Domarius

I have had a few of them yes, was it the "over the years" part that gave it away? It applies to anyone really, not just girlfriends, but it's easier to fall into the trap if its your girlfriend because you have an emotional investment with them. I tended to attract more low-self esteem or needy girls than normal because I tend to be really good at talking people through things and making them feel good. I'm at the stage where I can very soon get to someone's "issue" pretty reliably after some time of them telling me their problems, and is what made me come to the conclusion I posted above. Nice to see you agree Spar, but I wasn't aware you usually don't agree with ANYTHING I say, cripes... my view on life has changed a lot since even only a year ago, so maybe that's not so true anymore, if you're referring to arguments long gone.

I believe it's good to try and make this just happen naturally if possible - the fact that you move your person up against the wall should give you a lightgem bonus, and mappers should be careful to place patrol points and hallway widths that you can let them slip by you without bumping into you, if that's what they want to allow.

Yep, talented. Obviously low self esteem. Fact - You cannot be your girl's psychiatrist AND boyfriend at the same time. If you are any good at it, eventually you will hit her wall, and she'll hate you for it, because she can't face that issue, and will project that anger and confusion onto you, for directly addressing it. If you aren't that good, then you'll go round and round in circles constantly giving her "helpful advice" and "words of support" as she keeps coming back to you with the same problems and using you as a "what do I do next?" guidebook, and hence can blame you for any advice that went bad. Your relationship will be reduced to talking about her problems all day, and she'll associate that negativity with you. Either way, her attitude towards you will slowly turn sour, and of course your natural reaction to that is to be nicer - which will look like trying to suck up to her, and will keep making things worse. The best course of action I've found, over the years, is to get to her point sooner, give her the facts straight, and when she comes back with a similar issue, you have to tell her "Well I told you what I thought about that already." Ideally you want to be able to say then "You're probably better off talking to your girlfriends if you just want someone to tell it to" or something along those lines, or at least let her talk about it and not give her any advice, just say "Gee that sucks" "Yeah I know what you mean" etc. You can't "fix" her, not the way you think you can anyway, trust me. Ultimately, low self esteem has to be dealt with internally. You have to enforce independance - if she learns to constantly go to you to whine and complain to, she'll stay in her low self esteem mindset.

This page Getting_Characters_and_their_Anims_into_ Doom SVN, http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ and SVN access (spar handles those accounts) Any questions, just ask.

Coool, radiosity rendering

Yeah definetly. I don't see why he can't come on board.

Might need a bit of help in the texture area though. The transition just looks too harsh and artificial. Not that we need to bother with it, just that's what might be making people think it looks wierd.

Well it suggests something could be improved but the important question is, will it do for us at the moment. I think it'd be fine. I think it's because the eyes are just stuck in, no shading around where the eyes meet the skin , so the are very obviously stuck in. If you wanted to do something about it, you could make the skin get darker around the eyes, and the eye texture itself could get darker towards the back of the eyeball. I showed a guy at work, and he said for a zombie, the skin doesn't look rotten and falling off, it just looks like old man skin. He's a programmer. I'm afraid to show the artists because they will rip it apart But I can if you want.

Great!

FYI - when I updated I got updated versions of all the anims, so I'm assuming you updated the finger control thingy on those. I just commited a parry_left anim I was working on, so it got missed out on that finger control update.

This looks like it has character. It looks like a dopey guy with makeup on his face. So this would be great for a human but it's no zombie

You could tweak forever and still not get as good a result as just starting again with a photo reference for the model and texture... even oDDity didn't try to create faces from scratch.

Well, style and quality-wise he seems to fit in, but I just can't get over that face. It's like his eyes are too asian and his mouth is too low. It's the only part that really stands out as obviously amateurish. Regarding zombies - don't just cut holes in a normal human model, cause that's all it looks like. Dead bodys don't hold their shape very well, flesh is half sloughing off the bone, and the face just looks... well, you can tell they're dead at a glance, even without holes or blood.

That's awesome. Well feel free to adjust the combat idle if you want. Long as it doesn't create too much work - we need to move forward once things are "passable" at this point.

Oh I thought the animation was going to be of your physics version... I think in Oblivion they just weight mapped them like the rest of the clothes, so they moved with the body but didn't flap around at all. Looks okay as long as nothing drastic is happening...

That's fair enough. Combat_idle needs the tunic animated to look good. If you end up doing your draw and sheath based off it before I get around to that, I don't mind also pasting the changes over to your draw and sheath.

It's always improving with each screenshot, which is really promising. In my experience, I don't think detailed feedback is too useful, I think it's better to speak in feelings and let the artist try and come up with the solution. The face feels too pained and akward and stiff. oDDity's faces, obviously based off photos, look much more full of character. Overall, oDDity's characters visually feel more detailed and dirty, your one still feels unnaturally a bit to clean and shiny. But it's come a long way.

Do you mean how we do the import clip thing to make the other animation mb files use the same rig? Cause I was thinking - we will use the updated rig from now on, but as far as the existing animations go - it doesn't have a difference in game (everything still exports and looks the way it should because it uses the latest mesh), so the only draw back would be if someone wanted to tweak one of the anims we've done so far (walk cycles, attacks etc.) they wouldn't get your finger control changes. So I was thinking we could just keep animating No problem if you want to update them though.

Yeah I didn't need to revert the rig, I tested it - I updated the proguardmesh_export.mb, exported the proguard, and he still displays in the game. You can keep working on it where you left off, everything is up to date now, including your changes.

(delete)

Wow! How will we keep them in sync?

Yeah the def file was out of date - only reason I reverted the rig file was because I didn't have time to test it. I'll revert back to yours tonight and make sure it still exports properly. Regarding the proguardmesh_export.mb, yes that's true, so we should see a corresponding proguardmesh_export.mb update with every update of the rig. There wasn't one, so I figured it hasn't been tested. It's okay, I'll do it tonight. Just paranoid - I hate it when things are out of sync and you can't work on animations, and I'm sure you and ascottk do as well

Ahhh I see - I didn't realise there was a problem, or I would have checked! (Come straight out and tell me "hey your latest commit is giving me errors!" next time ) Yes it seems I didn't upload the def file, and I know why and how I'm going to prevent it - I'm not going to have my hacked version of the mainmenu.gui anymore (hacked to not play the menu music), because it makes the little red exclamation mark icon on the darkmod folder lose its meaning. Now I know if it's red, I've forgotten something. I noticed you uploaded a new def file at mesh that's not compatible with what's there, which is understandable if you didn't have the latest stuff. What I did now was revert to the working versions of the proguard mb and def file, which means your changes are overwritten, but you can get your previous versions from SVN history and now resolve your work with mine (now that it's uploaded...). I did this to make sure what's on SVN is always working. We should always check that this is the case by running "exportModels tdm_ai_proguard" and then restarting Doom, and running "map test\climb" (I just like to test there, it's small and no AI) and then "testModel tdm_ai_proguard". Also this makes us not forget to update the proguardmesh_export.mb

I reckon choosing what is in focus and what's not, has got to be an artistic choice, so this would be great for ingame cutscenes but not gameplay. Actually I saw it used in one place during gameplay to good effect - in Crysis, if you look through your gun scope, the lens is in the middle of the screen and its contents are in focus, and the scenery outside the scope (filling the rest of the monitor) is blurry. Mostly an aesthetic thing but helped focus your attention where it was supposed to be.

It's best just to approach this from a visual perspective. oDD himself said it's not what tool you use, it's how you use it. I specifically remember him saying he hated how people emailed him asking "What program do you use???" like if they only had THAT program, they could make artwork as good as that.