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@Dram: The crates are there, but they don't work. If you try to spawn them the map crashes when it tries to load the CM. Our cubical crates have too many polies to work as a clipmodel for a moveable (I checked it out and apparently they have some extra polies at the seams of the faces to make it look more believable or something) @OrbWeaver: I don't know what steps are necessary beyond just putting it in the model and texturing it with common/clip (or common/collision, can never remember which). Dram has done it before though, so maybe he can tell us.

I would much rather do it with a model than a brush, if it works. Do we have documentation on how to do it this way? I can't quite see how the stuff about converting to func_clipmodel and exporting as CM would work if the clipmodel is part of the mesh.

I wouldn't say it's next to useless. It's great when you want to mock up a quick windowframe or do hardwood floors. But I've noticed that the more complex a model becomes, the less I tend to use it.

Ah I can see now how 110% would work for what you wanted. That's a good image I can use as reference too. DO you mean the eyes at the current crouched model height, or standing upright?

If the couch is a static, there's no limit on how complicate the CM can be (right now it's using every tri on the couch rendermodel as a tri in the CM). Doom3 has specific limitations on collision models for moveable items, not all collision models. Maybe it can be concave, I'm not sure, but it does deinitely have to obey the limit of 16(?) faces, and we can't change that. Doom3 physics is all collision based, so every time you move around a moveable, it has to take the clipmodel for the moveable and mathematically solve for when any part of the clipmodel will collide with anything else in the physical world. That's probably why they have that limit, but who knows. Again, these are the limitations (from the CM tutorial thread) : "max vertices = 32" "max edges = 32" "max polygons = 16" ""max edges per polygon = 16" "The collision model must be an enclosed hull. Dangling polygons or" "edges are not allowed." You can have multi-clipmodel static entities in Doom3, but I don't know if it would work for moveables. You might have to bind two moveables together and make a prefab to get that effect. So a valid question might be : Do we want people to be able to move the couch, or shoot between the legs of the couch? We might have to choose.

I assume you had the gamma tweaked correctly on the LCD? I've just recently made the jump from a 19" CRT to a 21" widecreen LCD, and once I set everything up properly I haven't had a problem playing dark games (Thief, Oblivion, Prey), and don't notice a vast amount of difference between it and my old CRT as far as color differentation goes. As for blurring? A non issue. There isn't any blurring I wouldn't see on an LCD I wouldn't see on a CRT...that's dependant on the monitor you get, of course. And Dram, you have to view an LCD from a fairly extreme angle before it'll start changing colors. I can dive my head left and right or lean to the very edges of my chair and not notice a difference. It only looks weird when I'm standing over it or looking at it from the edge of my desk. To be fair though, getting a good LCD screen seems to be a turkey shoot. My particular monitor is nigh on perfect for what I need, even with editing gradients and photos in Photoshop. But I've heard of people getting the exact same model I have and having tons of problems. Stuff like monitors buzzing, banding gradients, bad color quality, dark and light spots, dead pixels, all that good stuff. The chances of you getting a perfect monitor vs. a fucked one seems to be about 50/50 no matter what manufacturer you choose. What it really comes down to is how much hassle you're willing to put up with. A CRT will work fine out of the box and probably won't require you to make 3 trips to Best Buy before you get one you're happy with. But an LCD is much more vivid and sharp, and comes in widescreen flavors which give you MUCH more space to work with on your desktop and editing programs (plus it makes games look really swanky). It's up to you to decide which you want more.

I think the map looks fine without reflections. Any reflections in the demo map will just make it more obvious to the player that they're using the doom marine model.

All I'm saying is that if it's going to be done in-model as procedure, then they're all going to fall on one person pretty much (unless everyone becomes a modeller). Since the DoomEd method exists though, people will use it, so there will be no 'purifying' it out. Anyway, I'll hold off on adding any CMs to game then, pending the decision here... Ironically, we couldn't use a CM for a couch, because it would have to be concave. Edit: oops, missed this: So we will have a mix then, and go with whatever comes first for "accurate enough" objects, and otherwise use modelling for less suited items, unless there are objections.

Well the broken arrow model I made uses this and works fine

That was how Brian @ Id suggested doing the CMs, so he at least thinks it works. Haven't tried it personally, but I'm pretty sure BT has tried it and said it worked. I'd say see how accurate you can get with a brush, and if it's not a tight enough fit around the model, go for the modeling method.

As far as I can tell, once I know how to do this, everything will be fine, but untill then, it's going to be a long and painful process learning how to do this. I added some files to CVS \def\tdm_ai_citywatch_elite.def \models\md5\chars\guards\elite_citywatch\search.md5anim To test load the model, I followed the instructions and typed testmodel elitecitywatch notice the absence of underscore - that seems to work, and not elite_citywatch, and not tdm_ai_citywatch_elite either. And I don't know why. Although I added the search anim in the def file, I can't get it to show up with nextanim in the console, only the old ones play.

Do we know for sure that an in-model CM will work? I have never actually tested this but if it works it would certainly give better results than chopping up a brush.

SH: any progress on the fire elementals? I've been watching this Atlantis show on History tonight and I'm almost quivering with the thought of an updated Lost City, complete with fire elems floating around. A forgotten, ancient buried city screams something more other-worldly than simple undead. If the lost soul model doesn't work, we could probably do with just a fire textured sphere and some firey fire particles attached to him (I could whip a particle up pretty quick).

I think it's all the same in terms of the final file format, but you do have a good point that a CM in the model is more accurate than the brush->export method since it doesn't have to be grid-aligned.

The way it works is that Add Entity gives you the complete list, while Add Light and Add Model just give you a quick path to two very common specific types of entity ("light" and "func_static"). I could theoretically add more hardcoded shortcuts like this (perhaps "Add moving light" or something), but I wouldn't want to go down the route of special-case subsearches. A Doom 3-style media browser is on the to-do list. Not sure what you mean - are you referring to a shortcut key with ALT? Glad you share the vision. Hopefully I can prove wrong my own previous assertion that there is not a game level editor in existence that isn't unfriendly and bug-ridden.

Yes. Yes. If you zoom in small you should be able to fit the brush to the size of the model fairly well. You can also shave off parts of the brush with the clipper tool before exporting, as long as it remains a single convex brush.

OK, I've been looking over the model for a bit and it looks like it'll be about as easy to animate as I thought it would be. It helps that I can keep the pose and delete all the animation frames with a single command. I should have a few animations and variants done in the next few days. Quick question though: in Motion Builder, how do you set it to smooth between keyframes (so that it doesn't have that robotic look where it moves one direction and then directly moves the other direction without any smoothing).

934 for visible model and 300 for collision mesh.

Yeah, I'm not sure those are going to work, actually. If I saw that model in-game I wouldn't be quite sure what I was looking at. The problem with jewellery is that individually it is _very_ small, and it's rarely found in piles, as you said.

I think you're overreacting. Need I point out that there was a sect of mages in Thief? And Mechanists invented all sorts of things, as do the Inventor's Guild. So it's not like mage and inventor guilds are entirely without Thiefy precedence. Of course, our setting has nothing equivelant to Keepers and I don't think the Inventor's Guild has any relations to the Builders. Our setting isn't the Thief universe. However, we want TDM's universe to be enjoyable for fans of the Thief universe, so we're going for the same sort of ambiance. Most maps that would feel at home in the Thief universe will also feel at home in the TDM universe. Although we can't and won't prevent others from releasing Thief model/voice packs, we will not support them as that would be copyright infringement.

A small section of Street I made in D3. The only major problem is that I have an artifact, some kind of bug has left this rubbish remenant in my map, despite the fact it shows up neither in the gridview or the realtime render. Copying the map into a new file doesn't solve it either! Arg! 2 enterable houses. First is a squat, not very interesting, thiefy outdoors loo with a view on the factory. Second is the posh one. Gas lights substitute for a real model. Seem okay. Did have opaque piping but it cast grim shadows and I have no gold texture so it was black, not very nice. Glass= posher. Tried to do what people said about detail, I looked at real houses and thought "Yeah they have more going on than just doors and windows. At least the interesting ones do. See the skirting boards, cornering, window sills, door surrounds etc. Mages tower. A bit of thiefy fun. I quite like the dark organic possibilities you can get in d3ed, so I put on some anus-texture (Seriously, id texture names are anustube001 etc) fleshy tubes piercing out the tower, and creepy green lighting. D3 Hell textures have some nice bits and bobs, the brickwork making up the street surface for example. I read in the wiki about how electricity in TDM travels though EM induction etc, like how transformers work, with prongs for "electricity waves" to come off. Like Thief. So I went about making some crazy pronged lamposts. I am really pleased with them. Nice off-the-wall fantasy feel. Posh house bedroom is a bit barren. As I say, models and textures limited so far. Here it is on Imageshack. Use mozilla.

I don't think I have access to the FTP, so if you could send the FBX files to my Gmail it would be appreciated (I picked up a copy of 7.0 Motionbuilder so it should work for what I need). I also took a look at oDDitie's tutorial in the animation forum for Motionbuilder, I'll probably need to look at a few other ones along the way. I'll just start the model in the combat stance (does an existing animation use that stance so I can just start from that point?), and then maybe try having it end in a couple different ways so we can figure out what looks best.

ASE model/shader not found issue now fixed in trunk. Trees are textured correctly in tavern.map.

Okay it seems pretty obvious from looking at the def file: entityDef monster_zombie_maint_wrench { // ... "def_attach" "prop_wrench" "def_head" "head_zombie2" "head_joint" "Shoulders" "def_dropDeathItem" "moveable_wrench" "dropDeathItemJoint" "Rhand" } This shows how to attach both a wrench and a head. The dropDeathItem makes them drop it on death. For stuff like a belt pouch or a sword in a frog, I guess we don't want this, it should remain attached on death. We might have to modify the code a bit so that it only drops the sword when drawn before death. Looking at the SDK, you can have as many attachements as you want, def_attach1, def_attach2, etc. Also from the SDK, the place where you specify the joint to attach to is actually on the entity you're attaching, in the key "joint" This doesn't seem like a very good design, since a given object wouldn't be able to attach to multiple joints, like the sword needs to attach to the hand when drawn and the belt when sheathed, but whatever, we can change that later since it's just retrieving a string. Also, I don't see a scriptfunction or anim frame command to set the attachment point, we'll probably need to add that also. Should be fairly straightforward. Anyway for now, this is how you would set up one item to attach to one joint: In the item's def file, "joint" "<name of joint on the model to attach to>"

Least Squares Conformal Map (also Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy). It has something to do with the algorithm and the way it tries to preserve local angles. Cool spider BTW, I have made several attempts to model a spider in Blender but never quite managed to get the proportions right.