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Darkmod: Inspiration thread


Bikerdude

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looks good

not very Thief-like,but it be awesome too see those in TDM

I'm pretty sure it could be redone 1in1,but I wonder how much fps it will show in TDM ? 5 ? 10 ?

 

FPS depends on your computer. Looks like Fidcal is getting 15 in Witcher, I'm definitely getting more. So 5-10 on who's, yours?

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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I always wonder how other engines manage to render so much more extra detail and objects...

 

I don't get it. I don't see any extra detail. The construction is using models/patches, rather than square brushes, which looks great, but other than some of the textures I find things look LESS detailed than TDM.

 

Compare the garlic strands in the last shot to ours. Or the sacks.

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After getting used to the limits of the d3 engine, I always wonder how other engines manage to render so much more extra detail and objects... it is both inspirational and depressing at the same time.

 

^_^<_<

 

Doom3 isn't the best engine as far as that goes, but it does pretty good from Thief missions if the author is careful.

 

Engines like that have occlusion Culling. ie: everything behind something else just doesn't render. Doom3 is dumb, it can only occlude what can't be seen through a portal. Hammer is smarter, it builds leafs and doesn't render anything in a leaf that can't be seen/portals (placed by author) which makes it easier to use in that respect.

 

But it's old tech, I think most new engines are just going to occlusion culling, even unity has it (pro only I think), but even the free version had distance culling which we didn't have into LOD was implemented.

The Witcher also uses the hell out of LOD's. In the castle at the start the walls have an overlay of matching brick models that fade when you get a distance away.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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There's plenty of things D3/TDM could do if people wanted to spend eight months to a year doing nothing but modeling geometry and creating specialized textures.

 

A professional artist creating a map from scratch is clearly going to get better looking results than a hobbiest making one out of brushes and prefabricated assets.

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Remember, these images were just for inspiration. Dark Mod does most things far better than Witcher 2 but no reason why we can't get good build ideas from it.

 

The fps is strange. I've played it for days and thought I had good smooth action with all settings at max except bloom I turned off. I've never understood the attraction for bloom. I'd have guessed I was getting 50 to 60 everywhere not 15 to 25. Somehow it must smooth it out. I only ran Fraps today to get screenshots.

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I guarantee that Witcher uses some form of lightmap along with it's other lighting methods.

 

Even UE3, which has decent dynamic light options, most mappers fallback to using lightmaps for performance.

 

Moving light is heavy stuff.

 

If your gonna be jealous of any modern engine, be jealous of Frostbite 2 (Battlefield 3). Realtime dynamic radiosity,

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Nope, Witcher not only has real time lighting it also has SSAO (just made nbohr1more wet his pants i know), bloom, post processing...

And you can definitely tell if you turn off SSAO, I tested it in a spiral stairway in the castle with yellow bricks. SSAO looks good for sure and has that baked lightmap look. Turned off you get the 'plain TDM tex look'. But while playing i didn't really notice, and it didn't bother me not having it.

And I was noticing this in TDM last night. Sure baked/SSAO looks great. But with good lighting/detail a map doesn't NEED it.

 

 

 

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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i have a feeling there every Carmack's engine it is modified Quake engine , even tech4 .... I'm so tired playing with lags :(

 

look at darkplaces engine - this is quake1 engine fork,but it have patches (native quake didn't have patches),dynamic light,bump mapping,shaders and more....

 

 

Proceed with caution!

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What can be said?

 

John Carmack is a purest. He designs engines the way they "should be done" rather than how mucking about with tricks and hacks and Graphic Chip specific gotchas. He complained, even after Doom 3 was released, that the hardware vendors didn't follow his advice about future workloads. In his mind, ATI and Nvidia got it all wrong. I kinda agree, if you look at all the modern engines they all do deferred shading which is managed by SOFTWARE culling. Nvidia and ATI should be handling that stuff, not Epic and Crytech. :wacko:

 

 

Doom 3 was double tragic for Carmack because it squeezes the most out of a Geforce 3 that you can but it launched too far after the Geforce 3 was relevant. If he retooled the engine for better DX9 usage, all those folks who paid $1000 for an overclocked Geforce 3 would be throwing temper tantrums over the broken promise. So instead he kept his word and the engine renders just about it's full feature-set on a Geforce 2 leaving DX8 and 9 level shaders for post-processing stuff only.

 

Then, adding insult to injury, OpenGL became a big clusterfuck because ATI and Nvidia could never agree on how it should go and the "oversight committee" were a bunch of spineless pussies who couldn't arbitrate worth shit. It's lucky that Doom 3 even had DX8 level features to work with by the time it was released. OpenGL 2.0 was barely above DX7 feature level and half of it's features were broken in both ATI and Nvidia drivers because of the ongoing tug-o-war for OpenGL's future (or intentional $abotage by Micro$oft???)

 

Hopefully, the GPL release will be a chance to rewrite history and use the engine to it's fullest potential.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I see...

 

I wonder,why the fuck Carmack always wants innovations in his engines ? I still thinking there is doom3 game is fucking piece of shit ©Bikerdude

 

Source engine by Valve based on idTech1,but it is optimized much better (this is engine still sucks and not capable for Thief game because of lightmaps)

 

also CryEngine1 from 2004 optimized very well,I done far cry on P3-650mhz,256 ram,Radeon9250-128Vram without lags,and its much more beautiful and interesting game than doom3

 

 

 

 

my heart is breaking when I play game based on engine from 2003 on hardware from 2009,so I will go and play some T2 Fm's...

Edited by Shadowhide

Proceed with caution!

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I can't say Hammer is optimized better. Personally I have used it a lot for mapping, and I've done quite a bit in DR too (though most of that hasn't been seen).

 

Both are very similar, and both have pluses/minuses. If we could merge the best features of each one we would truly have an excellent engine.

 

*Leafs from Hammer that are very much like T2 - auto optimizing/portaling with the ability to portal/optimize further by hand for perfect results (which is what we HAVE to do with DR).

*Light baking for AO in maps from Hammer.

*real time lighting from DR (1 dynamic light in Hammer will crush FPS on the best computer).

*use of space bar in DR for keybinds, I really like default Hammer controls.

*displacements from Hammer so you can paint terrain (shape and blend tex) (we have patches)

*patches from DR so we can make cylinders, smoother terrain than displacements, and being able to bend and twist them (displacements can be painted or sub D'ed into a lot of shapes, But they have to start from convex cube ONLY)

* all the Dr tools Hammer will never have (readables, objectives, S&R...)

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Are you any good at drawing game maps? That could be useful.

 

I don't know - I've never drawn a proper map, just ones from my head / plans.

 

I'm kind of dipping my toe in the water posting super quick sketches - I desperately want to help, but I feel like a little kid trying to sneak a look at what a bunch of grown ups with proper skillsets are doing. =-P

"No proposition Euclid wrote,

No formulae the text-books know,

Will turn the bullet from your coat,

Or ward the tulwar's downward blow

Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—

The odds are on the cheaper man."

 

From 'Arithmetic on the Frontier' by Rudyard Kipling

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 months later...
I liked the idea of a civilisation that worshipped machines (a bit like the Hammerites from the Thief series), so my plan is to create a Temple of Steam as it would look in the Unreal universe. I'm picturing something like a steel church which doubles as a gigantic machine of an unknown purpose, with walls full of spinning wheels, gears, pistons, pipes and so on

metalshrineprogress3.jpg

metalshrineprogress10.jpg

metalshrineprogress7.jpg

http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?167267-Old-School-Unreal-Contest-Thomas-Browett

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Great stuff Clearing!

 

Not sure if Unreal Engine 3 maps count as inspiration or de-motivation though :laugh:

 

If enough juice can be squeezed out of Doom 3 after GPL then we can consider this "future-proofed inspiration". :)

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Not sure if Unreal Engine 3 maps count as inspiration or de-motivation though :laugh:

 

If enough juice can be squeezed out of Doom 3 after GPL then we can consider this "future-proofed inspiration". :)

 

AFAIK It's always about the artist, not the engine. I mean. Those Thief 2 (At least I think they are from Thief 2, because of the colored lighting. and yes. I'm tardy to the party.) screenshots on the first page of this topic are fricking AMAZING.

So regardless, these definitely count as inspiration! :D

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