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Wow, if only there were a thread halfway down the page discussing this very subject... http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=1532

Hello all, I'm new to the forums, but this looks soooo good. When I was playing Thief: Deadly Shadows, I thought to myself... Wow if only they had used a tweaked Doom 3 engine...Lo and behold! I think once this dark mod is up and running, we can make Fms way better than the official Thief 3 and previous games. But about copyright issues... Can we not mention Garrett or Mechanists or anything? Because I was thinking about actually creating a new DS once this mod is released! (using the same storyline, videos, but changing the levels to make them much longer and way more in depth.) Anyways, keep up the great work

Merry Christmas to the DM team and everyone who visits these forums !

Right now the elite city watch/professional guard/builder guard can walk, run, draw sword, attack. I've also seen one look up at the ceiling. I think these are mostly placeholder animations, though I could be wrong. I suggest starting with the Stage 1 and 2 animations in the master list: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=1650

Against a blackjack: - Mail would do little - hold a metal mesh over your head and pound it with a rock, see if it helps. Mail is intended to protect against edged, and to a lesser extent pointed, weapons. - A helmet (the metal itself) would do little. It does help spread the force out over the contact area, for this reason it is of benefit against crushing attacks that might break skin or bone, however a blackjack, while capable of doing nasty damage in this fashion, does not use this mechanism to cause loss of consciousness. Hold a metal bowl on your head and hit it gently with a hammer - see if you still feel force of the impact. - Concussion results from the brain hitting the inside of the skull. The blackjack transfers its force into movement of the skull, so the greatest piece of protection is going to come from anything that dimishes this force, which will be from non-rigid bodies that convert the kinetic energy of the jack into distortion of their form. Hence padding under the helmet will have the greatest defensive effect against being ko'd (why bike helmets have crushable foam). However, I think it's not unreasonable to assume that most of this padding will be present on the crown of the skull, intended as a defense against overhead killing blows, and so a crack from behind against the back of the helmet by a skilled blackjack wielder would still be able to deal the necessary force. If we can accept that blackjacking will routinely knock out individuals withough causing serious harm and frequently death, then I think accepting that a helmeted guard can be knocked out requires substantially less suspension of disbelief.

I've been exporting blendshape facial expression and lip sync vertex animation from maya to to doom using a script that parsonsbear from the doom3world forums wrote. He's willing to configure and change it to best suit our needs. I'm basically beta testing it for him. This means there's no problems from the animations side of lip sync and facial expression, its up to you coding boffins to work out your end of the deal.

I was playing an FM the other day, and it got me thinking about thief and its universe. I just love how insted of having somthing that can only happen 1 way, like pushing a button, they make many ways of hitting buttons, insted of the 1 standard walk up and smack it method. What are the plans for this(if any) in TDM? Well we be able to shoot them with broadheads/moss etc(assuming they will exist in some form)? Might you even take it farther by making ANY physical object capable of hitting buttons/moving leavers? Maybe even bodies of guards? I just wonder because I grow tired of the closed in linear universe of so many games, where theres a leaver/button that isnt easy to get to, but it isnt really a leaver/button, its an object that can only be interacted with in 1 way, via activation through proximity or touch. Thats one thing Ive always been interested with in gaming/computing. The idea of building a world that operates on basic principles, where there isnt really 1 way of doing anything. Where you dont have to wonder whether or not you can do somthing, apply the basic principles to it and anything that would work will. Buttons/leavers are a simple example but they serve the purpose well. Another, slightly off topic question I had regards AI attention. I love in thief being able to use noisemaker arrows, but they have drawbacks(if you want it to be realistic). A guard would probably find this noisy ass arrow, and then realize without a doubt that there was a thief around. Are there any plans to make noise in general attract attention, not just noises from specific sources? I always thought it would be awsome if you could just throw somthing and it would cause a guard to go look, not in the "search" mode, but just in a curious non-threat mode, and after seeing the object, be on maybe a slightly higher state of suspicion, but not actually worried. It just goes back to my thoughts about how I would like games to work, where you build a system basic enough that it can expand the possible playing styles/gameplay beyond what one could do by just coding every senerio one can think of. I hope not too much of this has been discussed elsewhere, Ive been reading around on these forums a while unable to post because my registration was being silly.

I can't say if it's good enough for the game until its textured and in-game. The head looks a lot better textured than as a wireframe shaded model. I can see a lot of unnecessary geometry in there. For example, each limb section only needs one loop, while you have two or three. You also have too many lines flowng down the length of the arms, legs and body.. As long as you keep it 5k at the most, though 4 would be better since it's not a complicated mesh. That cape-thing is goign to be impossible for animating. At least put a split in the front of it, or bring in it a bit to the shoulders.

I now have a progam called customiser for facegen, which means I can make my own head mesh and UV layout and textures, import them to facegen, and then generate faces based on morphing of my own meshes. This obviously means there is no way of them knowing we used the app, since all faces will be based on my own meshes, UVs and textures. http://www.facegen.com/customizer.htm

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2955 thats where you'll find the newest version. you have to wait till an admin transforms you into a beta mapper though (damn it admins, stop being lazy! ) Welcome aboard

Yes, or any app will do. THe probelm may also be that there are some one or two point polys on the mesh, and that's why triangulaitng doesn't work, in which case you hit the 'w' key in lightwave to bring up the statistics, go into polygon mode, and make sure there is nothing but 3 pont polys in the model.

@ oDDity: That means you: 1. import the mesh from Maya to LW 2. triangulate it 3. export it back from LW to Maya 4. export from maya to game. right? BTW, Hi.

I get this sometimes as well, triangulating it in maya doesn't work for me either, so I just take it back into lightwave where I model it and triple it down. I've no idea why triangulating the mesh doesn't work in maya. Even if you take the model into a free app like blender I'm sure you can triple it and export it back to maya. I don't know what you mean by 'specific conditions' for animating and importing. The only things you need to know are that the model must be facing down the positve x axis, and for walk/run cycles, the forward movement must be applied to the origin bone, not the hips.

Hey Dark Mod team, we're watching your mod turning out better and better. Now after your first ampshots and modelrenders you seems to continue sucessfully to give them motion. Well but taht's exactly our current problem with some of our models: We, the Recall to Hell team, have had massive problems recently with exporting animated models from Maya 6. The console prints the following error message: "Copymesh: Too many vertices on a face (4)". Here's a screenshot of the error: http://img483.imageshack.us/img483/4100/spidererror1ab.jpg Logically, we assumed that triangulating the mesh would solve the problem, but it didn't. As far as the export.def file and the bone setup are concerned, we don't expect any errors there, it seems to be something about the mesh itself. Do you have any advice for us how to alter the mesh so we can finally get it ingame? And do we need specific conditions for animating and importing? That would be very kind of you! Best Greetings, RTH Team

Depends what software you're using. On 3DS, you have to make parts as seperate objects so that they can have different materials, and then just group them together. Could be another way though. That is if you wanted to use 2 existing textures. The only other way to map onto a single mesh with different textures is to have all the different textures on the one bitmap. Then use UV mapping to specify what polygons get what part of the bitmap. You'll need to do UV mapping anyway, to get the texture following the curves of the fountain, rather than the planar mapping you're currently using. I'm sure your fountain could be used once its textured well. You can always make a high-detail normal map reference version later after this one.

Well, that's a terrible and inefficent way to Uv map the head in the first place, you cna see that most of the texture space is used up around the neck, and the main part that matters at the front of the face is getting the least UV space. You want to split the face in half before uving it. Slice it down the middle of the head, not in the z axis like you were mirroring it, but in the x axis. There's no way you can UV a whole head as one big piece. He will have hair, so the seam across the skull top won't be seen, you can make the seam go behind the ears, so that only leaves a bit of seam at the nexk to smooth over. I've neevr had a problem like that isong unfold3d, so I don't know, but try spliting the mesh and see if that works.

Maybe that term is not used on foreign forums... Flooder - someone who writes useless posts.

Already happening http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101261

Try hitting up the penny arcade forums, they start congo lines for these things all the time.

That's cool, Schatten. FTP password changed back in June. Not sure if you have the new one? Check this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=609

So as not to pollute a texture presentation thread, I started a defect entry for currently oversized stuff. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?act=S...18&t=2972&st=0#

they are less complex, but very different. for example unfold3d doesn't accept meshes that are split into several parts - that's not a big problem for character models, because usually all parts of a organic body are connected to each other. props, like tables and chairs for example consist of several parts - a simple table is actually just 5 boxes - so you have got 5 meshes. of course you could model it as one mesh, but then you'll need a lot more polygons. if you coding guys don't believe me, try it out yourself and unwrap one of our prop models with unfold3d - at least my version 3.0.9 doesn't accept a single prop-model - maybe there's a new version out there, that is able to do it.

Yeah. If you checked the posts from the other guys who were supporting me, they were the oines that actually contributed some code or knowledge to the forum, while most others, backing son_of_sam2 were noobs themselve. Well, I don't really frequent the board much anymore. There is no point. I do look there quite often, but this is more out of boredom when all the other forums on other sites dried out and I have to wait for something. I don't really expect much in tems of actual info. Currently the most hottest topic apparently are wether VC2005 is nice or not. What can you do?

What about these: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2109

Err, you are aware that Oddity has done several Belcher models already, right? http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...=626&hl=belcher They're not quite done yet according to Oddity, but we do have them :/