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He 'knows' this, because he made it up as the Hammerite Imperium backstory. Anyway, that T1 concept art was pretty Roman, but I don't much go for Roman armour, and perhaps that's why it should stay T1 Concept Art. I think Springheel's concept is great meself. Where are all my modellers........bah.

I don't really use the ftp, DF, but thanks. Alexius, I disagree about the Hammerites having Roman influence. In the concept art the armour is decidedly late medieval, with full breastplates on both figures, and metal greaves and skirt on the other. Other than the colour and the presence of a tunic, I see nothing Roman about them. Since the Builders are metal workers, and technologically the most advanced group, it seems to make sense to me that their armour should be both advanced and full of heavy metal plates, rivets and the like. I was wavering back and forth about the shoulder plates. I thought adding them might be a little TOO much armour for basic temple guards. I will probably do a more heavily armoured version for the elite guards, however. This concept isn't set in stone. The logos are very helpful, thanks. I particularly like the idea of a hammer with a flame background, like the middle one. Fire would be right up there in Builder symbolism.

Right on, yeah I agree with all that was said. I'll try to get them to be smaller images later tonight or tomorrow, and have the images show up in the post instead of as links. Good idea! Not a problem. [uPDATE: Done.] I agree that the room is bland and I actually, honestly, kind've hate it. It looks better in-person, when standing way far away (LOL) -- actually kind've looks real. BUT (and this is a big BUT) it does lack A LOT of the dynamicism and moodiness we all know and love about Thief. Fortunately, I already realized this and won't be doing another room like that I think I did that room as almost a "study," if you will. I was using Thief 2 as a reference and was seeing how they did the panels on the wall, etc., though I know I erred on a couple things. When i look at that room though, I'm like 'borrrrring' I have a feeling the drawings will get better over time. I'm actually working on a different room scene right now that I think you might appreciate more when I'm done. There's more life and moodiness, in general, to it -- and it feels more Thief to me. I'm using PhotoShop and the coloring will be much better. Once I get a digital pen, I have a feeling you'll be seeing a lot more cooler things, too. Thanks for the feedback guys. Let's rock this thing!

Wow, a man of many talents. Coming up with concepts for furniture by doing some research into the relevent time periods is something that needs to be done. I like the museum stand for that reason. The concept art for T3 involved a lot of dynamic sceans and good use of colour, that gave designers a lot to work from. In comparison, that shot of the room with the light on the wall is really bland, in terms of colours, archetecture, and overall feel. When the concept art was drawn with the camera at a really dramatic angle, you might think "well, the camera angle itself isnt' saying much - your viewpoint moves around all the time in the game", but what you really should be getting out of the image, is looking at it at a whole, and it gives you a feeling, and then you say "well, how can I somehow translate that feeling into the game, and give the player that feeling when they play the game?" I think that is the true power of concept art. We need something that says something new. Well not real new - we know what the Thief world is like - dark and moody, with brooding shadows and atmospheric lights, and ominous sillhouettes. But see how the concept art took that "theme" and gave it its own character? It's not easy but that's what I think we should aim for. A unique style of our own. I can see these sketches are just drafts, but they're a good start.

Thanks for the feedback, Oofnish! I'm glad you could listen to them. I think it's important to point out to everyone, though, that these were just quick samples I put toegether to find out if people thought my keyboard had the potential to help out with this project or not. The sounds were by no means supposed to be "songs," since I was just trying different sounds out on my keyboard and throwing them all together. I only spent maybe an hour or so creating all three of these files. I could've put them all in one big 10MB file, but I wanted to section it up for lower-bandwidth users. If anything, I'd classify these files as a hodge-podge of a bunch of random sounds thrown together. I did not aim to have any bit of continuity whatsoever. Aside from just general "ambience," I may also be creating stuff for menus, in-game melodies, very specific in-game situations, player movement sounds, player interaction sounds, weapon use sounds, steam-punk machinery, etc. So, by me putting these files together, it was meant to give you a simple taste of different sounds my keyboard is capable of. When the melody or sounds in my files all the sudden shift from one thing to another, it's meant to showcase the wide variety of capabilities my keyboard has. Or when a sound in file #2 all the sudden goes from runblyness to weirdness (juxtaposed) -- for example -- I was just trying different effects. This is necessary, because as a sound person, you're listening for everything 'in-between' as a possible resource to re-create and use in some way. Every little second of sound in those files could be used for something. For example, if you take 1/2 a second of a bell sound and stretch it out to 3 seconds and lower the pitch two octaves, you might be able to cut a part of that resulting sound out to create a footstep-across-grass sound or an arrow launching sound or something. (I actually don't know what sound it would make, but this is just a theoretical example to show you what I listen for when I'm listening to the above files.) I wasn't suggesting these files be used for the DarkMod either. It's simply way too early to tell, and the sounds would need to be way more polished. For sounds, in general, I think it's best to hold off creating anything final for a long time. We need to get a lot more concept artwork done and possibly create some in-game scenes before we get on the track of what ambience or loops will be used. For ambience and music, it will likely be imperative to actually play through a rough draft of the DarkMod game before deciding on which sounds/music to use. I know a lot of my inspiration will actually come when I'm walking through a level and seeing what I encounter. My imagination will run wild at that point. In the end, the clock bells you're referring to (if they're to be used) would likely be used for the game menu or an in-game scene near a clocktower or something, but it wouldn't repeat forever in a neverending looped sequence. It would maybe strike 12 times for a clocktower sequence... or maybe just a couple times for a game opening sequence or splash screen. Hopefully you won't have to worry too much -- I think I'll be pretty good at avoiding repitious sounds that shouldn't be indefinitely repetitious, or that stand out as being repitious. Oh yeah, and the piano in file #1? LOL. I threw that 'piece' together in 2 minutes. The rhythms are off and everything. I was just trying to make a somewhat coherent 'melody' that was 'vaguely' reminiscent of a piano piece that was used in Thief: Deadly Shadows. If I were to actually create a piece for DarkMod, I'd actually spend a lot more time on it than 2 minutes ... and I probably wouldn't use a piano piece from T:DS as my inspiration. Or any piano sound for that matter

Very much so. It has that same hollow and rusty metallic sound that's most evident in the 2nd track. It's not exactly the same, but it's close...SH seems more dischordant and uses alot more white noise in comparison.

Ok... Link me to 1 place where password protection was compromised and people got in on oh so secret developer info. I guess the blog was made for the same reason huh? =P If you had that much time, maybe you could spend it on learning better HTML. Assuming you made the site.

Don't use realtime render...go into the game for god's sake. Much less memory intensive.

Well, don't forget that you can turn off the shadows completely in Doom 3 for really low-end PCs.....gulp....that destroys much of Thief gameplay for you, it would end up like quick-lighting in DromEd. So we need to have a PC which can run the realtime shadows, which means probably a Pentium 2GHz at the low end and an Athlon 64 at the high end. Which approximately equates to a 128Mb Graphics card (Radeon or GeForce), for Medium to High detail. So if we aim for a PC like this: Pentium 4 2.5Ghz/Athlon XP equiv 128Mb Graphics card (Radeon 9800 or GeForce FX recommended) 256Mb of Ram (512Mb most definitely recommended) Some sort of sound, we like 5.1 surround. OpenGL....weeeee. Anyway, that's roughly what I expect the very average PC will be in 6 months/a years time.

I have no doubt about that. And while seeing a full courtyard through a transparent pane of glass is undeniably cool, you always have to take performance issues into consideration. You might have so much detail down there that an opaque window would be the better option. I'd rather go with highly detailed areas that are somewhat closed off from each other, IE you can't see inside a house from outside or outside from the inside, than sparse open areas. Visportals can help with this a little bit, but a few sacrifices will have to be made to make sure it runs well for everybody. I'm not saying we can't use transparent windows, we'll just have to be selective about how we use em. I remember a map for Vamp I made that had almost 2000 brushes on display in a single screen...ran great on my comp, but it crashed the game for alot of other people. Since then I've tried learning how to keep something that looks good in check with it's performance.

I'm like "Why wasnt the mask in the original game??" That's how much I support it. Look at what Ninja wear. Only just the eyes are visible. Cause white skin really glows in the dark. I've always wondered why Garrett never bothered with a face mask. And then of course, it's easier to implement... When something has this many good reasons, it's a sign.

If I have a photo I can do simple furniture with Blender. A table, lamp, etc. shouldn't be to much of a problem, but I sure can't do any characters. And I can't really draw good, so if you want me to create any props I need a clear picture how it should look like. I also have no low-poly experience. Usually I don't have to care about this, but I could give it a try.

Hey there, I see you already have a few artists signed up for the "DarkMod," but please let me know if you'd like me to assist in any way. I'd like to help out with the artwork, if possible. Here's my website, showcasing some of my artwork: <link removed> All the artwork is done free-hand (not tracing). Even though I was referencing original artwork on most of the examples, I can create my own stuff, too. To help explain the 1st drawing, that one was done with colored pencils. To help explain the 2nd picture, the following original drawing was provided to me first. I went into PhotoShop and enhanced it to create that 2nd pic on my site: <link removed> To help explain the 3rd picture shown, the following photo is where I got the original Mickey: <link removed> (I made the CGI-looking background free-hand with PhotoShop.) Also, I did the Flash animation at the top of my site completely on my own. All the graphics used in the animation are my own, created in PhotoShop CS. The sounds, on the other hand, actually came from the Tron 2.0 video game; ones that I particulary liked and wanted to use for my animation. I can help create any concept artwork or finalized artwork, such as for maps, characters, weapons or anything like that. I don't have any 3-D computer modeling experience, but I have PhotoShop CS which I'm very familiar with using. I've also worked quite a bit with "dEdit" (editing tool for Tron 2.0 game) and messed around in Blender a little, but not much. Here are a couple Thief "funnies" I did: "Deadly Shadows": <link removed> For the "Blue Arrows" Controversy: <link removed> I also have a Roland XP-50 keyboard that I might be able to help produce sound effects with, if needed. I think I'd be great at voice work, as well, but I don't have any special audio equipment so am not sure how that would be accomplished. Regardless, I just wanted to let you know I'm out here if you need any help. Thanks for your consideration! - Darkness_Falls

Gonna play devils advocate for a sec... The Thief 3 SDK can have levels at least almost as large as what we saw in Thief 2 assuming that ISA didn't build a memory cap into the editor itself...which I don't believe they did. But for everthing else Doom 3 is a much better engine. Considering how versatile the SDK is apparently gonna be, it doesn't seem to be a matter of if the engine can handle a Thief-like game, but rather if we have the skills necessary to make it handle it. Course if there is one thing the TTLG crew is good at it's making some amazing stuff with clunky and limited tools, if the T3 editor is released we'll see some great FM's no matter how awesome or crappy it is. But no matter what happens we'll still be over here working on Darkmod simply...well...I guess cuz we want to and it's fun.

A little. I was looking through the forum sections but I found nothing suitable. So we need a list of sounds that we will need. We should compile this list and post it in the design documents forum for reference. I guess a SciFi Mars research base has not so much need for carpets.

I will (and so will my wife...I mean love-buddy, I mean co-worker pakmannen) be working on sounds. But there hasn't been much atm. As for attaching sound shaders to materials, I'll investigate. *Fingernail dons Sherlock cap*

but being a slave is sooooo much easier....right.... ahhhhhhh...............nevermind.....I go back to my dark corner and hide

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.

I'm osrry but I need to say this. What kind of Thief would be carrying around a huge sword? Too much weight, clanging against objects, that makes alot of noise. Thief 3 had the more realistic thief with the dagger... I say go with the dagger, it makes more sense then a sword. "Remember, your a thief not a murderer, don't kill anyone"

Have you uploaded the textures with normalmaps and one big material text file, to the ftp? It's much better if we stick to one definitive version of stuff, so we'll use your versions of BT's textures as you made the normalmaps by hand, rather than mine. So upload them!

Yeah! Sounds definitely good. The problem is, that I like both of this current lightgem solutions. Mine and the other one. The only problem I have with the other one is, that you have to place the compass somewhere and personally I prefer to have it always on and not as an inventory item. I don't think that this would intrude to much on the Thief style if we can keep the compass always on. Your suggestion sounds very good to me. If somebody of our artists could come up with a concept drawing this would be great to judge how it looks.

Yup, Dom, Blackthief needs to get the game so he can have as much fun with it as I am. Yet another quick update, this time with BT's blue windows in tow. I really need to learn how to make light materials, once I do I could get the shadows being cast on the floor to mimic the window perfectly and get a nice crosshatch shadow setup going on.. Whoop But as it is it looks pretty alright. Needs furniture and light fixtures...and a ceiling still...and maybe some more tweaks on the lighting...but anway, there it is.

Holy shit, I can't even express how much that sucks.

Currently working on the DX retex project http://dxrebirth.deusexgaming.com/ http://s7.invisionfree.com/DXReTex/index.php http://www.offtopicproductions.com/DXReTex/ But I can easily do some concept art of prety much anything, though i would consider my area of expertise to be anything mechanical and organics. Also, any advert art is right up my alley, I've been doing this for DX Retex and Deus Ex: The Aftermath (concept art for them as well.) Later on i'll be available for texturing. I was going to do some textures for SS2: Rebooted, but we all know what happened to that, and what i made for it doesn't really apply now that it's no longer a SS2 remake. So, yeah.

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.