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Yes it does. Trust goldfishguy. Apple Macs traditionally used to default at 72dpi for screen resolution but anything up to (and sometimes beyond) 96dpi is common these days. Take a 17" screen. 800x600 (about 62dpi) is going to be a different resolution to 1280x1024 (about 96dpi). comprendez. good. But anyhow goldfish guy, Springheels right too. Ain't no one got a 300dpi monitor. Not many folks have a 300dpi printer for continuous tone images for that matter. But yeah. Huge images on the internet is just rude. Post little pics if possible please. Or link to larger piccies if needs must. Life is nice and cosy when you are young and healthy and with good eyes - like you and me. 800x600 on a 17" screen is good for anyone a bit far sighted or a bit over the hill though. Feel sorry for anyone checking the forums on a web enabled phone.... (something I do from time to time)

Maya is the best overall 3d app available yes, but I spend a lot of time hanging around the CG commuity, forums etc, and Lightwave is regarded as the best poly modeler available. It has it's shortcomings obviously, no history, edges or NURBS are the main ones, but it's just so fast and intuituve once you learn it, and you can also virtually 'sculpt' in it , in a way not possible in other apps, apart from ZBrush. I used Lightwave 8, but it's virtually identical to lightwave 7 and 7.5, most of the changes in the newer versions were made to Layout, character setup and animation.

Ah, thanks. Applegeeks' forums aren't bad for tutorials either.

If you're interested in some good tutorials and critical feedback, there are a couple good forums to look at. Epilogue is one that has a lot of stuff available that might help. http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/phpBB2/

Sorry, but you have no time to search the forum, even though most of this stuff has already been answered a hundred times, and on the same page, we have no time to answer it point for point for the same reason. If you want to rewrite the AI of course you can do that, but there will be no special kind of langauge or setup that we support. Everything that the AI dependens on can be done via scripting, and I see no point on adding additional code on top of this. If the AI can't something do you have to mod it in the SDK and export it to scripting. But I guess in most cases writing a few scripts should be sufficient. Depends on your individual needs though. Apart from that, there is no real limit to what you can do. If rather want a Splinter Cell kind of game, you can easily use TDM as your base, because many items are covered already by it. of course you would have to add your own textures and models as well as animations, but from the code itself, I guess the only thing missing would be the special moves (just an example as I haven't played SC much). You could also use the codebase and create standard Doom 3 maps with it, since this is also just different textures and models with animations if you don't like the steampunk setting.

If you find something out then you should probably download this http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=255 and incorporate it there to test it out. My next plans are to figure out how to change the buttons, and how to let the SDK do something for me.

Our team is in really bad shape. We will probably lose the first game, and every other game. I think what we lack is unity and our players are just too friggin tired. We will see how it all plays out. Unfortunately they have lost 4 or the last 5 exhibition practice games. It all spells doom. In fact I would be surprised if we manage to win 1 game. It's sad really. But that's reality. I don't expect us to pass the first round. Our only chance of winning in less than a week from now is God and team spirit. They have to come together and realize that this is once in a lifetime type opportunity. Some of them will probably never see that field from the grass again. They have to go out there and play like if their life depended on it. They have to forget about everything else and just worry about playing as one, united, a team. Our coach Guimaraes knows the team is in bad shape. Kickoff is Friday morning, 11 pm eastern on the States. We need a miracle. My favorite teams are Costa Rica, USA, England, and Italy and Spain. I do not like Brazil and hope someoen puts a whoopin on em. I hope someone embarrases them for beating us 5-2 last time they met Costa Rica. In fact if Costa Rica was to play them I hope somehow they get pissed off and go on a rampage. Revenge dammit! Grr!! So yea lol. I want payback and I want it NOW! Blasted Ronaldo. This time you will see!

Not really related in line with what we were talking about here....but I just mocked this up for fun. Someone at the ionstorm forums asked if we were going to change the name or just leave it as "The Dark Mod". Thinking of how Eidos and Ionstorm may take to us creating a mod inspired by one of their intellectual properties, I felt it would only be fitting to call the game THIS. On a half serious note...*L* I think I might even like that name. HA. @ pakmannen: Wow, I love that mock up. @ Springheel: I see where your coming from. The inspiration for that idea came from the idea that the fans will be creating prophecies in a sense. Fan Missions are essentially adding to the story. Kind of mystical and fantasy oriented I suppose, but it's also in line with the Thief universe, just approaching if from a different and I think more cerebral direction. Kind of quiet and reflective, like the game itself. As more fan missions are written, it would be like the prophecies unfolding. Just some thoughts to ponder. Anyway, enjoy my silly mockup.

Yes the anims can control different parts of the body. I'm pretty sure Doom 3 can do what I've seen other engines do - if 2 animations are controlling the same bones, their effects are averaged out so that it does both at the same time. Valid concerns about the code controlled head, but I'm faithful that it will look pretty good, with just simple accelleration and decelleration between start and end position. I can't wait to see the results if a programmer tries this out.

No it's not correct. Bone's are the unifying method of making the character move, whether it be animation or code. When I animate in motion builder, I'm moving bones. The animation is just a sequence of bone rotations. The code can manipulate these rotations in real time. The only issue is if a bone rotation is being controlled by the code and the animation at the same time. In some game engines, this is allowed, and the average rotation is interpolated. But even if DOom 3 doens't support this, all I have to do is not animate the head as part of any animation, so that the neck joint will not contain any rotation information while that animation is playing, leaving it free to be modified by the code in real time.

I just happened to encouter this thread on Doom 3 World: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=15829 Can anybody contact this guy? He says that he has created 150MB of textures for free use, and many of them are not strictly based on Domm 3 szenarios. Complete with normals and bumpmaps, etc.. So somebody of our artist should contact him ASAP and see 1) if there are textures that we can use and 2) if this guy might be recruited if he enjoys creating textures so much. If there is a bandwidth problem with downloading the textures I can easily help out, but it should definitely be investigated by somebody of us.

Yes. You should talk to Fingernail about that. He can give you access to the teams forums where we have the concepts and everything.

Well, first off, I wouldn't even have mentioned it if I thought a great deal of effort was involved. I'm well aware how busy the team is and certainly don't want to add significantly to the already large number of things to do. I was operating under the assumption that the armor could easily be removed (and, of course, the sleeves made plain and changed in color) without requiring any major work on the underlying main character model itself, and so it would be very fast to do, especially for an expert. Perhaps it's actually harder to do than that. And I don't think this falls under the category of a personal request. Even if you don't plan to feature Keepers in the story line you guys plan to make at some point, A.I. models that have a similar look to them would still be highly useful tools to have as basic building blocks for the kinds of missions Thief fans are going to want to make. Just as the "builder" character models are going to be essential for so many Thief FM's. Anyhow, perhaps it's so easy to make those adjustments that any reasonably knowledgeable DOOM III modeler can handle it without messing up the model in the slightest. If that's the case, then fine, I'm sure someone will do just that. And as for lending a hand, I never said I was unwilling to do that. I don't have any practical knowledge or experience on 3D modeling or programming, but I could help write lore, story text and such for readables, and also character dialogue, when you fellows get around to working on your campaign.

Those Doom 3 outdoor environments look awesome, yet I am curious as to how they perform.

You can do this already, because Doom 3 can also do large areas. You just can't use the megatexture extensions, which makes huge outdoorareas look more realistic in an easier way. The rendering is the same though.

At least Doom 3 can also look good outdoors. http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=15865

No - it's a fact. Unless your post is explained to me, it will remain nonsense to me. Well we don't. Like BT said, the Doom 3 monsters do this already, and I've seen the meshes for the Imp etc. It's all one mesh. It's done with bones. The programmers can directly interact with the bones no matter what animation is playing.

Yes. Q4 is essentially Doom 3 with some new stuff included. I haven't seen Crysis. Do you have a link?

So the best engine to mod for a Thief style game is Doom 3 in your opinion?

To be fair, Thievery did a pretty good job of using the vanilla Unreal 1 engine to produce a similar game to Thief (albeit multiplayer oriented). Similarly, Nightblade (if there is anyone still working on it, the website hasn't been updated in ages) is making a Thief inspired mod using Unreal Engine 2. They did/are doing this without the source code AFAIK. UnrealEd is a very powerful piece of software, and Unrealscript is very easy to work with. Given the capabilites of Unreal Engine 3, I have no doubt that even the vanilla version would be a great start for a Thief style Mod. It certaily is more feature rich than Doom 3, though its hardware requirements are substantially greater, and wihtout the possibility of source code availability, and relatively limited exposure to the workings of the engine, it would be more challenging to make deep modifications to by amature modders.

I think I remember seeing you around on the ISA forums back before Thief 3 was released, that render of the Thief jumping the wall looks really familiar (and absolutely completely amazingly awesome). I'm impressed, everyone else is impressed, and you're already a member of the team as I write this. Welcome to the team, man..hope you have fun.

*sigh* Okay, in absence of explanation or apology, I'm assuming Spar's post was just nonsense. I hope everyone has seen this. Moving on... @BlackThief - so all we have to do is get the search animation into TDM, and place the fingers around the sword properly? If this is the case, then on the weekend the first thing I'll do is fix the hand around the sword. Then I'll see what I can get done before monday, in the way of learning how to get the animation into Doom 3 and then actually doing it. If you can point me towards some info related to this, that would be great.

Nope. Why do you think that. Unreal is not Thief. Therfeore it has about as much simialrities to Thief as Doom 3 has. Maybe less, maybe more. Depends on the technical features.

Original versions of textures should be maximized to whatever you see fit and in TGA format, but they don't go into the main repository..we upload those to a separate hi-res repository for release as a separate package. As Gildoran was saying, we're going to see if we can do a switch over to .dds files completely. The reasoning for this is quite simple, the lossless compressed TGA files that we initially aimed to use, are not recognized at all by video cards, so Doom 3 has to reinflate the TGA's to their uncompressed size. This adds to loading time, and also decreases ingame performance. DDS textures 'are' recognized by video cards natively, so they are loaded as is and don't increase load times. We can also get away with 1024 X 1024 .dds textures that will give us roughly the same ingame performance as a 512 x 512 TGA.

Integrating third party software is unlikely to be a possibility until the Doom 3 code is open-sourced, except perhaps in limited situations (I think the physics engine is fairly modular for instance).