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Hi there guys! This is Jim from DoomCast.com. I've been talking to Fingernail and offered him hosting and some space on our forums! Just wanted to say hello and meet the people who are going to bring out this awsome thief mod! I still remember the first time I played thief, lol, getting chased around the first manor and scrambling up a rope to hide hahaha Hopefully this mod turns out great! Anyway, gtg Jim Doomcast

I'm not a part of the Dark Mod team actually, I can't code, do models or textures anyway. Kinda dedicated to Black Cat Games aswell... I'm just hosting the forums for Fingernail and the crew.

I've been involved in a few UT/UT2K3 mods, and a few Deus Ex mods. Oddly enough, even tho I've been doing modelling and animation for four years or so, I've never been an artist before this mod. Hmm. As for releasing this if TDS gets an editor - we're all in agreement here. I'll lay it out flat: Doom 3 has an incredibly powerful engine. It is the first of the Nexy Generation. It runs more efficiently, can have bigger levels, and is built with future hardware in mind. Can you say specular and normal maps? How about full-on pixel shader control, even without an SDK? Normal mapping at a reasonable resolution? There ain't no reason to drop this project.

I'd guess that any textures, noises, models and what-not created by these guys would be available to FM authors for T:DS also... Its an interesting prospect. T:DS obviously has quite a head start on the Doomed project. Sensible people might jump ship and focus resources there instead. Here's hoping that Eidos and Ion Storm make some kind of decision one way or the other soonish. Currently a level editor is supplied with Doom 3. Some simple mods are possible by hacking texture, model and other files. I could be wrong, but I think that the format for 3d models is the .md5 file type - which has been used by John Carmack and team for years and is well supported with utilities and file converters. ID have promissed to release the full software development kit shortly - which should allow for some pretty serious modding - similar in scope to the situation with Half Life and the Unreal games.

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?

Don't apologise Phil Are you refering to the post you made about mods and Quake 3 being released under the GPL? If not, I have probably missed something and you can ignore the bit below ID have re-released the source code for Quake 3 and some of its other games (including the previous incarnations of Doom) as open source under the GPL - but only years after the games were originally released (Quake 3 was only GPLed a few weeks ago, after the release of Doom 3). While the titles are considered commercially viable they are distributed with a closed source license. It will be years before ID even consider releasing Doom 3 under the GPL. ID normally ask that fan made material is distributed freely and non commercially. Don't get me wrong. I'd encourage anyone to be as open with licensing and copyright as possible. I'm a linux user, a fan of the GPL and am contributing to open source projects. But the GPL is not the appropriate license for a Doom 3 mod, they are incompatible in a legal licensy kind of way.

Ok, I'm not a team member but I had a looky and noticed that the thread was closed - which is a shame because some further clarification might be needed. I havn't read the terms and conditions yet, but as far as I know Doom 3 and Id's Doom3 SDK are not released under the GPL. Id only release their code as open source (quite a different thing from letting people play with the source code) several years after release and the shelf life of the product has expired. Neither is GPL a 'non commercial' or 'free' license, it just happens that a lot of free software uses GPL. Meeting the (fairly hefty) requirements of the GPL will almost certainly infringe Id's own copyright as you will be granting the right for anyone to distribute the code commercially (doh). And, just in case you havn't got the gist of this post yet, the GPL has been designed exclusively for the distrubtion of software code. It is next to useless for licensing creative content such as audio, textures, level designs and so on. The deeds offered by Creative Commons are much better suited for that kind of thing. In short. GPL is wholesome and good, but unless you specifically know otherwise, steer well clear. Id will probably mention terms and conditions for distributing Mods in one of their readme files.

great work man I hope I get D3 tomorrow in the computer store, where I buy my new computer components. If everything works fine I'll be able to play D3 on highest-details in 2 days BTW: as soon as you've got your ceiling we should post this screen in the ttlg-forums, I think people will be really impressed.

There's nothing wrong with the window, looks perfectly thiefy to me. A moon? Never! No time to modify. Springwheel's stuff's perfect anyway. (Runs away with the artwork to the Imperium forums.)

Arg. Sorry forgot to include contact info. God_is_my_goldfish@yahoo.com Or PM me in ttlg or ionstorm forums.

All mods that are made are under the GPL, General Public License. I feel that all of you need to download the Quake 3 Game Source and read the agreements and install it to check out the code. This will give you a better idea of what to expect since from the beginning I could tell that none of you have actually modded for any games besides Thief before. This would be a really good idea. You don't get to choose a license, ID Software chooses it for you. If you make a mod for an ID Software game you HAVE TO release it for free, no questions asked. If you want to sell your mod then you need to buy a license to the engine and produce it all yourself and find your own distributor. I really think before you all get too involved that you need to take a few steps back and take a look at the agreements for ID's other game source that they have released. Quake 3 Arena/Team Arena 1.32 Game Source

Since we started with this project I haven't heard anything about which license we will use. This is IMO quite an important decisision, as some memebrs may not want to use one license modell while others may and still others don't care. As we have seen in the case SCO against IBM this issue is NOT so trivial and can potentially affect everybody here. This is also important to protect our project against copyright claims or others ripping off. So I would suggest to discuss this BEFORE we start to create to much content and afterwards being dissatisfied with the decisions. One question: If we code for D3 what resctrictions are there for our mod? As with DromEd we had the restriction that all FMs had to be free and were not allowed to be commercially used without permission. I expect that a similar restriction exists for D3 mods (but then again it may not) so this already might affect the decision on which license model we can use. There are also other considerations, because if we choose i.E. GPL or any other open source compatible license model (there are several of them) we can register for services like webhosting, shell accounts, CVS services and others, which may not be available for closed source developments. I think it is better to use such existing services instead of relaing on private resources, because this gives us a major advantage. If there ever is a break in the private resources we will have to find new resources where to translocate them. If we use public resources, everybody has access and we don't need to worry over uptime or accessability or support. That doesn't mean that we can NOT use private resources as well, but it gives us many advantages for free and serves as a seamless backup. If this is comptable with D3 restrictions therfore I would suggest to use GPL/LGPL or a similar license model and I think there is also an Open Content license for art so we could put this there as well. Since this is a community project and we want to use community resources as well, I think this would be a fair decision. One reason why I also want to have this clarified is, to protect our work (I already have seen such a thing happen). If i.E. somebody writes a good AI code and suddenly decides that the code is so good that he no longer wants to offer it for free, then we are screwed. In this case we woould have to start from scratch and rewrite all this code from new. I don't want something like this to happen, so we really should decide an a license early on, so everybody knows what he can expect or not expect from the project. Of course this is also true for art (images, sound, models, levels, etc.), despite me writing mainly about code because I'm a programmer myself.

Oooh, guess all hope isn't lost for having a System Shock-alike done with Doom 3 in the near future. We could talk to em and see about passing a sound propagation system back and forth between the mods.

A cool tutorial from the D3W forums about creating new creature models. http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=5133

If the Doom 3 Linux client will support mods, and this mod will run properly, i'll gladly test it for you. Provided you have some good bugtracking software such as mantis. I'm also a tester for Alien Swarm. A modification for Unreal Tournament 2004 which also runs on Linux.

I've made you an administrator now, Fingernail. Set up the forums how you want it.

Since when was Object making not under Art? Yes, more art forums: Objects Concept Art Characters Textures and another forum for levels/test screenshots.

I won't be avalible this weekend, just so you know. We can make the arrangements to the forums next week, before we open it to the public.