drumple

there is this site here... but i have not tried any of them so i dont know what works or what doesnt.. http://all-streaming-media.com/record-video-stream/

yeah, those worldmachine shots do like amazing, but like u speculated there Domarius, i would also say that those screens are prerendered and not for ingame use. @Fingernail, i would say the best way to go to get what your looking for would be to do a low poly mesh in the distance, and then a mountain range on a portal sky to finish it off. with proper lighting on the terrain mesh, it could look pretty good. i didnt add any more lights than the 1 projected i used for that terrain test, but more here and there might smooth off the more darker jaggies. and the reason i went with a huge projected light there was to actually use the cloud shader so the clouds would move over and darken the terrain as they passed.. in fact.. that may be a good way to soften the more hard edges, besides giving a real nice effect... but i didnt do it since im uber lazy tonight.

terragen is a decent program to make terrains with, but the terrain still needs a little tweaking on the verts to make it look proper, and to fit whatever scheme your shooting for. The one drawback of the doom3 engine is the lack of light map support, and i know for most things its not needed... but for things like distant mountain ranges and so forth, it would have been a blessing. its hard to map a large terrain without any decent phong shading, and sharp edges do show up. I tried to use heightmaps before to make terrain, but i found ( personaly ) that its better to make the terrain by hand, as in the following example... for the above pic i used gtk-radiant 1.3.13 and wolfenstein et, and started out with a flat layout and locked the x/y and just worked the z's on the verts. the d3 editor does not seem to work well with that type of vertice ajusting.... now what would really make it look decent is some phong shading. EDIT: er... that is a pic from doom3, thought i should clarify that. i used wolf-et and an earlier version of radiant to make that terrain test... wolfet/radiant -> bsp -> convert to ase -> convert to 3ds, import into milk, ajust some groupings, out to lithunwrap for the uv's, back to milk.. and export to lwo from there.. i never knew milk could export to lwo before... but it cuts out a few steps for me while i plug away at the blender tutorials, and although it sounds like a massive amount of work/screwing around... it wasnt, trust me. most annoying part is starting the terrain, but after a few layers it gets somewhat enjoyable as u build a mountain.

well, i added some blend add textures to all the ones im using in the church map ( except for the light emmitting ones now, such as the stained window ). this time around i did not add any bluish effect, as it seems they take on a slight blue themselves when their brightness is turned way low ( i used irfanview and a setting of -220 for everyone ). now i can see everything as if in a dullish moonlight, and i'll add some lights now and see what effect it gives... i use my fists that i can see ingame as a lightgem. i'll post some screens shortly of the before and after look plus a count of all lights used. EDIT: some screens... all ambient 1 all ambient 2 all ambient 3 and with no lights just the ambient added... no lights 1 no lights 2 original map had 36 lights, and it still needed more, beacause a lot of the map was in darkness still... i cut the lights down to only 18 now, and you can see everything in it, and you can stand in the shadows and still be in total darkness with no light cast on you, but see the floor/walls ect.. of where your standing in. im going to go with this type of lighting for now, little more tweaks i think, but its what i was looking for in some kind of minlight/ambient system.

nah, your not strange. to make a decent looking map takes time, even on some of the more little things players may not notice. acrhes and curves are the worst for me, thats why i prefer to them in brushwork and then to models for manipulation. aligning textures in doomed is a pain like all the radiants are. in model form they are easy to align. plus another reason i prefer it is that its modular, in that 1st pic of the newer church, everything in it is a model except for the pillars and floor. the arches, far wall, torches on the pillars and the windows are all models. i just copied and pasted to make more, that map file of the church is only 444k so far. as for the lighting.. thats a pain in doom3 to get looking right... i added the light bluish to appear as moonlight.. but as i have seen in the thief games, everything is slightly lit, even the dark areas and ambient light in doom3 is non existent so i have been reading, but not due to the engines design, but to hardware limitations with the new lighting system... even though i dont understand why nvidia or ati couldnt just add a sorta hardware minlight to the gpu's that adds whatever value of minlight to all textured areas .... but anyways... another way maybe is to add another stage to all the non light emitting texture shaders that blends in a fixed color texture that will act as a light... maybe a real deep blue that will make every corner thats dark lit up ever slightly... thief 3 managed to do it somehow... maybe i'll screw around with that idea for a bit... i have been playing with the particle emitter and i think i may have a way to get that moving moonlight streak effect that was in deadly shadows... so far it looks promising... EDIT: i had a chance to play with blending a very darkened diffuse image with a very slight tinge of blue added, and it seems to work very well.. very "thief 1 or 2" like... maybe with more ajustments thief 3 like.... before with only 1 light source from the window no thief style ambient after with the same 1 light source and added textures ambient textures added still needs a bit of playing with i think.. lower blue ajustment, or even just a straight darker diffuse with no colors added, but it has some advantages in that it does make it look thief style, and you can reduce the amount of lights needed to reveal the corners and other pitch black area's. hiding in those now easily seen dark corners should decrease your light gem since its still a 'pitch black' shadowed area. i reduced the size of the ambient texture by half and up close in the dark it has that campy thief style of look, flat and blotchy, but when a light is added all the bumps and specular comes back. up close no light up close with light

How i got those arches took a bit of time and running around, and i know its not the most efficient way to go about, but it works for me... and if u want to try it u will need a few mostly freeware editors or equivilent's that u may already have. i'll run down the list of what i used to make them, - Wolfenstein Enemy Territory ( the game ), and a decent gtk editor for it, i prefer version 1.3.13 - Deep Exploration, used to convert model types, free trial - Lithunwrap, UV unwrapper ( used to be a freeware version, became Ultimate Unwrap ) but can still be found in its lith free form somewhere on the net. - Milkshape 3D, 30 day free trial to edit low poly meshes - 3ds Max 7 to export ASE models. now then, there are 2 parts to the arch, and here's the run down on how i got the spacer one ( basicly same for the other large ceiling one ) I opened up gtk enemy territory editor, and made all the brushwork in there 1st, i did initially use a simple patch mesh to make the layout, making ity curve in a quarter circle, but ajusted some vertex's on it to make it arch more upward and to a point in the middle ( more gothic feel ), then i made brush work, simple blocks and moved the corner edges to where the patch matched closest on a grid of 1 when it looked alright, i deleted the patch ( there's actually no patches in those arches, it just looks that way ) i textured the parts that were going to be shown, saved it and bsp'd it. then i used q3map the latest version, and converted the bsp to an ase model, everything that was textured gets compiled into an ASE model, everything that has caulk on it gets ignored. i then took that ASE converted it with DeepExploration to a .3ds, which i then used LithUnwrap to convert it to a milkshape model format. opened up milkshape and edited the polys/verts to make the bevels and so on. afterthat, back to lithunwrap to edit the UV map, saved the new model as a .3ds again, that gets loaded up into max 7 and exported back to an ASE, which i then use in Doom3... all those arches are models. and i know its a long winded round about way to get them made, but i dont own the 3ds max 7, its at my friends place, his brother has it so i cant use it to do all the work. i have to split it up among diff editors. but that process works for me and i can flip between all those programs uber quick since im used to them. all i need in the end is the finished .3ds which i burn to a cd or disk if its not to large and go visit my friend for a bit and get the ASE exports. im thinking of trying gmax, because it has an md5 exporter script somewhere and it would reduce a lot of the running around.

Thanks a lot. I will post some more screens as i go along in here so you all can decided if i can be a beta mapper. There's still a lot of things to learn with the doom editor, and i get side tracked will all it can do. Its a real nice engine. thanks again

oops, sorry oddity, dunno how i got that confused... lol

thanks for all the kind comments. im just such a thief whore, i cant get enough of that game, and i dont understand why its such an unexplored genre... in fact i dont even play fps shooter demos anymore unless they have something different to offer, like fear but a classic stealth game, with a good history... i would like a crack at the beta for mappers, here are some more screens of my new church, ( i have since rebuilt that original screen 5 times from scratch now.. ) this one looks like the one im gonna go with.. larger area, more gothic... pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4 there were a pile of earlier screens of the church in a diff map, but i started to play with to many things and it started to look like a ballroom with reflected floors and so on... still a nice look... but not very churchy/thief like.. here's 2 screens from those tossed maps... old church1 old church2 i would love a chance to try the beta for mappers, so i can get more done, like doors and this overall maps objectives. or at the least to see sparhawks models moving around the church and lower crypt. but please email me with any info to offer.. i knew this mod would rock when i saw those incredible models that sparhawk made!

no, actually those textures i found on a thief 2 oriented site which had a pile of txtures, here is the link to it, some of them are real nice http://www.washboardabs.net/thief/textures/

Im a huge fan of the thief series, and was pleasantly surprised to see a mod in the works for the d3 engine. everything looks fantastic from what i have seen so far. Im very intrested in making a map for this mod, something gothic with a graveyard... here is a screen of a church i started to put together in doom3 ( but not for doom 3 play.. meant for the darkmod ) church 1 its very dark at the moment because i have not added proper lighting, plus the textures are a mish-mash of whatever for the time being. Im more concerned with the overall geometry til i get it proper. but its mapped in d3, and i would love to get a chance to try it on the darkmod. who should i contact to request this?