OrbWeaver

It is a related issue actually - as you say the camera does not need to go past the vertical in the "pitch" direction in order to address every point on the sphere, so generally this does not become a problem. I imagine you could get round this problem by ensuring that whatever transformation is applied to the direction vector is also applied to the up vector.

Freeware usually refers to the sort of small, freebie software applications you get on magazine coverdisks. It is typically written by one person and is not available under an open-source licence, although the binary is distributed without charge. FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) is available under an open-source licence whereby the users are granted the right to modify and distribute the software at will. Free Software has the added restriction that users are not allowed to make proprietary, closed-source derivatives of the original software, whereas some Open Source licences (such as the BSD licence) do allow this.

Water does not need any kind of additive blend. It should be a filter blend that darkens whatever is beneath it, plus the reflection which gives the impression of illumination by reflecting lit surfaces above it.

A camera actually needs two vectors - the direction vector and the up vector. My guess is that as you approach the vertical position, the camera tries to orient itself so that both the up vector and the direction vector are pointing "upwards", thus causing the rotation. Once you are past the vertical, the camera would in fact be upside down so it flips over so that the up vector is still pointing "upwards". There is a problem that sounds a bit like this in Blender, when you extrude a profile along a path and it approaches a point where it is travelling vertically and then back on itself - the profile will flip 180 degrees as the up direction gets changed.

Minor nit: open source != freeware. Tor seems good but the problem is it is prohibitively slow for many things, due to the requirement for your traffic to pass through an encrypted tunnel of 3 randomly-selected international servers before it reaches you.

Anybody who uses IE loses the right to complain about pop-ups. Seriously, that's like going to a malaria-infested zone without any jabs and complaining about the ensuing sickness.

You should check the console tab in the editor, it provides useful clues: Changing "specular" to "specularmap" fixed this (commited to CVS).

That's how it was modelled, there is no bottom half to those rings. It seems to work out OK if you put it on the floor, just means that the fence is shorter than the gate but this doesn't look too bad in practice (makes the gate stand out).

The reason there are four different materials is that the UV-map is not unique, therefore you can only use tileable, repeating textures. By having separate materials you can add more variety by using a different texture for the individual components. If you would rather use a single material, just edit the ASE in notepad and change all of the *BITMAP lines to the same value.

They can still access the forum in general, just not the Applicants forum. I would have thought that suddenly being able to see Contributor Tasks or Level Editing would be a pretty big hint that the application was successful, even supposing that they weren't actually informed as such.

I've checked in the irongatesegment.ase as well as the latest version of architecture.mtr which contains all of the materials for these objects.

I suppose the idea is that once someone's application is successful they become a contributor/beta mapper and no longer need access to the applicant forum.

It works ok in my local workspace, I'll check the CVS version as soon as the CVS server starts responding again.

As a European it is typically difficult to empathise with a culture that holds the possession of a deadly weapon to be a constitutional right. Nevertheless, I have tended to become more sympathetic as I read about the constant slide towards fascism that is happening in the United States. Guns may not make for a civilised culture, but when the Thought Police come knocking on my door I'd sure as hell rather go out in a blaze of glory than sit in some jail cell wondering whatever happened to that thing called "freedom".

Sure, I'll have a look at it. Presumably it can use the same texture anyway.

Not so taken with the people myself. At least here you can have a mature disagreement, on TTLG it doesn't get far before "omg stfu j00 suck l0l!!!!"

I tend to agree. It's a long time since I remember there being any interesting dicussion on TTLG, either in the Thief forums or the general ones.

Yup, I'll do this tonight. I think we should have a rule that non-UV-mapped unskinned models should not be committed into the models/darkmod tree. Perhaps there could be an extra repository for WIP/untextured models, but having them in the main tree is confusing and useless to mappers.

As I recall, there is a key you have to set to tell Doom 3 to actually start playing the animation. I don't remember the name but it should be documented in the editor help for func_animate.

I have fixed the model and added a basic rusty metal texture. I cannot claim to be much of a skinner but the model is now UV-mapped so is free to receive a better texture if required. The UV-map is non-unique which means it will only accept tileable textures, but there are 4 submeshes which may be given independent materials - the main gate, the spikes on the top, the rings at the bottom and the curly thing.

Just don't let a modeller hear you say that - it is a very good way to completely wreck a model from the point of view of symmetry, smoothing and UV-mapping (in Blender at least the UV data is erased by using this function).

Successfully imported and again - no UV map. Is something wrong with my Blender setup or do half of these models not have a UV map? EDIT: Just opened the ASE in notepad and yup, there is no UV map for this object, I'll have to create one myself in order to solve this problem.

I have tried importing the candlestick1.lwo and it imports fine, however there do not seem to be any UVs on the object (the material names are ok). Can anyone with LightWave confirm whether there is supposed to be a UV map on this object? If so, then there is a problem with the LWO import script.

You don't require a Python installation to use Blender itself, but it is required by some scripts. I recommend installing ActivePython, and making sure that you can run "python" from a command prompt before using these scripts.

I don't think you should be seeing that message, I certainly don't get it. Can you open up a command prompt and type "python"? Do you have Python installed? I've never touched that field, I didn't even know it existed. I'm pretty sure that if that needs to be set, it should be set to your Python installation not the scripts folder, but in my experience having Python in your Windows path (and possibly setting the PYTHONPATH variable as well) should be sufficient to run these scripts.