STiFU

I removed the hud myself and could easily pick them, but neither TDM nor TDS is a lockpicking simulator... So why make it ultra hard? After all it shall only create the illusion of picking a lock and for a masterthief, it should be fairly easy to pick a simple lock like that!! Wouldn't feel very thievy if you spent like 5 minutes on a lock! I think the customized harder lockdifficulties in TDS-FMs were just right, although if too many of them were used over the whole level, the lockpicking process became rather annoying. But if it's that important to you, why not join a RL-lockpicking group, mostly found at universities (no joke, but still I want to humor you)? :-P

Sure, it isn't, but given the fact that it's rendered all the time and that you can put a lot of details into a skybox like in every other room, you have to be carefull, that's what I meant. It's a shame. It was very nice in q3, because if you had an "openair" map you could just add a sunlight to the skyboxshader and you didn't have to deal with lightning at all anymore... All shadows were baked nicely, where of course Doom 3 doesn't bake shadows at all. How would an unlimited parallel sun-/moonlight be realized in Doom 3? Or would it hurt performance too much? And another question: Did you also use a cubemap on the reflecting water from that video you guys once posted? Those reflections were distorted by the noisy-surface of the water and I'd like to know how to do that.... I just tested it, just to be sure. It works, but boy are those default doom3 skies ugly...

Wrong topic maybe? But thanks baddcog, finally somebody says something.... But I think Scope is having problems with the skybox itself not with the walls covered with the skyportal shader inside the actual map. I extraced the skybox of thiefsden as a prefab for later use as well and it works without a problem. It's a shame that the clouds in it don't use alpha though, 'cause I wanted to add a predesigned background behind the cloudlayers. So from my experience it doesn't matter how you texture the inside of the skybox as long as it seals against the void, since the texture isn't visible anyway through this specific type of cloudlayers. This info_skyportal system is very powerfull. You can do a lot of very nice things with it, but you have to be carefull, because it can hit performance a lot. At least that was the case in TDS and since the mechanics are the same, it's a good guess to assume the same for TDM. Doom 3 does also support the old quake skybox system, doesn't it? In that system you create a shader in which you add the 6 pictures for the skybox and a (sun-)lightsource maybe, to cast some shadows (and emit light of course). This skyboxshader can then be applied to the walls on which you'd normaly use the skyportal shader and the engine does the rest. I am not sure, but I think that you mustn't use these skyboxshaders inside the info_skyportal-box, because the skyboxshader and the engine already do, what the info_skyportal would do, which is rendering the skybox in the proper angle. Redundant! On the whole the new system is way easier to use and more flexible. After all you don't have to fiddle around with any mtr files for your own custom skybox.

Condemned was pretty nice and put it's engine to way better use than Fear, which looked disgusting and monotone in most parts. I loved the overall deep atmosphere of the game, which again was way over the top of Fear. Nice Game! Petition signed...

Very nice!! Using an object directly makes more sense to me in most cases anyway, since things like a flashbomb or a healthpotion have to be used mostly very fast. I guess I would replace nearly all inventoryhotkeys, by inventory_use. Could be nice for the picklocks too, if you stick to the T2 lockpicking system. You could by the way finally reveal something about your lockpicking system... I really liked the one of TDS and in another discussion somebody also mentioned Oblivion's system, which was ok too, but we still know nothing about yours'!!

If you say so... I was just playing around a little with DR this weekend. Can't do anything on it this month though, because I got 4 big exams coming up and as every student, I know nothing so far... Anyway here are two screens: (The yellow of the window is not actually that glowy ingame. Doom 3 just seems to fuck brightness when making screenshots and I had to raise it manually via PS again, which created that awkward yellow effect)

Who is responsible for the beautifull pictures fading in the background of the mainmenu, by the way? They look very professional. I also wonder whether you guys got highres versions of the concept arts shown on your front page. Some of them could possibly serve as beautiful wallpapers...

Ok, thanks. I am a little confused by that though. After all, caulk is not visible, so why does it seal against void? I am assuming I could use caulk on the void walls as well then, so that they are plain black. I actually intentionally caulked surfaces behind patches, but as I read that patches don't seal, I wanted to make sure, I am not doing a mistake...

All the textures seen on the screens are uncompressed... So much about compliance of the texture guidelines, damn you broken glass!!

Hey one question about patches. It's said in the wiki that they don't seal against the void, so I guess I have to use solid textures behind every patch instead of caulk, for the visportals to work, right? That unsmoothedtangents thing is written without a space between the two words, so it was just sort of a typo that made it fail. I didn't test it any further now though, 'cause I got it workin... Also this thread should maybe be moved into the darkmod editor's guild, as well as that noob texturing/modelling thread...

Well, it is not Thief, so we're cool here... I really like the theme, because it's very atmospheric and produced very professional (The speedchanges are a delight). I can see though, that a more subtle ambient soundtrack like random machinery-/steamsounds would be more suitable as a menutheme, since we are going to fire up the menu veeeeery often and music is always very repetitive on the long term. A soundtrack like this one is cool for the creds, an intro, or a cutscene, and especially the latter. A very good compromise would be to make the first 30 seconds just soundeffects and then let slow let the nice soundtrack set in. What I also really like are the resolution of the textures on the first person weapons. Those look really nice already and I think the animation of puting the sword back into the sheath is realistic. But I'm ok too with making it a little faster...

Nice work guys!! I also enjoyed the soundtrack a lot and the menus are stylish too. The possibility to turn the junkobjects is plain funny, will you implement corpse turning too?? xD You could fit a body perfectly into a locker then....

Happy Birthday! It's the perfect moment to thank you for the many times you helped me, so: Thank you! =)

Yeah, I can accept that and thanks... I actually know nothing about Python, I just noticed that no one had helped Maximus and so I browsed the blender page for instructions on installing those scripts. I recently tried the technique to create a normalmap from real surfaces, by taking pictures of them while enlightening them from all four sides, one at a time. My example surface is an emblem on one of my cabinets and the result is very satisfying in my oppinion (not perfect tho), so I recorded a little video in case anyone of you is interested... Click me!! (I just recorded it in the crazybump preview with parallax deactivated, because I don't know how to script moving lights in doom 3 yet and I also didn't want to make such a fuzz for nothing... )

Well, since both versions exist only with different meanings (the snake and the general term for plants) it's not really a typo, just a question of what the name for the scripts came from. But then again in "phytoplankton" the "n" is missing, damn it! But I am no native english speaker anyway, so minor typos like that could well be tolerated, like we germans (and everyone else) have to do too in our every day life, all in favor of the saying/"common signature": If you find a typo, you can keep it!!

Ah yeah, katbits. They got some nice tutorials there too... Anyway I browsed a little for you and those exporters are phyton scripts (.py) and have to be put into a certain directory in order to register with blender.

Yes, thanks and hi angua. It's just a phototexture I made tiling1d and crazybumped it, with very little specularity added. Nothing special. I was thinking about applying for beta mapper status maybe, so I made a couple of textures (about 25) and now I am producing some smeshes, to make a little test map and if I like what is coming out of it, I am going to post it here. Not sure yet though whether I'll have the time for producing a whole map, so at the moment, I am just producing content, which I am of course going to donate (if you want that is)... I actually didn't make sure the uv layout didn't overlap so far though. What came out of it are the final results of renderbump, i did nothing with that layout. But as I tried to seperate the faces on the uv-layout like suggested in the link, I also made sure that nothing's overlapping of course... When I used xNormal I noticed that way too many traces failed (~3500). I didn't know how the technique used to render the normalmaps, but by now I do, so I increased the size of the highres mesh, so that the traces are always hiting something. Later I noticed that I didn't have to do that, because there is a toggleswitch, that enables tracing in both directions. I am going to try to increase the tracedistance now... Well, there is actually no option to do so in my version (3.12.0.409...), which is supposed to be the latest stable release. I'll just stick to renderbump. It's not that bad in the end, since I don't have worry in which direction I workout the details and stuff like that. By the way, in the link I posted it was said, that doom 3 can render unsmoothed tangents. Adding the parameter "unsmoothed tangents" to the material file like suggested here doesn't work though. Anyone got some information on that? The result of it looks disgusting on the screens, but I'd like to see the difference in my example and maybe it gives even better results, who knows? =)

Ok, then say sorry to Angua aaaand back 2 topic... Neither did work aparently. I deleted all smoothgroups on the highres mesh, which creates this faceted look (I guess this is what you meant, isn't it?) and I put all polys of the lowres mesh into one smoothgroup. Didn't change the way, the normalmap rendered at all aparently... I also got some problems with xNormals. Seems to be very buggy. At first it wouldn't load up ASE-files, so I exported as OBJ. Then it seemed to calculate something finally, but after 15 minutes I stoped it, since it originally took 10 minutes to render in doom 3. Then I loaded up one of those example cfgs, reverted to defaults again, after some time and all the sudden it rendered. But now there seems to be something wrong with the uvlayout, because it only renders very little of the whole mesh and I think way too fast, because the rendering process takes like 7 secs now, no matter how I export my meshes. Awkward... Edit: After some internet research I found that even though renderbump is rendering the same awkward gradients it can still look different if you have changed smoothing or something else on the mesh and after testing I noticed that it works better now... Still not perfect though, as you can see at the upper stoneedges: So thanks guys. Here is a really good explanation of this tangent smoothing by the way.

Ok, sorry. I started this thread with the intention to initialize a spot for q&a about DR editing and DR related stuff though. Gonna try xNormal now, but what do you mean by "angua"? Is that another normalbakery?

Renderbump spits out shit I tried renderbump now for the normal generation from an high res to a lowres mesh and it returns shit. Take a look: As you can see on the normal, faces that are supposed to be straight (they are straight on the highres mesh as well), are not straight, which looks really awkward ingame when the light comes from an unfavorable direction: Do you have some ideas how to fix this, or is there perhaps a better way to bake normals? (I'm using 3ds max, but I guess for the normal baking I could just use any tool) Maybe it has something to do with the smoothing groups? Very unlikely I think...

He talks about ASE export phytonscripts for Blender.

Nice work on the Levelshot... I'd have kept those pages secret 'till the release, but it's your marketing in the end!

I just found another massive collection of tutorials for Doom 3. Both video- and texttutorials. I think I woun't need to make the transition to Maya now in the end. There are also some tuts for 3ds max...

NICE! One question about that though, will you limit the stages of grouping (depth of the tree) or will it rather be completely dynamic? Of course, you want to concentrate on the demo first and we want you to do so too, since everyone just wants to play in the end! But I am absolutely of demagogue's oppinion, it's still not that important which way we go though. I'd just prefer to press a single key instead of two, to select a brush, that's why I suggested Ctrl+LMB and I thought it was very convenient/effective because you'd only use two buttons and one combination of the two for the different Selecttypes. With your suggestion you'd have the opposite: one button and two combinations of different buttons. But I am really unneccessarily picky here. I'll use it no matter how you guys decide...

Or Ctrl+LMB? I think it's not reserved yet either and extra convenient. I hope you can implement super-grouping. After all, treestructures are always powerfull. Complex objects like Dram's, which you were talking about, could then be subdivided into groups, for better customizing and a better overview. DR would alomst be like a normal 3D-app then.