Moonbo

Yeah, I have to confess to building my map section by section, if only because it's easier to know if you're making a mistake. It does make for more linear-ish levels though.

Cool, thanks guys, I'll send him your comments.

So, as some of you know I'm working on a Dark Mod FM that I'll hopefully release in a month or so. The reason I got interested in making a FM is because I've been working on a novella heavily inspired by the Thief universe for the last year or so and ended up playing a lot of Thief 2 FMs while writing it. As I finished writing the novella, I found myself with some free time, and Dark Radiant seemed a lot easier than Dromed :-). I'm just about ready to publish the novella on Amazon now (maybe as soon as tomorrow) and wanted some feedback for my cover. I'm very blessed to have a friend who is a professional concept artist but he's never played Thief before. I'm pretty happy with what he came up with, but since you are all Thief fans I wanted to know what you thought of the final product and if it was worth making any changes before I publish: So, what do you think? You can find more of the artist's work at this link if you're interested too: http://jonone.cghub.com. Edit: so he made the name font monotype and a little bit larger. Thanks for the feedback, book is up now: http://www.amazon.com/Shadowcursed-ebook/dp/B00BYEW02M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363951832&sr=8-1&keywords=shadowcursed .

There are are a few more chandeliers that i know of - several of them aren't entities so you'd have to look in the models section, but there's at least one three-candled chandelier that is an entity. Try looking in the "extinguishable" section of the light entities.

Is it possible to swap out animation sets between AI's? So for instance, is it possible to have a guard use the zombie or werewolf animations?

Hey Capela, Like Badcog said, you can flip through light textures like you would any other texture by putting the "light_texture" spawnarg on a light. You don't need to dmap after switching light textures so it's pretty easy to flip through a couple and see if they work. I'm pretty sure you'll see some that match up with the hanging lights you have as well as the light you have stuck into the wall - if you need me to, I'll see if I can track down their exact names, but it should be easy to spot them. Mess around with light placement and you can get some pretty neat effects.

@ Flanders, thanks for the great advice, I'll do both of those things. @ Sotha, thanks :-). About the ceiling texture, I kind of put myself in a bind where that texture doesn't really seems to fit if you tile it, but I'm hoping it doesn't look *too* stretched in game...I guess we'll see what the beta testers say. @Capella, looks good! Did I ever mention that I got inspired for how part of the church in my map looks like based on your screens? Anyways, you should try using light textures on your lights, hanging ones like that are ideal place for them.

Some more pics on the area I worked on this week, would love to get thoughts on how to get more color variety in the 3rd and last images:

Thanks Grayman, that did the trick.

Thanks Grayman, using tdm_elevator_loop works. Ideally, the file I'd like to use is machine_gears01_loop, but that stops playing after one loop, is there something that needs to be changed in the sound shader to make it loop properly in snd_move?

Thanks guys, I ended up using plain metal bars, but the moving glass patch trick sound like it'd look pretty neat so I'l probably use it a bit later in the level. Here's a simple question: I've got a sliding door that I'm using as an elevator. It looks like from documentation that if I want a sound to be playing while the door is translating up and down I should use the snd_move spawnarg. But when I use this, the sound doesn't loop, it just plays once and then stops...is there another spawnarg I should be using?

Hm, how about a wimpy guy (kind of like the servant from Thief 1).

How about one specifically for mages or inventors?

Thanks Obsttorte, I got it to work. I made the walls into a single func_static (textured w/ the collission texture) and teleported it in upon trigger. Now I just need to make the "visible" part of it. Ideally I'd love for it to be a kind of magical force-field but I don't know of any texture or emitter that would be appropriate...any suggestions would be appreciated :-). Otherwise, I'll just have to make them boring metal bars or something.

Thanks Fidcal, I couldn't get it to work, so I'll just have to not put anything interesting next to those banners and hope the player doesn't notice the clipping issue :-(. In a totally different vein, I'm trying to set up a "trap" for the player. Where they walk into a room and are surrounded by four walls (either metal bars that descend from the ceiling, or via a magic forcefield of some sort). Before I waste a ton of time setting that up, are there any examples of something like that in any released FMs, or is there a pretty straightforward way to do that? I'm thinking the best way would be to teleport in four func_static walls colored with player clip to be the actual walls (or somehow make them solid, but I don't know how to do that) but don't know if that makes any sense.

I think I would be able to submit my map to the contest for sure if it's extended to August (hopefully earlier than that though).

Quick question, probably for RPGIsta: remember how earlier it was discussed that you could use the "inline" spawnarg to stop enlarged func_statics from clipping out of sight. When I apply this to banners it reverts to the default skin (so if I use the hammer skin in DR, it still shows the default heraldry skin in-game). Is there a way around this?

! Dang, wish I could build that fast. Looks really good.

Looks good! Reminds me of "The Transaction" for some reason, maybe the rain.

And one more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuGhCTann30

Been listening to a lot of trance-y techno music (of all things) while working in Dark Radiant. Here are some good tracks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWCyGVQ3_20

One way to get around this is to use the "light_center" spawnarg. This determines where it looks like the light is coming from (for drawing the light texture and casting shadows). So what you can do is place a light in the middle of the room and then move the light center over to the wall (click on the light, go into vertex mode, and move the red dot you see at the center of the light, or just change the coordinates in the spawnarg). This makes it look like the light is on the wall but it's actually in the middle of the room. This can lessen intersects between rooms. But what I've noticed is that you can get away with quite a lot in terms of overlapping lights (up to 3 overlaps w/out any big performance drop) - it really gets bad when you combine light overlaps with things like big spaces or you have 4 or 5 lights hitting in one spot. A good trick is to do what Badcog recommended in another post. In the map console type in r_showtris 1 and r_showlightcount 1. The showlightcount command will color how many lights are hitting each area and you can move things around or add brush detailing to just make sure you don't have too much intersecting in any one spot.

Haha, Melan, I guess I need to take more dark screenshots. Yeah, it's supposed to be moonlight in the first and second pic (darn...would it destroy the symmetry of that scene if only one set of windows has light?). I'm not much of a graphic artist so yes I'd be great if you could make a moonlit version of that texture :-)...we'll see I might just keep it the way it is.

Finished up the rest of the church this week...which means I'm at the 1/2 way mark of the mission. If I can keep up the pace, I might (God willing) be able to submit the map for the the unusual gameplay contest as I only started it a few days before the contest was announced. Here are some pics from the church interior; I'm really happy w/ how the lighting turned out (unless you guys say otherwise :-P). Feedback always appreciated - and I'll start using tags (thanks nbohr1more!) on the pics from now on as things are going to get spoilerish.

Thanks nbohr1more, hopefully I'll get to use those in a little bit.