Search the Community

It's not a banknote by chance? The best way is to delete the old harddisk and create a new partition from scratch. That's the fastest way. Of coure it depends on your system setup. If you have everything on a single partition C: then you are scrwed. Many non-developers partition their jarddrive this way, but this is the crappiest way to setup your system. So if you setup a complete new installation I suggest that you create bootpartition for your XP (mine is 4GB which is more then enough) and install all apps on another partition. This way you can easily recover after a system crash or when you need to setup your OS, which happens frequently with Windows. but to answer your question. Normally it should be possible to install over an existing system. But it could be that you have old files intermingled with new files which CAN cause problems.

ok, I can do that. I'm also waiting for some further replies to my thread at D3world.org, cauze I want to know exactly what's the problem with yours and my models. strange thing is, that I didn't had any problems with the bookshelf, eventhough I did exactly the same, as with the desk. I imnported it into blender, did the diffuse map and some minor changes to the UV-map.

dear Atti, It looks so cool man...You are working like IKEA!!!! but gothic version of IKEA I dont believe any other team will reach that much mesh quantity in their game...Im so excited...And every object im seeing from the game engine giving me heart attack..I dont think i will survive ....after seeing the first level.... Yesterday i was suffered with the sexual climax problems, today im getting so emotional ..... tomorrow... i dont wanna guess it.. Best..

Sure you could do this. But if you do this, then we would loose a great character modeler for the team because your model really looks good to me. I don't think that you should stop this. Your model looks fine and if it has some problems then you should learn which ones and fix them, instead of running away. I don't think that there are many mods that have such good modellers and that's not only oDDity I mean. I'm really suprised about the high-quality team that we managed to get together, because when I see some FMs I often think that they are rather amateurish. So far I haven't seen anything on our mod where I had to think this (except my models of course ). It's not bad modelling, but maybe you should really focus on one thing and finish this first? I know what you are doing and this is really a lot. And I don't want for you to burn out because you are taking on everything.

dear oDDity:) I ll try to fix the face.. Of course i was more like architectural and mechanical modeller for years... I think i should stick with making just furniture and stuff like that for this mod and keep my time trying to fix things.....I mean of course i can change, add so many other props to your base model but really it doesnt do anything good for my skills which im really trying to improve. I was making cartoon 3d characters for TVs but not that much humanoid characters. And for some time (springheel knows the reason) i may have some anatomical problems.. I think it s better for me not to try anymore on character models... Because really this team has the best.... so the best must create the final characters...I mean we should not give away the quality... So i think .I m not gonna try to make character for this mod again... and I even do not put any kind of picture on LW modellers background. Not even a logo. I mean i force myself to not copy the actual stuff..So for me it s not even an option to put a model and change it...I mean it may take months for me to make a good proportional model or a face but it s ok really i dont have rush After many occupations in this visual art fields i started to focus on modelling mmm couple of months ago.. So i think im still so amateur... i was focusing on so many other things when i was making that woman. i mean my mind was divided in three things as i was making it....It was really so hard for me to work in 3 different PCs on 3 different stuff.... but this is not an excuse... of a bad modelling ... And i admire your work...It s not a good thing for me to mess with it best (with us)

My major problem with "body awareness" is, that it's plain stupdi from a real world point of view. At least in many cases. Seeing hands when walking around? Why? When I go I never see my hands and I'm not aware of them. Even running I barely are aware of them, so why would I have a constant reminder that I have hands to use? I know that I have hands and so does the character in the game. Pickupanimations are ok, but they tend to slow down an action and look most of the time simply ridiculous. The lockpicking was not so bad in T3 because the hands were in a quite limited position (hence the suck in) and looked more or less ok. But having a pickup animations means that either the character has to be in a proper position or the animation will look wrong. Either because the hands will have to be extended in order to reach the object properly, they will have to be bended in an unrealistic way, or they look realistic but will touch air instead. If we want realistic moving handanimations, then the player has to be in a position where it makes sense. This means, he has either to be sucked in (which I hate) or he has to move in the proper position himself (which could become frustrating). The major problem with body awareness is IMO that you never will have the amount of control over a computer character as you have over your body. Simply because the only things to control the character is the mouse and the keyboard. And this is exactly the reason why you either have to force the model into an animation or the player has to learn complex control mechanisms. A good example is the slight delay when the palyer is looking in another direction then the body is aligned of. The delay is not realistic, simply because in RL you never have this issue. You can move your head independently of your body (to some extent ). So looking in one direction and going in another is never an issue with a real body, but it is with a computer controled character because usually you can either control the body or the head but not both. And these are similar problems for all other body parts to. I can control my hand while simoutlanously moving my head and also my feet in totally different directions. I can even read while walking and I do this all the time when I'm on the street. So to me body awareness is something that is much overhyped and expresses more a lack of phantasy than anything else. I have no problem seeing no body and still knowing that it's ME that is running around in the castle steeling things. Yes. That's also my opinion.

There is no problem with that. I think the reason for putting it in the middle are twofold. 1.) Because of 3rd person view, the have to position the model in such a way that it looks believable from 3rd person view as well as from first person. That's also why you had to be sucked into position. Placing it on the sides would cause unneccessary problems, because it can either be on the left or right and there has to be enough place so that the model doesn't either dissolve into the building or might be collisioned and can't get into the proper position. 2.) Probably handles on the sides could be harder to see because of lighting conditions. Considering the XBox it might be much worse on a TV screen. When the object is placed in the middle the light is probalby better there. Just pure speculation of course.

YEs. I'm sure it ;ooks even better in game, with the real time specularity. Just on the subject of doors - does anyone know what the reason for the central doorhandles/locks in T3 was? Will there be any problems putting door handles and locks on the right/left side of the door like normal?

Hey Sparhawk, I think you misunderstood the post I made over at moddb. It wasn't the textures that we were having problems with, we actually had a very large set of them already made. The problem was with creating custom models that would react as a physic object. I think I pretty much sum it up on the news post at moddb. Basically, we just have a lot more options with HL2, especially for the medieval setting. It is easier to do large outdoor environments with amazing looking water and foliage. The whole idea, now, will be to incorporate the world into the playing experience. With all of the physics props available we can make for some very interesting and unique ways around certain obstacles. If a group of zombies is coming at you up a hill, just grab some barrels and roll them over instead of wasting a clip of ammo. Anyways, I am glad you guys over here at Dark Mod cared about the mod; it's nice to know that somebody was paying attention. Cheers, r.gun

When I look at oddities character models they are really looking great, as probably everybody agrees. What I wonder though, is as how they will look in-game. Remember BlackThiefs problems with the Zombie skinning? Because the models are mirrored. So I would suggest to start skinning at least on one character from Oddity to see how they turn out when they are ported into D3. I would really hate to loose that great look of them, but we should get some experience with this.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Of course it has to be quick to load, but such a small level should not mean any problems in that area. And regarding text that's not an issue either, since we place them were we want to. Another cool thing would be that when you click on "load game" for instance, the camera could move forward a bit, pherhaps inside a nearby house or something like that. (But it shouldn't take more than 2-3 seconds, or people would be annoyed). And I wouldn't like a street crowded with people. Just a sort of abandoned alley, pherhaps a guard patrolling in the distance. Some birds taking of from a roof. Small things like that. Also, I seriously doubt you'll be blown away by the avi. I did mention I suck at video compression, didn't I?

Come off it? I'm not referring to 'problems' with steam - it's larger than that. If you are comfortable with their 'delivery system' and what using it involves and means in the big picture, okay. I'm not. I happen to think it's another case where producers of a product are forcing something on people, and people are bending over and taking without protest. There are countless products and companies that can serve as further examples in everything ranging from automobiles to toothpaste (yes, toothpaste). I don't want any part of it; though, as I said - it's probably the way of the future, and there's no avoiding it as long as the masses accept it. That topic alone could spark a huge philosophical debate about the "way things are" versus the "way things should be"... but I don't feel like it right now.

Oh come off it, steam isn't that bad. Yes it's got some flaws but i haven't had many problems with it.

DeepO is talking about things which are bad and good game modelling practice. Things which improve performance. Basically, any game engine likes nice neat rows of triangles which it can render all fairly easily. It doesn't like to have them all bunched up unevenly; it doesn't read well. Also it can lead to clipping problems, that sort of glitch.

Looks good. I don't see any problems. Only challenges.

Well, I managed to get it into the editor, but as you can see there are a few problems...

LOL! I was just posting this problem. Bouding Boxes Fixing this issue should also fix the frob problems. I played around this for some coins and I noticed that this box determines when the frob triggers.

Yeah, it might be that the light is pretty harsh. I also tried having the books hilight at the .50 setting and it was quite visible. Could be a combination of the harshness of the light directly above the books and the frobbability problems I was experiencing. The only thing I found was that the books and coins didn't seem to frob when they were centered on the screen. Sometimes they would be off to the side a little bit. How is the middle of the object determined, is there some kind of box around each item that it has to be centered in?

Well, I tried creating one manually, but somehow ran into problems getting everything to be the correct size. I somehow have also lost the webpage tutorial about how to import them into the editor, so that has knocked me off schedule, somewhat.

I think the table is ok. It's the environment where the table doesn't really fit in, though. I don't know. The question is how this impacst performance. Of course the stuff should look good, but will there so many books at once that we will get problems of this? Of course you always have to keep the whole picture in mind. Teh game shouldn't start to get a slidshow when three Ai's are coming in the room. I noticed that you spelled the names differently. One time you wrote coffetab1 and the other one you wrote coffeetab1. After I realized that the table showed up in the editor as well. And of course you must set the game to darkmod as well, but I think you already did this.

I've got some serious problems to resize the table in blender - when I make it bigger parts of the model dissappear in the 3d-view and it doesn't look any bigger in the modelviewer

I just noted that the lightgem model is on the FTP server. This is good to know. Unfortunately it is in a non-ASCII format and thus we can not edit it. I don't want to install lightwave just to be able to to open the file and I wouldn't even know how to do this in ligthwave. Ignoring that fact that I don't want to install a pirated copy of Lightwave as Blender perfectly serves my purpose. As the lightgem is only a static mesh, I expect that I can easily import it into Blender. Of course to avoid such problems in the future you should always assign the material name right from the start. I think we should create a HUD directory in the models section where we can store the respective HUD models. So the lightgem would have a path like this in the material: //darkmod/models/hud/lightgem Also always provide a textfile with the authors name/email, what the file contains and which version this is. oofnish did that in this case, but we should make this as a rule. Since we will store other HUD elements as well the description file should be name <modelname>.txt --------------------------- Author: Name <email> Version: 0.1 Description: this is the most woot model for our mod. ---------------------------

I've uploaded three versions of the Lightgem model (.lwo files) to the FTP site. They are in /models/lightgem. The whatis.txt file gives a basic description of what each file is. The lightgem.lwo file is the high detail model that we probably don't want to use. 2.5 k polys The lightgemr2.lwo file is a medium detail model that renders nearly as well as the high detail model, at 1024 polys. Still probably too high, plus there are some non-planar quads that may cause problems. The lightgemr3.lwo file is a lower res model that looses some visual detail and has 770 polys. Still might be too high, and the nonplanars are still there... The lightgemr4.lwo file is a algorithmically reduced object with 692 polys. These are all tris. The mesh is quite messy in comparison, but the model doesn't render too badly. We may want to use this. The reason I provide all these models is so we can choose which model is the best size and complexity. Also if someone is better at reducing models than I am, they can give it a crack and perhaps come up with a better result. Material definitions are all procedural and stored within the lwo files. I also changed the point colors a bit. Here is a new sample:

I don't know what to do about the other problems, but I think we can avoid at least the model issue next time. Every stuff should go into CVS. Most programs support ASCII formats and this is what we should put in CVS. The textures and soundfiles can stay on the FTP server, as my machine and upload bandwidth is not exactly fast, but everything else should go into CVS. I think this is a better thing to do anway. And with everything I mean EVERYTHING. This includes material, def, map and any othe file that we need. As it is, already I have to change stuff that Renzatics also works on and there are already chances that we overwrite each others changes (custom.mtr for example).

I am pleased its not just me then ..I have over fifteen years of commercial 2d 3d (traditional ) experience (www.alandickinson.net)and have worked with most of the major companies within my field …try to get into the games industry and nothing ..not a sausage! I think one of my problems is that game companies like to put you into very defined boxes and I don’t really fit into any. I must say I am surprised you have not had any success getting an environment role. Renzatic is absolutely right in what he says …I have heard the same said so many times mods are a great way to build experience. Shame you are in Canada I have seen a lot of environment positions here in the uk.