Tels 268 Report post Posted November 25, 2012 http://www.phoronix....item&px=MTIzNTA You've got to be kidding Oh yeah. We really need to improve out PR skills, the impression we leave on the outside world seems to be half and missing important things. (It would also be nice if someone would ask us before writing such an article, but I guess that would be too much to ask of people who don't even know we exist and then come out with the excuse of "oh its just a mod in the disguise of a total conversion which totaly not has 7 years of work in it and there are no additional innovations planned for at least another month" Quote "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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Ladro 42 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 Oh yeah. We really need to improve out PR skills, the impression we leave on the outside world seems to be half and missing important things. (It would also be nice if someone would ask us before writing such an article, but I guess that would be too much to ask of people who don't even know we exist and then come out with the excuse of "oh its just a mod in the disguise of a total conversion which totaly not has 7 years of work in it and there are no additional innovations planned for at least another month" I totally agree with you, Tels. However I think that this post on phoronix it's important, also if it's not well written. I think that this will improve visitors and gamers of TDM, especially Linux gamers :-D Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rich_is_bored 281 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 To be fair the differences between TDM and Doom 3 are only readily apparent in the game mechanics. To understand how the engine has changed you have to pop the hood. That's probably a bit too much to ask for a site that only posts single page blurbs. The best I can come up with in terms of a "visible" engine level improvement would be the switch from EAX to EFX but then that change hasn't made it's way into the distributed binary yet. Quote ModWiki Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
demagogue 1121 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 I posted screenshots of the id4 engine source & our v1.08 source. At least it's visible our sourcecode has about 4 times more files or so. Well the game folder anyway, where that's most visible. The core systems are more "engine-changing", but that doesn't come across in a screenshot. But I still think the screenshot I did post makes a point.In this thread: http://phoronix.com/...inux#post298585 I don't blame people either for thinking we're just a mod with a lot of new assets & some tweaks though, and haven't done anything to the engine. It's what anyone could think just looking at it offhand. Quote What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tels 268 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 I totally agree with you, Tels. However I think that this post on phoronix it's important, also if it's not well written. I think that this will improve visitors and gamers of TDM, especially Linux gamers :-D Oh, I know it's important. (Even bad press is good press as the saying goes and Phoronix has a huge audience. Such saying that we could improve our PR a lot. BUt I'm glad that people got the message through and at least we are no longer invisible, that counts for something! 1 Quote "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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tels 268 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 I posted screenshots of the id4 engine source & our v1.08 source. At least it's visible our sourcecode has about 4 times more files or so. Well the game folder anyway, where that's most visible. The core systems are more "engine-changing", but that doesn't come across in a screenshot. But I still think the screenshot I did post makes a point.In this thread: http://phoronix.com/...inux#post298585 I don't blame people either for thinking we're just a mod with a lot of new assets & some tweaks though, and haven't done anything to the engine. It's what anyone could think just looking at it offhand. OTOH, what part of a "total conversion" makes it not clear that it is not "a mod"? I think we might still send the wrong message here with the whole "is a Doom mod" (or that old message floats around somewhere). Yeah, being stand-alone would help getting a better impression, but I think we have progressed so much to a stand-alone and full international game with AAA game content that we should make this quite clear. There aren't really many traces of D3 left and they are so buried you would be hard-pressed to find them. At this point the difference between standa-alone and now is more a technical minor thing - the user wouldn't even notice except for the fact that you don't have to install D3. But visual etc nothing would change. Related: Watched yesterday a play-through of Black Mesa Source and the guy stressed a lot that "this isn't a mod, its more like a full game" and so on. The funny thing is, if you play it only for 1 minute, there is no way you could imagine it is some kind of "mod". It's a total conversion, and it's own game all right. But apparently they suffer from the same problem, people looking at it for 30 seconds and discounting it because "its a mod and I need HL2 to play it" (which isn't even true for them). The whole "D3 mod" thing probably bites us in the rearlong after we are stand-alone from uninformed people. An press like that that stresses the whole "its a mod" point in the first sentences doesn't help. About the "one page blurb" - yeah, I kinda expected a member of the press to research before they write. Seems I aimed to high with my expectations 1 Quote "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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
demagogue 1121 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 Some guy posted a question for us in that thread I posted. It's not my area, so anybody up to answering it?http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?75419-The-Dark-Mod-For-Doom-3-On-Linux&p=298744#post298744 I'm very much impressed by the Dark Mod and tried it a year or two ago. If you don't mind me taking the opportunity to ask a bit about your engine advancements, I would like to ask the following: Back then it was a major pain to get the Dark Mod to install and properly operate on Linux. This was due to the game having had *very* specific ideas on where to install stuff, and the defaults where the game expected its media did not fit my file system structure (e.g., all my games are at /mnt/data/games, not /usr/local/). Sadly, symbolic links did not work at all. Also to select a campaign one would have to select it ingame (which would apparently copy some files around?) and then restart the game, which would only work spuriously etc. I think I read back in the days that the open source engine release would offer you the opportunity to rework the whole file system stuff to work "as expected" (unzip game and/or new campaigns wherevery you want, start, play). Any chance this already happened? Quote What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Melan 1792 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 About the "one page blurb" - yeah, I kinda expected a member of the press to research before they write. Quote 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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tels 268 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 Some guy posted a question for us in that thread I posted. It's not my area, so anybody up to answering it?http://phoronix.com/...8744#post298744 Here is a possible answer, somebody could copy it to their forums (I have no account there): Some of the linux specifics stem from the idTech 4 (aka D3) engine way of doing things and we couldn't change some of them w/o access to the source code. However, now that we have merged the D3 GPL source and our source, there where already number of improvements done for v1.08 (done by taaki, and Serpentine): The installation now only needs one directory /home/username/.doom3/darkmod/ and all the FMs are only under /home/username/.doom3/darkmod/fms/ and no longer copied on "install". The mod itself also does no longer restart to install/uninstall a mission, it just reloads all the assets. This fixes issues with duplicate files and directory confusion. Also, symlinks work just find, you can f.i. put everything into: /home/username/foo/darkmod/ or wherever you like, and put symlinks like these: lrwxrwxrwx 1 xx xx 36 2012-08-14 23:11 pak005.pk4 -> /home/xx/games/doom3/base/pak005.pk4 I know this works, because I'm using it on my system When TDM goes stand-alone, even these symlinks to the D3 PK4s will go and everything should be self-contained inside one darkmod/ directory, which you can place wherever you like. 1 Quote "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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Ladro 42 Report post Posted November 27, 2012 Here is a possible answer, somebody could copy it to their forums (I have no account there): Done :-D (i just created a fake account and done a copy-paste of your message :-)) Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tels 268 Report post Posted November 27, 2012 Done :-D (i just created a fake account and done a copy-paste of your message :-)) Next time please attribute the text to me - now somebody browsing/googling both forums might think I created the fake account ... Quote "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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Ladro 42 Report post Posted November 28, 2012 Next time please attribute the text to me - now somebody browsing/googling both forums might think I created the fake account ... I'm really sorry, Tels :-( I made a new post to correct the right attribution to you for the text. Sorry another time. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
