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I think that Snape is still good, and that Dumbledore is not dead. There are a number of aspects to the ending with which I am suspicious. * At no point does Snape fire any curses or hexes at any of the good guys, even though he is a very competent wizard who would have been able to take out most of the children single-handedly. When a Death Eater attempts to perform Cruciatus on Harry, Snape stops them with the excuse "Harry belongs to the Dark Lord, we are to leave him". Even when Harry is attacking Snape, Snape only blocks the curses, he does not return them. * Dumbledore says some very strange stuff when drinking the evil potion ("I know I did wrong, please don't hurt them" etc.). He does not explain to Harry what the potion was or what effect it actually had on him. I suspect that drinking the potion caused something "evil" to enter Dumbledore, and Snape actually "killed" the evil thing rather than Dumbledore himself (eariler on in the book we are told that Avada Kedavra does no harm to the physical body). * During Dumbledore's "funeral", the magic flames "rise up to obscure the body", and then a large tomb appears. Dumbledore's body is never actually seen to be destroyed. During the funeral Harry thinks he sees a phoenix rise up into the sky, which I am sure is significant (perhaps Dumbledore is an Animagus). One suggestion I heard was that Dumbledore also had a Horcrux, although I doubt this since it would seem to be against his character to have murdered somebody. I also think we will find that Dumbledore had a much better reason for trusting Snape than is given in the book.

No idea, I'm just a sucker for hype. If dog shit was preceded by a massive advertising campaign I'd probably buy it. It's just one of the few books everyone reads, so it's good for talk at work, on forums, ecetra. Da Vinci Code was also quite crap but made for a decent discussion.

Actually I found the 6th part much better than the 5th. I can see what you mean about the tearful kiddies. I wonder wether Snape is really a Death Eater or not. I know that in all books he acted in such way that you had to think he was one, and then it was shown that he was not. It's pretty similar with this book, and considering Dumbledors command to Harry, he could have done the same to Snape, in order to secure his position. Of course Snape is the character that is supposed to be despised but this can also mean that despite of that he still could be the "good" guy as he was in all the previous books. I would be very surprised if Snape doesn't have a major part in the next book. Care to post any ideas what you think how Snape and Draco could come off in the next book?

If it is part of a campaign it would sure be fun. For a single map I think it would be a lot of work in relation to the benefit. If you create a full campaign it makes more sense, because you would also have to explain why the thief is even able to use rats in such a fashion. In a single map you would just get a readme telling you this, but in a campaign you could create the first map in the normal way, and then something happens to the character that allows him to do such things, which are unfold by the storyline.

I apologize first of all, I should have made it clear I do not want the familiar as an everyday part of the Thiefs toolkit, I thought Id said it in the first posting but I didnt make it explicit. I was thinking of something more mission specific, like the Thief gets busted and tosses the rat into a trashcan as hes dragged off to jail. The rat then has to make its way across a city block to the gaol and get inside and yada yada. Or a tomb with a switch across the map that needs to be tripped, the rat has one set of encounters on its way to and from the switch, the thief has his own getting the prize. Or a bank job with a bitchin security system where the rat infiltrate the systems guts to disable it then the Thief moves in. spar:The problem is with balance. The thief has a big advantage over the AI already. So if you introduce new cool ideas, you always must consider the gameplay implications. I think that the rat idea sounds cool at the first introduction, but when I think about how it would feel in the game, what it would mean for the gameplay and such, than Oddity is right even though he is rude as usualy. I wish I had a spider familiar, I send it to Ireland to bite Odditys ass off. After hes done his work, of course spar:If you have to start thinking of how to limit a tool and need to introduce a lot of limitations then the question arises why such a tool should even exits? Good point, in this instance I think because the rat is both a tool and a character. The maps are the basis of its use, ultimately. The maps will demand the services of a rat with their special dangers and goals only managable by something small and furtive, but with good storyline and care this can be done without obvious contrivance. You will have a new tool to approach maps that the Thief cannot handle himself +as well as+ a new sub-character, with comepletely different abilities and weaknesses, a different way of handling dangers, heck a new point of view, literally. spar:Which one? Of course the tools have some limitations, but I'm not aware that the current tools require a lot of extra limitations just to make them work. Tools are both limited by their design, their cost, as well as their availability in the game, no? My point was that its not so crazy to use some limitations to tweak the game one way or the other. Course, I was screaming at the moment spar:How? It is a spying tool that is barely detectable AND it can move. The scouting orb, had it's natural limitation that it couldn't move, and you had no control once you threw it. This is a natural consequence of the device itself. Of course they could have introduced an invisible floating orb but why did they not? True, but on specific maps those abilities would be challenged. I see your point if the rat were a commonplace thing. spar:The difference is, that you can easily spy out a room with this. When the thief is standing around the corner and looking there is a chance that he gets caught. The rat is much save because it can crawl under chairs where the AI can't even follow. So there needs to be a balance for this otherwise the game would become REALLY easy once you start using a rat. Basically it would be just the routine of deplying the rat, scouting the next corridor, move forward, repeat. I think you see what Ive been saying, your points are correct in terms of everyday tool but please reconsider with the familiar as a "special guest" kind of tool for those extra tough cases.

The same way you see a Thief who is trying to be quiet and unseen. Dont tell me they are impossible to see, I just saw a rat the other day that could have passed for a puppy. And this rat isnt simply going to be skulking about in the basement, it has to travel upstairs into m'lady's chambers, via the kitchen, nursery, and living quarters. And rats dont need to be caught, I have killed a few with myself and a stout stick is all it takes. Ill grant you this, it may take something extra to cause the AI to attack the rat, but thats simply a matter of making it a target with coding. It certainly doesnt strain credulity to imagine castle guards killing a rat. Specially if they catch it digging about in the key box. As for them targeting a spider, well thats an easy one and something the player would have little trouble believing. Whats wrong with that? The scroll is only usable once per day. Or it is only usable once. Or there are only so many rats available on the map. Every fucking tool in the game has a contrived limitation. Its no magic eye, its another character for the player to mix up his/her gaming experience with. You have to play the map much differently. Sure you can spy ahead with it but so what, you are going to do that anyway. Were you planning on stepping boldly into the light as the Thief? So there is no real difference, other than the gameplay dynamics.

Think what you like, but the notion that this would make the game "easy" truly is stupid. How could playing a sub-character with a fraction of the health, abilities, and weaponry be considered easier than playing the Thief?

Ok, remember how the scouting orbs worked, you would deploy them and you could use them until you broke contact, then you had to go get the thing. I want something similar, except that you can break contact with the rat, have the Thief do some stuff while the rat hides under a chair, then switch back to the rat to complete tasks with it. This would work back and forth as many times as was needed, you would not have to wait for the rat to return to the Thief to use the Thief character. Problematic? I figured the rat could be carried by the Thief when not in use, clinging to his back or something like that. I dont think you would even have to see much of the rat itself, maybe when its deployed but the player is using the Thief you would see the little guy on the ground but thats about it. It wouldnt have to be the highest rez rat either. When the player is in Rats Eye View, hereafter REV, all that would need to be modelled AFAIK is his front paws moving in front of him and the tip of his snout and whiskers for fun. Maybe if he picks up a key or something you could see that in his mouth. The wall climbing thing is perfect, but what the hell is vanilla D3? I thought D3 was "vanilla" enough.... As for the light gems, would it be possible to keep the light gem when you switched characters as opposed to constructing two distinct ones? If thats not doable, would there be any other kind of detection thingy that could be constructed? I just wanted to extend the sneaker factor to the familiar as well. Since we mentioned spiders, I had another fun thought, what about a spider familiar? It too can climb walls, and can pick up small items in its forelegs. Its about the size of a RL tarantula, but heres the special twist. If you can sneak up behind a guard on a wall or tapestry, and line up with his/her neck/head, the spider familiar can leap and bite the guard on the exposed skin and give him/her an injection of venom. This isnt necessarily deadly, but it could be a KO. the spider could only do this once on a map cause it take all of its venom to KO a human and it must replenish its supply over time. The Spiders Eye View, SEV, would be fun too. You can see a few of its legs, maybe an object its carrying, and the GUI hud could be faceted into a couple of panels to remind the player of the spiders 8 eyes.

I guess you mean it that the player can switch between the rat and the thief as a the controlling character? The rat would be trailing with the thief, while the Thief would have to wait until you get back to it. Something like that? As to the projects major obstacles. Doing the rat trailing behind should be rather easy. The lightgem would also not be a big problem, though it has to be adjusted for the rat, but this would be no big deal. You wouldn't even need to change the code, or probably only slightly, depends. What definitely would have to be implemented is the wall scaling. This can be done for sure though, because there is a D3 mod which does this for the spiders (they are scripted in vanilla D3). I don't see a general problem with this. It would still be a lot of customizing, because you would need to create the models and animations and add the code for switching between the player entities and such. If you want to have a lightgem for both of them at the same time, I do see a problem though. The lightgem is rather performance intensive, and I don't think it would be a good idea to create multiples of it.

Has anyone herad of Parkan II? I just noticed it today and suddenly want it...bad. I heard Parkan Iron Strategy was good too, and you can download a demo, unfortunately my internet just got capped (went over the 20gb limit) which is absolutely fucked. Should be uncapped tomorrow, so im gonna get it then. Apparently its already out, but on their forums someone said that the US version should be out in december, that means January for Australia..ugh. Anyone know anything about this? Russians especially should hehehe...

I guess it bears mentioning--yet again--that this is not T2. These are TDM pagans. TDM pagans are groups of primitive, tribal societies that are similar to gauls, basques--and yes--celts. If you can't handle a character with checkered pants (a very common pattern not limited to celts, btw), feel free not to use that model. Maybe the model won't even have checkered pants. It's just concept art, after all. Sheesh, if people have this strong a reaction to deviating from T2's pagans, I can't wait to see what people say when they see the Inventor's Guild.

I think the non members should respect the fact that this has all been discussed and decided upon by those who are actually making the mod. Not a single idea suggested in this thread was not at some point discussed in the campaign or concept art forums, and arguing won't chage what has already been decided upon. If you don't like the direction the mod is going in, then fine; it's fully moddable. Get to work. This isn't a drive-thru 'make a game the way I want it' forum.

All MMOs are a grind, that is how the genre is defined. I thought World of Warcraft would be different, but only the first twenty levels were any fun for me, after level forty it became a long grind where you were essentially forced to find a group (and to find a good group was near impossible in the later levels, at least on Illidan). It would take 2 minutes to kill one enemy for the same experience it would to kill an enemy at level twenty (which would take 5 seconds at that time). It just got frustrating and I felt like I was doing nothing but watching my character attack and attack and attack. The quests got less creative as the game went on (Go kill 5 murlocs level 10, 20, 30, 40...), and the standard (Collect 5 turtle steaks for me), when they have a .01% drop rate. I even got a plugin that would tell me how much time I played (on that character, 180 hours), and divide it into the activities I was doing. 50% of the time was spent traveling, and frankly, after spending 90 hours nearly four strait days walking around the world in that game...hey I want those three days back! Ya, so you have to know what you are getting into with those games, and personally, I find them to get boring real quick when the leveling slows down

Greetings. I'm an avid Thief fan who found his way here and was immediately impressed by work that's being done. This looks to be an amazing project and I'm very excited about seeing it completed! I've looked through the board and haven't seen a topic on this so I thought I would post it to see what kind of response I would get. I had an idea for a Thief-like game which I'm sure has been thought of by others, but not talked about much, that being the concept of a free form world. As I know nothing of programming, or modding either, I was wondering how difficult it would be to code and create a near complete free form city or world using the concepts and tools you have now? For clarity's sake, by free form I mean a world or city where there are no painted buildings. All, or nearly all, objects can be interacted with and every building is accessible to the character, from individual homes, to shops, to the castles and mansions in the city. Obviously, all the buildings would have multiple access points, including the roof or high window and you could literally have a complete 'thieves highway' of all the rooftops in the city. Virtually all walls would be scalable as well. Naturally this would take a great deal of time and effort to do, but I was wondering if it were possible, and even desireable, at this point. My general idea is a free form, non linear stealth game where you start out as a novice thief in the city. You have a small apartment/safe house, a few simple tools, and a few NPCs on your side like a fence and a few tipsters/informants for potential mission info. As you go through the first initial missions (heists) you gain access to more risky/lucrative missions and you get more and better tools. You would also have access to more fences in different areas (possibly getting better deals for your merchandise), and more informants, possibly even a bit of political clout if you do certain missions for certain people. But none of these missions are literally required. You can just as easily walk down the street and enter a random shop or house and burgle for extra cash if you choose. Assuming you take more and more lucrative jobs, you eventually become a 'master thief' and perhaps even start your own thieves guild with you as the head, if you want to go that far. Creating a random building and/or street generator into the mix would create even more replayability since each new game would have a different city with different buildings. Naturally there isn't much in the way of actual plot, which a good number of people would want, but it would still be an interesting endeavor for those who want a little variety from the more linear style of play. Any thoughts?

Leet Character Emporium is down atm. What's up? And yeah, what is the score with NightBlade atm? It's been aaaaaaages since anything new was announced. I've all but given up on it now. I know it's there but I'm not even looking forward to it because there has been no clue as to what is going on. I did actually think it had been cancelled at one point, but then someone posted something at BCG forums about MP testing.

There is a bug in the Thief game engine that causes it to misread the amount of available hard drive space used for virtual memory. What you can do is try deleting some files on the HD where you have installed thief, or alternatively, adding files (about 40Mb worth) - this will make the game engine think you have sufficient space (I have used this method, it works - I had the same problem on a drive that had 65Gb of free space)... this bug exists because the game was made at a time when hard drives were quite small, and they obviously never conceived of 100Gb plus HDDs at the time and so hard coded a sloppy way of reading hard drive free space. There is more info available somewhere on the TTLG forums, don't have an exact link at the moment...

Here's some feedback: Open pouch: looks good, although I might do something a little less purple...it's almost a cartoon colour compared to the rest of our objects. Closed pouch: same thing about the colour. It's a little short and fat, so we wouldn't be able to attach it to a model's belt as is. The rings look good. The vase looks pretty good. The gemstones should be a richer colour so that they stand out more, especially the ruby. The diamond could be a brighter white, otherwise they'll be very hard to see. The streetlamps need work. The poles are ok, although the texture needs to be roughed up more and less specular. The tops need a brighter and more yellow look to the glass. See this pic as reference: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2208 The tiara needs a different texture. I have no problem with the long table, but I can't see a useful difference between the two dressers. This post raises an interesting question about how many variations of each model we want to include on CVS.

Seiklus, here's the link http://www.autofish.net/clysm/games/seiklus/ And if you like elastomania, you'll like this I reckon: Boom Boom Volleyball http://www.miniclip.com/boomboom.htm Its got really cool and funny physics. It doesn't play by real volley ball rules, more like hand ball - if the ball ever lands in your court, it does a small explosion, and you lose some life. Also, if you hit it more than 3 times in a row, it does a small explosion and you loose some life. It's really cool because you aim by where you hit it. The character swings their arm around to make a circle and wherever the ball hits on that circle, it bounces away on the appropriate angle. In this way you can do all sorts of cool tricks like hitting it really high, then jumping really high above the ball itself and hit it downard on an angle to do a spike shot.

The editor is built into Doom3 itself. For doom 3 specific usage, take a quick look through the forums at www.doom3world.org, it will help you get started with doom 3 level editing. You can see the editor by bringing down the console and just typing editor when you have doom3 running. This isn't the best way to start it though. You actually need to create a copy of the doom 3 shortcut and make some changes to the "target" path. I can't remember exactly what you have to do at the moment and I'm almost falling asleep. If you have trouble finding the directions over there either myself or someone here will look it up.

Modetwo, who hosts and maintains the forums on our behalf, is no. 1 since he installed the forum software!

In the last 11 pages of this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...l=limited+saves Though I think it spilled over into other threads as well.

Well I am a animation student. I made projects with some 3D animation in it but it's just a start. Soon im getting 3D character animation the right way. So yes I can do some small animations but not (yet) very compilcated ones (still have to learn the techical side).

Squill obviously has some modeling and texturing skills as well...we could always use those. I guess it comes down to whether he would prefer to be a team-member with full access to the mod tools, or a beta-mapper who gets resource updates every six months or so. Squill, I note that you list 'animating' among your skills. Is that just for simple animated models, like the blowing banners, or can you handle AI as well? We have a need for both, actually, but especially character animators.

I like your attitude "if you fuck up, you deal with it" - just like in real life, no handy quick load That's the way I like to play. I like your idea for a mace - a dagger shouldn't kill a zombie, if we go off all the lore created in D&D and movies and all that, and yes a mace would be more appropriate. Would make choosing weapons for a mission more interesting. The dagger vs black jack is a delicate issue. They do the same thing in T3 except the outcome is the character dies or does not die. And the only rammification for that, is the noise, the blood, and any "no kill" objectives that might be active. I still prefer the blackjack. But it simply should not work on some enemies, particularly non-human ones. In which case a dagger probably wouldn't do much either.

Hey there. Been following this project for a while, and I must say I wait eagerly to see it complete. Although I have browsed thru older topics and even read some of 'em, I couldn't find one where this theme had been fully discussed. If there is, I may have missed it . Well, here I go anyway (sorry for the long post): I think that there should be more than one choice for a damaging melee weapon (aprat from the blackjack, which MUST be permanent, if not this wouldn't be Thief related anymore!) that the player can choose to buy or just pick from the start depending of the mission and the objectives you have. It would help a lot to mission balance. I've already got some ideas and the different scenarios to make an example: 1.- Dagger (don't flame me for this one!!!): let's say you have a mission where you need to sneak inside of a very fortified zone, like your typical Thief mission. A dagger is easyr to carry and is capable of killing foes cleanly and quickly. But it's pretty useless against armored foes. It would be useful only in places where you expect less or weaker resistance, or if one of your main goals is to stealthily get rid of some character that's inside the complex for some specific reason. For that last one, a sword would be less-than-ideal. 2.- Sword: but then there's a mission where you somewhere you know there'll be heavier resistance, call it armored guards, better trained swordsmen... or maybe you go into a pagan forest or a cave inhabited by dangerous animal species. A dagger wouldn't cut it, but a sword would be much more effective, because of its longer range of attack and superior damage dealing. Let's not even talk about blackjack here! I found pretty stupid the fact that you could just go and blackjack a giant two-legged, gas-belching lizard with an enormous and thick cranium. 3.- Small mace: then come the zombies... they feel no pain, they won't die from bleeding wounds, won't stay put for long after they fall down. That makes the dagger a no-goer, and makes the sword much less useful. You should have some means to deal with the undead face-to-face. To crush their rotten bones and rend them harmless. Can you spell "mace"? But a mace is a mace, it's heavy and slow. Zombies are slow too, so no big deal. But most guards and pretty much all of the critters aren't that slow, or aren't slow at all. So a mace could be evaded easily and lose a lot of potencial. Of course that Thief has always been about stealth and stuff. But shit happens. You do run out of fire arrows to blow up incoming zombies. You can accidentally trigger a trap that sets off an alarm and sends five or six guards after you. You can accidentaly wake up a whole nest o' burricks. You can't always rely on stealth to survive. I believe most thieves don't have a magic "Quickload button" to resort to in this cases (well, we have one... but that's no excuse! ). And a master thief always plans ahead for a mission (even if you can't always predict what you'll find). So I believe it makes sense from a realistic point of view... Apart from this: will we be able to see our body? I really liked that about TDS. I think that it's pretty dull when in a game you look down and you don't see yourself. It's like "Yay! Looka t me! I'm a floating hand holding a sword!". At this point of gaming history, it's something so basic I wished that more game devs had thought of. If you made it down to here, thanks for reading!