Ratty

How funny! I never thought of it that way. But it's definitely easier to build that way than the tunnel method, MOST definitely easier to change and redesign as needed, and performance didn't seem to be an issue, did it? I don't see then why that was a bad decision. Seems anything else would have been stupid. I am still struggling with DoomEd. Building anything is incredibly slow. I figure like anything it just takes getting used to, but gosh it was sooo easy to start building something in Dromed and I've been working with DoomEd for awhile and it's still a horrible, painstaking struggle. Since you brought up additive/subtractive has anyone ever tried the reverse in DoomEd? Start with a huge block of solid cheese and carve your level out of that?

They did this in Thief 1. In Thief 2 they carved out one huge honkin' space and built the entire City within that. Not saying you should do that in DoomEd--definitely not saying that--just pointing out how they did it in Dromed 2. In my own project my City has rooftop action and ground action. You have NO idea how hard that is to plan out until you actually attempt it. Rooftops that are fun to be on make for dull buildings on the ground (due to the need to restrict the line of sight mostly, but other reasons too). Interesting attractive buildings on the ground make rooftop action a lot less fun. Basically the best rooftops are on top of tall square buildings with wide flat roofs surrounded by even taller square buildings. VERY boring from the ground. I can't do the tunnel thing but settled for a City divided into rather large cubical segments with creative passageways from one to the next. I have to draw each one on paper (GRAPH paper I found out to my dismay) and pretty much spend days planning it out before I even begin to place a brush. Then usually I have to trash it and start all over from scratch.

City hub crap: I rather like the idea of a city hub as the center for a set of missions. I didn't like the way it was implemented in TDS, mostly because the hubs were so small and uninteresting, and, yes, the running around part did get a bit old. A city hub is the direction I've been going in my own DoomEd adventures. But I'm going to hijack this thread and ask a related question. I'm trying to think about Doom 3 and Quake 4, and I can't remember whether you could freely move between maps like you could in System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Thief 3, etc. Does the engine support that? I know in Quake 4 you could return to maps later but I can't tell whether it's the *same* map, with the state maintained, i.e., ammo you have collected gone, teleporters destroyed, etc. Now an almost completely unrelated question about loading times. I know you can do huge, huge maps in Doom 3 and I wonder how this affects loading times. Does anybody know yet? Is it a straightforward relationship between map size, polygons, entities, etc., and loading times? Or does something more subtle go on, i.e., immediate loading for the visible part of the map and background or deferred loading for the rest? The later Unreal Tournaments do this I believe. Parts of the map aren't even rendered until you enter them.

I can't (and sorry to get so off topic, but I'm in a chatty mood). Instead of finding yet another key to get through the massive wooden door at the end of the hallway, how about putting a couple of security cameras there and you then have to find the room with the switch to turn them off. Or in a cave someplace, instead of a key to open a locked door, what if it was surrounded by explosive frogs and you had to find enough broadhead arrows to kill them before you could get close enough to the door to pick it. Those are just off the top of my head, whatever, something like that wouldn't work for all situations and then you get dangerously close to using too many switches to control gameplay, but it represents the idea I'm trying to get across. Something new and different will always be funner than finding yet another key, or trying to open yet another door that is unpickable. And it gives the FM more variety and color. Variety is GOOD. And I'm not saying eliminate all keys, sometimes they're just what the doctor ordered. Moderation in all things, that's all. I would think of it as a challenge, an author saying to herself, the player shouldn't be able to get to this area until these things are done or my mission will break. But instead of requiring a key, how can I change it to do something interesting and fun? Even if keys *aren't* overused, it still sounds like a recipe for a better FM. OK, no more. I'm sorry to have hijacked your thread. Please carry on.

While I never liked key clutter I've always preferred the individual keys to a keychain. Their different colors, their different models (e.g., Earth key, Fire key, etc.). It seemed more realistic and you knew for sure when you found the right key (say, if you stopped playing the FM for a few days then came back to it). I always thought key clutter was a design flaw on the part of the author, not Thief's key mechanism. If your mission requires more than 5 keys something is wrong with it, key clutter or no. Using keys so much to control gameplay and guarantee a certain progression just seems so pedestrian and unimaginative. But I definitely understand your point about tension, though for me it's more annoying than tense. It reminds me of the very first time I played the Haunted Cathedral, there was this one certain locked door directly beneath a light where zombies shambled by regularly. It required 3 uses of the lockpick and I remember being scared to death and panicky as I tried to pick it and dash back into the shadows before the damn zombie shambled by again. Good times.

Yeah, very rare in FMs. Which is why I always appreciated the disappearing key after use trick to keep your key clutter down. But as for locking doors using lockpicks, I bet the ghosters would appreciate that one. Leave the scene exactly as you left it (minus the loot of course) with nobody ever the wiser.

Mixed blessings in some FMs: The author would remove the key from your inventory once you unlocked the door. It was nice not to have to cycle through so many keys you no longer needed, but there went any possibility of being able to relock the door! I too remember a few FMs where it was great fun to lock guards and monsters into a room or cell. Especially if they had those cursed helmets where you couldn't blackjack them. Even more fun if you could lock them in someplace where there were ZOMBIES!

Body awareness. How intriguing. Lockpicking was one of the few changes I actually LIKED in TDS. EXCEPT for how it grabbed hold of your body, forced you to squat down and held you there. Now if you could replicate the picking mechanics part but not assume the player is so stupid and guide/force them into a squat, that would be grand. Course maybe you can't legally do that. I have all sorts of ideas, but no doubt you guys have been discussing such things for awhile.

D3 seems like such an obvious choice to me too. I simply was never able to get into Unreal editing, as much as everyone raved about how wonderful it is (simply trying to move around the map by skooting the mouse turned me off). D3's additive approach does take some getting used to--subtractive editing is just so darn elegant--and I'm still struggling with the lighting. But man those levels load so darn fast, even the big ones. I think that's what's impressed me most about D3 so far. Plus, as people have pointed it, it'll be open source one day. Source seems interesting at first glance, facial animations and all that, blah blah, but who wants to deal with Steam? And those micro maps annoy the hell out of me, even though the transitions are short. At least they did in HL1, haven't played HL2 yet cause my home computer doesn't have an internet connection (did somebody say "crack?" I looked around at some but couldn't find one I thought might be reliable--PM me with advice somebody!) As for recommending games, give Painkiller a try. It really is rather fun and pretty cheap nowdays. It takes awhile to get into it--I put it aside for a long time then came back to it and really really loved it--but it seriously grows on you. It's similar to Serious Sam except each map is radically different in style, the weapons are better, it gives you many different ways to tackle a situation, and the tarot cards give it a great added dimension once you get the hang of them. I know, totally off topic now. Sorry, I'm bored and lonely.

I'd never heard that. It would be very cool and quite weird if true!

I love that's face! It is awesome. It is calm and very dignified. You have managed to imbue a real sense of personality in that guy. Now I just want to pop into the game, sit down and have a chat with him.

Then there's Basque. Non Indo-European, not related to any other language. A language isolate like Japanese. Finnish and Hungarian are related, like English and Latin are, but doesn't mean one can understand the other. I'm impressed by the translation attempt. It looked like complete gibberish to me!

Thank you thank you! I've been learning the Doom 3 editor in anticpation of TDM and was sick at looking at all the metal textures. Your pack will be good to give me an idea how my architecture will look in the "real Thief world" as I build it, Course when TDM is released I'll go through and redo all the textures. Some City textures especially, please? Especially the Fachwerkhäuser textures, windows, and doors. Stone and such is pretty easy to scrounge up elsewhere.

Hey, thanks sxotty! I guess I need to spend some more time checking out doom3world. That's where I got those great video tutorials. I should have known they'd have texture resources. They have a LOT of texture resources. Whee! On with learning the editor! I wish you guys had a using-the-editor forum. Doom3World's is very nice and the people are polite and helpful but I'd like to hang with my own kind (Thiefy people). Plus some questions may, even unwittingly, be Dark Mod specific. For example I'm curious about scale. I've heard some speculation that the scale of things may change. I.e., some people think the player POV is too low. One of the first things I need to do with learning the editor is get a feel for the sizes of things: how big is a typical room? How wide is a street? I know how to do this but I'm worried about the scale eventually changing out from under me when TDM is released and my maps ending up too cramped. I long ago mapped out my ideal City on paper, but when I get started actually building it I need to lay details down on graph paper with a appropriate-sized grid. That way I can closely estimate the size of the hulls for each section (Each hull will be lined with a wide wall of tall buildings to block lines of sight, this is also where most of the Thieve's Highway will be located on relatively flat rooftop areas with interesting "hallways" connecting ajacent City sections--it's all planned out). That sort of thing. Or questions like, can the Doom 3 editor do shape primitives like in Dromed or do you basically always have to carve out what you want from a multi-sided cylinder? How can you easily create a pyramid or a dodecahedron? Just like in Dromed? Does the Doom3 editor have anything like multibrushes to store brushes of useful shapes for building things like rooftops, etc.? I hope you can create a editor-learning thread for newbies to feel comfortable (and the gurus who love them).

Hi gleeful, I only want to work on geometry for now (and simply learn the editor) without worrying about textures. But I don't want to have to stare at Doom 3 metal textures for the next year or so until TDM is released. Eventually I'll just use TDM's textures to minimize filesize if for nothing else, plus I imagine they'll be a MUCH better quality than anything I could hope to ever create. I can't imagine trying to build my city without *some* idea of what things will look like properly textured. I was hoping I could just convert some textures from some other game, like Hexen 2, into .tga, maybe I have to convert to a Doom 3 palette or something, I don't know. Do you think that would work? I mean if I have to apply all of the stuff mentioned in those tutorials you listed just to get it to work, then I'm in trouble cause there's no way I could learn the editor AND spend my time fussing with textures. Even if it technically worked, displayed in the game and all, would they look so awful as to be next to useless? For now I don't care if they look bad, but if they look downright awful then I'll just have to be satisfied with Doom 3 metal for quite awhile. BTW, those links were great. I've gotten competent at creating tiled textures from my own digital photos and munging with the palette to get them to look good in games, but I've NEVER learned a thing about the various kinds of mapping artists apply to textures in modern games. I imagine when I do a level with the TDM tools I'll need to include a few of my own textures at least, and those tutorials are going into my bookmarks! But anyway, knowing what my intention is--creating something just good enough to help me visualize what I'm doing--would my approach work do you think?

Hi guys! I've been psyched about the Dark Mod since I first heard about it. Your goals are well-focussed and not too large, the chances for success as a project are really good when so many other projects of this type fail for one reason or another. I feel confident you're going to make something really great and in fact I'm getting involved now. I watched all of the Doom3 editing videos I could find and they really make a difference. It's so much easier learning the editor by watching a video than by reading even the most graphically beautiful, detailed, well-organized text or HTML tutorial. So I'm going to start my first ever room tonight, then move on to joining two rooms with a hallway, then see what I can do from there. I want to be ready when you release your toolset. I guess I have the ultimate Thief modder's dream in mind. A huge, single level city. I have had most of it planned out for a few years, actually. Streets and rooftops both. It may take me a couple of years but that's my goal. It would be great if you someday added an automap to TDM. The downside of a big city is that it's easy to get lost and confused. My idea is to organize the city into distinctive sections, each connected to one another by only one or two "chokepoints." Not only would this make it harder to get lost or confused, but it would probably be good for framerates too. I've planned the basic architecture pretty carefully so as to avoid really long lines of sight, even did a few mockups in Dromed with good results (stumbled across some tricks to make a thieve's highway easy too). These sections would be visually distinctive (slums, taverns and restaurants, a business district, civic center with lots of marble, docks, a park). That way you'd always know immediately where you were just by looking at the style of everything. And if that isn't enough, there would be plenty of very unique landmarks to keep you oriented. Sewer exit points would be labelled too so you knew where you were coming up (most of the time, heh). And of course lots of secrets. Big, meaty secret areas, rooftops and neighborhoods. From what I know about Doom 3 I could create something pretty enormous with lots of actual usable buildings with people and rooms in them and such (and not have to resort to the Dark Engine way of most building being empty fakes) and, provided it was well-planned and divided up, it wouldn't take too long to load. In reality I may not go that far due to gameplay considerations, but it's nice to know it's possible. So I imagine I can start on the geometry and that at least will be usable in TDM eventually. I'm resigned to retexturing, re-AIing, and probably relighting eventually, but that's okay. I'll probably screw the lighting up the first time anyway and want to redo it eventually when I know a lot more. Lighting sounds really tricky in Doom 3. Don't overlap light volumes, don't illuminate a single brush face with too many lights. Plus Doom 3 has no ambient lights! Yikes. That sounds like the biggest drawback to the engine. One question for now. Does anybody know of a source of decent quality medieval style textures? Either a free source, or a paid source, or even another game whose textures I can "borrow" just while I'm working. I know I'll have to retexture everything eventually anyway. I can't think of any games. Thief 3 city textures weren't really my cup of tea but I plan to look at them again. Maybe Hexen 2. As I remember it kind of had some textures like that. Oh, and I still have Daikatana around someplace, it had some good textures as I recall. Any other ideas? I'll post some newbie map pics soon.