Search the Community

http://www.3dtotal.com/ I've stumbled across these during one of my little internet searches and practically fell in love with them at first sight. What we have in these individual texture packs are the perfect raw materials for just about any type of texture we could ever need. As I said to Fingernail, it'd be like the modellers having some basic undetailed human shapes to start with and detail as they please, and could get us to the mapping process in almost a 3rd of the time. But (there's always a but) it does make us reliant on another persons product, and it does take away a bit of the creative process that we all enjoy. While we still be styling and detailing it to our specifications it's still someone elses hard work we're using. That and the issue of even if we CAN use them in our mod is something we'll have to ask about. There are pros and cons to using them. The pros being quick, easy, high quality textures that can be bent to our specification with minimal effort (the things even come with bump and specular maps). The cons are...well...it's not our own work, it costs money, and there's the chance that they won't allow us to use their textures in a mod no matter how different they are from the original textures. So what do you think? Speed and quality or slow and homebrewed quality?

Stopping him from witdhdrawing it from our Mod should be no issue, as we all should have agreed on exactly that.

That's a texturing issue. I think we'll do the textures as soon, as the model is complete.

Round one of texturing for the face. Will probably leave it like this for now, while I start on the armor and such. Comments welcome, but keep in mind that this is a loooong process. Things to change: is too ruddy, eyebrows are way wrong, nose has a bit of a shading issue, eyelids and eyes need detail, may add a hairline just in case, lips need to have their detail brought out more.

Which would, of course, be largely pointless. Not much point blinding a guard half a block away. The thing about smoke arrows/flash bombs is that they are limited in number rather than particularly challenging to use. You've got me on the steampunk issue though I'd certainly still recommend implementing a 'flash' or smoke arrow during the early stages of development so the functionality is there without needing specific modelling and animation (although I suppose the DOOM3 grenade throw might suffice?). Regarding the shattering noise arrow. I quite like the idea. Breaking glass would certainly attract attention. Although in the first two games the noise arrows were few but reuseable. I hate to be a kill joy, but do we need a noise arrow at all? Could the thief not just fire a broadhead at something noisy or throw a pot? Less work is good in my book.

Very nice job. Re: the glow inside the arrows, I like those too (though the glow for arrows other than fire should be quite dim, so they don't give the thief away). But that is a lighting issue, as I understand it, not a texture one.

I REALLY like that mask idea. A LOT. And not just from a holy-shit-easier-to-model standpoint, either. It looks excellent indeed, and it makes sense, right? Harder to see him. As for the indent issue - I tried that first, but it didn't smooth very well, so I'm actually gonna do a combination. Right now I'm going through all of the edges of armor and adding a bit of a curve to the outside edges of the armor, so it's a bit raised. Just about every sharp edge is gonna get chamfered to a nice curve, as well.

One good thing about the whole resizing issue... Lights are now far easier to control

I am in agreement on the short sword issue. I think a big part of this project is not just making this a T3 clone, it is also to recapture the essence of the original games that was lost so willingly in T3. The dagger was not within the Thief continuity...regardless of the devs intentions. It may be best to include both options as I hear Garrett was to have gotten a dagger in Thief 2 Gold. Since Looking glass closed down before it could be made we never got to see it. So, yes....a dagger DOES have its place, but so must a sword! The Dark Mod can be what Thief 3 should have been.

Since we started with this project I haven't heard anything about which license we will use. This is IMO quite an important decisision, as some memebrs may not want to use one license modell while others may and still others don't care. As we have seen in the case SCO against IBM this issue is NOT so trivial and can potentially affect everybody here. This is also important to protect our project against copyright claims or others ripping off. So I would suggest to discuss this BEFORE we start to create to much content and afterwards being dissatisfied with the decisions. One question: If we code for D3 what resctrictions are there for our mod? As with DromEd we had the restriction that all FMs had to be free and were not allowed to be commercially used without permission. I expect that a similar restriction exists for D3 mods (but then again it may not) so this already might affect the decision on which license model we can use. There are also other considerations, because if we choose i.E. GPL or any other open source compatible license model (there are several of them) we can register for services like webhosting, shell accounts, CVS services and others, which may not be available for closed source developments. I think it is better to use such existing services instead of relaing on private resources, because this gives us a major advantage. If there ever is a break in the private resources we will have to find new resources where to translocate them. If we use public resources, everybody has access and we don't need to worry over uptime or accessability or support. That doesn't mean that we can NOT use private resources as well, but it gives us many advantages for free and serves as a seamless backup. If this is comptable with D3 restrictions therfore I would suggest to use GPL/LGPL or a similar license model and I think there is also an Open Content license for art so we could put this there as well. Since this is a community project and we want to use community resources as well, I think this would be a fair decision. One reason why I also want to have this clarified is, to protect our work (I already have seen such a thing happen). If i.E. somebody writes a good AI code and suddenly decides that the code is so good that he no longer wants to offer it for free, then we are screwed. In this case we woould have to start from scratch and rewrite all this code from new. I don't want something like this to happen, so we really should decide an a license early on, so everybody knows what he can expect or not expect from the project. Of course this is also true for art (images, sound, models, levels, etc.), despite me writing mainly about code because I'm a programmer myself.