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So... What was up with the forums all day yesterday..?

Evening Due to time constraints, Im requesting help with a mission that Gold, Mortem and myself are working on. many thanks biker.

Since TDM 1.08 and/or DR 1.73 this function just dosent work correctly anymore and its infuriatingly frustrating. When replacing textures DR returns the message "0 shaders replaced", yet it is replacing the fucking shader! and the only I find out is either than I copy the texture from a brush i just changed a texture on when I flush & reload the shaders.. grrrrrr.

If I know a particular texture is used in my map, but I don't remember where I used it, is there any way in DR to find out what brush I used it on? This is going to be important for replacing D3 textures.

[update] Spoke to Marcus @AMD UK on the phone and as it turns out a number of complaints have been made against "Spyre". My AMD forum account has been unbarred and my Ip address unblocked!!! Bought a new gfx card for xmas, been having issues with mainly the driver So I though a good place to look for support and polity vent etc - or so I thought My second post got flamed by some smart arse fanboy and then promptly locked, to which I reported the posted asking why it had been locked.. and then my account on there got deleted and my Ip blocked (untill the isp dhcp refreshed etc) so I cant login even with a different account name. I have emailed AMD directly about this as I did nothing wrong according the t&c's and I got no warning Pm or email from the forum mods. Now I've been over at the nVidia forums a long while back when I had the 8800GTX when I was equally frustrated when posting about the driver issue with thief etc, but at no point did a thread get locked or worse my account deleted. I don't have loyalty to AMD or nVidia but depending on the answer I get from AMD next week this card maybe going back and AMD will be added to the list of manufactures I will never buy anything from again. So whats the moral of this story, well take your pick.. [update] found cached copies of 1 of my posts Cached AMD frum link Cached AMD forum link2

Just playing TR-2013 atm, and noticed the scum floating on the water, if there any reason why we can creating BM version of our sewer water textures..?

when i do a search, it give me some results, I click on a result and exspect to get taken to the post it specifies - but no..... I get taken to the first post of the bloody thread it is in..ggrrr

Old post (22 Feb'10): I don't know what process we follow to create textures, such as normal maps, but I did find some heightmap textures in the assets folder. Now, as we all know the surface perturbation is very well simulated by normal maps, but if we start extracting the Ambient Occlusion maps from the high polygon models or from heightmaps, then we can either have the interaction shader modified to add the Ambeint occlusion shadow based on light's direction or we can simply bake it on top of diffuse map so that entire lighting result gets modulated by AO with no extra shading cost. Now, for stuff like instanced geometry (such as boxes, hey stacks and a lot of such stuff), AO can be calculated 1. either from high polygon models that we generate normal maps from that use with their in game counterparts, or 2. from hightmaps using third party tools and then combining this heightmap based AO with AO generated from the geometry of low polygonal (in game) model. You can compute per vertex AO and AO from normal maps and from heightmaps using many third party softwares. For characters, I'd suggest to generate AO from the high poly counterparts and that would add the game a definitive visual improvement even if we choose to combine AO with diffusemap. Now, as per the map geometry (non-instanced) is concerned, we can generate AO from heightmaps that would account for accurate soft shading from surface perturbation and then to account for AO from actual geometry, we can either use AO maps the way they were used in training mission (but strictly for everything this time), or I can attempt to build a per vertex Ambient Occlusion generator that integrates into Dark Radiant and stores the AO result in alpha channel of vertex colors. This alpha channel can easily be accessed from within interaction shader and can be combined with heightmap based AO. We'll have to finalize free tools that would let us do all this and then a way of batching some these processes (e.g. generation of heightmap based AO), so old assets can be processed in one go. If we have all this done, then visuals will be at least at par with current gen games. Even if we are planning on shifting to id tech 5 engine, this asset creation method would have us prepared, since rage, like many other games, uses diffuse maps with baked AO. A note on an integrated Per Vertex Ambient Occlusion Generation tool: It's going to be fairly time consuming on my part to attempt to create such a tool. I haven't started looking into how the map data is stored, but I know it's stored in text format, so it should be theoretically interpretable. I also can use some help from the dark radiant veterans here to get a nice head start, in case we decide for it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update 27 Feb'10. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think what I said in this thread so far, is kind of scattered in pieces and it's about time that I should make short points so that there's no confusion. Many thanks to STiFU for his time and for helping me get over the multi-hierarchy bulletpoint problem I got while posting this. Ambient Occlusion shading for Static and Dynamic(animated) geometry What's AO? The illumination at each point is a function of other geometry in the scene (Courtesy - AO on Wikipedia). So please don't confuse dynamic lighting with this. Types of Ambient Occlusion we can have in Dark Mod: Ambient Occlusion coming from the real Geometry. Texture space Ambient Occlusion Coming from a simulated Geometry, i.e. normal maps. E.g. Soft shadows between the cracks of a wall. Ways of obtaining Ambient Occlusion Generating Texture space AO: This can be generated from the height maps. These height maps can be generated from source images used to generate the normal maps. [*]Generating AO From Actual Geometry: Either, hand painted maps. Or, with the help of an Ambient Occlusion Generator integrated in Dark Radiant. For characters, AO maps should be obtained from the high polygonal models of the characters to get AO from pores of skin, cloth grains, chainmail armour etc. How to apply the Ambient Occlusion to scene (Alternate approaches): Based on direction and distance of each light. A pixel facing away from light should retain maximum AO a pixel facing directly the light should have AO wiped out. E.g. a torch held close to a dark corner (due to AO) should wipe out 80-90 of AO shadow whereas areas away from torch should retain 100% AO. Requirement: In order to achieve above, we need to store texture-space AO and geometric AO to a memory that can be made available to interaction shader at runtime. Texture space AO can be stored to blue channel of a normal map. This way, to store texture space AO, no extra texture memory required at the cost only a couple of extra shader instruction. Geometry based AO can be stored to the alpha channel of vertex-colours of the geometry with no texture memory cost. Also, vertex-colours are already accessible in the interaction shader. With AO generator this process can be automated. Making an AO generator would require a lot of R&D and work on my part. Manual method, e.g. hand painted AO is difficult in this case. I don't know how hard (if at all possible) it is to paint vertices in dark radiant. [*]Constant AO regardless of light's direction and distance. This should look like the grime decals, except for the fact that, we'd have texture space AO as well this time. This approach would require no change to interaction shader whatsoever. Texture space AO has to be baked into diffuse map. Geometry based AO can be stored to separate textures that can be applied as decals. Hand painted AO is already being used this way, e.g. grime decals. In an automated approach, AO generator can generate AO maps from geometry and can store them to disk. It should also automatically prepare/change materials accordingly. Requires feasibility study of this on my part. The least we can do to improve the look of the Game with the help of AO: Regardless of whether an automated approach for generating ambient occlusion is feasible, we can at least do following things to improve the look of the game, without having to change a single line of code and/or shader: Bake Texture-Space AO into diffuse-maps. Obtain AO from, preferably, high polygonal models of characters and bake it into their diffuse-maps. Grime decals as we are already using. Bake AO into static objects' diffuse-maps such as crates, hay-stacks, cart etc. AO would look a lot better if we have high poly counterparts of these to generate the AO maps from.

why are they so slow this evening..??

I don't know if my memory is failing me, but I can't remember how to achieve an effect with a texture. I'm adding some new foliage models that are flat planes. I'm pretty sure I saw an example a while ago of how to make such models lit on both sides, rather than one side being lit and the other side being completely black. Just setting it to noshadows and noselfshadows doesn't work, and I've tried twosided and translucent as well. Either I've forgotten how to do it, or I'm misremembering that it's even possible.

The forums have been upgraded, please see this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/9845-forums-upgraded-to-ipb-3-0-3

Evening I made a small desktop, but that only fly in the ointment is I cant change the texture of the lampshade when I switch the light on/off any ideas..? [edit] found an alternative lamp glass work around - change the texture to one of the 2-sided glass textures - only issue i have now is Im getting a weird reflection of the candle flame, in that i can see 2 flames instead of one, I assuem the only way to fix that is to edit the material def and remove the reflection line..?

I've started to quite enjoy messing around turning pics into tiles, and from browsing the forums I'm wondering if I could help with textures (the 'turning them into tiles' part, at least). No idea whether what I do would be up to TDM standards, so I've attached some samples for you to check out. If you think they show enough promise for me to be useful, let me know. Just to be clear, I'm not submitting these as potential textures, just as examples of my ability (or otherwise ) to tile. Source image for brick wall: http://ipadwallpaper...1-wallpaper.jpg Sources for other textures are from http://shadowhousecr...ns.blogspot.com

I'm occasionally working on a new map, and yesterday I found and decided to use one of Melan's window textures from SVN. It's textures/darkmod/window/ornate/stained_azure_long, and here's a snapshot from DR showing how I'm using it: But in the game, it's being replaced in some instances with a stone texture, textures/darkmod/stone/brick/rough_blocks02 Here it is in the game: The stone texture is used elsewhere in the map, but not in the vicinity of the window. This instance of the window is a copy of the original instance. Other copies are a mix of the correct window texture and the incorrect stone texture. I checked the materials file, the dds file, and the *.map file where these windows are defined. Everything looks fine, and there's no mention of this stone texture. Has anyone else seen this behavior? Thanks.

I was trying to find the aforementioned thread as I'm working on a map atm and I noticed that the Darkradiant dosent have an image for "textures/common/shadowcaulk" Anyone point me to said thread..?

I'm preparing a new straw texture plus crumb straw edge using the same alpha map as the grasses I did. I've got a decent 3000 x 3000 high res texture and processed it for tiling. Technically it tiles and most of the extreme tiling artifacts I've removed but I'm still improving on that to try to minimise tiling effects even more. I'll do a normal map later using Njob. Here's a 256 x 256 snapshot. The final in-game texture will be 1024 x 1024. Question is, the scale is too large at the default 0.25 in DR and I prefer it to look about right at that scale. If I use scale in the shader do I need to put that on every stage (including the makealpha in the crumb edge version?) and is there a performance hit? Hopefully it scales it once only when it loads the shader. Or am I missing something here? Just creating a 2048 x 2048 makes no difference to the scale and anyway is overkill RAM-waste compared to most of our textures. Similarly, quadrupling the image to form a new image and sizing it down again is a waste of quality. [EDIT] I think what I'm saying is that scaling it down means the tile is effectively very small. Seems odd when I started with a really good 3000 x 3000. Another question: do I reduce the saturation? Some straw is more grey depending how dry maybe. Or should I make two versions? Or make it close to our current straw and bale model so they can be used together? Also, I checked it out and hay is not the same as straw. Hay is dried grass used as animal food. Straw is the stems of wheat etc used for bedding. Putting straw in fodder troughs probably looks stupid to anyone who lives or works on a farm. Not that I plan to make any hay as well.

Just returned from a 7 day holiday, opened up this forum, had at least 4 pages of "new content". Made it past page 2 (to about June 03), and then had to take care of a few things here. When I came back, the forum had logged me out (timeout?), and when you log out, it forgets all "new content". So you log in, and it says "there is nothing new for you". Great, now I never know what I missed between May 30th and June 03.... grrrrrrrrr With email, you would still have all unread messages *sigh* Is there a way to change this behaviour? It has annoyed me in the past, but not as much as this time.. Edit: It's even worse, there is "no new content", but when I go f.i. into the "off topic" sub-forum, it still shows me threads as unread that I definitely already did read an hour ago. So I can't even just look at all the "unread" threads. Oh boy...