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But as was said earlier, a halberd is very tricky to code. Think of all the collision issues just in getting the AI to swing it. We might be able to do it, but it would require some extra work. Better to save that for a later release. As long as we have sword attacks and hammer attacks, that gives us a lot of variety of possible weapons (axes, maces, clubs, morningstars, etc). As for the rapier idea, it just doesn't fit very well with the style of the rest of the weapons and armour. As Rob Roy showed us all, rapiers just don't stand up to heavier weapons.

Well, we've already been through these issues long ago at the beginning of this project. We took what we deemed to be the safest route. Faction creation can still be up the the FM makers if they wish, or they can choose ours. We are respecting copyright by not using any existing materials, they are simply "inspired" by them. Everything that we have has been crafted by some very gifted hands. Don't get me wrong, community concern is very much appreciated on the matter, but we really can't expect to move forward with our work if we are second guessing our direction. Forward HO!!!

I think we can take on board Dave's point about making at least the mercenary elites physically bigger and more intimidating, and about making our thief smaller and slight. I think the riot police comparison is best for the city guards. These are the guys called in to do the tough jobs. They should have shields and better helmets and better weapons, and maybe a litle heavier armour as well. The regualr Watch could have short bows, and the elite have longbows with more damage and longer range, and they'd be more accurate with them as well. ALso I think the regualr watch should have only short swords while the elites have a halberd and a short sword. That way they have everything covered from long range, to extended melee, to close combat. I'd love them to be able to trip the player with their halberd (they were used for this in RL as well) The mercenary elites would be big bruisers, with big weapons - bastards swords and a dagger and a heavy crossbow. I'm thinking of keeping them light armoured, just chainmail and a tunic with the no-BJ helmet as well. THese guys actually enjoy killing (as do the reguaklr mercenary)and this should be reflected in their barks, whereas the city watch/elite are far more professional about their business. We dont need to worry about weapons now, no, any AI can use any weapon we make at a moments notice, by being given the correct animation set, but it's best to get the concept of how the various AI are armed cleared up.

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.

I agree an extra long blade would be the way to go, but it should also be a sword that is quick, you can't really wield a bastard sword and move fast. Concerning the armor, i'm not sure, but i would suggest making it very sleek and fitting. Something that you would be able to move somewhat readily in but still be protected. Not weak leather armor perhaps, but a lighter form of metal?

Very good point. I think I've given other people the same advice and then failed to take it myself. Ok, well, before I bother with another version then, let's discuss what we want elite guards to be like. My view of elite guards is that they are better-equiped than even professional guards. I did that by giving them better armour, but perhaps that's not the way to go. Although I thought it was common in T2 for guards to have plate armour on. So if it isn't the armour that makes them stand out, what should it be? I think elite guards should be distinct even as a silhouette. As for weapons, they should definitely be using something more substantial than a shortsword. I think an extra-long blade is appropriate, or something really nasty like a morningstar.

If they have only 20 polygons it should be ok. Assuming a 20m long wall with 20cm distance between each spike would mean 2000 polygons if they were all visible at the same time.

Just to point it out the symbols dont really matter except in the extreamely detailed cases... THis is how parodies of movies work often. so long as you dont use th name, they dont copyright a guy in red with a hammer who religious, or a gaurd in blue. the symbols maybe, but even then it's streching it.

That is not official and doesn't mean much. You don't know how this particular member feels about copyright or his project, and also management has quite a different view on this. As a developer he might be pleased to see that his project inspired such a lot of activity. Maybe he was not happy as T3 turned out and sees our mod as what Thief should have been. There are hundreds of reasons why he doesn't need to laucnh into immediate actions, so we can not really count on that. Yes. That's what I already said right from the beginning. We shouldn't ask them for permission as long as we make sure that we make it different enough. It would be different if we would try to recreate an exact copy of Thief, as Saphire tried to do in the beginning. But that is not what we try to do anyway.

That's why we try to avoid the problems SS run into. Well, as long as we are NOT proposing this, which we don't, and stay clear of everything is a potential infringment, we can not hold liable for FM authors doing this. Eidos would have to hunt down each FM author individually. And when you look at our models and textures, they capture the spirit of Thief, but they are very different at the same time. I doubt that anybody can say that our builder model is looking like anything in a Thief game and the same is true for other models. Making the gameplay can not be copyrighted, otherwise there wouldn't be so many FPS games out there, and we also changed names and everything to avoid copyright problems. Well we already explained that this should not be done, and we also will tell our FM authors later that they should avoid this. For some this is an important point and for some it is not. I don't really care if the Thief is named Garrett or not, because in the end, gameplay is what matters to me. And for our campaign, we will have a different story anyway. I know. I guess this would be very tough to play. Lockpicking a robot while he is running around?

Taking the ideas in this thread I've come up with this. THe idea is he's been cast out of the order, tied up in chains and drowned as execution, he has some ceromony peformed on him trapping his soul in his body so it'll never reach the Master Builder. He stays underwater quite a long time before the chains rust enough to break and allow him to move around again. Let's be fair to him, all that nonsense would put anyone in a bad mood, so now he's back and he isn't happy...

Ok...that's slightly different than what I was thinking, but it's fine with me, as long as it isn't going to add a tremendous amount of disk space. We should throw some different body types in for variety, but I don't know if we need three versions of every single one. We would want a fat noble, for sure, but we don't really need a fat city guard.

Read the post about liscencing in the Devchat board.

Lol, that's a long shot Spar, there were a thousand names in that game) My real name is Rod, so does that make me the two handed sword trainer from the mercenary farm in Gothic 2?

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.

Doc_Brown: You have some good points. The setting in The Dark Mod does resemble Thief, and no one will deny that this project's purpose is to bring the game into fashion with the technology of today. However, could there be a legal problem? Not likely. I'll lay out the basics of the matter. Copyright law is a very convoluted and difficult to understand business. Working extensively in the MUDing community I have acquired much experience on this issue. Look on any MUD database and you will see that over half are based directly on copyrighted games. Yet, they are still up and running. Why is this when they are so blatantly violating copyright law, you ask? There are more Dragon Ball Z and Star Wars MUDs then you could possibly count. There are exceptions: Sony Online Entertainment did shut down a chosen few to make room for Star Wars Galaxies way back when, however I can not stress more that sort of occurrence is rare. The reason why these Copyright violators are not being shut down?: 1) Court costs time and money- Court is one long, monstrous, money consuming battle. Even if you were to file a case now, it would be years before an trial occurred. Lawyers cost serious money for both sides. Companies don't bring people to court lightly. They try to avoid it at all costs and they only ever do it sure of their success. 2) Fan made projects = publicity- In the instance of games, when fans put enormous amounts of effort and time into a game they love, they are respected. Fan made projects for the most part will promote and highlight a company's interests. They create hype, excitement, extend the life of the game in question, and draw in a new crowd people who before were uninterested. It's free publicity for them, and if it's positive they love it. The repercussions of bringing a highly respected and hyped fan project to court could wound any company greatly. Loyal customers supporting it feel betrayed: the company is a money hungry legal machine bent on world domination, in their minds. 3) Fan made projects and money- Firstly, when a company sues in court, that company has the burden of proof that they have lost money. As discussed earlier, a company will only go to court when they feel threatened--a threat to a business is a threat to their money. Thus, a non-profit fan production such as The Dark Mod, poses no threat to that company. In United States Copyright law: you bring someone to court when they are profiting off your idea. Copyright is the desire to protect your economic claims to an idea (in general). Therefore, with no money involved, there isn't a problem. Also, The Dark Project is discreet enough not to directly claim it's using Eidos's intellectual property. So, while similarities exist, it's not directly associated with Eidos. Anything negative about this project can not be associated with Eidos in this case, and it would have to be something negative for the business department to even take notice enough to think about shutting this down. Bottom line: There is nothing to gain by threatening or staging a legal battle over a small project that would chastise fans and cost serious dollars with such little legal significance when there are zero damages to collect. The probability that this project would be shut down is understatedly minute. You have many unique and interesting ideas, however, the Dark Mod doesn't need to tailor their system for you. The beauty of Fan Missions is the freedom for you to express your creativity, which I observe you would greatly enjoy doing. You can tailor fan missions any way you would like and make any world you like. All the Dark Mod is providing are tools to help you with that world you want to create. It's a foundation. As the creator, it's your job to build on that.

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

I read something about that a long time ago. So it's not exactly new to me. But I wouldn't know the details anwyway. If you need some code to support that we would need to know what it exactly should do.

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.

Lovely work once again oddity . Really nice attention to detail ..the textures are great. How long did it take you to do this model and texture her? I am back working on the noble man at the moment ..I have the low poly model just about finished and will start detailing it in zbrush. I have done some tests and it seems to be working fine ..only thing is I could really do with a faster machine to run zbrush at the resolution I want to work at. Have you done any of the low poly versions yet ?

I think alot of long time modders were initially put off by Doom 3 because you have to unlearn some old habits to optimise your maps. Your lights have to be balanced with just as much care as your geometry, and in some cases more brushes can actually help improve performance...it's almost a complete 180 from the way oldschool maps were made. I don't think it's a problem with just Doom 3, though. Every engine that uses realtime lighting will probably use similar optimization methods...considering that it's the next big step for first person games you might as well get used to it now and get a leg up.

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.