STiFU

Whut?? Somebody vote for Hitman!! Legacy of Kain before Hitman and Commandos, I don't understand the world...

There are actually multiple versions of the german computermagazines. In stores you only get the versions without any age requirements. If you want to have the 16+ or 18+ version, you have to verify, that you are of apropriate age and have to get yourself a subscription. AWSOME!! But hey, I am actually a little happy about all that strict rating stuff here in germany. Today's content has become so violent, that I wouldn't want my kids (if I get some, that is^^) watching that stuff. Sparhawk, me thinks Tels is right. I also still know the times when Index meant "forbidden", but today it's similar to 18+ media. As a substitute, media can still be confiscated. It's really forbidden then. You have to release some reeeeally politically incorrect stuff to get your work confiscated though...

I am using crazybump too. Created nearly all my normals with that tool. It gave me bad results only once, but then I just modeled the bad parts in c4d and a perfect normal map was done... I spent the most time on creating a custom normalmap shader, 'cause I couldn't find one anywhere. In general I also prefer 3ds max for modeling. Is texture baking and a normalmal shader integrated in version 8?

I know about patches already from my quake 3 mapping experience (mostly trickjump obstacle courses for q3 defrag, in case you are interested click this link). Used the 1.5 radiant and I love it. Still missing some features here apparently, but there for DR comes (or will come) along with other nice things. But hey, the other tut is really coming at the right time. I've been looking for information on that topic all day. Didn't know Doom 3 did the normalbaking. I guess you can't bake the diffuse channel without though, right? So in the end you gotta bake in you prefered 3d app anyway if it comes to more complex diffuse texturing...

Yeah sorry, I though this was a quick and easy to answer question. Doom 3 does indeed not other sounds for the surfaces. The Article on surfacetypes in the wiki was kinda misleading here, 'cause it listed doom's surface types, which actually don't have different sounds either... Anyway, I don't need the sounds right now anyway. I was just wondering, what might have gone wrong here...

Just a normal brush. If I put multiple materials on the floor next to each other with suposedly differenz surface sounds, they sound all the same...

In the surface parameter list on the wiki it's said that those are the default doom 3 surface parameters, but they don't work for me either. The sound doesn't change when I walk on it...

Is it normal, that the normal D3 surface sounds don't work without a further setup either? I have a material like this and the sound is never altered when I step onto my surfaces: textures/darkmod/wood/panels/tiling_1d/trim_small_precious_001 { wood qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/wood/panels/trim_small_precious_001_tiling1d_ed.tga diffusemap textures/darkmod/wood/panels/trim_small_precious_001_tiling1d.tga bumpmap textures/darkmod/wood/panels/trim_small_precious_001_tiling1d_local.t ga }

I prefer to work on a low poly level from the beginning. On the one hand it's cleaner and on the other, it's much easier to optimize it later on. Also I think over all you still save some time, 'cause you woun't run into nasty problems that could possibly be caused by such a triangle reducing feature.

There is a german version of Doom 3? I'd be suprised about that. I thought Doom 3 was placed on the index the day it was released...

Seriously Unstoppable. Get yourself a project or something. Ok, it's nice to have a "conversation" here, but if you invested as much time into gamedevelopment as you invest into meaningless topics and posts, you could create a game or at least a mission for TDM on your own easily. Anyway, that poll only consists of 3 options, which is way too less. I for my self would vote for call of duty 4.

Now there we got a confrontation again, because I liked bioshock... Maybe it wasn't as complex as System Shock, but the atmosphere and story (maybe sometimes a little too predictable) was great, as well as the overall graphics and leveldesign. Also the german synchronisation was suprisingly good in my oppinion, although so many said the english version was so much better. But sparhawk is right again. You learn from every media. If you read a paper, watch TV, or play a game, what's the difference? Ok, the information in a game are mostly of less quality than the other medias' and TV information is also of less quality than paper's. From this context one could agree with oddity, because gaming servers the least quality information of the named categories and could be acknowledged a waste of time. BUT on this train of thought I made a little mistake. Isn't the classification of quality information subjective? Yes, it is! For sparhawk a hockey game is understandably more than entertainment like he pointed out and for all of us every first person game is more than entertainment (though not every game is entertaining ), because we play in an analytic way and learn more and more about leveldesign, texturing and all, which is important to most of us.

I guess it's the integrated aimbot...

Played it today. Awsome game... Seriously! Couldn't get my hands of that neat controller...

Thief for instance...

Thievery was awfull. Actually the only good multiplayer stealth game was Splinter Cell, but that is already too intense. You could feel and hear your heart beating when you played that game. I could never play it longer than two rounds... Stealth is just not that suitable for multiplayer.

I got the list already from your wiki, but thanks anyway. That link you posted is very helpfull, so thanks again... For quake 3 there was a neat tool for creating the materials, called Quake 3 Arena Shader Editor (Q3ASE), with a proper preview and all. I wonder whether the author could be bothered to lay open the source to us, so someone could add the doom specific features to it? Q3ASE enhanced my working with q3 shaders very much, because this way you can just learn by doing... The best thing would of course be to integrate such functions into DarkRadiant, since you got the preview already implemented and would only have to write an interface for creating the materials and a function to reload all or just the changed materials in DR. (Keep in mind that I am not demanding anything here, it's just a gentle suggestion, which in my oppinion would enhance DR to a great amount) About that full bright thing, I actually had a very similar solution and now I realized that it was just the preview that didn't work. I should test things ingame more often...

So for my testing purposes I should just switch to High detail and leave those TGAs out, I guess. Ok then, thanks for you answers. But you should really clarify this informations a little closer in the wiki, so that this question might never arrose again... And I got a new question already. Is there something like a shader manual for Doom 3, similar to the one for quake 3? I googled, but couldn't find anything. I need to know the parameters for the material files, especially the ones to create a full-bright material, like a lit window or a skybox. I know there is a special technique for the skybox, but it should be possible to create a full bright material anyway, shouldn't it?

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.