OrbWeaver

Learning Dromed before Doom 3 would be like learning C before C++. Unhelpful and counterproductive. Playing a lot of Thief-style levels is certainly a good idea, as well as developing fundamental skills in modelling and texture creation.

There's an EDITOR for THIEF ????!!!!!

I noticed that one as well. I think he's right in as much as modding becomes increasingly time-consuming as the standards set by the original game go up, but I hope that Carmack doesn't adopt a "it's too complex for you" attitude towards modders the way Warren Spector did with T3.

Great-looking water can already be done in Doom 3. Functions like MegaTexture could probably only be implemented once Doom 3 is open-sourced, unless there was enough fledgling code already to make it work (which is unlikely).

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?...334234&from=rss From what I can make out, the MegaTexture is just a very large texture that doesn't go into VRAM, and then some logic in the engine picks out the portions of the large image that should be rendered depending on which parts of the object are in view.

I may not have created anything spectacular in Blender, but plenty of people have. Whether Blender has a similar interface to other "mainstream" apps is almost entirely irrelevant, since the skill in modelling is not knowing the specific interface of the 3D app, but knowing the techniques involved in creating an advanced model which are the same in any modeller. In fact, once people actually get to know Blender's interface, rather than blowing it off because it doesn't have standard widgets and configurable keyboard shortcuts (the horror!) they find it is actually very streamlined and allows you to get work done with very little hassle.

Milkshape better than Blender? Why pay hard cash for a low-poly-only modeller when you can have a professional-quality high/low-poly modelling tool for absolutely goddamn nothing?

You don't need to wait for Dark Mod to do this, you can model and texture it into Doom 3 now.

Everybody likes new, groundbreaking 3D interfaces that utilise the full range of your body's motion to communicate with the PC. For the first 10 minutes, that is. I wouldn't like to imagine what my arms would feel like after a 2 hour gaming session using such technology.

It's better to hold it further to one side or even slightly behind you, so that the light source does not enter your FOV at all.

It amuses me in TV and films when a character is searching with an oil lamp or other omnidirectional lightsource, and they spot something and hold up the light in front of them to get a better view. I can confirm from experience that in this situation you would see nothing except for the light source itself.

ascottk might be worth a try as well, he has done some retexturing work in T3 and recently expressed an interest in migrating to TDM.

Nobody is disputing that this in real life, the existence of a object's silhouette implies that some light is hitting the object. Grinningman's assumption was that this is also true in the Dark Mod lightgem code, which is incorrect. The lightgem only responds to light which falls on the player directly from an in-game light source, not theoretical light reflected off other game surfaces.

Grinningman is correct in a purely pedantic, literal way, in as much as the existence of a silhouette entails a difference between light that intercepts (and therefore "illuminates", if only very slightly) an object and light which doesn't. This is nevertheless merely a semantic debate that has no relevance to the actual issue, which is whether the lightgem in its current incarnation automatically takes care of silhouettes (it doesn't).

I think you are overestimating the amount of skill that is out there. I would glady make textures if I had the time (hell I even applied at one point), but unfortunately I am just not that good at making textures. OK, but not that good. The problem is that once you learn a couple of simple techniques in modelling, texturing or whatever, you are immediately seized by the notion that you absolutely rock at modelling or texturing, just because you can produce stuff that you wouldn't have thought possible before you started (I've been there myself). Unfortunately, this applies to everybody else as well, which means that your own work is in fact pretty average. The result of this is that there is a big discrepancy between the number of "modellers" and "texture artists" who drop into the forums, and the number of actual talented individuals who can make a real contribution.

Moving onwards and upwards, apparently.

It depends on the environment too. I can just about see the dark areas on my bright LCD in a dimly-lit room, but I wouldn't bank on being able to see much on a standard CRT in a brightly-lit office, for instance.

That's the bit that always infuriates me. Useless bimbo girl gets chased by killer. Useless bimbo girl has sudden fit of non-bimboness and hides in wait for the killer, then when killer approaches, bimbogirl makes a single feeble attempt to strike/stab/shoot the killer, then sits down and cries with back to the body. Killer is not really dead and gets up again. The total failure of "victims" in films to aggressively seize their one moment of advantage and gain the upper hand is an extremely annoying cliche.

I actually wonder whether the "instant knock-out" effect should be abandoned in favour of something more realistic and suitably low-tech - either extreme choking and blindness as with an acidic gas, or delayed collapse and incapacitation as in an asphyxiant. I suspect this would be too contentious for the core toolset, but would make an interesting addition for FMs.

No it's not, it's called presenting an argument by analogy, and actually sums up the core of this debate rather well, which is that adding a game-level feature to cover one or two specific (and fairly uncommon) map situations is not generally a good idea.

There are plenty of reasons why a cave might be full of dead bodies - many of the existing missions feature caves with bodies of people who have died of starvation or zombie attack. It is entirely unreasonable to expect a player to deduce that a cave full of bodies indicates invisible poision gas, when in previous experiences he has entered such caves quite happily without suddenly dying for no (apparent) reason some time later.

Absolutely. One has to consider what a particular feature adds to the gameplay, and this one adds nothing.

This isn't a mining rescue simulation. We don't need an accurate mechanism for poison gas detection and avoidance. As ZylonBane said, it would be a suitable design decision to assume that all killer gas was visible and odourous, so that the automatic holding of breath was justified and reasonable. If you have ever had the misfortune to inhale a small amount of such as gas (I accidentally inhaled some NO2 when tipping a testtube of some reacting substance into a sink) you will realise that taking a complete breath is not even possible - you stop inhaling the minute the gas enters your olfactory system. Also, having a "Hold breath" key from a gameplay perspective is like holding up a large neon sign saying "This game contains poison gas traps!!!".

Is it not the case, however, that the sort of features that are implemented without discussion are the sort of features that would never have stimulated much argument? Otherwise the developer probably would have discussed the idea beforehand, in order to avoid working on a feature that nobody wanted.

Are there any examples of such features from past experience?