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http://www.golem.de/0411/34861.html For thos of you who don't understand german. It's basically what I already said why I don't want to buy HL2 because of it's shamless steam hand-cuffing. Consumers are quite angry because some of them can not play anymore because Valve decided to deactivate their accounts. Of course they can always create a new one, but that's not reall the issue. Imagine buying a car and each day you have to go to your dealer asking for a new key. Also they are quite angry because they are forced to go online all the time. And another issue, which is IMO one of the more important aspects: The consumers can not sell their game once they played it through, despite this being a perfectly legal action. Valve even contacted Ebay to disallow selling of HL2 accounts (which is also perfeclty legal here). They based their claim on these sells are done with faked credit cards. Sure. Every single one of them has been done with a faked credit card. Who would believe that? If you also tried to sell your used copy on ebay beware. Now you know that YOU also used a faked credit card. It's not that Valve is doing this alone. I have seen this also by other companies. In case of NuMega regarding SoftICE they were doing the same strategy. I hope you enjoy HL2 putting your consumer rights in chains in exhcange for pretty graphics and physics. Of course we all know it IS neccessary. Pirates and all that excuses. And it's not THAT inconvenient after all, Is it?

Loot texture is on the FTP. Can someone give this a go in game? I'm off the bed at the moment. Edit: this is gonna get pulled down to 256x256 later, but for now, leave it as is. I figure a 256x256 diffuse and normal, and then a 128x128 specular.

I made the game version. I'm still tring to get the best from spec maps, they seem to wash dark textures out and make them look like plastic.

When I look at oddities character models they are really looking great, as probably everybody agrees. What I wonder though, is as how they will look in-game. Remember BlackThiefs problems with the Zombie skinning? Because the models are mirrored. So I would suggest to start skinning at least on one character from Oddity to see how they turn out when they are ported into D3. I would really hate to loose that great look of them, but we should get some experience with this.

Hi, It s TYROT. One of my devoted Thief follower friend point me out this MOD. If you guys accept me i can help you on many things. I was searching for a decent mod for years. I think this is the ONE Im using lightwave for years. I will add to latest works i have done. And trust me. I may help you with the musical scores too. you can check some work i have done in www.ivedaproductions.com website. I made many logo animations, architectural renderings. Although the musics over there made many many years ago.. In texturing also you may consider me. Cuz i love Photoshop ..if you want i can even make MATTE painting for you. Just for a present ..i will upload some textures just for you to download ... i ll let you know and yes. Im an old fella .. 31 years old. working in animation and Tv production field..I made game reviewing on TV shows. Im gonna start a new one soon. And im preparing a DOCUMENTARY about THIEF world... so will you let me accept me into Guild. And the friend whose showing me this MOD is a great writer. He graduated from newyork film academy and he is writing feature length movie scripts around the world. Probably he may join you in terms of narrative writing. He knows everyword in whole thief series....think about the obsession:) Im so happy that faithful followers of Looking Glass gathering over here.. Im extremely excited...

I'd certainly like to have two 1024 sized textures per character like I have for Ut charcaters. THe spec maps can be smller, maybe even 256, but the normal maps will also have to be full size and non compressed, though I thinkl we should DXT compress all the color maps, since you can 't really see the differene in-game anyway, and it saves a lot on memory. A 1024 tga which is 3mb can be DXT 1 compressed to 500k.

THe wallpaper texture is from http://www.decorate-waverly.com/Search_Pro...?intCategory=16 A great resource for tilable wallpaper, fabric and carpet swatches. Yes, that's the rendeered model, but let's wait to see it in-game before saying it's any good)

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.

Some of those are missing reference pictures at the moment. Before you do the weapons, let me check with another member who is working on getting new weapons into the game...I can't remember if he is doing the models or not. I'll post shortly. edit: Ok, he's working on the programming but is just using placeholder models. If you'd like to start with the blackjack (here's a good picture to work from: http://www.thieveryut.com/weapon/blackjack.jpg ), I'll try to get reference pictures for the bow and holy water flask shortly.

If it looks like this in the 3D app, then it must look really great when in-game. Nice work!

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.

well these are all 3rd-person games and it was nice to look at. but where're making a total 1st-person stealth game, so I think a cloak is really unnecessary. anyway I think that springheel is right - it be would rather unpractical for a thief wearing a cloak. Imagine you're chased by a bunch of guards and suddenly your dead cool, black cloak is stuck into the door :lol:

Well there was the horrible one in the rather horrible-spawn, the eternal. The new batman begins game has a cloak that looks like it actually works. And the max payne mods that added a cloak didn't look to bad either.

I don't hate HL2 or steam, ist just that you can't change editor right away. And i think doom3 is more like a zombie game. HEHE! but me and rgun really talked for it about a week, and i can really see the posebilityes of using source, becouse that really blow him away and got some really nice ideas for the mod and the missions. witch i ofcourse can't speak of here. And our streets in doom3 became laggy when we put some models in and even we made viportals it couldn't work So now i can't make medieval strugtures any more.HEH. Well..... nothing to do about it. HAMMER SUCKS!

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.

I do all my art digitally now, except for the occasional landscape piece in oil just for fun. You know, I can't think of a 3d game that has characters with cloaks in it. Anyone know one?

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

I just tested it. The model is so tiny that I can barely see it. Only a few pixels big. I created the files in the FTP directory of your lightgem, so you can load them ingame. Take a look at them and resize it. You can copy the directories directly in your darkmod folder and then load the mod and a map and you should see our hud. Another problem is the textures of the gem. You must render them as they are to be seen from the player because they will be displayed exactly as you render them. There will be no transformations applied to them. So what you should do is to position the camera in such a way as if you are the player looking at the game screen, and then render the 16 images. I think the colour ramp should be probably a little bit brighter. The dark end is good as it is, but the the brightest one should be brighter. You can find my version of the lightgem colours in the guis/asset/... folder. You can take a look at it there. Of course the colours you should take from your own, but just look at the brightness level. And please rename the textures to the names that I already use.

Fair enough, but that still means that you will frequently be unable to see the part of the gem that you need to see without having to adjust your POV. I would guess about a 30-40 degree range up and down would be unusable. I don't want to have to change what I'm doing *in-game* to get a good look at the HUD. Too obtrusive, and for too little benefit. If people are worried about losing their sense of perspective, then just include a 'straight ahead view' key.

That's not a problem of the game it's a problem of the level layout.

It has to be lit from a non-game source, otherwise you wouldn't be able to read it in the dark. I'm not exactly sure how this is done. Perhaps it will be lit with a fullbright shader or something. I don't know. How are the little inventory items and healthbars going to be lit? I don't quite know what you mean. Do you mean for the turning of the compass? I suppose it could be done that way, as long as it isn't too jerky. You'll have to talk to Sparhawk about how that would work best. It depends on how he plans to code it.

No, no part of the lightgem is affected by in-game lighting...it's part of the HUD only. If you want to make it affected by the gem's light, like in your example, that's cool.

We will only see the model at one angle...the second of the two pictures I posted above. That's pretty much how we want it to look in-game. As for whether that's done with a model or bitmaps, I'm pretty sure the compass-ring has to be a model for it to move around, but I'm not sure what the plan is for the gem. That's Sparhawk's domain.

In terms of the textures, that's perfect. And Sparhawk will be able to use this for his tests no problem. In the actual game though, we want to use the lightgem oofnish did (or a replica, if his model is no good). The second one has the north spike as a slightly different colour, so we can tell them apart. edit: Maybe I misunderstood the post above...is that just a gif example, or did you make a model like that?

I did my textures manually in about one hour. It only took s o long because I didn't know how to do it better. Now I learned to animate and it should take less then 10 minutes to do this. Should be pretty simple. Just model the gem and then make a render in 16 steps with animating the material brightness for the gem. I guess that LW can do this and copy each render to a seperate image. Blender can do this as well, and I think this is pretty basic functionality for most 3D animation packages. The gem should be rendered against a black background with Alpha included so that the background will be removed when imported in-game.