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The jar has reduced Fingernail to tears! Okay, going serious for a second. The next thing I'm gonna try for is a good light fixture, somewhat similar to what's already in my map but far more detailed. Would you say that 250-300 triangles is good target to aim for?

If there is anything I'd comment on it'd be the orchestra hit sample you use in the first track, I think something that sounds a bit more lonely and eerie might fit better. Everything else sounds great, and I'd probably use it in a map or two. One thing you'll need to keep in mind is that with Thief you rarely ever have true single tracks, instead you have individual pieces that play at certain points and can mix together easily and produce something that sounds great. Like if you were to start a mission you'd only hear a bassy rumble, but as you approach the mansion you intend on breaking into you'd eventually have a weird warble sound come in on top of the rumble that'd go away if you were to back off and go return to the starting point. It's all locational...if that makes sense.

The artwork is pretty damn good, great for concept drawings. As for mapping it seems you've got a good grasp of how to design levels and looks like you're comfortable with the editor. The map itself seems pretty good overall, but it could do with some throwaway details and some subtle lighting to liven things up a bit, and it couldn't hurt to do some more work on the walls here and there to break up some monotony... I'd say you gots da skizills. I'll ask Fingernail if he thinks we could use another mapper at this point and see what he says.

Black Cat Games used more or less the same strategy. They got rid of the obvious names that are copywrited but kept what cant be copywrited (potions, flashbombs, water arrows, etc). Looking at it I would say that Thievery only misses hammers. There is even a map with lookalike haunts complete with blessed arrows.

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.

I have no doubt about that. And while seeing a full courtyard through a transparent pane of glass is undeniably cool, you always have to take performance issues into consideration. You might have so much detail down there that an opaque window would be the better option. I'd rather go with highly detailed areas that are somewhat closed off from each other, IE you can't see inside a house from outside or outside from the inside, than sparse open areas. Visportals can help with this a little bit, but a few sacrifices will have to be made to make sure it runs well for everybody. I'm not saying we can't use transparent windows, we'll just have to be selective about how we use em. I remember a map for Vamp I made that had almost 2000 brushes on display in a single screen...ran great on my comp, but it crashed the game for alot of other people. Since then I've tried learning how to keep something that looks good in check with it's performance.

Your texture alignment is a little rough in some places, and the lighting could use some work, but other than that it's a damn good looking map. The props in particular are really slick.

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.

First specular map I've done... This door is FINISHED! WOOO! Edit: And this...

If I had a whole suite of textures like this door I'd be able to whip up an awesome map in no time. But as it is, this is what I have done so far...as you can see I'm taking my time with it. The normalmapping process begins...slowly. I can also add in any other type of background so we can make multiple doors using this overlay. And yeah...I know...I took the handle out...I suck. Didn't wanna have to deal with it. Fingernail: It's not bad so far, but your scale is off. Your windows should be about the same size as the door, if not smaller. I have a fairly good roof texture in the package you could use in place of that brick floor...it was one of the few I couldn't get to work so you'll have to screw with it to get it ingame. Edit: Oh yeah! How could I forget my...GLOWY WINDOWS!!! I'm beginning to think that fireplace looks like crap, too.

Make a specular map of the door, with the metal bits slightly shiny.

Obviously I've been interested in this mod from the start but since I'm involved in some other issues I've not made any comments. The screens you've show so far are very nice. I don't recognise anyone on the team from other mods or FMs except ModeTwo from TUT and NB. How experienced are you guys? And how are you finding it? My main query is - what will you do if we get the TDS editor? There will be a bit of a software conflict with people making FMs for TDS whilst you guys work on this. Given that you have stated that this will only be out next year at the earliest do you not think that many of your ideas will be overtaken? Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to bring a negative vibe - I'm just being realistic. I don't have Doom3 and won't get it until XMas at the earliest (as that is probably when I'll get my new gfx card). I have a NB/TDS map/FM in the works. It's really a SP FM but I can adapt it to NB MP. If the TDS editor is released I will make it for that 1st. But now I have an MP version designed I want to take to NB eventually anyway. And if there is no TDS editor then I'd love to make it for The Dark Mod as that is the only way the real atmosphere and plot will come out. Can someone explain the SDK/editor score with Doom3? What comes with it and what can you DL? And what are it's limitiation, what is it's scope?

Needs to be cleaned up towards the center, it's obvious that the texture was flipped down the center and it looks a little weird. Beyond that it's good. I've started adding basic single color surfaces today, stuff that looks alot like Thief 3 textures actually. Kinda come to realise that we need to put some restriction cap in on this, otherwise we'll end up with a pk4 file that's almost a gig in size by the time we're done...I'm adding these things left and right just for variety. But anyway, it looks like this. We also need to resize these textures properly. Almost all of them are 512x512, which probably contributed to me oversizing my map. Thing is 256x256 makes it look sloppy and low res and the normalmapper doesn't like 384x384 for some reason...

another wooden texture - alrady uploaded it on the ftp: http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/Textures/wdn-panel.ceil.jpg I think it'll look good as ceiling and as a panel. the only problem will be the map for it, cauze of the detailed carved frame. looking forward to see this ingame - I made the texture using a photo of my grandma's desk she's got some really nice furniture in her living room - I'll make some more textures with suff of this room.

Whoa, holy hell...my scale is way off. I figured that the characters chest would be about even with the top of the wood panels. Guess that explains why the little scale marker on the Z-axis window is smaller than it was in Vampire...Doomguy is alot shorter than what I'm used to. Oh well, it won't be that difficult to fix. Also, the reason it leaks isn't because the walls are too thin, walls that are 2 grid units thick are about the average for Id's maps, it's because my lights are too big at the moment. I'm still learning the in's and out's of D3's lighting, and right now they're too large considering the size of the room. I have cleaned up the geometry in my most recent mockup, though...so it shouldn't have any gaps. Edit: Now that I think about it, the fact that the lights have to be bigger than what they need to be might be a good indication that the room is too large...I'll have it fixed up over the next few days. Edit 2: New map (non shrunk, what's shown in my most recent screenshots) is available here. I would've uploaded it to our regular FTP, but I can't seem to access it at the moment. Since the geometry is cleaner than it was in the first rev no BSP errors should pop up.

Renz: Nice as your room is, and 1337 though your skillz be, there are some problems. Did you test the map in game mode? You can't have done, seeing as it is not buildable in it's current state. Even though I added an end wall, it still 'leaked', because the other walls were too thin. Make them thicker. And no gaps. Also, the scale is a bit off, as seen here: I know walk-in fireplaces might be considered a luxury. Anyway, otherwise it looks great. Put in a scientist for Great Scalability.

Specular maps are easy. My mini-specular tutorial. Go back to your diffuse (colour) map. Desaturate it (greyscale). Use brightness/contrast to alter the shininess and lack of shininess (black = matte, white = very shiny), dependant on the material. Black out, add in manually any extra bits you want especially shiny/matte. Then save it with the suffix _s and add the line "specularmap doom3/base/textures/blahblah" to the material definition.

Well, please conside me as a tester when the Time comes, I also have some Great map ideas, that might work. Thx for your time.

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.

Yeah, those 2 blueish white wood textures do have a more colonial feel to em, but I threw em in cuz they fit with the theme of the map I'm intending to build... Which is somewhat inspired by this... If it ends up being too specific and doesn't fit with the rest of the textures I'll end up taking it out or tweaking it til it does.

My system specs: AMD Athlong XP 2000+ 512MB DDR (Semi-soon to be updated to 1GB) Geforce 4 TI 4200 SB Live! Value Gentoo Linux running kernel 2.6.7 I can set up a mantis system with all the catagories and stuff if you provide me with a place to set this up. (I think mOdE might be willing to host it, i'll ask him when I see him.) But I think you guys should start building stuff first. It's too soon to set up a bug reporting system as of yet. Catagories should be something like, Gameplay, Map, Sound, GUI, Display.

Hey, thanks for the texture. I think I might try and tackle your stained glass windows next and see what I can come up with. Pretty soon, counting both your textures and the ones I've done so far, I might have enough to make a good sized mockup map. But if you can, see if you can make some bumpmaps to help me out with. Photosourced textures usually need to be tweaked alot more than the Blade textures do, so it'd be alot faster if I had an extra hand doing em. Edit: Actually, it'd be a good idea if everyone making textures (which I think is just Blackthief, possibly Alexius, and I) were to get together and started organizing everything. It'll mean alot less work on down the road if we keep everything in order and pack the textures the same way and whatnot.

your map looks great man yes the texture isn't perfect, however I thought it would look a little bit more old and medieval that way let's move this into the art-forum...

Nevertheless you can already think about what you can test and how and also how to report it. Performance, Art, Map glitches, mismatching objectives, Gameplay, Sound, etc. Of course it would be good to know what system you have. It doesn't help if we have 30 testers all with similar system specs. This information can probably be posted in the (hopefully) soon to be created information board where we can store non-discussable project information.

A level design board would be great. Even though we've still got a bit to do before we reach the point where we start mapping hardcore, it'd still be good to throw around some ideas and have everyone comment on what's cool or not. I've already got a great idea for a map, and it'd be cool to have a good place to talk about it at.