OrbWeaver

A couple more models... http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/5650/chair8xi.jpg http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/446/chairhi5vo.jpg (High-poly rendering of chair model) http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/2198/table3tg.jpg http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9382/tablehi0pi.jpg(High-poly table model, vertex cols but no skin) http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/7587/scene6wq.jpg Apologies for somewhat low-res screenshots, I cannot get D3 to take them in anything other than 1024x768 without AA (even if graphics mode is higher).

Yes it is certainly the case that FM makers need to optimise their maps (just like with TDS). You need to turn off shadows if individual lights don't need them, avoid overlapping light volumes, subdivide large surfaces if they are illuminated by many lights (more than 3), use caulk wherever possible, keep the on-screen polycount down to a sensible value (about 60k - 70k is recommended) and use visportals to divide the map into zones. Doom 3 is more optimised than TDS, but the editor won't do any of these things for you - authors have to take responsibility themselves for making the map run well.

Yeah sure - there is plenty of open source software that is exceptionally high in quality. However if a commercial offering was to remain successful it would need to have at least one redeeming feature that was not present in the OSS version (although in many cases that "feature" is services & support), or perhaps be better suited to a specific task or situation (i.e. Apple Macs are very popular with graphics designers and musicians).

I should certainly hope so - it would be sort of embarassing if the commercial offering was inferior to the free alternatives.

I find it amusing that according to the IBP pricing guide you pay more money to remove a tiny two-line copyright notice than you pay to use the software in the first place.

Plus with D3 we'll probably get the sourcecode anyway in a few years.

Had a go at the shoulder pad in Blender just for fun. It was a bit more than 5 minutes and needs a bit more subdivision probably, but it came out OK. I wish Blender's patch/surface functionality was as good as what Lightwave appears to have. Blender has very good subdivision surfaces but NURBS are fairly basic and Bezier patches do not even exist.

Reliability is often correlated amongst drives manufactured in a single batch. If the two drives were identical and bought at the same time it is not improbable that they could both be affected by a fault. Maxtor are pretty reliable in my experience, you were probably just unlucky.

Fair point - I was originally intending to make it a lot rougher but I kind of liked the way it came out and stuck with it. It would be a five-minute job to change, though.

Some model shots as requested: http://img281.echo.cx/img281/8379/odrailing7hf.jpg http://img110.echo.cx/img110/1320/musrope6ha.jpg (The rope comes out slightly better in game, the screenshot is only 1024x768 with no AA so the "twisted rope" effect is reduced slightly).

Not yet, at least not within Blender itself. The best way to do this is by exporting models as ASE with the fast Doom 3 exporter (http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=10999) and using the freeware ORB RenderBump tool (http://www.pcgamemods.com/11163/). You can also export to LWO and use Doom 3 to renderbump but this gives very inferior results in my experience.

It's not really something I can imagine Carmack wanting to do - pay large licensing fees to a 3rd party for the privilege of allowing modders to use their proprietary tools. He's very much an "open formats" kind of guy. If you haven't tried Blender I suggest you give it a go - there is a steep learning curve (as with any full-featured 3D editor) but it supports both LWO and ASE very nicely and is open source, so you can't get much more low-budget than that.

I was wondering if it is possible to postpone my application. The standards of this mod are exceptionally high and I think it would be necessary to spend some time developing my skills to the point where I can make a meaningful contribution, rather than wasting people's time with "average" work. Good luck with your mod, and I hope I will be able to join you at a later date.

I'm not sure what you mean by "natively" - both D3 and Unreal support the ASE format which can be used perfectly from Blender. Of course T3 has to do things differently and use a custom-designed in-house format for meshes (presumably a design decision to optimise for - you guessed it - XBox). To those comparing the relative merits of Unreal vs Doom 3's geometry paradigm, remember that you cannot use T3Ed as an example of Unreal's limitations. T3 uses a completely separate BSP tree which takes the Unreal BSP as its input (somebody presumably knows why, although I don't), and this "Flesh BSP" is what causes limitations on BSP complexity.

Agreed. I do not use Hollow at all, I find it confusing. Instead I just block out the floorplan of the map by drawing brushes that are one grid unit thick. Then I draw out a wall, bring it up to the correct height and clone/resize it all over the place to make the wall plan. Then I select all the floor brushes, clone them and drag upwards to make the ceiling. The ability to quickly draw and resize solid brushes makes this very quick, even for fairly complex floorplans that would take a long time to create by resizing and rotating the Builder Brush in UnrealEd/T3Ed.

You are right, they do actually look pretty blurry in those screenshots. I am not sure if it is poor lighting, JPEG compression or the fact that I took them from the editor rather than the main game, so stuff like anisotropic filtering may not have been in effect. I will go back and take them again from the main game at full resolution with high graphics options enabled, and see if they look any better. EDIT: Racked up my graphics settings and tooks some more, which are a lot less blurred (I think it was image_anisotropy which was set to 1, should have been 8). http://img235.echo.cx/img235/5589/shot000178ut.jpg http://img296.echo.cx/img296/3351/shot000187qw.jpg http://img300.echo.cx/img300/7607/shot000206im.jpg

Hi all, thanks for your replies and your feedback. I agree that the textures could use more detail (I assume this is what you mean by "low-res" - they are all 512x512 or more). I will work on distressing them somewhat, and adding some more finer detail, dirt & noise etc.. I am currently working on: - More ornamentation for the corridor scenes - some columns, ceiling trims etc. - Adding detail to the wall lights, renderbumping and skinning them properly, they are relatively low-detail at the moment which is why they are only shown far away - New models w/ skins - I want some kind of font/fountain for the alcove area in the mansion shot, some more efficient chains/ropes for indoor use (those chains are about 3k polys per segment), and some railings and bannisters for mansion scenes. I will post updates to these as and when I get them done. I am not sure what sort of timescales this will involve; I don't want to do a rush job but neither do I want to "miss the boat", so to speak.

OK, that's what I thought. By "65k per portal" you meant "65k renderable at any one time", and it's up the the designer to make sure the visportals are set up correctly to effect this.

To some of your questions: 1 & 2) Importing textures into Doom 3 is creating some TGA images and putting them in a folder, with a text file to describe all their parameters. Much easier than T3Ed and you do not need any external software (other than to create the TGAs). Models are similarly easy, dump them in a folder using an open format (ASE or LWO), which you can export to from loads of free and commercial applications. 5) I never liked Dromed, but I did like T3Ed (in terms of the actual editor interface). Radiant is probably somwhere in between, it is not quite as nice as UnrealEd but it gets the job done. One thing you have to get used to with Doom 3 is the different workflow for creating levels - there are no subtractive brushes, everything is additive, which takes some adjustment if you come from an Unreal/Thief editing background. 8) Yes. Doom 3 can handle much more than Dromed. On my Radeon 9800 XT I can have a scene with upwards of 150k polys with dynamic shadows and it still runs at 1280x1024 at 25 fps. I can't answer your other questions as I am not a Dark Mod developer, however in general the Doom 3 engine kicks serious ass compared to the Thief engines. (BTW your English is indistinguishable from most native speakers).

Doom 3 lighting is amazing. Behind that unobtrusive looking "texture" dropdown lies a wealth of programmable lighting flexibility. It just gives the impression it is limited because most of the power is in the light shaders (text files), rather than in exposed properties in the light editor as with T3Ed.

Does that take into account the fact that you may be rendering more than one visportal at once? If you have two adjacent portals with 75,000 tris each, you may be able to see 150,000 if you stand in the right position.