Plutonia

For the record, Fallout 3's AntAgonizer is a terrible character. Just like all the rest in that game.

Yeah I know. I need to make LODs and a shadow mesh. Fortunately it's really easy with Modo. Anything that's 100% quads can be decimated pretty easily without compromising the structure of the mesh. I disagree regarding the skeleton though. The character has funky toes and elongated pinkies, but it can still use a standard skeleton. I can bind the bone that governs the ball of the foot to the grabby-toes. And any extra bones can just be ignored by existing animations, for example if I were to have special bones for the mandibles and antennae. Existing animations are only concerned with the bones in the hierarchy that they recognize. It shouldn't even matter if there are slight differences in the lengths of limbs because skeletal animations are all about rotations, right?

The bugbeasts and craymen of Thief 1 were made from the very beginning to be simply humanoid demons with features of praying mantis and crayfish. So they're more humanoid than insect or crustacean. The very early version of the bug demon was much more demonic and had way less insectoid features. It had an almost human face and two pairs of regular human female breasts for some reason. The magical spider beasts you encounter in the very last missions of TDP were not even originally supposed to be just recolored spiders. They were meant to be humanoid female black widows, very much like the bugbeasts, with jet black skin that has red markings. They had two legs, six arms, and five eyes like their normal spider counterparts.

I had the design for most of the body ready for a long time. First I started about 6 months ago but my workflow was all fubar so I abandoned the mesh. I figured out a better strategy and started sculpting the highpoly mesh about 3 weeks ago.

Well, the Thief 1 bugbeasts do a smacking noise with their mandibles and do this high-pitched happy humming when idle. Yeah I haven't finished the texturing, plus I don't exactly know how Dark Mod handles materials and shaders.

Maybe if someone makes a pagan-themed mission set in the wilderness and needs special tougher AI for the harder sections. Oh, and the "muscles" are actually individual sections of the exoskeleton, modeled somewhat after the human muscular structure. Hmm... and I thought I was merely combining humanoid and insect features just like the original designers of Thief 1 with the final bugbeast design. I suppose she could be a bit less humanoid and more insectoid to offset the monstrousness.

A long time ago I asked someone if they could help me with getting a Dark Mod character skeleton for my modeling project but I abandoned it for a long time. A while ago I picked it up again and finished the model. So here it is. A Mantian huntress. Inspired by the Bugbeasts in Thief 1. I had the idea that they have an insect colony type society, except where the gender roles are reversed. A single male king and a whole hive of female drones and warriors. They live in huge jungles far outside The City, but a few of them remain in the ranks of pagans. They have peculiar feet that are great for climbing trees and hanging upside down to ambush prey. They have a thin and flexible but sturdy exoskeleton and sensitive eyes that can see a wide angle. Their pinkie fingers are shaped like deadly scimitars that can stab, cut and slice with ease. Even with a normal map the polycount is pretty high. About 30k quads, but I'm sure that can be lowered with a little work. Textures are diffuse, normal, specular amount and specular color. FYI the model is not yet rigged with a Dark Mod skeleton, just a temporary one for posing. Trying to bind it to an MD5 mesh skeleton can prove difficult due to MD5 models being in a T-pose and my character being in an A-pose. Model and render made with Modo 901

Oh, I didn't even remember that Modo can use game units.

So Noesis is the one you mean, right? (Edit: Of course you mean that, you said it right there but I'm a blind idiot) Modo bones are locator hierarchies. You just have to enable the linking visualizations to make them look like bones. And you know, I don't even need to get the animations, I just need the scale and bone structure/hierarchy. But I suppose it doesn't matter if it's also animated. Speaking of scale, do you know of any exporting problems when it comes to Modo's meter-based unit scale and the Dark Mod? Every program exports into different scale, for example Modo models are 100x larger than Blender models or something.

Collada should be a format that works with every program ever so exporting that shouldn't be a problem. So is OBJ but I don't know about its skeletal animation properties. Anyway, tomorrow is a holiday so I need to go to the next town over to get wasted with my friends. I'll continue making the model, but it might take a while. Well, the good thing about taffers is that they're patient. No amount of Thi4fs is going to change that I hope.

I'm using Foundry Modo. Is there any way to export TDM models to Collada or FBX?

Is there a version of just the skeleton exported into an editable format that can be opened with a 3d-modeling program? It doesn't matter if the mesh is there as well, I can just get rid of it. Because if I get the skeleton, I can just change the bone lengths. Actually, I also get the standard humanoid scale from an exported skeleton as well, so I can edit my mesh to fit TDM standards better.

I don't really mean a rig that is meant to be easy to animate. Just the skeleton that humanoid character animations work on in the mod itself. Afterall, any animation that is not the hip bone is all just rotation values, so as long as I get the correct bone hierarchy and basic form , I can skin any mesh to use the skeleton that someone else can animate.

Hi, I'm modeling my own interpretation of a certain humanoid creature from one of the Thief games, and I'm attempting to make it so that the polycount and topology are game engine friendly. It's going to have normal and specular maps, and I was just thinking that if someone could give me just the basic humanoid skeleton that the animations in TDM use, I could bind the model to that so that whoever wants to develop the creature for the mod would be able to do so. Any basic model format is okay. dae, obj, fbx, etc. Also, what's the acceptable polycount for character/monster meshes in the game? And does there need to be things like separate shadow meshes and LOD meshes?

I'd really want to play Lost Alpha, but even with the most optimized settings, I can't keep the game from crashing. That has made me wonder, is Lost Alpha just old 2005 assets added into the final release of the real game, or is it actually the old alpha version of STALKER made to barely work? And how exactly is it possible to program a game to crash when you alter the terrible default key bindings? Oh, and apparently the PDA functions will crash the game, especially if you go into the contacts tab, and there happens to be hostile (red) stalkers in your vicinity.

Those are roguelike-likes, or "rogue-lites". Simplified. A roguelike is a game where levels are randomly generated, death is permanent, and gameplay mechanics and classic RPG elements are extremely complicated. Roguelikes basically bind every key on the keyboard to some action, and there are dozens of character and equipment attributes and environmental factors used in every dice roll. Speaking of dice, roguelikes are always turn-based. When you take a step, your enemies take a step, and if your character is fast, you might be able to take two steps when your enemy can only take one. And once you die, you do not lose the game. There is no game over. The death was simply part of the story of that character's adventure, and is added to the record right next to the champion who actually managed to finish the mission, if there are any. It's often very improbable for a player to finish a roguelike game. It takes a massive amount of strategy and in-depth knowledge to play properly, but in the end of the day, it's still all just rolls of the dice, and therefore it's theoretically possible to roll badly every single time.

Sometimes? You do mean "always" right? Everything is a loading screen. Windows, crate piles, secret doors. Only at those white markers in the City hub the game actually opens a different screen with a progress bar. The irony is that on a fast SSD, the loading always takes just a second, but only that separate loading screen takes that one second, because it doesn't require button mashing to play an animation. EM tried to disguise loading screens behind animations, but it only made them more apparent because of the inescapable mandatory wait that is independent from your machine's performance.

That's what separates regular games from something considered an "immersive sim". Normally in games, when you press the "move faster" button while crouched, your character stands up and runs. In immersive sims, you have a button for changing a stance, and moving faster/slower. When you press the "move faster" button while crouched, you move faster while crouched. At no point did you actually tell the character to stand up. An immersive sim never does anything that the player didn't explicitly order the game to do. -Because a person doesn't do what the he didn't want himself to do. That what makes it an "immersive" simulation. You control the character. The character doesn't, and the game doesn't. Everything you accomplish is based on your own skill, and every failure you experience is your own fault. Unlike something like Assassin's Creed or other animation-prioritized cinematic semi-interactive applications, where almost nothing you accomplish is your own doing, and almost all of the mistakes you can experience are the game's fault. If NuThief was an immersive sim, those loading screens would have you select a crowbar, apply that item on the window, then press the climb- and forward keys to climb through, use the mouse aiming to turn around, and activate the window again to close it. No automated multi-action sequences. Those are for cutscenes.

Okay. Well, it was worth a try. So let me get this straight... all those speeds are separate systems? There isn't one single base speed and a set of selected arbitrary multipliers based on run, walk and creep in combination with standing up and crouching, and a base sound volume being calculated from the result of the equation? Which in turn would be filtered through the surface material to produce the final volume? Mind you that this isn't a criticism of coding practices or anything. Were talking about a mod afterall. A base gameplay mechanic built very deep into one, to be precise. I mean, with the Dark Engine it wasn't even possible to mod the engine enough to get the game to rotate the camera outside the player's control. (Kinda like the fact that you couldn't get the player to have control over the camera in NuThief. Zing!)

I have a question about how the movement speed modifiers are programmed... Are there static modes for different speeds, which determine the volume of the footsteps, or is there a gradient, and the speeds are just specific values chosen from that gradient? Because I've noticed that I almost never use the mouse wheel for selecting items or weapons in any game anymore. So the wheel becomes useless. The Dark Mod also has hotkeys for all the most important items that you need to be able to select quickly. If the speed modifier in The Dark Mod is a full sliding scale and not just several digital values, then wouldn't it be possible to bind MWheelUp and MWheelDown to "Increase speed" and "Decrease speed" like in Splinter Cell (1-4)? If when the player activates the "run" modifier, the game just selects a specific speed value, and the footstep volume is calculated from a combination of speed and surface material, then wouldn't it be a pretty simple procedure to program a slider that selects an arbitrary modifier? I think this would be a nice, albeit a bit gimmicky optional addition to the movement mechanics. The standard speed modifier keys would still function normally, and set the pre-determined speed modifiers when activated. ...Or would this somehow mess up the footstep emission system during movement by allowing players to make dozens of changes to movement speed in a second?

I have never had my PC heat up as much as it did when I was playing NuThief, and I'm not the only one. There have been many reports of the game causing overheating issues.

I think ghost-only mission objectives only make sense in context with the mission's purpose. If you're just going to steal something, there's nothing wrong about incapacitating a few guards. But if you're supposed to plant evidence, case a place for a future mission, or infiltrate a friendly area without losing trust, then the mission needs to be a failure if you leave hard evidence of your infiltration like being spotted or hurting people. Even in the Thief trilogy, where the protagonist is a total egomaniac who avoids murder just because it's "more professional" rather than out of morality, ghosting objectives only exist at times when it really is needed, not just based on a difficulty setting. And actually, there is one mission in Thief 2 where I think ghosting should logically be mandatory, but isn't. (Framed) And there is also a mission where ghosting would actually be harmful. In Kidnap, your target always has bodyguards. If you knock out both the target and his entourage, you get a nice head start and you can exit without anyone realizing what you have done. If you refuse to knock out anyone other than your target, the bodyguards obviously know that something is wrong. Ghosting is a very binary thing. Either you don't hurt anyone, or you might as well knock out everyone, because one piece of evidence is enough to prove something. So in missions where leaving hard evidence of outside interference would have serious consequences or completely negate the goal of the mission, ghosting should be required. Otherwise, well... it could always be a nice bonus objective that pops up when you finish a mission

Raptor: Call of The Shadows just turned 20 last April fool's. Not only does it have a fantastic soundtrack, but I think it's objectively one of the best games ever. And I don't mean "I like it personally", I mean "every aspect of the game's design is inarguably honed to perfection". Thief 2 is my favorite game of all time, but it does have some glitches and bad design at some points, and I simply can't argue for less quality against more quality. And this is a great remix of the game's music tracks. My favorite is the mission 1 theme at 1:48 http://youtu.be/Y_SgzSU-Ok0

I like supernatural and adventure missions because firstly, they offer more AI variety. You can't just knock out zombies. Secondly, they are not as much limited to sensible, functional and intact architecture. So the level design has more freedom as well. I never felt like the zombie missions in the Dark Project were there to scare anyone, even though the hammer haunts are the creepiest taffers in history. I just felt like they were an excuse for the developers to give different strengths and weaknesses to the enemies, and to force players to develop new strategies. Adventure missions taking place in underground caverns and abandoned ruins force players to look for new ways to navigate, because they can't rely on always finding a staircase or a doorway.

I think levels should be designed with realistic architecture in places where the player has no business going, but I don't think invisible walls are bad either. For example, if you have a section of a city, then it's stupid that the area depicted in your map is somehow this self-contained space with no actual way out. If there are streets leading out of the district, in my opinion it's more realistic for there to be an invisible wall and a message that says "You can't go any further", than it is for that street to be inexplicably filled with junk or entirely blocked by a cart or something. Your map shows the area you can access. It doesn't mean that the area should be physically cordoned off. Games have levels. Levels are parts of the world. Every player should understand that the entire world can't be depicted seamlessly. You don't need piles of garbage blocking the streets to keep the world intact.