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TDM 1.04

Aprilsister

By Aprilsister
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Scope

Scope

Posted
Posted (edited)

Since we can't comment in the announcement-proper...

 

I must say that this promises to be the Giantest Leapage yet.

 

Thanks to all of you guys for what it includes!

 

Really surprised to see this out so soon! Must have only gone live in the last few hours - grabbing it while its hot!

Some of the changes look good, I hope the new LOD system squeezes a few extra FPS out of the game :)

Edited by Scope
-Scope
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Melan

Melan

Posted
Posted

A lot to praise here. The mod is really moving into smooth territory with the revised stealth score, savegame compression, FM previews, plus there are a lot of new assets people will get a kick out of.

 

OTOH, I think you guys should have announced it on TTLG with a lot more fanfare - at least opening a new thread. I am not sure everyone potentially interested is reading the megathread. Hey, actually, maybe you could send the announcement to Digital Nightfall - the TTLG front page is getting updates again, so that's another place to send the good word. :)

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Tels

Tels

Posted
Posted

savegame compression

 

Is not yet actually implemented :) The beautyful hack by stgatilov just removes the "editor_" spawnargs from all entities during the game, meaning the do not waste time getting copied, or saved/restored and thus also save memory during runtime as well as decrease the savegame size to 1/8 .. 1/10. Savegame compression will hopefully reduce this even further :)

 

@TTLG: I agree, this should be front page material.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Tels

Tels

Posted
Posted

Are you saying the mere presence of a few editor spawnargs constituted 7/8ths of the entire gamesave before? Hard to understand.

 

Yes :) Because our atdm:base entity has >100 editor_ spawnargs documenting the various variables. And the engine always loaded all these spawnargs, and made a copy of every spawnarg, even inherited ones, for each entity. So each entity got the dozend or so "editor_" spawnargs from itself, plus the one from its "inherited" class, plus the one above and so on.

 

The entire problem can be traced back to the general problem that for each entity, all spawnargs are cached in string form, in addition to the internal variables. So the entity has "idVec3 origin", which is 12 bytes (3 floats) with the origin of the entity, in addition to the two strings "origin" and "0 1 2" in the idDict. To be fair, the engine only saves one copy of each string, so things that each entity has like "editor_vec origin" "blah blah" get only stored once in memory. However, it did go to the savegame multiple times, and that is why the savegames were so inflated.

 

Anyway, that (the duplication of data in spawnargs and internal variables) is something we might fix some day, but it is complicated, so not today.

 

The reason why in original D3 this was never really a problem are:

 

* they did not have much base classes, instead they duplicated everything into every entityDef. Just for maintability reasons we changed that. However, each added class ended up with an extra spawnarg documenting it, the name etc..

* they did not document much (one the order of 1..10%, we have on the order of 50% documented spawnargs)

* TDM added a lot of new spawnargs for new functionality, inclduing their documentation

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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nbohr1more

nbohr1more

Posted
Posted

I can't praise this enough!

 

Everything is smooth as glass, features have been added, no existing features have been broken, and it was released quickly as well. If only my employer could release version updates this smoothly...

 

BTW...

 

How goes the OSX build?

 

(I think that will be a big boon to promotion too...)

 

:wub:

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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lost_soul

lost_soul

Posted
Posted

Thanks and congrats on the release. I just have one question. St. Alban's cathedral is one of my favorite FMs thus far. The music in that FM worked in 1.02, but not 1.03 or 1.04. I seem to recall hearing this was a TDM bug. Has it just not been fixed yet? I wonder if BikerDude owuld be willing to tos out an updated version of the mission with working music.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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demagogue

demagogue

Posted
Posted
Has it just not been fixed yet? I wonder if BikerDude owuld be willing to tos out an updated version of the mission with working music.

 

The volume was broken in the beginning (too loud), and Bikerdude put in a hack to bandage it over (soften it; he set the volume very low intentionally). So now that volume is fixed generally (made quieter), his low value now makes it too quiet, as it actually is properly supposed to do. It's understandable, but the volume really must be the same as the decibel reports so there isn't a way around it.

 

I understand that LEGION has already put together a version of Bikerdude's FMs to have proper volume (and EAX), and I believe Bikerdude has given him the go-ahead so they'll re-release it fixed (if they haven't already done so).

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Springheel

Springheel

Posted
Posted
I think you guys should have announced it on TTLG with a lot more fanfare - at least opening a new thread. I am not sure everyone potentially interested is reading the megathread.

 

It's also posted in the FM forum, but not exactly to overwhelming response....

TDM Missions:   A Score to Settle  *  A Reputation to Uphold  *  A New Job  *  A Matter of Hours

Video Series:   Springheel's Modules  *  Speedbuild Challenge  *  New Mappers Workshop  *  Building Traps

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Melan

Melan

Posted
Posted

I noticed that. I wonder if that character assassination campaign those few clowns were doing did genuine damage... <_< Oh, I don't know. Weird.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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nbohr1more

nbohr1more

Posted
Posted

There needs to be more content and a story. More noise.

 

I was planning on doing Team member profile stories and discussing the work that went into the release.

 

Unless more comprehensible detail is provided, the changes listed look like tweaks and technical mumbo-jumbo to players and they wont get excited about the features until a mission uses them (for which they will likely attribute to the mission author rather than the TDM team :laugh: ).

 

All the sweat and tears, and I'm sorry to say that Dram's Blackheart Manor would probably elicit more fervor from the audience than some of these back-breaking miracles like adding 3 AI types in a short mod update release...

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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Melan

Melan

Posted
Posted (edited)

Well, I literally added Dram Nosslak's globe to RttC five minutes ago, so... :rolleyes:

 

[edit]WTF, I am mixing up names[/edit]

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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nbohr1more

nbohr1more

Posted
Posted

Not that Blackheart Manor or Dram are anything to disparage, I'm just saying that the TDM team's work seems to be perceived less to players than the mappers' work. Dram being an outlier case as he is also a Team Member. :)

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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lost_soul

lost_soul

Posted
Posted

Well, this player understands and appreciates the work that has gone in behind the scenes. I understand that the new characters don't just appear like magic... unless you use the spawn command :)

 

I also noticed the lack of excitement on TTLG and it kinda saddens me. Would NVidia or some other hardware company sponser a mapping contest? They need more game content on the PC because as a gaming platform, it is dieing. We could use more maps to play. Thus, we should have a mapping contest that is "Powered By Nvidia", where the winner gets a free GTX580.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Aprilsister

Aprilsister

Posted
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Posted
TDM team's work seems to be perceived less to players than the mappers' work

 

But, really, this is an "of course". I hope Rttc v2 or some other mission that will feature some of the newer (even 1.03) features gets released soon...

 

And I'm not soliciting for my own sake; I might not even play Rttc2 as I usually can't bear replaying anything even if it's enhanced or reworked or whatever... and the other mission I'm thinking of that might get released soon is one I've also already played...

 

There's not been many missions for about a year now... so the players have nothing to keep/get them interested. No buzz. And buzz it what works best.

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Springheel

Springheel

Posted
Posted
I wonder if that character assassination campaign those few clowns were doing did genuine damage.

 

Did I miss that? :huh:

TDM Missions:   A Score to Settle  *  A Reputation to Uphold  *  A New Job  *  A Matter of Hours

Video Series:   Springheel's Modules  *  Speedbuild Challenge  *  New Mappers Workshop  *  Building Traps

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