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Could be something funky going on with our implicit RGTC compression. We use a Microsoft BC format for pre-compressed normals but our on-the-fly encoder is supposed to use standard OpenGL tangent space normals. I wonder if the work to fix BC loading had some unintended effect on uncompressed loading? Maybe @orbweaver can be convinced to take a 2nd look?

For the FM? For beta 1 it's here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/H1QBB04GA0#oBZTb1CmVFQb I've already done around 100 fixes though, so you might want to wait for beta 2 which should be ready in a couple of days hopefully. All links are in the first post of the beta thread here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22439-the-lieutenant-3-foreign-affairs-beta-testing/

You mean Discord? That's fine, you are more than welcome to use the forum if you want to help test

Is that really correct? Unless TDM team changed stuff from Doom 3 times, if you use Doom 3 as example, normal maps that represent outward surfaces, use OpenGL system, those that represent inward surfaces, aka holes, use D3D system. On real DirectX renders, outward surfaces, use the D3D system instead and the OGL one for inward, is inverted. And to reinforce this the original example by idSoftware, looks to use the OpenGL system see here cyan for top, purple for the bottom, in d3d is inverted. Thou like I said maybe the TDM team changed all of this by now...

Texture normal map type: does TDM use opengl or Direct X?

I think this is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because the ability to customize exists does not mean most mappers will use it. On the contrary, if one considers the customization that are already available, we see that the overwhelming majority of mappers stick to the defaults. The exceptions are interesting also. Kingsal's the only mapper that readily comes to mind who habitually deviates from presets seemingly just for the sake of being different. However everything they make is clearly in service of cohesive visions. Hazard Pay, no matter how you feel about it, unarguably loses a great deal of its survival horror character if you take away the napalm arrows or the punishing save system. The Voltas don't need to use Thief style elemental crystals in place of TDMs arrow model, but the fact that they are there makes a definite statement about the author's awareness of their inspiration for their work in TDM from the original games, which in turn draws attention to other, subtler creative choices. I think it's also telling that some of kingsal's modifications have been adopted by other authors. As OrbWeaver said, "If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed." However, how can the community come to a consensus unless there are maps to showcase the advantages of new innovations? Requesting, or worse requiring, players to go in and manually change settings in order to experience a new mechanic is never going to gain any traction. Certainly it is not worth the effort of creating an entire map built around a new paradigm.

Hello all. I use a laptop with a small screen -- 14 or 15 inches, I think. So, screen space is very important. I rely on keyboard shortcuts and undocked windows extensively. The only issue I have at the moment is the aggressive docking of window panels. So, hopefully this is a reasonable layout for a small screen.

A somewhat goofy content pack, but coincidentally I was just thinking that I could use some more varied pipe models for my WIP FM. Thanks for releasing this!

Another possible option is to use cvars for these constants. However, such an option would be available only when proper mission overrides for cvars are implemented.

Throwing a few words people used to say long ago to help enrich those texts. Not sure if they all work in English since I'm just translating from Spanish but I think most should work well. - Stratagem: Used by Nobles to describe a plan, course of action as in "Device a Stratagem" use instead of Strategy. - Given Word (People used this one a lot, had weight). You can't betray the given word. - Sophistry or Sophist (as in dirty sophistry). Play of words to deceive. -Countenance (Please execute/exercise Countenance) - Artifice: Plan or plot to deceive. - Modesty (Lacking Modesty) - Sylph: Slender woman. - Cameo (As in compliment: "She's beautiful like a Cameo")

Why not use the modified weapon scripts from the April Fool's FMs? Those seem to be working just fine on this dev build

There are 10 released FMs that use custom arrow scripts for a variety of reasons. With this current dev build, if you try to use the bow, it just doesn't work. It's broken

Welp it's about that time again to wheel out The Lieutenant for another mission and I could use some help making sure it's at least somewhat playable. Please register your interest here and I'll start a new beta testing thread soon. Due to custom assets the file size is quite large (about 500 MB). Potato users welcome. Some screenshots:

The Megatextures concept predates idSoftware. It even predates hardware accelerated 3D in consumer graphics. The problem it solves is managing image diversity. It is well suited to photogrammetry where almost nothing is repeated \ tiled. It is not well suited to human texture artists because even the most perfectionist ones are going to use some sort of template that they repeat and thus it is a waste to store the resultant work as unique pixels rather than tiles.

Megatextures were a horrible idea for obvious reasons, not sure why ID chose to learn that the hard way. The concept from what I remember is the whole map uses a single gigantic texture... instead of how we independently pick a couple of 1024 px brick materials for a few brushes and surfaces, the whole map acts as one model with one material and a single texture which probably needs to be 1 million x 1 million pixels even for a small level. This is ridiculous from a perspective of system resources with 100's of GB's of storage and huge (v)RAM requirements and hours of loading time, as well as raising the skills required for level editing since you now need mappers to also be texture artists and sculpt / paint their levels instead of just placing stuff. The only thinkable benefit is there's no repetition since every pixel on every part of the world is unique, but who notices any similarity with independent texturing if it's done right anyway? Detail textures have yet another advantage there: Since you scale the pattern independently on top of the original texture, you can make every surface appear as if it has unique pixels like megatextures. Hence why I'd advice having the details be very high-res, 4k or 8k even 16k if we can take it: Yes that's enormous, but remember we'd only have a few patterns probably no more than 15 in total, and can store them as grayscale then use a single image to modify both albedo / specular / normal (heightmap to normalmap): Map the detail in world space rather than the brush or model UV map, and the resulting pattern on every surface in the world will always be unique since the original and detail textures will be out of sync.

I think that this discussion is probably similar to discussions that idSoftware themselves had about the challenges of texture storage in engines that heavily rely on Normal Maps for real-time lighting. The conclusion was Megatextures ( later known as partially resident textures ) but the suggestion was a little too ahead of its time. Heck, early Megatexture games would probably benefit from detail textures more than idTech4 because they capped the pixel density to allow larger map-sized textures. Many modern games have caught up and use partially resident textures but do so in a more conservative way thus making them part of a hierarchy of texture usage methods that includes texture atlases and traditional tiled textures.

I always say that...The only thing that beats a fail is a try. I'm actually interested in these Detail Textures now that you further talked about its history and how today we'd use it on 1080p for 512 and 1024 textures. If anything, it would be a fun experiment just to see how it would look and how it would go. Also, yeah, I wouldn't want the game to be bigger than 100GB and have extreme loading times, all in the name of modern textures at 4k, I have a very hefty computer but that doesn't mean poor ol' but venerable IdTech 4 wants to handle it.

Here's mine, also 3 monitors but I only use 2 for DR: single XY view on the first monitor; switch between XY views using CTRL-Tab Camera and all other tools on 2nd monitor - now that everything is a tab no need to tile everything 3rd monitor for other non-DR stuff (like the forum )

I agree, that is an issue. It would be better if the system handling briefings/readables could be revised as you indicated, to handle individual sentences as #str_, rather than whole pages. Baring that, having a key field like "#str_This is a whole page\nfull of text that goes on and on and on [...] until done" would appear as a very long single line. That is nasty to look at in the Readables Editor, and even worse in the .langs file, where the too-long text would appear twice on a line (once with #str_ prefix of English version, another in translation). So for those, it would be better in the short term to stick to symbolic keys, e.g., existing #str_12345 or revised form #str_myfm_book_of_spells_page_1 I might add, in the longer term, enhancing the Readable Editor to use the .lang files would be an enormous improvement for FM authors and a significant accomplishment. A fair amount of work though, but probably doable in increments over several releases.

Could people share some examples of Darkradiant window layouts you use? A screenshot is fine. I thought of making a wiki page with a couple of example layouts and what are the steps to make them happen in Darkradiant.

I was looking into this a bit more and conclude that the translation system in itself is actually an universal external data system. So instead of xdata, you could use a #str_someword and then reference to that in the /strings/fm/english.lang file. Well I guess it's probably not really news for some of us. Edit: This actually works fine: File english.lang for Thief's Den "#str_Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." "Nobody crosses me! Must get back Frothley's scepter Creep stole off me." Then in the objective editor you add #str_ before every objective text. This way it's easier and you can still see which is which.

The Blender export scripts have been updated to work with the new Blender 4.1 series. In this Blender version, they removed "Autosmooth" altogether, along with the corresponding parts of the Python API. This meant that the "Use Autosmooth settings" option had to be removed from the LWO exporter, where it was previously the default setting. The new default is "Full", which smooths the whole mesh, giving similar behaviour to ASE models, although "None" is still an option if you want a completely unsmoothed mesh.

That is my recollection too. The i18n system was basically Tels' personal pet project (hence the Perl script which is unmaintained because nobody in the world except Tels and Larry Wall have any interest in writing code in Perl). Because of the various implementation problems and general user-unfriendliness, Greebo didn't approve of merging it into the main mod, so it became a sort of optional extra that individual mappers could use by accessing various resources on Tels' personal server.

The translation pack has the german string in the base pack rather than in the fm subfolder. I will fix it in the mission database. Edit: Fixed in the mission db Edit 2: Nope. Not exactly fixed. It seems that lang files in the mission string folder need to be "complete" because they fully override the core strings. If I am correct, this was broken in 2.11 when we permitted in-file overrides of core files in missions. Edit 3: Still broken in 2.10, rolling back to 2.07 Edit 4: Still broken in 2.07. Something has gotta be wrong with the translation specific to this mission. Edit 5: The core mission XD files don't use the strings so nothing happens if the lang files are in the strings/fm subfolder. Probably means that the translation packs "never worked" for many missions unless impacted players sought out special editions of the missions on Tels' server. What a mess. Fuzzy recollection time: I think Tels was trying to push the team to mass convert all missions to move XD data into strings/fm/english.lang but nobody wanted to broach it and even mission authors weren't happy about this way of handling things. If the translation pack takes precedence, the best way forward is to include the converted XD file into it. Testing... Edit 6: Couldn't get the XD update to work, so I decided to checkout Darkfate's version. It works flawlessly. I copied their pack into the standard translation pack and the added string files for the other languages worked as well. Darkfate's packs include map files so I'll need to study whether we can avoid that. Otherwise we are basically doubling our mission db or "damaging" our hosted versions to make them translatable. Since this mission is so small and probably will never be edited again we can probably use darkfate's version as-is.

No disagreement on this but one clarification: You can use characters instead of numbers, eg. #str_mycrazyspeech . This was discovered around 2.10 but is not widely known.