Search the Community

Hehe, that issue is a drop in the ocean compared to what is going on in the dev forums right now, on the related issue I mentioned. Not to worry, it'll get sorted soon, it always does.

Actually I think the confusion has arisen from a different issue. Changing the default "droppability" of things will only make sense depending on the rules for what can be dropped and when - and judging from some of the posts, this is still unclear between team members. I've raised this issue in the dev forums.

While it has been brought up even before this public thread started, I appreciate your understanding of how separating the lantern from one's person can be useful. It's useful in a variety of situations too, not just a special case in a single FM. Setting the lantern down to do other things while lit could be useful anywhere it's dark. The great majority of FMs contain places that are dark. Why should this use of the lantern be limited to an FM where the author has specifically gone in and toggled droppable on? For that reason, I don't think this statement of yours applies to the lantern: Again, it makes sense anywhere it's dark and the player chooses to do something requiring both hands with more light provided by the lantern. You can't predict where that spot will be. It's up to the player and it could be anywhere. If we did make it an FM author option toggled off by default, how would the player know beforehand whether the author toggled the lantern to droppable? Are they expected to pull out their lantern at the beginning of every FM and test it? Or should they wait until they're executing a plan that relies on setting the lantern down for light, like they have gotten used to doing in other missions, and all of a sudden find it's superglued to their hand? No immersion break there. Or even better, you could let them know in the mission briefing. "I have a simple job planned for this evening... Btw, LANTERN IS DROPPABLE." This is starting to go in circles, but I simply am not convinced that this needs more policing than a simple player option of whether to hit the "drop" key. A rational player stays prepared for the worst; if they don't know whether they'll have to go thru a pitch black area, they'll aim to keep the lantern with them in case they do encounter such an area. We all agree that setting down the lantern is not totally useless, in fact it has practical uses. I just hate to see the usefulness of a tool decreased because we choose to baby the player instead, because they might manage to throw their lantern down a bottomless pit. If LGS had taken that approach with all of their player tools, tools would have been a lot less interesting. Anyway, I'd say vote on it if nothing is being resolved by debating, but internally, we already did decide this issue by majority. If Domarius is really not happy about it he can post a new poll in the development forums and see if anyone's changed their mind. I don't think anyone's going to change their mind by now if they haven't already.

Nice looking gate, Mag. You can continue to email the models to me if you like, or you can check out the information forum for the details of our FTP site and put them there. Either way, if you check this post: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3147 it will give you the folder structure we use for the models. You can also check the information forum for details of our internal model website, which displays all the models currently in game.

Pardon, but did mister developer person just say (about 5 mins into the second video) that the realtime soft shadow stuff was something they couldn't end up using and it's gone? That now there are settings for what you want to cast shadows and not? So much for realtime lighting. That's going to go over well. Nice how he understated and obfuscated it. Disappointing also that they say (on the forums, not this video) that implementing mounted combat would take a dedicated team hundreds of man-hours to design and code and test... when Mount & Blade does it from one guy's programming... And damnit Bethesda, love your stuff, but use some interpolation on your animations or something. I've only been on board since Morrowind, but you guys are infamous for choppy animation. All that aside... it's still goddamn exciting.

Yes, D3 has some persistent info classes for data that exists outside of individual FM's. What do you mean by "this could decimate linear gameplay"? Do you mean you could have a campaign where you complete maps in any order, but things you do in one map effect things in other maps? This isn't really within the scope of TDM, but personally, I've always wished the "city hub" areas of a campaign allowed for more researching of the missions beforehand, and the ability to do stuff in the city hub that effects the mission. I think we talked about this a bit in the public forums. It would be great if one could decide some things about the mission beforehand, like which direction to approach from (set the player spawn / insertion point), time of day to go in (effecting light conditions and guard patrols), etc. You could condense time and wait around in the city for a few days, robbing a few small time flats while you wait for the phase of the moon or the weather to change so you can approach your target mansion undetected, or something like that. Then there's the possibility of finding off-duty guards and servants in city pubs, and pickpocketing, bribing or otherwise convincing them to give you information about timing of guard patrols, lock combinations, or even offer them a percentage of the take to unlock a certain entrance for you or look the other way when you pass their guard post. You'd have to make sure the mission didn't become ridiculously easy as a result of such an "inside job," but you could make it difficult to get to a particular guard, like requiring some sort of intricate blackmail side-quest within the city section.

Updated the Model Guidelines Post: Please review. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?act=S...st=0#entry22708 crate02.lwo needs to have the crate02 texture uploaded to models/darkmod/props/textures.

See this thread in the documentation forum for the surface types: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2974 Dram is correct for the "old" D3 surfaces. For the ones we added that were not in D3, we couldn't practically change the material parser, so we had to kind've hack them into the system. As described in the thread, for the new surfaces, you put in "surftype15" instead of "wood" and put the new material name as the first word under "description." You could do this for the old ones as well if you can't handle 2 different entry methods, but because the old surfaces get parsed to an integer, things will run somewhat faster if you do them the way Dram described. I put the surface types in some of the floor textures myself, but thought it was best to leave it up to the texture artists since I don't always know what texture is supposed to be what.

This topic needs to end now....We do not promote public wars in our forums, you want to do that go someplace else.

Yeah... I'll try and fix this tomorrow some time and post a revised sound in my sound thread. No, mine was more of a 'create a whirring noise in flight from its barrell structure.' The last pic in this post adopted GIMG's drill appearance to achieve this. I don't like the ball bearings thought, personally. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=11843 but we can figure out something. And my concepts inaccurately show an arrow tip. I forgot (or didn't know) they were going to need to bounce around when I made them.

There is a sound for torches. Check the sticky threads on the sound board: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2698 (I starting to wonder how many times I'm gonna have to repeat this.. ) Edit: okey, once more, for claritys sake. If you want to know if a certain sound exists/uploaded to cvs/whatever, Check The Sticky Design Documents!)

Whats that? One thing about playing the TDS FMs, Ive noticed that my dislike of the lack of backlighting has shrunk somewhat. Im finding that a blend of "suspension of disbelief" about Garretts Keeper abilities to "cloak" himself and the general presence of magic in the Thief world are tempering my dislike of backlighting situations. And its not really the active lights that bug me, its when I think Im in the dark and then suddenly realize Im standing in front of a huge back lit stained glass window that the illusion is hit hardest. When an active light is involved, i.e. a torch or lantern, Im usually avoiding it or Im getting lit up because there is no other way around it. I realize they can back light you as well but I guess its the usual activites Im involved in when active lights are around (hiding, slinking, dashing from shadow to shadow) that makes the jarring realization of backlighting less likely to occur to me. Another criticism of the AIs in TDS. The selection of guard sounds and such are so stale. Sometimes they dont even make logical sense, for example the other night I made a noise by breaking a glass case filled with jewels. The guard in the next room shouts out "Whats that ?!" or something. I go and hide, he comes into the room, looks around, then says "Huh, guess my eyes are playing tricks on me" or something. Huh indeed! Needless to say, an AI who hears with his eyes is a bucket of cold water on the illusion of immersion. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been best to NOT make TDS, its so painful to have it around but to have it suck so damned bad. At least I got an opportunity to let the games designers know how I feel, which is why I havent posted on TTLG forums in about a year. One post comes to mind, where I said the style and layout of the powerups reminded me of another video game classic: Pac-Man.

Couldn't you say that spotting someone sneaking up to you is a combination of movement detection and pattern recognition? Movement draws the eye, but once the eye is drawn, you look directly at the thing to make out the pattern, right? I'm pretty sure we've talked about this before, but maybe it was in the private forums. The FOV abstraction, coupled with a movement modifier that makes you more visible when moving, is actually not that bad a model. Think about how a real person's eyes would be randomly scanning over the FOV physically allowed by their head. We assume that they're scanning randomly over the FOV, so any point within the FOV is sampled by both rods and cones, over time. If there's movement, the rods will probably pick it up first, then the eye will be drawn to it and the rods will be utilized to recognize the shape. Therefore, we can say that, taking the time average, the detection probability is approximately uniform within the physical FOV. Plus, from a gameplay perspective, you can predict the AI visual response based on which way the AI's head is turned with the FOV method. If you want to get into the difference in response between rods and cones, you either have to assume that the AI stares straight ahead in a fixed direction relative to the way their head is facing, which IMO is a rather bad assumption, or you have to let the eye move independently of the head, and model the psychology of how a real person scans their eyes over the FOV limit imposed by their head. Personally I'd rather not try to mathematically model the psychology of eye movements for every single AI and every single alert state. Also, this would mean the AI's visual response would vary unpredictably due to the random eye movements. The player couldn't guess at the visual response based on the pattern of head turning, because the eyes move much faster than the head and could change position at any moment. Believe it or not, it's more fun when a plan based on patient observation of the AI's behavior is rewarded, rather than being randomly caught because the AI's rods happen to flick over you when you're moving at the edge of their FOV. We could give our thief random coughing attacks that would give him away, too, wouldn't that be fun!

Cool, sounds good. The new D3 soundengine handles reverb itself, so you shouldn't need to put in quite so much reverb IMO, but it will work fine for now. (Like you were saying, when tested ingame I think it would be a bit strange to hear that much reverb if you shoot the arrow 5 ft away from you in a small carpeted hallway). I would like to create a noisemaker weapon for testing, but I can't until a modeler creates an idMoveable compatible collision model for the broadhead, as described in this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3314 Right now I just get an error about the arrow having no collision model when I try to use it as a moveable in the noisemaker.

Weird, what is this? It's not MMORPG, right? I've never heard of it, and if it's what I'm thinking/hoping it is (ongoing RPG/RTS mix?), it could be the first of this kind that I'd actually be interested in. Looking at the forums, they have a LOT of posts. Might have to look further into this... Edit: this is becoming more and more interesting

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

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.

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.

What, the public forum? Wouldn't it be better that we're tied up in the development forums than chit-chatting here?

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2052

We already have a pretty comprehensive list, broken into reasonable stages. Any animations we come up with that aren't there can be added to the list. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=1650

the headline basically says it: since about 3 days ago I can't access the cgtalk site+forums anymore. firefox tries to connect to the site for a few seconds than I get the "operation timed out" message, same thing with IE. I first thought they may have server-problems, but I asked some other guys and they don't seem to have any problems with the website. After that I tried it on another other PC and on a laptop here, which connect over the same router - they can't open cgtalk as well. Anyone an idea what's wrong?? They have actually no reason for banning me, since I probably have 10 posts per year and never had any argument over there - most of the time I'm just reading through the threads, which is quite interesting and I learned a lot over there.

Late in the blackness of night, my mind, wandering from the task at hand, turned to my love of old, and a pang of rememberance gripped my soul. How I did long for sight of my beloved. As I sat musing thus, an inspiration fell upon me! I would seek news of her to fuel my reminiscent thoughts. When lurking in forums of old turned my nocturnal wanderings to my favourite engine for search, my heart gave a leap at what I did find. Hark! How the all-seeing eye of google doth provide! For there, before my sleep weary eyes, a most wonderous piece of news my gaze did light upon. The Dark Mod, of whose prophesied fame I had read long ago, had grown in beauty and grandeur. And now, before me on this fateful night, I beheld my beloved, as though she were born anew! Dressed all in the fineries of DooM III, she was verily transformed beyond all mine imagining. With tears, wetting my cheeks, as I did gaze upon her, I cried aloud, "Oh! My beloved! How thou hast changed! No longer art thou the low polygon creation of Looking Glass yore. Thou hast ceased from thy whoredoms and slavery to the evil Man Eidos and his treacherous mercerneries of Storming Ions. They who defilest thy bed with Deadly Shadows. Thou art transformed! And lo, behold thy texturing, thy lighting, thy models, and thy normal mapping. Harken to thy ambient music, thy sweet ambience, oh my love! Yes, thou art become a thing of such beauty. Joy in thine re-birth!" I remember thee as thou wert, before that vile toad took thee. I remember the nights long past, we in the intimacy of my solitude. I played thee as only I knew thou desired, revelling in thy foreboding depths, drinking in thy beauty. Oh my love! I remember thy secrets. How I long for thy mysterious touch! Come, my love! Play with me. All is not lost. Nay, all has been regained! Ok, I read briefly about the Dark Mod about a year ago, but as I haven't done much game-playing in the past year, I lost sight it altogether. Tonight, though, I had a sudden inspiration, and after viewing thedarkmod.com, I was blown away. This little bit of pretentious bullshit is the resulting heart-felt awe at what's being done--I couldn't stop it! And yeah, I DO realize that it sounds a bit like masturbation, but hey! It's a single player game, no? Looking good, Dark Mod team! Oh and if you're ever interested, I might be able to provide you with some in-game texts

In case anyone's interested my most powerful computer is a PCI nVidia 5500 256MB video mem (not PCIe mind you) with only 256MB of RAM and 1.2 GHz Athlon and Windows XP. Although my main computer is a dual processors Pentium Pro 200MHz with 512KB on-die L2 cache each running debian. Yes, I'm a cave-man. I will buy something with at least 16GB RAM and dual processor dual core as soon as I get a real job. maybe SLI with both cards installed. I think the secondary processors should be used for things like AI and physics. Regarding Garrett's special keeper training alowing him to do what we can't do in RL: I always thought that the majority of his skill lies in mind manipulation of surrounding people, masking his thoughts and diverting their attention sort-of; and he can't do what some people can do in real life, look at the post here on the forums about the google video of russian climbing - if he could do that he wouldn't need rope arrows. editing, just rememberd what I wanted to say, though not how it connects to the thread. A possibility is to use inexpensive USB "VR" gloves on both hands combined with a goggle display or surround monitors to eliminate the old "press forward to run, backwards to backstep, turn, strafe left, etc" buttons replacing it with touch here on the wall, slide your hand here, hold your fingers steady on the cleft, etc. Just look at the russian climbing video on google video how the guy runs and jumps. To an outsider, of course, a thief-player or more correctly a modded darkmod player would look like a freak waving his hands about and doing various mudras.

Hello all, I'm new to the forums, but this looks soooo good. When I was playing Thief: Deadly Shadows, I thought to myself... Wow if only they had used a tweaked Doom 3 engine...Lo and behold! I think once this dark mod is up and running, we can make Fms way better than the official Thief 3 and previous games. But about copyright issues... Can we not mention Garrett or Mechanists or anything? Because I was thinking about actually creating a new DS once this mod is released! (using the same storyline, videos, but changing the levels to make them much longer and way more in depth.) Anyways, keep up the great work