STiFU

...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?

I can't help you with that, but I can talk about custom ingame music... I recently played a Multiplayer shooter - that I don't want to entitle here any further, because it will end up in endless discussions again, whether or not to play war games - while listening to "The Matrix Reloaded - Motion Picture score". It was awsome!! Makes you feel so majestic with your weapon. You almost felt like you could dodge bullets...

Hey, that's a cool task. I was always wondering how the actual texturing process of a mesh works and how to extract the normal maps from it. Does anyone know a good tutorial?

Streetsigns or references to buildings and names would be kept in the default language, like in every other tanslation. It's only about the rest of the readables...

Yeah better concentrate on important stuff!! I can never understand why translations are necessary. After all english is an universal language and especially in germany we learn it at least 4 years, but in average 5 years which is even more extendable to 8 years. And a recent change in our school system makes my little stepbrother learn english from the third grade on instead of the fifth, which was when I started learning my first foreign language. So today you can learn english up to 10 years here and everyone who can't understand it afterwards is a fool and I wonder how he passed preschool. I was never a language person either, mathematics and scientific subjects were rather my strengths, but english is easy and everyone should be capable of speaking or at least understang it... (I guess this was my first offensive post in a public forum, but I just felt it had to be said!) One more thing, I think other translations are needed much more than the german one. In some countries you just don't learn english that much. So if you start translating, better start with those important ones. In the end, germany only gets translations of commercial games, because the game-market is so huge here and not because of an actualy need for it.

That's cool. Are you planning to create multiple default skypresets for TDM? If so it would be nice to have a moonshine night in a similar manor, but of course way more subtle. Also a Sundown could be more suitable for a dark thievy environment and feature your nice effect.

Yep. Sweet! Did you make those textures yourself?

Didn't read the whole thread so far, but really many questions are answered in nice videotutorials on 3dbuzz.com. You have to create a login but it's sure worth it for beginners and even for advanced people in some areas. Tutorials for gamedesign on the most important engines (Doom 3 aparently, but of course in DoomED) and for Rendering-/Modeling studios, as well as c++ and other stuff. Although I don't know where a Videotutorial could be of any use in learning c++? Also, since I was forced to use 3ds max, I found that it's a really nice to for gamemodelling. Haven't used Maya so far though, but Cinema 4d, which I normally use for any renderwork, surely sucks for gamemodelling!! I am definitely going to stick to 3ds max... It's simply structured and you can work very fast in optimizing polycount by hand.

Phew and I was worried that the voiceacting might be crappy since it's *just* a fanmod, but as it sounds you seem to pull it off very well, NH! Eagerly waiting to hear some things of your home studio as well...

Uhh that's real sweet. What was your general technique to fake those godrays?

Perhaps someone should contact Fingernail or Springheel about this. It's really important for you guys I think...

Oh cool that it's already planned out. That last alert statistic is nice Ishtvan. No additions necessary. But still: Performance reward would be awsome! And since you already got all the variables, probably not that much of a problem, but I don't want to demand anything here...

Aside from that you get to discover more things later on, when you got the climbing gloves. Have you visited that high secret attic in the first city district?

Of course they can't say that DX 2 sucked, but what they could say would be something like this: "We know Deus Ex 2 didn't agree so much with the original fans and we are planning to correct this, while maintaining the affection of new players." I used this formulation, because a friend of mine, who didn't play Deus Ex 1 at all said that DX2 was a really nice game to him and not a dissappointment at all. I was never able to understand that oppinion, but after all, if you don't have any expectations, you can't get dissappointed either. It's really hard to keep a certain quality of a series over the years. I think the only gameseries which managed to do so was Hitman! (and Duke Nukem of course )

I am actually playing Thief 3 again since a couple of days, because I had to push my thief-fever down and I didn't want to spend the whole afternoon trying to get thief 2 to run on a quadcore with a widescreen tft. (In the end, widescreen didn't work in T3 either, but that's another story) All what has been said so far is perfectly right, but you forgot to mention one really positive thing about Thief 3: The living City! A lot to discover, many things change in the city parts after every mission and it gives you a lot more freedom than the missions themselves. I really like this concept, having to travel to certain fences, shops and of course to the missions. Really nice!!

So, first of all, will the nice debriefing missionstatistics we all know even show up after each mission? It's always nice to have a look at those. But now to the basis of this thread. I'd like to discuss what kind of things should be displayed in the statistics and I and a friend made some thoughts about that. Of course there should first be the basic statistics: KOed People Killed People Discovered bodies/corpses Alerts; number of times detected Pickpockets Secrets Special-loot-items Playtime Amount of Loot picked up Damage dealt Healing taken The last two are not that important to me to be honest, but let's just stick to the roots here. Three new ideas for the statistics: 1) So my friend said that you can never really tell if you ghosted the mission "perfectly" and so he had the idea that it would be nice to include the "highest AI-Alertstage" of a mission into the statistics and I can only support his idea. It would be really lovely... 2) Another thing I had in mind is something we already know from many other games, but mostly from the Hitman titles. Based on all the statistics, the player could get Mission-ratings like the "Silent Assassin" in Hitman (which is very close to ghosting) or "Butcher" if you dealt a lot of damage or killed many people. I guess many of you guys will probably reject this suggestion, but I for myself always get a blast when being rewarded with a nice title for my playing... 3) Well, on this stage it starts to get complicated and I am assuming that it's not even possible to include this kind of statistics. This is supposed to be a completely new page comparable to the "Overall statistics" when playing a campaign, only these statistics inform the player about his general progress over ALL FMs he has played so far: KOed People per mission Killed People per mission Discovered bodies/corpses per mission Alerts; number of times detected per mission Playtime per mission Damage dealt per mission Healing taken per mission Average AI-Alertstage Amount of Loot picked up per mission Pickpockets per mission Secrets per mission Speciallootitems per mission The last 4 points should of course be given in percent. (It's obvious why, but I don't know how to explain myself right now) Especially that last point could become more interesting in the very late development of the mod, because you could start an online ranking-system with it. I am curious who of all the Thief-Players is the freakiest ghoster. Anyway, these are just open suggestions, but what do you think about them?

Both new Tomb Raiders were very enjoyable, but it was especially Anniversary to suprise me with its big levels. I wondered whether they use some kind of blockloading as in Oblivion, but it didn't seem like that. I am assuming that they could only build that big levels on costs of the really beautifull next-gen mode, like we know it from Legend. I also heard though, that they didn't include it because of console limitations. (Damn you low-Ram gaming consoles) But Still: Tomb Raider Anniversary >> Best Tomb Raider ever!!

What? Some of you guys are older than 20??? ;D Happy Birthday!

I even registered to give you the full support...