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Found 6 results

  1. As most players will surely agree, one of the things that make TDM great are its visual capabilities, which come from idTech 4 having been so well designed. As I've been playing more with rendering and game engines during the last period, I realized this is something worth bringing up in the graphics department. I dare suggest it since frankly, TDM has some of the best graphics in the world of open-source games today... the idea of adding a common effect that would rocket its visual quality even higher sounds acceptable enough to post about. Typically there are two light occlusion effects, though I can imagine them combined in one by a smart renderer: Ambient Occlusion to simulate darkening in tight spaces, and Global Illumination to simulate light reflecting off surfaces. They're often costly to calculate for realtime lights, but there are engines that do it right... Tesseract (FPS based on Cube 2) offers a great example of doing FPS-cheap GI! A more serious problem specific to TDM is that this would affect the brightness of areas, and in turn the gameplay on existing maps... it would need to be an user option for this reason. I'm mostly curious on the opinions of the devs; Could at least SSAO be considered at some point, if not an implementation for radiosity? Some examples of why this is so awesome.
  2. I'm coming across a little annoyance periodically, which I'm sure nearly every player can confirm and at least partly agree on. When playing TDM on headphones, directional audio does not set a minimum volume for the ear opposite of the source. This means that when a sound source is to your left, you hear it entirely in the left ear... and if it's to the right only in the right ear. The first problem with this is that it's very irking for the player... to the point where I often have to look in a certain direction just to avoid noise in one ear and complete silence in the other. It's the same as trying to listen to music on one headphone only: It has an uncomfortable and unnatural effect on the brain and you feel tempted to press the stop button immediately. An additional issue is realism: If someone is standing to your left and talking toward you, you will of course hear them a bit more clearly with your left ear, but you'll also hear them with the right ear somewhat. My suggestion is a new menu setting in the Audio panel, which allows us to configure a minimum volume that a sound can be reduced to by its direction alone. This would allow everyone to set it based on what feels most comfortable to each person, as well as what type of headphones they are using. It should only need to be a small value for comfort... something like 0.05 or 0.1 volume when the sound is coming directly away from that ear. I know that directional sound is very important from a gameplay perspective; Players often use it to listen to a guard's footsteps or idle ramblings and know where they're coming from. This is why I'm suggesting a small minimum cap enough so it doesn't irk the ear, or at least having an option players can enable themselves even if it's off by default. Till then, is there already a cvar for this in the settings by chance?
  3. I hope this isn't a useless thread, just thought it would be constructive to let everyone know about it. I was looking up some TDM related concerns, and accidentally stumbled across another fork of the idTech4 engine. It's called fhDOOM, and it seems to have a lot of neat graphical improvements over the stock engine. eXistence/fhDOOM There are definitely things in there that TDM could consider grabbing! Some important ones highlighted on their front page: Modern renderer based on OpenGL 3.3 core profile. Any up-to-date engine should have this as a norm.Parallax mapping. Not sure if we have this already... I only know the original engine had simple bump mapping.Soft shadows. A heavily desired and long awaited feature.Alpha textures affecting shadows. This allows light to shine through textured grates, which is a very beautiful improvement.Soft particles. This one we already have now however.An example of the old lighting system (ours) versus lighting with shadow mapping (fhDOOM): As the obstacle to new features is almost always finding someone willing to code them, discovering those improvements for our engine is a goldmine... since unless they conflict with any of our changes, I assume they should be easy to just plug into the code. Can any of this good stuff please be considered for inclusion in TDM's version of the engine?
  4. I recently saw a post about the functionality of the idTech 6 engine, which brought this suggestion to my attention. It's actually a simple and trivial improvement, although I can imagine people missing it and not thinking about its absence. Also keep in mind I don't know the lighting code of TDM, and everything I say is purely out of observation. Like most engines that use dynamic lighting, TDM tends to have considerable performance issues when a lot of lights are rendered at once. This is often because of shadows and possibly other calculations. A common way to prevent extra computation in the renderer is caching all lights, and only updating each one when necessary. Meaning either the light itself has moved, or something is moving in front of the light. If both the light and the geometry it affects are static, there is nothing to recalculate, which offers a significant performance boost. TDM has a serious problem here: Even if the engine already knows how to cache lights, every torch has a moving light source! If you look closely at a torch, you'll notice its shadows constantly bob around. While this makes sense aesthetically, it also means that light will be recalculated each frame... even if the torch is mounted on a wall and no physical object or NPC is currently moving within its radius. Since most maps use torches and have areas where characters don't walk in front of them, I see a notable performance improvement being lost here. My personal suggestion: First of all, does idTech 4 support light caching for static lights + geometry to begin with? If somehow the original engine didn't have that, I definitely think it should be patched in! Once that's solved, I believe moving light sources for flame based lights should be controlled by a cvar; If people are okay with the performance loss, they can enable that to get bobbing shadows... if not, disable to allow torch lights to be cached and improve overall FPS. An idea to compensate for the visual loss: Can't we use an animated light texture to simulate moving flames altogether, as well as pulsating brightness? The light bobbing looks pretty extreme anyway: In real life, candles have a smooth flame that casts a neat shadow, and shadows don't always move that chaotically even when it's a noisier flame like a campfire.
  5. TDM has a complex and amazing AI: Guards can do all sorts of things like noticing when something was stolen, detecting broken arrows on the ground, permanently remembering encounters with an enemy (the player), and much more. But there seems to be just one obvious thing, which the AI is completely unable to take into account right now: Allies who go missing. Suppose two guards patrol a corridor. They always walk in opposite directions and meet each other in the center each turn. The player later kills or incapacitates one of the guards, then hides the body in a room. Currently, the remaining guard never questions where the other guard has gone after a while. Expected behavior would be to become somewhat alarmed. My suggested implementation is this: There should be a way to define how often two or more AI's should expect to see each other. Each AI has a value for every other AI, indicating how many seconds have passed since they were last seen; As time goes by, the value slowly increases... but whenever the given AI is spotted, it is reset back to 0. If the value is allowed to reach a certain amount, like say 300 seconds (5 minutes), the AI should stop and mumble something like "where did that other guy who was with me go?". The guard should additionally get an alert level each time... starting with just stopping and looking around, and later drawing their weapon and searching for an intruder. If the missing ally is seen after some time, the AI should say something like "where did you disappear, I was worried about you". I assume this would be a bit of work, and will also require new voices. So even if it won't happen tomorrow, I wanted to put the idea up in case someone would like to take a look at it eventually.
  6. This is a pretty big and complicated feature, and I realize it will likely not happen in reality... at most it would be a mod. I was still wondering how people feel about it though, and if they think it would be fitting for TDM and its gameplay. The first DeusEx game had a damage system exactly like this, and I remember it was one of the things I used to love about it. The idea is to allow each section of the body to take an independent amount of damage, which has various effects on the player. The typical sections are: Torso, head, arms, legs. When your torso is damaged, there's usually no effect other than that you die. When your head is damaged, vision becomes blurry and dark, and hearing might be impaired too. When arms are damaged, you are less efficient at using tools and weapons, and will ultimately drop what you are holding in your hands. When your legs are damaged, you start by no longer being able to sprint, and end by being forced into crouch mode. Why would something like this be done? Mostly for realism, and to have extra mechanics that better simulate what can happen to the body in battle. Gameplay wise, it would certainly add an unwanted layer of extra difficulty, but also some strategy: Imagine you have only one arrow and want to shoot it at a guard... you might want to choose whether you wish to hit the head and kill them, just the arms so they can't use their sword to attack you, or their legs so they can't chase after you. Oppositely, if you get a body part damage and an ability impaired, you'll have to make do with that limitation and look for alternatives... for example you can't run so you must be much more careful while hiding.
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