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Here's the link for the Thief font: http://desktoppub.about.com/library/fonts/hs/uc_jd.htm According to a post at Ion Storm's forum, this font is for the original Thief games. You maybe all already had it/knew about it? (I know New Horizon already knows about it, but I hadn't seen it before.)

I agree, and I wasn't suggesting that look. He would have a normal hood covering the top of his face, but a piece of cloth covering his mouth and nose. I'll be able to post a drawing by the weekend. I also like the idea of having his face always in shadow. Preserve the mystique, definitely.

I also like the masked face look. Makes sense from a need-to-stay-hidden standpoint. I think it can be pulled off as long as we can avoid him looking like a ninja in the face. I may be wrong, but I think it might be a combination of a few things: (1) 'percent of coverage,' (2) 'angle at which the cloth is worn' and (3) 'tightness on the face' that gives ninjas the ninja look that many of us are accustomed to seeing. However, it might be worth researching classic/medieval thief attire, if such a thing exists. Perhaps dark makeup was used instead, or something? Either way, if we need to lock something down now, I'd be cool with using the masked face. I didn't like T:DS in that they showed Garrett's face in the light a lot. I think we should try to keep a certain 'mystique' of our character's appearance. Whether that be done by his face always being in the shadows in cutscenes/art, or a good portion of his face being covered by cloth, or a combination thereof -- I'd be a happy DarkMod camper

The big question is figuring out when to make these sacrifices and why. I'm intending on using a few more brushes than what we saw in Id's maps because Thief is a much slower game and can probably afford a slight framerate drop in comparison. We have this awesome engine at our disposal and all, so of course we should take advantage of it and do things we haven't seen in any Thief game to date....we just gotta use some common sense and think some stuff out. From what I've seen Doom 3 uses about 4000-7000 brushes per map, with usually about 200-400 on display in a single scene (an admittedly pulled-out-of-my-ass estimation) . I plan on using about that same amount of brushes, maybe a little more if the memory requirements aren't too high, and about at most 700 of em onscreen at once. Since the engine can handle that amount you don't have to worry about making any threadbare rooms to save on performance, but to be on the safe side I wouldn't go over that mark. For a quick example here...say you're in a bedroom that's made up of about 150 brushes...you could go ahead and throw a nice transluscent window in there and not worry about choking your graphics card...but if you're in a giant ass entryroom with a grand staircase I'd throw curtains over the windows to keep from drawing what's outside and adding to the burden. lol, kind of a longwinded and sorta preachy post just to say what everyone pretty much already knows, but I wanted to throw it out anyway just to show how I plan on doing the maps.

Doom 3 comes packaged with the level editor in the executable. All you have to do to access it is rightclick on the Doom 3 shortcut, click on properties, and add "com_allowConsole 1 +set r_fullscreen 0 +editor" in the target box after the quotation marks. But if you mean how we've made all the test maps, well...we've got lots of stuff down in the (currently?) hidden sections of the forums that go through it all step by step. It's a long process that'll probably bore the hell out of everyone not interested in the technical side of the mod. And yeah, the SDK will be free. As for the Garrett model...I think DeepOmega has been doing it in 3DSMax, not too sure though.

Hello, I offered my help on the coding side on the old forums. Until the SDK comes out, a lot of the stuff I'd like to get started on will have to wait. As a result, I was only periodically checking the old boards, and only just now saw the message regarding this move. I'm still more than willing to offer my help on the coding side. I'm mostly interested in helping with AI, and movement code (Mantling, run/walk/sneak/crouch modifications). I'm also willing to help anywhere else that requires it. Even Art. Sorry for not posting anything for a while, but until the SDK comes out, a large number of things are simply speculation at this point. -oofnish

Hey, not bad at all, Fingernail. Once you get done you'll need to post a tut on how you did it so we can all join in on the fun (wow, that rhymed). Oh yeah, a nice tip on making specularmaps. I went through your mini tutorial and make my first specmap by just making a darkened greyscale image of the material I wanted to shinyize. Thing is once you're done with it the lighting will end up being too uniform across the surface and won't look quite as realistic as it should... The solution to that problem is surprisingly easy. To fix that, just make your greyscale image as usual, add a render cloud on a new layer, gaussian blur it a bit til the clouds don't look quite like clouds anymore, tweak it til you're happy with the results, then blend the layers (I used overlay, but quite a few of the blend filters will work). Instant nonuniform specular map, the end results are alot better and you only need basic photoshop knowledge to do it.

Wow, quite exciting to see that window. I'm actually trying my hand at making a window texture...I'll post my results for criticism and look forward to getting some pointers so I can learn how to do this as well and be more productive to the team.

Hi there guys! This is Jim from DoomCast.com. I've been talking to Fingernail and offered him hosting and some space on our forums! Just wanted to say hello and meet the people who are going to bring out this awsome thief mod! I still remember the first time I played thief, lol, getting chased around the first manor and scrambling up a rope to hide hahaha Hopefully this mod turns out great! Anyway, gtg Jim Doomcast

I'm not a part of the Dark Mod team actually, I can't code, do models or textures anyway. Kinda dedicated to Black Cat Games aswell... I'm just hosting the forums for Fingernail and the crew.

Keep in mind that high-rez textures are better in the long-run. While we may not have a rig that can run on ultra-high video quality, others may, and planning for The Future is always a good idea. And 512x512 is not high-rez. Go for 1024x1024 wherever possible.

Don't apologise Phil Are you refering to the post you made about mods and Quake 3 being released under the GPL? If not, I have probably missed something and you can ignore the bit below ID have re-released the source code for Quake 3 and some of its other games (including the previous incarnations of Doom) as open source under the GPL - but only years after the games were originally released (Quake 3 was only GPLed a few weeks ago, after the release of Doom 3). While the titles are considered commercially viable they are distributed with a closed source license. It will be years before ID even consider releasing Doom 3 under the GPL. ID normally ask that fan made material is distributed freely and non commercially. Don't get me wrong. I'd encourage anyone to be as open with licensing and copyright as possible. I'm a linux user, a fan of the GPL and am contributing to open source projects. But the GPL is not the appropriate license for a Doom 3 mod, they are incompatible in a legal licensy kind of way.

A little. I was looking through the forum sections but I found nothing suitable. So we need a list of sounds that we will need. We should compile this list and post it in the design documents forum for reference. I guess a SciFi Mars research base has not so much need for carpets.

Well...in principle. But let's do even better, even more variety. That'll benefit both projects eventually. I'll post that design doc up here.

Apologies, but from your post... ...It didn't sound like you're quite as sure as you need to be. The SDK is not open source (GTK Radiant is not open source, only the GTK bit is) and GPL is the wrong license to use because of the reasons I have outlined above, and also because you can not link to closed source libraries (such as the Doom 3 engine) under the terms of the GPL. GPL is a wonderfull thing, but is is not the appropriate license for a Doom 3 mod (I mean that in a legal - you will open your self to cease and dessist notices from ID and the free software foundation if you do - kind of way). Sparhawk is on to a good thing to request clarification of copyright issues, but choosing the right license license requires a little care and attention. Good work so far, by the way. I'm looking forward to contributing some stuff to the project

Ok, I'm not a team member but I had a looky and noticed that the thread was closed - which is a shame because some further clarification might be needed. I havn't read the terms and conditions yet, but as far as I know Doom 3 and Id's Doom3 SDK are not released under the GPL. Id only release their code as open source (quite a different thing from letting people play with the source code) several years after release and the shelf life of the product has expired. Neither is GPL a 'non commercial' or 'free' license, it just happens that a lot of free software uses GPL. Meeting the (fairly hefty) requirements of the GPL will almost certainly infringe Id's own copyright as you will be granting the right for anyone to distribute the code commercially (doh). And, just in case you havn't got the gist of this post yet, the GPL has been designed exclusively for the distrubtion of software code. It is next to useless for licensing creative content such as audio, textures, level designs and so on. The deeds offered by Creative Commons are much better suited for that kind of thing. In short. GPL is wholesome and good, but unless you specifically know otherwise, steer well clear. Id will probably mention terms and conditions for distributing Mods in one of their readme files.

I'm no good at plots etc, but I can write scripts for characters <line etc.>. I'm not sure from your last post if you're any closer to needing something like that than you are for needing testers or storyline writers.

wow - the ceiling looks great now ! I think you should go ahead and post it on the Dark Mod thread...

Make sure you check it out again...I just tweaked the ceiling and added some more trim along the walls. If it's alright with everyone else I'll go ahead and post it on the TTLG thread. It's kinda got that Widow Moria look to it, which is alot closer to the style we're going for than my first map.

great work man I hope I get D3 tomorrow in the computer store, where I buy my new computer components. If everything works fine I'll be able to play D3 on highest-details in 2 days BTW: as soon as you've got your ceiling we should post this screen in the ttlg-forums, I think people will be really impressed.

There's nothing wrong with the window, looks perfectly thiefy to me. A moon? Never! No time to modify. Springwheel's stuff's perfect anyway. (Runs away with the artwork to the Imperium forums.)

Bugger, sorry, here's most of my work on various things- http://img46.photobucket.com/albums/v140/god_is_my_goldfish/ (Last post, I PROMISE!)

Arg. Sorry forgot to include contact info. God_is_my_goldfish@yahoo.com Or PM me in ttlg or ionstorm forums.

I'm working on one here and there, but I'm quite busy today. I might have something tonight. Edit: Ok, I have a few more minutes to make some comments...The typical banner size is 468x60, which is not a lot of space. The new one by Alexius looks great but is far too busy to be used at banner size. Perhaps it could be used as a website header or something. I'm not entirely sure I like the colour scheme, which is awfully bright and red...it makes me think more of Aladdin than Thief, but that's me. I have two different versions in the works and I'll post one of them tonight for comment. I can't work on it from this computer though.

I doubt very seriously that we'll be sued over it. From what I can gather, since I grabbed it from a 3rd party source (google imaged it, first pic that comes up when you queary Thief which is off another messageboard), didn't slap a "copywrited by Renzatic" on it and only used a small portion of the actual picture it falls under fair use laws. As long as we don't claim authorship, we're safe. lol, and that's a the blur line...that's the guy's hood you're seeing. I was pretty anal about getting rid of any obvious editing marks since I basically did this for practice and wanted to get it right. The only way you can tell where I cut and copied is if you up the gamma a good ways.