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Waiting for it to come out on PC

The 'city' line didn't work anymore, since none of the title graphics actually have a city in them. And "Stories from the Shadows" basically sums up what the mod is all about. It took the collective brainpower of at least three team-members to come up with it, with only a few brain cells to spare. Odd: I'll see about using that new pic, but trying to customize every graphic would be overkill, I think. The thief isn't necessarily supposed to look exactly like he's in the scene. It *is* a bit of an overlay, linked to the title as much as the background. But I'll see what I can do after I get the damn php working. I'll try to get the new bow in.

Not bad at all, my only comment would be that his hair doesn't seem to come off his head as much as just sit on it, though that could make sense, if it was a wig.

I like the 2nd one better. Better colors, better lighting, better placement of the bow (compositionally speaking). The placement of the bow in the top one, and the solid black colors of his clothes, just kind've makes him look more like a ninja with a curved ninja sword; that's all. Where did "Stories of the Shadows" come from? Did I miss a thread? I like it and think it makes some sense, considering FM authors will hopefully be making countless stories from our tool. However, when I play games (e.g., Thief) I play more for the gameplay than the story -- thus, I don't pay much attention to the story -- so the phrase doesn't do much for me, personally. Maybe we can make a couple catch phrases to use over time, during our marketing campaign. Appealing to the story side of things for a while like that phrase does, but then also maybe eventually including messages to appeal to those who like and focus on the adventures of thieving around itself, rather than the story. Just a thought. Note: I know we don't want to confuse people too much and I think we should remain somewhat consistent with our message (too much dilution isn't good), but I'm hoping there's room for a different phrase some day, when the time is right.

It's up for grabs Included in your happy meal: 9 Textures 1 map 2 particle effects in a prt file 2 material files and lots of fun lovin. There's more to come, this is just the start. 1 texture needs to have a normal made for it (pagceiling01), one needs to be retiled and have it's normal replaced (pagtrim01), and one is a severely altered John P texture (pagfloor01). The rest are all ours 100%. prt files are opened with wordpad as per the usual. Texture layout follows the new standard set by Fingernail. Grab it from the FTP: thedarkmod/maps/paganesque.rar

Since the day was overcast and my camera wasn't the best possible to have, many of the shots will require some color enhancement, renz has already looked a few over and said they would be useful. ftp://208.49.149.126/TheDarkMod/Miscellan...est%20preserve/ I got a good variety of shots and many of the same materials for mixing and variations of the same texture. I'll be returning to the forest preserve come spring and summer to get more textures that don't look so dead.

Ahh, gotcha...I didn't see the block prompt come up.

That would be an interesting challenge. I wonder if the TDS editor has any inherent level size limitations. There's no way you could redo the previous thief games and come out with missions as small as those in TDS (unless you came up with good places to insert loading zones), but perhaps if you're not targeting the maps for the XBox then you may have fewer restrictions.

Think of it like this, if you can draw a grungy wall or cool looking trim then you've got 3/4ths of what we need. The rest can come with practice. Your stuff looks good, I don't think you'd have much a problem making em once you get used to it.

Dram: Hah! I can't believe someone actually remembered that little map. Thing was with that map, I was just trying to learn how to make basic shapes, I didn't plan it out. So I wanted to make another map to show something more refined. I had this great castle going, set in winter time, with real time day and night and moving shadows (it was this cool little trick I figured out)...but I don't think that map is gonna come out any time soon. Maybe I can remake it for NightBlade some day. Renzatic: Hey thanks for the link. I have a basic idea how to make textures, but that should help more. I don't think the multiple light source thing would work out too well on this particular time, but the rest looks informative. But probably what will end up happening is I'll just take a trip over there (whenever I can get some time) and fill up the memory stick with potential textures and see what your texture artist wants. That way I wont crop and fix a bunch of textures that don't have a use. Also, about Radiant, not sure how fast I could learn it to be of any help since I'm getting a full time job here (quit college recently). I realize most of you are all having to this part time, so maybe I'll try and learn it and see what I can do. Thanks for the offer, and I'll get those photos as soon as I can!

As I said, if you can come up with a good reason why the Thief used to be a noble that fits into the plot I'll include it. I'm not against our character having a long-winded back-story, as long as the player is told it for a good reason. We could always include it in the manual, anyway. As for our Thief's name, I've been calling him 'Picasso'. But he might as well remain unnamed.

I've come to realise that the way our current directory is set up is a bit....counterproductive. You can blame it on me considering that it was originally my idea, but I was more of a stark newb then and I now have a better idea of how to approach this. The biggest problem with the current directory is that it's a pain in the ass having to jump from folder ot folder just to load up specific textures that you need. None of the other editors out there, be it vanilla Doom 3, Unreal, Farcry, or whatever, are set up this way. I'm thinking of modeling it around a theme specific setup rather than the set/subset dealie we have now. For example, instead of: Mansion/walls/stone/mansion_wall_stone01 Mansion/doors/wood/mansion_door_wood03 or Crypt/doors/metal/crypt_door_metal01 Crypt/Floors/stone/crypt_floor_stone06 ..it'll be designed to load up every specific texture for that theme and organized by name. Like: mansion/mansdoor02 mansion/mansdoor04 or crypt/crypfloor06 crypt/crypwall07 That way a mapper won't have to jump back and forth between folders to have access to all the specific theme textures. If he wants to get to the door textures all he has to do is scroll down the window til he reaches em then jump back up to the walls later. Easy as that. Plus we have to consider that we're wasting tons of space by having an extra _ed file in there when we can just use the diffuse for both. This is how Id has it set up and we could easily cull an extra 60 meg from the mod by doing this. It'll take alot of material rewriting and texture renaming, but it won't be as difficult as last time thanks to Blackthief reorganizing all the materials into seperate files. The only problem I see with it is if we get ALOT of textures, as in more than 200, in a specific folder....but overall this is a much better setup. Your thoughts?

It's easier to document some departments over others. Depends on the content...but we'll try to come up with sometime without taking too much time from development.

:lol: I'll never say it again. Oh, by the way. Anyone want to help me come up with a name for my business. Essentially, it's a home based computer repair service. I'm bone dry on names. I can never think of them, but if anyone has an idea of how to convey home computer repair in a clever way, I would appreciate the help.

Only comment is that the neck is a little confusing. The cloth seems a bit bunched up, maybe it could come down a little ways in the front in a "V" shape or something. (though I may be wrong, perhaps the final textures will finish off the model)

After playing Thief(Gold), Metal Age, and Deadly Shadows. I'm very pissed at the events which have taken place in DS. The constant loading screens, tiny city size, glitchs, followed by lack of online game play has flustered me. We waited over 4 years for Thief DS, and they burned us without realising a level editor. Without fan made missions, i've been forced to shelf this game after beating it 3 times on all levels. On the plus side, I did enjoy climbing walls, stabbing people in the back, and the graphis. However, I do feel cheated by the company. I expected the same quality of workmen ship, and hourless game, that I recived from Thief Gold and The Metal Age which never came. In turn, I hope The Dark Mod entertains all Thief fans for years to come. Best of luck, I'll get Doom 3 and The Dark mod once it's finished.

Come on, all of you got at least a semi when you saw that pic.

Yeah, if you're using GTK that wont work. How come Doom's own editor aint running under Linux?

sword or dagger I have seen them both in many of the thief 2 fan missions I have played. its already been done. Both are Good and depending on how many times you may have to kill guards BIG GUARDS you may want a huge sword. many of the fan missions stretched the GAME either this way or That making each level fun and fresh and new. Making it an option or leaving it out all together FANS will Create there own if they really need it ... BUT it would be nice if the Dark mod Teem would right in as many tricks and weapons and bombs and potions as possible. PLUS I don't think that anyone started a game by creating all the stuff to go in it first. Didn't they create game spaces test spaces and then decide "hey that corner looks empty lets make a really cool shrubbery to go there" or "how will the player get to this area up here lets make a rope arrow" when Looking Glass People Gave us the DROMED it allowed us to use items that where created fro the specific levels that came with THIEF the reason some things where called RAMEREZ_CHAIR or something like that is because most of the items in THIEF are made for a specific level. so think about what infinite possibilities for Level storyline one may come up with and create all of them Or create say 15 really cool levels with varying Themes and Loosely cohesive stories that take the Player on a vary cool journey through a interesting Back story Each level Stylized differently and containing all objects and cool stuff that would be in that area (like golden hammers in the Builders Temple and nice Chairs in the dining Room of Lord Constantinople) once you have created all of your levels fully lighted and full of objects and objectives and each with its Toolkit and weapon-kit tailor maid for each mission. Then you will have Object_populated the same way they did when they shipped thief 1. all in all they would not have put a chair in a room if it didn't look empty without it. And they wouldn't have put a blackjack in garrets pocket if they didn't want you to KNOCK OUT THAT GUARD WHILE HIS BACK IS TURNED... SO IF YOU DONT MAKE 13-15 LEVELS WITH OBJECT, WEAPON, AND AI OF VARIOUSE STYLES YOU HAVE NO LIMIT LIKE THIEF 1 AND 2 HAVE ON THE DEMAND FOR OBJECTS AND PEOPLE AND WEOPONS BUY SAYING "HERE IS THE GAME" LOOKING GLASS HAD ALREADY DEFINED ALL THE OBJECTS YOU COULD GET AND USE IN YOUR DROMED. WE HAD TO BE SATISFIED WITH WHAT THEY GAVE US AFTER ALL THEY GAVE US ALL THE OBJECTS FROM THE GAME WE COULDENT EXPECT THEM TO CREAT EXTRA OBJECT FOR JUST INCASE WE NEED A SO AND SO OBJECT. DEFINE YOUR LIST OF OBJECTS AND TOOLS AND AI NOT BY THE REQUEST BUT BY THE LEVELS YOU CREATE (EACH ONE BEING STYLIZED VERY DIFERNT BUT LOOSLY COHESIVE TO THE BACKSTORY) AND NESSESITY

I don't know why always this appeal for authority is presented as if it were an argument. The are devs we are devs. Just because we don't get paid for it doesn't mean ANYTHING. I can tell you that I met programmers on my job who have "skills" on their resume and grads and whatnot, and still they don't know shit and come to me asking me. I am project leader for various software projects and I have team members which have grads while I have none. This doesn't really mean anything. They are working with compilers, we are working with compilers. Their modelers work with exactly the same applications as ours do and the same is true for our texturers and other team members. And to be honest. When I compare the quality of the animations or textures against the one from TDS then I would know who to bet my money on regardless of them being "professionals". I cant speak for the sound because a driver bug seemed to prevent me from hearing most of the sounds in TDS, but judging what our guys deliver I don't see any problem either.

Got around to reading some of those. Very interesting. Diffuse field I haven't yet seen a good model for coupling the diffuse field from one room to another (I guess I should say coupling the 'room mode' excitation from one room to another, since I found out the mode energy spacing is too large in small rooms to make a true diffuse field with lots of modes ). This is what I'm most interested for indoor propagation in small, reflective rooms where reverb dominates. Does anyone know a rough equation to use for this case? Say you have a small room with a door leading to a larger room, and a point source in that room causes reverb, exciting many of the room's modes. What I want to know is how much intensity from the excited modes in this room couples into the next room thru the door. I would guess that the coupling coefficient would be related to the ratio of open portal surface area to surface area of the wall the portal opening is in (so a very small opening wouldn't couple that much reverb from a very large room, because most of the transverse modes would be hitting the wall instead of leaking out the portal), but I have no idea if that's right. Theo put up an equation for this and I guess I'll just use that, but I'd like to understand vaguely where it comes from. Direct propagation In those papers they describe well established algorithms for actually ray tracing / beam propagating thru a 3d model (for direct sound propagation), but I think this is much more spatial resolution than we need. For our simplified model, I'm treating every room as a scattering matrix with the ports being the visportals. The most tricky part about my model for direct sound is figuring out the path sound takes to get between two portals in the same room. The most simple way is just distance from the centers of two portals, assuming no bouncing, just a direct path between portals. This fails for two parallel portals that are right next to eachother, where in reality the wave would come out of one portal, bounce off the far wall and go in the other portal. Direct Prop: Calculating single bounce if necessary If I can get this 'create AALDB' on map compile to work, it means we can take a bit more time to calculate these things like single bounces between portals, if necessary. I could imagine doing a test to see if two portals were more or less across from eachother in the room, and if not, do a trace from the center of the portal along the normal vector to the wall, record the trace distance and point hit, then get distance from that point to the 2nd portal and add it to the first distance, calculating roughly the path length of one bounce (of course we would neglect multiple bounces, and not worry about making the angle of incidence = angle of refraction rule ). This would fix the "failure situation" described above.

What's that supposed to mean - you better have a good explaination. 'It was a joke' won't be accepted. You really don't want to come here to Northern Ireland, it's a complete dump. There's nothing interesting to do or see here (alright, we have the giants causeway and the worlds oldest whisky distillery ) You'd very quickly get bored looking at scenery, it's all more or less the same here. I'd vote Scotland - far better scenery, more diverse and dramatic.

Just wanted to chime in some things about swords: In T1, in the highest difficulty setting (and we all played this, right? Right? you couldn't kill guards or innocents, anyway. So I always thought the sword was bloody useless, except for fun games. So, what I _really_ would like is that on the loadout screen you can select your weapons (buy sword, or buy dagger, or both if you think you need it). If these things come with a weight-allowance, even better (if somebody thinks they need to carry around a big, heavy, bright, clunky sword - well, let them) The dagger would be usefull to pry small chests open, or similiar "tool" related situations. Of course, prying it open would make a guard notice it, vs. opening it with a key or lockpick Tels

blackjack=stealth blackjack all the way.... Splinter Cell and Hitman are entirely different genres of gaming. The thief's main focus isn't murder, it's getting in and out with the goods without being detected. Once we stray from this formula we lose the character of the Thief series. If you ahve never played Thief, go and get Thief:TDP... the original started it all and hasn't been topped (IMO). I reloaded Thief:TDP the other day and have been playing it with fresh new eyes and ears. One word comes to mind.... PERFECTION! I cannot believe just how perfect the overall experience was in this old game. It's amazingly immersive and the cutscenes and storyline are second to almost none. Once you've played (and subsequently gotten addicted to) Thief:TDP your opinions of what the game should have/should be will, more than likely, drastically change. Try it, then come up with more ideas....

So you can rig and animate your characters as well? That'll come in handy if you can. Looking through your site I think you're definitely talented enough in all areas, from concept art to modeling, and now you say you've a dimploma in animation as well. You've got my vote.