[Hendricks266]

I've had for some time in my list of stuff to add some way of splitting music out from the episode/level system and adding controls which are not available now.

Same thing with increasing map amounts.

[Mblackwell]

Still want paused rather than stopped sounds when the game is interrupted.

[Mikko]

Anyone else unable to play in Polymost since the latest ATI patch (the one that was released right after Rage)? EDuke32 simply stops responding immediately after launch and the log reveals nothing.

The software mode has an annoying bug that reverts brightness/gamma settings back to default whenever the screen flashes. Pressing F11 returns the user's settings but this fix only lasts until the screen flashes again (or changes pal etc.).

[Helixhorned]

Mikko_Sandt, on 24 October 2011 - 12:04 PM, said:

The software mode has an annoying bug that reverts brightness/gamma settings back to default whenever the screen flashes. Pressing F11 returns the user's settings but this fix only lasts until the screen flashes again (or changes pal etc.).

Confirmed for ATI systems in fullscreen. Do you also suffer from abysmal performance for palette effects that change every frame (like the red damage flash)?

[Plagman]

Well that blows. Mikko: when you say the log reveals nothing, do you mean the crashlog of the debugging version or the regular log?

[Mikko]

The regular log. I'm not familiar with the debug version.

Helixhorned, on 24 October 2011 - 01:10 PM, said:

Do you also suffer from abysmal performance for palette effects that change every frame (like the red damage flash)?

There's a noticeable spike but I wouldn't call it abysmal.

[Jblade]

Is there a reason why a startlevel command taking the player to volume 1 level 9 would bug out and take them to the menu instead? Micky reported a problem where the level transition (using startlevel) took him to the main menu instead of E1L9 like it should of done. I went straight to that level and it took me to the base map, but does Duke do something weird with Episode 1 levels if you play them in a row or something?

EDIT: Nevermind, I misunderstood what Micky C meant!

[Kyanos]

Quote

In computer graphics, accounting for level of detail involves decreasing the complexity of a 3D object representation as it moves away from the viewer or according other metrics such as object importance, eye-space speed or position. Level of detail techniques increases the efficiency of rendering by decreasing the workload on graphics pipeline stages, usually vertex transformations. The reduced visual quality of the model is often unnoticed because of the small effect on object appearance when distant or moving fast.
Wikipedia.

Does polymer use this? Or possibly mipmapping support?? I came across the term LOD and got curious.

[Plagman]

It does use mip-mapping, so there are texture LODs. They're automagically derived from the textures you specify in DEF, though. That means that if you pass in a DDS file that contains its own mip levels, they won't be read and EDuke32 will generate its own set instead.

For models there's no such thing right now. You can't really automatically derive LOD levels for models and expect it to look good, so the proper way to fix that would be to let people define their LODs and use that. However you can pretty much achieve that right now by specifying several separate models and switching through them with CON code depending on distance/whatever other criteria you chose, so making this a full engine feature would be more of a convenience than anything, which makes it pretty low priority.

[Kyanos]

That's good news that it's something that can be done with con code. It doesn't need to be an engine based feature, or applied to most models, but I can see it coming in handy with something large in an open space or just a lot of models being "seen" at once in certain places in a map. And I didn't ever notice the mip-mapping going on so that's great work.
"automagically" LMFAO

[Plagman]

Mipmapping only kicks in if you pick a texture filter mode that takes advantage of it. With Bilinear, transition between mipmaps is rough (like in HL1 where you could clearly lines of blurriness at fixed distances). With Trilinear, it's smooth so it's harder to notice. However you have to remember that Anisotropic filtering is a technique that relies on mipmaps being used to work, so maybe you've been taking advantage of it without realizing it.

[Helixhorned]

OK, here's the deal with the hardware gamma bug on ATI cards:

Setting the gamma works all right, but the next time a new palette is uploaded (IDirectDrawPalette_SetEntries), the gamma is reset to the base value! Revision 2085 works around this issue in two ways.

r2085 commit log said:

From the time of OpenGL initialization, gamma lookup in classic/fullscreen
will be done in software. Before that, always do a setgamma() after setting the
palette, since this is what resets the HW gamma. However, this may lead to
unappealing artifacts with portions of the scene being sent to the screen with
different gammas.

The reason that OpenGL must be initialized in order to disable HW gamma is that I couldn't find a way to query the driver vendor using the DirectX interface. So, this looks like a genuine DX driver bug to me, but I don't have the motivation to check whether such behavior might be to spec after all.

[Mblackwell]

Plagman, on 26 October 2011 - 06:35 PM, said:

It does use mip-mapping, so there are texture LODs. They're automagically derived from the textures you specify in DEF, though. That means that if you pass in a DDS file that contains its own mip levels, they won't be read and EDuke32 will generate its own set instead.

For models there's no such thing right now. You can't really automatically derive LOD levels for models and expect it to look good, so the proper way to fix that would be to let people define their LODs and use that. However you can pretty much achieve that right now by specifying several separate models and switching through them with CON code depending on distance/whatever other criteria you chose, so making this a full engine feature would be more of a convenience than anything, which makes it pretty low priority.

Worth noting that the number of polygons on a particular object seem to matter less than the number of objects as far as game speed. Having multiple models combined into one sprite had similar speed gains to making things outright invisible in my tests. Granted this isn't always viable.

[Jblade]

Just downloaded the latest snapshot, and uncovered a bug that's probably related to the ATI stuff that other people have been experiencing. Full screen in classic mode is completely black for me - I just see a black screen. I can still move around and stuff and when I quit for a split second I can see the display normally. Playing in 32-bit mode works no problem and I can run the game in windowed mode in classic no problems either but if I try to play fullscreen as classic than I get the bug. I've got a integraded Radeon 3100 I think so it's old stuff.

[Helixhorned]

Does that also happen when first switching to OpenGL mode (if that's possible at all) and then back to classic?
edit: looks like 'yes' from your post
edit2: what happens when you press F11 while in-game (and in 8-bit fullscreen, arrived at by e.g. 'vidmode 8')?

[Jblade]

I just tried ingame, If I set it to openGl first, go full-screen, and then set it to classic mode in the menu than it works as normal and I can see just fine.

EDIT: I just did this, went into windowed mode and then tried to go back into full-screen mode. I could see normally for a few seconds but then the game hardlocked and I had to turn off my laptop.

EDIT2: Just tried your edited instructions. It all worked, although there were a few seconds of garbled colours when going into that menu via classic mode but it didn't crash or anything.

[Helixhorned]

OK, hopefully it's fixed in r2094.

[Jblade]

Yep, that fixed it - thanks alot for the very speed fix!

[Micky C]

There's an issue with the spotlight animated projected feature. There are some textures that animate in mapster, and other textures that are only made to animate in the game itself, and it seems the animation doesn't work for these types of textures, or at least the television-screen-with-static.

[Danukem]

Micky C, on 06 November 2011 - 08:46 PM, said:

There's an issue with the spotlight animated projected feature. There are some textures that animate in mapster, and other textures that are only made to animate in the game itself, and it seems the animation doesn't work for these types of textures, or at least the television-screen-with-static.

Animations that work only in game use CON defined actions. A single tile could have any number of actions associated with it. Even if a light SE could somehow know that there was a CON defined action associated with the tile number, there is no way for it to know whether the mapper wants to use it for the light, and if there is more than one such action there is no way for it to know which one to use. So I would say it is sort of a conceptual error on your part to think that the spotlight projections are supposed to use in game only animations. There might be some hardcoded animations (i.e. not in art files nor in CON) that are handled differently, however. But I don't see why we would want those to project, either, since it could mess up mods that have different art on those tile numbers.

[Simon_Croes]

I don't know where to post this or if it has been already posted but I get this cache error with an old mod of mine:
Unable to open cache file: Permission denied

The mod I'm working on has highres textures and models but for some reason he doesn't want to turn on the cache compression in the options.
I have other projects I am working on and these do work with the cache options...

Any help?

[TerminX]

That means that permission to write or create the file was denied by the operating system. Check the filesystem permissions for the directory for that mod.

[Simon_Croes]

I tried to set the permission and security of my directory to the default setting like the directories of my other mods. But nothing seems to work. I cleaned up my mod with deleting unnecessary files. I even tried to copy my files into a new directory somewhere else on my harddisk. But still no effect.

[Danukem]

Can't you just delete the cache?

[Simon_Croes]

If you mean the textures.cache file, I tried that for several times. If it helps here is my log file.

Attached File(s)

•  eduke32.log (4.09K)
  Number of downloads: 554

[Mikko]

Just posting to let you know that the Polymost mode works again. Dunno if it's because of the latest snapshot or because of the new ATI patch that was released a few days ago.

[Helixhorned]

insane_metalhead, on 07 November 2011 - 09:41 AM, said:

If you mean the textures.cache file, I tried that for several times. If it helps here is my log file.

[from log]
Searching for game data...
Found no recognized game data!
Warning: could not find main data file ''!

The mod is standalone, right?

Can you post the log with r2106? Its only change is that it'll print the file name of the cache file it tried to open, maybe that will give a hint.

[Simon_Croes]

r2106 does give a difference:
Unable to open cache file 'textures': Permission denied

But I don't know why. Here is my log anyway. I really have no clue how to solve this.

EDIT: yes my mod is standalone

Attached File(s)

•  eduke32.log (4.17K)
  Number of downloads: 548

[Helixhorned]

Well, nothing out of the ordinary there. Just to be clear, the file "C:/Pens Entertainment/The Darkness/textures" (without the .cache extension) doesn't exist, so you can't delete it, right? And you can create a, say, text file normally in that directory?

[Simon_Croes]

Damn that solved everything! I didn't even knew that you may not have a directory called "textures" in the main directory where Eduke32.exe is at. I moved to "textures" directory into another one and that solved my problem. Seems like the directory was blocking the way of creating the file textures (without the .cache). Thanks a lot Helixhorned