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What fucking use is empathy to someone with Alzheimer's. Some new cure I haven't heard of? IF you really cared, you'd volunteer to actually help people who have it, rather than making posts on forums saying how terrible it is. There isn't a town in the country where you couldn't go and volunteer right now to help someone. The truth is, you don't give a shit, at least not in any way that might impinge on your life or cause you the slightest inconvenience. SO don't give me this crap about how caring and empathetic you are. Selfish AND hypocrites, and you wonder why it irritates me so much.

Is the Radiant editor that DR is based on the problem? Maybe some other people have got it working properly on Vista and have some answers on some other Radiant forums.

There is a hardcore set of ghosters that typically hangs out at the eidos forums. their rules are simple. Don't be seen leave no evidence (other than missing loot) don't be heard above suspicioun (Is that a rat, did I hear something) basically level one alerts is the max. If an ai hears or sees you for sure (I saw you, come on out) level 2 alert than the ghost is busted. They even go so far as to complain about friendly ai in missions, because even though they are friendly, if they saw you they saw you. Personally I like to play what I call appartition mode Much like Fidcal, I'd rather not ever be seen or heard and I try not to use too many tools. But if they are alerted above level 1 I will hide and wait, not reload/retry. So at the end of the night they just think they were seeing things (must've been a ghost - the house must be haunted)

And yet you frequent forums every day to read the opinions of other people. Imagine that. I, on the other hand, want to know what other people like in their missions, being a beta mapper who plans on building a few. Which is why I started the thread. P.S. Are you guys always this grouchy? Or did you all get out the wrong side of the bed this morning?

That's excellent work, especially considering you did it in two days while still learning the editor. New Horizon is the guy to contact about applying for beta mapper status (or anything else). Email recruiting@thedarkmod.com or send a PM to New Horizon via these forums. Include a link to this thread so he has some context, and in case he hasn't seen those screenshots yet.

I searched the forum on loot values but didn't really come up with much. Probably not a huge deal at this point but probably needs looked into by the team before release. I'm adding loot defs so I thought I'd post my thoughts. Obviously the main thing we are aiming for in loot is the ability to easily recognize it. Values : seems to be the one factor that is most important. I've added alot of skins to the loot.def file. I did this so we get consistant loot values. Other wise the author would create a gold ring and have to choose a skin and change the value for a silver ring. Of course we can't stop an author from choosing any value they want, but most likely will stick to convention if it's easy. Probably the most important reason to have standard loot values is for the players. Often times at TTLG someone would be looking for that last 75 gold. It was easy for someone to say: gold goblets are 75, look here and there, a coin stack and a plate would be 75, ect... Anyone can double check my values and give input. Basically on things like rings and coins silver = 1/2 gold. Also I tried to make diamonds the most expensive with emeralds second, opals, down to less precious gems like amethyst. I didn't change any existing values, just tried to base ne values off of the existing items. Moveable/Static Loot : In my forums search I came across a thread or two talking about this. I think this is old news but would like to hear what you all currently think about it. I think at one point the team wasn't sure if it should move or not, due to explosions blowing it out of reach, whether or not the mover would work with loot, ect... All these issues seem to have passed so I suggest we get rid of static loot, is there a reason to still have these entities? (other than it already being used in maps?) With the exception of the scepter, statue loot, religious symbol and the diamond all of the loot models have collision models. I can add collision for the scepter and the statue as they are ase. The diamond needs retex so I can do that and add collision, although it will then be an ase. Someone else will need to add collision to the religious obj. I think bonehoard has some static loot which would be better as moveable anyway. I couldn't reach so I shot 10 arrows and it never budged. It was a gold vase which doesn't appear in the loot list but should. I suppose angua just added loot props for that map. Also, I'd like to get more opinions on the gem textures. I want to replace the diamond and ruby textures of old with these. I've got one thumbs up so far (from PinkDot?) the big blue thing is my diamond, the little white thing is the old one. of course there are several sizes... The tex on far right is meant to replace the ruby (small red next to large red) The red on left turns out to be a bonehoard specific shader. --EDIT--forgot to mention, the small red gem with my tex needs remapped, it would look more like the large one.

Do you think I have time during work hours to post essay-long rebuttals on internet forums? Some of us have jobs to do, you know! I'll outline some quick thoughts, seeing as its lunchtime over here. We seem to be mostly in agreement, it's just the wording that's causing problems. I'll ignore all that you do agree with me on. Regarding the story - as I said somewhere on the last page it doesn't have to be a complex story about an imporobable affair or whatever. Just little stories to make the characters feel more alive. Everyday, humdrum things. Perhaps someone could mention that they visited a dentist and had a tooth pulled out by some new steampunk contraption and it hurt like hell. Just little tales to add a bit of life to the mission. A sense of discovery - As I said they don't all have to be 'finding the lost city' style moments. Chopping down a banner to find an alcove, or something. I'd be suprised to find an old house without anything to find it it. Anticipation - Why should this kill the suprise? What the player finds where he's going doesn't have to be what he thought was going to be there. A twist - We'll just haveto agree to disagree on this one. But as I said before twists don't have to be big. Personally I enjoy 'em. Originality - Team members don't want me to discuss this. Keep it human - Agree to disagree. I don't like zombies and bug beasts. It's not much of a sneaking game if they just walk after you when you're caught. Haunts are fine because at least they involve some sneaking. Each to his own I guess. Rewarding Loot - As I said before realistic placement of loot and loot as a reward aren't mutually exclusive. Loot would be in hard to get areas - whoever owns the house doesn't want thieves and servants getting them after all. The loot would be where the guards are. Anyway, I think this disagreement is best resolved through the medium of level building!

I'm not convinced I'm going to be able to use the Lightwave Md5Mesh exporter for everything I'd like to do...it just isn't widely used, so support or technical questions generally don't get answered. Additionally, it is incompatible with the Maya method, so any changes I make to things become difficult for anyone else to edit. So, I'm basically going to need to learn how to rig in Maya, and hope that I can do most of the actual modeling in Lightwave. I'm not excited about trying to figure out a totally new modeling program...I feel like I've only just gotten comfortable with Lightwave. I'm going through tutorials and videos, but I'm bound to have a lot of newb questions that they assume people already know. 1. In Lightwave, you can make a weightmap for a mesh even if there is no skeleton present--the weightmap will automatically work with any skeleton you import as long as the names of the joints match the names of the weightmap. Is this also possible with Maya? If so, how do you see what a vert is weighted to when no skeleton is present? 2. Is "model_src/ai_parts_mb svn folder called "tdm_rig_base.mb". (taken from the wiki)" still the default skeleton we are using for TDM AI? 3. And a really newb question...how do you view layers in Maya? 4. Is there a good md5mesh importer for Maya 7.0?

Um.... I just noticed that all the new animations were not exported with a "scale" keyword (actually, they look like they were just copied directly from one folder to another). That means that they are the same size as the original citywatch animations. This means that when the Thief plays any of those animations, he becomes the same size as the citywatch. Originally, he was considerably shorter (and he still is, when he plays any of the old animations, like "look_around"). The def file shows a "scale" keyword of from -90 to -94 on several animations. The new animations, however, are not even in the def file. They need to be exported with a scale keyword to work properly. This will also affect the beggar character, who uses the Thief animations. It may also be an issue for the builder priest, who appears to be the same size as the citywatch as well.

Thought it would be good to move this to the public forums.

I tested them in an empty room. The goal was to test the effect of a number of meshes, so I wanted to eliminate any other considerations. The test showed quite clearly that multiple meshes had *no effect whatsoever* on framerate--at least on static meshes. It's possible it added to the overall load time for the map however, I didn't really pay much attention to that. Here's the original thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...&hl=submesh edit: the original test, using 5000 poly objects, showed only a drop of 2 fps when going from 1 mesh to 4, even with *135* models on screen. So while there does seem to be a marginal decrease, the effect is so low as to be not worth considering, IMO.

http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance This link is not new on this forums (Gildoran posted it some time ago). You can find there some info on Draw calls and Batch sizes. Basically draw is a batch of polygons of the same shader and for one light only sent to graphics card. So 10 AI with 10 shaders each lit by 3 lights mean 300 draw calls. It's plenty, because 1000 is recomended maximum number of draw calls per frame. And where's the rest of rendered map? Springheel - I believe 10 meshes AI are a performance killers. Did you check them in empty room or in full map, with plenty other models and geometry with various textures? If anybody has time to do some test (sorry, I can't for a while) just check how many draw calls each AI adds to scene. There's a commnad r_showprimitive which shows draw calls number.

@Baddcog: the thread where discussion started: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=135335 I'm not on my TDM system at the moment, but I do have one performance thing I can mention. When I was doing the recent AI tests, I noted the difference between D3 AI and TDM AI. The setup used 40 D3 imps, and later, 40 TDM city watch (same map, same environment). After trying all of those AI performance testing cvars (several of which shut the AI down completely, so we can figure any TDM AI complexities are not factoring in), I found that the room full of imps gave me, ~20-40 FPS. That's a lot of polys running quite well on my slower system. The 40 citywatch (not animating, not aware) brought the framerate to the low teens (12-14). I believe the citywatch and typical TDM AI have close to 5K polys. The D3 AI have half that. They're quite blocky actually, but it's hidden well by really incredible materials. So anyway, that at least would indicate that yes, while Doom3 can render a truckload of polygons really well, it does add up. In this case, double the polys nearly halved the framerate. I believe 125k polys is a pretty packed scene. It can definitely be done, but it's pushing it, especially with all of our advanced systems in place.

Would that be why they are in separate folders?Basically, yes. It doesn't move the pk4s, it just points to them. Each mod needs to be in a subdirectory of the D3 directory. There are some test FMs in SVN but I don't know if you have access. You don't really need a pk4 -- the files can be separate, in pk4s, or a combination. See the link in my previous note for the details, but all you need is a startingMap.txt, a darkmod.txt, and the map files, all in a folder under the D3 main directory. The loader does the rest.

I cannot answer all your questions, just give a few hints: * it would be possible to make a few "empty" demo FMs that you can toy around with * Thief's Den is not just a FM but a (partial) snapshot of our enitire development tree - including one FM. The effect of this is that a couple of things might be not really setup like they should. For instance, TD deals with only one FM, it doesn't support multiples of them, the "darkmod" folder was actually called "thiefs_den" etc. So basing your code on the layout of TD might not really work because of subtle details. Somebody else probably can answer much better what these are. As for your loader, I do like some of the ideas (giving missions ratings and so on), but there was actually put a lot of effort into the loading screens and menus of TDM and your loader sort of bypasses this completely. It looks a bit like creating double work (for either you _or_ us _or_ both Anyway, does GL work on linux?

Got some new info for you guys from official Eidos forums. Deus Ex 3 is going to use the Tomb Raider Revival engine from Crystal Dynamics. http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=176735 Here's a Q &A. http://www.developmag.com/interviews/104/Q...-Eidos-Montreal Just started reading but it looks like this time they chose something that has already been established and won't waste time like Ionstorm Austin did with Invisible War. I have high hopes for this game.

It's an ingame menu that will unzip and put the chosen map files in the appropriate place, all the player has to do is put .pk4 file in the correct folder for the loader to find them.

Wait a minute, is that the exact command you are using? If so then you should be using dmap mymapfile, as it will automatically expect the map to be in the base/maps folder.

I don't know why I bother, you are the wost debater on these forums, no better than a child at times. This isn't about any grand anthropological conclusion, I'm simply backing up my initial statement, whch was challenged, that the urge to have kids is not instinctual, does not occur in animals, and therefore cannot be instinctual in humans. The conclusion is that it's an intellectual process, caused by a mix societal brainwashing and tradition, the realisation that new generations are a necessity, and as an inevitable consequence of the the fact that sex is so desirable. Yes, nature makes sex desirable to make us do it so evolution can happen, but it does not give us an innate desire TO HAVE KIDS, only TO HAVE SEX. A desire to have kids, and weighing up all the pros and cons that go with it, is too complex a thoght process to have evolved, it's something that only human brains can think of.

This is possible. The ModelSelector could be set up to read the NOTES.txt from the currently highlighted folder.

Well there are chains in both dungeon and some other chains under mechanical. I think there are also some chains in Doom resources. This is why I tried one or two dummy models with names as links, eg, forMoreChainsSee.. etc. Is there any way to have some kind of text file that DR could read to display in the model selector? It can only get worse as different people put similar things in different folders. If each main folder had something like 'NOTES' so if you look under mechanical for a chain but can't find the one you want then look in NOTES and see, 'see also dungeon and doom' or something.

If we're just talking about the mechanical folder, that's probably ok...I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I think of any more than that. (btw, currently chains are placed in dungeon)

The mitten hands are separate meshes so it's not that hard to rerig: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=102537 Not that I don't mind someone else redoing my work

my consol says this when ever i BSP.. and i can never load a map.. ive tryed saving it in doom3 base maps.. darkmod / maps.. and just maps in the doom 3 folder. wondering whats goin on??? any help would be great. --------- Game Map Shutdown ---------- -------------------------------------- ---- dmap ---- --- LoadDMapFile --- loading maps/C:/Program WARNING: Couldn't load map file: 'maps/C:/Program' ------------- Warnings --------------- during running dmap... WARNING: Couldn't load map file: 'maps/C:/Program' 1 warnings Map_SaveFile: C:\Program Files (x86)\DOOM 3\base\Maps\test2.map writing C:\Program Files (x86)\DOOM 3\base\Maps\test2.map... --------- Game Map Shutdown ---------- -------------------------------------- ---- dmap ---- --- LoadDMapFile --- loading maps/C:/Program WARNING: Couldn't load map file: 'maps/C:/Program' ------------- Warnings --------------- during running dmap... WARNING: Couldn't load map file: 'maps/C:/Program' 1 warnings Map_SaveFile: C:\Program Files (x86)\DOOM 3\base\Maps\test2.map writing C:\Program Files (x86)\DOOM 3\base\Maps\test2.m

Texture forum, not thread. It's here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showforum=4 I guess Contributors don't have access to the start-up thread... or SVN in general. Perhaps there's some confusion over which group you were supposed to be added to?