyone would complain today and request removal for any reason, but if any resource had its license misunderstood that could destroy existing FM's unless perfect replacements were found. Obviously I presume the team never included any asset randomly found on the internet without verifying their explicit requirements in detail, but it doesn't hurt to check. I think the best that can be done otherwise would be to have a list of which assets are libre or have the NC clause: That way a map can choose to use those models and textures that are free if the author wants their FM to be fully libre, albeit this would handicap an author in what packages they can use. If core assets like character models or textures are also NC, the idea is likely pointless as you can't make a FM without those, at best you can skip a few texture packages... not sure about other things like core scripts or defs, since they're technically code I presume those are GPL?

I was able to reproduce this in 2.12 beta as well as 2.11. Start mission setviewpos -5727 974 292 24 -57 0 Wait for new objective setviewpos 3795 5676 -3164 18 160 0 Wait for objective complete Shoulder body setviewpos -1643 3574 -1903 4 180 0 Drop body on elevator platform Press elevator button Setting "logFile 2", I was able to capture some console messages before the crash. "MISSION COMPLETED" displays twice instead of once. I haven't had a chance to look further into this. WARNING:idClipModel::Handle: clip model 0 on 'bellero' (dc8) is not a collision or trace model WARNING:idClipModel::Handle: clip model 0 on 'bellero' (dc8) is not a collision or trace model WARNING:idClipModel::Handle: clip model 0 on 'bellero' (dc8) is not a collision or trace model MISSION COMPLETED MISSION COMPLETED ----- idRenderModelManagerLocal::EndLevelLoad ----- 0 models purged from previous level, 1031 models kept. --------------------------------------------------- Regenerated world, staticAllocCount = 0. Getting threadname failed, reason: No such file or directory (2) --------- Game Map Shutdown ---------- ModelGenerator memory: 133 LOD entries with 0 users using 2128 bytes. WARNING:idClipModel::FreeTraceModel: tried to free uncached trace model (index=0) --------- Game Map Shutdown done ----- Shutting down sound hardware idRenderSystem::Shutdown() ...shutting down QGL I18NLocal: Shutdown. ------------ Game Shutdown ----------- ModelGenerator memory: No LOD entries. Shutdown event system --------------------------------------

@grodenglaive I think random head turning might be plausible for specific characters, if they're supposed to be paranoid for some reason. But you should let the player know in advance that they're always looking over their shoulders. I don't know if Elsevier has any reasons to be paranoid, but it could be plausible in his case. It could even be one of the reasons why Astrid had a hard time seeing him insert the safe code. The doors thing, at least some interior doors were auto-closing too. I was specifically thinking of the dinning room doors when I wrote that. I think there were more auto-closing interior doors, though. Personally, my potato doesn't have any real issues with performance in this mission. Only on the outside the frame rates drop below 60 sometimes, but never enough to make any noticeable difference to the gameplay. That said, I wonder if you could use double visportals on the outside doors. That might help, as the inner portal should close more often, without needing to close the doors. I use double portals sometimes because of that. But it needs testing to know for sure whether it helps or not. (It also requires adjusting info_locationSeparators, as they can only touch one portal). Also, the big visportal in the water that separates the front yard from the spider area seems to be always open. I wonder if having two visportals in a V shape (from the top view) instead of that one, would help closing it. Or some similar configuration that doesn't interfere with the view from the watchtower.

I actually committed the relevant changes in source several months ago, but for some reason it looks like the generated HTML on the public user guide page hasn't update. I'll have to see if there is some problem with the CI script which is supposed to generate the web page from source control. I think the problem may be that the CI system is expecting the .html file to be included in source control directly (which it no longer is) rather than running AsciiDoctor itself.

New script for mappers: my flavour of a fog density fading script. To add this to your FM, add the line "thread FogIntensityLoop();" to your map's void main() function (see the example in fogfade.script) and set "fog_fade" "1" on each foglight to enable script control of it. Set "fog_intensity_multiplier" on each info_location entity to change how thick the fog is in that location (practically speaking it's a multiplier for visibility distance). Lastly, "fog_fade_speed" on each foglight determines how quickly it will change its density. The speed scales with the current value of shaderParm3, using shaderParm3 = 1000 as a baseline. So i.e. if shaderParm is currently at 1/10th of 1000, then fade speed will be 1/10th as fast. Differences to Obsttorte's script: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/&do=findComment&comment=310436 my script uses fog lights you created, rather than creating one for you. Obsttorte's script will delete the foglight if entering a fogfree zone and recreate it later more than one fog light can be controlled (however, no per-fog-light level of control) adding this to the map requires adding a line to your void main() script, rather than adding an info_locations_settings entity with a custom scriptobject spawnarg in my script, mappers set a multiplier of fog visibility distance (shaderParm3), while in Obsttorte's script a "fog_density" spawnarg is used as an alternative to shaderParm3 smaller and less compactly written script fogfade.scriptfogfade.map

I know of no reason why it wouldn't - the xray glasses are really the only thing that does any kind of screen effect. There is no FOV slider in the game so it was not tested admittedly. I am not recalling anything really that interacts with the players inventory directly in the mission. Dropping the glasses with "Drop Inv. Item" and reacquiring them doesn't restore the item to the players inventory either I am guessing?

The "peculiar lenses" don't work for me. Neither the ones I bought, nor the second ones I found in some tower. Every CInventoryItem (C++ object) stores pointer to entity in m_Item. In my case, this pointer is dead, i.e. it points to an entity which was removed some time ago. I guess for the glasses to work, it should point to the "atdm:xray_glasses" entity. The reason why it works for some people is either because the glasses don't die for them, or because they die but not completely and no other entity created afterwards takes its entity number. So the main question is: who kills the glasses entity and why? UPDATE: Just to add some more detail. I think I'm playing clean latest version with latest TDM beta. I got lost pretty quickly, so I completed all the objectives and explored most of the map first. Then I returned to the starting area and went to buy a sword. There I noticed the glasses, bought them and tried to use them instantly: they did not work. Then I explored some more and found second glasses in the tower + a piece of advice to use them. Now I have two items, but they don't work anyway.

Looking at the performance charts, I feel the move is to turn it on, cap framerate at 60. Most of the minimums were around 60 with DLSS Performance on, so it would be flawless. But here I am at glorious 720p quality. Also my main system is out of commission for some reason, I'm going to try updating the BIOS.

That is interessting. I also do not find hungerian notation helpful in any way. Exactly the opposite in fact. I was doing a lot of functional programming recently, where code is very short and concise. Maybe that's the reason. It is simply not needed there.

They are there for a reason though, not just because someone said so. If you want to communicate with people and you work on the code with someone, you need to share some common principles. And while I agree that things like clean code can be a bit extreme at times, I've never seen anyone questioning it super hard; neither stuff like solid principles, for example. Obviously, you can be a rebel if you want to, but you'll probably end up working alone.

It's easy to imagine how #1 can be solved fairly: When the player or an enemy AI shoot an armed AI, the AI that was hit should be given a random destination near the attacker to run to. The further the player is from the target, the larger the radius around the player in which a random node may be picked; If you're far away the virtual sphere should be large, meaning AI may run to a room or passage near you but still in your general direction . This new behavior should be influenced by AI acuity and difficulty settings though I'm not sure which ones... also toggled by one, for those who prefer the old way and abusing clueless guards as they wonder what force of the universe must be hitting them. By the way, and I just realized this now: The problem doesn't only affect attacks, but also spotting the player before attacking. Think of the last time a guard standing outside spotted you on a balcony before you hid, enough to draw their swords and start searching but not attack you outright; The guard was alerted by something in a building, yet he draws his sword to search the area near him. If I'm standing outside and think I see a burglar in my house through the window, I'm going to go near my home if I plan to confront the possible intruder, not start looking around the road next to me and say "I know you're here somewhere" which would imply I have a serious problem Main reason I mention #2 is when I helped with transcribing the subtitles for the drunk voice, I noticed there are voice lines for AI returning with an ally. Two in fact: If the player is still there the AI has a voice line for telling the other person "that's the one let's get him", if the player hid there are lines such as "you were too slow now he got away". Those voices in particular are never played, or at least I don't remember ever hearing them in all those years: It occurred to me while I wrote this post that they're likely designed for a mechanic that was never implemented... or was but broke very long ago? Curious what its history is.

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.

With TDM 2.12, after the credits finished, the "Mission Complete" screen did not display. I found that the screen was black and I could hear my footsteps when I tried to move around. I think the reason for the mission not completing successfully was that the "Do not kill or harm allies" objective was never marked as "1 = STATE_COMPLETE" instead it was left as "0 = STATE_INCOMPLETE". Note, I didn't use noclip throughout the mission. Same as: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/18054-fan-mission-the-accountant-2-new-in-town-by-goldwell-20160509/&do=findComment&comment=458491

How about using TDM automation framework (and maybe pcem/qemu)? More info see: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19828-automation-features-and-discussion/

I think the issue was that I was using a zoned approach with non-zoned sounds. I switched to the *_z variations of them and the problem seems to be gone. Although, for some reason it seems I still need to have fidelay 0.1, which is probably a sign that there's still something wrong. @demagogueIt took me a while to notice the _z sounds are in a separate folder, though... I had no idea what you were talking about when you mentioned them. Now I do. @peter_spy it's hopefully fixed in the latest, which I just released a couple hours ago.

Do you realize that the original code is wrong? In fact, it has been wrong since revision 2, i.e. since the very beginning. Absolutely no reason to do anything special for one platform.

That was fun! A very impressive, sprawling map with lots to do. Love it! I did get stuck with ...For whatever reason, my installation is one where you don't fit through the gap in the wall, and the peepholes don't work either. (Yes, it is Linux) I never did find But I did manage to figure out 3 of the 4 Good Deeds unaided.

Yes, I would like to find out what the issue is even if the ultimate decision is to use a different library in future. So far I have established that this line in Game.cpp is apparently working (no exception is thrown): // Import the game file into the registry GlobalRegistry().import(fullPath, "", Registry::treeStandard); but this (and any subsequent attempt to getKeyValue) then fails: // Get the engine path _enginePath = getKeyValue(enginePath); I can only think of two hypotheses: It's a timing issue or race condition: the import call is returning but something in libxml2 has not "finalised" the tree so it isn't ready to do XPath queries yet. I don't think there is any asynchronous or threaded code in the libxml2 API but who knows. There's something different about how XPath queries need to be formatted after merging. E.g. perhaps "//game" no longer works, and it has to have some other prefix. Further debugging is therefore needed. Edit: OK, there's definitely something weird going on with encodings. Adding a Registry::dump call into the Game constructor gives me output like this: output error : string is not in UTF-8 output error : string is not in UTF-8 eCrosshairs" ="mU" ���mU="SHIFT"/>< ="ToggleGrid" ="(&#xB3;R"/>< ="ToggleView" ="U" ���mU="SHIFT+CONTROL"/>< ="NextView" ="" ���mU="CONTROL"/>< ="ZoomIn" ="Delete"/>< ="ZoomOut" ="Insert"/>< ="CenterXYViews" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+SHIFT"/>< ="CenterXYView" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="ToggleCubicClip" ="" ���mU="SHIFT"/>< ="ToggleCamera" ="U" ���mU="SHIFT+CONTROL"/>< ="TogTexLock" ="" ���mU="SHIFT"/>< ="DragVertices" ="U"/>< ="DragEdges" =""/>< ="DragFaces" =""/>< ="ToggleSelectionFocus" ="" ���mU="CONTROL"/>< ="ThickenPatchDialog" ="" ���mU="CONTROL"/>< ="ToggleShowAllLightRadii" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+SHIFT+ALT"/>< ="ToggleClipper" ="mU"/>< ="MouseTranslate" =""/>< ="MouseRotate" =""/>< ="MouseDrag" =""/>< ="NewOrthoView" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SetGrid0.125" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid0.25" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid0.5" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid1" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid2" ="U" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid4" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid8" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid16" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid32" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid64" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid128" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="SetGrid256" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="ToggleTextureTool" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="ToggleMainControl_TextureTool" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT+SHIFT"/>< ="NormaliseTexture" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="TexToolGridUp" ="plus" ���mU="SHIFT"/>< ="TexToolGridDown" ="minus" ���mU="SHIFT"/>< ="TexToolMergeItems" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="GroupCycleBackward" ="ISO_Left_Tab" ���mU="SHIFT"/>< ="GroupCycleForward" ="" ���mU=""/>< ="RevertToWorldspawn" ="" ���mU="SHIFT"/>< ="SavePosition1" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition10" ="(&#xB3;R" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition2" ="U" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition3" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition4" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition5" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition6" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition7" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition8" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="SavePosition9" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+ALT"/>< ="LoadPosition1" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition10" ="(&#xB3;R" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition2" ="U" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition3" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition4" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition5" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition6" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition7" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition8" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="LoadPosition9" ="" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="ToggleOrthoBackgroundPanel" ="U" ���mU="Y&#x11D;mU"/>< ="ToggleRotationPivot" ="" ���mU="CONTROL"/>< ="ToggleAasVisualisationPanel" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+SHIFT"/>< ="GroupSelected" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+SHIFT"/>< ="UngroupSelected" ="" ���mU="CONTROL+SHIFT"/></mU><> Whereas with xmlParseFile there are no weird characters and the output just looks like properly formatted XML. I wonder if we have some nonstandard characters in our XML files for some reason.

For some reason when I load the mission in 2.12, I get stuck right at the start. So immediately I have to use noclip. After that it plays fine. This does not happen in 2.11 . I wonder what the cause is.

For an as-yet unknown reason, this commit seems to break XML parsing on Linux: #6439: Use xmlReadFile instead of xmlParseFile which has been deprecated and removed. Privatise Document() constructor accepting an xmlDocPtr. As far as I can see, the commit is entirely correct. xmlParseFile is indeed deprecated, and the new usage of xmlReadFile matches what the libxml2 examples are suggesting. But the result is that although the xmlDoc* returned from the function is not NULL, nothing XML-related works, the entire registry system returns only empty values, and almost all of the tests are broken (because the main radiant core cannot be initialised without any registry values available). Changing back to xmlParseFile makes the problem go away but is an unsatisfactory solution because it specifically reintroduces a deprecated function call. I am not sure whether this is a bug in the specific version of libxml2 on my Ubuntu system, or something incorrect about how we are calling xmlReadFile (i.e. perhaps it requires an encoding or a particular non-default option to correctly process our XML files). Unfortunately like many of the core GNOME C libraries, the documentation is bare-bones and explains almost nothing (like what any of the parsing options actually mean), and I cannot see an obvious way to ask libxml2 to return meaningful errors, or to query exactly what might be wrong with a constructed xmlDoc* object. It makes me wonder if it would be better in the long term to ditch the reliance on libxml2 and instead use one of the light-weight C++ XML parsing libraries like RapidXml or pugixml instead. Not exactly a trivial change but might not be too cumbersome since the existing XML code is wrapped in our own xmlutil classes and not generally used directly by the rest of the codebase.

I don't see any purpose in distinguishing human and non-human sound. If I am non-native speaker, I want to see subtitles with words only, because that's what I have trouble understanding. The only reason to see non-word subtitles is that I don't hear sounds for some reason (sound turned off, no speakers, hearing impaired). It does not matter who makes this sound.