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:lol: I wouldn't really call the character evil, but rather "emotionally and morally detatched" from society. I didn't give you a lot of our previous discussions because it's important that the writer has a chance to explore creatively without being tainted by the wants and desires of the whole. I was very pleased to read what you have written and Springheel did point out some of the same things I was going to mention. A few things I might suggest as food for though. His wife isn't dead, but is instead now married to a rich nobleman. Perhaps the Thief has indeed been imprisioned all of these years at the request of this supposed Noble Lord. Maybe the Builders had been paid off to "take care" of this nuisance but the Builders power has weakened since the greed of the nobility have begun to choke them out of the richer parts of the city and back into the run down areas. The Daughter wasn't killed but rather died of a disease that had been afflicting the young several years before. The wife had been lead to believe the Thief had run off to war or that he had been killed in the Thieves Guild. She would not have known he was the head of the guild. Essentially, he wants his life back. The part with bringing back the daughter may still work. How desperate is he to reclaim a part of his life? There should be some price to pay for using this tool of ressurection. Those brought back should not quite be themselves, but rather tormented, perhaps evil. This could be something else he has to debate. Anyway, just some thoughts that popped into my head while reading your work. Thanks for sharing. Much appreciated.

I agree with you on most points. Especially about the ending, which I didn't like. I was just thinking of a way the campaign could end without him defeating an evil in society. I had not been given the part about this character himself being 'evil'. I'll work on the plot, anyway. This is just a basic concept which will no doubt morph into something better as time goes on. You just keep what is good and change what is bad. In this case is think the good is: The Brotherhood of the Renaissance, The Baron (I know I haven't really fleshed him out above, but I have him in my head and he's a decent villain), the characters efforts to get back into the thieves guild. The bad is: The characters background, the whole daughter thing.

I have a problem with this...our Thief character is supposed to be inferior to trained warriors. He is not a combat veteran by any means. As it doesn't seem to be crucial to the rest of the plot, it might be better if he was away for some other reason. Maybe he was caught and exiled by the old prince of the city, and now that the city has been taken over he sees an opportunity to return. Or perhaps he has been working in another city for a time. I like the first couple missions. I also like the idea that our Thief used to be a high-ranking member of the guild, but there is no one now who remembers him. I also like the idea that the city has been taken over, providing lots of opportunity for political intrigue. I'm not so sure that the Builders would be conquering cities though...they aren't an army. Would a political coup work? They certainly might have the power to overthrow the government. Or perhaps some other force has taken the city, but they have turned power over to the Church. My biggest problem is the ending. I wasn't thrilled with the idea of our thief having a wife and daughter, and the ghostly girl thing makes me think too much of the Cradle in T3. Having the climax be bringing his daughter back to life is not my favourite. It also kind of leaves the whole cauldron thing hanging. Who is 'the baron'? Why was he brought back? He seems to just vanish from the plot. And why does bringing his daughter back to life make him worthy of becoming head of the thieves' guild? That conversation with the new 'baron' didn't make sense to me. Another thing--it still seems like just about every mission is the Thief being 'duped' by someone, or doing someone else's work for them. I got so sick of that in T3...Garrett always did everyone elses dirty work, and never seemed to do things to further his OWN agenda. Still, no story is going to please everyone. I definitely think there is potential here. We can see what the others think.

A Very Basic, Simple Version of the Plot (V 1.0) I have no idea what the Thief is called, so far now I’ll just call him ‘Thief’. I’d thought of ‘Picasso’ (he’s an artist, see?), but maybe that’s too exotic. I’ve tried my best not to let the plot get ‘epic’ towards the end. In fact, the whole crux of the ending is that the character does not want to get involved. He is not a Garrett, out to save the world. He is just out to save himself and… well, I don’t want to spoil it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 1: Escape From Low-knot Prison Background: “Six years of war had made a general of me, but once I heard my City had been taken over by the enemy I knew I’d have to go home by the quickest route. So I allowed myself to get caught; nothing hurt but my pride, and much better than going back home on the back of a cart to be buried in some anonymous grave with the rest of the taffers. Now I’m here in the City again, a prisoner of war, and all I have to do is escape to see my wife and daughter again.” Information: The title says it all. You simply have to escape the Prisoner of War building. This level takes place in the old part of the City, the medieval part. Enemies are normal prison guards. Level 2: No Honour Among Thieves Background: The Thief finds that his wife and seven year old daughter have died in his absence. “They were both dead; killed by who, I didn’t know, and it didn’t seem to matter at the time. The City was responsible. I lay around in its dingy bars for a while, no one knowing or caring that an enemy was in their midst. The war seemed to be taking place in another world, beyond the tight stone shell of the City. After a while I decided that it was time to get my old job back.” “The Thieves Guild was still there, but after six years I wasn’t known and they certainly wouldn’t welcome me back with open arms. You couldn’t kill your way to the top of the Thieves Guild; well, you could. But then you wouldn’t have a guild to control. And after six years of war, I’d seen enough of death for one lifetime.” “I had to work my way to the top, with old fashioned thieving. The head man was a rich alchemist called Tybalt with strong ties to the Guild of Mages. He lived on the wealthy side of the city, out of the shadow of the Builder’s Palace. If you can’t kill your way to the top, apparently you can just buy it.” Inside Tybalt’s Office in the Thieve’s Guild Tybalt: Any thieving experience? This isn’t just a case of hacking and slashing like in that war. Talent is thin on the ground these days, and rationing make the rewards meagre. I of course, have other means of getting what I want. Tybalt places a gemstone with a lions head on it into his desk. Tybalt: This is a rare gemstone of great worth. It shall stay in this desk. If you can hand it to me at five o’ clock tomorrow morning when I awake, the job is yours. Information: The test is to sneak into the Thieves guild and steal the gemstone. The Thieves Guild is also in the medieval section of the City, but there may be some steampunk devices and victorian architecture in the upper floors around Tybalt’s office. This is up to the level designer. Level 3: Brotherhood of the Renaissance Background: You return the gemstone to Tybalt. Tybalt: “I’m very impressed, not only because you stole the gemstone but because you brought it back. It shows loyalty.” You: “It’s a fake.” Tybalt: “Of course it is. You can tell by the triplets. You’re a clever man.” Voice Over: “He didn’t know the gem used to belong to me when I played the same game with new recruits. Calling me clever could have meant two things: a career, or a rusty knife through the mattress of my bed one night. But he gave me a job, regardless of any dangerous intelligence.” Tybalt: “The Builder’s who 'conquered' us have set up residence in the Old part of the City. Those religious fanatics are powerful, and they don’t like us ‘heathen’ mages with our pagan magic and colourful alchemy. I fear a war in the City one day, when there’s naught abroad to distract them. We must ally ourselves with the enemy, supply them with our technology, worship their god, and kiss the Emperor’s feet.” Tybalt: “There is a cult calling themselves the Brotherhood of the Renaissance that meet monthly in one of the richer districts of the City. I can’t have them killed because they’re all nobles, politicians, people like me with more money than brains who like to meet up under a full moon, dabble in witchcraft and necromancy; the exact kind of thing the Builder loves to smite. It is essential that these kinds of activities be put a stop to if we are to survive the Builders occupation.” Information: The first part of this level resembles the classic ‘Thieves Highway’ of Thief 2, as you make your way cross the City to the mansion where the meeting will take place. The second part takes place in the mansion itself. You overhear a meeting in which the members of the secret guild discuss a planned resurrection. They mention a ‘Renaissance Cauldron’. The leader of the cult departs, and you are told to follow him. But when you leave the mansion he is gone. A young girl who tells you to follow her after the men approaches you. The architecture of the mission is wealthy Victorian, set in the advanced half of the City, with the most advanced steampunk technology guarding the nobles houses. Level 4: Nocturne of the Dead Background: “I followed the little girl through the busy streets, the crowd parting before her like a sea of black. I struggled to catch up. As we reached the borders of the city we saw the two men leave by the East Gate. I have a feeling they’re not going for an afternoon stroll.” Information: This is the scary dead mission. It begins on the outskirts of the City from where you have to follow the two men out towards an old, evil castle. Your objective is to steal the Book of Going Forth which the necromancers are suing in their resurrection rituals. However, before you can steal the book you see a ritual taking place. The necromancers place a body into the Renaissance Cauldron, which rises out reborn. The resurrected man is The Baron, a horrible, scary, skeletal man. After the ritual you steal the book and leave. Architecture is a kind of very evil gothic. The level designer should have fun with this one. Level 5: Classical Tyrannicide (working title ) Background: You return to Tybalt’s house with the Book of Going Forth. You step into the living room and see that he is... drinking wine with the Baron and his female aide. Tybalt: “Ah, I see you’ve already met the gracious Baron Marw.” You: “But…” Tybalt: “Don’t. I must apologise for the actions of my thief, but do not blame him. He was acting strictly under my orders. I believe you have something that belongs to this gentleman?” You hand over the Book of Going Forth. The Baron’s aide extends a bony hand and takes it. Tybalt: “The situation has changed, Thief. We must adapt. The Baron has come to me with quite a tempting proposition, one that would solve many of our problems.” Baron: “Yes.” Tybalt: “You know of this Renaissance Couldron, Thief? And you have witnessed its power? The Baron’s plan is genius, and would ensure the alliance between us and the Builder’s children for many years to come. Perhaps you would like to tell him the rest?” The Baron smiles his skeleton grin. He holds up a ball. In it we see the Emperor of the Builders upon his throne. He is pierced by an arrow. Builder: “The Emperor is struck down! He is dead.” We see the Baron carry the dead body of the Emperor towards the Renaissance Cauldron, and place him in. The Emperor awakens, grasping the side of the cauldron. Builder: “He lives! The magic of the Builder inspired these mage’s work.” Baron: “He owes us his life!” Information: This level involves sneaking into the Builders palace and killing the Emperor. The way the player chooses to do this would depend on his playing style. Those who prefer ghosting can poison his food, etc, and leave the level without technically having killed anyone. The less bothered could just put an arrow in him. The architecture should be the most magnificent Gothic imaginable, with huge cathedrals, stain glass, ecetra. The palace is in the old section of the City. Level 6: Background: You walk down near the sea. There are celebrations in the distance. You hear a sound behind you. It is the little girl. Girl: “You shouldn’t have helped them. You have to stop them.” You: “It isn’t my place to stop them. I was just a pawn in their game, and now I am leaving the chessboard.” Girl: “You shouldn’t kill people, father. It hurts. I know.” She reaches out her hand, and it passes through yours. She is your daughter’s ghost. You: “Who did this to you?” Girl: “The Thieves Guild took care of us after you left, but then Tybalt took over and sold us to ‘them’. They want to use the Cauldron to win the war, to bring their soldiers back to life.” You: “The war is no concern of mine.” You look down at the ghost. You: “But, my daughter, you are. I could… bring you back.” Information: Your mission is the final level is to break into the Mage’s Tower, steal your daughters body, bring her back to life in the Cauldron and then escape without either of you dying. You will also need to steal the Book of Life to do this. The level is a mix of steampunk and gothic elements. Outro: Tybalt’s living room. Tybalt: “You are to be made the leader of the Thieves Guild in my absence. Now that I am a Baron, we will of course be enemies. But I won’t come down that hard on you, my old friend. You know, I’m sure your daughter looks familiar.” You: “You might have met her mother.” Tybalt: “Yes, probably. You meet a lot of people in my line of work. Almost never in social situations, though. (Sighs) Happy thieving.” LE FIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Any elements you like, or dislike, say so.

I think, if presented properly, they could be perfect in the thief world. I agree they shouldn't be some sort of political group, but instead are a shadowy faction, that rarely is ever seen, and when you do, watch out! I don't really like the previous designs i did much. To flowy and extravagant. I'm gonna do a few more tries to try and get the design right, but for any final concept art, one of the better character artists should do it.

Being Myrdraal style, they would be a seperae character class. Just like guards, or zombies are different classes. In this way I can see them fit in as regular AI models that can be plugged in a level. Of course their power has to be balanced with some weekness, but I see nothing wrong when players have to figure out a way to defeat them. So far we have only AI that is already known to the players because they are clones from the LGS games. And I didn't like the assasins either because they were made very cheap.

Well let that be a lesson to you, if you have a character idea, post it in a forum regularily perused by civilized folk.

Hi guys. My name is Alex and I am the team leader and artistic director (in fact the sole artist) for a mod known as Killing Floor which is using UT2004 tech. (www.killingfloor.net) I have always been a Doom 3 fan, and as I see all the other great D3 mods go down the crapper, i've noticed that you guys continously look very, very strong. Anyway, im a damned good artist and i use 3d studio max to create my work. If you reach a point of desperation for artists i can probably take a bit of time out of my own work to create things like map objects etc. Although character modelling isn't exactly my forte. If you are in trouble, please consider that there ARE people who care and would like to help. This is pretty mcuh the last and best Doom 3 mod i see in development that's even worth looking at. Looks fantastic so far!

The DR development is here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showforum=51 Can you see it? I figure you should, because you have "Beta Mapper" in your profile.

Sorry about the confusion. There are greater things at work in the background, you are correct there, but we don't want it to be a "save the world" type of premise. Much like real life, there are things going on in the background that affect our day to day business. I would suspect that our characters motivations would be based on the fact that his life is being disturbed. Not by his good will. Anyway, short answer...yes, there are larger threads in the background...but they should not be immediately aware to the player or our main character. These things can be hinted at through disruptions in our characters life. Perhaps what seems to be disturbing his life on the surface is later revealed to be a part of something larger. Sorry to be so vague, but I don't want to push you in any specific direction or taint your line of thinking.

NH has given me the summary. The wording here is a little unclear. Does this mean the story should only be about the main character's life, paying the rent, joining a guild, removing an obstacle to business, a competitor, ecetra, without any suggestion of a larger plot involving other forces, or that the focus should simply be on the more mundane aspects of Thievery while a grander plot involving outer forces can be revealed as the BIG picture comes into focus? It would seem rather strange for a Thief game to eschew these things completely, since they are a well loved ingredient in all the Thief games and most great fan missions.

We should obviously discuss the main character's apperance before I go off and unilaterally model him. SH already has art done, but he didn't consult anyone either, so we may not all be happy wiht it. First thing we should clear up is that this is not Garrett, the only similarities are the hood, the bow and the blackjack. This guy has a different personality, background and appearence. I like the hood and mask idea, I've used it before on thief characters, but I was thinking of doing the full cloak as well. I've never really liked the look of a hood without a cloak. It's not a problem since we he isn't an in-game charcater anyway. There's just something about a full length cloak that looks hard and sexy and mysterious. How armoured should he be? He's obviously not a fighter, but he is aware that the guards where he's going are heavily armed and good fighters, so he'd what some sort of protection for a worst case senario. I think hardened leather armour would be a wise precation. I was thinking of making him more like a D&D thief charcters with his leather armour and cloak, kind of leet looking, but not totally fantasy. I'm attaching various pictures I've found of various items I thought might be good for ideas. If anyone else has any pics they think would be useful the post them as well.

I think we might be making a mistake in actually showing the arrow and the bow on screen in the players hands. It creates more business than is necessary in my opinion. I see the logic behind it and respect the principle, but I don't think it's the best way to do it. If there are players willing to do away with the onscreen icons and memorize their key bindings then they probably would appreciate not seeing the tip of the arrow poking up on the screen. The arrow tip would be more distracting since it's moving around. It also doesn't strike me as a good idea in the sense that the character is running around holding the arrow like that. It's not going to be as easy to knock the arrow. The player would have to position the tip into his fingers before firing. Normally, the player reaches back and pulls an arrow out of the quiver from the appropriate orientation in one smooth movement. I think this is one of those situations where we don't need to provide the visual. If a player is hardcore enough to turn off the weapon/ item icons...they likely don't want or need the visual representation. It would defeat what they're trying to achieve and needlessly clutter the screen for those who do want the icons. Keep it simple.

Well, I make regular contributions to the Imperium blog. Look here. If I remember correctly there is a little bit of fictional Thief style writing on that blog as well. I also created this mini-blog from the point of view of a fictional character with a good grasp of English, found here, but that was ages ago. I could upload a few newspaper pieces I've written, but that kind of language is completely different from the kind of writing you'd want me to do. I'd give you a piece of a novel, but unless you can speak Welsh that would be of no use. I won't disappear, anyway. I love Thief.

Loot would be useful, as Sparhawk said. But I think you definitely should be working closely with Renzatic on the design of this mansion. He will really benefit from more interior shots of what the various rooms might look like. Another thing that would be handy, although less important right at the moment, would be expanding on those pictures that BlackThief posted of the multi-story city buildings. I'm sure we will be including some city streets in one of our early maps, and having more pictures like those would be a great help to mappers. Especially if we were able to include some steampunk elements into the design, which those images lacked. And if you're really in the mood to do character art, we can never have too many townsfolk concepts.

Does anyone need anymore character concepts? I can't seem an assignment list for objects/environments that need concept art. So if someone could specify what aspects of the mod need concept art I'd be glad to get started up again now that my SAT's are out of the way. Thanks, Kevin M.

IMO the sheath animation is simply not worth the effort. It might be that there are some issues with it or it might be that drawing the sword form a sheath means that the character has to hold the sheath while drawing, which would add another delay to the animation.

I could see a situation where people might complain about realism tho: If you animate it so that, when selecting an arrow, the character is holding a bow in one hand, and the arrow in the other, then somehow they're still able to frob things (3rd arm at work? ).

Yeah, I'm pretty rocking at animations (if I do say so myself). Along with whack-a-mole, character animation is one of the few things I can just understand instinctively.

There is no need to hand it over as long as you be in contact with Od, for the model. He can not do everything and he doesn't need to, but he should be the kind of supervisor for all our character models, as he is undoubtedly very skilled at it. It depends on your time though and what Oddity says in the end.

Also we had an agreement on IRC that Oddity is the main responsible for all our character models, which makes sense, so we have a consistent style.

It's looking better, yes - but we should now make it clear that this is a thief model, and not the thief model. Springheel has asked me to do the main character. This is because we don't just need a good model, we need a combination of leetness and uberness for this main model, since it's primary purpose is for showcasing and it won't be seen in the game except in cut scenes, which means that even that ingame model can be pretty high res.

If that's the case, then your assertion that my system would require more nodes is incorrect. That seemed to be your main reason why you thought your system would work better, so now I'm confused about exactly what benefit you think your system has, or how you would address the awkward pathing issue. Yes, you can. In fact, that's exactly what a path_lookat does. It directs the AI to look at a particular entity, then plays an animation (or not). If you're saying the functionality doesn't exist, that's also incorrect. You can use a path_cycleanim to play an animation X number of times. If you're trying to point out that the D3 code for these paths hasn't been ported over yet, that's true, but I don't see how it's relevant. To be clear, I'm in favour of random probability, and have been ever since bringing up this concept back in 1994 (http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=463). I just think system #2 (variable chance to path to each node) is a better and more versatile way of achieving it.

Yeah, alright, ok, we 're not complete idiots you know, I've already got a character in the game, but yes, I will need to lookminot the whole AF thing, for characters as well as some weapons. I'm working on the player arms model and the bow and arrow models and animations ATM, and will do the rope arrow next.

Thanx for the excellent explanations! @Fidcal: Here is a link I am refering often to: http://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/materials.php @Gildoran: Your remarks about shadows got me thinking that my blue tiles (the version with the red base + blue overlay) looked mighty odd in the shadows. Maybe this is an issue. Can you please have a look at this material and tell me if what I want to achive is actually possible with doom shaders or if it would be better to "paint" complete diffuse maps for each tile color (aka "only blue, red, green and maybe yellow")? Please see here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...st&p=147621