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Our character isn't Garrett, nor does he have a mechanical eye. We won't be including a scouting orb in the toolset. I'm sure if anyone in the community wants it badly enough, they will mod it in. Won't be hard to do with the doom 3 engine.

The military now has a scouting orb which is an arrow. check this out. http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002232.html This puts more pressure on Garrett The Main Character in TDM to have one too.

I wouldn't be so bitter about it ... to me they were just joking around, and even then mostly about Slash's free use of the term "official", not really about anything he was going to make per se. Also, I think TDM's quality will largely be able to speak for itself ... It's not like the team is going to be policing what can and can't be made with it. Dromed never got a wiff of LGS support and the Editor's Guild is notorious for attacking the latest mega-projects; doesn't seem to make T2 FM-making any less popular. And even if some guys do appear to attack some projects with a roll of their eyes, sometimes mega-visions should be chastized a little to force the creators to defend them or at least think realistically about them. If Slash thinks what they said was unfair, he can try to convince them otherwise. Anyway, this thread looks exactly like the one in the Off Topic forum, so my answer will be the same: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=61672

However an arrow to the head is far more *likely* to be fatal than one in the leg. A brick in the head (and yes, we've already established some AI will throw rocks/bricks/etc at you) is more likely to be mission-ending than one in the arm. The only question with damage locations is whether it's fair to penalize the character for getting hit in the head if they can't effectively judge whether that's going to happen. In real life you take extra effort to protect your head/face in dangerous situations, shielding it with your arm or ducking. In the game that's much more difficult to do. On the other hand, if I poke my head above a crate and get hit with an arrow, it should be pretty serious.

The mutiplier is necessary to prevent any load/save cheating, where the filthy, sly, underhand players ( which make up the majority of gamers) try to make a quck save before he tries combat. If there is no multiplier then he can save and load until he beats his opponant due to natural luck, and he can keep doing this wiht every fight, since every fight is a fresh 'roll' with the same 50/50 chance. With the multiplier, even when he beats them, or succeeds in making a big jump, his multiplier has still gone up, so the next fight/jump will be even harder, etc, until he'll have to save and load a million times becasue his luck will be near zero and he'll be taking a fatal blow with every hit. There's no point comparing this to an RPG. The largest part of the fun of a dungeon crawl RPG is the combat. Combat plays no part in this game, so players should be punished heavily for attempting it, and this simulates the fact that the character they play here is a little skinny guy who's no good at fighting and is going up against large strong men who are. Hence, IT SHOULDN'T BE FAIR. The vast majority of people would not have the abiltiy to go in and swap the numbers around or ad din health potions unless they knew how to code, and I would not have them easily placed in a .def file where any kid can get at them. That's ont of the things I hate about the Doom setup - just how easy it is to go into def files and filddle with all the core settings. It ahas advantages of coiuse, but also disadvantages. Believe it or not (and I know you will) I have put forward a serious proposal for encrytping some of the def files so people can't tamper with them -at least not without knowledge and effort, in which case you deserve it.

Hmmm... I still don't like it. You have much more experience with this series than I do, I'm sure, so maybe it fits well with the past games. The way it's spoken, combined with the word "idiot" being used, makes it seem like it's from present day. The ogre talking has the same "modern day" vibe to me, too. I just don't like it when video games such as this throw modern-day vernacular in. Or at least if they do, I'd prefer there to be a little more emotion behind it. I know I've said before, but in Morrowind 3, I despised everyone telling me how much they hated me as I walked through villages or talked to anyone. Hopefully they've dropped that nonsense. And I hope every character doesn't find it necessary to analyze me and verbalize their analysis before talking with me. Judging by the Day 3 video, I'm scared. At least 4 or 5 of the quotes seemed to be a judgment of my character in some way. It may make sense in some sort of gameplay sense, but it comes across as unnatural. Wouldn't that be a riot. You go out to dinner in real life. As you're talking to the waitperson, he says, "I sense you meddle in the affairs of too many people. I don't like you. I'm not going to give you the menu!"

I'm at a loss as to why this is being argued as if it's being considered for the toolset, it isn't. As I've stated, the toolset will have the standard system. This is for FM authors. When the toolset is finished and we begin work on a campaign, then we'll look at these ideas and decide how they will work. Until then, I think we should all drop it and quit making fools of ourselves with schoolyard tactics in the public forums.

That kind of "asshole" speech is common to the stubborn redguards in the game. If you've played "Reguard" you'd know where the smartass attitude for the Redguards started. An example: Cyrus (a redguard, main character in the game) walks in to the dragons lair. The dragon then says something like "a little light (lights brazier), a little privacy (door closes behind Cyrus) and let the pleasantries begin". Any normal person would understand that a dragon is a bit stronger then them but Cyrus goes on to say "Ok Dragon, hand over the soulgem or I'll (something but i forgot exactly what he said. It was a smartass threat though)" IMO it fits quite well, especially with the facial expression the guy had there

lol, totally true! Jim Hensen would be proud, though. What's up with cat, lizard and ogre creatures having pretty much standard human voices? Thus, another problem with the voice acting. I also liked the horse scene. If you don't feel like going out into nature and getting some exercise by hiking or taking a walk, then Elder Scrolls will be the game for you; assuming you'd rather just do it on a computer. Don't get me wrong, I'll probably enjoy this, too. (For a while.) I hope the gameplay is good and that the minor character annoyances I've seen so far will not ruin the game for me.

The characters don't look that good either, and ther's no shdaows as far a s I can see, which looks terrible on a hooded character. THe lip sync is pathetic as well. It's only a small step up from Kermit the frog. It's almost more disconcerting to have bad, untimed lip sysnc than have none at all. I loved the video with the horses though, it surely would be great to steal a horse and gallop about that landscape.

We're not making a change for the sake of making a change. The only reason to change the current system is if it doesn't do something that we want to see in the game. I'm still not convinced your system would result in the kind of gameplay people want. There's no value in doing something differently unless it's *better*. One thing I learned as a freelancer, creating game systems for pen and paper RPGs--it's often true that an idea sounds great until you actually try to work out the actual numbers involved. Replace the word 'luck' with 'health' and you have just described the current system. This is also true with the old system. I don't understand what you think the difference is. Let me see if I understand what you're describing. You would give each 'event' that might damage the player a percentage chance of killing them. A 20 foot fall might have a 20% chance. A thrown brick might have a 5% chance. But what happens if that chance fails? The character is hit with a brick and it doesn't kill them. What happens? You used the term multiplier. So everything now has a greater chance of killing him? A second brick has a 10% chance? A 20 foot fall now has a 40% chance? What about a very minor damage, like getting hit with a stone. That has a 1% chance of killing you. But if you survive a 40 foot fall, your multiplier goes up so that the stone now has a 50% chance of killing you. And presto, later in the mission you're killed by a kid hurling a stone at you. Isn't one of the things you hated about the current system that you might be killed by a minor wound? And how pissed off is a player going to be when the odds work against them and they're killed by a stone even though they haven't been injured before in the mission? If that's not what you had in mind, then you're going to have to explain in more details.

Not without the source code...some tweaks are possible, and I've released some myself...but the kind of optimization won't happen without source code...or someone who can reverse engineer really well. There is no Thief sub forum, for the simple reason that this is the official forum for "The Dark Mod", and having "classic Thief" directly on our site, is likely not a wise step for a mod that is already treading a very fine line when it comes to intellectual property. We're glad you think highly of us, but we are not here to take people away from the already great Thief community forums that exist out there. TTLG and Eidos provide a wonderful community for the fan base. When our toolset is released, we hope that they will create a sub forum for us, much like they did with Thievery.

Could some one actualy optimiz the engine? since ION is gone there is no hope for the game so if some one made a custom patch that re optimizas the engine then the game might run way better. might be posible. and why in the fuck is there no thief series channel in your forums. this web site should be the fucking data base of the thief community. everyone should be here in steed of looking glass forums or small forums through out the net. and the circle will never update so what ever. you mod is the future of thief btw. if you havent realized. if i was u i would make a whole thief series section below the dark mod ones.

one thing i realy havent heard about or talked about is the keepers. obviously the most important character other then garrett in the series. he does missions for them and was trained by them. what are your plans for them? will you make them dark and misterious like in the first game. you never realy lay eyes on them but you know that they are vary important. and when you do there blackend by the shadows. vary dark indeed. the keeper is the most powerfull character in the story i think. there so compelling.

Die By The Sword has a combat system that never gets old, and I heartily support a robust combat system in The Dark Mod - directional blocking, for example, creates a fun challenge when you need to get out of a sticky situation alive (rather than simply holding a 'block' button). I think a successful combat system emphasizes defense and keeping your guard up, which is appropriate for the situations our thief character would use the sword in (last ditch defense / escape tool). Mount & Blade is another excellent example of first person melee combat - http://www.taleworlds.com It has blocking / attacking by mouse movement: hold block / attack while moving the mouse left, right, up or down to either block or ready an attack in that direction (down is thrust). As a practicing swordsman, it feels very natural.

And replace it with WHAT, exactly? The concept of hit points exists for two excellent reasons-- First, the necessity of calculating the player character's physical status. A human's ability to function effectively is a complex aggregate of their health, constitution, endurance, fatigue, state of mind, and dozens of other variable factors. All this complexity cannot be modeled meaningfully in the relatively simplistic gameworlds currently available, so there's no point in trying. Thus, games abstract the whole mess into hit points, much like D&D's "armor class" concept is an abstraction of physical armor, reflexes, perception, etc. Second, there's the necessity of communicating health information to the player in real-time. In real life, you "just know" how your body is doing-- millions of nerves all feeding status reports to your brain continuously. Since games can't currently plug into the base of your spine, character health data *must* be represented in a way that can be mentally processed in roughly the same amount of time as it take in real life-- which pretty much leaves no option but a bar graph or two (or three). Then you have the question of why, at a certain point, the player just falls over dead. Again, there are two unimpeachably excellent reasons for this-- First, player "death" is merely (sometimes) an abstraction of the player character becoming sufficiently injured that they could no longer function effectively. Sure, yet another minor scratch or bump won't outright kill you, but they add up to degrade your performance. Can you go on with a twisted ankle? Yes. But can you go on with a twisted ankle, a scratched eye, bruised ribs, and a bleeding head wound? No. So the game just "kills" you. Yeah, it could instead put up a message like, "You're too beat-up to complete your mission", but the difference is purely academic so why bother? Second, when it comes to damage you have to draw the line somewhere. Fact of life, that. Games can degrade player performance instead of slaying them outright, but that generally sucks because it rapidly leads to downward-spiral situations-- you become less and less capable of dealing with whatever hurt you in the first place. It's usually better to just slay the player and let them start off fresh. If you were really as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't need all this explained to you.

Macsen: Journalist with some interest in writing, architecture and fantasy. Does some work for the Hammerite Imperium and Dark Mod from time to time. ZylonBane: Obsessive compulsive fidgety nanny who gets riled up over the smallest mistakes. Probably a member of the apostrophe society. Does nothing for Thief other than try his best to scare fans away from the forums. Who is the loopy one? I have too many bones in my mouth to comment.

Starforce shall soon die. > Not only did that Starforce forum admin boner post a link to wares right on the forums (linked earlier), and public voices are speaking out (editor of PC gamer, also linked IIRC?), but more publishers are stepping up and refusing to use it. No StarForce in NA SpellForce 2

Hmmmm, this post is very much like you, oDDity. What is the exact difference between Ishtvan goes to the model forums because he needs something model-ish and oDDity goes to the sound forums because he needs something sound-ish ?

Exactly, and if programmers need any special modifications for models they come an tell me about it, there's no need for me to search the coding forums looking for something that might interest me, it's usually all illegible nonsense as far as I'm concerned. At least when you guys come to the modeling forum you can look at the pretty pictures. Still, hopefully everyone knows where to look for sounds now.

It looks like you used an atlas unwrap. YOu really want to use unfold3d. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2052

Hmm, do you think a request thread in the beta-mapper forums would make sense? Or even better, a feedback thread? My point is that I'm unaware of any feedback from people actually using ambients and sfx so far, but we need that in order to straighten things out. I fear that in a year or so someone will drop in and say "sorry Schatten, but your ambients pop so much they burst my eardrums". I'd rather be able to fix issues in a progressive manner than to rework the whole bunch.

Hmm, I didn't know that you could take screenshots at higher resolutions that your monitor supports. That would be very handy for getting super detailed shots for use in making posters and things of that sort. Also, is there a way to force screenshots to use full AF and AA applied to the scene before it's saved as a file? Might as well make the screenshot look as good as possible. oDDity: Just curious, is your avatar supposed to be a certain character or just a more or less random person? Also, did you model that avatar?

I've been long thinking about adapting some classic IF adventures into Thief FMs ... they'd work even better in TDM. The best one, the one I want to do the most, would be Magnetic Scroll's *Guild of Thieves*, which fits the thief world to a T. It has everything you'd ever want in a medievalesque burglary FM, and all the readables, back-story and logical progression, all well designed I thought, is already mapped out for me! Aside from this one, I wanted to do an adaptation of The Pawn (I just liked the world it was in) or what would really work well is Anchorhead, which is a very Lovecraftian, dark horrorish piece that, as an interactive game, is brilliantly plotted, scripted and logically worked out (what distinguishes IF from normal fiction) ... It reminded me a lot of Rowena's Curse in its logical flow, where the plot progresses/unfolds as you solve key puzzles/events (or Ominous Bequest, although less so) & I like that style, but more than that: the atmosphere/ environment/ setting is absolutely lush: overcast, rainy, foggy, dark forested, victorian archetecture and furniture (although there are some modern objects as well). Finally, I was thinking about trying to adapt some more serious literary works just to start raising the bar on the possibilities with FMs, so e.g., Camus's The Plague, with the PC as the character trying to do anything to escape the arabesque, Meditteranean quarantined city, while at the same time dealing with more serious themes about mortality and religion (without being preachy).

i was thinking you should have a support paypal tho, pay 5$ US or so and be able to be testing the latest builds with the team and provide feedback in the dev forums. I'd pay simply cuz I wanna help... course youd have to put stipulations on ppl, like make them sign a non disclosure agreement so they cant leak crap without being sued. anyhow just a thought to earn the team money.