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Obviously, ambient sounds (tied to certain locations/areas) will also be needed, and perhaps sounds for when our thief walks through a bush or walks through some tree branches (foliage), etc. I'd love to try and help out with some of the "foley artistry" work, but am not sure how possible that will be. What type of sound equipment will you be using? As a side note, I'll probably be able to crank out a few sounds/ambiences from my Roland keyboard. I noticed Doom 3 actually had one part where it used an exact ambient sound that's in my Roland keyboard. My ROland sounds wouldn't be 'real life' sounds like footsteps, per se -- but more along the lines of music/ambience/atmosphere. GoldWave software may allow me to layer sounds and tweak some of them, as well.

Have you tried opening one of the Id maps yet? It'll slow my comp down to a crawl if I turn on realtime rendering and eat up all but a few megs of my ram even at default fullbright. If we're gonna make bigger maps than what Doom 3 had, and chances are we will, I'll have to upgrade to a gig at least.

Yeah, it's key to remember that we won't be releasing this baby for a year (or I will be shocked). So it's ok to aim a little higher in terms of poly count and so forth, since the average Doom-playing machine will be better a year from now than it might be at this moment.

btw- my PC just meets the bare minimum system requirements for Doom 3, if anyone wants testing on a low end machine.

Well, don't forget that you can turn off the shadows completely in Doom 3 for really low-end PCs.....gulp....that destroys much of Thief gameplay for you, it would end up like quick-lighting in DromEd. So we need to have a PC which can run the realtime shadows, which means probably a Pentium 2GHz at the low end and an Athlon 64 at the high end. Which approximately equates to a 128Mb Graphics card (Radeon or GeForce), for Medium to High detail. So if we aim for a PC like this: Pentium 4 2.5Ghz/Athlon XP equiv 128Mb Graphics card (Radeon 9800 or GeForce FX recommended) 256Mb of Ram (512Mb most definitely recommended) Some sort of sound, we like 5.1 surround. OpenGL....weeeee. Anyway, that's roughly what I expect the very average PC will be in 6 months/a years time.

We need a target platform. It is really handy in DromEd to have the showstats feature, and the recommendation in the Manual that "300 polys is okay for high detail areas, but try to keep areas that may have action in them down to 200 polys". Of course, nowadays we up that, for our target audience. I generally try to keep to 300, and only go higher for "pretty" areas. I hope there is a similar "showstats" feature in Doom 3, 'cause then we can pick a statistic(s), like polys, brushes, or something, and set guideline limits that are appropriate for our target platform. Eg. 300 polys, 1000 portals.

The big question is figuring out when to make these sacrifices and why. I'm intending on using a few more brushes than what we saw in Id's maps because Thief is a much slower game and can probably afford a slight framerate drop in comparison. We have this awesome engine at our disposal and all, so of course we should take advantage of it and do things we haven't seen in any Thief game to date....we just gotta use some common sense and think some stuff out. From what I've seen Doom 3 uses about 4000-7000 brushes per map, with usually about 200-400 on display in a single scene (an admittedly pulled-out-of-my-ass estimation) . I plan on using about that same amount of brushes, maybe a little more if the memory requirements aren't too high, and about at most 700 of em onscreen at once. Since the engine can handle that amount you don't have to worry about making any threadbare rooms to save on performance, but to be on the safe side I wouldn't go over that mark. For a quick example here...say you're in a bedroom that's made up of about 150 brushes...you could go ahead and throw a nice transluscent window in there and not worry about choking your graphics card...but if you're in a giant ass entryroom with a grand staircase I'd throw curtains over the windows to keep from drawing what's outside and adding to the burden. lol, kind of a longwinded and sorta preachy post just to say what everyone pretty much already knows, but I wanted to throw it out anyway just to show how I plan on doing the maps.

Doom 3 comes packaged with the level editor in the executable. All you have to do to access it is rightclick on the Doom 3 shortcut, click on properties, and add "com_allowConsole 1 +set r_fullscreen 0 +editor" in the target box after the quotation marks. But if you mean how we've made all the test maps, well...we've got lots of stuff down in the (currently?) hidden sections of the forums that go through it all step by step. It's a long process that'll probably bore the hell out of everyone not interested in the technical side of the mod. And yeah, the SDK will be free. As for the Garrett model...I think DeepOmega has been doing it in 3DSMax, not too sure though.

Hey all - I knocked up a quick model of the wooden inlay trim thing. Unfortunately, in that fateful reformat I lost my Doom 3 install, and the CDs are home. I'll grab them this weekend, but for now I just exported the two ASE files for your use to generate normal maps. I attached it as a zip. There's a good tutorial on doing it at http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=5133 - it should be pretty obvious which of my files is which. WoodInlayLow.zip

Why? Doom 3 can do translucent in realtime - you just need a 'thicker' alpha texture. Or frosted glass.

Hello, I offered my help on the coding side on the old forums. Until the SDK comes out, a lot of the stuff I'd like to get started on will have to wait. As a result, I was only periodically checking the old boards, and only just now saw the message regarding this move. I'm still more than willing to offer my help on the coding side. I'm mostly interested in helping with AI, and movement code (Mantling, run/walk/sneak/crouch modifications). I'm also willing to help anywhere else that requires it. Even Art. Sorry for not posting anything for a while, but until the SDK comes out, a large number of things are simply speculation at this point. -oofnish

Omega, go for it. Read up on the scale and formats you need. You can just pass 3D object 'texture planes' through Doom 3 using the 'renderbump' command, and it outputs full normalmaps.

Thanks man and Hello to ya! Ya, I'm trying to make a good doom 3 site with plenty of content, but it's alot of work lol

Hi there guys! This is Jim from DoomCast.com. I've been talking to Fingernail and offered him hosting and some space on our forums! Just wanted to say hello and meet the people who are going to bring out this awsome thief mod! I still remember the first time I played thief, lol, getting chased around the first manor and scrambling up a rope to hide hahaha Hopefully this mod turns out great! Anyway, gtg Jim Doomcast

Wow, great work. Once I'm finished up with my studying and side projects I'll really have to fire up the doom editor and learn how to use it. It looks like a hell of a lot of fun.

Ok then. I will gladly set it up for you if you provide me with a place to set the stuff up. I need some webspace (with php installed) and a mySQL server to set it up. However, I cannot test anything yet, because ID haven't released their Doom 3 Linux client yet.

Basically, I've just played around with the ones in Doom 3. You choose a texture and it's either animated, fog, flickering, got little lines/shadows in it, etc. So you could make a lattice window projection, and project it from the window to the floor.

Okay, I've started resizing and once again have come to realise just how freakishly small everything is supposed to be in the game... 512x512 isn't a massive texture by UT2k4 standards....but Doom 3 shrinks everything down to an obscenely small size that we might as well reduce the sizes down to 256x256 just to make everything easier to fit... Just check this out... That's the actual size of the texture vs. how big it needs to be. An amazing difference if you ask me.

I'm not a part of the Dark Mod team actually, I can't code, do models or textures anyway. Kinda dedicated to Black Cat Games aswell... I'm just hosting the forums for Fingernail and the crew.

Wow, not bad. Upload the normalmap onto the FTP and I'll test it out in Doom next chance I get.

Hmmm, you're probably right about the T3 engine being able to handle the larger missions. I just wonder if it wouldn't bog down since it doesn't seem to be as finely tuned as the doom engine.

Gonna play devils advocate for a sec... The Thief 3 SDK can have levels at least almost as large as what we saw in Thief 2 assuming that ISA didn't build a memory cap into the editor itself...which I don't believe they did. But for everthing else Doom 3 is a much better engine. Considering how versatile the SDK is apparently gonna be, it doesn't seem to be a matter of if the engine can handle a Thief-like game, but rather if we have the skills necessary to make it handle it. Course if there is one thing the TTLG crew is good at it's making some amazing stuff with clunky and limited tools, if the T3 editor is released we'll see some great FM's no matter how awesome or crappy it is. But no matter what happens we'll still be over here working on Darkmod simply...well...I guess cuz we want to and it's fun.

Quake 3's Source was never released. Wolf 3d, all of the Doom's, hexen 2 and Quake 2 have. We are discussing Game Source, which is the source that comes with the SDK's, not the full engine source itself. From what I have read. Quake 3 MIGHT be GPLed by the end of 2004.

I've been involved in a few UT/UT2K3 mods, and a few Deus Ex mods. Oddly enough, even tho I've been doing modelling and animation for four years or so, I've never been an artist before this mod. Hmm. As for releasing this if TDS gets an editor - we're all in agreement here. I'll lay it out flat: Doom 3 has an incredibly powerful engine. It is the first of the Nexy Generation. It runs more efficiently, can have bigger levels, and is built with future hardware in mind. Can you say specular and normal maps? How about full-on pixel shader control, even without an SDK? Normal mapping at a reasonable resolution? There ain't no reason to drop this project.

I'd guess that any textures, noises, models and what-not created by these guys would be available to FM authors for T:DS also... Its an interesting prospect. T:DS obviously has quite a head start on the Doomed project. Sensible people might jump ship and focus resources there instead. Here's hoping that Eidos and Ion Storm make some kind of decision one way or the other soonish. Currently a level editor is supplied with Doom 3. Some simple mods are possible by hacking texture, model and other files. I could be wrong, but I think that the format for 3d models is the .md5 file type - which has been used by John Carmack and team for years and is well supported with utilities and file converters. ID have promissed to release the full software development kit shortly - which should allow for some pretty serious modding - similar in scope to the situation with Half Life and the Unreal games.