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@Maximus: It's harder than you think to just build up realism by adding "little bits" of realism. I'm generally for more realism with customizable options, since different people obiously have different ideas about what's fun vs frustrating, but I disagree with your statement. Working on the mod, I've found that when you increase the realism of one aspect of a model, it often necessitates increasing the realism of a different apect of the model, otherwise the whole model will break down and be less realistic than you started with. An example we've seen on the public forums is a demand that the AI have different vision parameters in their peripheral vision than their central vision. Right now guards have equal detection probability across their entire field of view. The claim is that they should have different light/movement detection abilities in their peripheral vision. Sounds innocent enough, right? But if you were to just implement that by itself, calculating peripheral vision based on the direction their head is facing, you'd have a situation where their corneas are alway physically straight forward in their head. Within their FOV, you'd get predictable and abrupt changes in their vision reactions based on where you were standing relative to their head facing, which is not what happens in real life. Real people on guard are constantly scanning their eyes over the field of view allowed by their head. By just adding the peripheral/central difference without adding eye scanning movement, we made the system less realistic than it was before. To un-break the model, we would have to do a lot more work and make an eye scanning algorithm independent of the head turning algorithm, and take into account psychological factors like how wary they are, fixing their eyes on something suspicious or moving across it, etc. The net result after all that work is: An idle guard who's moving their eyes around randomly would have an equal time-averaged detection-probability across their entire field of view. That's the same result as what we started with, after a lot of hypothetical work. Making just one small thing more realistic did not improve things, instead it broke the model and necessitated making other things more realistic, and in the end it effectively didn't accomplish anything.

Welcome to the Forums! I'm looking forward to hearing your visions about Radiant and your project. Ah, that surprises me a bit, but then again, I haven't been observing the GtkRadiant community a lot. Weren't there two more developers working on GtkRadiant lately? What about Shaderman? Wow, that sucks. I'm surprised that GtkRadiant 1.5 was even released under the GPL when no one seems to really care about the project. Not that I'd object... Sounds cool, I'm looking forward to hearing those. Well, that's nice! I actively started coding last September (after reading some tutorials), so there's a lot to learn for me, especially when it comes to OpenGL.

Sounds like there's a lot of things we can help each other with, even if our interests aren't completely identical. Hey, I've seen STiFU around... I think he's even on these forums occasionally. I'm supposedly part of The Cabal but I mostly just lurk nowadays. The Dark Mod has stolen me. Actually there's a bit of cross-pollination there - ascottk (who is currently our most prolific animator by far) made some AI models for The Cabal. We Thief fans are a tight-knit bunch. Glad to have you around!

Can someone point me to some good tutorials for drawing and rendering vegetation transparencies? I'd like to start working on the hedgerows idea I mentioned but I can't find much about making 2D plant images for LW8. BTW here is a cool link that was posted in the forums a long while back, its a great breakdown of LightWaves tool and some other links to plug ins and stuff. Thanks to oDDIty IIRC. http://www.suture.net/tutorials/modeling/index.php

Fix for sword joint distorting mesh: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...ost&p=94397 original thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=5109

I can't speak for anyone else, but I did look at the win32 program, and commented to that effect. I didn't elaborate because there's not much to elaborate on. The code looks fine to me. (Didn't test it.) I didn't look at the other one very much because I'm not familiar with the game or its plugin interface. As for testing your changes... I understand it's difficult without CVS access. The problem is that the team has been burned before by a "contributor" joining up, gaining access to all of the resources, and then stealing copies, leaving without actually contributing anything, and posting the files on the internet. So now it's a matter of policy that contributors don't get full access until they've submitted something. Nothing personal. This is why I suggested a scripting task to start off with, since you don't need CVS access for that - you can just use the beta mapper's alpha. Doing SDK work without CVS access is a bit of a pain. The beta mapper's alpha is here if you're interested, though it won't help you with the SDK since it contains no code apart from scripts: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?act=a...p;f=31&id=7 (I think you should be able to access that forum?) Still, you should be able to test this in vanilla D3. Make a simple room in the Doom 3 editor (there are a bunch of tutorials around on the internet - doom3world.org is a good place to start) with a really high roof. Start it up, press Ctrl-Alt-~ to display the console, type noclip, and toggle the console off again. Then fly up to the ceiling. Spawn a zombie (using the console, see http://au.gamespot.com/pc/action/doom3/hints.html for instructions) so that he falls down to the ground below. In vanilla D3, he will land there without taking damage. Your task is then to modify the SDK so that he dies if he falls from a great height. BTW, as for using your compiling SDK: I find that the easiest way is to take your compiled gamex86.dll file (should be in the releasedll or debugdll folder) and copy it to the root D3 directory (where DOOM3.EXE is). That way it overrides the DLL for *all* mods you have installed, so be sure to delete it if you install a mod - the Dark Mod, or any other mod.

Authors use pen names for various reasons. As for Robert Jordan, he uses a different pen name for each style of writing he's done. He used to write bodice-ripping romance novels under the name Reagan O'neal. Back when TEOTW et. al. were really popular and I was reading them, my wife picked up what looked like an historical fiction book by Reagan O'neal (psudonym of Robert Jordan! - more milking) on a trip we were on with my mother in law. To pass the time driving I started reading the book out loud to everyone- that is until about three pages in- yep- there was a literal bodice rip, and the book went straight into the trash.

The public forums are slow, sure - but the private ones are a buzz of activity, so there are people around. Personally I don't use IRC. I know from experience that if I do enter a chatroom, my productivity immediately drops to zero and stays there. Same with instant messaging. It's a distraction which I can't afford. Forums suck up a lot of my time too, but at least they don't interrupt!

Noblewoman: Female mitten hands New legs New AF http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=5050 Citywatch: Legs rigs fixed (not on cvs yet) - the lower legs needed to be weighted into the upper legs in the back.

Just as a note, here is a link to a website trying to create a bank of common creative license sound effects. We may qualify for usage of some of the sounds. Also, the creators are attributed so we could track them down. Also, the forums have tons of discussions on the issues we are talking about here, with input from copyright attorneys etc... http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/

Having worked for companies that have seen patent and trademark lawsuits, this is not a small deal. If anyone with a lawyer thinks they can convince a jury in the US that their copyright was infringed, they will bring a suit to garnish wages from whomever of us have jobs. There are district courts in Texas that are very amenable to such cases, and they will be filed there. Note that all they have to do is convince a jury that their revenues may have been diminished... not that the party breaking copyright actually made any revenue. Also keep in mind that if any materials or planning related to copyright infringement were hosted on a service, such as these forums, they could go after them as well, so long as the country they are in has a copyright treaty with the US, which most countries do. Basically they will go after whomever has the deepest pockets. Please be careful about this as I don't want to have to drop off of the project for legal reasons. Yes, usually this just begins as a cease and desist letter, but you never know where it will go from there. What I would reccommend doing is using the collections of sounds as a basis for getting ideas on what types of things can be recorded. Sometimes you can listen to a sound effect and say.. ah, they are hitting a slinky with a ruler! (not that the sound is good if you do that). Also, as many of the people here do, I've got considerable experience with making sounds using combinations of synthesizers, trackers, filters, and effects in Buzz. If there are particular sounds we want, I may be able to make some using some simple samples and a bunch of effects.

I was chatting with namespace and Shaderman last night on IRC, I think they are basically Doom 3 which is good. We are so far ahead of GtkR for Doom 3 support that I don't think there will be much code worth merging, although namespace has written a new version of the OBJ export plugin which might be of interest. Shaderman also has an interesting feature which allows tagging of textures, so you can search for "all of the red textures" irrespective of how they are organised in the VFS tree (provided you have added the correct tags, there is no automated identification). I didn't ask what the precise political issues were, particularly in a public GtkRadiant channel, but I am fairly sure we will learn sooner or later.

You may want to look at this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=5035 There are new rigs for animations with heads & weapons for Maya & Motion Builder. Full body IK too.

All of the current AI now have full body ik for animation purposes. Included in the rar archive are files for maya (mb) and motion builder (fbx). There's a maya binary with no ik for fbx importing. Each character has their own folder with 3 files each. Original files: http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/models/In...ask_animref.rar Updated citywatch (stand alone): http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/models/In...tch_AnimRef.rar Files (AnimRef_idles are posed in the idle position): AnimRef_idle.mb (maya binary with full body ik - fbik) AnimRef_idle.fbx (motion builder with ik ready for animation) fbx_import.mb (af_posed ready for fbx importing with no ik) All character have their weapons & heads attached via parent constraints. The Maya version with fbik has floor contacts for the feet. Known Issues: When importing an fbx, the origin might be resized. Follow these directions in Maya: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...ost&p=93477 The head & sword mesh might be off their original position in Motion Builder if exported from Maya. In Motion Builder use the Navigator window & double click the constraints. Uncheck "Active" then click the "Snap" button: This will align the mesh to their proper position. The head & sword mesh might be off in Maya. Delete the parent constraints in Maya, reposition meshes then reconstrain. You may also want to look at oDDity's Motion Builder tutorial: http://www.pixelwerks.be/pictures/MB_tut_01.avi The full body ik (humanIK1) in Maya is parented under the skeleton so if we need to move the origin for walking/running then the fbik will move with the whole thing:

I just received a PM on TTLG from namespace, one of the GtkRadiant developers, who said that they have some issues (of the political variety) with the administration of the project and that he and a couple of other developers (Topsun and Shaderman) are going to be leaving. Namespace was very positive about the development (and documentation) of DarkRadiant and expressed an interest in working together to continue the Radiant legacy. I suggested that he register on these forums, and could perhaps get set up with permissions to view this forum so that discussion and cooperation could take place. What form such cooperation will take remains to be seen -- although namespace wishes to support older games, including a personal project, I mentioned our goals for modularising DarkRadiant so that other games could be supported via different plugins (rather than different code paths in the main executable).

It's a forum with an off-topic section and a thriving community (even if the community is mostly made up of members that hold most of their conversations in private forums - it's thriving behind the scenes!). These things will happen.

Menu Issues: --check out updated fog swirl on mission_success and mission_failure. Possibly add an extra layer to the material -- replace 'back' text with Main Menu button -- add parchment for load/save screen -- sort out credit screen (low priority) -- create overlay for up/down arrows -- modify colour of text highlight -- explore Carelton scale--possibly need bold version -- confer with Ish about control functionality --look at mouseover effect for input 'box' http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...amp;#entry94984 As well: -- work on design of New Game screen

It may be a closed beta, but he had posted the link on the polycount.com forums which are public, and did not restrict who could download it. I'm trying to find the links to the forum's topic, but I can't find his thread. It had some cool screenshots. EDIT: Found it http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?C...an=0&page=0 Some screens: Here's a quote from one of his posts:

Heya Orbweaver, Might have another hand for you. Dark Mod <darkmod_apply@hotmail.com> wrote: Hi parsonsbear, I received your email about wanting to help. What type of programming background do you have? Just need some details so I can create an application thread for you. If you're interested, there might be some programming for you to do on the main mod...but if Dark Radiant is your true interest, we can certainly use the help there as well. I can't find your username on our forums. Which forum are you registered on as parsonsbear? Thanks. N.H.

Actually it's pretty easy to get things to spin, it's just one line in the projectile def to give it a launch angular velocity. As for special mapper-placed tags for everthing to take cover behind, we usually try to avoid solutions that make the mapper place tags everywhere for things, when possible. If we did that for everything, the mapper would spend all their mapping time placing special-case objects. Also, the AI should be able to know that they can take cover by going around a corner if the player is on the other side, but it would get pretty tedious to tag every corner in the map.

I was wondering about the "rudimentary 'take cover' behaviour" will it be anything like the behaviour in fear? cause what they did in fear is giving the items in the 3dworld id-tags so that the AI knew what to do if there was any object in the neighbourhood to take cover with. This also reduced the need for raw CPU processing power. If you could implement something like that then you could focus on the animations of the characters instead of writing something like this behaviour completely anew. greetz p.s. i dont know anything from coding but webbased coding, so it is rude to asume it will be easy to implement into the dark mod and you probably have your priorities somewhere else p.s.s. the update is looking good

greebo - if you need some grave models for your map, you might want to use one of the models I have made recently. They should be on CVS by the end of this year. Take a look at this thread to see what's in the set so far: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...ost&p=91243

This is the problem with the world. If I had spoken that out loud no one would have corrected me Next time i'll just cry.

I didn't see anything on the forums about the compass designs so I made a poll. Here's the reference pics for a compass: http://www.100thpenn.com/compass.jpg http://www.pewter.it/400X400/0096601B.jpg http://www.smartstart-toys.co.uk/images/Compass.JPG http://www.stanleylondon.com/compass.jpg http://gallery.hd.org/_tn/std/maths/compas...OVray-by-BG.gif http://www.qpindia.com/pcat-gifs/products-small/compass.jpg If anyone has other suggestions or reference pics, post it here.

drumple's info on getting .roqs in game is on wiki http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3504&hl=