FishFace

*leaps back in to the forums* Are you guys getting paid by ID software for this shit? Because when you guys get a release date for it, I'm buying The Dark Mod. I might play D3, for a short while, but this is going to be the reason for it. Couple of things: Loved the trailer overall - esp. rope arrow swinginess and mantling. Bit jerky in places, physics were kind of weird, but as you say, this should be fixed later on. Make sure you get your old english perfect for the real thing. Anyone who's sung hymns has an almost intuitive grasp of that stuff. However, the quotation at the start was gut wrenching in its back-hearkening. And, if smooth highlighting is possible, it should be included for the polish it affords. On/off snapping of highlight will only remind people they're in a game - nothing in real life truly snaps instantly - even lights have a just-discernible period of brightening/fading. (I guess computer monitors and suchlike are exceptions )

I still don't see any reason why a noisemaker arrow would make a guard less suspicious than the tap of a stone.

I hope you're using the SpinelessDoll version of ragdoll.

So basically, dope, we have a gimmick which no-one will use because it's pointless. The limitations make the idea useless - if it's easy for it to die and when you do your character dies, what's the point? You may as well go in with the main character! If you have to main eye contact, there are few situations where leaning is much worse.

@Dope: That doesn't make sense. Really, is a guard going to be more suspicious when he finds a whistling (or firecrackling...) arrow, or when he hears the click of something that could be his imagination? If he finds an arrow, he knows what's happening. If he finds a rock, there's no indication!

Which pisses me off no-end

The smoothing angle is a threshhold, and faces that have an external angle of more than that to the next face will be smoothed. For example, if you set it at 89°, everything up to right angles would be smoothed. Percentage implies something like a degree of smoothing, however, which sounds odd.

If I recall, the Dark Engine could deal with this not too badly - you could lean through windows, for example, and round corners - although the Bendy Lean was a bit much.

I'm certainly crap at texturing. It doesn't help that Blender isn't too hot on the texture front - I found C4Ds method so much more intuitive, because it was uniform and extensible in a uniform manner. But the real problem is that I suck at creating the textures for, e.g. a face. No matter how good your model is, it'll always look CG unless you get a decent texture on the thing.

And give me someone with more skill than me to build it

In my experience, modelling talent is more important than artistic talent. As long as you are reasonably competent in the latter, you can produce reasonably competent work, as you can take good references and to an extent, push points around until it looks good. In that sense, the artistic sense of knowing when something looks shite and more importantly why it looks shite (and what in hell to do about that) comes in handy. However, you can know exactly how to represent something in 3D, but if you don't have the modelling talent, there's no way in hell you can translate that into a model in any sensible time and with any sensible poly-count. (Note that with a high poly-count, not only does the model become unusable in games, but it becomes difficult to handle in the application, too.) For example, in a high-poly modelling situation, you might want to add a wrinkle to a face. It takes great skill, such as which I do not have (he said, from experience) to add one in such a way as to not a) make the model unweildy, make it look weird on other places and c) make the wrinkle look realistic in the first place. In ones artistic imagination, it's quite trivial to simply push that bit in, and give this bit a tug, or on paper to darken an area, but the same operation will usually need to have been planned from the very beginning in the case of a 3D model.

I'd like to see more maps with huge structures. You know, something like Angelwatch, except bigger and with more architecture. With something that big, you get such a 'woooaah' factor looking up at such a massive structure - and that kind of awe is so rarely felt in games. Occasionally you get some snazzy graphics that make you think, "neat," but true awe, such as that inspired by real-life architecture, is something out of that league. We wants it. I feel that that castle would do something like that - it would feel appropriate to start the level down there in that river, clamber among the rocks, and then have to climb up a scree slope, so you're looking up at this humongous beast of a building, then having a selection of windows to shoot rope arrows it. I get a similar feeling looking at the gates of Mordor, or the Deeping Wall & Hornburg. In short, give me architecture and give it me BIG!

If you have no cash, then Maya has a learning edition you can use (all renders have a watermark) or there are a couple of good, free apps, the most well known of which is Blender, but there's also Wings3D. Recently, Blender has seen a lot of development towards making its UI more consistent and easier to fathom, adding new features and so on.

We know your tastes are immature and bad, oDD, but you don't have to state it load for people to gloat over I also liked the scouting orb, although the idea that a huge big metallic looking ball didn't a) go CLANG when it hit the floor and didn't attract any attention was silly. Sure 'for the gameplay' but it should've been reflected in the model... I think the clockwork rat idea's pretty good, although winding the thing up would remind me too much of Tom and Jerry and those little mouse toys for cats. As long as the mechanism for winding it up is something dissimilar to using a key, though, so's it's nicely placed in the gameworld. I don't know whether such a clockwork mouse would be any use for clambering around a difference engine, what with those things to climb - clockwork tends to be not so good for that. Still, if there were such a tool, that environment would be excellent for it. Especially if it were /possible/ to beat the level without using the rat, and then if you botch up with it, it gets crushed by one of the larger gears, or boiled in a steam valve, you have to then face the security. Unless the rat carcass somehow sticks inside the workings of the thing

Sensible? Most gamers like prettiness, even if it's only hypothetical! @obscurus: It's a bit like Uncanny valley. If you can't hack it, you'd best just quit trying for that level. I expect there's an equivalent uncanny valley for general environments like there is for faces and other human things.

It sounds like an idea that should be used in one campaign, and one campaign only. It's simply too far-fetched, too "out there" to be a recurring part of the game. If it cropped up more than once, it strikes me that it would feel old-hat. A nifty thing to be coded by one campaign designer, not something for a toolkit.

They'd try and kill it, because if they knowingly let one run around, they'd be fired! No genteel Lady wants rat-crap in her soup. I'm with oDD + co on this one. It'd make things easy and probably repetetive, even with the limitations suggested.

Just because graphics are one of the least important parts, doesn't mean they aren't important at all! Especially if there's a mismatch in realism, then immersion goes poof. In the Dark Engine, it was all crappy, so your imagination filled in the blanks. If one bit of a super-realistic graphic engine is much below par, then you automatically notice it. I guess that's why it's so dangerous trying for good graphics. Anyways, if you can make water with individual droplets in falls and suchlike, it's probably not going to be a problem!

Find a guard, ask him to sniff the flower

OK, maybe that's not the only reason, but it certainly appears that way. What connections to celts and Thief pagans have? they're both called pagans. Anything else? *shrug* I'm sure I'll be wooed when I see a model or animation, anyway.

The problem is not that they're not similar to the T2 ones, but that you're on the one hand saying "TDM Pagans are not like TMA Pagans" yet the only reason they're like they are is because they're called the same thing as TMA (and TDP, sorry) Pagans! I don't want something identical to LGS pagans - they had flaws, and it would make this mod a clone. But the reason for making them celtic (or celtish, given that there are other concepts) seems to be an odd, tenuous one. And yes, the checked trousers DO cause problems for me

In summary, "Hahaha, you racist tit, shut up." I don't think anything else needs to be said, it would be too dignifying. Perhaps the reason I'd be reminded of the game structure by a celt and not a lamp is because lamps are everday, Celts are odd. And kind of laughable when they wear their checked trousers. Seriously, extrapolating from a name to an idea is silly - the concept of a T2 pagan is totally different to the concept of a celtic pagan. It seems the only reason one could come up with a celt is in order to retain the tie to the name pagan - if you want to use a different concept, there's no need to keep the name like that

oDDity has a point as regards women - we can't just put women in guard positions for the sake of it, there has to be a valid reason for doing it. The fact that it looks ever-so PC is not a point in its favour.

But it's supposed to be similar? The reason I don't want to think 'Celt' is because celt is our world. Whatever these guys are should not be something that's plainly based on our world. It'd be like dressing up the Hammerites in cassocks and dog-collars. For a start, if this is NOT Thief, why are we going for celts. We've taken the name from Thief and used something based on that. Surely what should be happening is taking the role that the pagans in Thief took, and extrapolating sideways, as it were. In other words, inventing something new, that doesn't remind me I'm just playing a game, but that evokes similar feelings to the pagans from Thief. Well... If you think those pagans were crap, then perhaps not similar feelings, but hopefully you catch my drift. I'm not trying to suggest anything specific for the pagans, but something so clearly based in reality doesn't ring true as part of a fantasy world.

Ethnic soup = teh gud. Games need more grit, more depth, and some guard yelling racist abuse at people does that. As long as it's not one note 'bash the foreigners' - i.e. you could have the poor people from land y, and the rich merchants from y, who happen to be treated very differently. Or those from land x are inventors and supply parts to the Guild, but Zs are outcasts who get spat at. All this gives the feeling of a world beyond the edges of the screen. Most games you play stop at that edge, but Thief has a tendency to not. I'd like pagans to be similar, but not too similar, to TDP pagans. IMHO, the wolf-head idea isn't so hot, but the pagans - made darker and more twisted, instead of comedy sidekicks - were good. Looking celts is silly, though... That's not pagan, it's celtic. If I saw that "elite pagan" in game, I wouldn't think, "pagan," I'd think "celt." Sure, include celtic elements, like blue body-dye or whatever, but replace the checked clothing with something a little more original!