STiFU

Hmn, sounds like LOD and mipmapping... You have to simulate focusing an object somehow and aparently the mouse is the quickest and basically the only way. Of course you could also focus different objects bei tabbing through them, but that's nonsense of course. The screens look really good. I think they also use a highres texture pack or it just seems to be so detailed because the pictures are so small. But the last time I played default doom 3 I was always pissed about the blurred textures. (kinda ironic, isn't it )

Well you could just play without the ambient light fix, but you have to keep in mind, that you're not playing the map the way the mapper intended to. I don't know anything about that stuff either... But I once asked the author of the reliefmapping mod whether he could also write an altered glprogs file for Prey, which he actually did, but it didn't work. What a shame! Anyway, I'd presume that the changes in the glprogs for the ambient lightning are fairly simple. If you would talk to the author too, maybe you could edit the texture-mod glprogs-file yourself.

Holy Moly, those ingame screens look amazing. You could perfectly tell a fable like "Hänsel and Gretel" in that Forest... But here is a quick suggestion for the groundtexture (which is maybe even usefull to the darkmod overall). There are custom high resolution texturepacks for oblivion featuring 2048x2048 groundtextures and 4096x4094 terrain textures, which are really amazing. The latter are only used for the distance I think, but I am not sure. On those darker ingame shots the repetitive pattern isn't noticable at all of course, but you're way above the ground there.

If you want true displacement, you have to use reliefmapping. There is a mod for that for doom 3 too, but that one kicks performance's ass... ;-) I played doom 3 that way. It was interesting, but it also has disadvantages. For one, if you look sideways at a surface you'll notice that the texture is stretched on the "surface-orthogonal" parts (of course). Aside from that, it looks very blocky because of the looooooow-res textures of doom 3. But with a proper set of high-res textures and heightmaps it could look damn sweet. The problem with parallax- and reliefmapping is, that the mods use an altered glprogs-file for these technologies and TDM already uses a different one for the enhanced ambient light. So someone would have to dig in deep to combine two of those files. Here is a little video, demonstrating reliefmapping in quake 4: Click me!!

In case anyone is interested, there has been a steampunk contest at cgsociety and the winners have recently been announced. There's some really nice stuff. I am especially impressed by the little robot "steamnocchio".

Hehe, yeah well, I played original quake 3 trickjumping a lot, so I really enjoyed the speedrunmode and timetrials. Especially, when I discovered all the nasty tricks to keep up your momentun like the three-step rule, initial momentum trick or pipejumps. Not as skilly as q3, but still fun. On many timetrials you can be like 10 seconds faster than the 3-stars-time, especially *New Edge*. But I guess we are deriving from the topic here a little. So back to you, TDM!

That's exactly what I suggested on the On-mirrors-edge.com forums. But I and a couple of others had a brief look at how the game is dealing with the levels in UnrealED and it uses a complex blockloading system (different to oblivion), which will make it really hard to design an open city. Aside from that, Mirror's Edge seems to be the slowest unreal engine 3 powered game, I've played so far. So you'd need a really big fat computer to play an open city (where the blocklevels have to be much bigger, than in original Mirror's Edge). Anyway, I still didn't finish the last speedrun, but all timetrials 3*!! ;-)

Haha, as soon as I read the thread title, I thought someone must've played Mirror's Edge recently. I guess bouncing of walls would be a little bit too acrobatic here, but being able to hold on to borders and climb along could create some nice climbing-gameplay. The problem here is though that it would absolutely be necessary that the player sees his hands or it will look really awkward. I also remember posting this once already and I think that the conclusion was "it's not gonna happen", at least anytime soon... Edit: Here is your original post by the way.

Don't be generalizing. It can be a pain!! Remember thief 3?

I always thought the ttlg forums were pretty civilized, aside from geting flamed when u use teh h4x0r speech, but I don't like that anyway, so I'm fine with that. Better stick to proper, readable english! I do hardly look into ttlg these days though. Since TDM, I lost interest in the TDS-deadend, so I mostly stayed around here.

Hmn I guess that was just a reference to a very bad teeny horror series... "The Hills have eyes"

Man, who revived this thread? I performed a tripple backwards summersault when I read there was a new video preview... All for nothing!

In case someone is interested: Here is a sales chart in comparison to the apparent rival in business. Aparently the axis of ordinates isn't labeled.

Yeah, I probably mixed it up a little bit, but I did remember that the whole L'Arsene series was excellent and especially the den. It could also be that I am thinking about one mission in the t2x campaign. Gonna have to look into that when I finally get some time to play again...

Well I am sure there will be very nice city missions for TDM later and as far as I can tell from the screenshots, there already apears to be one in the works. While I must say, that there were many astonishing City-FMs for the previous thief titles. I am still trying to remember my favorite, but I seem to have forgotten its name. I think it was the second part of the L'Arsene series "Emilie Victor", but I haven't installed thief 2 currently to verify the thesis and I also couldn't find any screenshots anywhere. Is there even one site that still shows the fms with nice screenshots? Quick sidenote: I just googled "thief mission screenshot" and on the second page was an entry saying "The Dark Mod (Thief for Linux) › Forum › ubuntuusers.de" ... Maybe someone should tell the betamapper responsible for that post, that TDM is not Thief! :-P

Hehe those customs also look kinda retro! I prefer to play ps one and snes emulated on my windows mobile device... Well, I actually don't, but I wanted to point out it's possible! But of course you ain't got the nice controlls like on those devices.

When I finally switched to LCD I tried multiple panels. I had a V7, a LG and some other brand but they were all crap. Then I bought a Samsung 22'' for 300€ and I was very happy with it. Samsung's MagicColor feature really enhances the visual quality a lot. But as already said, the angle dependency is kind of bad, as well as the light halos at the lower and upper side of the screen which are only noticable on a darkscren, but therefor extremely frustrating in thief. I sometimes turn down brightness to the minimum in order to decrease this effect when playing very dark games. I wonder whether thief looks better on a glossy panel. Anyone have one? Anyway, you'll love your LCD if you have to spend a lot of time at the PC per day. And by the way, there is a big german website reviewing Monitors called prad.de, which is THE BEST reference in this concern. There is also an english version of it: Click me!

Mirror's edge is probably the closest candidate for that at the moment. At least concerning athletic movement. (Hmn gonna have to check out if it's finally been released for the PC.) Anyway, back to topic, I must say that I wasn't such a big fan of TR in the beginning. I finished Tomb raider 1, but the other parts until legend have only been played a little bit or not at all. Mostly because of the querky controls and camera. In Leged and Anniversary the camera was perfect, but aparently Underworld was a step back. But hey, I think I'm off playing again. Still four Treasures to go... ;-)

I've recently played said game and I must admit that I really like it. Because of the (really) sucky camera it takes a little bit to get used to the controlls and such, but aside from that I've got nothing to criticize about this product. The overall setting, atmosphere and graphics are damn nice and there's a lot for the explorer's mind too: The levels (there are basically six) are huge and stuffed with secrets. I don't know how to say this now without spoiling anything, but the levelarchitecture is somewhat dynamic and took my breath away a couple of times. I guess most of you people aren't too fond of third-person action-adventures, but maybe some will give this one a shot and let me know what they think... (Also note that Lara gets dusty/muddy/rainwet over time and her pupils transform according to lightlevel )

Since Doom 3 costs like just 10 bucks these days it shouldn't be a problem for anyone to get their hands on a copy of that game and I think you guys are doing already enough for the community. No need to ask for more, just to make the installing-process more comfortable... Also ID software is a company with a generous policy and worth supporting because of that in my oppinion.

Believe me, by the end you are starting to miss having little ammo. At the beginning it's a real fight of survival, which creates a lot of immersion, but later it becomes too easy, when you have the nice weapons and ammo en masse (and skills of course). I was very recently talking to a friend about the game and we've discovered that you can reach the end of this game in many different ways (at least two^^). He experienced big story elements that I didn't and vice versa. We were both very suprised about that...

I think we had the general realism topic around here once already and I guess the point was that realism in games is only good as long as it serves the gameplay and the immersion. Knowing that a guard will eventually wake up doesn't create very much immersion in my oppinion... And like the others said before, it destroys an essential part of this gametype. Like in Oblivion, it was kinda nice that the people were actually living a real life in the city, going to the pubs, "wizarding their dogs asleep" and all that, but in the end you just wind up searching for quest-persons or traders, while you could be long gone on a dangerous adventure instead... (Of course there is always the option to use the wait-function, but that is just uncool)

I am going to check it out this christmas break with a couple of friends along with Call of Duty 5. I hope we can get decent 20 hours of gaming out of those games. Especially the latter is supposed to be really short, like 5 hours or something... And If we're done too early, we'll just start Neverwinter Nights 2!

Also, why would that even be necessary? Either you knock the guards out or you kill them, but you don't attack a guard and run away afterwards, so that he could heal up... Ok, maybe if you fought a guard and you atract a couple of others to the fight, so you decide to run for it. But this is not very common, is it?

I didn't play Clear Sky, because Stalker sucked too hard. I had never before experienced a shooter, in which the enemies manage to sneak their heads directly into your crosshair... Hilarious!! Also the preview trailers suggested a totally different gameplay and so I was very disapointed by the actual product.