bardic

Heh, I guess if a sequel is greenlit the technical coders, Bob and Angelique (notice one is female to be politically correct, and french because it is Canada) may not have as much to do during the planning stages and could justify some billable hours by prepping an editor release. Given that the community has an editor for every Thief game to date, and the amazing things they have done with them, releasing an editor should be seen as a major part of the game's success and planned for from the beginning.

So since I haven't seen any of the previous talks or hints about what they were planning to release, I assume I am safe in making a guess that can be neither confirmed or denied. An Editor for the new Thief Game? I did find it odd that they would announce a modding contest, using every version of a thief like game, except for the new one. Although, like has been mentioned, the plan may have changed as it was run up the chain of command, and someone decided, let's release the editor in 6 months when we have exhausted some DLC content, and to get new people to buy the game just to edit with it (maybe in an effort to see how much revenue is generated by the editor separate from the initial sales). Of course, if I am wrong I still hope we will see an editor for it, because who doesn't like editors?

The water arrows don't grow in the sink, the owners of the arrows put them there to keep the freshness. If we are going to complain about anything it should be getting some money back for all the equipment we didn't use or carrying those forward. I always have so much equipment that I don't use in case I need it later, and then the mission is over.

I was tlking to a friend about this and he would really like to see some sort of progressive change caused by the player. Like ghosting a mission means that the next mission has conversations about how so and so was robbed and nothing else was disturbed, or killing everyone means more guards in the next mission and conversations/readables about the carnage. I think that it would probably have to be 1 mission built as sub missions, one after the other, for the players interaction to carry forward (or could one mission save certain values to an ini file and the player manually copies those to the next FM folder?) Most people would rather have 3 missions released in order, than have to wait a really long time for all 3 to be finished together just for this type of immersion gimmick.

I had an issue where my map wouldn't create a pointfile because the leak was caused by setting an external surface texture as "nodraw". Regular leaks since then have always worked right.

OK, mixed results there, but it does work. With the 32 bit Dark Radiant I can either disable Aero or go into the shortcut and check "disable desktop composition". With the 64 bit version changing the shortcut doesn't turn off Aero when the program is run. So I'm stuck disabling Aero and have to remember to turn it back on after I'm done editing. I think I will stick to the 32 bit version and when I have a big level with longer load times I may test the 64 bit version to see if it performs better. Thanks for the link.

I did some searches but seach terms for "windows 7 dark radiant" bring up all sorts of things about actual windows. I loaded up TDM on Windows 7 x64, went ok, but the first level I played was super slow (1 frame every 5 seconds or so once it was loaded). Updating video drivers fixed it, but I get something similar in dark Radiant and don't know if they are related. When I install and load the x64 or x86 versions, it takes forever for the views to respond. The grid views take a long time to come up, and clicking or dragging takes 5 minutes or more to register. Are the two related? Do I have a video driver issue, or do others have issues with Dark Radiant in 64 bit Windows 7? I loaded the editor up in a virtual XP and everything runs smoothly, but I don't think I can test things that way because of the low VM graphics. AMD Phenom X4 9600 Asus Crosshair MB Asus GeForce 8800 GTS 2x 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800Mhz Windows 7 x64, clean install

I think oDDity wants games that are so dynamic that the player changes the world based on cause and effect. Games like Oblivion do this with many quests, but the quests don't have a very big effect on the world, or an effect on the main quest/plot. The closest you come to this is probably by viewing all the Thief OMs and FMs as a single game instead of viewing them individually. Basically a choose your own adventure, but your only major choice in that situation is which mission to load up. The goal would be to have all the stories integrated into a single game, and all the possible changes to the world, and a system of making different stories available and unavailable as the character progresses (but better than the randomly generated dungeons in Oblivion). Which means combining the story and resources from 20+ full games into one, or getting an AI that can generate its own well made missions based on the play style of the user. Companies would rather release 20 different games than create one massive one if most players won't even hit 10% of that content. Forsaken said it right, it sounds like an MMO game. The goal is to cram that much content into a normal game somehow.

Maybe a separation needs to be made between the story of an individual mission, and the back story. Thief has a huge back story. We know the history and dozens of factoids about hammers, pagans, mechanists, keepers, nobles and the city watch, but it is because we have been fed small amounts of history as we played through three thief games, and a multitude of FMs. We shouldn't expect TDM to have that story in place already. We can have a basic idea, but the world will take shape as we play FMs and especially large campaigns. Also, we don't want missions that try to give us the back story all by themselves. A mission about the inventors guild could have messy workshops with objects that roll off tables at the slightest touch, wild haired inventors that are always misplacing things and won't notice stolen objects, and random midnight runs through the halls yelling about how they have figured out some difficult problem. Add some conversations and inner dialog and you have told the player all about inventors without a single readable. It's like a story that can't be transferred to a book, and yet everyone knows who the characters are. By the way, I'm really enjoying this thread.

I don't know if you should disable that moss/door thing. If I have spent hours trying to find a key, I want the sound muffled when I start banging my head against the door.

The more I think about my gameplay style, the more I think I lean towards oDDity's views (if I am interpreting them correctly). The story leads me and lets me know what I need to do, but doesn't shape my experience as much as my own imagination. For me it's all about immersion. The cutscenes are usually more about how they set the tone using graphics, music, and the character's voice, and less about what is being said. The textures and shadows in the level set the mood more than a readable. And the gameplay makes you feel like you are the character whether you are playing as Garrett or playing an FM as some other hero. Like others have said, one of the main problems with Thief 3 was the gameplay in general. Thief 1 and 2 were smooth while running and jumping, mantling, turning while crossing a beam, and fighting. That really goes such a long way in keeping you enthralled by the world around you. Thief 3, on the other hand, is clunky. The control is terrible and breaks the immersion. Part of the problem with Thief 3 is just the way the unreal engine was re-programmed. Even on a fairly decent system the gameplay had tiny speed issues. Like microscopic freezes while running or when attacking. Barely noticable, but enough to spoil the effect. I've loaded it on my new system, and while it still has control problems, it runs smoother and is more enjoyable because those tiny little annoyances are gone. I played through several FMs like "The Bridge" and "Cabot" and there was an amazing difference. I'm getting off topic, but basically I think the level and gameplay make the mission. Even without a storyline, or a very small backstory, people develop their own perceptions as they play. Almost all of us have played thief and have that common background. If someone who has never played thief sits down at a computer running a fan mission or the dark mod, would they mold the story around something they knew, like Dragonlance or Lord of the Rings? The author can guide the reader with a story, but people will still surround that with the imagery they have in their minds. For me that will probably mean that when I play missions in TDM, I will still be myself as a thief, and instead of people calling me by the nickname Garrett, they will call me by some other nickname (for some odd reason).

Good article, kinda tempting to get one some day. As for the mod, People have already made Haptics mods for Halflife, and it sounds like some are planned for Quake4 and QuakeWars. I think somone else will get one made for the Doom3 engine eventually, and then anyone who wanted it badly enough could add the extra tactile responses for TDM and make it a separate download for people who could use it. It would be pretty cool, and I don't know that the Dark Mod team would need to do anything extra for it to work.

Well, if someone would write a webform and database for it the coders could update it with a checkbox on an item and their name. 2 seconds max. You could have prizes of money and women to the person who completed the most tasks each week. I guess you'd need to keep people from abusing it too, so only a few people could add tasks. Anyone who posts things complete that aren't gets a flogging, And I guess we should make the person who completed the least get a flogging or two also (hey, workd for Egypt with those big triangle thingys)

Yeah, Oddity would beat me to it. (edit man, 2 more people are faster than me) I agree with him, make a normal of a high res model and use that on a low res/optimized one. Here's a quick one I made from the first pic. in Max make a plane, increase the segments, use the displace modifier. Then make a normal and optimize your mesh.

Have you tried fractalizing some small spikes and then putting those around a low poly oblong sphere? the inner part doesn't need to be high poly because you can't see that when the texture is done right with transparency and things. But the jutting spikes will show up good against the sky or a building. Or take what you have and subtract the center with a low poly sphere, to keep the uniformity but reduce the inner poly count