Dunedain

Wow, what an awesome video! If I didn't know better, I'd think I was watching an early sample video for Thief IV. Great work to The Dark Mod team and to Dram for the very Thief level design!

Can't wait to see a stained glass window in a Hammerite cathedral in a fan mission. The screen shot below looks great, love that deep blue in the windows, looks sooo good! http://www.mindplaces.com/darkmod/screen33.jpeg

I'm perfectly happy with the wonderful things the DOOM III engine can do as is, no need for major alterations. I'm glad we have such a superb engine to use for The Dark Mod that will allow gorgeous and intricate Thief fan missions to be made.

Yeah, those strange creatures that were around the Maw lent a certain creepy air to Thief when you ran into them. It was like, "What are these things??". In small doses and in strange places such things are ok. Also, on the subject of models and animations and such, I'd like to welcome Oddity back. It's great to have a modeler of that caliber helping out.

I didn't mean try to pick the arrow up by the rope. I just meant that when you looked at the rope arrow after the crate had smashed on the ground from falling that you would see the rope arrow lying there amidst the broken crate and perhaps see some of the rope still trailing out of the end of the arrow, since the crate smashed while the rope was still deployed. But you would still pick up the rope arrow by frobbing the actual arrow itself, as always in Thief.

Maybe the arrow with loose rope behind it would be lying there amidst the broken crate and you could pick it up then?

I agree, it keeps it simple and more predictable. And besides, the vast majority of small crates would be rather light, so no point in worrying about rare exceptions.

Great job on the rope arrows, guys! Will crates of the same size have different weights possible? For example, there might be a small crate that you want to shoot a rope arrow into to climb up, normally this would be a problem, but this crate happens to be filled with many metal objects, so it's much heavier than a typical small crate. Could you climb up such a small yet heavy crate without pulling the crate down? The thing about dragging a crate with a rope arrow sticking in it and holding the loose end with another crate doesn't seem to make sense. If you could shoot a large crate with a rope arrow high above you and then climb up onto the crate and then pick the crate up and drag it back down some long staircase to where you were or to some other location, with the deployed rope dragging behind the crate, and then maneuver the crate so that you could walk around to the other side of of some hole in the floor or other such opening with the rope dragging over the opening but not falling through it just yet, what good would that do you? If you were able to get the crate to other side of the opening with the rope dragging behind in the first place, then there is no need for using a rope to get across the opening. hehe

Maximius: Those are some good ideas on how to handle the simulation of guards waking up after being knocked out without it looking odd. The problem is that if you've gone to great lengths to quietly knock a guard out so no one will notice and now are trying to sneak through an area with other guards and the first guard wakes back up, then all of that effort is for nothing. As he'll alert the other guards and the place will erupt into chaos with guards running all over the place looking for you. So much for your stealthy thieving operation. So, I think Komag is right on this one, it would just cause too many problems. You'd, in effect, be forced to ghost every mission, or even normal street encounters with guards in the same City district, no matter how much more difficult that might make things.

After seeing how many different enterable buildings you were making for your large Thief mission, it occurred to me that if you maybe doubled that number or so that it could include just about every place (not sure of the exact number) from Thief I, II and III that is in The City itself. Of course, some of the places like the Hammer Cathedral have quite a few rooms and would take a good bit of effort. But small places like favorite shops and fences where Garrett can sell stolen stuff are just one or two rooms and could be done pretty quickly. But, yeah, it probably would take several level designers at or near your skill level to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time, and have everything look at least as good as it does in Thief III. But like you said, if different quarters of The City were divided among different level designers, then the work could proceed in parallel at a good pace and you could add detail and great lighting all over the place to give it that polished look. Then just add guards here and there at different places where appropriate in the streets, some merchants selling apples at the local fruit stands, maybe a barkeep at the inn, so the City has some life to it and doesn't look deserted, and you're all set. The rest would be up to FM authors to add what they need (loot, guards inside certain buildings, etc.) for the specific mission they are creating. But the basic well-known parts of the City would in place. Imagine the cool depiction of The City from Thief III and how great it looks, then add onto that some places from Thief I and II that weren't included in Thief III. Then either make it one big level or, as you suggested, divide it into several large sections that are bigger (less portals, more united) than the continuous areas that the Unreal 2 engine could handle in Thief III. And that illustrates the idea pretty well. This would provide a familiar hub to operate from in Thief fan missions in TDM; like in Thief III, where part of the adventure takes place there in the city locations on Garrett's home turf, and with the other places that you need to go to on the outskirts of the city connected to by portals. This, of course, would only be a part of the City, there would be plenty of dead ends and alleys where FM authors could conveniently extend and add to it via portals that take the player to other districts in the City. Thus, the City would remain mysterious and unknown to a large degree (something I very much agree with maintaining), with only the well-known locations from Thief modeled. The rest of the City being vague and undefined, a place with limitless adventure and where new locales are always waiting to be explored.

jdude, I have to commend you on the quality of your work, one look at that street and you can tell right away this is going to be a very fine looking Thief level in TDM. I'm also impressed with the scale of the effort. Perhaps you would be the sort of level designer with the kind of skills and ability to design/create fairly fast that would be capable of modeling the city as we are discussing in this thread below. Who knows, maybe jdude will be the first level designer/FM author that will come at least fairly close to the dream of modeling The City in TDM at a high quality level. And thus, of course, attain legendary Thief fan status. hehe http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3470&st=0

They used to have that in Star Wars: Galaxies, as a natural, organic way to control the number of Jedi. And it kept the number of Jedi to at least a somewhat realistic level, since Jedi are supposed to be very rare at this time in Star Wars. Then, as usually happens in MMORPG's, they started to cater to the lowest common denominator, by first eliminating perma death for Jedi, and then making it not even hard to become a Jedi. Now anyone can be a Jedi, right from character creation even. Which means you have Jedi running around all over the place now, which greatly damages the authentic believable Star Wars atmosphere that SWG once had.

Well, he referred to the work as generic. I don't think it's generic, the quality is top-notch. One look at those hammerite/builder character models and visions of cool Thief missions immediately arise.

Domarius: It's from your own quote of oddity on page 3. QUOTE(oDDity @ Apr 29 2006, 08:26 PM) "I just feel this mod is a waste of my time and talent. I'm stagnating here, almost knocking generic stuff out on a production line." I thought oddity was being too harsh on the analysis of his own work; I think the quality is quite high.

Ah, the realism issue again. There have been some interesting suggestions on how the damage system could be made more realistic and obviously oddity tends to favor systems that lean toward the brutally unforgiving end of the realism spectrum. I certainly don't object to having some sort of "super realistic" damage/injury model option added in the main TDM menu for those that want maximum difficulty when playing a Thief fan mission. I would take exception with the statement that oddity's work on TDM has somehow been "generic". I think oddity has made in TDM some of the very best looking models I've ever seen in any mod. These are some of the best looking, most intricately detailed and eye-catching character models around. They lend a real touch of sophistication, elegance and polish to the mod. One look at them and the impressive quality level is instantly obvious, hardly "generic".

Well, it would depend on what they were doing in these "torture" chambers, I don't recall of the top of my head if such specifics were mentioned in the Thief games. Perhaps these are used mainly for typical corporal punishment, flogging and such, at times for serious offenses. Does Thief specify that they were literally torturing people? If so, then naturally they would be wrong to do so. Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat: No, I was referring to evil (and thus right and wrong) as an absolute moral standard that things can be judged by. The Hammers, for instance, are opposed to stealing (unlike our friend Garrett and his allies ), which is wrong, and they are opposed to and trying to stop their arch enemy, recently deceased (at least we think), the Trickster, who was trying to cast the world into darkness so he can rule over it with his deranged pagan followers, and killing anyone who got in his way, etc. These are good things to be for. That doesn't mean that they don't do other things wrong, or in a way that is inappropriate. I was speaking in a very general and broad sense when I was referring to the Hammers. They have a strict code of conduct that generally adheres to what is morally right. But that doesn't preclude them being flawed in other ways. I wasn't attempting a thorough analysis of all aspects of their behavior. Another example would be the mass murder of jews by the Nazis. This is something that was absolutely wrong and evil, not just in someone's or group's opinion, or because it was unpopular, it was literally and absolutely wrong. According to the Nazis it was ok to do, but just because they said murder was ok to do, didn't make it right or any less evil. And that's why they were hung for it.

Well, while the Hammers do clearly oppose what is objectively evil, their methods at times might be more than is warranted for a given situation.

It's interesting when you consider the Thief history. In many ways it's like our own history, but there are obviously some differences. Thief basically takes place in medieval England, with things being more or less exactly as one would expect them to be at that time. With several exceptions. The most obvious being that magic is real. It's certainly not something one encounters every day, but if you are in the right place at the right time, you might just see some. The Church that we are familiar with is instead the Order of the Hammer, with which it has many things in common. The Hammers intensely oppose evil and immorality, and those that are allied with those forces. We have the Keepers, who watch over The City and it's environs, keeping an eye out for trouble. They are very well educated, steeped in knowledge of ancient lore, and have mastery of magic through the use of these mysterious glyph symbols. And then we have the weird pagans, a violent bunch who lurk out in the wilds mostly and who serve evil and chaotic forces. The rest of the people are pretty much what you would expect in a medieval town near the coast, shopkeepers, guards, political leaders, sheriffs, tavern owners, noblemen, all kinds of workers, merchants, sailors, etc. It's also not unheard of to encounter zombies and similar foul creatures in evil places. And a ghost of a good man with a friendly nature that is in need of assistance with something might even be bumped into on occasion in a Hammer graveyard. There is also this odd technology situation. While almost everything in the world has the sort of technology that one would expect in medieval times, there are places where you do see the odd gas light, or even some crude electricity in evidence. But most of the time it's just normal candles, oil lamps, torches, etc. The gas lights one would assume are made to work by someone having stumbled on some place near the city where there were natural gas deposits very near the surface of the ground, detected by the odor, no doubt, and through driving some pipes down a ways were able to access small amounts of it. This would then be fed through pipes to a very limited number of gas lights in the nearby area, and thus they can sometimes be seen in the houses of the very rich, or fancy museums and such. Probably the best way to generally explain this stuff is to note that very few have access to these sort of things, these types of more advanced constructs and devices are the exception to the rule, not the way the vast majority of people live at all. You either have to be rich or well connected to the few than can build and maintain such devices for you to have any regular experience with them. And even those peoples' lives are mostly medieval (or renaissance, at best) in nature when it comes to their normal routines and daily lives. Obviously some of this stuff doesn't exactly line up with the way things go in our history, with these incongruent technologies side-by-side and so forth. And other things like magic are purely fictional. But it's simply the way things work in Thief's version of our world. It's like trying to explain how the force works in Star Wars in the context of the real world. In that sci-fi galaxy far, far away, known as Star Wars, these things are simply assumed to be that way. It's not intended to be a 100% realistic depiction of the real universe. And neither is Thief. I think Thief has a really intriguing alternate history of events, and it's a lot of fun to read notes, scrolls and books in the games to find out bits and pieces of it's history and lore.

Will guards sometimes just shake their fist at you or hurl insults if they can't get to you? It would seem quite odd for every guard to have a ready supply of wine bottles and/or stones on them to fling at people they can't easily get their hands on. Plus, if several guards couldn't get to you, it could get rather goofy with a crowd of guards all standing around throwing things at you and the resulting rain of stuff bouncing all over the place and littering the floor. hehe

Yeah, Thief III has some of the best concept art ever in a game, it looks sooo good. As far as translating that into 3D, even with all the PC hardware we have now, there are still some pretty tough limits on how good you can make things look and not slow even fast systems to a crawl. Games themselves never look as good as the concept art, especially concept art this excellent. The artist doesn't have the artificial constraints that 3D hardware imposes. He can depict the places and characters as they truly are, without worrying about polygon counts and such. But it's great to look at such wonderful Thief art, and it gives us an ideal of appearance to shoot for as faster PC's become available and we're able to get closer to what the art looks like. Video cards like the new GeForce 8800 GTX will help in this area.

Gaetane: I must say that, like the others, I am very impressed with the quality of the level you are working on! And this is just your first try at making a level, it's crazy to be that good right from the start! I can tell we are going to see some really professional looking levels from you in The Dark Mod. I like the screenshots of the levels the others are working on, as well. We're in for some great looking Thief action with this mod. It's almost like watching Thief 4 being worked on by Looking Glass and seeing early screen shots come out occasionally, very exciting!

ascottk: Just wanted to mention that is an incredibly ugly avatar. hehe

SneaksieDave: You're right about KF McCall, that is some wonderful stuff. Just look at that intricate hallway he drew, sooo nice. That could inspire any level designer to new heights of greatness. Perhaps you can have him do some more concept sketches for TDM?

Yeah, I've seen the Nightblade model and it looks quite good, but I assume it's not in the correct form to work in Thief III, right? Or could it? Whereas this other model of Garrett that was made for Thief III, but not used for some reason, would apparently work in Thief III with the proper animation adjustments/additions.

Oh, ok. I thought that someone on the Thief III team had released a version of Garrett's model made for Thief III which has his proper appearance with the long cloak, but that unfortunately didn't get used in Thief III. Is that correct? So, it would take all new animations or have the cloak as a separate mesh to make it look good in Thief III, eh? Hmm, I don't see his sword and sheath on the model, or is that a separate model which is attached to Garrett's main model? Perhaps this fellow will provide the actual high res model, too.