Gildoran

Monster-clipping is absolutely necessary for any finished map that has AI. Good clipping prevents path-finding errors such as monsters falling off ledges, refusing to walk over patch/model bridges, trying to walk over hand-rails, getting stuck in corners, etc. As an added bonus it even improves path-finding efficiency. The id dev site describes it in detail. In particular, notice how much more simplified the world looks to monsters on a well clipped map: (images taken from id dev site) Clipping the level for the player is also generally a good idea, though it's most commonly done in multiplayer maps. Player-clipping helps prevent the player from getting stuck on level geometry; it's useful to prevent the player from getting stuck behind couches or from getting caught on bricks that slightly protrude from the wall.

I would guess it has a religious origin, since other commonly used phrases are "for god's sake" and "for Christ's sake". Most likely Pete is used because some christians find it offensive to reference god/Christ in exclamations ... perhaps Pete is for St. Peter?

It can be fairly convincing even if the cubemap isn't an env-shot of the surrounding room. For example, if you look at the motivational posters in vanilla D3, they all use the same cubemap to simulate glass reflections throughout the game. It only starts to look jarring if the room is much darker than the reflection. But yeah, it tends to work best if the mapper can control the area the material is in. BTW, I've seen Dram use cubemaps to very good effect... In addition to windows and tile floors, he used an envshot to provide cheap reflective water, and due to the size/position of the pond and the unchanging outdoor lighting, it looked nearly as good as real reflective water.

I didn't implement them. I believe they came with the water physics mod, and were integrated into TDM by other members (Dram?). The distorted reflections are implemented using a combination of mirrors and vertex/fragment shaders (limited programs that are run on the graphics card once per-vertex or per-pixel). For example "heathaze.vfp" is used for glass and heat distortion effects in vanilla D3, so it's well suited for water effects. There are other similar vertex/fragment shaders. The distortion effectively works by rendering the scene, then for each water pixel, you copy a nearby pixel into it. This is not the same as refraction (in fact, I highly doubt any current game supports true refraction), and it results in a whole bunch of annoying artifacts, described here. Note: I'm never quite sure how much technical detail/accuracy people are interested in... if I'm not going into enough detail, or if I'm assuming too much prior knowledge, feel free to say so or ask any questions and I'll do my best to adjust and answer what I can.

I don't think any current metal textures do that... usually relying on specular maps looks better for metal since it takes into account normalmaps and the lighting of the environment. However, at least one of our mappers likes to use cubemaps for reflections in windows and on polished shiny floors. It's pretty effective, though it tends to look overly bright if all the lights get snuffed.

I've long had an idea for a way to do real-time normalmapped radiosity, though my idea doesn't reflect light off of portable objects. The idea is that you divide BSP space into a tetrahedral mesh, and use a precalculated radiosity matrix to quickly convert light at the surfaces into the correct radiosity at the tetrahedral mesh vertices (this could be done very fast by abusing the graphics card). Then you render the scene, filling the depth buffer, and render the tetrahedral mesh, linearly interpolating lighting between its vertices (I believe it's possible to do this on current generation graphics cards, though I could only figure out how to render one tetrahedron at a time, so that may be a bottle-neck). Rendering a single tetrahedron can be accomplished by using the stencil buffer to ignore any fragments outside of the tetrahedron, then pushing the position/depth of each fragment through an inverse screen matrix and a tetrahedron shape matrix to find out how much "weight" to give to each vertex's lighting. Making the radiosity normalmapped is a simple matter of computing a low-res cubemap for each vertex instead of a single value. Ambient occlusion for portable objects would be possible also using tetrahedral occlusion meshes that are attached to the objects. I believe that for scenes with very simple BSP geometry, this could potentially be fast enough to run on current hardware.

I don't think the skybox is any more expensive than any other part of the level. Yep, they're called cubemaps. They're not only good for simulating skies, but also reflective surfaces. However, in Doom 3, they're just a texture; they don't emit any light. Although I haven't tried it, I doubt there's any problem with using a cubemapped texture as a wall for a skybox since a cubemap is just a way of looking up a texture (whereas skyboxes are actually rendered).

Did you place devil.dll in your D3 directory?

If this is the same FTP from which an outsider was able to find Thief's Den, is that wise?

It's possible to get by without any risk of damage from the spikes. Hint: (maybe spoiler if you've played T2)

That's already implemented, but the demo's key-binding menu is incomplete (it only lists bindings for the lantern, compass, etc). Surely the finished version of TDM will show bindings for all standard equipment. However, if the demo's omission of a hotkey drives you bonkers, you can manually bind it via your config file or the console. The relevant lines of thiefs_den/doomconfig.cfg are: bind "k" "inventory_hotkey Compass" bind "l" "inventory_use Lantern" bind "BACKSPACE" "inventory_hotkey" inventory_hotkey selects an item without using it, and inventory_use uses an item without selecting it. Almost any item should be selectable/usable in that fashion. For example, if you want to be able to use the spyglass by pressing z, just add this to your config file: bind "z" "inventory_use Spyglass"

Both of these problems are known. The blackjack will become easier to use and I'm under the impression that the current sword system is more or less a placeholder until somebody has time to improve it. We've been hearing this a lot, despite that the movement speeds were carefully timed to match Thief. There's been some speculation that either people aren't aren't aware of the run key or that something (perhaps footsteps, head-bob or field of vision) makes movement feel slower than it is. Any comments?

Don't forget "Sudden Floating Syndrome", where upon hitting the ground, it would randomly not set your state back to walking, forcing you to float an inch above the ground until you could find another ledge to fall over. Since sufferers of SFS are incapable of jumping, those that landed in a pit would be stuck for all of eternity. On the bright side, moving at full speed without footsteps can be useful for sneaking.

What?! You're saying Celsius and Fahrenheit aren't synonymous? Stop spouting nonsensical gibberish, lest you encourage people to believe such fantastic quackery as "Kelvin is measured from absolute zero".

Except for the pagan-speak. *shudders* Let us not think about that.

You might find these wiki sites useful: Readables tutorial XData File Creation Xdata file format

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, Unstoppable. It certainly wasn't my intent to stop you from posting about things you enjoy. I just thought posting the entire 2-page changelog was a bit ... unnecessary, especially considering that a link would have been just as informative without filling up multiple screens.

Instead of quoting the entire contents of the patch, why not put up a link to the patch so it's easily accessible (changelog and all) without cluttering the forum?

Map authors will be able to make whatever they prefer, be that medieval, Victorian and/or fantasy.

You should check out Thievery or NightBlade. I wouldn't anticipate online play from TDM; it's difficult enough to code a full single-player mod without having to worry about things like client prediction or propagating state through a network.

...just like how a real thief would get tendonitis from lockpicking too much. Ingenious! It's great not just for lockpicking, but also for getting that extra boost of speed when running away from guards, and searching for items in your backpack (actually it's only part of the backpack rummaging minigame) and something else that the thief can do when alone (here's a hint, it's synergistic with the voyeurism associated with the Thief genre).

Regarding computer-generated music, I was responding to this: Two of the problems with current videogame music are that it's highly repetitive (because there's at most an hour or two of music to fill at least 20 hours of gameplay) and that it isn't tailored to suit the situation second-for-second; I was suggesting that both of these problems could perhaps be addressed by computer-generated music. This could transform videogame music from a stolen gimmick to something more analogous to cinematic music. That simply isn't true. In the case of particularly enjoyable music, I've paused levels or delayed completing/leaving them so I could listen to the music a while longer without having to concentrate on other things. I collect favorite songs from videogames and enjoy listening to them long after I've completed or abandoned the game. I'm not saying every game should have music, just that I don't believe it's automatically a bad idea.

Unfortunately, it seems like most games interpret "dynamic music" as having a normal song and a combat song and starting one whenever the game state changes. I'd love the see a game that actually altered its music, but they tend to be few and far between... Mario 64 (and Banjo-Kazooie) faded in/out instruments based on the player position, which actually worked quite well - it altered the feel of the music enough to improve ambiance, yet was subtle enough to not feel artificial; the first time I played the sunken-ship level, I thought it was a wonderful coincidence that I entered the water or the cave right as the music appropriately transitioned. I've often thought it'd be cool to have conditionally branching music, but I don't think I've ever seen that implemented. I guess the next step up would be algorithmically generated music... I know classical music can be randomly generated by computer programs - perhaps a musician with a CS background could write some algorithms to randomly alter/branch a background theme, kind of like how Farcry has randomly generated sound environments instead of playing one long wave.

I don't know about the Sedlec Ossuary, but in many parts of Europe, the plagues left so many dead people that nobody could find enough space put all the bodies. Often they'd stack coffin after coffin in the same grave site with the uppermost coffins being as little as 6 inches under the surface. Eventually the ground in graveyards would become unstable and prone to collapse, toppling grave markers and exposing diseased rotting carcasses. When the graveyards became too full to pack any more corpses in them, they'd excavate the whole place and fill a cave or church vault with the resulting charnel, creating catacombs, ossuaries and charnel houses. Then they'd be free to start afresh, loading up the graveyards with even more corpses...

But this thread is about Terry Pratchett and his letter seems to hold a more diplomatic version of oDDity's complaint...