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A new texture won't look like a burnt object though. I tried making one for the books and it just looked like a black book. It would have to be a separate model. And if we're basically talking about some kind of 'pile of ash' model that can be reused for any kind of burned object, then alright, that -is- easy. But if we want to make a burned version of all of our models, that's a lot of work.

Hmm, so the edges need to look less intact. What about a skin that applies some alpha transparency at the edges and corners to make it look like chunks are missing? Or if you don't want it to be completely missing, but want it to look like a hole that goes down to a deeper layer, we could put two texture layersi n the model, one below the other, and alpha out the top one to create holes. Don't know if that would look right though. As for whether it's worth doing.. well, we might be gettin a bit carried away. We don't have models for the water arrow, fire arrow, gas arrow, noisemaker arrow, etc, and we're thinking about making new models to support the player sitting there and throwing stuff in fire to see what happens. This would be a pretty low priority compared to existing stuff that we don't have modeled yet.

wow.... i want to frame that and put it on my wall. can you do us a favor and tell us what's currently under development then? and is there any way that I can help, cuz I can't model, skin, or map. I can write but it looks like you have plenty there, all I'm really good at is coming up with UI and interface stuff which isn't exactly a problem for you all, that and fleshing out game worlds i'm not bad at being an amature game designer myself

I fired up TDS the other night to check out the cats, not only do they turn as if they were rotating around a pole but the humans do the same thing when they are searching around for you! They run, stop,then rotate like they were standing on a Sit N Spin (a childs toy here in the U.S.) I can understand why animals would be a bit more difficult to model, given they usually have four legs and complicated movement patterns but holy crabcakes Eidos couldnt even do the HUMANS realistically.

Could you not allow us to see into the developement forums and watch the debates unfold?

I think I posted this in the other thread, but I can't find it now, maybe just going crazy from lack of sleep, but: If the skin doesn't work that well, what about a charring decal like what currently happens when you shoot stuff with the fire arrow? Are you doing a normal map with these skins? Maybe a normal map would help convey the illusion of a burned book better, because it could have random height variations, indentations where it charred all the way through the cover, etc. I'm just wondering because you said it looked unconvincing and you wanted to do a model that's more eaten up, maybe we could do what we do for our other models, create a high-poly version and use that to create a normal map?

Hmm, a burnt skin doesn't work very well after all. The model is too crisp and sharp for a burnt texture to look believable--just comes across looking like a black-coloured book. So maybe some kind of charred book model is the way to go...although again, it won't really match every book model. I wonder if it's even needed? We could just use the monster gib effect to have the book 'burn' up and disappear if it's thrown in a fire.

I don't know about this. In the drugstore (don't know a better term for Bauhaus ), you can get fake fire. I think it is called "flame light" in english. Basically this is built with a small ventilator in the bottom, and a read light pointing at the "flames" the flames itself are made out of floppy paper which are jumping around because of the ventilation. I saw these flamelights in a store, and on first glance they looked pretty real, until I looked closer. Actually I thought more about the fire arrow. It has such a big explosion and smoke that you cxan easily swap the model while the smoke dissipates. Having a blending would be even cooler. This would be a nice touch if you drop a book into fire. You might even loose information with hits, if you have a frobable parchment, which contains the number to the safe, accidently dropped into the fireplace. Yes. Something like this also came to mind. Assuming it has particles.

Yeah, BT made it as a complete model with an animated texture...instead of a particle effect. Either way would be valid really....except it would mean that all our torches would need to be skinned with animated textures...but since we have the particle effects editor at our disposal. it would be a waste not to use it. Yup, it's an animated texture. For testing, you could just swap out that texture for a non animated, burned out texture. Yup, the torches have all been handled by particle effect entities right now. I'm working on a little room for a rope climbing scene and I have a torch there that I want to douse. I'll see if I can set it up to work.

Yeah, I also think a skin could do the job, no need for a separate model. We'll need a "snuffed out" skin for every light source that can be snuffed out and that has built-in textures for flame. That skin needs to replace the flame part with a transparent alpha or something. @NH: I'm not sure torches would look good with an animated texture flame. It seems like flames based on 2d planes wouldn't scale up well to the size of a torch. Although I dunno, is it done in a way that you can look at it from every angle? I've never paid close to the flame attention when rotating around our candles before. That's an interesting idea. You would expect the book to start burning (i.e., blending in the charred texture) in the part that's closest to the hottest part of the flame and the burned part would spread out from there. Is it possible to write a shader to blend the texture over some limited radius that increases with time, and define where it's centered? That might be do-able with the shader parms you can pass in. [EDIT: Btw, I see another mission objective possibility: You are paid to sneak in to the home of someone who's blackmailing your employer, steal the blackmail material, and burn it (if they pay you enough not to turn around and start blackmailing them yourself ) ] IMO burned books probably have lower priority than the snuffed out skin though. Btw, for the video, if we set up the water stim on a torch instead of a candle, we could just add the deactivation of the particle effect to the response script, and we wouldn't have to wait for a snuffed candle skin, right? Or does the torch model also have flame embeded in the texture?

That was what I thought, but I haven't looked so closely. I guess I was assuming it is a model, because when I select the entity, I always was under the impression of the full candle being selected, but it might be a mistake from me. So it is a full model? I was assuming that from the way it behaved. Is it an animation? Because I thought it flickers also. Doing this should be easy. I would oly need the charred model of a torch. Or if it already is and just a particle effect attached, then we can already do this with the current code. Assuming that particles are interfaced to the scriptengine, which I think it is.

OK. I must check that because I haven't seen them. That's why somebody would have to texture it appropriately. Also we don't need to have a complete charred copy for every book. If we have one or two books charred, and some generic brunt books, we could do this and it would still look believable. You don't need to have a burned version of everything. If I have some stools made of wood and have some charred logs, then it would look as if this models burnt down completly that you don't see much from the original model. That would be nice. Thx!

Yes, definately. There is really no need to create a completely separate model for such things, just use the skin swapping available in D3...you could even make the book burn slowly in the fire, by using the 'blend' feature.

Isn't the flame particle on the candle a separate entity? You should just be able to kill the particle effect. That's how it's done in the previous games. I haven't looked at that candle, so perhaps it's setup differntly. If the model itself is skinned to look lit, it would likely be just as easy to create an alternate skin and swap that instead of the entire model. Edit: Ahhh, yes...I see now. I just looked at the model in the editor. That's actually a rather nice way to do flames. Perhaps we should consider doing that for torches as well. Has a nice, warm effect. Then we could just create an 'unlit' skin to swap out. I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it of course...it may be better to actually use a 'particle effect' rather than a particle texture. For the video Spar, it would be great if I could douse a full sized torch. Torches have been using true particles, so it shouldn't be much of a stretch to kill the entity placed on the torch. It would just need to be 'linked' to the light somehow.

There are burned logs in the props/fireplace folder. If you're planning on having books that can be 'burned' by stims, won't they have to match the original book model? We have a thin book and a thick book...if someone throws a thin book into a fire and it is replaced by a thick burned book, that won't look very good. The texture would also have to be entirely black, so that no original colour shows through, otherwise we'll have green books turning blue after being burned, which again won't look so hot. I think that's probably why most games don't include burning models (except in very specific cases) as it's a lot of work to come up with burned versions of every conceivable model. It might be easier to just create a charred skin that can be used for the book models we already have. I can do that if you want one.

What would the burned books be for? And when you say snuffed candle, do you mean an existing candle model without the flame or an entirely new model?

If some of our modelers feel bored I would appreciate it if we could get a snuffed candle and some burned books. They should be derived from the existing models, so I can use the to swap them with stim/response. This would be a higher priority. I could use some stand-in model for now, but it would be good to have this in the video, so it should be made with priority.

It seems to me that the success of many mods is based on public interest. my suggestion is take a bunch of screenies and have sort of a pic of the day section, even it it's just a texture, or anything like that to show us somthing we haven't seen, even if it's just one of the guard models from a different angle... you could prolly take 20 or 30 in just 10 minutes and keep a months' worth of pics... but yah, you're gaining interest here fast, but you're losing it slowly over time, you need somthign that people will keep checking back often but as is, the forums are slow, aand news posts are very rare, but if you posted somthing, ANYTHING once a week, even if it's a link to a forum thread of interest etc, you could keep public interest up... just my 0.02 worth.

Well, we don't really feed thief-thecircle.com any specific info. Add to that the fact that all of their dedicated staff are essentially away or inactive right now, which means that any updates are done by the ttlg.com admins, GBM or Dave or Digi. And they have a whole forum and site to manage, so it's not surprising that not much happens there. Also, you could say that we're not exactly flavour of the month in GBM's book. Although I feel he's probably warming somewhat now he realises we're around for the long term, he was initially annoyed at what I would describe our buoyant and assured attitude, and he might call egotism on the TTLG forums. There is actually a mini hosted-site about dark mod on thief-thecircle.com, but it's rather old now. I imagine we'll get a forum when it's released.

More like the PDA, although you could also read them in-game by picking up the model (though you couldn't turn pages).

Has anyone picked any of these to model yet? If not i could do the stockades, Candlabra, Shovel, Anvil & Hammer. BTW can someone give me a link to where the discussions about the current animations that are needed is at. I also need to get with the modeler of the chars to get the models for me to animate, and a list of what animations are needed. Thanks Gameking

Well, we seem to be working our way through the backlog of models needing to be skinned, so time to put out some new requests! Some of these are left over from previous posts. The new ones are to fill in some areas that we haven't got many models for yet. Standing Candelabra http://www.cowboyindian.com/waai1540.jpg http://www.aoweb.com/images/2622600-R1-043-20.jpg Curtains -- (never uploaded by DeepOmega) (open and closed) http://www.pushby.com/tomas/img/lrg/mint-drawn-curtains.jpg Candlestick holder Example #1 http://www.condellceramics.com/images/g1946.jpg Folded towels/clothing (a small pile of folded laundry to stack on a dresser, or beside a bathtub) http://www.vet.ohio-state.edu/sa/atcenter/...32/image08.jpeg Hanging goose(plucked or not, to hang in a kitchen or butcher shop) http://collections.ic.gc.ca/bulletin/num1/...s/b1william.jpg Chimney http://svenart.3dk.org/ http://www.historiclandmarks.org/images/chimney-pots-3.jpg http://www.englishantiqueimports.com/chimn...Chimney_200.jpg Door knocker http://www.paintquality.com.au/press/press...r%20OS17078.jpg http://www.sunbronze.com/165.jpg Shovel -- http://members.memlane.com/gromboug/shovel.gif Anvil -- http://www.blackiron.us/graphics/anvil-parts-txt-1.gif Forger's hammer -- http://www.homesteadheritage-homesteading....ages/anvil3.jpg Broomstick -- http://www.kestrel.org/vanilla/n0000024.jpg Torture Chair -- http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/adventures/ka....16.42-4519.jpg Stocks -- http://sca.org.au/abertridwr/Abertrydwr%20...in/Stocks02.jpg Brazier -- http://www.sandylodge.demon.co.uk/images/brazier.jpg Gravestone -- http://www.mass-doc.com/images/mgoose2.jpg http://www.kinfolks.info/arner/churches/zi...ille/jacob1.jpg Spectacles -- http://www.silverspiderforge.com/images/spectacles.jpg

The noisemaker arrow is ready to be coded. Because it will bounce off walls and not stick in, it has to be a moveable entity. To make it work as a moveable, I need an arrow model with a collision model, like BlackThief made for the chairs. If we don't have a model for the noisemaker already, would it be possible for someone to whip up a collision model (either .cm or embedded in the model if possible) for the broadhead arrow? We haven't needed it up 'till now, since the broadhead has been either a projectile that has its collision model defined mathematically, or it's been a frobable item that doesn't need to collide with the world. We do need it now though if we want the Noisemaker to drop to the floor after it hits a wall, bounce off walls, etc.

This thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=1650 lists all the animations we'll need. Oddity and Domarius are currently working on some, so best check with them about what has already been done and what should be done next.

Ah. I only checked the players field of view (that was some time ago) and I had the impression that the camera was independent of the model. But it might be that this is only in case of the player and the AI is handled differently. I only assumed that it is similar.