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Doom 3: Hell on Earth seems very similar to the expansion pack 'Ressurection of Evil' being created by Id or one of its affiliates, so maybe that was part of their decision to shut down production.

For example, Thief Deadly Shadows was a total converson of the Unreal engine. Fortunatley we don't have to rewrite the renderer though. The Doom renderer suits our purposes vey well.

A total conversion means that you create an entirely new game based on a particular engine. Thief and Doom 3 are both first person, and that is about as much similarity as it will get. Everything else will be coded by us or converted in such a way that is suits the new game mechanics. The difference between a TC and a mod is primarly the scope. A mod extends on the existing game while a TC creates an entirely new game in all regards. This is basically the same thing that game companies are doing when they are licensing an engine. As for the tools. This is not THAT clear right now. Many things can already be done with the existing tools, because they are much more flexible then I thought. Of course we are still pretty much in the beginning, so we have to feel our way through. The first priority is to get the core game mechanics to working. This includes the lightgem, sound propagation, improving the AI, extending objective conditions and all these things. Once we have the core gameplay working, we can focus on making this things a more or less smoot ride for others to use our assets to create thief style maps. Thjis could mean that we just need to write a howto and explain how to set up i.e. frobable objects, or it could mean that we need to write a third party editor in order to setup things that are not supported by the D3 editors directly. Of course the ideal solution is to write plugins for the editor, which is possible, but I'm not sure if we have the tools for this, as Id didn't release everything. So I know that plugins can be written, because Id uses this as well, but if the interface is not available, we can not do it.

Sorry if I'm being pestering, but as a software developer, I'm interested in the details. What exactly is a "total conversion". I could either take that as putting a new interface on existing editor engine or it could be your way of saying you're writing a whole new editor. Are you writing code against the Doom 3 engine's API? Or are you working with the editor API? Is the editor open source so that you can make changes to it?

Thanks for dropping in. Essentially what we're doing is making a total conversion of the Doom 3 editor. When we are finished it will provide FM authors with the tools they need to construct missions. It's likely going to be another year before we see the toolset released, but hang in there.

The Doom 3 community is faltering a bit, but is far from dead. I've seen interest in a game dry up and watch a community die, this one is still going strong...if not a bit stunned at the moment. In the end it's gonna be Quake 4 that draws all the attention to the engine. D3 has piqued a bit of interest, but it'll be Quake that brings all the hardcore Id modders to the scene.

Yeah, Sledge was saying the very same thing about the big Doom 3 mods last week. They're all pulling out. I don't know if they feel it's just too much work or what. At any rate, I'm not going anywhere.

What other big mods are there for doom now anway? They seem to be dropping like flies. Look's like we'll be the only one that ever get released

The arms stay in the same relative positon to the camera wherever you look, just like with any doom weapon. When you're not holding anything you'll see no arms at all.

Just have the arms attached to camera I think, like Doom and the early Thiefs, otherwise it requires to have a whole body for the first person animations reather than just arms, and we get into the whole area of body awareness.

This is something I think we can consider before the initial release. The bow is a weapon, just like the blackjack, just like the sword. In Doom 3, you can see what weapon you're using at the bottom of the screen. You don't need an icon because you can SEE it. If a player doesn't like this, they can turn View Weapons off. And they will see NO weapons. I don't see why we need to make a special exception for the Bow, just because T2 did. It's inconsistant and doesn't lend itself well to customising your HUD. But as always, we shouldn't be talking about things SOLEY in terms of realism - rather, Gameplay first, realisim second. In this case, we're talking about interface optimisations. This is something I don't think we can consider before the initial release, but I'm mentioning it anyway. You can make it so that everything is selected the same way. Deux Ex did it. Deus Ex was made by Looking Glass after T2, and I think the interface is a general improvement over T2's. In Deus Ex, you have less keys to fiddle with, because there is no distinction between "items" and "weapons", and you have a "HUD Item Belt". You have way less keys to worry about, because you simply select an item with item up, item down, then you see it, and you press fire to use it. It could be a MedPack, or a gun. Makes no difference. The use key is reserved for interacting with fixed game world objects, like switches. No need to put your current item away. To manage all your items, you have an item belt, which is always on screen, has 10 slots each with a corresponding number key, and you can put anything in any slot via the inventory screen. Item up and item down only moves through these 10 items. This is better than T2 because; All the items I can cycle through are all on screen, so I know how many clicks I'm going to have to go through to get what I want I know exactly which number key to press to get what I want instantly. I dont have to cycle through stuff I'm not currently interested in, including certain weapons. And in our mod, a hard core user could turn off the belt display, already knowing what they've got in each slot. I only think there is a distinction in T2 between weapons and items because they don't have an interface like Deus Ex does. Obviously making a Deus Ex type interface is more work, but it proportionately more useful to the player, I think. Eg. in the (heavily GIF compressed) top screen shot, I dragged the medpack into slot 6. In the bottom screen shot, I pressed 6 on the keyboard, or scrolled the mousewheel over to slot six, and he's holding it out in front of him, ready to drop it or use it.

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.

Id has never been too keen on contests in the past and it doesn't look like they'll be changing their stance anytime soon. It would be damn nice to win a licensed commercial release of the Doom 3 engine..valued at a cool million. It'd be the woot moment to end all woot moments.

I hope you're not serious Vad. :lol: It's a total conversion of the Doom 3 engine into a stealth based platform. Everything has to be designed from the ground up. AI, Sound propagation, Textures, Models, Voice Sets...etc, etc. This can not be pulled together in a few months.

What about mirrors? In-game cutscenes? Aren't we doing this the way Doom 3 did?

A small slice of "hell" is very fitting, since we're using the Doom 3 engine ... a hell-oriented game

Glossmaps will not help with lootglow. Metal has a low glossiness anyway, which is the default in Doom. The amount of sheen is still controlled by the spec map.

I've made the rope mesh to replace the missing one you were talking about. I just used the same names so nothing has to be changed. It only has four joints in it and I don't think it's working properly. IN the editor, the rope mesh is horizontal, and when you launch the game it swings down to a vertical position and jerks about a bit like normal, but after it stops, there is no way to interact with it again. I've tried using the g_dragEntity on it, but I can select it with that. What I need to know is how to create my own AF file from a rope mesh and bones, bit as usual with Doom, the documentation for the AF editor is worse than useless.

I created this room(not in Doom...) for testing wand, floor ceiling textures...

This model is the scariest/best model i saw since a long long time... really premium class... and it looks more scary than all monster models together from Doom 3... It would be a pleasure for me to make an environment for this model...

I'm gonna throw in my 2 cents here...it's not quite on topic (I rather like the look of the windows, though they could use some a bit more grunging up), but it could still fall to VD in the end. I'm actually beginning to think that doing a goodly chunk of our windows as models instead of textures would be better in the long run. For buildings off in the distance a texture would suffice, but for windows you'll be slinking by in the darkness it'd draw less resources as a mesh instead of a collection of brushes. Having 5 window models lining a hallway isn't as much of a draw on video memory as 5 large textures would be. I've heard that Doom 3's models work somewhat like UT's static meshes. If you wanted to make a grassy field, having 60 brushes with 60 different grass textures would end up eating alot of video memory, but having one grass model copied 60 times wouldn't be nearly as bad since it's only using the memory from the first grass model and the rest are cloned from it.

:lol: Yeah, I should have turned on the fps indicator in fraps...the old framerate in T3 can be pretty mind numbing on the old Geforce fx 5200 that I bought to tide me over until I can afford a good card. It does drop a lot more with fraps turned on however. I must say though, my Doom 3 experience has been much more enjoyable on this card.

Ahh yes, gotta love T3's framerate You must've been pushing at least 10FPS there! I remember those days all too well. I hope Doom 3's framerate is much better than T3's for our project.

Yes, thank you. Definitely not "RED." After I mocked it up, I was like arrrgh, they should've been blue'ish -- like oDDity suggests. I agree wholeheartedly that red looks a little funky. As for "laser pistolish" - yes, I agree there too. I'll tone it down. I think those designs work okay when they're standing vertical -- as I believe T2 has a similar design to that, maybe GIMG, too -- but when they're shooting something, they become too laser pistol'ish. I think the pointy things at the top on either side make it look too futuristic, too. Splitting them apart sounds really cool too. For this one, I think I'd like to keep it a standalone unit. We can then make some modifications of it that are split apart, as you suggest. I envisioned the size of this machine to be about 15-feet from left to right. About 6-feet tall. Not too big, not too small. I'd have to see it in the game to fully judge. I'll try to not make it too technical, also. I don't want people thinking Doom 3 when they see it, of course. I just remembered T2 had a bunch of dials, switches and meters on their machines, so was striving for that. Let me load up T2 again tonight to absorb their machines' "look and feel" more. It would emit a droning hum sounds. The particles (not an all-out "beam") moving between the energy transmitter/receptor would move fairly slowly. In general, I'll try to tone down the futurism. Good suggestions! Any more? I won't be able to start working on modifying it until later tonight. Thanks again, all. Much appreciated.

Agreed that sound should have different volume levels, but with the footsteps there hasn't been much difference in volume between "walking on carpet" and " walking on tile". Of course, the tile is heard more clearly simply because of the nature of the sound... more high-end transient sounds that carry much better.... but it would have a slight raise in volume level. This could be a good indicator to the player that they are walking loudly. But, on carpet the volume woul dhave to be louder simply so the player could hear their own footsteps. Again, it all comes down to what feels "right" in the game. As far as environmental things go, the general sound of a room is decided probably most likely by the sound engine itself. I was reading through some of hte docs on the Doom 3 sound engine and noticed the use of reverb. This reverb setting for each room will probably decided what the room will sound like. Presets could be made for each style of room. cathedral_01: lots of reverb, large room size, moderately fast early reflections, no damping bedroom_07: no reverb, small room size, extremely quick early reflections, 100% damping sewers_03: tons of reverb, medium room size, fast early reflections, 35% damping and so on, and so on.... Does this seem like the answer to the question of sound environments?