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I like Springheel's idea of a picture on the left, the menu on the right. This would allow individual modders to make their own artwork to put on the left-hand side to give a 'teaser pic' regarding their mod, right? Might be a good selling point to other modders. "Stop, Thief!" and "The Man That Took Stuff" don't seem to really do it for me. Thief, as we know it, has a serious, dark and foreboding mood. I'd want to play on that feeling rather than something that seems lighthearted or comedic as I feel when I read these. They're definitely crafty, but not my personal preference. I immediately thought of the 1980s electronic boardgame titled "Stop, Thief!" when I read that one. (I used to LOVE that game!) Here are some ideas: * The Mod Squad * Thief: The Modding Age * Thief: The Immaculate Collection Haha, I'm only kidding

I think there is potential in the book idea, because we could change the illustrations for each page. It also allows for more 'illustration' style pictures on the left. Here's a quick example. I'd prefer using in-game art though. Basically, my take on this approach is that the player is looking at a storybook detailing the adventures he is about to have. We should showcase scenes that give the most 'thief' bang for the buck, picking scenes that really shout "This is Thief!" The painting I picked doesn't really do that...it's just a placeholder. But things like showing the thief about to bj a guard...showing him pressed into a shadow, showing some of the marvelous settings that get our hearts beating, etc. Every time the page is turned, we can have a new menu on the left and a new illustration on the right.

It's really difficult to go one way or another because they're all so good. In my mind though, the one thing that screams out at me is to lean towards simplicity. Keep it clean and concise, in other words...the opposite of T3. *L* I'm too hard on that game....man, Eidos is going to hunt me down.

I was also thinking that having more than one picture at a time could be cluttered but I had an idea on the way home from the movie theatre. It was inspired by something Renzatic showed me earlier, a set of blue prints superimposed on the intro screen over the existing picture. To me it looked like the map was fading out and the other picture was replacing it. With that in mind, if we had something like this, with the image only taking up the left hand side.....(sorry, had to borrow this pic) ...we could fade images in and out of view. Imagine this, it's really dark and forboding, with the exception of the flickering candlelight...and while this is happening, perhaps we could have the sound of a light wind howling. As the candle flickers, the images on the menu very slowly fade in and out. A map, a museum, the exterior of a mansion. Then like Springheel said, you hear the candle being blown out when you choose an option such as loading a game. Very moody work here guys.

We definitely should have some kind of animation going. A flickering light is a good one. I'm not sure I like the idea of having a picture in the background and then another illustration on top of it though...that might be too cluttered. Tell me if this sounds corny or not...I was just imagining this in my head...I saw darkness, then the flickering sound of a flare being lit up. The menu springs into view, with the light flickering and strange shadows dancing across the page. If a sub-menu is selected, we have a page turning sound, or one parchment is put on top of the other. If the start game is selected, there is a "whoof" as the flame is blown out, and the screen goes dark. Then the mission starts loading. What do you think? I think it could be cool. (btw, two things Ren...what filter did you use and can I get that parchment texture from you?)

That's too funny. We should seriously consider that title. It's a very sly, tounge in cheek, reference and I don't think it can get us in any trouble. It's not that much different than Irrational games taking "System Shock" and turning it into "Bio Shock". I think that it even carries a message to not take things so seriously. Would we risk it? I pulled that menu from a screen shot of S-Holes retro menu just to set the stage for that little mock up, but when it comes down to it, I think the parchment really works. Actually, it would really tie the style of the game together since we would definately want to have in between mission briefings in the Style of T1 and T2. Yeah, I'm quite fond of it, this really seems to gel.

Well, if we decide this is the route to go, we have someone with a lot of experience with pen and ink illustrations. I still like the idea of using our own models, however, especially after putting so much time into them. Here is another darker example...I've taken one of my paintings and run it through a filter to make it more stylized. Something similar could be done with an in-game shot.

That's really cool, I really like that. The ingame art really works with the book theme too. Nice stuff. I really disliked the clunky menu of T3, it was really quite excessive. These suggestions really feel quite Thiefy. I wonder if the main menu could ..in theory...represent the book of prophecies? I had an image of my head of the Menu loading up with glyphs written on it at first, and then the glyphs morph into english.....start new mission, Load/ Save Game...etc.

What about a compromise? We show in-game art, but make it look like it's a book illustration. Something like this: (swiped one of your thief pics for the example, oDDity, hope you don't mind)

Yes, I really love the book idea. I'm not sure we should display the Thief in action since we're a first person perspective game. It may lead the player on a bit in that respect. We do have that lovely Thief model... , but we'll get to see it on other Thieves thank goodness.

If we were really ambitious we could do a nice 3D hud showing our Thief getting ready for a long nights work. Since Doom 3's frontend is already 3D it wouldn't be much of a problem to implement, but it could take awhile to do right. Like you'd have the options lining the left side of the screen and you'd start out in the center of your apartment/hideout. Clicking start would have you walking automatically (and in first person) to the door, opening it, and pushing out into the black space beyond. Going to options, which would be where you set your controls, video options and other miscellany, would have you walk over to a workbench where the thief polishes and tweaks all his tools. Loading a game or selecting an FM would take you to a bookshelf where it'd bring up the book...similar to how we'd do it ingame. Like I said it's ambitious, but it could be pulled off with a little work. I could do the map fairly easily, but we'd need someone to help with the programming.

Very cool. I've been looking for some good rugs to throw in the game.

Very nice...I'm going to slap #4 in game right now.

Lowpoly. That's the model that's actually used in game. Man, I can't wait to animate this guy - character animation is my one, sole, natural-born talent.

The best place to find wallpaper textures? Why from an online wallpaper retailer, of course! Browsing through the samples has netted me more than a few potentially good textures to be used in the game, in fact the beige wall that's on display in my most recent room mockup was sourced from here. Some are a little cheesy and wouldn't work in the Thief universe, but if you dig around the site for a few you'll find some excellent textures that are well worth throwing in. I intend on taking a few and piecing them together to make some nice, detailed walls. If anyone else has any good websites we can source from, place em here. They don't even have to be useable as actual textures, if we can get a few ideas or inspirations from then they're more than welcome.

I'm a big fan of your thief model, but our intent (at least at the moment) is to have only a single model as the main character. Multiplay is something we have talked about but it won't be attempted until we have the basic mod done, and probably even the campaign. So the idea of being able to choose between different models is probably not useful. But... We do need to have different thieves in our game besides our main character. Deep Omega was thinking about using the main model minus the mask, but it might be better to use a different model. What if we used your thief model for that? It would be for other thieves, assassins, etc. (although I wouldn't make them too 'cool' with the double knives...our main character should be the coolest.) What about the other models on your site? As I was looking at them, I noticed several that would fit very nicely into what we're doing. Are they something you would be willing to donate or are they already spoken for?

I could easily modify my existing Thief character very quickly for this game It's allready high poly so the souce for the normal maps is already there, though I'd probably have to add a lot more details in ZBrush, since I never orginally intended it for that purpose. We're going to need more than one thief character anyway, right? Maybe I could make mine more of a blade/assassin type thief, complete with twin blade on his back ala Legolas and shurikens (etc) since a lot of people love to play a more agressive thief style as well as ghosting.

I'm not sure which of your models we could use in a Thief game anyway, they seem to be all fantasy D&D types, ans we all ready have the thief class which we need) I love that monk model though, very nice.

Ren walked me through this once on IRC, but I can't quite remember how to do it. I've created a texture and I want to create a light next to it in order to check out the specular effects. I've tried right clicking and selecting 'light' from the menu that pops up, but what I get is a little green square that doesn't appear to cast any light at all. Once it's there, I can't move or select it. What's the proper way of adding a light? Also, if anyone feels like it, I would love a short tutorial on how to actually import a custom texture into a pre-made room so I could see it in game.

nice to meet everyone in here one main thing about orchestrating music that films do... they normally dont score a film until they have ruff cuts done and the composer/artist can work around that. it should not happen where we make sounds and the programmers of the game work around the sound. we are there to bring the world "alive" not to make the people that create the world fall into the guidelines of the score. sure its ok to get general guidelines of the music we want, but nothing should be set in stone, until ruff demos can be played, or story boards are drawn so all the sound people can huddle together for the ambient track, efx and voices. just something to think about peace LB home studio consists of: Hardware Yamaha S03 music synth Boss DR-670 drum machine Peavy RQ 200 6 channel mixer samson 8 channel head phone amp PreSonus "smart" compressor Art Tube Amp Rode NT1-A Condensor mic (on loan to someone at the moment) Shure BG 2.1 stage mic M-audio Delta 44 M-audio 24/96 Numark Turntable DJ mixer Teac 6 Disc cd player 2 stand alone burners for on the fly burning Software Acid Pro 4 Wavelab 4 Waves Bundle Gold efx pluggins and too many samples to name

hi all just read about this mod. i have been an avid fan of the thief universe since T1. i have a full home studio capable of numerous tasks in audio. A project this size seems a daunting task for one person though, so i ask that you find someone to help me if possible so we can section out the audio tasks, but if thats not possible it may take me a while to come up with everything (i do have a RL as well ) this is what i can give you... voice over work for characters in game, recorded from a high quality condenser mic, not some cheapo radio shack mic. I can give you ambience and environmental sound structures. i can also help with story content as well. So if you need my help please contact me. I don’t have any examples of “ambience projects” but I do have numerous tracks and recordings I could send you to outline my skills. I could send you my resume as well which shows my music activities and my time spent co-hosting a college radio show among other things. Peace LB foundryproductions@yahoo.com

Ok then, it's a date. I'm having problems with my internet connection ATM, and can only access from various friends computers, so don't despair if you don't hear from me in a while) I love your work on the main thief DeepOmega, very (n)ice. Having such great concept art really helps, huh? With Nightblade I'm just having to do all my own concepts, and they're quite derivitive and hackneyed for the most part.. If you could snag K^2 from the ion boards, it would be nice, he's knows a lot about scripting, writing shaders, plugins and all sorts of programing goodness. Pester him about it. He's also a great Thief fan. He and I are also involved in another mod for the forthcoming Halflife 2. I'm PM you his email Fingernail. edit: I have doom3 (shit game) but what other tools do I need? Have they released an SDK yet?

Thanks. What format should I upload these to the ftp site with? Zipped? How difficult would it be to put this on a wall in the editor to look at? Can you draw a brush inside another brush easily? I guess I'll experiment. Edit: Well, that wasn't so hard...I'm catching on! (a bit) Here's the painting in game:

http://www.donrearic.com/sap.html Search for "blackjack sap" and you get quite a lot of results. That page goes into detail on how the different varieties are made, and gives some pictures at the bottom. We can choose just the right blackjack for our game. I remember one of them on that page is mentioned especially for being easily concealed.

Must...have...more....good....textures! This makes me wanna start on more of BT's stuff and get it in game.