STiFU

I actually played Dark Messiah as a warrior and after that as a thief and it wasn't much harder to kill the chieftain then. Maybe they altered the difficulty of him... But yeah, it's a real shame they didn't release the editor for DM, it could'Ve resulted in some fabulous FMs. I think the reason why most of those ninja games are in 3rd person is, because they mostly involve a lot of jump and run elements, which are hard to do in first person for many players, at least for those who don't come from quake 3 trickjumping... Also, it's much cooler to see the moves those ninjas actually do. In the end, a game like that is mostly for martial arts fanatics, who want to see how their Ninja rapes the enemies. On that note, I recently saw some preview gameplay footage of Ninja Gaiden II. Ok, there is nothing with stealth here, but I found it so hilarious that I had to share it with you... Perfect example for the dumb-factor of console games! Anyway, I liked the Splinter Cell series, I loved the Hitman series and if thief 4 was some kind of mix of these 3 gametypes I must admit, that I'd play it...

I'll take it!! Still, it's not like I dislike any FPS, it's rather that I need to see real innovations. Maybe I just played HL2 way too late. I really enjoyed Prey, and you can imagine why. That game was really innovative, as was Portal, which can hardly be acknowledged a first person shooter though. Neither a FPS but a genre close TPS was Gears of war, which absolutely rocked my world, no matter it is a big console title. I played it through twice. This game is rather simple either, but it's a whole different experience in coop, besides its architectural beauty, massive graphics and evil characters. (Let's forget the crappy story for a moment) If you hate console games like I normally do, I'd still give this shooter a chance. So as a conclusion let's just say we demand different things of a Shooter... And I must support Oddity's oppinion as well. If there will be a thief 4, it'll be bad, because of the consolisation, which in my eyes means nothing more than simplifying every gameplayelement to that extend that every nut can finish the game without any problems in a couple of hours, or days.

Ok, then I misunderstood "repository". I thought it was just a place to store the highres textures for future alterations. But you still need the specular map as a TGA on Ultra High. I just tested it... Don't want to picky, but I wrote a little replacement for the list... On Ultra High Doom 3 uses uncompressed textures (TGA) only, but on lower settings it looks for compressed files first and uses those instead. Diffusemaps: DDS (DXT1/DXT3) and TGA (can be RLE-compressed) Normalmap: TGA Specularmap: DDS (DXT1) and TGA Editor Image: JPG (not over-compressed) Remember to put the compressed dds files into the dds/textures/.../[texturegroup] folder and the uncompressed into textures/.../[texturegroup] . At that point, a link to the Texture Folder Structure would be usefull too. Another thought now. Since the only difference between ultra high and high detail apears to be the use of uncompressed textures, why not create a real ultra high mode, which doesn't limit us to dimensions of 1024, but 2048 instead for example. Nothing would have to be changed. The TGAs would be 2048x2048 or something like that, but the compressed only 1024x1024. Ah wait, we'd have to make a smaller normal maps as well for the lower settings then. So it would be a bit of extra work, but so damn detailed... =)

By looking a little closer at the structures I finally found the solution and it absolutely makes sense. On Ultra High you got no compression at all. Every channel is used in uncompressed tga format, so every texture-channel must be present in the default textures directory. What a shame I didn't see that earlier. Maybe you guys should correct this also here in the wiki. Those TGAs are actually necessary...

I used DXT3, cause it's said on the "Texture Guidelines" Wiki page to either use dxt1 or dxt3 for diffusemaps. For compressing I use the nvidia normalmap dds exporter for photoshop. When compiling I get the following warnings: WARNING: Couldn't load image: textures/darkmod/stone/natural/rock_large_holey_ 001 WARNING: Couldn't load image: textures/darkmod/stone/natural/rock_large_holey_ 001_s So at least I know now that it's the dds files that don't work. They are located in the folder dds/textures/darkmod/stone/natural/ . Wiki says that there is no need to clarify that dds files are actually located in a different folder than the other files in the mtr . Please verify this. Also I found that my mtr was actually wrong, although I copypasted it from the wiki. It should say bumpmap but in the wiki it says normalmap. Better correct it here.

Since it's just a real quick and hopyfully easy to answer question, I thought I'd post it here. I am currently playing around a little with the darkradiant but when I run my map my custom textures don't show up, altough they do in the editor's preview, with normal, specular and all. But ingame it's just all black. If I replace all with default textures it works like a charm. Any ideas how to fix this? This is my mtr: textures/darkmod/stone/natural/rock_large_holey_001 { surftype15 description "rock" qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/stone/natural/rock_large_holey_001_ed diffusemap textures/darkmod/stone/natural/rock_large_holey_001 normalmap textures/darkmod/stone/natural/rock_large_holey_001_local specularmap textures/darkmod/stone/natural/rock_large_holey_001_s } Diffuse and specular are dds (with dxt3) in the proper dds/textures-folder and editorimage/normal are jpg/tga in the textures-folder.

Hehe, I see this is going to be a nice discussion... I think, no one can deny that HL2 belongs to the rather trivial gaming gernre. It's just a normal first person shooter like every other featuring nothing significantly new. It was done ok, but in general games like that bore me, which again is just a question of taste... Dark Messiah in contrast gave the player a lot of different opportunities to finish a mission and there was a lot to discover, it actually felt close to thief sometimes. And that is what I like in a game. If I can never decide how to accomplish my aims, I can just go ahead and watch a movie. That is definitely not my definition of interactivity... Yeah, which is kind of the same I said: it's a question of taste. The "subjective effect" on me was, that that game didn't bring anything special and was boring, which is ending up in my trivialisation of the gameplay... But you guys got some points about the engine. I didn't realize that the movement was linked to the engine, because of the bodyawareness. Ok, then we got the loading zones and the movement. This both sucks to the original thief fans, but I wonder whether the other potential customers could miss something they don't know. I must admit that I actually finished Thief 3 before the other two thief titles. I only played the demo of Thief 1 and I loved it, but I couldn't buy it, because I was still too young. (I am 21 now, so you can calc back) So when I played TDS I didn't find the movement to be itchy at that point, but when I came back from T2 to TDS I absolutely hated it. Since that game was also released for the xbox, it was presented to a mostly new targetgroup, which didn't know the thief series so far and is used to loading zones. So I guess we'd have to dig deeper for more reasons, why the game didn't sell well.

So you tell me that the normal customer knew (and cared) about the limitations of flesh? I sure don't think so. The original thief fans of course were pissed because of loading zones, but the other players assumably just accepted it and all of us probably didn't know the other limitations of the engine until the editor was out, which was a lot later after the original TDS release. So I say, the initial success (which is always the biggest part of the whole) of that game got nothing to do with the engine, but only with gameplay etc. . (Movement mostly, which was kinda drunken master style) Well that again is just a question of taste. I prefer TDS very much over HL2. You play FPS like that through once and that's it. There's nothing that would make it worth replaying it, because it's more linear than TDS and there's nothing to explore at all. Just regular Hitboxshooting and some nice physics... wooooohoooo! (If you want to bring up the source engine, then at least use the excellent Dark Messiah as an example and not such a lame ass FPS)

Uhhh very nice!!!! This absolutely made my day and it started of real bad! How about a countdown on your mainpage?

I must say that the drivers for the 8800 GTS were nothing but a disappointment... First the scaling doesn't work properly, so I can't use any other Resolution on my TFT besides the native 1680x1050. Then I tried a fix, which disables hdcp support, but no luck here either. Also when I bought this gfx card, there weren't even drivers out for it for vista and since then they didn't manage to bring up a decent driver at all... I prefer XP anyway, so that's not that much of a problem for me. Though I must say, that I have been using the 169 driver generation since about one and a half months and I got no gfx bugs in any games, including Gears of War, CoD 4, MoH:Airborne, Stalker, which are supposed to be games that have problems with that driver. Didn't check Doom 3, Thief 2 and Timeshift though. I only had gfx bugs on some alphamaps in Soldier of Fortune 3, which is hilariously worse by the way (yes, I know I used the comparative wrong here, but it just reflects the quality of this fabulous game the best way).

I think the trailer to "I am Legend" does its job very well too. Here is a link to the streaming 720p trailer. It leaves the viewer wondering what actually happens in that movie and I became most impatient to see that movie and I really liked it, but it might not be everyone's style. Next to some written lines in the trailer, there is also a narration by the protagonist, which he is normally broadcasting via the radio, to explain at least a little of the film. So kind of a talkover, but not in a bad way. I really loved the overall atmosphere of the film. The first glimpse at the trailer reminded me a little of the ruins in Stalker, but this movie is by far more impressive, than that crap game... EDIT: Sorry, it's not really a 720p trailer, the uploader was just too stupid to clarify it correctly. It's just 720 horizontal, not vertikal.

Oh my god, that is hilarious. I always thought us germans were a strict people, always sticking to bureaucracy and stuff, but what you quoted is a totally different chapter... But then again, NCY is the melting pot, mixing a lot of different cultures, while in germany is also happening some culture mixing but not as much by far.

That's cool. I made an Ivytexture and it looks a lot better with colored specular, so yay, I can use it now!!

I was wondering whether Doom 3 supports colored specular, since the newest version of crazybump does and it looks really neat on some textures. But I guess it doesn't since everyone has ever talked about greyscales. Is there any game at all which supports colored specular?

Nasty words like ??? Wiki wiki bang bang!! How is it going with the non interactive version?

Phew, living in a patchwork family is really stressy sometimes. You got two families to celebrate christmas eve with and twice the grandparents. Merry Christmas / happy holiday everyone...

My friend told me exactly the same thing yesterday, also adding that it becomes kinda boring when the aliens apear, which is kind of similar to Farcry. I didn't play it really so far, because I got demoralised by the fact, that I can't run it on full detail properly. I mean I play worse looking games too, but if I can play it on a higher level of detail, I want to do that and nothing less. After tweaking it a little I got nearly all the nice effects besides object motion blur running under direct x 9, which almost doubled FPS in comparison to vista, but I still got only 26 FPs in average and that feels a lot to slow because of that extreme motion blur, I think. And of course in action scenes it can drop down a lot again. I also didn't play it in my monitors native solution, but one step below (1440 x 900), which was also good because it ends up in blurring the screen a little and was kinda a fake of alpha to coverage... So where you capable to play it on "maximum" details? If so, what are your specs? (I could possibly reduce the resolution even more, but the problem with that is, that nVidia still didn't fix that geforce 8800 gts scaling bug under xp. So right now, I can't use any 16:10 resolutions on my 16:10 monitor in the proper aspect ratio, not to talk about 4:3 resolutions. There should be a fix, that comes with temporarily disabling hdcp support, which I don't need so far, but it didn't work on my sys again, aparently. So in the end, I guess I'll just have to buy a new GFX card sometime...)

Hehe good point. I didn't realize that so far. If you visit a homepage you don't specifically notice which language it is, just that you understand it... That's a little stupid of him and I'll tell him about it. The video you have seen doesn't look too good, I know. It was shot because of a german hobby gamedevelopers convention and the whole thing was just put together real quick with a dirty robot mesh a friend of mine modeled in a couple of hours. What you spectated was LAN-multiplayer. If they already had graphics artists, it would look a lot better...

...or Ascendancy! Congrats Crispy! Very nice! I hope you'll manage to get their somehow! I guess winning such a price is a good way to start a career in this area...

I think everyone here knows what a crossface is, Crispy... Anyway, "Enter the Matrix" did exactly that and also enhancing the fades with instrumental effects IIRC. It's been a long time since I played that game, so I am not 100% sure, but what I am sure about is that it was amazing... I think the music even changed a little when you switched to bullet time. I really cannot understand why that game has such a bad reputation. It's endless fun!! A friend of mine was planning to do a horrorscifi-shooter and we had plans that I should create a soundtrack like that for him too, but then he decided to do mulitplayer shooter and I don't give away my time for creating music for a game, in which most people will disable music anyway... =) In case you are interested, his name is namespace, which some of you might probably know from the GTK Radiant 1.5 - and I think he also helped a little here, didn't he? - and here is the homepage for his engine: www.panic-dev.net . By now the team consists of three very capable coders and the engine is coming along really nicely, but they got the problem that they don't have any graphic artists. So if anyone here is interested in such work and doesn't work for The Darkmod yet: This could be your step into professional gamedevelopment...

Yeah the Crysis physics truely are amazing. Have a close look at these two screenshots I made... I am not quite sure, but it could be that I had physics on medium for testing purposes when making these, but it's hilarious anyway... =)

Ambient sounds and music create a better atmosphere in games in most cases. It's really neat to wander through big cornfields that are lighted red by the downgoing sun and listening to the chillout oblivion soundtrack and then all the sudden all heaven breaks lose, you see a gate to oblivion and many monsters. Dramatic moments like this are well captured by the soundtrack I think. "Enter the Matrix" had really well dynamic Soundtrack by the way. I was always amazed how good it fit to the gameplay. Definitely worth checking out...

Well, it's all about creating a deeper (or more versatile) gaming experience. If you like to play with the default tracks over and over again, it's you deal, but if we chose to listen to different music while playing, for any reasons we (also) chose, we may do so. It seems like you got way to much free time... I don't have all day to listen to music. I got a job and my studies, so I see my free time as a priviledge which I may design as I wish and I don't care what anyone says how I should spend it. I hate to say it, but I'll do it anyway: LOL!! Are you seriously critisizing us because of listening to music while playing?! :D:D

That's cool!! If G.I.M.G ( ) has further problems with his host you could also just use one of the free wikis and upload the information there. But a read only version is of course enough for the moment...

It would be really sweet if the wiki was online again next holiday... I wanted to take a little peak at mapping in Dark Radiant on the quiet christmas days!! That's at least a way to get away of my relatives!! So, is there a chance it will be online 'till then?