Search the Community

Yes, you are still viewing The Dark Mod Forums I've just finished the upgrade of our IPB Board Forums to the latest release. Packed with new features, rewritten code and all that. Have a look around. The skin is currently the default one, but will sooner or later be converted to a darker skin, to fit the Dark Mod universe. Also note that the forums have been moved from http://modetwo.net/darkmod to it's own sub-domain: http://forums.thedarkmod.com - all forum links will still work tho, thanks to Apache's rewrite-plugin. Please report any bugs, requests and comments in this thread. PS: The forums will run a bit slow the first hours as the cache is being rebuilt.

Just wanted to say, Hello! From reading through various posts in the forums it seems like a great community and I hope to become a part of it. So I got the hankering for some Thief as of late and stumbled on TDM through some googling. After purchasing Doom 3 through Steam and instaling TDM, I have been nostalgiacly playing through many of the FMs and have also decided to d/l the Radiant editor and start making a mission, maybe many, we'll see. As it turns out also, I just started (today!) my 1 week vacation from work and intend to dive in to the Radiant editor and am currently going through the A-Z wiki on it. A bit of background on me, I 'used' to work in application support till the economic crash a couple years ago and was laid off and am now running a machining center at a local machine shop, using Mastercam daily, 2D/3D stuff and have always wanted to make a mission/game, and decided since I've always enjoyed the Thief series and stealth gameplay so much, this is where I would start. After getting to my third year in Mechanical Technology I changed my major to Information Technology (should have went with straight Computer Science but ahhh hindsight). I've always loved building things and designing things and also really enjoy computers, art, audio, and the entire visual experience as presented to a user. I have created a couple playable maps before using the older source engine editor so I'm vaguely familiar with 3D modeling, skyboxes, lighting, AI pathing, etc. That's been over 10 years ago though. I got familiar with 3dsmax, ProE, Autocad, and Mastercam in my first major during school so that helps a bit when familiarizing with a new editor and as previously mentioned I've dabbled around in the Valve Source editor. I'm also very much looking forward to the Crucible of Omens campaign created by the marvelous talent at TDM and would like to help in any way I can once I'm familiar with the Radiant engine. I can also do many many voices, I've often thought about moving out to Cali from Indiana and finding work in voice-overs, voice acting, etc. All this started as a youngster with little friends, time on my hands, and imaginary friends. Wow that's hard to admit. So anyway, I've been working on a shadowy Garrett voice, and can do guards and some women characters with old, old english, gruff, slippery, sneaky, terrifying, voices and personalities. Just thought I'd mention that as it may be a way that I could contribute early on and would also enjoy. So anyway, too much about me and not enough A-Z wiki, back to the tutorial! Glad to be here and hope for good things to come.

Just a heads up that the header images are now missing from the top of the forum. I suspect due to domain forwarding or something like that?

Have I been hacked or is the site being rebuilt or hacked?

I'm trying to achieve an effect and I'm hoping someone might know a way to do it. Say I have a model of a sphere. If the sphere is being hit by a light from one side, the bright side will be bright and the dark side will be black (or whatever the default ambient is). What I'd like to do is have ALL sides be equally bright when hit by light. I don't want the sphere to glow in the dark, however. So I can't use an additive blend material. I want it to be lit only when there are lights nearby, but I want ALL of it be lit, not just the side facing the light. Essentially, I'd like the sphere to behave as though it is being hit by an ambient light. Noselfshadow won't achieve this affect...additive blends won't...anybody know of a way to do it?

I'm working on a two part campaign with both parts being released seperately. The second part is going to take place in a manor during a ball so it would be nice if the guests have some venetian ball masks to wear. 2 at least. It wouldn't look good if everyone was wearing the same mask. Here's a few pics of what I have in mind: I won't be starting on the second part of the campaign until the first part is released so there's no rush. I would love to have a go at modelling myself but just making this campaign is going to take me the rest of the year.

For the last 1-2 weeks the forums have been really slow and unresponsive for me, when I type a post half the time it just sits there etc.. is anyone else having the same issues..?

Floor pressure plate I'm trying to make a presure plate that moves down when either the player steps on it, or a moveable (however small) is placed on it. It should not be frobbable, or otherwise activatable, except by placing things "on top of it". So far I tried two approaches: * a atdm:mover_button (frobable = no). This works fine for moveables (tried a crate), but ignores the player stepping on it. (I am not sure, but shooting an arrow at it might activate it, what I don't want, either). One problem is that the plate "bounces" a few times when you throw the crate on it (multiple collisions?) * the same button, but set noImpact = 1 and notPushable = 1. Then I set a small trigger_multiple on top of it, which targets the buttons. Works, if the player steps on it, but ignores moveables entirely. (Another problem is that the plate toggles up and down while you stand on it) * tried trigger_touch instead of trigger_multiple, but it does nothing, not even call the specified script function via "call". So far this has been quite frustrating. I 'm pretty sure I can handle this via extended scripting, and triggers etc., but I wonder if I didn't overlook something simple as "atdm:preasure_plate"? Did anybody get something like that to work already?

http://www.phoronix....item&px=MTExMjU To be honest, what is the point? There already are lots of free and open arena-style games. I have no business telling those folks how to spend their time, but it would be nicer for the gaming community if these guys made a Doom 3 based game because we've seen so many Q3 clones already... and a D3-based game could help TDM go stand-alone. Is it worth pleeding our case to these folks? We could say "hey look, we already have lots of usable assets in a "new" engine, and if you help us go stand-alone, you could use the assets to do something cool and unique like making a medieval deathmatch game with swords and the like."

Does anybody else have this problem? In the (European) evenings the forum is unbearable slow. The server is delivering about 8Kbyte/s, sometimes less and usually stops midwhere during loading the page. Sometimes you can't even get the index page, sometimes you can log in, but then only get half of the overview etc. In the mornings everything is snappy.

I've upgraded IPB to the latest stable version, and since this was a major upgrade (from 2.3.6) I also had to re-do the forum style. Most of the new stuff is in place, but I bet that the logo will be changed. One of the many new features in version 3 is rating of posts and also a "report spammer" ability which will make it easier to single out spam bots and ban then at sight. Hopefully this will stop some of the spam threads we've seen recently. Make sure to empty your browser cache if you're experiencing any problems. And please report any errors etc in this thread. Cheers, ~m2

Every time I have opened DR in the last couple weeks, it seems I don't get much accomplished as far as new construction. I have mostly been tinkering with minor details while I have to yet make a city scene and create the rest of my pagan village. I have only a 'south gate' area for my city and one building to explore... and those two areas are not even connected yet. Making the city area is going to be a challenge for me since I have no experience with that type of mapping.

Tried a forum search in here, and nothing came up, so here we go. The topic for today is difficulty, more specifically, how to make a mission difficult without using fake difficulty. Seems the most commonly used (in my opinion) methods for creating difficulty seem to fall along these lines: Key hunts - You end up retracing your steps over and over to find keys to unlock further areas of the mission. Loot hunts - Similar to key hunts, but not as bad, your progress (unless its the final objective) are seldom hindered by having insufficient loot. AI spam - filling a map with a million guards feels fake to me, you often end up with a rote-learning exercise with where and when to move, the outside area of Sons of Baltona would be a good example of this. Adjusted AI acuity - with guards already able to identify you instantly and ramp up to the fully alert threat level if you're in the light, tweaking these variables seems to be hit or miss for increasing difficulty Light placement - this one isn't too bad, though excessive light placement can lead to rote-learning patrols to avoid over-exposure to strong lights Objectives - this seems like one of the better options, with an example being the fake crown in Crown of Penitance, if the fake gets noticed the AI alert level in the area goes up which makes things tougher for you. Athletics challenges - though I have no doubt that our protagonist(s) are nimble and agile little fellows, probably with solid upper body strength, I'm wondering at what level of complexity do dexterity/timing based athletics challenges become fake-difficulty (think Swing but worse, Swing was about right for dexterity challenge IMHO) Ghosting - This is my preferred method of playing missions these days, but it seems some missions are not built for ghosting at all. One example off the top of my head... Too Late? The warehouse one... right at the end, that fireplace/candle combo in the warehouse, I can't find any way to get past it without a water arrow (since throwing something raises alert level and iirc makes stealth score 0 virtually impossible without "kiting" the 0 level alert to momentarily pause an AI). Is building missions to allow for ghosting removing fake difficulty via the AI and Light factors? I think I've covered everything I wanted to here, now I open the floor for mappers and players of all skill levels and experience to chime in on this. I guess the overall goal of this thread is to come up with a set of difficulty factors that we can all agree don't feel fake or forced, hopefully to allow aspiring mappers to avoid some pitfalls when they go to create their first/next mission.. I'd like to thank the Stealth Bastard user missions, some of which contain a ridiculous level of rote-learning, frame perfect movement and timing skills that belong to Max Payne on fulltime bullet time mode, for inspiring me to create this thread.