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What fucking use is empathy to someone with Alzheimer's. Some new cure I haven't heard of? IF you really cared, you'd volunteer to actually help people who have it, rather than making posts on forums saying how terrible it is. There isn't a town in the country where you couldn't go and volunteer right now to help someone. The truth is, you don't give a shit, at least not in any way that might impinge on your life or cause you the slightest inconvenience. SO don't give me this crap about how caring and empathetic you are. Selfish AND hypocrites, and you wonder why it irritates me so much.

Of course this is a slightly different case in that Pratchett is a well known fan of Thief fan missions and regularly posts (or posted) on the Thief newsgroup on FMs that he was playing, from at least 2001-2004 looking at the dates (not sure if he's posted on TTLG, if he did, it'd be under an altnick) ... you could count the number of FMs he was obviously playing and posting about and it was a lot. And more than a few TTLG, etc, people got to "know" him as well as anyone else you could know on a forum. So I think he deserves a little more regard around here, as a Thief FM fan, than other authors. Even independently of that the news is a downer if it means his output will be cut short. cf: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13377 http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?...599#post1149599

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?...120#post1509120 Also http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?...509#post1494509 and etc.

Is the Radiant editor that DR is based on the problem? Maybe some other people have got it working properly on Vista and have some answers on some other Radiant forums.

There is a hardcore set of ghosters that typically hangs out at the eidos forums. their rules are simple. Don't be seen leave no evidence (other than missing loot) don't be heard above suspicioun (Is that a rat, did I hear something) basically level one alerts is the max. If an ai hears or sees you for sure (I saw you, come on out) level 2 alert than the ghost is busted. They even go so far as to complain about friendly ai in missions, because even though they are friendly, if they saw you they saw you. Personally I like to play what I call appartition mode Much like Fidcal, I'd rather not ever be seen or heard and I try not to use too many tools. But if they are alerted above level 1 I will hide and wait, not reload/retry. So at the end of the night they just think they were seeing things (must've been a ghost - the house must be haunted)

And yet you frequent forums every day to read the opinions of other people. Imagine that. I, on the other hand, want to know what other people like in their missions, being a beta mapper who plans on building a few. Which is why I started the thread. P.S. Are you guys always this grouchy? Or did you all get out the wrong side of the bed this morning?

That's excellent work, especially considering you did it in two days while still learning the editor. New Horizon is the guy to contact about applying for beta mapper status (or anything else). Email recruiting@thedarkmod.com or send a PM to New Horizon via these forums. Include a link to this thread so he has some context, and in case he hasn't seen those screenshots yet.

Do you think I have time during work hours to post essay-long rebuttals on internet forums? Some of us have jobs to do, you know! I'll outline some quick thoughts, seeing as its lunchtime over here. We seem to be mostly in agreement, it's just the wording that's causing problems. I'll ignore all that you do agree with me on. Regarding the story - as I said somewhere on the last page it doesn't have to be a complex story about an imporobable affair or whatever. Just little stories to make the characters feel more alive. Everyday, humdrum things. Perhaps someone could mention that they visited a dentist and had a tooth pulled out by some new steampunk contraption and it hurt like hell. Just little tales to add a bit of life to the mission. A sense of discovery - As I said they don't all have to be 'finding the lost city' style moments. Chopping down a banner to find an alcove, or something. I'd be suprised to find an old house without anything to find it it. Anticipation - Why should this kill the suprise? What the player finds where he's going doesn't have to be what he thought was going to be there. A twist - We'll just haveto agree to disagree on this one. But as I said before twists don't have to be big. Personally I enjoy 'em. Originality - Team members don't want me to discuss this. Keep it human - Agree to disagree. I don't like zombies and bug beasts. It's not much of a sneaking game if they just walk after you when you're caught. Haunts are fine because at least they involve some sneaking. Each to his own I guess. Rewarding Loot - As I said before realistic placement of loot and loot as a reward aren't mutually exclusive. Loot would be in hard to get areas - whoever owns the house doesn't want thieves and servants getting them after all. The loot would be where the guards are. Anyway, I think this disagreement is best resolved through the medium of level building!

Further to this topic: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=6991&st=0 is anyone else using Vista? If so what setup do you have and what version of DarkRadiant? I'm using this setup and DarkRadiant v0.9.4 crashes on me, but v0.9.1 works: Vista Home Premium Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 2 Gb RAM nVidia GTS 8800 320MB with latest nVidia drivers

I searched the forum on loot values but didn't really come up with much. Probably not a huge deal at this point but probably needs looked into by the team before release. I'm adding loot defs so I thought I'd post my thoughts. Obviously the main thing we are aiming for in loot is the ability to easily recognize it. Values : seems to be the one factor that is most important. I've added alot of skins to the loot.def file. I did this so we get consistant loot values. Other wise the author would create a gold ring and have to choose a skin and change the value for a silver ring. Of course we can't stop an author from choosing any value they want, but most likely will stick to convention if it's easy. Probably the most important reason to have standard loot values is for the players. Often times at TTLG someone would be looking for that last 75 gold. It was easy for someone to say: gold goblets are 75, look here and there, a coin stack and a plate would be 75, ect... Anyone can double check my values and give input. Basically on things like rings and coins silver = 1/2 gold. Also I tried to make diamonds the most expensive with emeralds second, opals, down to less precious gems like amethyst. I didn't change any existing values, just tried to base ne values off of the existing items. Moveable/Static Loot : In my forums search I came across a thread or two talking about this. I think this is old news but would like to hear what you all currently think about it. I think at one point the team wasn't sure if it should move or not, due to explosions blowing it out of reach, whether or not the mover would work with loot, ect... All these issues seem to have passed so I suggest we get rid of static loot, is there a reason to still have these entities? (other than it already being used in maps?) With the exception of the scepter, statue loot, religious symbol and the diamond all of the loot models have collision models. I can add collision for the scepter and the statue as they are ase. The diamond needs retex so I can do that and add collision, although it will then be an ase. Someone else will need to add collision to the religious obj. I think bonehoard has some static loot which would be better as moveable anyway. I couldn't reach so I shot 10 arrows and it never budged. It was a gold vase which doesn't appear in the loot list but should. I suppose angua just added loot props for that map. Also, I'd like to get more opinions on the gem textures. I want to replace the diamond and ruby textures of old with these. I've got one thumbs up so far (from PinkDot?) the big blue thing is my diamond, the little white thing is the old one. of course there are several sizes... The tex on far right is meant to replace the ruby (small red next to large red) The red on left turns out to be a bonehoard specific shader. --EDIT--forgot to mention, the small red gem with my tex needs remapped, it would look more like the large one.

I misremembered about the assertion. In earlier version of the ModuleRegistry, the assertion was there, but it got removed later on, because of initialisation-order issues (IIRC). Anyway, where should the assertion be positioned, when the reference is cached? Should it be done like in the code sample I posted above or somehow else? I guess for small maps this would be acceptable. I'm wondering whether this would be practical in maps like bonehoard with 13k+ map elements. I guess populating such a GtkTreeModel is more than just slow, that's probably why the GtkRadiant people settled for instant-updating. Another problem is the Selection-status-update. This is tightly bound to the scene::Instances now, which notify the GraphTreeModel on each change. I'm really not sure how this could be accomplished in a faster way while keeping the functionality intact. To be honest, I haven't figured out what the call graph is supposed to show. Is this some sort of call stack? The function lists don't make sense at all, they seem to appear in random order. Yes, I was referring to the erase() method which makes use of the std::find() algorithm. I already thought about replacing that, but there are of course complications. We need a structure that - stores pointers to scene::Instances - has fast append() routines - provides fast lookup to allow for fast removal - provides insertion order information. The last point is the tricky one. The GlobalSelectionSystem().getUltimateSelec ted() and getPenUltimateSelected() routines rely on a SelectionList::back() method. This is especially important for the "entity connect" command and "stitch patch textures", for instance.

The team is usually willing to take on new beta-mappers who show some experience/talent/committment, and then there are a lot of developer forums that regular members can't see. The public forums may expand, but I think it's probably too early for that at this point.

The dark mod has come along way. with dark radiant released and many Thief FM makers out there along with the hype about this mod in the thief community maybe You guys should add in some new parts of the forums. For editor Discusion, and just general mapping. along with coding and stuff. so there is help here for the mappers that are at work learning and using the D3 editor. just a thought it would be a good move to create a really good base of DM editors for the release. it would help us solve the problems we are having and get better as we talk about it and learn the editor. also maybe a FM concepts forum to. to talk about ideas for good maps and for ppl to req mappers and coders for DM projects... i think its the right move. it would also bring a lot of new people interested in the mod's comunity on a daily bases. maybe we can steel some of the fm makers from the first two thiefs haha. hopefully. theres alot of amazing FM's out there for the first 2.

Thought it would be good to move this to the public forums.

I tested them in an empty room. The goal was to test the effect of a number of meshes, so I wanted to eliminate any other considerations. The test showed quite clearly that multiple meshes had *no effect whatsoever* on framerate--at least on static meshes. It's possible it added to the overall load time for the map however, I didn't really pay much attention to that. Here's the original thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...&hl=submesh edit: the original test, using 5000 poly objects, showed only a drop of 2 fps when going from 1 mesh to 4, even with *135* models on screen. So while there does seem to be a marginal decrease, the effect is so low as to be not worth considering, IMO.

http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance This link is not new on this forums (Gildoran posted it some time ago). You can find there some info on Draw calls and Batch sizes. Basically draw is a batch of polygons of the same shader and for one light only sent to graphics card. So 10 AI with 10 shaders each lit by 3 lights mean 300 draw calls. It's plenty, because 1000 is recomended maximum number of draw calls per frame. And where's the rest of rendered map? Springheel - I believe 10 meshes AI are a performance killers. Did you check them in empty room or in full map, with plenty other models and geometry with various textures? If anybody has time to do some test (sorry, I can't for a while) just check how many draw calls each AI adds to scene. There's a commnad r_showprimitive which shows draw calls number.

@Baddcog: the thread where discussion started: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=135335 I'm not on my TDM system at the moment, but I do have one performance thing I can mention. When I was doing the recent AI tests, I noted the difference between D3 AI and TDM AI. The setup used 40 D3 imps, and later, 40 TDM city watch (same map, same environment). After trying all of those AI performance testing cvars (several of which shut the AI down completely, so we can figure any TDM AI complexities are not factoring in), I found that the room full of imps gave me, ~20-40 FPS. That's a lot of polys running quite well on my slower system. The 40 citywatch (not animating, not aware) brought the framerate to the low teens (12-14). I believe the citywatch and typical TDM AI have close to 5K polys. The D3 AI have half that. They're quite blocky actually, but it's hidden well by really incredible materials. So anyway, that at least would indicate that yes, while Doom3 can render a truckload of polygons really well, it does add up. In this case, double the polys nearly halved the framerate. I believe 125k polys is a pretty packed scene. It can definitely be done, but it's pushing it, especially with all of our advanced systems in place.

Got some new info for you guys from official Eidos forums. Deus Ex 3 is going to use the Tomb Raider Revival engine from Crystal Dynamics. http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=176735 Here's a Q &A. http://www.developmag.com/interviews/104/Q...-Eidos-Montreal Just started reading but it looks like this time they chose something that has already been established and won't waste time like Ionstorm Austin did with Invisible War. I have high hopes for this game.

Ok, the Decal patch creator is implemented now. Snapshot is on the way (in a few minutes), in case Sotha wants to test it out. http://darkradiant.sourceforge.net/snapshot.php

I don't know why I bother, you are the wost debater on these forums, no better than a child at times. This isn't about any grand anthropological conclusion, I'm simply backing up my initial statement, whch was challenged, that the urge to have kids is not instinctual, does not occur in animals, and therefore cannot be instinctual in humans. The conclusion is that it's an intellectual process, caused by a mix societal brainwashing and tradition, the realisation that new generations are a necessity, and as an inevitable consequence of the the fact that sex is so desirable. Yes, nature makes sex desirable to make us do it so evolution can happen, but it does not give us an innate desire TO HAVE KIDS, only TO HAVE SEX. A desire to have kids, and weighing up all the pros and cons that go with it, is too complex a thoght process to have evolved, it's something that only human brains can think of.

While I'm thinking about it: The dining room chair has a collision model and def, can be moved. It's the only one. So I'd say we either need to add that collision model to all chairs (since it works fine might as well use it) so they all move, or we should make that one chair NOT move. I think they should all move. Unfortunately they are all lwo so someone else will need to do it. (if they were ase we could just copy/paste the tex files) @greebo could you remove this line from your post models\darkmod\nature\trees\bc_*pot_tree => Shaders tree_bark02 and dirt1 referenced but missing. Those models are now gone. The pots are in decorative. authors can add trees/plants as desired. Also , they can use a patch for the dirt, this was done to have a proper collision mesh.

Copied from another post so if oit looks familiar it is: Beta mappers beware! bc_chest and lid 1-3 (deleted, replaced with chest and lid 1-3) bc_stairs renamed stairs... bc_pots renamed pot... bc_sign is now sign_square bc_coatrack now coatrack bc_ceramicpot_b now pot_creamic_broken bc_flask 1 &2 now flask 1&2 bc_non-extinguish lights deleted (previously renamed, waited to delete) renamed lights named to convention bc_gauges renamed gauges bc_doublebass renamed double bass bc_pines renamed to pines... bc_flower patch renamed bc_lily renamed lily That should do it, beta mappers get to work sorry. btw, shaders and textures will NOT be renamed.

The mitten hands are separate meshes so it's not that hard to rerig: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=102537 Not that I don't mind someone else redoing my work

Hm, I'll have to re-check, maybe I was confusing something. I'll probably commit your patch changes in any case.

Yeah well, gonna ignore the blunt... What you guys say sounds reasonable though, but I ain't got the time to do a therapy about it, at least not the next few years, so I am going to have to live with it a bit longer. This Arachnophobia has its advantages though. Computergames with spiders involved feel a lot deeper for me, than for the normal player. When I think back to the t2 minifm "Deceptive Perception", when that mega spider suddenly apeared behind you, man that gave me the creeps... AAAnyway, I just found that under "My Controlls" it can be specified, whether to show or not show the avatars. I somehow couldn't block the picture it self but a filter like "http://forums.thedarkmod.com/uploads/*.jpg" . So instead of not showing avatars at all, I know block "http://forums.thedarkmod.com/uploads/av*254.jpg" . The * is important, although nonsense. Ok, topic can be closed and thanks for your participation...