RPGista

Jeesh... Am I the only one getting tired of the whole routine of people who see themselves as consumers, posting about their "constructive criticism" (which is often simply subjective opinion), somehow demanding they be adressed by people who are actually doing things according to their own vision, in their own free time, with the skillsets they have? Im not necessarily talking about this thread in particular, though it seems to be starting to happen here as well. Its just something really widespread online that is becoming more and more grating to me as time goes by. Somebody posted some work, contributing something to the community. Not really your fancy? Yeah, whatever dude, nobody cares. Everyone's got their own opinions. No big deal. Wanna contribute some criticism, sure, do it in a cool, encouraging way. It would be much better to offer help, or make something yourself, because ths stuff takes a lot of work, even the most "noob" mapper or modder here puts a lot of work into what he is trying to do. Seems to me this forum might be getting less and less creative and I dont see a lot of the regular contributors and maybe theres a reason for that.

Those are some really good looking shots for sure... Love those landscapes, and those skies.

Very nice. I remember seeing this article back in the day, maybr it will interest you if you havent read it already: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=AI_Framework

Yeah, thats pretty cool to have customization. Wouldnt worry much about people's tastes though. Badass to be walking around fighting monsters in a dungeon with the bow and arrow. Do you think its feasible to add some basic stealth elements to the formula, so you could hide if you leave a monsters cone of vision, or surprise them if you walk silently? That would add to the action for sure, could give a different feel from other mutiplayer scenarios. Great work going on man.

Make sure you follow the A-Z tutorial on the wiki page or the video tutorial series by Springheel religiously in order to get to know the mechanics of map making and DarkRadiant, or you will be overwhelmed by technical issues.

I gotta say this is a triumph, my friend. The art direction is wonderful, all the light effects and lighting design on the level, everything is bumpy and theres a lot of detail and shadows moving, it all really plays with idtech's strengths. The hexen-like music and the heretic evil laugh when you get the item were perfect. The seamless transition from 3rd to 1st person view works really well, theres no break in immersion, and the thief3 guy fits right in in this game world. This is something really special, I hope you'll package your work as tdm did, as an organized asset pack with a mapper in mind, so a community can create many maps for your mod.

When talking about future features its hard to make a distinction between broad advancements we would personally like to have (as something that would modernize the game) and things that will actually have a significant, needed impact on the way the game plays. We would obviously love to see all sorts of things added to tdm, but the game has a lot of legacy, and we simply dont have the manpower... Still, anything that adds to the way light works in the game carries a lot of potential and relevance, as it is the single most important factor for tdm. Making lighting more interesting, more realistic, will always be worthwhile. If its a true raytracing method or a probe gi system like nbhor mentioned, that would be absolutely insane to have, for sure. Having said that, we should probably focus on the latter type of features, as they seem more attainable. For example, improving the idtech4 physics system would open entire avenues in terms of what mappers would be able to do, and how players interact with the world inside the game. We have plenty of examples of that in HL2, or Dark Messiah. TDM would benefit greatly from having a more interactive world, enhancing its stabilished style perfectly. Feathered alpha textures and better lod mechanics would allow for vast, good looking outdoors maps, making it worthwhile for mappers and contributors to explore that pathway, of having a sneaking experience that is not limited to the inside of buildings. Right now our nature assets are very basic and there are no open maps as far as Im aware, apart from the first section of winter harvest. Volumetric lights are not only for eye candy, coupled with parallel lights it would open the way for indoors missions that happen during day time, where you have to avoid the light beams coming through the windows, cracked walls or ceilings. It seems important for me that these features are,as far as possible, all part of the "engine", in a way that they work without having to be propped up by the mapper for each individual situation, in a painful, complex process that many will never dare go through. Thats pretty important for mappers. So new features also need to worry about being mapper-friendly if they really are to have an impact. Projected shadow lights and the color grading code have seen very little use so far if any, even though they are really cool, perhaps for the simple fact that they are not integrated in the game, and most people might not even know they exist.

Wow, thats pretty awesome. Is this achieved while playing the game normally?

Yes, thanks Grayman, for this. Really nice work.

Im sorry, but this is completely misguided. Even if it were true, and we have reasons to be skeptical about what the us gov says these people are, as they have a lot of interest in the matter, whatever a whistleblower happens to be personally has nothing whatsoever to do with the information he has exposed. The information is either true, or it is false. Every other aspect in the matter is secondary in relation to this simple fact. Now if you choose to ignore the incredible atrocities they have dennounced but feel confortable in accusing them of being vile criminals because they happened to break confidentiality laws (designed specifically to prevent the gov officials from having to answer for their crimes in office), then you see why you are perhaps misguided. As for the burning of the witch (assange), Im glad your leaders and authority figures have made some of you feel safer by finally taking this evil, evil man out of circulation.

I do know about Diego's werebeast, I tried working with it but by the end I decided it was easier for me to create a new model from scratch, so I could make use of a rig and character def I had created successfully before. I already have it modeled and Im in the process of animating it, but hit an annoying roadblock. I tested the new werewolf in game and I must say I like the result. Hopefully I can eventually get it done, work the kinks out with Springheel and Grayman and we should have a new monster to play with soon(ish) enough. If diego finds the time to finish his own cool werebeast someday, we would have two new characters for some scary missions, which would be even better. But lets not derail the topic.

Thats actually a pretty interesting topic. And I do like your idea. I remember feeling that Thief3 tried to go into this GTA kind of universe, but the city simply couldnt be as lively due to scale and depthness problems/limitations. But a guy like you would be in the perfect position to push the limits of mapping, with your coding mastery... Since releasing Remembrance I didnt really feel the need to do mapping again, up untill recently, with my forest modelling experiments. But throughout all this time, there were lots of ideas that would pop up, and you would give up soon after because they were all about heavy emphasis on storytelling rather than sneaking gameplay, and those just take insane amounts of work. They also demanded experience on things I didnt know about, particularly scripting. But I do remember this one story that stuck with me for a long time, about the player finding himself stranded in an abandoned castle in the mountains during a snow storm, and finding out that its actually not abandoned, the people who lived there were killed many months earlier and theres a werewolf there, in the shadows. It would be about this cat and mouse chase between the player and this indestructible, unstoppable creature. I was convinced that this horror setting would work really well with in tdm, because of its deep ai. But I would need a lot of control over this monster, if it was going to be good and unique. And right now we simply dont have that kind of support in the game for this. The AI is fine tuned to be a "guard", not really a monster that can track you down, walk on walls and things like that. At least this is well beyond the reach if you are just a mapper, and cant animate or code yourself. The point of the whole plot changed in time and ended up becoming more of a tragic, sad story. I abandoned the idea of trying to put it into game form, I now think it would work better as a stop motion short film (like the briefing in remembrance) or a small graphic novel I could draw - both would be easier to do and allow for far more freedom than to try and create the same atmosphere in a map, without really having the tools to do it in full. I still feel it would be an interesting little story that would be nice to read in a cold night, but theres not enough time to do it. It did inspire me to grind my teeth and go through the painful process of learning character modeling and animation, so I could contribute a new werewolf monster to the game. Ive been working on him for a few months now.

Yeah, this looks really cool. Love it that they kept the handdrawn feel...

Wow, freakin love that title picutre.

Well, have at it my friend. You can explore your own idea by making a mission, its not as hard as it seems. Do a bit of research on the theme (there are a few missions that focuses on code breaking scenarios), watch some tutorial video series and off you go.