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Well, now that I understand a little more about how to make guis, I've come up with a slightly different idea for the main menu. It will still show off a city environment, and will include a small animation like the current D3 one does. I'm working on putting together a small .avi to show you what I have in mind, but it will take a few days to get the images I need. I hope to have at least a rough version by Friday.

I don't think that this would be good idea. It'd be rather hard to place the two objects correctly together in the D3 editor. wouldn't it be easier to make it a md5-mesh object and animate it ?

That sounds like a very good idea. How do you man to attach that though. D3 can't render doublesided single polygons IMO. But still, even if you use a small cube it would be much less polygons than a real circle would use.

True, robots exist in real life, but using electronic circuit technology (and even then nothing that can master the bipedal speed, recognition and pathfinding ability of the Thiefbots). The idea that such a thing could be powered by a boiler and some gears is as ridiculous as animate zombies. To each their own woo...

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.

I'm giving my support for some kind of compressed textures. Either in a rar archive, or convert them all to .jpg and have people batch convert them back to .tga after they've downloaded them. I know that managing an archive is hard, but what about the batch .jpg idea?

I thknk we may have to do it this way after all. The only problem is. I currently don't know how to change the texture on the model on the fly. I know that the model has a material just like all the other stuff. So my initial idea was to deal with it, just like with the frob highlight. The only problem I have is, that I don't know how to find the entity for the HUD elements. And I need it to pass the message about the lightlevel to the material shader. In the logs I can see all entities that are spawned in the gameworld, but the HUD elements don't sho up there. So this means that it is not instantiated as an idEntity class ini the code. I hope you understand what I'm saying here.

Well, people will return to the main menu fairly regularly, so it needs to be something that will load quickly. And when your text is directly over top of the image, you want to be aware of what colour is going to be behind it. You have less control over how readable things are with a moving in-game shot. I don't hate the idea...I just don't know the benefit is worth the cost. But I'll take a look at that .AVI tonight. Maybe I'll be blown away.

No one thinks it would be a good idea to have the "animated objects" be townsfolk milling about the city scene? Heck I thought people would eat that up. It's something you can watch and be entertained by, as opposed to being just a title screen. *shrug*

Sure, I'll take a look at it. But I don't see the point of having an actual level (unless you mean a screenshot, which was the idea all along).

I haven't seen the HL2 menu, but I'm not sure I like the idea of an in-game shot...it could wind up just distracting from the interface. A few pre-chosen animations (like flickering torches or something) should suffice. Actually, as I'm reading up on GUI coding, I'm starting to get some new ideas. I'll have to see if I have time this weekend to put any together.

Nice animation. How does that explain why Garrett is better seen when he has the arrow nocked? I still like my rag idea, but unfortunately I don't have the drawing skills to show it to you.

Oh my God, are you trying to say that the future will be more expensive?!?!? Unfortunatly, that is a fact. Games are steadily getting more and more pricy, even the boxed versions. A content delivery system like Steam isn't a bad idea, and for the short term, a subscription fee could be a cheaper, more economical choice for some gamers. I can't say I particularily like the future, but we might as well be optimistic.

I was hoping to prepare/test this before revealing it, but I'm not sure how long that may take, and since this topic has been a bit hot lately (several mentions in the past few days), then I'll spill the idea now. Oh! And it'll work with a realtime map view too, if that's desired. Picture a city layout like that of citytest2.map, only better of course, From up on the thieves highway looking slightly down and forward, A light is behind the Thief, so his shadow is cast into the foreground, In the distance down the road, beyond the city, a castle looms on the highground. And of course, the realtime map part would include people walking around the streets below. Whaddya think? I started adding a castle wall to citytest2 last night and man, the framerate just doesn't drop! It must be other factors... it must be!

I remember this being brought up before, NH, and I think it's a good idea. I don't know that each crystal should be *dark* at first, but they should look like a normal coloured crystal until drawn. As it is drawn, the following animations might be appropriate: Water: As drawn, a material shader is added to the crystal so that it actually becomes transparent, as if it were now *made* of water. A few drops of water fall from it before it is fired. If we could make this effect seem to be spreading *up the shaft of the arrow* it would help deal with the troublesome problem of why guards never notice the arrow shaft lying beside a put-out light. Gas: As drawn, swirling green gas can be seen moving inside the crystal. Moss: As drawn, small plant tendrils spiral up from the crystal. Fire: As drawn, a heat-haze effect is added, and perhaps a bit of smoke. Flames can be seen moving inside the crystal. These are definitely neat ideas, but I think they should be put at the very end of the list of Things To Do. We could easily release the mod to the public without this, and then add it later as part of an expansion.

I had an idea that may make everyone happy. I don't know if I could buy into the destructive force of a rag burning on the end of the arrow..[ sorry sparkhawk ]..but how about this. Since these crystals have somewhat magical/ enchanted elements...it might make sense that they do not become active until they are drawn. For example.... Player selects a water arrow. As the arrow is drawn back on the bow...it slowly begins to glow that familiar blue color and a drop of water rolls off the tip of the crystal. For a fire arrow. As it is drawn back on the bow it slowly glows and then a flame erupts around the crystal. In both situations, the crystals are completely darkened before coming into contact with the bow. Should be possible with the D3 engine. Essentially, some of the more volatile elements could have a small animation as the bow is drawn back for firing.

No, renderbump is the normal map generation software that is bundled. It sucks ass. This is why I did the high/low poly dealy already, using ATI's normal map renderer. What you need is the material file line that tells it to use a normal map. No idea what this is, as I was never able to get it working.

Yes. We will need this too. Do you have an idea how to do this? I noticed that we will need this because currently I can run through all the nice furniture, being Garrett The Masterghost.

I totally get what you're saying, but I have no idea how to do it.

Good idea. Does he use the same name there?

Heresy!! Heheh. Nah, of course that is a swell idea. I don't see a problem, I don't see a huge advantage either though, so as long as it doesn't take up time that something else could be done in.

Deep Omega, hear that? I have no idea what it means, but the coins are your model, right? BTW, any progress on identifying units of measure for the various modelling programs so we can get the size right the first time?

I noticed something really strange - our custom objects are not rendered correctly in D3 ! as you can see the table stays black, eventhough the flashlight should lit it up... anyone an idea ??

I don't know if this is a good idea. This would mean that the gem itself would stay locked but the compass ring would move around it? I wonder how that will look in-game. I must check how this is done in T3. Didn't they do it the same way? BlackThief said that they used something like 16 textures with different colors.

Spar: The idea is that we might use a 2d image of the gem and put it on top of the compass. It wouldn't look any different (theoretically) and would take less rendering power. Then, to change the colour, we could just transition between several different .jpg versions of the gem. The compass itself has to stay 3d so it can spin.