So, what are you working on right now?

[demagogue]

  

5 hours ago, thebigh said:

I'm in the early planning stages of my next mission. I'm tentatively calling it The Ring of Despair and much of it will take place in an Inventors' Guild establishment laid out a bit like a university building.

 

Cool. For my campaign I scripted, one mission took place in the Inventor HQ for Bridgeport, called Secrets of the Inventors. I was thinking a lot about how to represent them and their areas, and I'll be really interested to see how other people portray them, because there hasn't been that much representation of them in FMs.

[HMart]

update on the boid system, not TDM related.

Spoiler

My last post on this, is not really something about editing TDM, so I should not bother you guys with it but now that I posted about it before, at lest I should show the latest and perhaps final work on my boid system.

The most important updates are:

Instead of moving to infinity, unless they collide with something, I can now limit boid movement within a fixed area.

Implemented a simple LOD system for the boids, now distante boids get shadows disabled, and their models swapped for low poly ones. 

Instead of ignoring the player and going through him, if a boid detects the player in his path, will now be "afraid" and run away (they don't detect the player on the sides, only directly forward).

Changed boid collison detection system, to use a single tracebounds per boid, instead of stupid 3 tracelines per boid of the old system.

Improved collision to the point, where boids now hardly get into the void and was able to improve performance, to where I can now have 600+ boids moving around, with the same performance of the older system.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zDyWDAA8Ci1HKGdQLuNjvaGpvosTXP7S/view?usp=sharing

ps. the penumbra like system in the video, was just something I did for fun as well.

 

[Geep]

The polished-up Version 2 of "Away 0: Stolen Heart" is now released! For details, see its forum thread.

From there, you can also download a new bonus illustrated Word doc: "Making of Away 0's Video Cutscenes". Here's a teaser image from that.

[Geep]

Working on more wiki pages. As I kind of an aside, I got curious about inlining, which I saw occasionally mentioned but not really explained. So I researched it with the results now here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Inlining

[Geep]

If you ever wondered what a .proc file actually contained & why, there's now a wiki page page on it: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=PROC_File_Format

It's a treatment of a complicated subject, so I can't guarantee I've got it 100% right. Just more right than anything else I've seen about it.

[Nort]

I felt that I needed some practice before I sank my teeth into my main map (which I won't reveal), and so I did a test map. This test map in turn turned into my apartment, which is a good tip for anyone wanting to map, but doesn't know what to map: Just make your apartment, or some other area you know well, and put a Dark Mod spin on it. If you release your map, you don't even need to tell anyone that it's your apartment, or your neighborhood, they're running around in.

...and alongside that, I've just finished writing a 23 page manual on basic mapping with Dark Radiant, so that I don't have to watch through Springheel's video tutorials yet again. I know just how unstable YouTube accounts can be - I've given up on trying to make accounts on that platform altogether now - so don't count on anyone's tutorials being around on the internet ten years from now. Write them down!

 

[Geep]

My first map (way back as a wad file for original Doom 3) was of my basement. I had a demon popping out of my refrig. So yeah, there's a tradition to map what's close at hand.

Vids are great, but it's hard to use them as a reference, to try to remember where you saw a particular problem solved. A general Google vid search (relying on YouTube's automatic speech to text transcripts) I don't find too effective.

For written content about DR mapping, some reasonable starting points are the Dark Radiant user manual and Fidcal's A to Z Beginners Guide, https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here!.

I'm doing my 2-cents here and there on the wiki too. The writing continues!

[Nort]

There is this euphoric moment, when you've spent over two hours doing skybox brushwork, expanding it more and more to engulf one building after another, having it fit perfectly against every detail of every trim of their far facades (since they're not yet detail entities), sneaking into a slim crevice of together-blending, neon-blinding caulk, to find a slim 4 unit wide gap which you almost missed, and after looking at this huge puzzle of brushwork, in which you hope not a single brush overlaps another, but all touch edge to edge, and corner to corner, you going into The Dark Mod, and you type "dmap", and it compiles without a single leak on the first try.

That's such a huge sigh of relief, and such an assurance of your craftsmanship.

[Amadeus]

6 hours ago, Nort said:

and you type "dmap", and it compiles without a single leak on the first try.

You are truly favored by the gods!

[datiswous]

21 hours ago, Geep said:

Vids are great, but it's hard to use them as a reference, to try to remember where you saw a particular problem solved.

I tried to mitigate that issue somewhat with the wiki page https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=DarkRadiant_Video_Tutorials

By adding the contents of the video's.

[Nort]

2 hours ago, Amadeus said:

You are truly favored by the gods!

...or more canonically the one true Master Builder.

[Nort]

I've just discovered how to do OpenAL EAX. It sounds like few maps use EAX soundscapes, and I'm surprised by hearing that. After all, this is a game about listening. Surely trying to make out footsteps amidst environmental echoes, is part of basic gameplay.

Of course, EAX is - much like bloom - easily overdone to the point where it just assaults one's senses. It needs to be done with subtlety.

In general, I feel like 3D sound is often neglected, which is a shame. Ideally, you should be able to compile a 3D soundscape from the brushwork and its materials, and then let your soundcard relay that in real time, like the graphicscard handles visual rendering.

...but I guess for now, EAX will have to do.

Edited May 17, 2022 by Nort

[Anderson]

16 hours ago, Nort said:

I've just discovered how to do OpenAL EAX. It sounds like few maps use EAX soundscapes, and I'm surprised by hearing that. After all, this is a game about listening. Surely trying to make out footsteps amidst environmental echoes, is part of basic gameplay.

Of course, EAX is - much like bloom - easily overdone to the point where it just assaults one's senses. It needs to be done with subtlety.

In general, I feel like 3D sound is often neglected, which is a shame. Ideally, you should be able to compile a 3D soundscape from the brushwork and its materials, and then let your soundcard relay that in real time, like the graphicscard handles visual rendering.

...but I guess for now, EAX will have to do.

EAX in TDM seems very mild compared to Thief Deadly Shadows. I wonder if a soundcard increases the effect or not.

[Nort]

24 minutes ago, Anderson said:

EAX in TDM seems very mild compared to Thief Deadly Shadows. I wonder if a soundcard increases the effect or not.

You can micromanage the EAX, but since that's so complex, I only use the stock presets, so it depends on the presets OpenAL has. I bet that since the years of Thief, the EAX devs scaled back the echoes of their presets a bit.

[thebigh]

At times while building I've thought something like, this room is half stone and half wood. So I'll take the preset for WOODEN_MEDIUMROOM and CASTLE_MEDIUMROOM and average them. That's about as much micromanaging as I'd want to do though.

[Nort]

In the basement of my map, ominous dark figures have gathered to conspire. They are called "The Skinless Ones" by those who have encountered them and lived to tell the tale. A year have they waited, for the Skin Dresser to once again return...

Spoiler

Edited May 19, 2022 by Nort
Spoilered the image so that it won't bother people.

[thebigh]

Team Vantablack.

[Nort]

On 5/18/2022 at 12:52 AM, thebigh said:

Team Vantablack.

Indeed.

Here comes one of the servants now, hopefully bearing good news for them.

Spoiler

Edited May 19, 2022 by Nort

[Nort]

I don't want to spam this thread, but one screenshot a week, is probably better than no screenshots at all, right?

Here are some crates that I just added. There is Daddy Crate, and Mommy Crate, little Kid Crate...

(I'm not trying to inspire you to add crates to your levels, though. Crates are notorious for being the worst kinds of fillers.)

[Nort]

Staircases are scary, and spiral ones are particularly scary. I can do those through patching and cutting, but in the end I just vertex edit things. It feels neater. ...and after that it's just the pixel perfect setting of all the textures that end up at arbitrary angles. There is a natural shader paste, but it doesn't work half the time.

...but I feel like I did a nice job here so far. Now I just need to align the stair textures a bit more.

[thebigh]

If Dark Mod was a point & click adventure game on Windows 3.1   

[Nort]

Guys, I just made my first shader. Isn't it just wonderful?

(Yes, that's how it's supposed to look. It's not meant to be visible in maps, so it's kind of like caulk.)

[thebigh]

Cool. That eyeball-searing pink sure will make it stand out in DR. What's it for; how does it differ from regular caulk?

[Nort]

Just now, thebigh said:

Cool. That eyeball-searing pink sure will make it stand out in DR. What's it for; how does it differ from regular caulk?

Well, the way that meshes work, is that each mesh has to have a shader. Right now the devs have chosen to just use shaders which doesn't exist, and this will generate console warnings. ...and so I made a file called "tdm_placeholders.mtr", in which I aim to define all these shaders. They don't even use a texture - just the caulk color.

[Dragofer]

Moved the image editing software discussion to its own thread in the Off-Topic forum called "Image editing software" in order to keep this thread reasonably on topic.