Greetings And Questions

[kwc]

Hello there, people.

 

First off... This project of yours looks absolutely fantastic. I'm a thief fan, but when I played TDS I felt something lacking - not that it was a bad game, quite the contrary, but still, I never got the same feeling I get everytime I fire up good ol' Thief 1/2. Now, with your mod, I've got another thiefy thing to look forward to in hope it's going be a return to the form. So, uhm, yeah, I've seen the T3Ed has been released (that being another awesome gesture from the awesome and friendly IS devs), but to tell you the truth, if, IF I'm ever going to design anything thief related, I think I'll choose TDM.

 

So much for praise . Now onward to the questions...

 

1) I kinda wonder how you're going to customize the editor built into D3. I mean, you're bound to use some specific functions, scripts and whatnot in this mod, and I fail to see how such stuff could be implemented into the editor without access to the source code.

 

2) Conversations. Can they be done in D3 engine merely by modding scripts? I don't think I've ever seen them in-game in D3, at least not the way they are done in Thief...?

 

3) Have you found any feature of the good old dark engine yet, that absolutely could NOT be ported into D3 engine without source code access? I'm asking this to get an idea just how flexible D3 engine is, modding-wise.

 

I know my questions are a bit on the sceptic side, and hell, I'd really like for you to succeed, but sometimes you've got to question... So if it ain't too much to answer now...

[New Horizon]

I kinda wonder how you're going to customize the editor built into D3. I mean, you're bound to use some specific functions, scripts and whatnot in this mod, and I fail to see how such stuff could be implemented into the editor without access to the source code.

 

While Id only included the editor on the Doom 3 CD they have since released a full SDK. This enables modders to do what is known as a Total Conversion, if they so wish. That is what we are doing with The Dark Mod.

 

2) Conversations. Can they be done in D3 engine merely by modding scripts? I don't think I've ever seen them in-game in D3, at least not the way they are done in Thief...?

 

Yes. Doom 3 scripting is extremely flexible.

 

3) Have you found any feature of the good old dark engine yet, that absolutely could NOT be ported into D3 engine without source code access? I'm asking this to get an idea just how flexible D3 engine is, modding-wise.

 

To my knowledge, there is nothing that we can't do at this point. Frob system is in place, lightgem is almost fully functional. So far, it's all looking good and doesn't look like we will have any major issues. The Doom 3 engine is very Modder friendly.

 

I know my questions are a bit on the sceptic side, and hell, I'd really like for you to succeed, but sometimes you've got to question... So if it ain't too much to answer now...

 

Only too happy to answer. There are many things possible with the Doom 3 engine that simply weren't used in the Doom 3 game. It's a fairly new engine, expect to see it at its best in a couple of years.

[Ishtvan]

1) I kinda wonder how you're going to customize the editor built into D3. I mean, you're bound to use some specific functions, scripts and whatnot in this mod, and I fail to see how such stuff could be implemented into the editor without access to the source code.

The DoomEdit source is something we don't actually have access to, so we can't directly change the editor in radical ways in that sense. We may be able to add menu items, and we can definitely add new command lines to run inside the editor console (bsp is a shortcut that runs the command "dmap", we will have other editor commands of our own making that hopefully we can also add a gui menu item for).

 

For example, one possible way to implement sound propagation functions is to compile the map the normal way (with bsp/dmap) and then type "buildsound" or something in the editor console to compile the sound propagation information. This is not as nice as a menu item, but I think you people that dealt with DromEd can handle it

 

The other option is Radiant, which is a fully open sourced editor that works with D3; However the version of radiant for D3 is still rather bare-bones and not as fully featured as the D3 editor. If Radiant takes off though and becomes competitive with the editor for ease of use and feature wise, we may switch our custom editor functions over to that, since it is fully open source.

 

2) Conversations. Can they be done in D3 engine merely by modding scripts? I don't think I've ever seen them in-game in D3, at least not the way they are done in Thief...?

 

Don't see why not. We have the source for all the AI if we need to add anything to the hardcode, but this could probably done with ingame scripting anyway, since it's just a matter of choosing when to play sounds and what sounds to play.

 

Have you found any feature of the good old dark engine yet, that absolutely could NOT be ported into D3 engine without source code access? I'm asking this to get an idea just how flexible D3 engine is, modding-wise.

 

Yes, we actually had quite some trouble with porting over "moving" and "walking" from place to place. Due to our tight release date schedule, and the fact that we do not believe players will miss it, we have decided not to include player movement in the game. We believe that a rail-shooter will be a great way to bring the Thief atmosphere to D3!

 

 

... just kidding.

 

No, we haven't run into any walls like that yet. We always have to do some fancy footwork to work around stuff that wasn't included in the source (like the renderer or the sound engine), but usually these things have very flexible interface methods, so we do our best. However, we are still very early on in development. So I can't make any guarantees.

[kwc]

Well I'll be damned... Never figured D3 is such an acrobat of an engine, especially judging from the game itself.

 

This is not as nice as a menu item, but I think you people that dealt with DromEd can handle it

 

Eh, I should have cleared it up in the beginning... I've no worthy experience in level editing in any reknown environment like Unreal or Quake, much less DromEd... Better spare the praise for those numerous heroes who actually got that abomination to work properly

Edited February 28, 2005 by kwc