MirceaKitsune

Was just a bit disappointed that that would be the first and only thing to pop in someone's mind, especially one of the best model artists here... considering I certainly wouldn't use the model for anything stupidly inappropriate in TDM, while I'm hoping this will be an interesting contribution that artists can appreciate and make funky new missions with. Anthro characters are something I need for some of my own planned missions, plus a thing I've certainly wanted to see in a project like TDM. As there aren't many freely licensed models of quality available, I decided to pick this one for the job... mainly since it's very realistic, and I figured its appearance would work best with TDM's theme. My goal is to achieve the same quality and feel as the existing character models, but we'll have to see how well that works out. [EDIT] Just noticed the actual image in your last post... lol! That's certainly something that would make the player stop mid-mission and be a little confused

Erm... this isn't for any fetish though. A bit confused someone would bring this up, fandom stereotypes or the "detail" of the base model aside. Though to answer the question, it's a widespread fandom, and inevitably there will be fans of different things everywhere. In any case, I'm only making a set of characters meant to be used like all other characters throughout missions, which I'm hoping to be playable and that they'll allow for some unique stories / places / etc. Hopefully people won't get typical bad ideas just because it's furry characters, which unfortunately seems to happen a lot. Hopefully the finished mod will present this better, when if will be eventually ready.

I had a question, related to both DarkRadiant and the engine: Is pk4dir supported? Some idTech based engines let you create a directory named whatever.pk4dir, which works the same was a zip archive called whatever.pk4. This would be very helpful for maps and other mods in progress, which I currently have to symlink from my test mission in darkmod/fms/.

I guess I'll be using this thread to unveil my first mod for TDM: I'm working on making a set of anthropomorphic / furry AI's, based on a quality model for Blender that was made freely available. I've been planning to give this a go for a while, since I'll want to create missions that have such characters. It's currently in VERY early stage, and I only have a partially finished model and base texture. As with everything I do, I plan to release it after I've finished all the basics and have something final. They should be quite different from the existing characters, and allow for creating new types of stories and levels. Opinions welcome! Notice: The current model contains nipples and overall realistic anatomy, which I censored in these screenshots but spoilering anyway. They're part of the original mesh and texture, and since I didn't want to hack it more than necessary I left them for the time being. I haven't decided what I'm going to do about this yet, and hopefully it won't get the mod hated rather than enjoyed. Since TDM has a community of cool and level-headed people, I'm assuming a nude 3D model won't be getting anyone angry.

News is great: I finally finished a testable version of my model, exported it to md5, and was able to preview it in-game! I got both the body and head rigs to work, as well as the head to be positioned exactly where it should (almost). However I have two remaining issues: - I tried weighting the eyes (low-poly spheres) to the eye bones on the head rig, named "leye" and "reye". While this seems to work in Blender, the eyes pop out and float a meter in front of the AI's head in-game. What am I doing wrong? I attached the eyes to the normal "Head" bone temporarily, but prefer the eye bones in case TDM supports eye movements when NPC's look at various spots. - The body contains a second object, which is not part of it and is meant to be defined as a separate model. This model however is also rigged and must be deformed by the armature. I know how attach simple objects to a bone, but how do I have multiple objects make up the body and animate with its rig?

Thanks very much! This might come very handy once I start putting the actual character together in TDM.

The seam will have to match exactly... the model isn't mine and I'm only making the necessary changes to port it to TDM, so I must work with what I have. Hopefully I can convert the Blender units between object centers into a distance in the entity definition, which should give me a precise position... another thing I'd greatly appreciate any tips on. For now I finished rigging the entire face, and made use of all important bones. I repositioned them accordingly, which will hopefully not cause any extreme deformations when the existing animations will play on the rig. Might be able to export a test md5 soon enough if all goes well, though there's still a lot to do.

Good news: The import script worked, and I managed to obtain the face rig from an existing head! I've put the unmodified version in a simple blend file, so you can easily add it when you plan to update this rig again (it's an essential missing component so I assume that's the right thing to do): http://www.pasteall.org/blend/39789 I'm still uncertain how I should position it for now. The character I'm making contains both the body and head in their exact positions, but the head mesh I imported contained only the head at location 0 0 0. I'm worried that if I snap the head of my character out of place, I can't re-position it back with the same precision... I will however want the body and head to be individual md5 files, so the head can work with existing bodies aside from its own. Any advice please?

Alright... so I need to find the md5 file of an existing head, import that into Blender, and extract the armature from it? That's a bit worrying since import scripts tend to either not work either not import all data. I would appreciate it if someone else could try this step and post the blend file, but I'll try it myself later if not. How do I even connect it to the control armature, as is done with the normal rig? For now I rigged the new mesh to the primary armature, and it seems to be animating very well! If everything goes accordingly (exporting to md5, creating the character definition, creating the material definitions) expect an interesting new set of characters for TDM sometime Not making any promises yet since it's the first time I do this with idTech 4... in any case I'll be publishing what I do have at worst.

Ok. Where do I get the extra rig for the head then, to put it into the blend file and export with it?

Yes: I plan to rig an entirely new model (already in Blender) to the TDM animation armature(s), and export a whole new character. Both the body and the head are completely new meshes, and I'll need to rig and weight any important armature and vertex group on them. I need to know how to do both the body and the face rigging properly for this. What do you mean upload MD5 mesh of a head? The proguard template already has a head, with the necessary vertex groups even... just no actual armature for the mouth / eyes / eyelids. If I simply create the vertex groups and give them the correct names and weights (eg: "jaw"), will they work automatically when I export the final character... or do I need to include the non-existent head armature and export with it selected too?

Ouch... how do I make my characters have working mouths and eyes then? I can't finish them without that, but I didn't think this might be a problem Any chance you could update the proguard rig and add the head armature and its base animations sometime, please?

I looked but didn't find any in the blend files. The head object uses the same armature as the rest of the body (in this case tdm_ai_proguard). Is the rig incomplete, or am I missing something else?

I plan to take a look at this during the next days, hopefully exporting the first actual character. I opened up the proguard blend file today, but noticed something peculiar: There are no apparently no bones for the mouth, on either the real armature or control armature. TDM does however have lip syncing, and you clearly see characters flapping their mouths when they talk. What must I do to the new model to make sure that lipsync works? Does simply having and properly weighting the "jaw" vertex group on the head mesh suffice? Same story with eyelids for blinking.

http://technofizi.com/best-linux-games/ An article titled "Top 5 Best Linux Games List 2015" features TheDarkMod as its #1 entry. I accidentally found this last night while searching for Doom 3 / TDM related stuff, and thought it could go here. While things like this do TDM some justice, I feel there should be much more talk about a FOSS game as awesome as this.

I have two new questions, both important if I'm to get my mission near completion anytime soon. First is about a bug I'm getting; I set up my ambient lights and music exactly as described in this article. Although ambient lighting seems to respect map areas for the most part, the light gets brighter and darker whenever I walk through any portal, including portals not marked as a different location. Why would the ambient light change between portals NOT marked with an info_locationseparator entity, and how do I change that? And yes, I do have an ambient light textured with lights/ambientlightnfo and named ambient_world covering the entire level. Second issue is more simple; How do I make an atdm:froblock and atdm:mover_button only work once? So after they've been pushed, they stop being frobable and doing anything again.

Well I just found out that MESA can no longer force anti-aliasing modes, this is now done by games entirely. So unless the engine learns how to make the setting work on Linux too, FSAA won't be usable for us. Can the developers please consider a simple fix in the engine code for this?

That's weird, since for most game engines the setting works on both platforms... in any case this explains it. Perhaps something the developers could look at sometime? Until then I'll put the MESA environment variables for this in the TDM shortcut, will look later to see which one it was. And just to be sure, since this is harder to tell by the naked eye: Does it work the same way with Anisotropic Filtering? Should the menu option enable it, or do I need the MESA setting to get 16x?

That I don't know, I don't have Doom 3 here. Last time I played it was many years ago, don't know if I still have it around and it was the Windows version anyway.

Thanks for that! Since TDM went slow on new features over time, fun additions like this can hopefully be expected over the next months, if people working on the code have the time and motivation for them.

I understand. I think at least retaining the best stats would be a nice change then, enough to give players a better sense of accomplishment plus a reason to replay missions in order to improve their best scores. As a minimal ranking mechanism, there could be a simple completion bar for that perhaps. Which shows 100% when all of those stats are at their best values (stealth score is 0, all loot was found, no one killed or KO'd). It would simply be taking all those persisted stats and multiplying them to draw a bar indicating the overall score. This is optional though and I mind its absence less.

My current mission seems to have issues of the FPS, due to a lot of distant lights being visible at once from certain locations. I was wondering if there's a property for the maximum distance of light sources, so a light will turn off when the camera is further from the given distance. Since they are pretty far and there are decorations in the way and those lights also flicker, the player shouldn't notice this, especially if a transition effect is possible like with ambient lighting.

At the end of each mission, I like checking my stealth score and other stats to see how good I did. I often wondered whether this data could be used to give the player an overall rank, permanently saved as completed mission information. I'm thinking something like "A / B / C / D / E / F" grades since that's the most common system. In my opinion this would make playing TDM missions even more motivating, because everyone will strive to get a perfect grade and tell others "I finally got an A+ for this mission", often having to replay it several times in order to achieve that. The rank would depend on data in the mission statics screen: Stealth score, number of knockouts and kills, bodies found, amount of loot found out of total, number of objectives completed. The main problem I see is that different missions might want to reward different approaches, like for instance: A mission might want the player to kill every guard in a house for an A+, while another could want them to not kill anyone at all... therefore an universal grade might not work. An idea then might be to have multiple scores instead: A rank for how stealthy you where (1 / stealth score), one for how violent (KO's * 0.5 + kills * 1, from amount of all AI present), one for the loot (% loot found), etc. But if this idea is too fancy to bother with: Could we simply persist the best mission statics at worst? At least the stealth score, loot found, and time? You can then at least select a mission in the main menu and see what your shortest play was, your best % loot discovered, and of course the smallest alert score and body count you managed to win with.

For mysterious reasons, anti-aliasing never worked for me in TDM. Since I hate it when edges make the pixels of my screen stand out, I would like to change this! The menu option is enabled, and r_multiSamples is saved at the value of 4. I have an ATI Radeon 6870 card, and the free video driver for Linux (MESA 11.0.5). FSAA works in most games although there are exceptions, while MESA is configured to do what the application says in this regard.

I had a question: Is it possible to define by what amount a door or portal block off sound? I want to create a door that blocks 100% sound, so when it's closed the AI cannot be alerted by anything outside nor can the player hear any sounds from behind it.