nbohr1more

There are some excellent Oblivion Mods yet folks still play TDM... The craving for more TDM will return.

Yes, and any speculated "rule" that you can come up with that says "if you do this your mission = bad" can be violated and yet produce an enjoyable experience. Thief itself was this kinda violation. Everyone was saying "nobody will enjoy all that sneaking around" yet here we are enjoying it.

The only other option that I'm aware of is to: 1) Disable Post Processing 2) Move the mission PK4 into the Darkmod base directory 3) Open the mission by invoking it's map name in the console: (example) map stalban.map 4) Save your mission as soon as the map loads 5) Rename the Doom3.exe to darkathena.exe 6) Start Doom 3 via a shortcut to new executable name 7) Open Mods > The Dark Mod 8) Re-Enable Post Processing 9) Load your last Save and enjoy If you have an older ATI card, you could also revert to an older Catalyst Driver (I use 9.10 )

Until you can properly disable Catalyst AI you will need to turn off Post Processing in the Advanced Graphics Menu

Try adding: seta r_mode "-1" seta r_customwidth "1680" seta r_customheight "1050" seta r_aspectratio "2" ...to your DoomConfig.cfg Also, maks sure these values are correct: seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "1" seta image_useNormalCompression "2" seta image_useAllFormats "1" seta image_useCompression "1" seta image_preload "1"

What's your screen resolution? You may need to set the resolution and aspect ratio manually.

I don't think so..., that's only for online multi-player AFAIR?

That sounds like the patch didn't get applied properly, are you sure you applied 1.3.1.1304 ? Here is Dram's mirror for the patch: http://www.dramthethief.com/darkmod/files/DOOM3-1.3.1.exe The latest Doom 3 patch removes the CD requirement.

Yes, I've cracked open DR at least a dozen times. This is my devolution: 1) YAY! I'm gonna make a mission 2) Oh, this will take some study 3) YAY, The A-Z Guide is GREAT 4) Oh, I added one extra light an now my map leaks... grrr... 5) Played with Sepentine's Func_Portal with Cubemap prefab 6) Couldn't get the alignment right for my own cubemap 7) Learned Strombine from Rich_is_Bored and others 8) Tried to position the ambient in the Training map... it's mostly right (some artifacts) 9) Built about 20 different light shader materials 10) About 5 of them worked as intended (none of the wild ones worked) 11) New baby at home, can barely beta test maps much less build one... Though I post a ton of posts in the forum from work. Color me intrigued but I will need to get fired and divorced to be of any use... ~~~~~~ Well... I guess if somehow I got a nice couple of days to myself I could start to build up the skill to map more quickly. Then I could trickle out small map sessions like the rest of these over-worked veterans.

Yeah, I see that. At most you could alter the default Caulk with a TDM override that contains one desired surface type (the one that's least audibly offensive). It wouldn't work for water (etc) but it would cover most conventional uses with the least audible artifacts.

Why not create a material that both has the correct Surfacetype Global and Monsterclip or Caulk Globals? Example: textures/common/caulk stone { noshadows forceOpaque }

LOL Only if the girl is some hilariously cute, puppy-eyed, cartoon character who is just too innocent to be believable ... Actually there's nothing wrong with the caricatures if they the readable author is clever enough about things. But it's tough to sneak in interesting material for these tropes and remain authentic to their character. Actually, it would be better still to have some of these folk essentially take their characters' dark leanings to the extreme and actually reveal (for example) a Builder documenting his torture of an unbeliever or a Lord beating his servent (etc) so we have a legitimate motivation other than "these dumb sods deserve to have their stuff stolen".

I suppose my statement was a side-topic but it cuts to the core of why someone would be dreading readables. I always hope that the mission author finds some way to inject some life into the readables and thus make the experience more compelling. The trap that is often fallen into is to follow the Thief mold and make the victims as deserving of Theft as possible with boring pompous communication. Even if this is another layer of deadpan it doesn't translate without a voice actor hamming it up. When read dry from the page, the archaic language of the period and reserved topic matter are often deathly. Now, if we talk about dark magic, blackmail, fear of ghosts or thieves, more blood pumping topics... then readables can be a joy of themselves (even despite the narrator's linguistic formality). I would still vote that readables are enjoyable but I always get nervous when I think a long boring letter to a fellow noble or big Builder tome will greet me.

Copied from the other thread:

One of the problems is that the Builder religion is painted as VERY dogmatic. This means that "by character" any readables with a Builder's words will be a droning recitation. Long spells of reading that stuff will be authentically as sleep inducing as reading actual sermons from the same period. I suppose religious historians would eat it up but anyone else will struggle. Then we have the Lords and Ladies, their correspondence is necessarily imbued with the dry passionless trivialities of spoiled people. Here, there are more opportunities for dry humor at the expense of the servants of the house (etc) but these folk are often the primary ones to relay clues. It's these caricatures that are meant to make the act of Theft amusing. You are stealing from boring, dogmatic, or inane people. The Dark Mod has it's claim that in comparison to Thief it's a "gritty universe" yet the caricatures persist here as well... except without much of levity and thus it often has a bleak or depressing feel rather than "gritty". If you wanted to make the universe feel more real and grounded it needs some light. The "bad people" you steal from must laugh, listen to music, tell jokes to their friends, etc. In short, they must be portrayed in more ways than the "people who deserve to be blackjacked"... A difficult path to follow...

I suppose having a variety of high quality texts to plop into your mission would be nice but to me generic readables are kinda like the argument about "Door Handles to Doors that Don't Open". We open a book or frob a note hoping to find material specific to the task at hand. Yet we are greeted by some material that is completely irrelevant or (worse) possibly misleading. If anything, these readables would need to be like mad-libs where blanks are left for specific locations of treasure details (etc). The readables need to be another sign-post to direct the player where they should go. I suppose ENTERTAINING non-sequitur stuff, especially humor, could be excluded from that requirement but seeing the same joke in several missions would also be a problem. You will have to spell out more logistics to convince me Sotha

LOL. Yes, I've had strange bursts of good performance. I usually chalk-it-up to the Branch Predictor in my Pentium 4 having a lucky streak. Memory fragmentation is certainly a possibility but I am wary of an 3rd party program that claims to help that as it is something more in the domain of motherboard chipset drivers... Oddly, some have reported that having background jobs running is sometimes beneficial rather than a detriment. I can only guess that if background jobs help that the video or chipset drivers were only tested with Heavy Multi-Taskers

Alright, to begin early on the contest process and have "even better" pre-planning, I am starting a wild thread to throw out ideas into to be collected for voting. I think it will be easier if any concepts are bolded at the top of the post in this format: Contest Concept: Campaign Secret Santa Size Restriction: Yes Time Restriction: No Time restriction meaning "Can prior work be revised for inclusion?" You would need to provide additional details for your concept in your post. For example: My example concept is to have a contest where each mapper is gives another mapper a mission concept to complete. The assigned mission must be one of the 4 available missions in a Campaign concept. Once all the participants have their mission, making sure to properly divided as evenly as possible, then the contest begins. The benefit of this approach is that no matter who's missions are the best, players can take the individual missions and string them together into their own preferred version of the overall campaign. Of course, the highest voted ones will be packaged together as the official contest version. Edit: For the record both Fidcal and Demagogue have presented similar concepts so I won't claim to be the original author of this idea... I just like it. ~~~~~~~ Just to keep it easier to track, only post your concept at the top of the first post about it. Then it will be easier to collect all the ideas and there should be less problems with missed contest ideas that were never voted on.

Yeah, there has been some talk of making Ambient AI. For big crowds??? I see the SEED system spawning func_animate objects as possibility (if anyone can figure out func_animate, or figure out how to make SEED produce 3D distribution patterns)... but I still think it might be a little too heavy on the target hardware...???

They licensed Havok Physics for that game... (A whole company dedicated to building physics engines for games.) Id Software used a small in-house team... Edit: Not to put-down what's there, just saying that the challenges of fixing the SDK physics are not necessarily trivial and improvements should receive proper respect...

LOL... Even John Carmack himself mistrusted the Ragdoll physics team and they struggled dearly with that portion of the code almost up till the release...

Well... I certainly see the bright potential from a Demagogue lead project but, as Baddcog and others have pointed out, the master chefs in the kitchen will all start arguing the menu... Unless a bunch of willing mappers jump in and raise their hands for contribution to contradict me, you will need to legitimize your position over the others via a vote. Or possibly by creating a bunch of rough unfinished maps with enough compelling material to beg for completion. Are you willing to throw your story into a vote contest? An internal vote amongst participants is almost assuredly a course for failure, the unwashed masses will need to step in to break the ties and nullify the sore feelings and ego bruising. I'm sure you are a reasonable person on these concepts but if you are to gain a groundswell, you will need to be anointed somehow. EDIT: I'm sorry. Upon reflection, that was way too pessimistic. If you've got a great concept it might alone be enough to overwhelm any possible dissent or strife.

I'm afraid of what that grass scene would do to my poor CPU but maybe MoroseTroll's SIMD work would help there.

I think it's questionable to have an open invite for "novice only" members. While the TDM mapper community is comparatively large in size to TDS, it's still a far cry from having a large enough subset of novice mappers to gather in great numbers for such a project. If there were and open call for ANY mappers to join a project then it would be more likely to succeed. I think, that this would best be worked-out in a fashion similar to the Community contest. 1) Announce the intention of a Campaign Project contest series 2) First have a "best campaign story" contest 3) Then have a "best project plan" contest to determine the best way to organize the mission construction 4) Then have a best version of assigned mission contest For step 4, you would randomly assign missions to all entrants and they would compete as with any traditional contest. The winner would get to have more oversight on the project and editing privileges. If you had enough entrants, you could have duplicate entries and pick the best version of the assigned mission to be in the campaign.

Hate to say it, but the Grayman "keep cutting your map in half until you find the culprit" method seems to be the best option... Edit: LOL @Ungoliant: Most good light faking uses blend multiply (blend blend) but that of course carries the risk that if any value in the blend texture is lower than the surface illumination it will darken things. Blend Add is addition, it will ALWAY brighten the surface.