Weakest link in TDM?

[Diego]

I never considered the sound effects bad. But, except for music, I'm not a sound enthusiast

 

For me the weakest link is the editor, despite it already being a great tool. Let me explain. The whole game is sustained by one big pillar: user content, i.e., maps. And that pillar is held by the editor. Thus, to me, the editor should be the focus of everyone's efforts, so that creating maps for TDM becomes easy and maybe just as entertaining as playing the game.

 

The only reason I'm mentioning this is because of the subject of the thread. Unfortunately we can't really decide where to focus in a project with this kind of organization. We take what we can get!

[STiFU]

What's your problem with the editor, I wonder? Ok, it is a different shoe than the cryengine sandbox for example, but among the classic editors, I consider it one of the best.

[Springheel]

Replacing EAX with the open variant EFX would be a lovely thing in the future but I suspect it would take some work...unless the port that Serpentine is working on supports it.

 

Given how unlikely this is to happen in the near future, I'd be very open to listening to anyone who thinks they could batch process all of our sounds to add some reverb, at least until we have the ability to add EAX properly.

[New Horizon]

It was working at one point wasn't it? There is that test map from some time ago and it sounded really nice.

[Springheel]

But that was only for people with EAX soundcards, right?

 

Problem is, no one is setting EAX values on their maps because mappers don't have EAX, which means no one hears EAX, even if they DO have the right soundcard. I don't think that's going to change until we get EFX, but that's a large project that is at least a year away, if not more.

 

In the meantime, having reverb on ALL our sounds would be an improvement over no reverb at all, I've come to believe.

[HMart]

Yes New Horizon it is working right now but has Springheel said only people with a EAX4 enabled Creative card can ear it, but you really can buy one for peanuts now, especially the older ones on second hand, the older that you can buy with EAX 4 support is the SoundBlaster Audigy 2.

About giving reverb to all sounds now, i really don't think that is the right action Springheel, imo without EFX, reverb or other effects should be discarded for now, why, because it should always be location based if not it will sound wrong and of putting, for example you don't want a small room sounding like a cathedral or a cathedral sounding like a small room, the only way this would work was if you made a bunch of copies of the sounds for special places like guard voices to be used on big places and ones to be used on small confined spaces, this of course is a bunch of work, very messy and prone to errors, like a developer without realizing using a sound sounding like is on a cathedral and another like a room but at the same location.

 

About making reverb editing eventually in the future, one easy way to control them would be to use reverb spaces, make a big brush encompassing the area you want to add reverb to, give it the reverb texture and the reverb func entity and change the key values on the entity to the room sound you want. In game all sounds inside this Space would pick up the reverb options but when out of it they would return to normal or pick reverb from another reverb space.

Edited January 7, 2014 by HMart

[Springheel]

because it should always be location based if not it will sound wrong and of putting, for example you don't want a small room sounding like a cathedral or a cathedral sounding like a small room

 

I'm not sure I buy that argument anymore. All Thief sounds had a certain amount of reverb, whether you were in a small room or not, and I think that's part of the reason they sound better. Since we can only have a single level of reverb for the time being, I think a small amount would be a better default than none.

[STiFU]

I generally agree, however shouldn't we rather strive for an ultimate solution? Having a proper OpenAL implementation with effects as HMart suggested would be great. I wonder what Serpentine has been working on. Gonna dig around a little to find out... ;-)

[New Horizon]

I generally agree, however shouldn't we rather strive for an ultimate solution? Having a proper OpenAL implementation with effects as HMart suggested would be great. I wonder what Serpentine has been working on. Gonna dig around a little to find out... ;-)

 

He is working on porting TDM to the dhewm3 build of idtech4. That build has openal efx already built in and working, and a slew of other optimizations and clean ups. Not sure how far along he is.

[STiFU]

Oh yeah, right. I remember, but didn't connect the dots. That sounds indeed very promising. Here's to hoping he gets back to us soon. He hasn't been around a lot recently...

[New Horizon]

If I knew the first thing about porting things over I would try to lend a hand, but he seems to have a pretty big project on his plate. I think he's changing thing to a multi-platform building solution as well. It's a lot of work for one person, hopefully he hasn't taken on more than he can handle.

[Deadlove]

Fuck Steam donations, pay this man Serpentine to get the game working with OpenAL so the audio can be jolly for generations to come.

Edited January 8, 2014 by Deadlove

[Springheel]

I generally agree, however shouldn't we rather strive for an ultimate solution?

 

Sure, if there's someone who can do so. But the only person who has even mentioned being able/willing to work on it is Serpentine, and he's been talking about it for a least a year. Porting TDM to the dhewm3 build of idtech4sounds like a massive undertaking, which is why I doubt it will be completed any time soon.

[rich_is_bored]

TDM has enough presence in gaming circles to reach it's target audience but the same cannot be said about targeting developers. It's unfortunate that the source is not hosted or visible in any way from the official Doom 3 repository on github. That's a missed opportunity.

[nbohr1more]

Yes, I have lightly broached this before. The Dark Mod's development has been a series of cool surprise releases which is great when we have a mega-motivated guy like Greebo

to push these changes out regularly. Now, with Greebo mostly dormant, it would probably be more beneficial to have an open structure for contributors. I will say that Read Only SVN

is pretty damn cool compared to the totally hidden process before but I suspect that GitHub junkies wont want to make their own Git with SVN data and especially wont want to keep

refreshing their Git to synch up.

 

As I recall, the above "opening up" was also on Serpentine's roadmap.

 

I wouldn't count him out just yet but it's quite disconcerting that so many vital improvements hinge on him.

 

It would be a little less unnerving if we already had our stuff up on GitHub where other tinkers could try making some

experimental branches and possibly even complete the Dhewm3 merge early (etc).

[brethren]

Surprising to see people criticizing TDM's lockpicking and editor, two of it's stronger points in my opinion.

[PranQster]

On the previous page was some chatter about converting .ogg to .wav and back to .ogg. Instead of that, how about playing the .ogg with loopback enabled and recording a brand spanking new .wav from that input? Then will exist a .wav file which will be much more useful than one converted back from .ogg.

[STiFU]

Same problem, PranQster. The soundwave as generated by the ogg contains faulty soundwaves from quantization that we cannot hear due to masking effects of the human audio-processing-system. They will be contained in the newly recorded wav as well though, which again breaks the functioning of the audio codec.

 

Also, we have the wavs at hand, so no need to discuss this issue any further...

[Garrett2014]

Im a new member here but a long time Thief fan Just check out my avatar ! Im just urious as to why someone dosent just contact that dude thats porting the new engine for us too ask about progress ?

[grayman]

Im a new member here but a long time Thief fan Just check out my avatar ! Im just urious as to why someone dosent just contact that dude thats porting the new engine for us too ask about progress ?

 

Welcome!

 

What dude is porting a new engine for us?

[New Horizon]

Welcome!

 

What dude is porting a new engine for us?

 

I think he means Serpentine porting TDM to dhewm3 build of idtech4. Garrett2014, it's not a new engine, just a different build of the idtech4 engine we're currently using.

[nbohr1more]

If anyone needs to speak with Serpentine, he can be reached at https://webchat.freenode.net using the #thedarkmod channel.

 

That said, I presume he wouldn't be too happy with a bunch of "is it done yet" requests.

[taaaki]

Serpentine has had a few weeks of Internet trouble, which is why he has been rather quiet. He's still working on the dhewm3 merge, but he hit a snag with some renderer bug from the merge. Unfortunately, working on TDM takes a backseat when he has paying work (which I think he has quite a lot of at the moment). Don't worry, we'll get there eventually. If he says that he doesn't have any time to work on it, I might ask him to pass his current work my way so that I can look at finishing it.

[Goldwell]

I'm curious as I have no idea about programming but what are the advantages of this merge?

[taaaki]

It's been a while since I've looked at the differences between doom3gpl and dhewm3, but the big ones are 64-bit builds, OpenAL improvements, move from MFC to SDL (more for the devs: I think this means that you can use the free version of Visual Studio without issues), and several other smaller fixes/improvements.