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[New Horizon]

I'm personally glad that Darkmod isn't about bringing a new Thief to the series. Garrett (Stephen Russell I believe without fact/spell check) had a great voice for Thief and I'm sure whoever (NH ?) does the thieves voice it will be in a similar tone/attitude. But I think Darkmod is bringing some new stuff to the table, along with all the old good stuff, I think it's befiting that it has a stand-alone quality to showcase the team's effort.

 

Ha ha, it won't be me doing the voice. I couldn't deliver on that, but I do have someone lined up with a VERY nice voice.

 

Yeah jhook, as Spring said...it's an intellectual property issue. In addition to that, it also gives us and fan mission authors more breathing room in using similar, yet different, characters.

[jhook]

Ha ha, it won't be me doing the voice. I couldn't deliver on that, but I do have someone lined up with a VERY nice voice.

 

Yeah jhook, as Spring said...it's an intellectual property issue. In addition to that, it also gives us and fan mission authors more breathing room in using similar, yet different, characters.

 

Hey NH,

It's been a while! Yeah, right to this and all that. Kinda washes out everything doesn't it? Anyway, good to see you still hangen. I know you guys are well into the D3 engine, but the Oblivion engine...... WOW!!!!!! Spee Tree, weather effects, pretty cool. I don't know if you guys have considered that engine, but D3 is getting pretty old. From what I've seen for the pics though. It looks real good. Can't wait.

[New Horizon]

I don't know if you guys have considered that engine, but D3 is getting pretty old. From what I've seen for the pics though. It looks real good. Can't wait.

 

Switching engines mid project would be quite silly..suicide really..a rather huge mistake in mod development. The doom 3 engine is the PERFECT engine for this or almost any type of mod. The SDK exposes a majority of the code, and it will be completely open source in another couple of years. Another thing is that we've put an extensive amount of work into building a customized version of GTK Radiant, the doom 3 editor. We would be flushing that down the toilet too. The engine getting older means nothing, as Thief style gameplay is about content, not fireworks...and the doom 3 engine has yet to even reach its full potential. Nobody has truly pushed it to its limits. Once it is open source, well...it can be kept up to date for as long as there is a Thief community to maintain it.

 

Game engines don't really get old if there is someone to maintain them.

[Komag]

Besides, Oblivion is mostly just pretty landscapes. I think it would make a crappy Thief engine

[jhook]

Switching engines mid project would be quite silly..suicide really..a rather huge mistake in mod development. The doom 3 engine is the PERFECT engine for this or almost any type of mod. The SDK exposes a majority of the code, and it will be completely open source in another couple of years. Another thing is that we've put an extensive amount of work into building a customized version of GTK Radiant, the doom 3 editor. We would be flushing that down the toilet too. The engine getting older means nothing, as Thief style gameplay is about content, not fireworks...and the doom 3 engine has yet to even reach its full potential. Nobody has truly pushed it to its limits. Once it is open source, well...it can be kept up to date for as long as there is a Thief community to maintain it.

 

Game engines don't really get old if there is someone to maintain them.

 

I wasn't suggesting we stop and change it. From what I've seen so far,it looks excellent! If your right about the D3 engine, I would say definately keep the D3 engine. Yeah, releasing the source code could do wonders. Hey NH, what about the audio trickery stuff I made pasts post about. Don't give me any speciffics, but is that going to happen? Are you guys invovled with audio environmental work? And, if there is no Garrett, is there a new charactor with a conscious we can hear? My point was it was a haunting presence to hear Garretts thoughts. Will there be another charactor based in that way? Thanks for your answers in advance.

[jhook]

Besides, Oblivion is mostly just pretty landscapes. I think it would make a crappy Thief engine

 

Yeah, as I found out. D3 is more suited for Thief. I do like the pretty landscapes though. Will the Dark Mod have a weather engine? Just another thought. I don't want to keep you guys away from your valuable time.

[ZylonBane]

I don't know if you guys have considered that engine, but D3 is getting pretty old. From what I've seen for the pics though. It looks real good. Can't wait.

The Dark Engine is exponentially older, and people still don't have a problem playing FMs on that.

[SneaksieDave]

Will the Dark Mod have a weather engine?

Ultimately, TDM can have anything people put into it. Can't do that with Oblivion; not even close.

[Capela]

I wasn't suggesting we stop and change it. From what I've seen so far,it looks excellent! If your right about the D3 engine, I would say definately keep the D3 engine. Yeah, releasing the source code could do wonders. Hey NH, what about the audio trickery stuff I made pasts post about. Don't give me any speciffics, but is that going to happen? Are you guys invovled with audio environmental work? And, if there is no Garrett, is there a new charactor with a conscious we can hear? My point was it was a haunting presence to hear Garretts thoughts. Will there be another charactor based in that way? Thanks for your answers in advance.

 

 

I like to hear Garrett voice to, make me feel more close with the character, but i really dont see how that could be implemented in the mod?

[ZylonBane]

I've raised that point before. IIRC, the conclusion was that -- since the Thief resource files are just ZIP files -- one could simply copy SND.CRF (or something like that) into the TDM install folder and it would be able to read the voice files directly.

[Baddcog]

@ jhook.

Trees in Oblivion cool eh? We got em (thanks to dram for diggin into that)! Oblivion's got nuthin on Darkmod

Well, OK, it is ALREADY released. But that's it.

 

@Sneaksie, Oblivion (like Morrowind) is quite capable of being modded in alot of ways and alot can be done. Unfortunately unlike Morrowind everything is a major pain in the @$s due to tools not being released and the tools that have been made so far are very rough. I was bummed, really looked forward to doing some mods for it. Once I got a comp that could handle it I bought it, looked into modding, gave up...

But again, I'd rather be doing Darkmod stuff anyway.

[Nyarlathotep]

But again, I'd rather be doing Darkmod stuff anyway.

Hear, hear! *Toasts*

[jhook]

@ jhook.

Trees in Oblivion cool eh? We got em (thanks to dram for diggin into that)! Oblivion's got nuthin on Darkmod

Well, OK, it is ALREADY released. But that's it.

 

@Sneaksie, Oblivion (like Morrowind) is quite capable of being modded in alot of ways and alot can be done. Unfortunately unlike Morrowind everything is a major pain in the @$s due to tools not being released and the tools that have been made so far are very rough. I was bummed, really looked forward to doing some mods for it. Once I got a comp that could handle it I bought it, looked into modding, gave up...

But again, I'd rather be doing Darkmod stuff anyway.

 

@ Baggcog...........

 

YOU DA MAN! Yeah, Spee Tree is what they used (fo Oblivian) I believe. You modded something better, then don't let me tell you what to do then. I'm just your average "village idiot". I see something, or read into something and think "yeah, that would be pretty cool."

[jhook]

I like to hear Garrett voice to, make me feel more close with the character, but i really dont see how that could be implemented in the mod?

 

Well, as I was saying, I am hoping they do someones voice into the mod. It doesn't have to be Garrett, but someone similar, or it becomes much less like Thief, and more of a first person shooter set into a Thief type theme. It was one of the things that set Thief apart I thought. It wasn't your average 1st person shooter. It had a personality to it, with Garrett relaying his thoughts and insite into the game. Thief wasn't about killing. It was about stealth and thieving. Hearing Garrett was that one thing that gave ther series impact, character and emotion. Just my 2 cents on the whole thing. I think The Dark Mod will still be outstanding, but the main characters voice would be a feature certainly worth implimenting.

[Komag]

Most of the voice comments were story specific though, which is what individual map authors can include when they release separate FMs that make use of The Dark Mod. I guess the mod could make some sort of "standard comments" pack to include with the toolset though. I'm just saying that it's not necessarily endemic to the mod itself, but more to missions that come later.

[Baddcog]

I agree with Komag, I think that the player comments can add some flavor, but even if we didn't have any it wouldn't ruin the mod. There is always ambient noise and AI talking, ect...

 

BTW, I didn't make the trees work, Dram did.

[Fidcal]

It's not just the audible comments but the concept of a player identity. This has been coming to my attention while trying to think of a story for my FM; so often with T2 you work it into the Garrett background to give it more meaning for potential players. A generic thief has advantages that one is not constrained to certain behaviour (though most T2 FMs probably strayed where they wanted anyway, including mine) but I am having reservations. Kinda nice to have some kind of common identifiable start character.

[bob_arctor]

We have speedtree? Last update I got (still downloading SVN one!) there were model trees.

[Crispy]

No, we don't have Speedtree, unless I missed a major development over the past week that I've been away. We do have some pretty nice-looking model trees though, which is I think what Baddcog was referring to.

 

@weather: There's no "weather engine" as such, but Doom 3 is very capable of making weather effects (via particles). We have beautiful snow and rain testmaps. And if you really wanted to you could probably write a script to modify the weather effects in your map over time (poor man's dynamic weather!), though I doubt that will be provided out-of-the-box.

[Baddcog]

Well, jhook didn't ever type speedtree, instead speetree was typed. Which I took for a misprint of special fx tree.

 

Dram did get particle leaves working on the trees and the trees are going to be updated to skeletal models with particle leaves as far as I'm aware. Everyone seemed to think they look better apart from the minor drawback of weird fx when standing under the tree and spinning. (who's gonna do that on purpose though)

 

I've actually never heard the term speed tree, but from jhooks post assumed he meant trees like Oblivion, that's what the new trees are like.

[Springheel]

Speedtree is just a program that autogenerates tree models.

[ZylonBane]

@weather: There's no "weather engine" as such, but Doom 3 is very capable of making weather effects (via particles). We have beautiful snow and rain testmaps.

Are they the optimized weather-effect type of particles that only emit in a moderate radius around the player, or do you have to saturate an entire map with particles?

[greebo]

Currently you adjust your emitters to "fill" a map area with particles. But it should be possible to implement some distance-dependent emitter entities without too much effort.

[Crispy]

Speedtree is just a program that autogenerates tree models.

Although there is a SpeedTreeRT component that hooks into the game engine, takes procedural tree specifications and generates the trees in realtime, which is pretty neat and has a number of advantages (such as easily scalable LOD, and lots of inexpensive variety). Oblivion uses this. You can just use SpeedTree to generate models, but the developer doesn't recommend it.

 

Needless to say, SpeedTree costs a mint. ($8,500 USD per PC title. More for consoles.)

[Nyarlathotep]

We can totally afford that! Besides the procedural generation, there really isn't much that SpeedTree offers that we haven't done ourselves or could rip (with permission, of course!) from the GroundZero team. We've already got particle-based leaf rendering, and the GroundZero team already has demonstrated impressive use of instancing and imposters (generated in real-time) to allow them to render entire forests with little to no effort from mappers. Writing a procedural generator for trees is unlikely to be really worth the time that could be spent elsewhere but is well within the talents of both our mod (doubly so for GroundZero, with their extensive use of procedural generation). It's been awhile since I've taken a close look at their technology, but I'm not much impressed with it.

 

In SpeedTree's defense, $8,500 and say, a week to integrate it, is a small price to pay when looking at a hard deadline and budget. Implementing an in-house solution could potentially take months or even years of man-hours to reach the quality and variety offered by their database and technology. It wouldn't be worth doing it unless there were at least one of three conditions met: one, that man-hours are significantly more expendable than dollars (like with mods); two, that the team is considerably reliant on procedural generation, and therefore the experience and technology used on trees can be leveraged elsewhere (e.g., GroundZero); or three, the team has every intent on GPL'ing their code (thus making licensed code a severe, but not insurmountable, burden).