Arcturus

In VR a game needs to run at very high resolutions and framerates to be comfortable. They are clearly targeting standalone headsets, rather than PCs, hence the low resolution textures and painterly mobile style graphics. Half-Life Alyx looked great, but loading times were long. At least they are not pretending they are making AAA game. It's not a Thief game of my dreams, but it looks fun enough.

@I.C.H.I. I apologize for my little rant. I take back what I wrote. Turns out, mocap is easy after all Animations come from: https://www.rokoko.com/mocap/free-mocap-assets Retargeted in Blender using this addon: https://github.com/Mwni/blender-animation-retargeting I took my Blender rig for darkmod NPCs and stripped away all constraints. For this demo I used .fbx from the pack with Mixamo skeleton, and manually set up the bone mappings. I made a separate thread. Yeah I know I think I will prepare those new animations and let other people decide if that's enough.

I uploaded "walk.md5anim" animation with fixed elbow issue mentioned here. I managed to completely fix chain clipping on priest's model: This character's coat is still slightly clipped. "walk1" for comparison: There are 8 joints in the skeleton for animation of coats.

@I.C.H.I. What I wrote in the previous post would apply to motion captured animations too. In the end they are just a bunch of keyframes, not magic. You'll be happy to hear that we already have one mocap animation in game already: It's so heavily edited though that it might as well be original. Motion captured anims still need to to be heavily edited. They generally need to start and end on the same pose, unless you're doing a cut scene. Animations need to fit arbitrary criteria set by the game, like a predetermined speed. I was told for example that running needs to feel like sprint, when actual in game speed is that of a jog. Current TDM skeleton is different from a typical standard animation skeleton. It was made in a proprietary software and it took me a lot of effort to retarget it to a rig in Blender. I made it based on imported md5mesh file. Perhaps retargeting the original rig inside Maya would be an easier task. A lot of bad animation is driven by game systems. The reason why NPCs will sometimes rotate 180 degrees while playing some idle animation is just bad code. The reason why rotating animations look like shit at the moment is because origin bone is driven by code and the speed simply doesn't match the animations. Well that and the animation is horrible. Changing rotation speed in code breaks combat, so I'm trying to make animation that matches the code, which is a hack. Feet still slide because of blending. Without blending it looks like this: There's still some jittering going on. Any idea why? For details I invite you to internal development forum. Another example is combat where torso and legs are independent. Combined with crappy animations it makes probably for the most robotic looking part of the game. A lot of it is just bad art. The default idle animation is just crap. The pose is unnatural, weight is placed on the leg that has a bent knee and is moved back and on top of it has a weird rotation. That's not a relaxed pose, but because it's the default, all other animations need to start and end with it. At least the mechanical looking sway of the idle anim à la Mortal Kombat could be fixed at some point. Ideally all characters should be ported to a standard rig like Rigify or Blenrig. The rigging itself wouldn't even be the worst part for me. It's setting up .def files and articulated figures (AF) that's the most tedious part. You're expecting a lot from a community who refuses to switch to high dynamic range rendering, even though that shit is already implemented in the game waiting to be used. I might experiment with mocap more at some point, but I encourage you to try it on your own. When I started working on this mod I new nothing about 3d graphics. Three years later I had a horse completely modeled, textured, animated and with proper rag doll in the game.

Currently there are two basic "walk" animations that game picks at random. Walk1.md5anim wasn't made by me. When game switches from idle animation to a walk animation there's certain number of frames when the game blends between the two. Because that particular animations starts at the most extreme pose... ...when animation starts, the right leg quickly slides back: Simply shifting the cycle so that animation starts at a different pose... ... results in a less jarring transition:

That's the list of files: /trunk/dds/models/md5/chars/undressed /trunk/dds/models/md5/chars/undressed/undressed_old_man_01.dds /trunk/dds/models/md5/chars/undressed/undressed_old_man_01_hair.dds /trunk/dds/models/md5/chars/undressed/undressed_old_man_01_s.dds /trunk/def/tdm_ai_heads.def /trunk/def/tdm_ai_undressed.def /trunk/materials/tdm_ai_undressed.mtr /trunk/models/md5/chars/heads/npcs/head_old_man_01.md5mesh /trunk/models/md5/chars/undressed /trunk/models/md5/chars/undressed/tdm_ai_undressed_old_man_01.md5mesh /trunk/models/md5/chars/undressed/undressed_old_man_01_hair_local.tga /trunk/models/md5/chars/undressed/undressed_old_man_01_local.tga

@kingsal https://svn.thedarkmod.com/svn/darkmod/trunk Is there a parallel development going on that I'm not aware of?

I added forceoverlays keyword to hair material which fixed it. I noticed that a lot of clothes on NPCs do not spawn blood decals. I uploaded the old guy to repository. I created new .def and .mtr files. It can be moved if needed. I copied nobleman's definition. Some idle animations don't fit the character, like adjusting belt or eating peanuts so that needs sorting out. I uploaded 2048x2048 texture, figured it will be enough. I can upload 4096x4096 if needed.

@chakkman Last year I borrowed vr goggles for couple of weeks and finished HL: Alyx. Also played some HL 2 vr mod and Dark Mod vr. In my mind Thief in vr makes perfect sense. If Dark Mod had support for vr controllers and additional option to teleport it would be perfect.

Thief was a fairly popular series. Popular enough that we now get a 5th title. I probably wouldn't buy a remaster just for slightly higher res textures and models. I'm not interested in fan made hd packs either. I wouldn't mind a remake though.

Die hard fans already bought 5 different copies. This game is almost as old now as Pong was in 2000. If couple more people plays Deus Ex that otherwise wouldn't then what's the problem. Fans also made shoddy remasters that get a pass only because they were made by amateurs.

Wonder if they fixed this: If more people learn about those games then I say it's a good thing.

@datiswous sorry I meant sky box. Sky portal doesn't seem to work. Blood decals do not spawn on top of the hair. Looks like it's caused by "alphatest" keyword in the hair material. When I remove "alphatest' then splats do spawn correctly. As you can see if I next bring back the alpha, then blood decals render nicely on hair. Was this turned off intentionally? In this particular case it looks a lot worse without it.

You can put a skybox on an NPC. Edit: I meant skybox, not portal..

I made new hair cards. @Bikerdude I think I am done with this model for now.

What they wrote in FAQ seem pretty permissive to me. Mostly heads would be useful I think, as they would be easier to port than the whole body.

Never seen that before until now. There's interesting stuff in those ancient threads.

I screwed up a little when I made the old rigging in Blender. With most Darkmod characters you can't really tell where the elbow is. In my animations there's an incorrect arm roll and the elbow is pointing in the wrong direction. But because all characters were dressed it didn't matter much. This model has wrinkly elbows so it's very noticeable. That means I will need to reexport animations with a fixed arm rotation.

That messed up fingers (duh). This will work better:

I moved the entire upper part of the torso down a bit. This way his shoulders won't be as broad any more. As a result this character will be a little shorter than other NPCs. Still a lot taller than the player though.

Exported body and head separately. I managed to eyeball the position of the head somehow. Seam is noticeable at closer inspection but it's not very distracting I think. So no scarf needed. I need to make shadow mesh now, I guess. The way eyelids are animated makes lower lids move more than the upper ones. Heads in Darkmod have other useful bones. If eyebrows were randomly animated it would liven up the NPCs. You could give guards a frown when in combat mode for example. Edit: I see there is already some barely perceptible eyebrow animation that I guess is part of the idle animation.

I think a biggest selling point for raytraced audio, other than being physically accurate, is that it eliminates the need for manual setup of audio zones. Author of that Godot plugin mentions that in 1:33. Sound, just like with raytraced light, reacts to changes in the environment automatically and in real time, so there's no need for laborious setups or pre-computation. The downside is player's electricity bill. Thief-like stealth game could benefit from raytacing more than most other genres, imo.

No need to. Let us know if it worked.

Image lacks contrast. You could try to normalize it You can also try adding RGB keyword, eg. rgb 0.3 to darken or rgb 1.5 to brighten.