So, what are you working on right now?

[demagogue]

I was busy before and missed this (the Seeking Lady Leicester WIP screenshots), so I guess it's good this thread was bumped. It looks really great! I'm excited to play it!

I'm really happy there is this outlet for us to see part of grayman's great legacy still emerging in a way that respects and even fulfills his wishes. And I'm happy we have reached this approach with Biker for him to contribute to the community in a way that's safe, controlled, and ultimately healthier for Biker & the forum. It's working great. Don't change a thing.

Above all I'm happy we have great FMs still being worked on and coming out. They really are the best medicine when everything else in the world seems to be falling apart.

 

On 7/22/2022 at 3:17 PM, kin said:

One thing I believe TDM is lagging in the realism department is the lack of high quality low height vegetation. It is unbelievable how much more realistic a scene can be with that aspect added. But who am I to tell.

The SEED system was created exactly for this purpose, it looks great when it's used, very realistic, and it should be used more often!

 

[kin]

5 hours ago, demagogue said:

I was busy before and missed this (the Seeking Lady Leicester WIP screenshots), so I guess it's good this thread was bumped. It looks really great! I'm excited to play it!

I'm really happy there is this outlet for us to see part of grayman's great legacy still emerging in a way that respects and even fulfills his wishes. And I'm happy we have reached this approach with Biker for him to contribute to the community in a way that's safe, controlled, and ultimately healthier for Biker & the forum. It's working great. Don't change a thing.

Above all I'm happy we have great FMs still being worked on and coming out. They really are the best medicine when everything else in the world seems to be falling apart.

 

The SEED system was created exactly for this purpose, it looks great when it's used, very realistic, and it should be used more often!

 

Looks interesting. I guess the reason that its is not used often may be the difficulty of implementing it in a scene? It would be perfect if someone could just brush it on surfaces for example with a deticated tool.

[chakkman]

8 hours ago, demagogue said:

And I'm happy we have reached this approach with Biker for him to contribute to the community in a way that's safe, controlled, and ultimately healthier for Biker & the forum. It's working great. Don't change a thing.

Not that I want to dicuss this here in any way, but, that doesn't seem very healthy to me. Rather the exact opposite. Unless you call saving people from themselves healthy.

Anyway. I think it's great that he still does mapping.

Edited August 2, 2022 by chakkman

[Obsttorte]

6 hours ago, kin said:

Looks interesting. I guess the reason that its is not used often may be the difficulty of implementing it in a scene? It would be perfect if someone could just brush it on surfaces for example with a deticated tool.

Not really, it is actually quiet simple. Fine-tuning it so it looks good and doesn't kill performance or create other unwanted effects takes its time, but besides that it is pretty straight-forward.

[Airship Ballet]

Bit a glow-up to show off!

 

[kingsal]

The animated grass demo is not actually using SEED. Its using a giant bespoke animated model so its only useful for that demo. Grass is actually fairly complicated to get it to look right and perform well. 

I started building  some animated grass models that are more friendly for authors to use; different sizes, skins, lods, ect. although I won't be done with them for a while:

Still WIP but here's a little video https://www.dropbox.com/s/f6cwq5ahy8jg7ud/The Dark Mod 2.10_64 2022-05-14 17-04-15.mp4?dl=0

[JackFarmer]

On 8/1/2022 at 7:56 PM, STiFU said:

I am a bit appalled about this supposed "will". What is the reference you base this on? Grayman explicitly told us not to release his works. His exact words were: "If I die, the story of William Steele ends with me. No handing off my FMs to others".

Even it has been cleared, you think I would publish something that would not meet with grayman's wishes?

I have been working with this community for almost five years and I really find it disappointing that you think I would do something unethical like that.

 

[kin]

13 hours ago, kingsal said:

The animated grass demo is not actually using SEED. Its using a giant bespoke animated model so its only useful for that demo. Grass is actually fairly complicated to get it to look right and perform well. 

I started building  some animated grass models that are more friendly for authors to use; different sizes, skins, lods, ect. although I won't be done with them for a while:

Still WIP but here's a little video https://www.dropbox.com/s/f6cwq5ahy8jg7ud/The Dark Mod 2.10_64 2022-05-14 17-04-15.mp4?dl=0

That looks perfect. Aren't there any ready to use in game foliage models for download over the internet?

 

edit: If there are no free models to download or they do not worth it, I am willing to donate as long as there is a reasonable participation from other members to split the price.

Edited August 3, 2022 by kin

[kingsal]

14 hours ago, kin said:

That looks perfect. Aren't there any ready to use in game foliage models for download over the internet?

 

edit: If there are no free models to download or they do not worth it, I am willing to donate as long as there is a reasonable participation from other members to split the price.

Thank you! Im looking forward to shaping them up for everyone to use (probably in 2.11 or as an asset pack) .

With regards to models on the internet,  if you can find a group of authors who want to split the price to buy assets and put them in their missions, that's totally fine.

However, license issues are tricky so unless they are CC0 OR we can confirm they were made by someone here- we cannot put them in the core mod, at least not without a bunch of scrutiny  

[STiFU]

23 hours ago, JackFarmer said:

Even it has been cleared, you think I would publish something that would not meet with grayman's wishes?

I have been working with this community for almost five years and I really find it disappointing that you think I would do something unethical like that.

Sorry about that. Please don't take it personally, I did not want to imply that you might be doing something unethical. When I posted that, I operated under the following thoughts:

1. it could also have been Biker's Words instead of yours

2. you could just have missed the thread about grayman's will

3. I did not know that some of grayman's other FMs had been adopted and my alarmbells just went off.

Sending some from Bochum to Ingolstadt right here!  

By the way, I never ever assume bad intentions in social interactions unless facts show otherwise ("innocent until proven guilty"). Some might call this type of thinking naive, but positive thinking is a key ingredient to a happy life. 

[kin]

6 hours ago, kingsal said:

Thank you! Im looking forward to shaping them up for everyone to use (probably in 2.11 or as an asset pack) .

With regards to models on the internet,  if you can find a group of authors who want to split the price to buy assets and put them in their missions, that's totally fine.

However, license issues are tricky so unless they are CC0 OR we can confirm they were made by someone here- we cannot put them in the core mod, at least not without a bunch of scrutiny  

I see.

One more thing, can this vegetation cast stencil shadows?

[AluminumHaste]

No, stencils shadows work by projecting, so they'll project the patch or model's tris.
The grass itself is a texture. You would need shadow maps for that to work which we do have now.

9 hours ago, kin said:

I see.

One more thing, can this vegetation cast stencil shadows?

 

[kin]

17 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

No, stencils shadows work by projecting, so they'll project the patch or model's tris.
The grass itself is a texture. You would need shadow maps for that to work which we do have now.

 

I have finally realised what is the real difference between stencil and map shadows. The problem here is that shadow maps are very gpu intensive. Are other games that cast foliage shadows using maps? like say far cry new dawn for example.

[nbohr1more]

Almost no modern game uses stencil shadows.

I think the newest AAA game that used them was ARMA and it only used them for very large light sources.

Stencil shadows require a huge amount of geometry processing and fillrate, whereas Shadow Maps mostly just require lots of VRAM and texture sampling.

The video card manufacturers could have done more to make newer generations of GPU hardware handle stencil fillrate better but it was much easier ( and profitable ) to throw more VRAM and samplers on the cards so they heavily evangelized shadow maps to all game and engine designers.

The state of the art shadow map technologies do mostly perform as well if not better than stencil due to tile-based rendering and shadow re-projection, history buffer and LOD techniques. As I recall, implementing this would require TDM to bump up the required OpenGL minimum version past 4.x. Who knows, both techniques may be obsolete soon as Ray Tracing hardware costs start to drop.

[AluminumHaste]

6 hours ago, kin said:

I have finally realised what is the real difference between stencil and map shadows. The problem here is that shadow maps are very gpu intensive. Are other games that cast foliage shadows using maps? like say far cry new dawn for example.

Just keep in mind, my post was super generalized and not technically correct, it's way more in depth than that.

Check this one out:

 

[kin]

On 8/5/2022 at 9:52 AM, nbohr1more said:

Almost no modern game uses stencil shadows.

I think the newest AAA game that used them was ARMA and it only used them for very large light sources.

Stencil shadows require a huge amount of geometry processing and fillrate, whereas Shadow Maps mostly just require lots of VRAM and texture sampling.

The video card manufacturers could have done more to make newer generations of GPU hardware handle stencil fillrate better but it was much easier ( and profitable ) to throw more VRAM and samplers on the cards so they heavily evangelized shadow maps to all game and engine designers.

The state of the art shadow map technologies do mostly perform as well if not better than stencil due to tile-based rendering and shadow re-projection, history buffer and LOD techniques. As I recall, implementing this would require TDM to bump up the required OpenGL minimum version past 4.x. Who knows, both techniques may be obsolete soon as Ray Tracing hardware costs start to drop.

I guess it's a wild dream for DM to have vegetation casting and recieving shadows.

[nbohr1more]

17 hours ago, kin said:

I guess it's a wild dream for DM to have vegetation casting and recieving shadows.

Shadow maps could be applied to vegetation, we just need to decide how to handle the special cases and not break the appearance of existing missions.

Relevant discussion:

https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19659-feature-request-emissive-materialsvolumetric-lights

[kin]

2 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

Shadow maps could be applied to vegetation, we just need to decide how to handle the special cases and not break the appearance of existing missions.

Relevant discussion:

https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19659-feature-request-emissive-materialsvolumetric-lights

Ok thanks and sorry for hijacking the thread. If someone could point me to a software that can be used to design game ready vegetation I could give a try (with some guidance maybe). Currently I have installed on my machine C4D and I have some experience with it for simple things.

Edited August 8, 2022 by kin

[kin]

On 8/2/2022 at 5:02 AM, demagogue said:

I was busy before and missed this (the Seeking Lady Leicester WIP screenshots), so I guess it's good this thread was bumped. It looks really great! I'm excited to play it!

I'm really happy there is this outlet for us to see part of grayman's great legacy still emerging in a way that respects and even fulfills his wishes. And I'm happy we have reached this approach with Biker for him to contribute to the community in a way that's safe, controlled, and ultimately healthier for Biker & the forum. It's working great. Don't change a thing.

Above all I'm happy we have great FMs still being worked on and coming out. They really are the best medicine when everything else in the world seems to be falling apart.

 

The SEED system was created exactly for this purpose, it looks great when it's used, very realistic, and it should be used more often!

 

Where I can download this demo map?

[Obsttorte]

2 hours ago, kin said:

Where I can download this demo map?

There is a link in the video description on youtube.

[Baal]

This is very much work in progress but it's starting to take shape.

[AluminumHaste]

Looking good man!

 

[datiswous]

8 hours ago, Baal said:

This is very much work in progress but it's starting to take shape.

Is this for the 2022 "Horror for Christmas" Contest?

[Baal]

No, it's the sequel to Sir Talbot's Collateral.

[thebigh]

3 hours ago, Baal said:

No, it's the sequel to Sir Talbot's Collateral.

[excited cheering intensifies]