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THe first one would be fantastic without the drumkit, it just doesn't fit into the rest of the piece at all. It's like you're in an atmospheric gothic cathedral city, and then suddenly someone start playing a late 20th century drumkit in the background. THe recording or mixing of the drums is not right either, it sounds like it's off in the distance, whereas the rest of the instruments sound full and close. I don't think it needs the drum track at all actually. There's also a bit after midway where it gets loud all at once, like it's suddenly pumped through a distortion filter for a few seconds. Overall it's very moody and thiefy though. THe drums fit in to the second oneo more, but they need to be a little louder in this one and the synth that kicks in with the drum needs to be a little louder as well, but it's mostly sounding great so far

This isn't going to be something I need anytime soon...I need to get everything else about the book working first.

I was just reading the update on moddb for "A terrible Secret" and I must say I'm quite surprised. First they claim that Doom 3 didn't allow them to create their set because they didn't intend to create so many custom textures. But than he says that HL2 is so much better with it's physics (which is certainly true) and with the proper artistic team they can also create the dark envirnonment that they envisioned. Now I'm a bit surprised because I wonder what that "proper artistic team" is supposed to do. Does have HL2 so many different textures set? And if so why would he need that "proper artistic team". If not (as I understand the text) then they will still have to create their custom textures, which implies to me that this is not the reason why they changed to HL2. Well, it doesn't really matter, just being curious as I liked the story from that mod and it's sad that they switched to HL2 and so I likely can not play it if it comes out.

the thief1/2 main-menu, books, etc. have a different resolution than the game - so it always takes some time, when you want to read a book, or your objectives, because the game first has to change the resolution.

Oh crap, my first editing mistake. Sorry Spar, hit edit instead of reply. I tried to reconstruct your post as best I could. Ah, you're right, of course. So it will require two potential interactive 'buttons'. Still easier than the main menu. You're right, it would. I don't think that would be too hard, although getting them to look like they mesh with the page might. I'll look into it. Hmm, not sure what you mean by this, Dave.

I mentioned it indirectly in my weekly update, but you're right, I should have been more direct. My plan is to see if I can do both the readable books and menu screen GUIs. I'm starting with the books because they should be easier (since they aren't interactive). I should have a nice mock-up of the main menu animation by some time next week. So don't hand out those tasks (in terms of scripting) until I give it a go...if I find it too complicated (and so far it doesn't look that bad) then I'll let you know. I'll definitely need some programming help at some point, but I'll see what I can get done on my own first.

Isn't there a toggle to make textures double sided like in UT? (and in the serious editor for that matter, you could actually make polys doublesided, invisible etc on a suface by surafce basis, which was supremely handy) edit: YOu wouldn't even need a cube, just copy and paste the first square and flip it's normal. You'd still ionly use 4 polys and get a perfect circle.

Sorry guys i couldnt reply right away for couple of reasons. 1- I couldnt pull myself together because of oDDity's amazing models. It s an amazing amazing amazing amazing art ..insane details, mindblowing character posing...I mean for me being in the same team with oDDITY is enough!. And It s so cool he has Edward"thecrazy"Munch icon. How cool is THAT!... 2- I was looking all those concept arts and everything. I mean i feel like im in heaven.. . I think many things gonna change after this MOD. I have never seen that much devoted and talented group. And NEWHORIZON what should we give you as a wedding present? Guys! We gotta give him something. ... something so unique...mmm? Mmmm what about "A bioorganic plugin" for him When he thinks something, that plugin will convert his brainwaves into an object in DOOM3 editor. OR, what about "instant ANIMATOR-Cloner" When the wife calls him he will clone himself. So he will keep on working for the MOD. Im telling you, you will need this:) (especially in marriage) So Sparhawk i think it shouldnt be that much problem :) writing those simple plugins. Although im a divorced guy, i believe the good marriage is the key on success. And i will follow you probably very soon for my second and latest attempt. So i wish endless happiness. By the way, you know my first occupation was Law. So if you need an ex-lawyer you know it s free of charge . But i suggest you to convince Sparhawk for the second "instant animator-cloner" plugin. you shall need no legal support. Best.

Moss arrows aren't woo either, working examples could easily be made. Zombies on the other hand are quite blatant and first degree woo. I restrict woo to the following: Undead (haunts, ghosts, zombies) Burricks THe Trickster Potions (health, invis, slowfall) Magic casters It wouldn't affect the game that much to leave those out, after all, T2 had few examples of any of them.

sounds fine so far maybe a little more bass in the first one ?

well I think we should first agree on one final structure - then I could manage this stuff as long as renz is not around. I could structure it on the ftp, but I won't upload everything in a rar - my bandwith and my traffic is still limited. would be great if someone else could do that from time to time for the 56k users - tgas compress VERY well !

Bare with me on this. This isn't some idea I just came up with. The illusion WON'T be destroyed when the compass points move (as I thought I illustrated). It's a trick used in many commercial 3D games. No, the 2D gem doesn't move. It doesn't need to, because it's a perfectly round sphere. You can't tell which way its facing. Look at my previous example pic. BECAUSE you can't tell which way a marble is facing, is why you can use a 2D pic for it. You don't need to render new pictures for every angle you see it on, because a perfect sphere never looks different, no matter what angle you view it on. The only way it looks different is if you change the light source, which isn't nessecary for a HUD item. -But you are right, there is no real difference with a true 3D one and the 2D one from a programming perspective, since both are simply changing textures on a mesh in real time. -And the poly count doesn't really matter I suppose, since there is only one of them and not lots of them all over the screen (like in-game objects such as coin stacks). -But the 2D one has the possibility of being pre-rendered much nicer looking, and perfectly round without huge amounts of polys. That is generally the entire reason for employing this trick. If I could find some screen shots, I could show you what I mean. Okay, it's not a decent example, but maybe it gets the gist across. Look at the tyres on the Karts. (They are all the same tire object). Notice how they have managed to get treads on the tires, shading, rims etc. all which would take up lots of polys. The fact is, that they only rendered 1 animation of the tire revolving on the Y axis (ie. rotating as if sitting on a microwave plate while it turns) and stuck this on a 2 poly square. They did not render frames for any other angles (except 2 more for the z axis, so the tire can look like it's spinning) because the fact is, that the tire will ALWAYS look like one of those frames from the animation of the Y axis revolving, no matter what angle you look at it from, high, low, diagonal, side, etc. because of the way the tire is shaped. It is a perfect circle. In the case of a perfect sphere, it looks the same from ALL angles, something they exploited in Mario 64 with the king ba-bomb - his body is a 2D image of a pre-rendered sphere with a highlight on it - that way, he is perfectly round (no polygonal edges), it only takes up 2 polys instead of hundreds, and his eyes, arms and legs rotate around that image as he turns, as if it was a perfect sphere, completing the illusion. Much like what I'm suggesting for the light gem. All I'm saying is that it's possible to exploit this trick to make a much more beautiful, glass-marble type looking gem, like the one that was first posted.

I think I will have to revise how the model should be displayed. I just wrote an explanation for you and suddenly I realized that this will not work this way. Now I must see how I can do it. I will post on this as soon as I know. The problem is. I can't import the ASE file. And when I import the LWO file into Blender, then the model looks like crap. It seems that the importer from Blender screwes up on some objects, because I imported other stuff and it looked ok. Maybe it has to do with complexity, I don't know. I can't really import it. But I will first fiugure out how to place the gem and the compass. It doesn't make sense right now, to do much on the model until I figured this out. The files I uploaded are all that you need. You don't even need to download everything. But I will see how I can do this and next time I compress it before I upload.

Well if those are to be the final gem textures as seen in-game then they'll have to be brighter than that. I thought the gem would be rendered in a 3d app first where the luminosity could be controled, and then 16 bitmaps of it would be taken and used. I'll render them again.

Yay! Another woo Vs the Mechs debate! I'm a T2 guy myself, I played it first and it's still in my top three favourite games. THe amount of woo and other nonsense in T1 really put me off the game. I have to say though, the Cradle mission from T3 was excellent, so woo can be done well. My favoutie mission types are generally the normal mansion/bank/warehouse/museum jobs, the sort of thing a thief would actually do, not those silly save-the-world-superhero or ghostbuster missions

Just curious about people's favourite missions from T1/2. I think you can tell a lot about what somone's vision of Thief is by their favourite moments from those games. Personally, I loved the Bonehoard and the first Underground citadel maps. I liked the idea of exploring ancient ruins, with old traps and zombies running around. I loved the Ramirez mission where you had to follow the assassins through the city. Stalking someone through the shadows was a great feeling. And I loved the Thieves' Highway in T2. The idea of being able to go where other people couldn't was very appealing. I also loved the idea of the quarrantined section of town (can't think of the name). That was a beautiful concept, and I hope we can work something similar into our own campaign. I generally did NOT like the mechanist stuff from T2, particularly the grenade launchers and surveillance cameras. Too high-tech for my taste. The boiler bots were not quite as bad, but still far from my favourite.

Indeed. When I first joined it seemed only a bit odd that there was only one user/pass, but even more odd when I learned that there was also public HTTP access. Wow, that's um.. kinda public, yes? But eh, if you guys are comfortable with that, so be it. Not like this has to be some big hush hush government top secret thingy. Yes, I definitely think this should be protected against. But the textures! The texchus, maan!

I just wanted you to know, that I'm working on a victorian dining chair now. Not much to see yet, but I hope that I can post the first screenshots this evening.

thx. I first have to figure out, how rendering works in blender regarding the leg - maybe you're right. not many players will notice that, but I don't think it would be possible to do something like thinner getting legs with a normalmap. Maybe I shouldn't try to make thing so realistic - I'll try to reduce the polys of this legs. Anyway I really appreciate your help, cauze I don't have much experience in modelling (I learned it about 3 weeks ago with sparhawks help and trial and error in blender)

Yes, it's great texturing, render it with some decent lighting to show of the textures better. The cushion on the seat and back didn't have to be modeled in though, the normal map would have sorted that out. The general rule is never to use more polys that absolutely necessary. They soon add up when building a level, and the less polys each individual object has, the more the level designer can put in the room without straining people's systems. quote " maybe you can't see that, because of the perspective, but the green-leg isn't just a simple cube. At first it's a simple cube, then it get's smaller and at the end it get's thicker again" Exactly, that's an unecessary expense) you could just taper the leg from top to bottom and have 2 triangles per side. Beveling detail can also be done with normal maps, and no one is really going to notice the base or chair legs anyway. Just little things like that you should be thinking about when making the low poly versions of meshes.

that's how I did the lowpoly-leg I'm pretty new to this modelling stuff, so it always takes me a while, till I figure out things like that. As I mentioned in the post before the complete chair now has exactly 600 triangles - (that's less than each back-leg of the high-poly version) that's low enough, isn't it ? maybe you can't see that, because of the perspective, but the green-leg isn't just a simple cube. At first it's a simple cube, then it get's smaller and at the end it get's thicker again

samething with me. I love mansions - it's just an incredible feeling to sneak through a highly guarded palace and grab all you can. But I also like zombie-missions like in T1 - I remember the first time I ever played thief, walked into Cragsleft and saw this rotten body on the floor. I didn't care about it, cauze I was looking for the way up to the prison, but suddenly there was a noise right behind me, I turned around and it scared the hell out of me ! I think everyone made similar experiences, while playing thief - it's just the best game ever and I appreciate EVERY mission - OMs and FMs. another thing was this undercover mission in T1 (don't know, how it's called in the english version). I really loved it.

Bascially I loved all those mission where you wre running around in mansions. Favourite one is Life of the party. The view of anglewatch, when I first saw it, was really absolutely astounding. Never cared much for the Zombie or underground levels, except Return To Cathedral. But I'm a little torn there because the Zombie maps are all very exciting.

Hmmm, where to start! The Dark Project: Baffords Cragscleft Prison Assassins The Sword The Lost City Song of the Caverns Return to the Cathedral The Metal Age Life of the party Shipping and Receiving Framed First City Bank and Trust Trail of Blood

I suppose this is off topic more than anything else - figure I may as well brag about the system that I'm building. Been meaning to put together a sweet workstation for a while now, so I'm using income from my first real job (whoo!) to cover it. So far, is about 1000 dollars, plus an anticipated 500 more over the next 6 months or so. 2.8 Ghz Xeon with 800 MHz frontside bus 200 GB ATA 7200RPM HD (Maxtor) Sony DRU-540 DVD +/- Burner GeForce FX Ultra 5950 256 MB 1 gig PC2700 DDR RAM ASUS NCCH-DL motherboard (sweetest motherboard I've ever seen for under 300 dollars - supports dual xeons up to 3.2 GHz, plus 4 DIMMS of DDR and an 800 MHz FSB with built-in Promise RAID controller, 6 SATA ports, 4x USB 2, built-in optical audio out... hot damn) Unfortunately, it took me about 3 weeks to convince ASUS that their mobo is dead, so I'm now waiting on a replacement. Whee. I'll be sad if this never comes together... Long-term goals: a second 2.8 xeon, another gig or two of RAM, SATA hard drives... The works. Gotta love it. For the curious, I'm basically waiting to get this system built before I continue the Thief model - my current one cries.