duc

I am currently wrestling with bevels, basically whenever I create one it always textures only the inside of the curve and it always does it in the zy axis. This is making me completely crazy is there a way to stop it making an 'inner bevel'? Obviously I can rotate the patch and manipulate the vertices but it seems to be the opposite of how most tutorials describe the function working in dedit or DR.

Not especially, the Dark Mod needs to stands on its own merits I can think of nothing that would underwhelm people more than buggy, ugly conversions of maps they have already beaten. It is not impossible to make the Thief games run on modern PCs so why not just play the original again if that's what you want? Personally I am looking forward to a new generation of stealth based single-player thievery and to see what people can do with the extra facilities of the doom 3 engine and the hard work of the Dark Mod team.

I'm not sure if that is sarcasm or not Sparhawk goingsupersonic: The nature of this kind of technique is that it produces unexpected behavior, a cursory examination of the article reveals that they accidentally managed to create bots that didn't attack at all but only hid. Stuff like this is extremely time intensive to test and debug, especially if you don't have a fixed criteria or an easy way of grading the results - for example a guard that checks common hiding spots at random might quickly drive even dedicated players crazy. The games STALKER and Fable are good examples of the problems that can be encountered, both made wild claims of evolving/learning opponents competing with the player but for various reasons fable delivered nothing, stalker looks to achieve only marginally more and even something as simple as SIN episodes dynamic difficulty shipped essentially broken.

Starflight 1 & 2, the Starcontrol series, nethack...

As far as I know Quadro cards are optimised (mostly at the driver level) for CAD applications, most modern gaming graphics cards are as good or better at driving directX/OpenGL for a smaller price. If you're just planning to play Doom 3 then grab an NVidia card, they've had the edge with openGL for a while. With graphics cards (as with most computer hardware and probably just about everything in life) the law of diminishing returns applies, check out the toms VGA charts here for information on how various cards perform in various applications, you may find that the extra expense of several hundred $ would only provide a small benifit, especially if your gaming rig isn't alredy some mighty super computer. (Stupid bloody bb code didn't like the original url so I had to tiny it)

Dunno if you solved ithis Bob but try yousendit.com or one of the similar services, you might have to split it into several archives though as they typically require you to pay for anything > 100mb

I would agree with Sparhawk, and qualify the statement to "it makes sense if the random condition is observable in some way", something like an arbitrary 12% chance that the guard spots you when looking straight at you is a bad thing to me. As sugested a better way of handling it would be to tie it to something you can see happen, that way if you get caught its because you didn't observe and plan carefully enough not because the computer rolled that you failed to save vs. spotting. Another example - do away with health bars but replace them with control, auditory and visual feedback. As you take more damage you move more slowly, breath more rapidly, make more noise and have trouble focusing. It's not game over until you make it game over or you die, and there might be a certain satisfaction to dragging yourself to the end even with serious impairment.

I remember Gothic had quite a clever aproach to this, far away stuff would be one solid low poly model which as you aproached it it would segue into the actuall set of models. Presumably they used culling to cut out drawing the stuff behind it and I believe this is the aproach that guildwars uses as well (albiet refined and at higher detail). Again this is something that'd probably be impossible to impliment without access to the renderer source code but it was a clever illustration of overcoming poly limits in an engine without attempting to perform complexed lod calculations.

Ultimately I suspect it comes down to how feasible it is to program and rig the AI models to climb, a compromise would be to have a custom flag set in the ladder texture property and the AI script - that way savy level designers could path and mark apropriate ladders. It'd keep the players guessing because they wouldn't know if an AI would chase them up or not (at least until they had played a level a couple of times) and would also hopefully allow level designers to tailor the situations to avoid brokeness.

I am planning a map themed around a victorian glasshouse, (e.g. kew gardens). Currently modeling static meshes in blender, trying to collect suitable textures and sketching out map layout. Working title "The Abandoned Glasshouse".

A potential solution to the problem that Oddity raises would be 'karmic balance'; particular actions become ethical, unethical or neutral so that how you completed the mission affected things throughout the campaign and would give something to aim for overall. Oddity could ghost through aiming for a special ‘Saintly’ ending, conversely people who slaughtered all the servants in an early mission might find the number of guards and their alertness level doubled in the next because of the ‘serial killer’ on the loose. Gameplay becomes deeper as each death/knockout would count in the larger scheme of things e.g. you misbehaved before so you could try and step lightly to let the unrest calm down. Further to this idea the difficulty level could skew the weighting system making it possible to play on easy and not worry too much about each guard but on hard the consequences of killing have to be considered. I am not arguing for limiting fan mission options, just suggesting a mechanism for the Dark Mod campaign that has more appeal to me than 'no weapons ever' or an arbitrary mission goal. I realise that its a pretty extreme thing to balance in terms of gameplay and probably too resource expensive - but I can day dream right?