Beta testing 2.13

[stgatilov]

8 hours ago, Daft Mugi said:

To clarify what I wrote above, sharpening significantly improves the clarity of font characters without causing clipping issues. However, enabling r_tonemapOnlyGame3d "1" specifically causes the characters to be clipped at the bottom, and sharpening cannot be enabled when r_tonemapOnlyGame3d "1".

The fonts look really great when r_tonemapOnlyGame3d "0" and r_postprocess_sharpen "1".

Of course if you enable tonemap then you get gamma = 1.2 which increases contrast and sharpening filter which reduces antialiasing/blurry border of the fonts. But is crisper always better? Maybe we should make all fonts black-and-white without antialiasing and use nearest sampling? Because then we'll get the most crisp result.

I don't see a major difference in the menu with/without tonemap. The fonts look crisp enough for me both ways. I wonder how many people are actually disappointed by the increased blurring.
Removal of tonemapping in main menu has other side benefits, like no color banding in videos, and presenting custom images exactly as mappers intended them to be.

Finally, I suppose sharpening filter might be dropped in the future.
Modern graphical effects often rely on dithering and low-resolution rendering, simply because rendering that stuff in full resolution is too costly. Sharpening makes the artifacts much more noticeable, as it happened on volumetric lights.

UPDATE: As for clipping, I can't reproduce any dependence on tonemap/sharpening.
I also tested inside Linux VM. Subpixel clipping might depend on resolution, but thus far clipping is the same for me in all cases.

[stgatilov]

beta213-02 is available.

[wesp5]

I noticed that the 2 new potions are not listed on the settings/controls/tools page yet, to assign a quick key there.

Edited January 26, 2025 by wesp5

[Baal]

On 1/18/2025 at 1:08 AM, Daft Mugi said:

With r_tonemapOnlyGame3d set to 1, there are font distortions (as seen in the animated screenshot).
The A, G, S, and O characters are the most noticeable -- the bottoms are cut off.

I can confirm that. But it does only happen on my AMD notebook. I could not reproduce it on an Intel netbook. Both running Linux, both only have intergrated graphic hardware.

[Daft Mugi]

8 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Of course if you enable tonemap then you get gamma = 1.2 which increases contrast and sharpening filter which reduces antialiasing/blurry border of the fonts. But is crisper always better? Maybe we should make all fonts black-and-white without antialiasing and use nearest sampling? Because then we'll get the most crisp result.

Thank you for looking into this issue.

I'm not sure about crisper is always better. I do think non-blurry is better, though. Here's an example:

 

But this is a bit of a feature request (non-blurry fonts) rather than addressing the issue at hand, which is font distortion when r_tonemapOnlyGame3d "1".

8 hours ago, stgatilov said:

As for clipping, I can't reproduce any dependence on tonemap/sharpening.

It seems that this issue is dependent on hardware/drivers, which is a bummer.

 

8 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Removal of tonemapping in main menu has other side benefits, like no color banding in videos, and presenting custom images exactly as mappers intended them to be.

Does the 2.12 tonemapper cause color banding in videos? Does TDM 2.12? Now that the 2.12 tonemapper is default, is r_tonemapOnlyGame3d "1" as default still necessary? Is there another way this issue of font distortion could be fixed?

Perhaps creating a main menu tonemapper with some post processing would produce better results? Its purpose could be: consistent main menu regardless of in-game 3D settings, no color banding in videos, custom images exactly as mappers intended, and non-blurry fonts.

[Amadeus]

21 hours ago, wesp5 said:

I noticed that the 2 new potions are not listed on the settings/controls/tools page yet, to assign a quick key there.

Good looking out. I'll get to working on this, and it should hopefully show up on the next beta release

[Xolvix]

Quick question - I notice the majority of missions seem to have updates now. I'm assuming this is to support 2.13 in some way, but will updating the missions cause them to have issues and become incompatible whilst still running 2.12?

Edited January 27, 2025 by Xolvix

[stgatilov]

4 hours ago, Xolvix said:

Quick question - I notice the majority of missions seem to have updates now. I'm assuming this is to support 2.13 in some way, but will updating the missions cause them to have issues and become incompatible whilst still running 2.12?

I think only Shadows of Northdale 1 have this problem, it simply does not boot.

The other changes should fix things in 2.13 but should not break them in 2.12. At least in theory... I'm not sure I checked it though.

[Geep]

That's interesting. I've not been following this "tonemapOnlyGame3d 1" initiative, so have particularly nothing informed to say about the underlying cause of the main menu font clipping or whether clipping can be avoided while retaining benefits for this new option.

I'd like to clarify my previous comment, that could be read as suggesting that clipping could be avoided by repositioning characters in font bitmaps. That would be a vast, vast time sink.

[Geep]

Just trying beta2. On my dev box (Win11, Intel integrated gpu), I'm not seeing any change in main menu font clipping with r_tonemapOnlyGame3d setting. I do see a slight change in perceived sharpness, although its hard for me to say how much is due to font edge effects and how much due to the parchment color change.

Unrelated: In the console, my cursor now appears with a twin ghost. That is, there's the main vertical bar, and then appx. a character's width to the right, a second, fainter vertical bar. Both blink and advance in synchrony.

[snatcher]

On 1/2/2025 at 7:32 PM, stgatilov said:

beta213-02 (rev 17281-10932)
* Some main menu buttons during game start replaced with generic "Next" (post).

Overall I see it as a step back in usability but since I am sure there are good reasons excuses I will give you a pass except for having "Next" to start a mission. I don't think you want your installers/software to behave like that.

[MirceaKitsune]

Quick idea I forgot to ask a while back, since new assets are still being added to the beta I figured it should work: Can we add the pray animation? Several FM's include pray.md5anim to have stuff like builders praying in churches: Figured FM creators would be grateful to have it available with everything else.

I'd also consider Kingstal's animated grass, same situation. I improved it a bit in my FM, Gem of Souls: Let me know if you want my pk4 with the materials and entity configurations I tweaked.

[snatcher]

Seeking Lady Leicester, Grimnir's Grimoires (4332, 1094, 180)

Can anybody else confirm?

[Amadeus]

20 minutes ago, snatcher said:

Can anybody else confirm?

 

I'm using the latest 2.13, and downloaded this fresh off the servers. It seems fine for me: 

[snatcher]

Thanks, Amadeus.

I deleted the folder fms/seeking, I re-downloaded the mission and all is good now.

[Amadeus]

On 1/27/2025 at 8:47 PM, MirceaKitsune said:

Quick idea I forgot to ask a while back, since new assets are still being added to the beta I figured it should work: Can we add the pray animation? Several FM's include pray.md5anim to have stuff like builders praying in churches: Figured FM creators would be grateful to have it available with everything else.

 

I thought I had already added this anim a while ago, but I guess not. I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be included in core, as a lot of FMs do use this anim now. I'll go ahead and add it. As for the animated grass; I'm not sure if that is actually done (you'd have to ask Kingsal as he was the one working on it, I believe). Plus that would likely require a bit more testing. Maybe 2.14....

[Geep]

Just testing my new redo of gen_lang.pl ported to C++.

I see that the [hungarian] section of main-menu all.lang has a lot of instances of characters that can't be encoded into the target iso-8859-2 encoding, so become '?' in the hungarian.lang file. (I can provide a long list of strings with this problem.)

By far the most frequent specific character problems:

• the o-double-acute character was "represented" at one time by o-tilde (a common hack) in all.lang
• u-double-acute was evidently "represented" by u-circumflex.

These representations are probably now unhelpful. Both utf8 (in all.lang) and iso-8859-2 have valid codepoints for these 2 characters.

However, I am reluctant to mechanically change this... do we have a hungarian-speaker to review this?

[nbohr1more]

4 hours ago, Geep said:

Just testing my new redo of gen_lang.pl ported to C++.

I see that the [hungarian] section of main-menu all.lang has a lot of instances of characters that can't be encoded into the target iso-8859-2 encoding, so become '?' in the hungarian.lang file. (I can provide a long list of strings with this problem.)

By far the most frequent specific character problems:

• the o-double-acute character was "represented" at one time by o-tilde (a common hack) in all.lang
• u-double-acute was evidently "represented" by u-circumflex.

These representations are probably now unhelpful. Both utf8 (in all.lang) and iso-8859-2 have valid codepoints for these 2 characters.

However, I am reluctant to mechanically change this... do we have a hungarian-speaker to review this?

Time to summon @Melan ?

[stgatilov]

beta213-03 is released.

[datiswous]

On 2/13/2025 at 3:37 AM, nbohr1more said:

Time to summon @Melan ?

I think he can be reached on Discord.

[snatcher]

This comment wasn't acknowledged in any way:

On 1/27/2025 at 9:34 PM, snatcher said:

Overall I see it as a step back in usability but since I am sure there are good reasons excuses I will give you a pass except for having "Next" to start a mission. I don't think you want your installers/software to behave like that.

I understand that what you are doing is difficult but please don't take shortcuts.

Besides, start a mission, go to the main menu, click on objectives and you get stuck:

[nbohr1more]

8 hours ago, snatcher said:

This comment wasn't acknowledged in any way:

I understand that what you are doing is difficult but please don't take shortcuts.

Besides, start a mission, go to the main menu, click on objectives and you get stuck:

Confirmed. The main menu objectives page is now bugged. Not sure if there is a quick fix but if you have a proposed design I will gladly test it. @stgatilov ?

[snatcher]

15 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

[...] Not sure if there is a quick fix but if you have a proposed design I will gladly test it.

I understand all these changes have to do with the new de-briefing screen but I didn't follow the topic.

Depending on the mission "Buy Equipment" has been replaced with "Next". "Difficulty" with "Back" but what I truly disagree with is "Start Mission" being replaced with a "Next" but ok, I guess it is a little too late to go back to the drawing board if we want a de-briefing.

[stgatilov]

On 2/17/2025 at 8:00 PM, snatcher said:

Besides, start a mission, go to the main menu, click on objectives and you get stuck:

I fixed this double button.

As for the button labels, I don't know what to say.
Ideally the C++ code should be expanded to model each forward/backward transition and detect where it goes, then assign the labels. And the GUI script should call this new "label initialization function".

[snatcher]

9 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

I fixed this double button.

Cool.

9 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

As for the button labels, I don't know what to say.
Ideally the C++ code should be expanded to model each forward/backward transition and detect where it goes, then assign the labels. And the GUI script should call this new "label initialization function".

The "Next" to start a mission is minor in the grand scheme of things but some will feel it awkward. Worth reviewing it for 2.14, me thinks.