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If I understand right, you're saying design the maps for our campaign and let the tools evolve from that. The problem with this approach is: we want to release the editing tools FIRST so that the community can use them to build FMs. That's why our plan is to release just the toolset and one example map first, THEN work on our own campaign missions. So delaying the decisions on what player tools to include until we have done our campaign maps isn't really an option.

Unless I missed it, I don't see any discussions around here on lock picking. I was wondering what thought you guys have to put into how lock picking should be handled. Is it going to be one of those things customizable by FM authors or are you going to pick a technique and build that into your toolset? I enjoyed the lock picking of TDS, especially after I turned off the lock picking HUD. That made it kind of challenging and made it feel a little more like really picking a lock. Are you planning on something similar? And what do you guys think about keys? Are players going to be able to cycle through their keys to find the right one, or is it going to be like TDS where the door unlocks automatically if you have the key (I didn't like that)? Perhaps the player can choose which method they want. Can you relock doors? I hope that all the locks won't appear in the middle of the doors a la TDS, but that's probably something that can be up to the FM author.

Hi guys, thought I'd introduce myself. I'm Kristian and I'm from the "cold" country in the north (Sweden). I've been modding since 1992 and I don't see an end to it at the time. I actually hadn't played Thief until a few days ago. (aside from a one map conversion for Doom2) Tyrot was talking to me about how awesome Thief 1 and 2 was so I went and bought Thief 2 (Thief1 was nowere to be found). Anyway, I'm rambling on. I just wanted to say that I am very intrested in your mod. Finally a team that seem to know what they have in the Doom3 engine. I was looking at The haunted mod and A terrible secret before as they were making mods that would really benefit from the dynamic of Doom3's lighting, but they both changed to HL2 engine for some strange reason. And I don't have HL2 (I played it through though, great game but the engine wasn't much to build a mod on compared to the Doom3 engine IMHO). Anyway, you are one of the mods that I'm looking out for. Keep up the good work.

dear oDDity YOU ARE simply AWESOME...I mean YOU ARE A TRUE GEM!!! IM OFFERING YOU a WEB TV SHOW.. YOU Will give your comments daily base about, engines, life, 3d modellers, 3dmodels, anatomy, girls...games... I mean the DARK MOD team can even licence the Doom3 Engine once you get famous.. Seriously im thinking to make you HATE IDOL.. Think about the FANS that YOU CAN HATE THink about the engines YOU CAN HATE YOu are an awesome man..It s time to build a webpage.. Im "oDDITY" and you know "i HATE you" (I will contact with Trey parker and send your posts to him at least you should be in SOUTH PARK..you are a truly inspiring character...I m serious im gonna make you famous" a gifted ARTIST with FULL of HATE and with tender Heart.. Man...Where was my mind earlier?????!!! BEST

I love it. That pic is perfect for a museum or any other type of grand public building..I've already got a picture in my head for the lighting and color and everything, so it'll probably be the first one I build.

Cool, I didn't know it worked. What happened, did he never get the resources to build it? Yeah I guess CPUs can be built with whatever logic gate system you have. I think I remember reading about the water-jet switches. People are trying to use bubbles in liquid for optical switching too. When I go to sleep, I dream of all-optical CPUs. Oh well, sorry to hijack the City Guard thread that was hijacked by the Steampunk thread.

Nope, the Doom 3 editor is packed in with the game itself..you access it by making a shortcut and adding a couple of strings on the command line. Or if you wanna go with something a little different you can get GTKradiant from www.qeradiant.com, they've recently added realtime lighting in the editor, so I might switch to it myself once they get a stable build up and running. And grabbing it from Wal-Mart gives you the advantage of not paying cash and finding out that someone embossed their name on the CD's with a screwdriver. Unless it's a rare or older title I usually go for the brand new untouched copy.

I'm so glad there are people other than myself who feel this way about "background info" :) Especially for being scared, I feel more scared the more "real" it feels. Which is why I found The Ring really scarey (you could look into all the reasons the things were happening if you payed attention to the movie), but not it's cheesy "b grade horror movie" sequel, "The Grudge", which just had things in there because "they looked scarey" and no other reason . It was so try-hard. Well oDDity, undead never looked like this in a game. This is going to be cool. And I agree with Darkness and Spar - we should be holding back things for surprises. Seeing this stuff before it's been "properly introduced" in the game, is like skipping to the end of a novel. A guy as scarey and cool as this, needs a whole build up, to get you way scared before you even SEE him. All this literature you can read about what happened, and peoples diaries saying they're seeing things, and then one that ends in the middle of writing, and all that stuff...

it wasnt my idea:) but i still think its more efficient to use things like that than to build custom walls from brushes..hm or not? i donno.. if you point on that..i dont think its wise to leave only the spikes and Fm authors will have to decorate their custom walls with them manually..maybe i dont see something clear but it sounds pointless

Heh, you can really tell you came for a morrowind mod) THios is exactly the sort of stuff oyu had to do there. It would work great for FM authors here too, though I'm not sure how many mappers would want to use prefabs for something as simple as a wall, it would probably be eaasier for them to build them from brushes. All the little details/spikes and decorations will be useful though.

Doc_Brown: You have some good points. The setting in The Dark Mod does resemble Thief, and no one will deny that this project's purpose is to bring the game into fashion with the technology of today. However, could there be a legal problem? Not likely. I'll lay out the basics of the matter. Copyright law is a very convoluted and difficult to understand business. Working extensively in the MUDing community I have acquired much experience on this issue. Look on any MUD database and you will see that over half are based directly on copyrighted games. Yet, they are still up and running. Why is this when they are so blatantly violating copyright law, you ask? There are more Dragon Ball Z and Star Wars MUDs then you could possibly count. There are exceptions: Sony Online Entertainment did shut down a chosen few to make room for Star Wars Galaxies way back when, however I can not stress more that sort of occurrence is rare. The reason why these Copyright violators are not being shut down?: 1) Court costs time and money- Court is one long, monstrous, money consuming battle. Even if you were to file a case now, it would be years before an trial occurred. Lawyers cost serious money for both sides. Companies don't bring people to court lightly. They try to avoid it at all costs and they only ever do it sure of their success. 2) Fan made projects = publicity- In the instance of games, when fans put enormous amounts of effort and time into a game they love, they are respected. Fan made projects for the most part will promote and highlight a company's interests. They create hype, excitement, extend the life of the game in question, and draw in a new crowd people who before were uninterested. It's free publicity for them, and if it's positive they love it. The repercussions of bringing a highly respected and hyped fan project to court could wound any company greatly. Loyal customers supporting it feel betrayed: the company is a money hungry legal machine bent on world domination, in their minds. 3) Fan made projects and money- Firstly, when a company sues in court, that company has the burden of proof that they have lost money. As discussed earlier, a company will only go to court when they feel threatened--a threat to a business is a threat to their money. Thus, a non-profit fan production such as The Dark Mod, poses no threat to that company. In United States Copyright law: you bring someone to court when they are profiting off your idea. Copyright is the desire to protect your economic claims to an idea (in general). Therefore, with no money involved, there isn't a problem. Also, The Dark Project is discreet enough not to directly claim it's using Eidos's intellectual property. So, while similarities exist, it's not directly associated with Eidos. Anything negative about this project can not be associated with Eidos in this case, and it would have to be something negative for the business department to even take notice enough to think about shutting this down. Bottom line: There is nothing to gain by threatening or staging a legal battle over a small project that would chastise fans and cost serious dollars with such little legal significance when there are zero damages to collect. The probability that this project would be shut down is understatedly minute. You have many unique and interesting ideas, however, the Dark Mod doesn't need to tailor their system for you. The beauty of Fan Missions is the freedom for you to express your creativity, which I observe you would greatly enjoy doing. You can tailor fan missions any way you would like and make any world you like. All the Dark Mod is providing are tools to help you with that world you want to create. It's a foundation. As the creator, it's your job to build on that.

If you had a peek under her skirts you'll see she has no body, just a face and a pair of hands) I export the low res version to Maya, build a skeleton, weight it and then export it to Motionbuilder.

Yeah, I agree. And I doubt they are going to want to custom-build every tree. We should provide a few different dead trees and a few different ones with leaves, and let them mix and match. The same models can be used for dead and leafy trees, in most cases. We can probably get all the variety we need with about three models, which can then be stretched in various ways to make different versions.

Sorry to resurrect a relatively old thread, but I have a question about the 'impaired hearing' property of rooms that Springheel mentioned, and some possible suggestions. Is the hearing impairment in an environment going to be a 'dynamic' variable that can be turned off and on (or ramped up if it's an analog scale), by scripts during gameplay? Or is it a map property that's set upon loading and stays at that value? I think you could do some interesting things with that if it were dynamic, for example: If ambient sounds were scripted to start and stop periodically, the hearing impairment could be linked to that, so you could time your movement to when the generator turns on or something. In a social gathering environment with multiple rooms, one could have a script that counts noisy party guests entering/leaving the room and adjusts the hearing impairment based on that. So if you KO all the guests or they leave the room, guards will be able to hear you better. If a character makes a lot of noise while moving (like the combat bots), that could also increase hearing impairment. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could build it into the audio system, so that guards close enough to hear your noises (the 'signal') would do some sort of signal to noise test comparing your signal to the other non-suspicious sounds they can hear. That might eat too many CPU cycles though, since you'd have to propagate both the Thief's 'suspicious' sounds and all nearby ambient sounds to all nearby guards, then run the signal to noise test on each guard (some might be better at picking out noises than others.. combat bot vs drunk Benny ). Maybe that would be feasible if you're already propagating all the sounds to the guards, and the signal/noise test is fast CPU-wise. I'm guessing that right now (and in previous Thiefs), only suspicious sounds are propagated to the guards? Anyway, just some suggestions. Good luck with the Mod!

Actually that is the approach that Blender is taking. I wonder why most games use their own editor for the geometry, because 3D apps can do exactly what is needed to build 3D geometry. But I guess the reason is because of all the extra details that are needed for a game. Question is if a 3D object can be converted to a level brush.

You can build the windows, balcony, little bits of detail, railings, columns, doorways, arches, everything like this as little bits in Lightwave and then import it and assemble it with a mix of Radiant brushes for great effect. And this allows all the parts to be reused by other designers anyhow...static meshes, basically. Go nuts. We need pillars, columns, just little pieces of architectural detail really. Chimneys. Everything, just don't bother with the boring walls, floors or steps.

It is beautiful work, it would do for part of a bigger mission, but still a little small to hold an entire mission on I think. I was thinking the modelers could actually build something like this in their 3d app and then convert it to brushes in Doom - what are the drawbacks of this do you think? IT would certainly look much better being made in a 3d app, and it could be made much quicker in a 3d app becasue of the superior toolset.

THat's a good idea. I suppose you could build them in your 3d app, it's be pretty tricky trying to manipulate them into place in DoomEdit.

Yes, we should build some generic wires and pipes and things which can be used to make more complex layouts...bends, joints, straights etc. If you can be bothered to wait and not just sail along in 5 minutes, I may be able to do this myself (and would quite relish the challenge of modelling & texturing my own model). So carry on with the larger machines. I'll try to sort out these other pipes.

Just keeps on coming....we're going to have to build a kitchen soon, if this keeps up!

Anf the moral is, build your own comp and install your own pirate version of XP pro)

The rest is great, but I see you're having trouble with the face. Would it be rude of me to offer you this model as template to build your characters around. You can reshape it to any proportions you want, tweak the face, add your hair, clothes, props etc. It'll save you a lot of time and effort I'm sure.

I was just thinking I could supply anyone who wants it with a male and female template, they're anatomically correct, and just have to be pushed , squashed, resized, tweaked etc. Of course it doesn't make it any easier, and it isn't cheating, you still have all the modeling to do on top of it, but it does give you something perfect to build the armour/clothing around, and saves the time modeling hands and feet and a new head for every character.. I use them as a base for all my characters, even monsters. I was just thinking that it may halp some people wo want to model but aren't confident enough to start a character from scratch. I'l post shots of them later.

I am pleased its not just me then ..I have over fifteen years of commercial 2d 3d (traditional ) experience (www.alandickinson.net)and have worked with most of the major companies within my field …try to get into the games industry and nothing ..not a sausage! I think one of my problems is that game companies like to put you into very defined boxes and I don’t really fit into any. I must say I am surprised you have not had any success getting an environment role. Renzatic is absolutely right in what he says …I have heard the same said so many times mods are a great way to build experience. Shame you are in Canada I have seen a lot of environment positions here in the uk.

Hi My name is alan and I have been a commercial artist for the last fifteen years, I have been poly modeling and texturing for five years building my portfolio. It is my aim to work in the games industry and would be very pleased to work with you on this mod. I would be happy to help with either modeling or texture, concept work ...it all helps to build the portfolio and would be great to work with a group towards a greater goal. take a look at some of my work at www.alandickinson.net.... I have a load of new digital images I have not updated ...if you are interested I can send some to you ?