[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

[NUKEMDAVE]

I don't know if this has been asked before, but is there any plans to add the abilty to import a background image into 2D grid mode in Mapster? That would make remaking real-life structures so much easier! You could just go into Google Earth and take screenshots of whatever you want to build. You'd probably have to be able to zoom the background image in/out as well to get it to a suitable size with the grid.

[Helixhorned]

Mmh I dunno, sounds a bit gimmicky. Isn't re-building cool architecture from memory more fun anyway? I even could imagine how to go about implementing it (much in the same way as the 2D floor texturing?), but the ability to scale the image and the potential need to split very large images into smaller tiles would complicate things. In short, I'm just not motivated enough to code a feature that will be used by one, maybe two people .

[NUKEMDAVE]

Helixhorned, on 10 November 2011 - 02:58 PM, said:

Isn't re-building cool architecture from memory more fun anyway?

Not for me. I like it to be as close as the real thing as possible. I always have to exit out of Mapster and look at pictures of what I'm trying to build. I bet people would use it more than you think. Not only could you import images like Google Earth screenshots, but you could import images of certain shapes you want to make into sectors. I tried to make a hole in the ground shaped like a nuke symbol once. Never could get it perfectly right.

[Stabs]

i wouldnt mind something like this scales the only problem though, if we are talking crazy stuff like this importing EPS/DXF but how it decides redlines and whitelines would be a nightmare

[NUKEMDAVE]

All I'm proposing is the abilty to import a background image into the black background in 2D mode, the ability to zoom it in/out, rotate and drag it around where you want it. That's all you need. Just imagine how quick you could put a large map together with that. You could build your whole neighborhood accurately.

[Mark]

I was trying out Commander's flashlight mod and I was wondering if anyone figured out how to get it to work properly with the SE50 spotlight yet?

[Mark]

Wow. No answers for that question.

I have been doing a whole lot of mapping recently. I want to thank Helix, Plagman, TX and whoever else for making it a crash-free experience compared to the "old days" of 6 months ago. I haven't had a crash mapping in Polymer mode or test mode. Before I used to turn on Polymer in Mapster only to quick test a light sprite and then go right back to rendermode 3 to continue mapping. And I rarely used test mode. Now I can freely use both without fear.