Opinions on St. Lucia Demo

[Mortem Desino]

Animating a quadruped would probably be more challenging than a biped though.

Or we could assign the spider! BWA HA HA HA HA

[Theothesnopp]

Or we could assign the spider! BWA HA HA HA HA

 

 

lol

[irchel]

to me, it's in its own way almost "perfect", except for the rather brutal memory usage. I know mem is cheap those days, yet if 1 gb ram plus 256 mb video ram (my config) is not enough for a standard map and still causes heavy swapping, something isn't right. But the same also applies to commercial titles, with "Age of conan" being the worst of all: fluent gameplay under 2 gb main memory is not possible, and even using 3 gb does not always avoid swapping. This is plain crap.

 

Maybe you should have thought about a port to xbox360 first.

good luck with 512 mb *combined* memory..

[New Horizon]

to me, it's in its own way almost "perfect", except for the rather brutal memory usage. I know mem is cheap those days, yet if 1 gb ram plus 256 mb video ram (my config) is not enough for a standard map and still causes heavy swapping, something isn't right. But the same also applies to commercial titles, with "Age of conan" being the worst of all: fluent gameplay under 2 gb main memory is not possible, and even using 3 gb does not always avoid swapping. This is plain crap.

 

Maybe you should have thought about a port to xbox360 first.

good luck with 512 mb *combined* memory..

 

If you adjust the settings you can reduce that memory swappage.

 

Are you running on highest settings or something? There are all kinds of ways to reduce memory usage in the doomconfig.

[Baal]

brutal memory usage. I know mem is cheap those days, yet if 1 gb ram plus 256 mb video ram (my config) is not enough for a standard map and still causes heavy swapping, something isn't right.

I'm running this on a very old system. 1 Gb RAM and 128 Mb video RAM. Apart from long initial loading times and low framerates in complex scenes it runs very smoothly. That may be due to lower memory consumption of Win2K. Do you have doom3 ultra quality mode enabled?

[Noisycricket]

to me, it's in its own way almost "perfect", except for the rather brutal memory usage. I know mem is cheap those days, yet if 1 gb ram plus 256 mb video ram (my config) is not enough for a standard map and still causes heavy swapping, something isn't right. But the same also applies to commercial titles, with "Age of conan" being the worst of all: fluent gameplay under 2 gb main memory is not possible, and even using 3 gb does not always avoid swapping. This is plain crap.

 

Maybe you should have thought about a port to xbox360 first.

good luck with 512 mb *combined* memory..

 

On the other hand, a used 1gb video is $150 on Ebay now and a I got my 4gb memory kit for $30 after mail in rebate.....a year ago...

[Tels]

yet if 1 gb ram plus 256 mb video ram (my config)

 

The memory of the grafic card is not used in addition to your system memory, most systems keep a spare copy of everything in the video memory in the main memory (so to faster swap textures into the video ram when needed).

 

That means that you still got only 1Gby to hold everything, that includes about 150 .. 250 Mbyte for your OS, 200 Mbyte for D3 and TDM alone, and a few hundred megs for textures. Plus a few meg for the video buffer, the map itself is a few dozend megabytes, and so on.

 

1 Gbyte memory is the lower limit. There is no real way around it, and as hard as it sounds, if you cannot afford the 20 US$ for another Gbyte memory, I wonder how you eat and can afford the power to run your PC...

 

In any event, enabling compressed textures is usually enough to make the swapping stop, so I would try that first.

[Mortem Desino]

I'm fortunate enough to have a nice combination of DIMMs, so I've tested SL with 512, 768, 1GB, 1.25GB, and 1.5 GB or DDR2 RAM (My test rig has 1 GB DDR1 for my minimum performance threshold whenever I'm mapping)

 

What operating system are you running? XP/Vista/Linux can make the difference. 1 GB + windows XP is the point when I don't have to use swap space for textures in SaintLucia. Add >512mb if you're running Vista and/or lots of background programs like an antivirus.

 

What sort of RAM are you using? DDR1 vs DDR2 has a very significant difference in my speed tests.

 

What video card are you using (Model?), and what interface(AGP, PCI-e)? My Radeon 9600 may be AGP with only 128mb but it had quite a nice processor in it.

[vorob]

Hello guys, well first of all I would like to thank you for such interesting work and such huge progress you’ve made from original doom to this thief-like mode. Super!

 

Now to business

 

Look, its wonderfull, we have shadows from this vase, perfect.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578467498272610

 

But what is that? Why we don’t have it from that wall-lamp?

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578495800043186

Also no shadow from chain:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578535039164370

 

See we have shadow from this light-eeehh-hude candlestick and also guard have shadow.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578600029529714

But here light of that “lamp” don’t cast shadow at all. Why is that? Cause it will look bad? Crappy shadows? Or because game performance?

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578625334665778

No shadow from door

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578580935413506

 

Btw, any chance to make doom3/darkmod shadows soft?

Edited March 26, 2009 by vorob

[Springheel]

Some models are set to have shadows off by default. It would look pretty bad if the lamp on the wall had a massive shadow right underneath it.

[Fidcal]

Yes, small objects very close to light sources such as the physical lamps and lanterns themselves cast unrealistic shadows because the light would diffuse around them in real life but in the doom engine they are hard black shadows so we almost always turn them off.

 

Individual objects can be set to cast no shadows and also light sources can be set to cause shadows.

 

There is a trade-off between performance and light/shadow quality. With careful placement the mapper can make the lack of shadows less noticeable.

 

There are in a sense, two forms of shadows. Strictly speaking a shadow is an area where light is obstructed from falling on a surface. These always have a hard outline in the doom engine. In theory multiple lights could be used to soften the edges of such shadows but the performance loss would be great.

 

Another type of shadow is caused where lights fade gradually into the distance and these are very diffuse and atmospheric. In a way these may compose most visual shadows and greatly help to obscure the fact that obscuring shadows have a hard outline. The overall effect can be very pleasing.

 

There are also special light textures that can show as a soft diffuse shadow of an object in certain cases.

[SneaksieDave]

After source code release someone will undoubtedly set D3 up with soft shadows, even if it'll run on only the fastest machines.

[Crispy]

Btw, any chance to make doom3/darkmod shadows soft?

No.

 

Not without rewriting chunks of the renderer, which we can't do because the renderer isn't open-source yet. Even when Doom 3 is open-sourced under the GPL, I suspect it wouldn't be an easy task. Possible perhaps, but you could be waiting a while.

[vorob]

Well, that’s ok, in the end its a mod. Think more important thing is to make more AI behavior, make some random things, for example quest items will be placed in random places like key in Eavesdropping mission from thief 2. Or make guards to look in some rooms even if they don't have this in their itinerary. This will make gameplay more random and you wouldn't know what to expect, or where you'll be safe.

Possibly, I’ll try to make some sort of video review of this mission with audio commentary, hope this would be interesting

Edited March 27, 2009 by vorob

[Fidcal]

We already have the ability to have random patrols and thereby random animations on those patrols so it's mappers' choice. For instance, a guard might occasionally check a side room or sit down in a chair and wait but not every time. And of course, there is variable waiting so you can never be quite sure when the guard will come along.

 

We have a variable placement property for each difficulty level. But actual random placement within those levels would really need the mapper to place each item in each of a variety of places then set up some random triggers or script to select which. This should be do-able.

[Noisycricket]

Not without rewriting chunks of the renderer, which we can't do because the renderer isn't open-source yet. Even when Doom 3 is open-sourced under the GPL, I suspect it wouldn't be an easy task. Possible perhaps, but you could be waiting a while.

 

What are the chances John Carmack is a huge Thief fan?

 

Pretty good i'd say, maybe he can help us when the source code is released.

 

I thought Quake 4 had soft shadows...

Edited March 27, 2009 by Noisycricket

[vorob]

chances John Carmack is a huge Thief fan? Pretty good i'd say

 

Are you joking? Think he barely know what it is...

[vorob]

About shadows and this shot:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578625334665778

 

How about to disable candlestick it self to castshadow, but allow others object to have shadow from this light? Like you've made with this candle

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578535039164370

Edited March 27, 2009 by vorob

[vorob]

btw, after few quick loads game crashes, what can it be?

[Fidcal]

About shadows and this shot:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578625334665778

 

How about to disable candlestick it self to castshadow, but allow others object to have shadow from this light? Like you've made with this candle

http://picasaweb.google.com/Babudzia/Scree...578535039164370

 

Yes, that's possible, subject to other issues like performance. But that is the mapper's judgement in this case.

[Fidcal]

btw, after few quick loads game crashes, what can it be?

There are some known issues with the menus and gamesaves. Normally, exit to desktop and try again, perhaps with an earlier save. If it keeps crashing on all gamesave I don't know if there is anything one can do but restart the mission. Sorry.

[vorob]

No, no, no, my saves is ok, they are not corrupted!) just when I load game to often on 3-4time game crashes. If I rung mod once again this save will load without a problem )

[Fidcal]

That's what I'm saying. There were issues with gamesaves and the menus and all one could do is restart Dark Mod to clear the error and load the gamesave again. That, and take care not to get killed too often! This has all been rewritten now so when Dark Mod is released you should be alright.

[vorob]

Well, and finally, object interaction control is a little bit jerky, especially when you touch wall with some object. It can stuck there for a sec, pretty annoying. May be its better to make it less realistic?) Body movement is a horrible thing, hard to take body, hard to move it, sometimes I can’t even move it thought door passage )) Make them more plastic

 

Objects in water or on water surface acts strangely, jumps, disappears, distorts. Sometimes it is impossible to take it from water. Glass bottles doesn’t sink, candles doesn’t go out in water O_o

 

Well think I won't be making video cause as I see state of this mod gone too far and you fixed most of bugs. What about problems above?

 

P.s. Detalisation (is there such word in English? ) of this level is very, very good, nearly perfect, just love all this little objects, all this wood beam in corners, stuff on a kitchen, things on tables, AAAA!!!

Edited March 27, 2009 by vorob

[Fidcal]

Thanks for feedback vorob. Yes those issues are known or already fixed. They may not all be fixed in time for TDM Release 1 but we shall be continually updating even after the first release.