FYI: Ambient stage no longer needed in materials

[peter_spy]

In TDM 2.08, the option for tdm_ambient_method was removed from the menu and it's set to 0 by default. That means the engine uses ambient lights, not textures to calculate this. You can safely remove the //TDM Ambient Method Related code from your materials, and everything will work the same.

This should make your material files smaller and more readable

[stgatilov]

Hmm... should we do a massive cleanup of core materials at some moment?

[peter_spy]

Yup, it seems so.

I'm also trying to understand how it relates to the use of the "ambient_world" name for your main ambient light. Wiki suggests that this works for the old ambient methods only. I did some experiments, and when you don't set the name to ambient_world, it works only on the first loading. If you reload a map, the light works for a few seconds, and then fades out.

First load:

Reload:

 

When I set the light name to ambient_world, it works every time.

Edited December 11, 2020 by peter_spy

[STiFU]

8 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Hmm... should we do a massive cleanup of core materials at some moment?

Definitely, but maybe hold back with that until we moved Frob-Highlight to GLSL, so we can also delete that darn frob-highlight hack from the material defs?

[Dragofer]

10 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Hmm... should we do a massive cleanup of core materials at some moment?

Definitely, this would massively reduce clutter in materials.

Also great would be to move frob highlight stages out of materials, or as an intermediate solution turn them into a single line instead of 2 blocks. But I think this is a separate issue from ambient methods and could be addressed afterwards.

[nbohr1more]

The r_newFrob cvar already "works" it just highlights with a weird looking shader. We just need to replace the shader with something better than the rainbow color effect.

 

https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5427

[STiFU]

I hope it has been implemented in a flexibel manner so we can swap frob highlights during runtime!

[stgatilov]

Fun fact: while this code about "ambient method" never gets executed now, it still generates warnings about missed textures pretty often.

That's when artist decided to move a texture to a different directory, but updated the path only in the main map, and did not change it in this "ambient method" block. Note that all referenced images get "preloaded" when material is parsed.