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Black cat have their own site, you don't need to go to the Thievery site. Check it: http://www.blackcatgames.com/ I think it is a better pointer than Thievery as TUT is one side of the Black Cat triad, and Alien Swarm did win Phase3 of the MSUR contest! In other news from my brain: I'm glad you guys have taking the line you have regarding copyright elements. The whole debacle with the Sapphire Scar is just disgusting. I can't believe they said it was disrespectful to use the SS2 name. Surely it is in homage. Twits. Beware the suits. Good luck.

We are certainly in need of 3d modellers. Your artistic style seems very manga-esque, which isn't quite the look we want for thief. Do you have any examples of modelling that you have done?

Looks awesome! Will you be wanting a colour version soon? Also, before we do a highpoly version, do we actually need one for the game? Will we see anything other than the hands?

Good job on the builder concept, Springheel -- and thanks for posting the historic reference material, Alexius. Hey Springheel - I added a new folder to the DarkMod FTP area called "Art-ConceptDrawings," and within that folder added a "Springheel" folder and a "Darkness_Falls" folder. This gives us our own separate playgrounds to keep track of stuff in without getting confused. Alexius, if you'll be doing concept drawings and need webspace, feel free to add a folder there. We could add other folders, too, if other artists come on board. I wanted to keep only drawings in there, but realistically we may want to re-title the folder and morph into more of a Art-ConceptArtwork area. You guys may already have webspace and don't care, but I needed the webspace.

Wow, a man of many talents. Coming up with concepts for furniture by doing some research into the relevent time periods is something that needs to be done. I like the museum stand for that reason. The concept art for T3 involved a lot of dynamic sceans and good use of colour, that gave designers a lot to work from. In comparison, that shot of the room with the light on the wall is really bland, in terms of colours, archetecture, and overall feel. When the concept art was drawn with the camera at a really dramatic angle, you might think "well, the camera angle itself isnt' saying much - your viewpoint moves around all the time in the game", but what you really should be getting out of the image, is looking at it at a whole, and it gives you a feeling, and then you say "well, how can I somehow translate that feeling into the game, and give the player that feeling when they play the game?" I think that is the true power of concept art. We need something that says something new. Well not real new - we know what the Thief world is like - dark and moody, with brooding shadows and atmospheric lights, and ominous sillhouettes. But see how the concept art took that "theme" and gave it its own character? It's not easy but that's what I think we should aim for. A unique style of our own. I can see these sketches are just drafts, but they're a good start.

Am actually home for the weekend right now, so I'm not gonna get any more work done till I get back to my dorm. But on the plus side, I think I've picked out the hardware for a new-ish computer - a 2.8 GHz Xeon machine with an open slot for a second SPU when I scrape the cash together, and 1.5 gigs of RAM. Awwww yeah. Once I run this by a few of my friends who are better with hardware, I'll order it and put it together. BTW, Springheel - awesome sketch of the face, it'll be great for what I need.

Thanks guys! I think it has potential also!! I need to play through Thief 1 and 2 again soon to try and re-capture the feel of some of the aural delights they had. I'm sure you already did this, but while listening to my tracks, close your eyes and try to envision differen't scenes/moods/situations that could be happening. There are a few bits of sounds in there I've noticed, for example, that might work well for machinery -- especially when looped. The piano & strings music sound used in the 'Darkness_Falls-1.mp3' file (about :45 seconds into it) is very similar to the one used in the mansion level of TDS (the level where you could see lightning flashes from inside.) That's the only reason I did that. And, no! Honestly, I've never played Silent Hill. Does it use similar ambience? I watched a friend play a little bit of SH2 on the PlayStation2 many years ago, but I seriously don't remember what the music/ambience was like. I love working with audio, so I'd love to try and help out with the audio portion of things. PS: I've edited my original post to now have the revised URLs. Thanks Renzatic!!!!

Precisely. On the down side, I'm seriously gonna need reams more RAM before I'll be able to finish this. I only have 512 megs, and it's starting to stutter at only 25,000 polys. If I turn on the subdivision, it turns into a slideshow. Time to double my RAM.

Rather than just making what comes to your inspiration, I'm going to start defining targets. Right now, we'll be working on a texture set for a Thief2/Overlook Manse feel - a house with wood, wallpaper, metal, stone, books etc. We are already a fair way there, but we need more flooring especially (wooden & shiny marble a requirement, as well as thick carpet). So carry on, but don't go crazy with some woodsie theme stuff. Next up, I reckon will be more city themed. But first: house textures.

There are so many things we need sketches for, I'm not sure it makes sense to do multiple versions of the same thing....

I'll be trying to crank out some sketches for this and some other stuff this weekend, too. Not to do double-work, SpringHeel, but to try and get different brainstormed ideas on it. I've already got one sketch on it, just need to clean it up and scan it in. TGIF!!!!

I might be able to push the brushcount a bit farther then. Since Thief isn't quite so fast paced, and most of the NPC's won't be casting fireballs or summoning more crap and loading the screen with a billion effects, then I should be able to pull it off. It's also pretty unlikely that you'll see more than 4 guards onscreen at once... But the first thing I need to do is get more ram. 512 megs just isn't cutting it anymore, and the editor likes to crash on me when my available ram gets too low. So to fix this little problem I'm gonna fire up the old Poor Renzatic Fund (The PRF) again so now you all can donate to a most worthy cause....getting me more stuff!

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.

Obviously there is very little need for high windows, stain glass, or windows in the city where there is no actual room behind them to be transparent. I'd only do this on 'feature' buildings.

Sweet! Thanks!! Actually, I had to add a hyphen at the very beginning of the text string you gave... and then it worked: "-com_allowConsole 1 +set r_fullscreen 0 +editor" I'll try to check out how you made the maps one of these days, too. I'm sure it won't bore me, but it might be a bit out of my brain's capacity to 'grasp' right now. I'm trying to learn ColdFusion, Flash, Dedit (for Tron 2.0) and other stuff at the same time. I might need to stick with just regular sketches for a while ;o) -Darkness_Falls-

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

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.

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.

Light shafts = easy. Just a texture on the light as usual, and projected light. Anyway, yeah the windows are too big. And yes, your roof texture doesn't work, I'll sort that out too. And we need to figure out shaders so we can have proper transparent/translucent glass in those windows instead of just a flat texture.

Wow, great start on the house, Fingernail. We need to find a good roof texture. The windows look awesome, but I agree with Ren that they're a bit too big. I love the skyline in the background though, where did you get that? Ren: Your glowy windows look great. Are they supposed to act a light sources though? It looks like they should be casting some blue light around but it doesn't look like they are.

We're definitely going to need some more 3d modellers--DeepOmega can't do everything. Maybe once the website is up we can generate some more interest. I'll see if I can get at least a beta version up today.

If I have a photo I can do simple furniture with Blender. A table, lamp, etc. shouldn't be to much of a problem, but I sure can't do any characters. And I can't really draw good, so if you want me to create any props I need a clear picture how it should look like. I also have no low-poly experience. Usually I don't have to care about this, but I could give it a try.

I like your sketches. Can you do furniture & architectural details? What we need, aside from character sketches, are little drawings of chairs, tables, lamps, windows, doors, arches, carvings, statues, stuff which adds atmosphere and a sense of place to a level. I'm going to let you in.

What Sprinheel said. We also need more 3D modellers - and despite advertising, I didn't get any responses. I can produce some photos, sketches of furniture and building decor.