[Lead]

What is required to contribute any artwork to the this Duke3D stuff?

[Hellbound]

Motivation

[Spiker]

Motivation and some beer.

[Tea Monster]

Prodigious and free-flowing amounts of hot tea. PG-Tips are best if you are in England. In the USA, you can make do with Red Rose. If you are lucky, you can find a British brand such as Taj Mahal at a Caribbean store. It has to be made very strong, with a splash of milk so it has that slightly orange hue.

Once you've done that, you need to fire up your media player or get your MP3 player going. I suggest something epic in scale and execution. Something that will be able to help you see what you are creating leap off the screen and into the game. That really helps with the motivation.

[Hellbound]

Och, sometimes 3d and 2d software is useful too.

[High Treason]

Hmm, a lot of people mentioned their computer power, i'm shocked that it goes so slow on those.

Itried it with that Polymer HRP that was linked a while ago, and not once did i drop below 60Fps except right at the start of levels. And my machine is ancient, you probably know the specs by now;

Pentium D 920 2.80Ghz
4Gb DDR-2-667Mhz
nVidia GeForce 9600

I suspect my graphics card is helping it an awful lot as well as all the many customizations i have done to things, but with everyone saying how slow it runs on their rig i am absolubtely amazed that my computer can do it this well - what with it being classed as Old. I was even more shocked to find that my machine has a tendency to load things a lot faster than my friends Quad Core Phenom / ATi 3870 machine.

Hmm, might try to rum Polymer on my P2 just to see what happens.

[chicken]

@Lead: check the to do list:
http://hrp.duke4.net...ext_hrp_release
Make your tiles 4x the size of the original.
And then: go ahead, dude!

[Mia Max]

@High Treason: You need to play a map with placed spotlights/pointlights. Then you'll see framerate droping.
I have many fps in maps without placed lights too. Sometime even more than 300 fps.

[Tea Monster]

High Treason, on May 27 2009, 07:27 AM, said:

Itried it with that Polymer HRP that was linked a while ago, and not once did i drop below 60Fps except right at the start of levels. And my machine is ancient, you probably know the specs by now;

Pentium D 920 2.80Ghz
4Gb DDR-2-667Mhz
nVidia GeForce 9600

(cries)

Methinks your graphics card is probably doing just about ALL the work. My CPU is pretty good (its not a quad core, but its no slouch either) and my FPS just plain sucks.

@ Lead - Check out the Tuts and Resources thread if you get stuck on anything in the game. Or dissasemble the DEF files to get how to get stuff into game (or post here ).

[High Treason]

Mia Max, on May 27 2009, 09:56 PM, said:

@High Treason: You need to play a map with placed spotlights/pointlights. Then you'll see framerate droping.
I have many fps in maps without placed lights too. Sometime even more than 300 fps.

I did, i added a load as well (which was fun and easier than i thought it might be - i figured it would behave like a "Kludge" but it didn't) which is why i am surprised.

Try closing loads of junk before you start it up, it makes a real difference, i have most of my games set up with a launcher i stuck together that kills explorer.exe and a bunch of other things before starting the game - it really does make a difference, gives me like 100Mb more RAM and an extra few fps after i have a set of processes killed, the launcher then restarts them once the game exits - i use the same trick to make crysis playable, it bought me about 10 more frames per second.

[Danukem]

High Treason, on May 27 2009, 03:18 PM, said:

I did, i added a load as well (which was fun and easier than i thought it might be - i figured it would behave like a "Kludge" but it didn't) which is why i am surprised.

Before you get cocky, open up your eduke32_binds.cfg, go down to where the cvars are listed, and make sure you have this line:

r_shadows "1"

If it says 0 instead of 1, then you aren't getting real spot lighting.

EDIT: Also, I doubt that your test is comparable to Mia Max's map. He has a large HRP only map with complex geometry, and a heavy rain effect from Duke Plus.

[MusicallyInspired]

Isn't it r_pr_shadows? I know both of them exists but I think r_pr_shadows is the spotlight one.

Also, you've gotta tell me how to make a similar launcher!

[Mia Max]

High Treason, on May 28 2009, 12:18 AM, said:

I did, i added a load as well (which was fun and easier than i thought it might be - i figured it would behave like a "Kludge" but it didn't) which is why i am surprised.

Try closing loads of junk before you start it up, it makes a real difference, i have most of my games set up with a launcher i stuck together that kills explorer.exe and a bunch of other things before starting the game - it really does make a difference, gives me like 100Mb more RAM and an extra few fps after i have a set of processes killed, the launcher then restarts them once the game exits - i use the same trick to make crysis playable, it bought me about 10 more frames per second.

And framerate never drops under 60 fps? I can't believe this.
I don't think I've problems with my computer, performance is good and I play most games in highest quality at 1920 x 1200 (stalker: clear sky sucks)

[Danukem]

MusicallyInspired, on May 27 2009, 03:39 PM, said:

Isn't it r_pr_shadows? I know both of them exists but I think r_pr_shadows is the spotlight one.

r_pr_shadows and r_shadows are the same thing. r_pr_shadows is what you would type in the console, and r_shadows is what appears in the binds file. I mentioned it because, if you were to turn off shadows in the console with r_pr_shadows 0, that setting would be saved and you might not realize it (in fact, that happened to me a while ago).

[High Treason]

@DeeperThought
I hjad a check, r_pr_shadows "1" is what it says. It does however fail to draw models a lot of the time for some reason - but i figure that's just down to it not being finished yet and so i am not about to whine about that.

@MusicallyInspired
Well, i usually write it in BASIC or C so i can have a .EXE at the end - there was a reason but i don't remember why it was anymore, you could just make a batch file like this (although i haven't really tested it in windows vista or 7 yet)

@echo off
title Launcher for: EDuke32 (or whatever it's got to launch)
color 1f
cls
Echo.Killing some processes, wait...
taskkill /f /im:explorer.exe
REM you can copy and paste the above line and replace explorer.exe with something else.
echo.Starting...
start /wait "eduke32.exe"
echo.Reloading processes...
start explorer.exe
rem Also start any processes you terminated before.
exit

I was thinking of writing one where it could start anything it was told to (from a single .exe file), haven't got round to it yet. Also some Antivirus software might think that the .bat is malicious (e.g. thinks it is W32:Bat.Dropper) but it is not.

[MusicallyInspired]

Wouldn't the processes you kill just start again? That's what happens when you kill them from the task manager.

EDIT: I tried one of my own and it says "'taskkill' is not recognized as an internal or external command."

[Tea Monster]

Dudes! The last time I had a dedicated config for Windows to play a game was for Quake 1.

[DarkyDan]

Wow guys I've lost touch with the 3drealms forums for a couple of years. When I was frequenting them (as dsotm) all I could contribute was 1 or 2 maphacks

Great work on the new renderer looks VERY nice, reminds me of booting up Quake Tenebrae around the time of the Doom 3 alpha, where it had some similar effects. I feel obliged to start following this project again

I will be patient waiting for an eDuke32 version that includes the Polymer renderer. The screenshots are enough to bring a smile to my face for the moment

...and once that is released and stable I guess the next step would be supporting a more complex model format?

[Chip]

DarkyDan, on May 29 2009, 04:23 AM, said:

...and once that is released and stable I guess the next step would be supporting a more complex model format?

With that said, I hope we'll have some kind of way of sticking 2 different models together like:
model A's sticking point is polygon 17
model B's sticking point is polygon 321
The 2 model's then become stuck to each other by having their listed above faces stuck to each other so when one moves, the other will automatically be moved with it. Think a gun model in an arm model.



However, I don't know if this'll ever be possible.

[Spiker]

Everything is possible as long as there are some people who feel like coding it and know a bit about it.

[Roma Loom]

Actually MD3 has support for tags to allow model attachments, but it's just not implemented in EDuke.

[Lead]

chicken, on May 27 2009, 01:44 PM, said:

@Lead: check the to do list:
http://hrp.duke4.net...ext_hrp_release
Make your tiles 4x the size of the original.
And then: go ahead, dude!

I haven't edited Duke stuff since like 1997.

Is there some kind of quick start guide or something. Like how I might get things set up so I can view\obtain access to the tiles, formats to save them in, and how to convert them and get them into the game?

[Tea Monster]

DarkyDan, on May 28 2009, 08:23 PM, said:

...and once that is released and stable I guess the next step would be supporting a more complex model format?

I suggested MD5 as it is it saves the bones and weight painting in with the model. You'd want that for critters. Something like ASE or even LWO would be good for regular models. I have no idea if the renderer could support 'smooth groups' or if that is handled some other way by the renderer.

I guess its going to be a case of "One thing at a time" as the rendrerer is still being optimized.

@ Lead - We save tiles as optimized PNG's. The GIMP and Photoshop are good for this.

@ DarkyDan - Yeah, that would be sweet and allow all sorts of good stuff to be done if we had the Quake style attach points on models.

[Parkar]

Tea Monster, on May 29 2009, 08:10 PM, said:

I have no idea if the renderer could support 'smooth groups' or if that is handled some other way by the renderer.

"Smooth Groups" is alreayd in effect on the md3 models. Most of them don't have them set up but I did it on all of my models I think just incase we would get dynamic lighting. For normal mapped models you generally want the whole model in one group and use normal mapping to achive sharp edges though. It looks more natural then the razor sharp edges you get from smoothing groups.

Note: Smoothing groups would be the "same" thing as sharp/smooth edges in say Maya.

[chicken]

@Lead: I posted a longer reply for you in this thread:
http://forums.duke4.net/index.php?showtopi...amp;#entry19707

[Jarongame]

Me need polymer! Oh and real nice video!

[Frost Nukem]

back with the furious Duke Nukem, Thanks for your excellent work Eduke32 team !!

[supergoofy]

Report: the latest svn build fixed the crash bug with level 2 of WGRealms 1 TC

[Chip]

Roma Loom, on May 29 2009, 01:52 PM, said:

Actually MD3 has support for tags to allow model attachments, but it's just not implemented in EDuke.

If that's the case then I really hope they add in the support! I'll be for ever happy if they did as it'll save me around 20KB+ of sync coding (why did I have to have so many long animations on my models )

[supergoofy]

For those that download the latest source, as of now, take notice that the lights are off. Download the source of 31-May-2009 instead if you want the lights. Better read the SVN log for more info.