Ratty

I have visions of him hiring his perfect team. They're all chummy, get along well and share the same vision. Great! You can't deny this is the ideal working environment. Who wants to have to work with people you hate? Guess what? That's life. Creative people can be complex. One day there's a disagreement. Someone feels a little too passionate about his idea for the game. Or someone accidentally takes Harvey's sandwich from the fridge. Whatever. Suddenly there's tension. Oh No!!!! Harvey's uncomfortable. THAT MUST NOT BE! Team cohesion is suffering. The quality of the game deteriorates. The sandwich-stealer must be fired! A team-member finds themselves in the middle of a divorce. They become depressed and withdrawn. Spending long hours at the office absorbed in their work. They don't laugh at Harvey's jokes, except sometimes a little in that afraid way ... They don't go out for beers with the gang. That person is a downer man and MUST DIE! Ah, now I have to go hunt down that interview just to show you guys. It came across as a little bitter and self-important. At least that's what I saw in it. My lip curled up when I was reading it but maybe that was just me. Harvey is icky I tell you. On edit: I noticed this in the SL interview: Increasingly, I am into team culture and creative direction. I see he's calling it team culture now. But we know what he really means. So, along with some really talented allies, I am going to start a game studio in Austin, Texas. Allies, eh? The man is looking at his work partners as enemies or allies. Doesn't this raise red psycho flags for anybody else??

Hey I just jumped into Second Life today for the first time. What are some cool things to do? As far as Harvey Smith, he seems like a scary guy to me. I think something's wrong with him. I've read more than one interview with him where he states, in so many words, the most important thing to him in designing a game is to have a team of people he likes and gets along with. The world is divided into cool people and uncool people, and if he had his way he would never associate with uncool people. That's a shit attitude if you ask me.

Whee! Great news. One of you guys should write a small, personal essay of what it's like right now to wander around your maps and do stuff. Put that up as your next update.

I was thinking about all the assets and code that has to go into building a game from scratch. Lots of little things a person never thinks about, even a mapper working with a complete game. All the animations, the little sound effects, particle effects, footsteps. We think about the big things like the new character models but not always the little things. So are you guys able to play a TDM map yet and actually have a little fun? Not everything is there by a longshot I know, but can you put AI in there that act reasonably well and sneak around them and steal stuff?

I love apropos

It's a matter of knowing your audience. Man pages, as written, have their place. It's the attitude of those who think they're sufficient for all people and circumstances that pisses me off. There is a prevalent belief that if you aren't a programmer and aren't comfortable with man pages then you simply don't belong on Unix and that pisses me off more. Befgore I was a programmer I spent a lot of time on Unix. You don't need to be a programmer to want to list files, copy or rename them. You don't need to be a programmer to need to understand file permissions or even redirection and pipes. I don't know about you, but I've seen perfectly earnest people posting intelligent questions on internet newsgroups only to get shouted down by a horde of hysterical RTFM responses and snide condescending quotations from relevant portions of a man page--as if a drippingly sarcastic tone of voice makes things sooo much clearer. Me, I've been on the internet since the 80s and I know to simply ignore people like that. I'll usually find one or two helpful people. But a lot of people take such things personally, either by getting angry or getting hurt and thinking maybe they aren't smart enough. I guess I've always interpreted the Dummies monkier more as anti-snob than anti-intellectual.

That is true. However I think that often such disdain is warranted and well-deserved. There's a fine line between intellectualism and snobbery. I've known incredibly brilliant people of both persuasions, the former are fun, the latter insufferable. Case in point: I've been a professional programmer for nearly ten years. I've worked in both Unix and Windows about equally in that time. Unix culture is insufferable while Windows culture is far more relaxed (and I won't go near Linux culture). In Unix, programs and documentation are written for programmers, in Windows they're written for users. I don't know how many times I've snorted in disgust trying to make sense of Unix documentation. They call it "concise and clear" while normal people call it opaque and terse. I'm reminded of the trademasters or yore who couched their craft in mystery and spookery to both elevate themselves and their profession and horde their knowledge from ordinary folk. And I consider myself lucky in the extreme if they deign to provide an actual example or two. /usr/bin/ls [ -aAbcCdfFgilLmnopqrRstux1 ] [ file ... ] (And I can't help but mention here one of the things I've admired about the Dark Mod team is how down to earth and unsnobby you all are. Knowledge is shared gladly, nothing is meant to seem mysterious or arcane) Compared to this I wield the term "Dummy" as a badge of pride, just as you describe Maximius. When I document a program I do it in HTML with lots of examples, screenshots, "quick start" tutorials and detailed down and dirty descriptions. I've never written a man page in my life. I've never written a [ -aAbcCdfFgilLmnopqrRstux1 ] [ file ... ]-style summary and never hope to. My community is XML for librarians and archivists consisting of heavy-duty and casual programmers, as well as complete non-programmers in small college repositories and historical societies who must wear many different hats and keep up with the latest technology as well as they are able with little or no support. And I laugh out loud when I see some of the tools released by the programmers for everyone else to use. First make sure you have the latest Java Runtime installed, adjust your classpaths, install the latest MSXML and Saxon, open a Windows command prompt, cd to the directory containing your files, type in /install/path/program_name -o option1 option 2 option 3 option 4 option 5 filename.xml > output file. Simple, no fuss! At conferences I've been astounded how surprised everyone is that some people dare to complain about how overly complicated everything is. I've visited small libraries and archives and listened to depressed professionals cry about how technology is passing them by. They hear again and again how "simple" things are and they begin to actually believe it. And it's so unnecessary. I've written community tools, packaged them into complete, self contained installation packages. No need for Java or Saxon, or classpaths. No unzipping things in specific folders or cd'ing to specific directories. No complicated command line invocations ... a simple, clean user-interface with generous documentation. I make it available on an actual, real website, not Sourceforge, ha ha. I pride myself on the name I've made in the community as a--get ready for it--Champion of the Little Guy! Snobbishness in its own right, I know. But hey, I'm not perfect. In some eyes I know this makes me exactly the anti-intellectual you complain about Maximius. You don't know how many times I've seen eyes roll when I mention I create documentation in HTML rather than man or pod format or whatever. Fuck you all I say! A Dummy needn't be stupid. He can just be the little guy looking for a break.

Yeah, dream on. Nothing like that at all. Fidcal, there's an awful lot of used copies at Amazon USA, $4.19 for the cheapest. I'm not, in general a Dummy, but there are some things where I gracefully admit stupidity. I think oDDity takes himself to seriously? Hasn't there been ANYTHING in life you tried to learn about and found it exceedingly difficult while others seemed to take to it with ease? If I ever need to repair a car, I mean REALLY needed to do it myself, I don't think there'd be a Dummies book in the world that could explain it to me simply enough. I guess in such situations most of us say "Gosh, I feel so dumb" while others say "Bah! It's not worth doing!" As I work with the book I'm liking it more and more. I can definitely recommend it for beginners. The black and white editor screenshots are REALLY hard to make sense of though. They should have enhanced them, made the brush lines darker or bolder or something.

Got my copy from Amazon yesterday: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047003746...6490020-7992016 The Doom 3 editing video tutorials were very helpful to me and got me started. But having a book open while I'm working, well there's just nothing better than that. I've even learned a couple of interesting things in just the hour or two I spent flipping through it I never managed to pick up from the video tutorials. It's a beginning book, just describes mainly the process of creating a map, the brushing, placing entities, lighting, creating textures. You won't find advanced scripting help or the like. If you're already familiar with mapping, even from something like Dromed, much of it is tedious and boring. A lot to skip through. A lot more if you're already somewhat familiar with Radiant mapping. I haven't read enough to recommend it yet, though I'm glad I bought it, personally. Really so far I wish it was a bit more streamlined. The lessons on creating a map are so detailed that it's easy to lose track of the process drowning in all the minutiae.

Actually it's a Star Wars Endor ripoff more than trail of blood (although it *is* in the "Maw"). There's no ground at all, that's way down deep in darkness. I'm still playing around with the canopy but simple blackness gives me the mood I want--an isolated universe of infinitely long trunks floating in blackness--though it's a tad boring, I'm still looking into branches, maybe a a real canopy with hints of the starry night sky peaking through ... I can't decide! I'll probably run bpth version past a few people when I've gotten far enough to get a better opinion. It's mostly eye-candy. The player doesn't move around in it much more than looking out over it from their balcony so that makes things a lot easier. I don't think there would be a need to close off portals based on foggy distance since the player will be constrained to a relatively small area (though there will be other foresty areas that the player can move around in but these need not be so vast. Such a technique might come in handy there though). Everything will be lit with non-shadow casting lights--that's a good tip. Only a small area needs to have realistic lighting. What texture should go on the distant walls? (The space is just an enormous cube) Since the effect is for everything to disappear into the blackness would plain black work just fine? Any other things as far as the texture goes that i should keep in mind?

Picture this, a dark forest. The canopy disappears into mist and darkness above, the forest floor is invisible in the mists below. All you see are trunks. Huge vast trunks, several with large multilevel treehouse dwellings wrapped around them like wooden donuts. The trunks fade away into the distant mist and darkness. The only sources of detail are the low polygon trunks and high polygon treehouse trunk dwellings, but the space they occupy is necessarily vast. Still we can make do with skyboxes and other magic to extend the illusion. In Dromed there were things you could do, like for instance increasing the texture size for the sky, being clever about breaking up long lines of sight, using textures instead of brushes for distant objects you'd never get very close to. Are there similar "best practices" for Doom 3? Particularly in regards to lighting, but any other tips would be appreciated.

I'd never actually do it. I was just talking out loud about an idea. I can't imagine any kind of scenario, even in the context of really challenging the most elite of Thief players, where ultra alert enemies would be fun. I kind of liked the humorous possibilities of a warehouse full of jittery guards hyped up on caffeine but it would suck to have to actually play through something like that. I think one has to be extremely careful about "being cruel" to the player. It can be done and can be fun if well thought out. I think of all those bad FMs I've played where the designer makes a chest with a lock that takes forever to open and it turns out to be empty or contain something heavy that makes a loud noise when dropped or explodes or something like that. Just the designer's cruel little joke. Ha ha. What fun. One of my favorite "cruel" tricks ever played in a computer game was the original NOLF. In an area with an object protected by laser sensors, each pathway you traversed contained increasingly more complex moving laser beams. The first one was a breeze, just hop over one or two and turn the corner to the next passage where there were a few more lasers that were a bit harder to get past. The next to the last one was a torment. You had to time things just right, hop over this laser beam just when that other one was spweeping away from you. Took me a long time until I finally made it to a safe place. Then I breathe a sigh of relief, turn the corner, and there is the last passageway, filled with an INSANE amount of lasers sweeping up and down, across, intersecting in dozens of places--completely and TOTALLY untraversable. I just laughed so loud when I saw that. Oh you have GOT to be kidding me! I can imagine some poor players trying to get past there time and time again until they noticed, hours later, the secret panel in the floor just under their feet. Now THAT was cruel in a fun way.

Games tackle difficulty a lot of different ways. Giving the player fewer hitpoints and enemies more hitpoints seems to be a common easy way out. I always loved the way it was done in Thief. More enemies in trickier positions, higher loot requirements. In Bonehoard remember, at the higher difficulties there were more areas open to explore. I thought that was a good motivation to attempt the higher difficulties, plus it enhanced replay value. I'm always impressed with FMs that really implement good difficulties, more guards in different positions, more lights, cameras, etc. A surprising number of FMs do this! As for super sensitive guards I was toying around with doing a kind of optional mini campaign where Garrett and another thief friend of his challenge each other to do more and more outrageous thefts, seeing who was ultimately the better thief. They would leave hidden notes for one another with the challenges. It would all be from Garrett's point of view so you would only actually do the Garrett challenges, but your competitor would leave notes complimenting Garrett on how fiendish his challenge was and how hard it was to complete ... anyway, one idea I had was to infiltrate the warehouse of a certain noble businessman specializing in the import and export of kafe. Since the guards and other workers had access to as much kafe as they wanted to drink, everyone was extremely jittery, nervous and hyper alert. Not to mention scads of possibilities for funny conversations. Garrett's competitor felt this was an especially fiendish and unfair challenge but Garrett was perfectly free to chicken out an refuse to do it if he felt we hasn't thief enough. Heh. Oh, did I mention he had to get in and out without anyone ever knowing he was there? I thought it was a fun idea, a special gift for the most hardcore of Thief players, but entirely optional within the confines of the larger main campaign.

Whee! Fire Elementals almost done. My favorites! As long as those are in I'll be happy with whatever you guys release. Sounds good, scaling things back to something manageable. My first thought would be to concentrate exclusively on the technology and drop work on the assets. Let the community take that up. But it occurs to me that the people who are working on assets may not necessarily be able to work on technology, so use them while you have them. But yeah, I'd like to see something released sooner rather than later. I think it should be tech-complete though to give modders a unified framework to work under. I'd hate to see a zillion different incomplete versions propogate. I don't want to play versions where, e.g., the head bob is different, the speed is different, height of the player is different, the way blackjacking works is different. The AI should act consistently too. So don't release it before all that is done. But after that I'd say get it out there and add assets via updates as you suggest. You might want to reach out and ask for somebody to manage community-contributed assets at some point after release. So we don't end up with huge individual missions containing all the same textures and models. A typical mission could say it requires at least the Dark Mod Asset Package v. 3.0. Someone could be responsible for maintaining an "official" asset package, making sure future versions are always backward compatible, etc.

This brings me I guess to another issue involving difficulty, the target audience, and the campaign you guys are putting together. My biggest beef with T2X was that it was too easy, even on Expert. I'm not sure how to put this delicately ... Oh hell, I won't even try. Sometimes I think the T2X people took themselves too seriously, designed a game as if they were a real development house creating something intended to sell to a large market. Now at the same time I'll commend them for actually releasing something that large and impressive when almost all other campaigns like that fail for all the reasons that they do. And if thinking about themselves as if they were professional game developers is what did the trick, then more power to them. But I could see lots of places in T2X where it seems deliberate choices were made to design in easy solutions or give the player an easy out or obvious alternative path (like the countless conveniently placed air shafts in Deus Ex: Invisible War). Deliciously difficult situations where an experienced Thief player such as 95% of their audience could figure out one or more solutions were very few and far between, considering a campaign of that size. I read in the other thread about your thoughts on difficulty and I agree. The designer does not pit themselves *against* the player, the designer wants above all else for the player to succeed. It isn't designer vs. player. But I also think it's important to know your target audience and understand your niche. Your Dark Mod campaign, whatever it will eventually be, won't be sold in retail and I don't think it should be targetted for people who are new to Thief. Your audience are players who have mastered Thief and want more in FMs. Among them are people with different playing styles: I know lots of FM players like to be able to kill enemies, most don't kill but do enjoy blackjacking people, some don't harm people but aren't too worried about being detected (Lytha style), and there are of course the ghosters (who say they don't like any special accomodations built into FMs for them anyway). But they are all unified in the fact that they know how to play Thief and understand stealth gameplay. So I'm just saying that I hope the campaign you produce with the Dark Mod won't be too easy on the hardest difficulty setting. Take yourselves as seriously as you need to to finish it, but remember who your audience is above all else. OK. That's all I'm just board that TTLG has been down so long so I come here to babble.

I need four. I want a hard difficulty, except that you can kill people (like Hard), and a hard difficulty where you can't kill people (like Expert) because I know there are both kinds of players. Along with Master that's three. But I also wanted an easy difficulty (like Normal) because I know there are players that enjoy an easier experience. This is based on my experience with FMs that are too easy so I want to make a Master difficulty. But I've read more than a few gaming articles that lament the absence of an easy difficulty in many games. Some gamers are in it for different reasons: a need to just escape from life for a bit, or something to play for a few minutes when time permits. But you know, come to think of it, that really just mostly applies to retail games I guess. I'm not sure how appealing a really easy difficulty would be to FM players. Yeah, I suppose I could lose the Easy come to think of it. And anyway, how hard can a Thief game be when you're allowed to kill poeple? That's pretty darn Easy right there.

Thinking about difficulty levels. I'd like four of them. The normal Thief 3 plus an additional one: Master. That one would be really, really challenging, almost impossible. Something a retail game probably couldn't do but for an FM dedicated to other die-hard Thief players a real must-have. So my question. In Thief 1 and 2 the difficulty levels were set at a maximum of 3. I know using Doom 3 we can do whatever we want, but are you guys setting things up so that it's easy to specify the number of difficulty levels?

I used to spend quite a bit on nice wines when I went up to Napa and Sonoma. My friends would always hint that I should open some of the nice bottles occasionally and share them. Stingy old me told them no, I wanted to keep them and age them so that years later I would have these awesome wines. My oldest were a couple of bottles of fine 1981 Cabernet. Of course I didn't know a lot about wine storage, or even which wines were good to age and for how long. Last year I finally opened them up. One after another ... vinegar. Moral of the story: Actually I don't know. Don't store wine? Drink it while you have it? Friends are forever but wine, 10 years tops?

I can't imagine it's a feature you'd use A LOT, but imagine your mission starts by placing you on the grounds of Lord Buttrump's estate. From a distance you see the windows as visportal textures. As you get closer they fade to transparency allowing you to actually see in through the windows while a script triggers AI to start walking about giving the place a feeling of activity. Without distance based visportals you'd either have to make the windows opaque, ala Thief style, or be very careful about detailing the rooms into which you can see, or be very careful about detailing the grounds in which you find yourself. Or do something clever like making the rooms very very low detail and teleporting you to a high detailed copy of the mansion and grounds when you enter. But that other feature, easy ambient lighting, gosh I wish it were that easy in Doom 3.

They fade in and out of black by default. If you want a specific texture instead you have to create it and assign it yourself. As for dynamic lights, you mean if you went into a room and turned on the light but the texture you selected was of the room with lights out? I believe these types of visportals are scriptable, so you could assign a number of different textures. Billboards? Not sure how those work. My understanding is--and please please feel free to tell me I'm full of shit--these distance visportals fade in and out of opacity with distance rather than blinking on or off at some discrete cutoff distance.

I saw a link to the updated Quake 4 editing FAQ on Blues News: http://aeons.planetquake.gamespy.com/aeons.../q4_map_faq.php I was struck by two things. The first was how easy it is to add ambient lighting. The second was a feature called distance based visportals which, as I understand it, is a nice LOD technique that lets you specify an image to be swapped in when the player is x number of units from the visportal. Seems like this would let makers create some really huge open spaces, or medium sized spaces with long lines of sight and high detail. Yeah, I know. Doom 3 will be open source someday, Quake 4 won't. But those two are some really nice features it seems to me. What are the chances id will incorporate something like that in a future Doom 3 patch? I wonder if the Dark Mod could be made to work in both Doom 3 and Quake 4.

Ausgezeichnet! I think you're on heaps of crack. THAT'S right. I remember hearing about Ents. Awesome there guys.

I thought I'd heard of plans to put something analogous to Burricks into the Dark Mod. Are you guys going to add other creatures as well? My favorites from Thief are the flame elementals. There's just something about them, the sound they make, then how it changes when they see you or get angry. How much fun it is to snuff them out with a water arrow. I love them and have always missed them in Thief 2 FMs. They're just spheres with flames around them, how hard could that be for your modeller to do? I formally request that Flaming Sphere Beasts be added to TDM. Also tree beasts, um, I mean Woody Bark Monsters, would be awesome.

A 3rd person view wouldn't hurt anything if it were included (aside from the time it would take away from useful Darkmod work), but I would like to see it NOT included as a matter of petty principle. 3rd person ruined TDS and not having it Darkmod would make me feel smug. I'm sure the Darkmodsters have their own loftier motivations but I only want to hurt its feelings and make it feel bad.

I'm not dissing DoomEd. I struggled with UnrealEd for quite some time before I finally gave up on it. I got totally sick of having to scooch my mouse around to get anywhere on the map for one thing, and if there's another way to do it, I never found out what it was. Thank god DoomEd lets you "teleport" around the map like Dromed does. Don't know what it was about Dromed but I was up and running and building stuff with that in no time. Seriously, I'm having a much easier time with DoomEd than I ever had in UnrealEd but it's still a struggle.