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I have opened this thread because I have thought people might be interested in sharing information and their thoughts about movies which are inspiring for TDM or the Thief Games. Some of them, like The Third Man (which inspired The Dark Project's city architecture, features a character named Baron von Kurtz who is suspiciously similar to Constantine, and even has a line that goes "Come out, come out, whoever you are!") are probably known to a lot of people here, but others may be obscure, or just not completely obvious. So, have at it. I will start with two of my recent discoveries, Louise Feuillade's serial movies.

Yes, you are still viewing The Dark Mod Forums I've just finished the upgrade of our IPB Board Forums to the latest release. Packed with new features, rewritten code and all that. Have a look around. The skin is currently the default one, but will sooner or later be converted to a darker skin, to fit the Dark Mod universe. Also note that the forums have been moved from http://modetwo.net/darkmod to it's own sub-domain: http://forums.thedarkmod.com - all forum links will still work tho, thanks to Apache's rewrite-plugin. Please report any bugs, requests and comments in this thread. PS: The forums will run a bit slow the first hours as the cache is being rebuilt.

So... What was up with the forums all day yesterday..?

I figured I'd start this so I can keep much of my questions, ranting and raving in one place. Excuse me while I think out loud (as loud as silent electronic text can be)... What to do next? Hmm... I have the beginnings of a large mansion creeper started. It is mostly initial brushwork so far. It is very loosely based on exterior photos of a real castle somewhere in Europe (I know where but not saying which). I have modified the layout and dimensions of the building slightly to make it easier to build in DR. The interior is entirely up to my imagination and so far has a dining room, auditorium, wine cellar, and part of a pantry finished. Oh yeah, the eaves have rain gutters and drain pipes too, lol. I set it aside to re-do SiegeShop and the Halloween mission. Right now I'm not sure if I want to continue it or work on something more adventurous. Building bunches of bedrooms seems tedious and unappealing right now, but someday I'd love to do a large mansion with many secrets, hidden rooms etc. My next planned map was intended to be a crypt/bonehorde style mission. But the Halloween build came up and I made a miniature version of what I had in mind for that. Time to put the thinking cap on. Maybe I'll watch a few movies, seeking inspiration. I need to make a city map soon too and need much practice at making an urban setting.

This mod has some great ambient sounds. What's yours and why? Some favorites of mine are: basement01_loop.ogg -- Simple, but very creepy sounding. It gives me the chills. church_kyrie01.ogg -- a beautiful piece of music, especially when the vocals become loud desolation_loop.ogg -- another one that gives me the chills haunted_spectral_loop.ogg -- makes the player tense... Every time I hear it I expect something to jump out at me. mansion_outside.ogg -- really conveys the feeling of being a thief. This track never gets old. solitude_loop.ogg -- One of the great piano tracks that is rarely used. Sotha (AKA the master of ambient sound placement) has used this one a few times. haunted_eerie_loop.ogg -- has a sad/gloomy sound to it. I love it!

why visportal is always closed when i place func_portal in it ?

Since a lot of you guys around here have your personal threads with collections of questions, I'm not gonna sit around but do the same myself. I want to make lightning flashes through windows. The windows aren't transparent so I have made them into func_statics. Then I've made a construction with the shadow texture to make the "light map". So the flashing lights in the room is affected by the metal and prongs of the window texture. The problem is that I now will render the outside areas, as the engine needs a portal outside to even render the flashes in the room. As I understand the thunder/lightning behaviour is tucked away in some kind of fx-file where all the preferences are. Is it possible to change the lightning flashes and make, let's say a spot light, inside the room, pointing away from the window, and creates flashes in the room? That way I can use whatever lightning map I want. Another problem I would like to solve is: When the flashes appear, the inside of the windows is totally unaffected. I would like to make them change to a brightly lit version, in sync with the flashes. Perhaps making a very thin sliver that covers the whole window, and make it into some kind of mover that moves with the flashes and goes out a small bit, just so that it covers the dark window.

Hey people. My brother has an Xbox 360 which I currently have access to, so I am seeking fun/good games that aren't available on the PC. I am guessing some of the people around here have an Xbox too, so lets share thoughts. Already on my list to play: Shadows of the Damned: Slapstick-Horror-Action-Game Alan Wake: I guess everybody knows this one Halo Reach Red Dead Redemption L.A. Noire Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Condemned 2 What I recently played: Dante's Inferno: Ok-game if you don't feel like thinking at all for once. I prefer Darksiders when it comes to Hack'n Slay though. Bayonetta: Also Hack'n Slay, but this game is so damn fun. The leveldesign is absolutely freaky and dynamic, e.g. walking on a skyscraper-tall boss itself while hitting it with your weapons. You're constantly surprised with new astonishing things, which are simply spectacular for the most part. This game can best be described as awkward but breathtaking. Wet: Action shooter, stopped playing after a while, because it got boring.

My partner and I plan to do a college-themed mission. I hope fllood doesn't mind if we use his progress summary as it's really useful: Name: Work in progress Type: an indoor building, maybe with a small courtyard in the front. We plan to include several floors. Size: Small - 4-5 floors with between 2 and 7 rooms each. AI: 'Professor' style AI, mansion-like guards, non-combatants. Player Goals: depending on the main story going through, the laboratories within the school will hold technologically important information, as well as new theories which may be profitable to obtain. There may be a unique object to steal too. Basement laboratories Design: 0% Geometry: 0% Interiors: 0% Gameplay: 0% Fine Tuning : 0% Ground floor - hall? Design: 0% Geometry: 0% Interiors: 0% Gameplay: 0% Fine Tuning : 0% First First floor - classrooms Design: 0% Geometry: 0% Interiors: 0% Gameplay: 0% Fine Tuning : 0% Second floor - classrooms/communal rooms Design: 0% Geometry: 0% Interiors: 0% Gameplay: 0% Fine Tuning : 0% Third floor - staff rooms Design: 0% Geometry: 0% Interiors: 0% Gameplay: 0% Fine Tuning : 0% Campaign Setup and Testing: 0% Ideas & Setting: The college educates students of high society in the sciences. It is a place of learning, but it is not a dormatory. Students would go to the college during the day, so the college is quiet at night. As the college is for the upper class, there is a lot of expensive items lying around, so the college have employed security. Also, the lecturers tend to stay at work until late, so a thief may bump into them. The idea is that the labs in the basement will hold the final objectives, so the idea would be that the labs would be the last place to go and would have the most security. In the lab there will be documents to read and items to steal. Perhaps some forms of magic? Access to the labs and secrets within is obtainable by visiting the staff/class rooms. fllood's useful map categories: Ideas and plans [25%] Design [0%] - Setting, Inhabitants, Player Aims, Layout Sketch Plan, Entry/Exit Points, Player and AI Pathways, etc. Geometry [0%] - Room Brushwork and Textures, Sky, Weather, architectonical Patchwork (Columns, Tunnels, Arches...), Beams, Grime, Doors, Climbables, Visportals, Location Entities Setup, etc. Interiors [0%] - Trims and optical Patches, optical Windows, Furniture and Outfit, Containers, Lighting, Location Sound, etc. Gameplay [0%] - AI, Monsterclip, Keys, Loot, Lockpick settings, Objectives, Events and Triggers, Equipment, Player Map, Shop, adjustments to Difficulty Levels, etc. Story [0%] - Briefing, Readables, visual story Scenes, Conversations, etc. Fine Tuning [1%] - Nature and Vegetation, Decals, Point Sound (Speakers), Decorations and minor Details, Secrets, Texture Touch Ups, Optional Objectives, Polishing, etc. Testing [5%] - Balancing, Performance, Campaign Adjustments, Fixes

"I must break into the weapons factrory... a sewer access shed is nearby... best not to be on the streets tonight. I received a tip that there may be a way to reach the roof, if I'm lucky. Inside is a siege weapon shop. I need to acquire the plans to the new weapons being built there..." I must mention this: There is a scene of violence more graphic than usual in this FM. Some might not approve. Not for the little ones. Download Links: The Siege Shop 1.2.0 >>> Mindplaces Link <<<Might be version 1.0.0 for a little while The Siege Shop By PranQster This mission is my first.... Second Release Version: 1.2.0 This mission is currently undergoing some major changes and optimization. Lighting, brush work, audio, etc. Improvements promised; let's hope I can live up to that promise. ^Did that^ Build Time: eternity Credits: I thank the entire TDM community. There are too many to name all without forgetting someone. And thanks to all those who helped me directly. Special thanks to: Bikerdude, Fidcal, Springheel, & greyman. They provided awesome technical support and valuble advice. Extra thanks to Springheel, BikerDude, and Nosslak for providing several models including, but not limited to, the commoner head model and the "Dolly" model. Thanks also to Shadowhide for the help with getting my script file working. Major Thanks to the Beta Testers: Chiron, Xarg, Aprilsister, AluminumHaste, and Midnight If I forgot anyone: Bummer Known Issues: Player Notes (in inventory): Last Line of the first page gets cut off. I'll fix this sometime, but it's easy to fill in the blank. Skybox and city background far from being done well. Do I care? Of course. Am I going to fix it in this FM? Probably not. There is a very unrealistic teleport which happens if you try to jump off the building (or from elsewhere) into the moat. Just pretend it didn't happen and soldier-on. Many things look too clean and shiny... not enough grime. Again... Do I care? Of course. Am I going to fix it in this FM? Probably not. A certain lever becomes magically frobable after certain conditions are met. Not the first time for this behavior in an FM. Solution: Just pretend you loosened it on previous attempts... kind of like when you easily open a jam jar that someone else tried to open for 5 minutes. If you get stuck with locked doors and no key... try harder to find the key! Read the readable items again if needed. ^All that has changed^

Here's my thread. I'll start by posing noob questions (I will also do so in the Editor's guild for more immediate problems), planning questions and requests for help. Later I will post screenshots and other preview things below.

OK, my turn at a thread with details on my mission. As I stated in the "introductions" thread, I'm changing my mission from a mansion to a "lost city" style map. It's up to Ungoliant how he wants to fit this into the overall plot, but typically when you have a lost city area, it's somewhat remote and away from The City (in our case, Bridgeport). And typically, the protagonist travels there to obtain some type of rare item or information that can only be found at that location. For my level, I'm picturing this: 5 outdoor "areas" - by area, I mean basically a glorified room where the sky is visible. 10 inside rooms, located one level below the outside areas, accessible by stairs or a ramp. For AI, I'm envisioning either skeletons, revenants, werebeasts, and/or spiders. I'd like to stay away from zombies, that doesn't seem to fit. Any humans are probably out, but there might be a stray thief or two who is doing some treasure hunting. Also picturing a couple of puzzles, and maybe some old traps left behind by the previous inhabitants of the lost city. And as much as it's possible with a smallerish level, I'd like some focus to be on exploration. One or two small secret areas would be cool. I kind of see this area only accessible via an underground passage - it's possibly our protagonist gets a map or key or artifact from another mission that allows himself access. I don't think there's much in the way of "lost city" assets in TDM, so I'll have to get creative. Lots of torches and statues and remains/bones/deadfall is the way, I think. More later...

From playing the Seasons Contest missions (bugs added as I go). Bug [1] Bring up the blackjackOpen a readable (inventory map in my case)Click (attack1)Results in blackjack arm raised indefinitely Bug [2] (SOLVED - map related with existing workaround): In Rake Off, in the starting cave, looking anywhere below horizontal results in falling snow not displaying Feature [3] In Reap as you Sow, objectives are numerous and change quite often. Viewing them through the TDM objective screen makes it easy to miss a few, because only a handful of them are displayed at a time and the mouse scrolling doesn't work item by item. Thief had the very simple and clever idea of choosing a much smaller font for large objective lists. Is this possible in TDM and what do people think of that idea?

map type: cave/subterranean. There, I'll just keep that little tidbit up on top of this thread in case anyone wants to know. This is my thread for posting my screenshots, progress updates, requests for advice, etc etc. For now, work has begun and is going well (but not well enough for screenshot yet). I haven't thought to far into the map yet but I have my concept for my starting area. Cave entrance is boarded up and semi-collapsed. Player gets in through a hole above the door that is high up and unreachable by the player (will be cool if i can fanagle the player to slide down rocks and drop for starting position). There will be many cracks, and holes in the wall/door leading out of the cave, and there will be lots of sunlight flooding in, including some sunbeam particle types with floaty dust. Right now to emulate bright light outsidea dark cave, I'm just using a big flat patch textured with _white behind all the gaps. It looks great for now, but later I might try a cubemap with some foliage/rocks outside the cave. Lots of old wooden beams and a boarded up door covered with rocks. in the first 75 feet it goes from well-lit white-ish sunlight to very dark, and I'll probably set up a trigger in the first dark area with some nice distant howling sounds (thinking about using werebeasts in the FM )

Let's not clog this forum up with stupid questions. I'll put them all in one thread now. I'm trying to make an object frobable. I read the inventory tut and entered the required spawnrags but when I try to drop the model it just floats in mid air. It seems I have to add the porperty "drop_to_hands" and set it to 0 for the model to fall. This doesn't work for me though. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

Ok, here we go. Need some good story ideas. Obviously, each person will need to come up with the narrative for their own mission, but we need some kind of a loose, overall story that will take us through all of our missions in a campaign form. I'm open to anything at this point. My original idea before any of you joined, heck before even posting the "novice campaign" thread to see if anyone was interested, was something like this: Protagonist infiltrates a mansion owned by a wizard and gains information (my mission) required to access other remote locations and find certain hidden or secret items. Yes, I know, so original. Pretty much just like the arc of stories from The Dark Project, where The Sword/Haunted Cathedral leads to The Mages Towers/The Lost City/Song Of The Caverns/Undercover. Still, I thought it was a good base idea, as it opened the possibility of creating several unique missions all with different settings and unique atmosphere. We don't need to use this by any means, so if you have ideas, let's hear it. As I've said, I'm open to anything. We also need to decide who our protagonist is going to be. We can come up with someone completely new, or we can go with someone already listed in the Dark Mod wiki. I think the character of Farrell sounds interesting, but maybe we can come up with something different/better.

2011-06-12: Map info: 840 brushes, 35 patches, 165 entities Current status: Map contains start pack, big terrain room, sky, and has 15% of building-outlines done Info: Modelled after a real world location, but it seems I have to make some compromises: The AI cannot climb the very narrow spiral stairs, so I need to find a way to block them in a realistic manner (stairs are under repair? old tower was bricked off, so AI cannot access it?). Building in varying degrees off-grid works as long as you keep an integer ratio (like 5-to-3 units in one direction, 1-2 in the other), so you can join doors and windows at the right places. That even works if the floor is not level. However, as soon as you try to add the roof, you end up with 3D brush-faced nightmares... The map compiler seems to introduce random errors (missing faces, or player gets stuck in floor, or non-solid walls) if things get too complicated. Unfortunately, it is totally unclear what exactly "too complicated" means. Add a brush, and suddenly the error is gone. Remove another, and another error creeps in again... Most of the (real) rooms have now either modern (tourist-related) usages, or their usage was/is never known, or they are not accessible to the public, so I have no idea how they look. Likewise, some good-looking things were not existing even 1860, but the state of the location pre 1800 was just too plain, boring or in ruins (which are harder to model than a clean wall or I already build the modern equivalent and I am weary to tear it down... At least one location seems not to be properly sealed against the outside, so the game mixes up outside and that location. I can't find the leak, however... Anyway, things progress nice, but very slowly. Don't expect any release or even screenshots this year.

I started a new thread at black cat forums to keep them informed and raise awareness. http://forums.blackcatgames.com/showthread.php?t=13438 Support the thread from time to time and you support Dark Mod by keeping it in the public eye. I'll add more as we progress.

when i do a search, it give me some results, I click on a result and exspect to get taken to the post it specifies - but no..... I get taken to the first post of the bloody thread it is in..ggrrr

the "what are you working on" thread appears to be locked from new posts. just noticed this..... whats going on?

I KO'd an AI. I placed the body for another AI to find. I noticed a possible bug. The AI sees the body and checks it. Then he looks around for the culprit. UNARMED. He is not wielding his sword. Then when he has searched enough and relaxes, then he pulls out the sword and resumes patrol.