drumple

the lighting can be tricky, im not shure if it can light more than 1 model at a time, it would look better as a roq but then im not shure if you can control the individual frame rates, ie.. play 1 frame where you want... however.. you wouldnt really need that much control thinking about it... a decent clock video with the gears moving and soft shadows, and then a single modeled clock hand to make the 1 revolution from 0-100% loading would be perfect. as for the stuttering, im kind of hoping it does.. since im used to it seeing that happen in the t1/t2 loading screens with their small clock faces spinning... but if it works out smooth, thats no problem.. either way.. im shure the roq would not stutter.. just any model linked to the loading_gui might, but thats an easy test.. just load a huge doom3 level and see how the loading bar moves.. if it transitions from 0 to 100 smoothly or stops once and a while.

actually, they can be virtually the same.. with the lighting and normal maps they look almost identical. a while back i modeled up a gear and used just the normal map from it on a flat 2 poly mesh and rotated that, it looked real good. its easier to rotate the model with the gui code as you can make gears mesh perfectly and in unison but that only looks good if players vidcards can do perpixel lighting and use normal maps. otherwise it looks rather plain and shabby. but, you could also just make decent gear textures, say 5.. and apply those to a 2 poly mesh and rotate those and it would look real nice, and thats what im hoping we will all decide upon. im not shure if images alone can be rotated, so far i have not seen that done in the guis, but a simple 2 poly .ase can, and its basicly the same thing, plus the benifit of it scaling proper will make it look better over standard gui image scaling which can be a bear to deal with. EDIT: i was thinking of a 3d clockring with the inner workings, here is the clockring style i had in mind, though it isnt textured yet. the only other benifit to this of course is that it wont look so 2d.. instead it will look like its popping out at you.

actually.. i think it would be very simple to make a decent clock like that, it looks complicated.. but to get it working in a loading gui is a simple task. md5's are not needed, nor is any type of animated mesh, just simple models and let the gui do the rest. im making a mock up of one right now to see how it will work, and it looks very promising. having the small hand of the clock rotate once to complete the loading is basicly one variable added to its windowdef. i'll see what i can put together for a test and add a link to download it. to make it work with any map you just rename the gui "mymap.gui" and place it in the guis/map folder. i'll see what i can slap together for the test and get a link here when i can.

ok.. i see how this works now, every map gets its own loading gui and don't share a common one, which can be a benifit.. say if an fm author wanted to add some text to his loading screen in the thief stye. the loading screens are 5k ( for doom 3), so we just have to make a decent generic one that every fm author can use, and they can add some graphics to it if they wanted... lets say the map is a builder type of map, then they can have builder oriented side graphics.. ect. it could be the reason d3 drops to a non existent frame rate when it loads is that there is no real update on the screen that needs gpu attention... but i'll add the gears now and see what it does if anything. UPDATED: yeah.. rotating models seem to work on it fine, so i would suggest we go with a real decent clock style like that one.

im going to try some experiments with moving models on the loading screen to see what it does, but im assuming that any movement thats put there will slow down the load times, hopefully im wrong. i have a gear that i was using to rotate and mesh with other gears.. simple model.. so if it works fine, it should be do-able for a better model similar to that clock, which looks real nice.. because im thinking if it takes one revolution of the second hand to indicate loading 0-100% would look nice, even if the clock stopped and stuttered at times would still look nice.

as for the loading screen.. im not to shure if any type of animation will work there... seeing how the doom3 loading screen works.. its just plain.. and you can see your fps drop and hover around 2 while it loads... im not shure if any type of animation can work. but a test will see if thats true or not. if it did work, i would lean more towards some animated models of the gears for the clock, since its very easy to make them flow smoothly together ( from another test i tried ).

i'll give that a shot

ahhh.. that would be excellent, then so many items could be implemented quickly.

just read this topic, the def file is to make the potions frobable, but the way the frob entity is setup seems to me, that it can only be used by individual map scripts. if activating a frob entity ingame could then use a scriptobject ( as an option ) then that type of frob entity would be not dependent on any script map, and would be part of the darkmod system to automaticly add to inventory or get used right away.. depending on the script. actually.. that would be best for most types of frob items, such as gold.. ect.. so no map script is needed. i was going to try to make a scriptobject to automaticly add up any gold/valuable items up but the way it works now, it has to be scripted for a map, which means any map would have to have the same script added, when doing such things should be a single scriptobject that covers it all, and all an fm mapper would have to do is drop the item where they want in the map and not worry about the scripting part for it. if you see what i mean... like the darkmod doors. but basicly.. if you add those def's to the darkmod item def file, you can select the potions from the menu in the editor and place them where you want, and they can be frobable... but of course.. not added to inventory yet, which has to be worked on still. you could make a script for your map to add them to inventory, but like i mentioned, it would be better if you did not have to and had a scriptobject to cover that. EDIT: screen showing the 2 potions selectable after adding the def files, and a potion normal then frobbed.

yeah.. tds relied heavily on a bluish feeling through the game.

im currently replaying t2 for some inspiration, and the one thing thats annoying me about the inventory is not the acumulation of various keys.. its just selecting through the inventory items to actually get to a key... it would be a nice idea to have a seperate way of selecting keys not with the inventory way.. like the keyring type of thing, where when u press whatever key on your keyboard, a keyring would pop up and cycle through the various keys you have picked up so far. just an idea id thought i would throw out

another happy birthday... so happy birthday.

happy birthday, hope its a good one.

the one thing that made spiderman a sucess over such such comic hero-to-movies like spawn was that it wasnt bathed in perpetual darkness... its always night in spawns world.. same with the 1st 4 batman movies.. it felt suffocating to me to watch them. raimi took spiderman into the daylight, and with the last batman movie nolan did the same... the one scene i remember from the 2nd batman movie that seemed like daylight was when the penguin was giving his speech at the podium.. but you got the impression that it was a heavy cloud covered day... i say the one thing that made spidey a success.. cause it also helped that the spawn movie sucked ass...

well, apparently this is the new symbiont spidey suit... doesnt look like it did in the comix, but at least its all black... so were gonna see venom at last...

the only time i remember seeing the bloom effect in tds is when you exited a shop after buying your equipment. entering a dark outside caused your eyes to see everything darker as it transitioned to your normal lighting over a few seconds or so. i really cant see a bloom effect when turning to a light source directly to tell you the truth.. it shouldnt make any difference at all in that situtation. the only way i can see that type of effect coming off, say a torch would be a sort of a larger frob box over the torch itself.. so if you looked directly at it, it wouldnt change anything since your not transitioning anything major, but turning away and back to view somewhere else in a level could cause it to bloom from darker to normal light again.

what im aiming for is a fm that starts you out over a wall in a graveyard, with the intention of completing the mission by eventually getting into a small corner of the lost city. two ways to get there, one through a church and the other though a passage in the graveyard, and it will go very deep underground. i started work on the entrance to the lost city a few days ago... what artifact to retrieve im not to shure at the moment... just working on setting the right visuals 1st.

adding a bloom effect should be a simple process, basicly its just keeping track of leaving/entering a light to dark or vise-versa area and transitioning the r_lightscale from its current setting either 1 up/down over a few seconds. the bloom effect does add another level of reality to your overall perception of the game, but when to and not to use it would have to be debated on, if its worth the effort to even implement such a thing. you can start up your doom3 and enter a level, and goto the console and ajust it one down/up from its current setting to see this effect overall.

well, i wasnt shure if you wanted it to read notation, piano roll.. ect.. that software will read it regardless of the time.

Harmony-Central keeps track of a wide variety of sound processing software, some of it free and for many different platforms. as for recommending one specific one, it depends on what kind your looking for, midi, mod, wav.. ect.. http://www.harmony-central.com/Software looks like a waltz, 3/4 time. try the software oddity recommended.

when ever i have a problem with windows not booting at all due to some odd error or some kind of crash, it seems to work well inserting the winxp cd, selecting the repair option which should send you to a shell window and then doing the chkdsk option as pak mentioned, it repairs the problems for the most part and allows windows to start again with my file structure intact, however.. from what my brother has discovered in a recent hard drive problem, is that there is some kind of problem with sata drives and the ntfs system running on certain motherboards with an older chipset.. im not shure if that has anything to do with your situation, and he now has 2 options, one is to buy a new hd and backup what he has on his corrupted one, or a cheaper method of buying a sata pci card, which apparently resolves the issue by not having to flash the bios, update xp and any other patches that may or may not solve it. again, im not shure if your running sata's with ntfs.. and it just may be the day that your drive picked to die.. which happened to me a few times.. which is a sad day no matter what options u have open to recover any data you can. hope you can resolve it, good luck. EDIT: the method of using chkdsk via booting from the winxp cd is of course depended on , if you cannot boot from a corrupted xp install on your hd.

i like the idea of a flare of some kind... like they had in t1/t2, not reusable, and only stays lit for a certain amount of time, then you toss it away.

that effect of walking into a darker area and having your eyes ajust to it and vise-versa as in tds, was called bloom, and it did add another level of realism to the game overall.

when id announced they were going to have a new quake based on the d3 engine, i was so hoping it would have been a sequel to quake1, and not quake2. and how they made the leap from quake1 to quake2 anyways i cant understand... q1 was so gothic, that medieval look would have just owned with the d3 engine.

i dont see the d3 engine as being outdated, i mean its pretty cheap to buy here in winnipeg also, but i think that for most gamers its the fps style thats getting outdated. while games like hl2, fear, cod2 are fps also, but its the style of thier gameplay and storylines that made them shine and keep the genre alive. i was all hyped when d3 was to be released, and when i got it and went about 10 lvl's in.. it got boring pretty quick. all repetitve with no end in site. reminded me of the very first castle wolfenstein games when they came out, very enjoyable for a time, but then the repetive nature kicked in. its things like great story lines, new twists and turns that draw people into the game, and thats the main reason i loved thief so much. when it first came out, i had never seen a game like that with so many enjoyable aspects. as for the d3 engine itself, its a very powerful engine, with a few more years in it to go, before i would consider it outdated.