Gleemonex

Thanks for the warm welcome, guys. To be honest, what really sparked my desire to return to modding/game-making is what had started wearing me out in the SScar days: the lack of OSS options for the toolchain. TL;DR Open-source software has come a long way in 10 years. (Boring part, feel free to skip -- I just find it interesting to ponder) It's actually a little convoluted. My buddy recently got a nice stylus for his iPad, so I used it to draw, and got back into drawing. Then I decided to look for some artist requests on Reddit. The first one that struck me was for ShadowRun characters. Then I read some ShadowRun stuff (I love tabletop RPGs). That led me to some youtube reviews which mentioned other sci-fi TTRPGs like Eclipse Phase. So I picked up some EP character art requests, then read the books, and really got into them. They piqued my interest on two levels: I enjoy the world and the system, and the books are released under Creative Commons. Which got me thinking about OSS. I figured that I could use my math background to come up with a travel time chart for EP's solar system (it's hard sci-fi), then found spreadsheets lacking, then decided to try to mod an orbit calculator into Celestia, but discovered that Celestia is just about dead nowadays. I looked into Celestia's chosen scripting language, Lua, then came across mention of a new OSS game engine that uses Lua scripting called Urho3D. Upon skimming the features and the discussion boards, I discovered that Urho3D has the potential for a fully-OSS workflow. Then I heard about id Tech 4 going GPL, and now I'm here! (Boring part over) So now I'm playing with Blender and Urho3D. I don't remember what the id Tech 4 workflow looks like (and it wasn't even GPLed yet when I got out of it), but a quick Googling shows that Blender can export models and UV maps into id Tech 4. As I'm still in the "warm up" phase, I'd be glad to sketch up or model some random objects like candlesticks or wanted posters or whatever.

Hi everyone! I'm Glee, formerly from Sapphire Scar, a Doom 3 Total Conversion which sadly died away a long, long time ago (early 2006, to be precise). TDM and SScar used to be code buddies back in the day. I've had a recent urge to get back into the game-making hobby, and in my catch-up reading happened upon the news that Doom 3's GPLing paved the way for TDM becoming its own fully-fledged game. My congratulations to everyone who made this a reality! I'm sorry SScar didn't stick around to be more help (and steal more code, heheh), but knowing first-hand how tough making a total conversion can be, I'm incredibly proud of you all. PS. I found my way back to the forum from a link to some SScar music still on Soundcloud: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/1188-a-present-from-sapphire-scar/?do=findComment&comment=393812

Extreme reply from the past! https://soundcloud.com/planet-bliss/saphire-scar-1 Sorry we disappointed you, Dram We died off in early 2006. But you guys are going strong!

! -Glee

That's exactly what a design document is for. Luckily, we acquired a dedicated project manager very early on (he's been with us since the SS2:R days). The importance of a ddoc in a mod is difficult to overstate. About my expressed doubts for SS. As do I! If the interest makes itself known, I don't see why we couldn't create the opportunity. Thanks for the food for thought. -Glee

I'm not sure. You could ask him in the concerned thread on our forums. This is just a starting point, since our music guys are nuts and crank out entire tunes just to test things out. I doubt this will be the final version that makes it into the game -- or even if it makes it into the game at all. And no offense taken -- thanks for your candour! You hit the nail on the head -- this low-key tune (or something similar) will probably end up in the main menu or credits. We're going to keep the in-game music closer to our chests, since we don't want recognition of a song to ruin game immersion. I'm afraid I can't take credit for that tune -- it's the product of Tawan. Given that our game will follow a story arc in a loose, open-ended fashion, we're going to have a broad variety of musical styles. We'll probably end up slotting a musician for each chapter, to keep musical/audio consistency within each chapter. Thanks for all the comments everyone! -Glee ------------------------ PS. Check out "Tawan - Loner" at http://www.ctgmusic.com/charts.php =)

Well, you lot were kind enough to give us a Christmas present in the form of your TDM preview video, and I'm here to return the favour. Here's a snippet of some of the newest music we've been working on. http://www.ctgmusic.com/song.php?id=5756 Enjoy! -Glee

It sounds like the best of both worlds, really =) I'd imagine that you can use the TDM tools to put together mission maps quite rapidly too. Proved wrong about what? Absolutely -- it would be foolish for us to underestimate our charge. It's a disadvantage in one respect, because it's more daunting and time-consuming. But there is a larger variety of activities to be undertaken, so there's always something to be done or explored or discussed. "Concurrent activity", they call it in the military ("activité concommittante" in French). There are no plans for it as yet, but it's not been ruled out. However, because SScar is an original world, there's probably far less interest in FMs than a world like TDM which draws on well-established genres (not the least of which, the medieval genre). That's one of the things I was looking forward to with D3:HoE; a fresh perspective on a known genre. -Glee

Wasn't that only valid until Jan 15th? I'd been meaning to get one, but procrastinated then forgot about it until the 17th -Glee

Well, I'm one Canadian who quite likes hockey -- but I've never been a huge fan of the NHL in particular. After all, as an Ottawan, "my" team is chock full of Swedes and Czechs -- and last year's Stanley Cup winners are a bunch of French Canadians who play in a stadium full of Floridians. I just hope the lockout results in an NFL-style salary cap and profit-sharing system, so that smaller cities (like the Winnipeg Jets) could hold onto their franchises, Green Bay stylee. -Glee

I love ET. The only reason I no longer play it is that it doesn't play nice with my firewall [1]. And I don't get cheaters either. I was actually the opposite of a cheater; I used to "volunteer" myself for the hardest tasks (like building the assault ramp on the Normandy Beach map) for the satisfaction of accomplishing something difficult. -Glee ----------------------------------------------------------- [1] I could work around it, but I'm lazy

Doom 3 supports 3rd person view out of the box. That doesn't make 3rd person a free ride, of course, but it's a large part of the solution. Now, whether it fits into the gameplay of a thief-like game is another story entirely. -Glee

I have no problem with criticism, but I'd like to ask that diametrical untruths not be spread about my pet pass-time. Yeah, TSP seemed like quite the juggernaut in the day. One of sscar's members (Yorick) was a large part of TSP, and we even inherited some of their assets as a result -- mainly music. And while our road towards a coherent plot hasn't been free of hazards, I like to think that we managed to avoid the more serious problems due to lessons learned from TSP. ------------------------------------------ Anyhow, to the subject at hand. It's unfortunate that D3:HoE won't be completing their journey -- I was quite looking forward to an open, large-terrain version of the sci-fi horror genre, especially with their lovely cityscape concept art. But the unfortunate reality is that the mod world is one of attrition. Much of this has been discussed on doom3world.org as well; incidentally, some of the projects on that site (especially "Doom 3 Can Do It Too") are doing a great job of advocating the Doom 3 engine. As has been mentionned earlier, Dark Mod is (from what I gather, at least) first and foremost a conversion/tool kit -- as such, it doesn't suffer the challenges of creating, and then working within a cogent storyline. I've seen some pretty impressive stuff from you guys so far, and I anticipate much more! -Glee

I'm not sure if you're saying that we treaded on EA's copyrights without good reason, or if we were shut down without good reason -- I'd say the first is wrong, the second right Of course, I'm naturally biased. Sort-of. We had been in informal contact with Irrational, and they basically told us that they had no problem with our efforts, but EA might. The System Shock IP is a huge, convoluted jumble, and the only thing that resulted from Irrational and EA trying to untangle them was legal fees. [1] We had decided that we were going to fly under the radar until we had some solid material [2] -- a major concern of some of these publishers is if a crap mod will tarnish their image. But one of our forum members took it upon himself to bring us to EA's attention, before we had anything to show :/ In a last-ditch effort, we decided to fully disclose to EA and formally ask permission to proceed with the mod. The rest, as they say, is history. Of course, it's safer if you can avoid direct copying, but that won't stop the highly litigious. When we got the EA "cease and desist" nastygram, the only mentions of copyright infringement were vague ("the System Shock name is under copyright") [3]. In fact, there was no direct mention of copyright infringement at all[4]. If we had gone to court[5], we would have ripped Mr Bené a new one. Unfortunately, in no way would we ever be able to even begin to confront EA in a court battle, no matter how right we were. And EA knew this. Fortunately, Dark Mod won't have to face off against EA, but if I may quote one of my favourite movies [6]: "Innocence is a highly overrated commodity." I don't mean to be a doomsayer, and I do think that you've taken sound precautions to stay out of trouble. I just hope you verily did learn the lessons that we had to learn the hard way. You have some solid work here, and I want to see it come to fruition A fellow LGS-inspired modder, -Glee --------------------------------------------- Gleemonex Sapphire Scar --------------------------------------------- [1] Note that even Irrational themselves don't want to touch the System Shock franchise -- their newest endeavour only fleetingly mentions SS as an inspiration. [2] Or any pertinent material at all, for that matter. All we had at that point were some concept images, the mod's name, and the attention of System Shock 2 fans everywhere. [3] That may not sound like a big deal, but keep in mind that legal documents are written in a very specific manner, for a very specific purpose. [4] Not surprising, considering that a. System Shock 2 is abandonware, and b. copyright infringement only applies in cases of actual or potential loss of revenue. [5] It's obvious that the nastygram in question was written in haste and with poor attention to detail. Note the mention of "your company, Digitally Evolved" (Digitally Evolved was the parent website of SS2R, not a company). [6] The Hurricane

That's never happened to me after playing Thief, but I did become a more aggressive driver after long bouts of GTA3 -Glee