firoso

true, I was thinking about the silloetting thing and that this would solve it but on 2nd thought I was too close to the issue and misse some realy obvious things.

this has probably been covered but... is there any way to read the light levels across polys on the player model? cuz that would give a very accurate light gem reading (kinda bothered me about this in thief 3)

end this line of discussion right now. I am extremly offended by it and disagree on many points but the main point is discussing it is not only off topic but just plain offensive to many people, get back on topic or don't talk about it please.

wow.... I started a decent thread :-) *shudders and watches for flying pigs*

yea basically, with a few tweaks and not nearly as effective, it's more about overbrightening than HDR, WOW uses bloom as well but at least it looks good in WOW.

erm... actually bloom is quite a bit different.. bloom basically takes brighter areas that are offset against the dark and make them kinda bleed the light outward effectively glowing... it's a subtle effect that uses shaders and I'm not sure I like it because it kinda makes the dark vs light problem worse by making light areas even brighter so it's harder to see dark areas, i've had to physically hold a hand over a lit area of my screen before so i could see.

Wow... I really like that Idea Domarius... If you ever get a screenie of this in action post it :-) would it be more like the "flare items" as in you can use it and drop it or would it be more like a Weapon (like the doom 3 flashlight without the whole bashing part) , and would this be some sort of magic lantern that only you can see the light from? (if that's possible) or will it illuminate you in such a way that you'll be easier to see? Btw Domarius, anything I can do to help, I really want to be a part of this team.

problem, one the monitor only takes up part of your field of view, and 2 the type of light put off by a monitor counteracts this effect, granted this is true to some extent, but not completely.

well i doubt a Screen light level analysis every 1/4 of a second or 1/2 second would seriously impact preformance much... like if the average light level over the last 50 shots was 50 or so (of 256) rampu up the gamma to make it 75 over the course of say... 10 seconds or so.

YES, exactly what i'm getting at, effects like that, tho the second one would probably be more scripted than a game feature, but yeah if you slllooowly ramped up the gamma in darker areas then it would be believeable and yet you could still play the game without washing out the light areas.

thanks Ombrenuit, I'm an amature game designer myself but i don't think I have much to contribute besides ideas. I'm only an intermeddiate coder and a horrible artist. I've got a little experiance with world design in Worldcraft/hammer back in the Q2 and HL days but i'm very out of practice and what's worse is the Doom editor, I hate the way that Z is manipulated and the general feel and layout, now if somone made a doom 3 ediotr with the same feel of worldcraft i'd be all over it, especially because I do think that conceptually I have alot to give to the dark mod in the way of missions and story, but I may be a picky pain in the butt, I really can't deal with the damn editor. if anyone has any suggestions tho let me know. actually i've been thinking about that gamma increasing effect, and i dunno how much control doom 3 has over it but adjucting the CONTRAST may be a better idea so it doesn't overbrighten the brights and instead increases the dark levels to a higher level of brightness... BTW I don't know if it's been said at all or not... do we get the OH SO LOVELY (meh...) TDS mechanical eye?

hmm all fair points and I must say very well spoken, one effect I would like to see however for various reasons which I think are rather obvious, but if the player stands still for a few seconds I do believe that the gamma should slowly lighten a small amount, it makes it easier to see in those EXTREMELY dark areas that frustrate us, granted I could just raise my gamma a bit but in my experiance raising the gamme just amkes the game seems washed out and unrealistic :-/ so I like to avoid that.

one thing I realized while playing a game of capture the flag in real life on my college campus a few weeks ago is that you stand and look at somthing in the dark for a few seconds that things seem to clear up just a little more, become a tiny bit brighter so to speak, this effect is due to sustained imagery to a dialated pupil, basically the image will be "baked in" to the retina. This could translate to TDM in a few ways. first, take a snap shot every .n seconds and take a general light level reading from that (not sure if this is easy or requires a great deal of processing power, but on modern hardware i'd imagine not) and then take that compared to the last 10 or 15 samples and curve the gamma accordingly to accomadate for the shrinking and dialation of the pupils. A similar effect could be attached to guards coming from the light into a dark area or vice versa, if a guard is standing in a well illuminated area and looking out into the darkness he's much less likely to see the thief than a guard already standing in darkness. By the way this is random but for a challange, try ramping up all the sensory settings in default.ini in thief:DS to around 3 or 4 (vision etc.) and have a go, it's way more realistic. Quite fun really :-P Feedback please!

well this is all good feedback, kinda what i was hoping to hear actually. I'm glad a lot of progress is being made. I really hope to see a gameplay video of all this new content soon, so far i'm more than impressed with TDM however.

Just as a thought, the stereotypical thief is male yes, but a female has the natural agility and light frame that make for an ideal thief so that is why I suggest that a female thief model and sound set be made for mappers that want to center a story around a female char. Feedback plz k thx.

wow.... i want to frame that and put it on my wall. can you do us a favor and tell us what's currently under development then? and is there any way that I can help, cuz I can't model, skin, or map. I can write but it looks like you have plenty there, all I'm really good at is coming up with UI and interface stuff which isn't exactly a problem for you all, that and fleshing out game worlds i'm not bad at being an amature game designer myself

well you'd all know better :-P Just a thought that i figured I'd share. One more thought that i had at work tonight, but is the engine far enough along or even close to far enough along to have a "training map" kinda like training in thief 1? i mean you'd only need the basic inv system, basic detection methods and maybe readables or somthing like that, just thoguth that'd be a cool preview in the future.

It seems to me that the success of many mods is based on public interest. my suggestion is take a bunch of screenies and have sort of a pic of the day section, even it it's just a texture, or anything like that to show us somthing we haven't seen, even if it's just one of the guard models from a different angle... you could prolly take 20 or 30 in just 10 minutes and keep a months' worth of pics... but yah, you're gaining interest here fast, but you're losing it slowly over time, you need somthign that people will keep checking back often but as is, the forums are slow, aand news posts are very rare, but if you posted somthing, ANYTHING once a week, even if it's a link to a forum thread of interest etc, you could keep public interest up... just my 0.02 worth.

I dunno if anyone has seen the virtual displacement mapping mod (paralax mod) for doom 3, this mod if properly used with custom textures could add a great amount of detail to the mod. basically it allows for artificial depth in textures that enhances the already spectaular lighting engine.