The Dark Mod ( aka Thief running on Doom 3 engine )

[AluminumHaste]

No you are correct, Quake 4 had very large outdoor areas that were completely bare.

 

[New Horizon]

About LoD - It's not the authors that need to use it, it's the objects in the mod resources that new low-poly versions and the system needs to use that automatically.

I think we leave the option up to the mission authors, although I may be wrong about that.

To be honest, i may have already seen that - some roman statue? Not quite sure because my gfx card sucks, but i noticed some 'popping' which is characteristic of LoD systems on low-end cards (where the draw distance to exchange the meshes is low). BTW, if that distance can be made adaptive to the card it would be nice

Though i bet it's only a few objects yet (the most important to apply this are naturally the npcs, which tend to be the most detailed objects on a room).

I'm not sure how many objects are currently setup to use the system, but I know our coder Tel's spent some time preparing a lot of them.

There is a menu setting to adjust the LOD. I believe it's under advanced.

Yeah, it is too bad id software didn't do more to make the engine more efficient but I guess they only did what they needed it to do. The BFG edition may help us squeeze some more performance out of it though. Fingers crossed.

 

[SCO]

Is it wise to leave enabling lod to fan mission authors?
I mean... why?

I guess there might be problems with the telescope object, but that may be possible to workaround.

 

[Infinitron]

Yo, New Horizon

Any chance of an updated version of The Minimalist Project for TDS?

 

[New Horizon]

Yo, New Horizon

Any chance of an updated version of The Minimalist Project for TDS?

Haha. Sorry, no. It has been so many years since I touched that stuff that I would be starting from scratch in terms of figuring out how things worked. Also, I lost all of my source files for the project so it's pretty much a done deal.

 

[New Horizon]

the dark mod cant even rise as an inferior version of thief. it can barely function as a game and thats after many years of development. the head guy cant help promoting it and then derailing every thread at ttlg even if it's barely mentioned in passing in a completely different topic. with the new thief patches and source leak it's more irrelevant than it ever was before.

That's somewhat harsh and unfair. It's fine if you don't like it, I don't like Halo or similar games, but at least have the humility not to come across as if it's a fact. It's your opinion that it sucks and thank you for sharing it, we will continue to try and improve upon our work. Given the number of downloads we track though, we have a healthy user base that is quite happy with it...as are we.

Also, what "head guy" are you talking about derailing threads at ttlg? We don't have an official "head guy" or Mod Leader. We have different team leads, but we work together as a unit. In the earlier days, I and a few others were certainly guilty of being a bit overzealous in our defense of the project but it was our baby. After pouring your heart and soul into a project for 6 years, and then reading harsh critiques from people about how it sucked and was going to fail, when they hadn't even so much as played it...well, that could raise the worst out of anyone.

 

[nbohr1more]

Whats wrong with TDM exactly?

It doesn't feel like Thief at all, and was made for an engine that can't render large levels without feeling you're just in a large room.

You mean "large rooms" like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErA4GDzViR0&feature=related

TDM has a lot of small missions made for contests, but they also have some missions that are the same size as T1/2 levels, if you actually take the time to look.

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/12985-animated-grass-test-map/page__view__findpost__p__264547

That performed WAY WAY better than I expected.

Normal FPS on the hill was around 12. Highest was around 30. Lowest was looking back from the castle at the field 6 or 7 FPS.

Very playable on the low end.

I don't consider 12 fps 'playable'.

Please don't take my performance perceptions as gospel. I have what should be the utterly lowest weakest hardware that should run TDM. My CPU is a Pentium 4 3.0ghz (nearly a decade old) and my GPU is a HD 4650 AGP which is likely bottle-necked significantly because it has a PCIE to AGP converter. That said, when I complain that I can't play a mission due to performance reasons, half the time (or more) Bikerdude will find some way to optimize it (often doubling the FPS).

This does show how dependent performance is on the aptitude of the mapper, so it's valid to say that it's a weakness of the engine. I can only guess that Carmack was surrounded by expert Quake mappers who loved to manually optimize maps when he designed Doom 3 (optimizing must be entertaining of it's own right because it became a Quake mapping team standard to include a mapper dedicated to it...). Doom 3 does some amount of auto-culling but arguably it is far too conservative. The LOD and Procedural content generator in TDM also has some culling mechanisms but these are necessarily conservative too given that the visibility determination is running from game code (rather than directly in the renderer).

As far as outdoor or spacious areas? I say the Doom 3 engine has a fighting chance to rival Source (both are "Forward Renderers"). The inclusion of Source style skyboxes is targeted for 1.09 and that will allow a sort of manual billboarding LOD.
Along with that, normal map compression will be a HUGE benefit when it arrives (a working prototype already showed significant performance boosts for both map loading and rendering).

All that aside, the answer to whether TDM can handle large outdoor areas comes down to your hardware. Are you trying to run it on decade old hardware like me, or is your rig within the typical 3yr upgrade cycle?

The larger question:

How long will the Doom 3 engine remain recognizably so? Just look at the Xreal engine which was once Quake 3 GPL.

Already there is a Doom 3 engine with deferred rendering, shadow maps, and megatextures:

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=25344&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

when the right feature-set comes along, TDM will be able to merge those features into their engine.

It's silly to say "Doom 3 sucks at x" or "Doom 3 can't do y" when some day someone
will fix those issues and remove those limits.

For the time being, TDM still sports some excellent outdoor areas such as the city areas in No Honor Among Thieves, Return to the City, and A Score to Settle and of course the Forest in No Honor Among Thieves. I've never felt claustrophobic in any of these missions.

 

[Infinitron]

That's somewhat harsh and unfair. It's fine if you don't like it, I don't like Halo or similar games, but at least have the humility not to come across as if it's a fact. It's your opinion that it sucks and thank you for sharing it, we will continue to try and improve upon our work. Given the number of downloads we track though, we have a healthy user base that is quite happy with it...as are we.

Also, what "head guy" are you talking about derailing threads at ttlg? We don't have an official "head guy" or Mod Leader. We have different team leads, but we work together as a unit. In the earlier days, I and a few others were certainly guilty of being a bit overzealous in our defense of the project but it was our baby. After pouring your heart and soul into a project for 6 years, and then reading harsh critiques from people about how it sucked and was going to fail, when they hadn't even so much as played it...well, that could raise the worst out of anyone.

That's a troll, ignore

 

[potatojohn]

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=25344&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

The game code in idTech 4 has been ported over to Mono C#. The engine comes with a Visual Studio 2012 plugin that provides the ability to debug Mono generated assemblies.

 

[Melan]

Speaking as a mapper who has built levels for both Thief and TDM, I'm finding that the latter can handle large maps and complex scenes all right. Sure, there are performance tradeoffs: you can create large open areas with fairly light detail which will run well even on weaker PCs, or you can create moderately sized areas with a large amount of detail which will also run well. You can combine the two (unlike pre-patch Thief, which just crashes if you are over 1024 polys), although it will run like crap on weaker PCs. But you can do it, given talent, time and effort. That means TDM will scale up well in the foreseeable future as powerful PCs become more widespread.

Absolute map size can go very high, although I don't know how this compares with post-patch Thief (I released my last Thief mission in 2009). But you can create maps which will exceed the size of any given Thief or Thief 2 original mission, with added complexity. They will also run fine on most PCs as long as they are properly optimised. This mostly means individual areas are sufficiently well separated from each other so the game does not try to render them all at once -- as I have found with my first TDM mission, bad optimalisation will make even a medium-sized mission a pain to run (note, this meant the engine was trying to cope with millions of polygons and a dozen AI or so at the same time - and it still didn't crash!). There are currently two upper limits to building:

• very large and very complex maps will produce a memory allocation error if you have less than 4GB memory; and
• you can only have a set number of interactive entities in a map - meaning if you make an immense mission, you will not be able to make every single fork, pot and pan a moveable object.

That said, these limits mostly apply if you are trying to really push the engine. Otherwise, it's powerful (and getting better version by version), and the editor is very user-friendly. Obviously, there are aesthetic choices people will have to agree or disagree with, and TDM will never be Offical Thief if that's what you are looking for. But it is a combination of a great game and a powerful toolset, which still has not been exploited to its fullest. The only reason we have not seen many large missions yet is due to the fact that people have mostly stuck to small or medium-sized projects so far (and the later can be done very fast - a moderately experienced mapper could create one in a few weeks).

 

[JarlFrank]

I think the game needs occlusion culling of some kind on top of the 'sealing' system. It's probably terrible to manually seal all the leaks on a outdoor scene (not having any experience of mapping).

It's already horrible enough with indoor areas.

 

[JarlFrank]

Here is the deal. The troll is ready and awaits to be uploaded here. Now I need to ask how one uploads image here, because from this reply console I see only Insert/Edit image, which pops up URL. I tried linking Imgur, but the picture is broken. Any ideas?

Hm. You can't upload pictures on the 'dex, so you have to find an imagehoster that works. What's wrong when you upload it to imgur?

 

[DalekFlay]

When TDM goes stand-a-lone and has 10 or so solid missions everyone agrees are good, I will dive into that shit like Scrooge into a money pile.

 

[Captain Shrek]

A) Thief style games should not be played in large open areas. THey are MEANT to be played with complex (!) architecture around the PC
B) Doom3 and Quake 4 are GAMES FOCUSING on COMBAT. The comparison is unfair if the way the areas for these games were rendered are being compared to Thief like gameplay. By playing these games you can at the most claim that they can do rooms right (they did).
C) Corridor combat of COD != Corridor design of Thief. Corridor combat means VERY linear design for maps (e.g. DA2) with fixed path and absolutely no freedom of exploration. TDM can easily avoid that with clever design and IN THIS CASE it has little to do with the engine.
D) TDM > TDE. TDE can't handle the same quality resources as TDM. And still TDE was a fantastic engine. The only reason why TDM lags behind the quality content of TDE is that it is not dedicated (As in profit inspired) design but rather comes from fan community who do it in their spare time, which is a great work anyway.

 

[New Horizon]

I don't consider 12 fps 'playable'.

Just wanted to comment on this. He was talking about a test map where all of the grass in the map was animated. It was not a real map.

We also had a user who reported worse FPS after upgrading to 1.08, which didn't make a lot of sense since most everyone had been reporting an increase due to our optimizations. Turns out his computer was at fault.

nvidia was directing 1.08 to play on my laptop's integrated graphics chip instead of the GT555M card.

He went from getting FPS as low as 10 up into the 50's on the same map.