Search the Community

Well I'll be damned. I had a post all written out, conceding defeat of this task, but I'm rewriting it! After doing tests weeks ago to see if I could overcome the technical hurdles of this task (not the artistic ones), and then putting this off and off and off, out of plain fear of it, I tried really hard this morning. And the result sucked, completely. A complete fucking disaster. I made a low poly (not low enough, in my opinion, but it's a start - 60 polys) hand to try and see if I could actually get a decent renderbump applied to it from Oddity's hipoly hand. The techniques didn't work well for me for the bell I made, and I ended up going with a handmade normalmap instead, so I didn't have much hope. And this was just a hand, so, more testing yes, but this was the real thing testing at least. The resulting normalmap was terrible. The model lit up like a xmas tree in Doom, and there is no specular to be doing that, so I was completely confused. WTF is it glowing white? The normalmap also did something I'd never seen before - instead of being comprised of shades of blue and violet/pink, it was the whole rainbow from blue to red and everything in between. Ever seen a yellow and green normalmap? I assumed this was because the lowpoly hand was a really bad fit for the hipoly renderbump. And, it seems that's partially correct (it still has some yellow around the index finger curl). But in addition to the no-so-great-fit, it seems I just made an error with the seams in the UV map. Right before posting, I thought to clear the seams and try something simpler and give it one more go. It worked. It's not perfect, but it's my first try on the real thing. I'll probably start over anyway, instead of just transferring this hand to a full statue attempt. And, it'll probably take me forever and make me lose even more of my sanity. And another modeller probably could do it better (or at least faster, and shouldn't hesitate to do so if they really want to, but please let me know so I don't waste my time). But hey, it worked! (side by side in Blender without subsurf, and then rendered in TDM)

But if publicity does attract people willing to help out, wouldn't accepting them make the TDM more like an FM project, or more like TDS? By accepting people thus attracted, TDM team risks getting people who haven't been there from the beginning and haven't grasped the depth of ideas that inspired the project from the start. Wasn't it a similar thing that ruined Thief: Deadly Shadows for so many who do not like it? As for attracting players for when the Mod is finished -- most of them are on TTLG forums, so making an announcement there on the day of release would be enough. As for gaining audience that would let the developers know that their work is appreciated and its results anticipated -- most of it is on these forums.

Well, I have them now; didn't take too long (though I did forget there was 47 of them! thought there was only 30 for some reason). Anyway. Looking through them, at least in my opinion (others have already expressed difference with it), there's not much good here at all. Not "no good at all", but not much. I'm still going through, and it looks like there are a few good doors, and definitely some window shutters, and a stone or two and a couple of woods, so I plan on trying to get those game ready, as far as my patience can handle. Other than that, another three million brick textures (I swear I'm going to start vomiting bricks soon), and most of them don't tile at all, or only tile in one direction - horizontal. Oh, and no normal maps. I thought there were supposed to be?? Most desirable textures have a worthless heightmap which is no more than a greyscale of the original, which anyone could do with any image editor, and which does NOT create a good normal map. It creates riply undefined crap. So, any texture to be used will likely need full preparation - tiling work and normal map creation - so, back to square one; hours of work per texture. So, in conclusion? 5 Gigs of a few good textures but mostly garbage you could find on any mayang/cgtextures type of website. I'll try to extract what I can out of it (hopefully not doubling any work if anyone else is doing the same), but it sure isn't a treasure trove. Edit: Jeez that was negative. Anyway, this was not to sound like a poop; just to state it for once and for all (it's been years, afterall), that the real textures pack ain't all that. Don't expect much of it.

I just saw this on D3World forums, it's a mod for D3 inspired by Descent (for those who don't know, 6 degree of freedom ship-to-ship combat, but more focussed on enclosed environments than wide-open games like wing commander). Good to know that more D3 mods are still alive, and it's got a public beta for download, too: http://www.chmodoplusr.com/IntoCerberon/

He's resized (well crap! forum attachments rarely work for me: THE FOLLOWING ERROR(S) WERE FOUND The total filespace required to upload all the attached files is greater than your per post or global limit. Please reduce the number of attachments or the size of the attachments. & the image is no bigger than other pics I attach Anyway, he's up on cvs & resized.

I updated the map, the main post (the AI who use these animations & the animators responsible). So summarize: City Watch, Mercenary Elite, Nobleman, and House Guard: af_pose idle *idle_torch (ascottk) idle_sword walk *walk_torch (ascottk) run *run_torch (ascottk) look_around drawsword attack *attack2 (ascottk) *attack3 (more of a jab really) (ascottk) search (Domarius) throw (Solis) *cower (ascottk) surprise_big (Solis) *painchest (ascottk) *painhead (ascottk) *painrightarm (ascottk) *painleftarm (ascottk) *death (ascottk) /* New Solis animations */ alertwalk blindwalk waistpain surprised failedKO /* squill animations */ failedKO2 sit_down anim get_up anim lay_down /************* * actions for fun/jokes/whatever *************/ *dance1 (ascottk) *flip (ascottk) *itch (ascottk) *nod_head (ascottk) *shake_head (ascottk) The map now has the merc_elite & houseguard joining the citywatch in the animation demos. I also placed an idle animation in between the other animations so you can tell them apart.

I had to remove the short sword from his def file. For one thing, the orientation doesn't match the long sword & there's no collision model for the short sword or the dagger.

http://www.garagegames.com/demos/browse/game/ If anyone else has any good freebie game links please post em!

Ah, here's were I explained that already. But I didn't have the part about pose tweaking, so I just added that. It's a stickied tutorial thread in the modelling forum. I should really Wiki-tize that. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3563

How can I fix it so tortoise no longer downloads d3game.vcproj ? It overwrote my version forcing me to upgrade it to vs 2005 format and wiped out all my settings like my custom post build steps.

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...ost&p=93484 & download the latest fbx importer. It might be on alias' site.

Yeah... but I have to admit, I felt intimidated and wondered if he was harder than a regular guard, and then I was seriously dissapointed when he was just as easy as the rest of them. Just another clone with a different voice. If the voice was that out of place, it would have to have a really good effect on me. Probably not even worth the risk since not nearly everyone will be affected the same way. Best to stick to european accents. Yes there is a lady they're mimicking, famous actor from a long time ago (someone here will know her name), they were even mimicking her on Bugs Bunny cartoons. Yes and that just screams "unoriginality" and "I'm not putting any effort into this, it's a kids game". I have to agree with you. But I still enjoyed it in spite of those things. It's just a shame, it could have been so much better.

It doesn't matter what the *.md5anim name is as long as the def anim has the proper name. I could easily point an idle animation to attack.md5anim. Anim decls won't be a problem to rename & I agree that we need naming conventions for those.

Now that the search animation is relative to the origin bone, I have a problem with foot slipping, that I've been trying to sort out for 3 hours... The foot makes contact with the ground. You put a key frame on it. You want it to stay there while the body moves forward. So when the hips move forward (taking the foot with it, since it's a child) you move it back where it made contact with the ground, and put a key frame on it. So it should stay on the ground in the same spot whilst the body moves forward, right? Fucking NO. It does some weird arse slide forward and backward again between the two points, still starting and finishing in the same spot, but with a wierd slip forward and backwards in between... Adding "correctional" key frames to keep it still, winds up with you pretty much putting a key frame on every frame, and yet it still seems to wobble unsteadily, and this is a brutal, hacky, messy solution, that will be a nightmare to edit if I ever want to change the animation. Opening the FCurves window to see if the bezier curves are causing some problems doesn't seem to help. I've set those keyframes to be flat (no curves for the movement, for translation and rotation) and they still do it! There has got to be an easy solution to get feet to stop slipping. I've been reading about some arcane solution involving override clips or something, that I can't quite understand yet... surely there's some easy way to say "between these two keyframes, keep the foot HERE no matter what"? I'm going to post on CG Talk... *edit* http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php...472#post4141472 I also posted links to example anims there.

Yeah that's sort of what i was trying to say in the first half of my post. Like a dorky noble jumping in shock or running away in fear.

If you post about updates then you should not really use this thread anymore. It's tiresome because we now have at least two threads with similar content to follow, and it's hard to find anything if you try to search later for something particular.

Bah I could not find one of the secrets on ep1m2. The one with the super health I believe it was. Just tried again on hurt me plenty made it to m4 before I blew myself up with a barrel And nightmare ? If you stand still at the beginning(Maybe anywhere) you lose health just by standing there. Good luck beating nightmare is all I can say. Back to topic That pipe code is something to do with rendering it looks like, did not dig into it just what I saw casually as I was working on the other stuff. Is that portable is why I am asking. We are planning to support linux and mac also correct ? As noted above please look at the keyboard!=mouse thread(Link in previous post) and comment if so inclined. I have already implemented the new keyboard code as well. It is #ifdef for now(Default is old code) It is all working now but needs some revision possibly. Especially the keyboard one.

We'll need the source Maya binaries or fbx files when you're done with an animation so we can share those animations between characters. Maya + the Doom 3 importer is finicky & includes/excludes unintentional joints of the meshes/animations so we may need to customize the def file export options according to what Doom 3 spits out. Instead of ftp, we're using svn now: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=5623

Are these supposed to be commical? I just need to know how far to emphasize some reactions. I might add one: brushing dirt off an arm. Should the fingers intertwine, or are you talking more like fists? Re: to an earlier ascottk post... Regarding the FBX question: if we are using the same skeleton naming conventions (the same skeletons), I could in theory simply send you the fbx data, it could then be imported ovewriting the base skeleton data, and be saved as a new animation. This is how we did it for the Snowcraft mod we did at school (took 72 hours from design to Alpha (2 animators/mocap techs))

Ok, here's what I think should be done: when gui::ingame =1 (or whatever) The main menu should have the following buttons. Resume Mission takes you back to the mission. Quit Mission shuts the map down and returns you to the regular main menu. If you go to the controls menu while ingame, then the Resume Mission button remains, but the Quit Mission is replaced by the Main Menu button (the one that would be there normally). For now you can just use text buttons, and I'll replace them with graphics later. Can you post any changes that you make to the code, btw? It will make it easier for me to integrate them if they come a little at a time rather than tons of changes all at once.

I have finished the mouse handler for now at least - See relevant thread for info http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=5006 I would like to do the keyboard handler the same way but wait and see what everyone thinks of the mouse first. Then if no one objects I will do the same. I have already coded 90% or more of what would be needed to do that just in case. We will have to do something eventually anyway if we want to be portable to anything other then windows. Speaking of which what is the pipe code for ?

Here's the source Maya & Motion Builder files (along with the def file) for the citywatch: http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/models/In...tch_AnimRef.rar I normally have the folders set up as: models/ask/*MBs In this case it'd be: models/ask/citywatchMBs of course you know where the def file goes & if he can read the modeling & animation forum, I'd like it if he could read this: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=5035 (also we're using Maya 7.0.1). I think Springheel knows what we'll need better than I do (I mainly experiment & if the animation is useful then I commit it ).

I have the updated citywatch rig as a separate download: http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/models/In...tch_AnimRef.rar (Also the second link in the main post)

--check D3 zombie heads for useability, and for severed head model --fix reversed normals on revenant --add if (gui::ingame) statement to get resume game/quit game buttons functional http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...opid=95934& --fix the textures on the ghoul

You will need to run Doom 3 under Windows, so you may have to buy a copy. Should be pretty cheap now, I picked mine up for $20 Australian dollars (about $15 US dollars). I wouldn't mind seeing whatever code you do have, even if it's nothing particularly special. Just to establish that you can actually code. As for C++/OpenGL books, I don't know any I'm afraid. I usually look stuff up on the internet if I need to. This post may help with regard to OpenGL books: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...ost&p=94636