Search the Community

Just wanted to say, Hello! From reading through various posts in the forums it seems like a great community and I hope to become a part of it. So I got the hankering for some Thief as of late and stumbled on TDM through some googling. After purchasing Doom 3 through Steam and instaling TDM, I have been nostalgiacly playing through many of the FMs and have also decided to d/l the Radiant editor and start making a mission, maybe many, we'll see. As it turns out also, I just started (today!) my 1 week vacation from work and intend to dive in to the Radiant editor and am currently going through the A-Z wiki on it. A bit of background on me, I 'used' to work in application support till the economic crash a couple years ago and was laid off and am now running a machining center at a local machine shop, using Mastercam daily, 2D/3D stuff and have always wanted to make a mission/game, and decided since I've always enjoyed the Thief series and stealth gameplay so much, this is where I would start. After getting to my third year in Mechanical Technology I changed my major to Information Technology (should have went with straight Computer Science but ahhh hindsight). I've always loved building things and designing things and also really enjoy computers, art, audio, and the entire visual experience as presented to a user. I have created a couple playable maps before using the older source engine editor so I'm vaguely familiar with 3D modeling, skyboxes, lighting, AI pathing, etc. That's been over 10 years ago though. I got familiar with 3dsmax, ProE, Autocad, and Mastercam in my first major during school so that helps a bit when familiarizing with a new editor and as previously mentioned I've dabbled around in the Valve Source editor. I'm also very much looking forward to the Crucible of Omens campaign created by the marvelous talent at TDM and would like to help in any way I can once I'm familiar with the Radiant engine. I can also do many many voices, I've often thought about moving out to Cali from Indiana and finding work in voice-overs, voice acting, etc. All this started as a youngster with little friends, time on my hands, and imaginary friends. Wow that's hard to admit. So anyway, I've been working on a shadowy Garrett voice, and can do guards and some women characters with old, old english, gruff, slippery, sneaky, terrifying, voices and personalities. Just thought I'd mention that as it may be a way that I could contribute early on and would also enjoy. So anyway, too much about me and not enough A-Z wiki, back to the tutorial! Glad to be here and hope for good things to come.

Melan posted these screenshots of a UT 3 map featuring some amazing architecture and steampunk over at ttlg. By now, I also checked it out ingame (download here) and besides the exaggerated cubemaps on the window textures, I really got nothing to criticize. This map is simply outstanding! So I was thinking, maybe we should try to get that guy's meshes for TDM. They would really fit in well and would be a great addition to TDM. While playing I couldn't stop dreaming about mantling/rope-ing through those building-roofs... His Readme says: Sounds a little bad, but we should definitely try to ask his explicit permission in my opinion. I don't know though what he means by "our permission" in that last paragraph. I guess it's just a typo, but it could also mean that the content belongs to Epic Games, because he seems to have worked there. Anyway, I think it's worth a shot... We'd just need to make it appealing to him. Tell him about the whole project and its current state, etc. I don't know how much effort it would be to convert the meshes of that map into a id Tech 4 compatible format though and also in what constitution his meshes are. It might very well be that he modeled whole buildings in an external app, instead of just their components. Who can tell by looking at screenshots? Many of the structures are distributed over the whole map though, so it's a good guess he designed those meshes very modular.

By the way, if any modeler is bored and has nothing to do, I'd be interested to get an MD5 mesh of our rowboat. I want to try and make a controllable boat vehicle, just for fun. As far as I can tell, this requires an AF structure for the boat, which requires an MD5 mesh of it. The simplest verson would just have one AF body like a rectangular prism and you'd sit on top of the whole boat. A more complicated version would have 5 AF bodies, one for each side of the boat. Then you could actually sit inside and the sides would be physically modeled. I think that means 5 joints, maybe one at the center of each side of the boat. These joints aren't going to be used for animating or anything, they're solely so that a simple AF can be built up around it. That's one way of getting around the "no concave collision models" problem: Make an AF where each body represents a side of the concave model, and have rigid constraints between all the bodies. Once we have an AF of the boat, our existing vehicle class can be used for it, and I can write some simple code that applies direct impulses to the boat based on player controls, which should move it thru the water. Hopefully with minimal motion sickness. A future generation might have moving oars that work kind of like the wheels on D3's vehicles, but I don't even want to attempt that at this early stage.

Attention animators: This should not change things significantly for you, other than the name change to the export file: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=189597

For the last 1-2 weeks the forums have been really slow and unresponsive for me, when I type a post half the time it just sits there etc.. is anyone else having the same issues..?

Well, it's no wonder we can't copy joints from the main skeleton to the head rig. The animation rotations are screwed up. entityDef atdm:ai_thief { "inherit" "atdm:ai_humanoid" "ragdoll" "guard_base" "model" "tdm_ai_thief" "def_head" "head_thief" "head_joint" "Head" "head_thief" "4 0 0" "copy_joint Neck" "Neck" "copy_joint Head" "Head" This allows the main body animations to control the head joints (as well as the mesh). With this, there'll be no more open mesh between the body and the head when AI look around. When the neck moves on the body, the mesh on the def_head will move too. Seamless integration between the body & the head. This is the shot of the thief's main skeletal pose (used for the mesh rig): Everything's nice and straight. Compare that to the idle joint rotations: This is all screwed up When we use these declarations on the def files then the head mesh totally distorts because the animation rotations are totally different from the mesh. Since I've been revising the maya binaries to help future animators, I may fix this problem but this will take a while. EDIT: The copy_joint works like this: "copy_joint main-neck_joint" "head-neck_joint" "copy_joint main-head_joint" "head-head_joint"

Does anybody else have this problem? In the (European) evenings the forum is unbearable slow. The server is delivering about 8Kbyte/s, sometimes less and usually stops midwhere during loading the page. Sometimes you can't even get the index page, sometimes you can log in, but then only get half of the overview etc. In the mornings everything is snappy.

I've upgraded IPB to the latest stable version, and since this was a major upgrade (from 2.3.6) I also had to re-do the forum style. Most of the new stuff is in place, but I bet that the logo will be changed. One of the many new features in version 3 is rating of posts and also a "report spammer" ability which will make it easier to single out spam bots and ban then at sight. Hopefully this will stop some of the spam threads we've seen recently. Make sure to empty your browser cache if you're experiencing any problems. And please report any errors etc in this thread. Cheers, ~m2

I've exported the beggar mesh to md5mesh format, but I'm getting an error. The model is made up of several meshes, but three of them have the wrong number of numweights listed. For example, one lists: numweights 229 .... weight 220 23 1.000000 ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) } but the last entry is weight 220. What happened to the other 8? I know I ran into this same problem with the citywatch, but I can't for the life of me remember what I did to fix it. I've tried unwelding all the verts in the offending mesh, but that had no effect. I'm not quite sure what I should be looking for here...I know if a vert isn't weighted at all that causes an error, but a different kind of error. I'm not sure why it thinks there are more numweights than there actually are. Anyone have any guesses?

I guess I'll start this thread, was talked about in (I'll come back with link) --EDIT--I'm not having much luck finding the post this was discussed in. ------------------ Basically it has been brought up that there are really no conventions set-up being used on objects as far as polycount/shader usage. New info has been coming to light so we might as well have somewhere to discuss it. I wouldn't say this is about redoing old models as much as establishing good guidelines for new models. ------------------ Things that need discussed (I'm leaving this first post fairly wide open here as I don't know the best conventions to use). Polycount: Generally basic objects should be somewhere around 250 polys for objects that will be used alot (goblets and whatnot that have a possiblity of showing up in large numbers in one scene) Doom can handle polys quite well but 10 goblets add up polys real quick, add that to plates, silverware, tables, lights, ect... polys balloon out of control. Also it seems that it's not the polycount that matters as much on performance visually as much as polycount performance wise for pathfinding/shadowcasting,ect... AI generally range in the 2500 to 5000 poly range. So one Ai in a dining room scene could easily be 10,000+ polys plus terrain. -edit- It seems that animated polys such as Ai weigh more heavily on the system as the need to be calcutaed more often than static polys I'd say that special items. A fancy piece of loot, something that will be in a scene once could push 500 to 1500 polys. This is my personal opinion and this is not meant as a guidline so much as a discussion point. Then we have terrain objects like Pink Dot's Galleon. This is about 12,000 polys p-lus 2500 for the rigging. This seems to be before shadow mesh and collision mesh were added. Shadowmesh: This is probably one of the more important aspects, even moreso than polycount as we are working with real-time lighting. Probably any object over 250 polys (?) needs a shadow mesh that is as low poly as possible while still giving a decent looking shadow. This can improve rendering performance greatly. Collision Model: Probably second in importance, after shadow and more important than polycount. Like shadows it has a large effect on computations. Seems to be precompiled on mission load (I'm uncertain of this - someone else probably knows better than I). Again, keeping them as low poly as possible increases performance with pathfinding. Shaders: I'm not sure how this effects performance at all. There could be alot of factors and I'm interested to know exactly what the best options are. I guess I've been working so far under the assumption that it would be best to reuse existing shaders and or materials as much as possible to keep mod bloat down. But recent posts have left me a little confused. From what I'm gathering more than one shader per object can start to bog down the engine??? So say we have 3 objects on screen. Each has 2 shaders. all three share one common shader. So in all there are 4 shaders on screen. Does doom manage these as four shaders total, or 2 shaders per object resulting in 6 shaders used? Do we want to steer towards mod bloat by giving each objects one shader if possible? Or is it better overall to try and reuse shaders even if it means several shaders per object? Do shaders load at mission start or are they loaded when object is in view?

Dmap seems to ignore a shadow mesh I added to my galleon model. It's definitely there, cause I can see it in DR. (black texture with SHADOW on it). But in game, when I turn the shadow silhouette on (r_showsilhouette 1) I can see shadow detail which shouldn't be there. (exactly same as visible mesh). And I think that fps is lower now than before instead of higher. I used textures/common/shadow material for shadow mesh. Did I forget about something?