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Actually I think the confusion has arisen from a different issue. Changing the default "droppability" of things will only make sense depending on the rules for what can be dropped and when - and judging from some of the posts, this is still unclear between team members. I've raised this issue in the dev forums.

While it has been brought up even before this public thread started, I appreciate your understanding of how separating the lantern from one's person can be useful. It's useful in a variety of situations too, not just a special case in a single FM. Setting the lantern down to do other things while lit could be useful anywhere it's dark. The great majority of FMs contain places that are dark. Why should this use of the lantern be limited to an FM where the author has specifically gone in and toggled droppable on? For that reason, I don't think this statement of yours applies to the lantern: Again, it makes sense anywhere it's dark and the player chooses to do something requiring both hands with more light provided by the lantern. You can't predict where that spot will be. It's up to the player and it could be anywhere. If we did make it an FM author option toggled off by default, how would the player know beforehand whether the author toggled the lantern to droppable? Are they expected to pull out their lantern at the beginning of every FM and test it? Or should they wait until they're executing a plan that relies on setting the lantern down for light, like they have gotten used to doing in other missions, and all of a sudden find it's superglued to their hand? No immersion break there. Or even better, you could let them know in the mission briefing. "I have a simple job planned for this evening... Btw, LANTERN IS DROPPABLE." This is starting to go in circles, but I simply am not convinced that this needs more policing than a simple player option of whether to hit the "drop" key. A rational player stays prepared for the worst; if they don't know whether they'll have to go thru a pitch black area, they'll aim to keep the lantern with them in case they do encounter such an area. We all agree that setting down the lantern is not totally useless, in fact it has practical uses. I just hate to see the usefulness of a tool decreased because we choose to baby the player instead, because they might manage to throw their lantern down a bottomless pit. If LGS had taken that approach with all of their player tools, tools would have been a lot less interesting. Anyway, I'd say vote on it if nothing is being resolved by debating, but internally, we already did decide this issue by majority. If Domarius is really not happy about it he can post a new poll in the development forums and see if anyone's changed their mind. I don't think anyone's going to change their mind by now if they haven't already.

THE reason it's persisted is because, like many hereditary diseases, the gene can be carried by females wihtout being affected themselves, and then passed on to her children, also because many gay people choose to have children anyway, and because of the social unacceptability in most cultures for the most of history, gay people ended up getting married and having kids like normal people. You can't choose to be homosexual if you're born heterosexual, but you can certainly choose to be bisxual. Just look at the situation in ancient Greece. THey had a social convention whereby older men would help young boys into manhood by having relationships with them, this included training in many things, as well as a full sexual relationship. We call it paedophila today. THey would woo these boys openly in the steet with gifts and in front of their parents. THere were whole regiments of older warriors and their younger lovers. Now, you're not going to tell me that all of these people were suddenly born gay or bisexual are you? Of course not, it was bisexuality created and nurtured by the society they lived in.

Nice looking gate, Mag. You can continue to email the models to me if you like, or you can check out the information forum for the details of our FTP site and put them there. Either way, if you check this post: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3147 it will give you the folder structure we use for the models. You can also check the information forum for details of our internal model website, which displays all the models currently in game.

Magnesius: You should be a team-member now and see all the forums. If not, let me know, otherwise, take a look at this thread for current model assignments: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3315

Pardon, but did mister developer person just say (about 5 mins into the second video) that the realtime soft shadow stuff was something they couldn't end up using and it's gone? That now there are settings for what you want to cast shadows and not? So much for realtime lighting. That's going to go over well. Nice how he understated and obfuscated it. Disappointing also that they say (on the forums, not this video) that implementing mounted combat would take a dedicated team hundreds of man-hours to design and code and test... when Mount & Blade does it from one guy's programming... And damnit Bethesda, love your stuff, but use some interpolation on your animations or something. I've only been on board since Morrowind, but you guys are infamous for choppy animation. All that aside... it's still goddamn exciting.

Yes, D3 has some persistent info classes for data that exists outside of individual FM's. What do you mean by "this could decimate linear gameplay"? Do you mean you could have a campaign where you complete maps in any order, but things you do in one map effect things in other maps? This isn't really within the scope of TDM, but personally, I've always wished the "city hub" areas of a campaign allowed for more researching of the missions beforehand, and the ability to do stuff in the city hub that effects the mission. I think we talked about this a bit in the public forums. It would be great if one could decide some things about the mission beforehand, like which direction to approach from (set the player spawn / insertion point), time of day to go in (effecting light conditions and guard patrols), etc. You could condense time and wait around in the city for a few days, robbing a few small time flats while you wait for the phase of the moon or the weather to change so you can approach your target mansion undetected, or something like that. Then there's the possibility of finding off-duty guards and servants in city pubs, and pickpocketing, bribing or otherwise convincing them to give you information about timing of guard patrols, lock combinations, or even offer them a percentage of the take to unlock a certain entrance for you or look the other way when you pass their guard post. You'd have to make sure the mission didn't become ridiculously easy as a result of such an "inside job," but you could make it difficult to get to a particular guard, like requiring some sort of intricate blackmail side-quest within the city section.

yeah i figured as much. really there is no hope for me ever getting it done unless there is a team backing the project. I can't do much beyond stories and concept art. I've got enough of a concept floating around in my head that it would make a fairly complete novel just standing by itself, maybe i'll go that route

I don't get it Oddity. Why would you have a player model? I thought all you'd do, without a body look feature or 3rd person like TDS, is have some arms doing things, and a bit of concept art.

Hi... I was wondering what we were planning on for fonts. Are fonts going to be specifically created for TDM, or are we going to use free fonts? If it's the latter, I've just browsed through http://www.1001freefonts.com/ and picked out several fonts that I thought might be useful for TDM. I was mostly looking for handwriting, calligraphy, victorian, art deco and typewriter fonts. Anyway, I figured we could discuss which fonts we tend to like/dislike... Here are some of the candidates that I thought might work. I particularly liked the following:

Updated the Model Guidelines Post: Please review. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?act=S...st=0#entry22708 crate02.lwo needs to have the crate02 texture uploaded to models/darkmod/props/textures.

See this thread in the documentation forum for the surface types: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2974 Dram is correct for the "old" D3 surfaces. For the ones we added that were not in D3, we couldn't practically change the material parser, so we had to kind've hack them into the system. As described in the thread, for the new surfaces, you put in "surftype15" instead of "wood" and put the new material name as the first word under "description." You could do this for the old ones as well if you can't handle 2 different entry methods, but because the old surfaces get parsed to an integer, things will run somewhat faster if you do them the way Dram described. I put the surface types in some of the floor textures myself, but thought it was best to leave it up to the texture artists since I don't always know what texture is supposed to be what.

This topic needs to end now....We do not promote public wars in our forums, you want to do that go someplace else.

First, fairly modest gravestone. Texture done by me, no photo references (a first!), the figure and text are from a free pack of medieval art photoshop brushes. There is a normalmap too, just not in view. I'll get it ingame later today.

Yeah... I'll try and fix this tomorrow some time and post a revised sound in my sound thread. No, mine was more of a 'create a whirring noise in flight from its barrell structure.' The last pic in this post adopted GIMG's drill appearance to achieve this. I don't like the ball bearings thought, personally. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=11843 but we can figure out something. And my concepts inaccurately show an arrow tip. I forgot (or didn't know) they were going to need to bounce around when I made them.

Odd did high poly models of all the other arrows, but not the noisemaker. I'm not sure we ever even came up with finalized concept art for it--DF had something a while back, but I think that was for a different ball-bearing concept.

There is a sound for torches. Check the sticky threads on the sound board: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2698 (I starting to wonder how many times I'm gonna have to repeat this.. ) Edit: okey, once more, for claritys sake. If you want to know if a certain sound exists/uploaded to cvs/whatever, Check The Sticky Design Documents!)

They should have tags for posts made under the influence.

Well it can run fine on mine, but my computer was state of the art as of summer 2005, which was more than a year after TDS release. I find that most console-PC ports have poorly optimized engines. A recent release that comes to mind is Stubbs the Zombie, which is graphically the same or worse than TDS, and runs choppier.

You just need to create a func_emitter out of a brush, and then assign its particle as the one you want. Although, it might be a good idea to build a custom particle display map. I'm not sure if the texture and model one is still being maintained, but that might not have been practical anyway - that'd be a LOT of art to display. But it could work for particles probably.

Yep, it never made sense to me in T2 either. Come to think of it, guards not noticing that sound is like guards not seeing the blue light trails behind arrows in T3 hehe. I still think we should build the functionality of a different flight sound for noisemakers, just in case we need it or FM'ers need it. I can see how it shoud maybe get a slightly different *whoosh* -- one that's maybe quiter, coolor, or somehow more streamlined than a regular arrow whoosh. Or if the shape of the arrow is drastically changed to match concept art or something, we might want to tweak the sound a bit. The T2-style flight sound as it exists, though, doesn't make much sense to me; never has. But I must admit, I have grown to kinda like it in T2 I could do without it though.

We do already have a Viktrola model though. I don't think the art department has necessarily decided to throw that out, have they? Although as I understand it, it was being skinned by c777.

Whats that? One thing about playing the TDS FMs, Ive noticed that my dislike of the lack of backlighting has shrunk somewhat. Im finding that a blend of "suspension of disbelief" about Garretts Keeper abilities to "cloak" himself and the general presence of magic in the Thief world are tempering my dislike of backlighting situations. And its not really the active lights that bug me, its when I think Im in the dark and then suddenly realize Im standing in front of a huge back lit stained glass window that the illusion is hit hardest. When an active light is involved, i.e. a torch or lantern, Im usually avoiding it or Im getting lit up because there is no other way around it. I realize they can back light you as well but I guess its the usual activites Im involved in when active lights are around (hiding, slinking, dashing from shadow to shadow) that makes the jarring realization of backlighting less likely to occur to me. Another criticism of the AIs in TDS. The selection of guard sounds and such are so stale. Sometimes they dont even make logical sense, for example the other night I made a noise by breaking a glass case filled with jewels. The guard in the next room shouts out "Whats that ?!" or something. I go and hide, he comes into the room, looks around, then says "Huh, guess my eyes are playing tricks on me" or something. Huh indeed! Needless to say, an AI who hears with his eyes is a bucket of cold water on the illusion of immersion. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been best to NOT make TDS, its so painful to have it around but to have it suck so damned bad. At least I got an opportunity to let the games designers know how I feel, which is why I havent posted on TTLG forums in about a year. One post comes to mind, where I said the style and layout of the powerups reminded me of another video game classic: Pac-Man.

Couldn't you say that spotting someone sneaking up to you is a combination of movement detection and pattern recognition? Movement draws the eye, but once the eye is drawn, you look directly at the thing to make out the pattern, right? I'm pretty sure we've talked about this before, but maybe it was in the private forums. The FOV abstraction, coupled with a movement modifier that makes you more visible when moving, is actually not that bad a model. Think about how a real person's eyes would be randomly scanning over the FOV physically allowed by their head. We assume that they're scanning randomly over the FOV, so any point within the FOV is sampled by both rods and cones, over time. If there's movement, the rods will probably pick it up first, then the eye will be drawn to it and the rods will be utilized to recognize the shape. Therefore, we can say that, taking the time average, the detection probability is approximately uniform within the physical FOV. Plus, from a gameplay perspective, you can predict the AI visual response based on which way the AI's head is turned with the FOV method. If you want to get into the difference in response between rods and cones, you either have to assume that the AI stares straight ahead in a fixed direction relative to the way their head is facing, which IMO is a rather bad assumption, or you have to let the eye move independently of the head, and model the psychology of how a real person scans their eyes over the FOV limit imposed by their head. Personally I'd rather not try to mathematically model the psychology of eye movements for every single AI and every single alert state. Also, this would mean the AI's visual response would vary unpredictably due to the random eye movements. The player couldn't guess at the visual response based on the pattern of head turning, because the eyes move much faster than the head and could change position at any moment. Believe it or not, it's more fun when a plan based on patient observation of the AI's behavior is rewarded, rather than being randomly caught because the AI's rods happen to flick over you when you're moving at the edge of their FOV. We could give our thief random coughing attacks that would give him away, too, wouldn't that be fun!

Cool, sounds good. The new D3 soundengine handles reverb itself, so you shouldn't need to put in quite so much reverb IMO, but it will work fine for now. (Like you were saying, when tested ingame I think it would be a bit strange to hear that much reverb if you shoot the arrow 5 ft away from you in a small carpeted hallway). I would like to create a noisemaker weapon for testing, but I can't until a modeler creates an idMoveable compatible collision model for the broadhead, as described in this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3314 Right now I just get an error about the arrow having no collision model when I try to use it as a moveable in the noisemaker.