Mortem Desino

I've mentioned this before, but steam has got the perfect system already in place for a time-limited demo of ANY game. Download the full game, and let Steam's online mode kill your game+savegames once you reach "x" hours of playing. PC gamers can ensure that their hardware can handle the game, taffers can ensure that this will actually be an enjoyable game, and devs don't have to waste time and money on the big side project of a playable demo. This could also really really good for small-time developers, who really don't have the time and money to make a playable demo. Their game may not look AAA, and there probably isn't a demo, so people will overlook it without a second thought. Kind of sad for those small devs that need publicity and purchases. I do have some sympathy for publishers' suspicion of gamers, but it bugs me that they don't actually implement the solution to the bulk of this problem. Call me retro, but the shareware system (i.e. "Please share this free 'episode one' of our game") seems more and more like a good solution. Or we can go back to game cartridges. They're really hard to pirate too.

As far as I can tell, this only consolidates keywords in a material decl, not entire stages of materials. Bugtracker 3122 looks much closer to what you're talking about, but I don't have the C++ chops to expand the material parser.

I haven't modified any model's textures (at least, not on purpose. I suppose there are some bust statues that use TDM textures.) Just so we don't get even more off-topic in this thread, open a bugtracker report, and list it as a "feature." If you've got the permissions, go ahead and assign it to me. If you want to help, Biker, I'll need a test map with all the permutations of doors & skins.

I think it would be really hard to convey to the player that these "Player-movement-ONLY modifier keys" also for some other reason modify frobs. It's an unexpected use of that key, and some players might think it's a bug during gameplay. I don't know about you, but I do an awful lot of crouch-running, and I don't want doors slamming open. The reason that method seemed to work in Penumbra was because of the intimate tie between player movement and world physics. Grabbing a heavy door and backpedalling/walking forward to open it made the player feel the weight of the door, because grabbing the door modified his movement encumbrance. It wasn't unexpected because all other physics interactions worked the same way: grabbing a crate to slide it along the ground also made you feel encumbered in Penumbra. TDM has no such intimate system. I don't find it particularly difficult to just double-click the frob button for a partially-open door-peek. In a pinch, from there, I can frob it once to close the door again. This sounds like a much better idea to me. "Accidental" tactile feedback. The feeling of holding down frob would feel akin to holding your hand on a doorknob, and releasing frob would feel akin to releasing control of the doorknob.

That little red light is known as "[digital] clipping", sometimes also called "overload" or "distortion". What Bikerdude is talking about are plosives (especially "p" "b" and "t"), when a puff of air from your mouth hits the microphone. Just use a foam windscreen or--even better--a pop filter. In a pinch, I've made one at home by stretching pantyhose over a wire coathanger.

The primary reason I haven't put detail textures in the core mod is that adding the detail texture requires an extra blend gl_dst_color, gl_src_color material stage, and I haven't really tested its performance hit (It doesn't make any framerate difference on my HD4850, but I suspect it may not be a negligible perf hit on an integrated gfx card). The other reason is that I would have to update those definitions to be vine-arrow friendly. It's not really hard, but a bit time consuming. (manually copy-paste the appropriate detail render pass from my old decls to TDM 2.0's material decls.) They're not too hard to integrate as an FM addon: I wrote a fix-up script that DR can run to change existing maps to use my detail texture decls. But, as I said, this ought to be performance-tested. If there is a performance hit, then they should be an optional feature. And since these are totally different decls and not a GL program, this detail texture method can't be easily turned on and off with a menu option.

I know that feel, bro. This thread has gotten me the motivation to start picking up blender just a wee little bit at a time. Knowing the proper way of making particular shapes is a bit hard to pick up so far, but I think that's because I started off many years ago using AutoCAD and Half-Life 1 HAMMER. The trigonometry-lover part of my brain wants perfection, but with 3d modeling it's actually refreshing to step away from pure isometric views and [mathematic] perfectionism.

Kerbal Space Program really brings me back to my teenage years when I spent a lot of time building multi-stage model rockets, and my very young years playing Microsoft Space Simulator on a 486 computer. The fact that I can go to the moon in KSP is just an enormous plus. Exploring mars, now, would be something really cool.

I added some more tips to the wiki entry for "The Creeps." Thank you thank you to whomsoever is spending so much time on it!

I'll pipe up for both TDM and Crucible of Omens: I think the TDM download package is already getting quite large (textures and sounds are usually the culprit for this). Though, I bet the Crucible of Omens campaign would be delighted to have an ambient track, if it's alright with you. Anyone else have an opinion on this?

Totes. Just tell steam to delete the local files. That's all I needed to do after a free weekend of Saints Row: The Third. It's annoying marketing, but relevant. "Hey, you've already downloaded this. Just give me your credit card number and your soul and instantly play."

A full-color-printed DVD and full-color-printed case and printing and (in come cases) an extra full-color-printed cardboard box might be a buck or two at cost. Shipping massive quantities to stores worldwide costs even more. The time and electricity to burn all that data onto a disk costs money, too (so does a download server, too, I guess). I suspect knocking off ~$5 USD for a download version would encourage some people to stop buying physical copies. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing, though... One thing that surprised me about Steam downloads: My dad just got The Walking Dead. But it's a ~4 GB download that he doesn't have the bandwidth for. I took my Ext. HD and copy-pasted my Steam version The Walking Dead data files onto his computer. When Dad logged into Steam, that download bar was up to 95%. Steam must do a CRC check for existing files. Good deal, especially if I ever have to wipe my HD or build a new computer. Won't have to download hundreds of GB. Right on about the sales. I enjoy taunting my cousins about game prices and handcuffing themselves to a "generation" of games rather than a whole history of games.

I can sort of sympathize with that. I got very nervous a year ago when publishers & Microsoft started using the phrase "licensing games" instead of "selling games". It's almost as nonsensical as if film companies were "licensing out" DVDs to Joe Consumer (like they "license out" movies to movie theatres) for fear that "everyone is a potential pirate!" If you sell me something, it's mine now; it doesn't belong to the seller or the publisher anymore. After I buy a game disk nothing should prohibit me from: installing it, playing it, modding the game, freely distributing the mod, turning the disk into a flying saucer, throwing it at a tree: all of which do no harm to or actually benefit the publisher's bottom line indirectly. Part of me sympathizes with publishers' dislike of rentals, but a large portion of that rental crowd can be appeased by releasing a demo. I really think Valve needs to figure out how to use Steam's DRM+distribution service to let folks freely download a game and try it unrestricted for 2 hours. Instant demo.

I agree. Their presence can be a potential tool of conveyance (like Obsttorte suggests), but right now it looks more like a mere spectacle. "Look at the body parts and how aware I am of my body-awareness!" In TDM and the previous thief games, frobbing a door open/closed is trivial and smooth and unobtrusive, just like an agile thief would work. In the Thief 4 gameplay footage, the thief bodyslides into position, stops to admire his hand as it turns the door handle, and then slinks though the door. Useless spectacle.

I've gotten that "I want it to just work" argument before from friends. Yup, sorry, but Linux gets shafted on account of hardware and drivers all the time. I remember my first linux install was Ubuntu "Breezy Badger" back when I was in high school on a frankenstein laptop that I built. I had a baaaad first experience. My fans were on low all the time, and never throttled up when they needed to. My wireless card wasn't supported whatsoever. My video card drivers didn't persist after rebooting (leaving me in 640x480-8-bit color). And ALSA sound stuttered terribly. Trying Mandriva 2006 a few months later was inexplicably easier. And I got to impress a bunch of high schoolers with my fancy-schmancy multiple desktops.

You can add a somewhat subtle neutral reverb and compound it with EAX or EFX. They just won't perfectly match most of the existing TDM assets. If you listen to the assets of Thief 2 (particularly the vocals), there is waaaaay too much naturally captured reverb compared to today's standards. But if you had an EAX-enabled card back then, boy did it sound nice!

I added a few notes to the wiki for "The Creeps" on how to fix the crash (I included the fix in the last updated pk4 some months ago). I'm very limited on time as I start graduate studies, so I give permission to anyone who wants to adopt and fix it. (Deepest apologies on my simply passing-the-buck ) Aside from the crash, I think it only needs replacement light textures -- (they don't need to be pixel-perfect, since lightgem stealth is a cursory part of the mission at most) The most difficult replacement asset are the particle effects. I believe there are some sewer water drips and some dust falling from the ceiling (both of which I stole from D3 assets )

I think I found something relevant that rich cooked up some time ago with vertex blending to emulate translucency: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11515-real-translucency-anyone

If it's NHAT, you aren't testing on anoott are you? 'Cause there's a really hefty script being called during runtime every second or so. I toned it down a lot in the newer version, but it's still CPU intensive.

Plague victim head! Keep that for a future halloween mission!

Nice work, Capela! I often struggle trying to make more interesting geometry than simple rooms and corridors. You could make those vaulted ceilings even more interesting to the eye with a different choice of texture. Just be careful about letting too many of those patches cast shadows.

I...might just be joining this contest. Perhaps. Right now it's just an experiment gone rampant, so I don't know if I'll be able to transform it into a mission.

But it does still need Doom 3's files. I swear, it looks almost like TheDarkMod.exe is sitting in your "Doom 3" folder instead of in your "Doom 3/darkmod" folder. Have you run "tdm_update" again? It'll doublecheck that all the darkmod game files downloaded correctly.

There's an article on our wiki of audio assets we still use in Doom 3. Some of them, like sound/ed/spook/ohgodplease.ogg belong to entire existing sets that need replacement (in this case, the revenant). It might also be helpful to know the original doom 3 soundshader name and what file that's found in. The-EMZ has got a really helpful list here. Our last sound designer has gotten sidetracked by his professional projects. I'm a hobbyist and a dabbler, but I'm at university and haven't had the time to record. I've gotten a few doom 3 replacements recorded, and even prototyped some new undead Revenant sounds, but they're sitting on our SVN server while I'm away on Christmas break. I'd be excited to see what you could whip up for creature sounds. Sonar X1 doesn't exactly come with ethereal-sounding plugins. rev_laugh4.mp3