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Yup, it could be potentially the best game ever, if they don't fuck it up with blatant laziness in some areas like the last time, but the main problem area in Morrowind is sounding pretty good in Oblivion at least... 'Oblivion features a groundbreaking new AI system, called Radiant AI, which gives non-player characters (NPCs) the ability to make their own choices based on the world around them. They'll decide where to eat or who to talk to and what they'll say. They'll sleep, go to church, and even steal items, all based on their individual characteristics. Full facial animations and lip-synching, combined with full speech for all dialog, allows NPCs to come to life like never before.'

The reasons are pretty simple. Most of us didn't like them, so we wont implement them. And the other reason is, that we feel that the player has many advantages already. Putting in climbing gloves would add just another thing that makes the game easier and thus less challenging. We want Darkmod to be a challenge, and many things that were done in T3 were put in to make it easier and more newbie friendly. Exactly the opposite from what we want to achieve. Which doesn't mean that newbioes shouldn't be possible to play it, but it should not be as easy as T3. T1/T2 were a pretty good challenge so we aim for this instead.

Hi guys, Eventually, I will need input on realistic values for sound propagation. In order of priority, here's what I'll need: -Data on the human hearing threshold for impulse sounds -How loud (in dB) is the max volume caused by typical walking footsteps when you're standing right next to them? How about jogging footsteps, sprinting footsteps? How about on different surfaces (carpet, floor)? Then I'll also need values for jumping up and down and dropping stuff. If you have time to do some measurements with a sound meter that resembles the human ear frequency response, that would be awesome. (I realise that a lot of these you guys have already made a lot of these into SFX files. I could simply measure the rms or peak-peak volume from those, but I'm not sure if they're normalized to their real-life volumes. That is, do we make some SFX, like stepping on carpet, louder than it actually is to make sure the player hears it?) -Loss per unit length when going thru various materials (metal door, wood door, etc). I can probably look these up in a table (actually, the reference site I posted in sound programming has values for loss thru materials for a few frequency ranges, so I'll probably just use the mid-range losses and see if it sounds realistic). Finally, I want to make sure I'm using realistic formulae. Doom3 uses quadratic falloff (1/r^2), which I believe models geometric spreading of spherical sound waves in free space. Sound waves confined to a cyllindrical tube falloff as (1/r) if I remember right. Which is more accurate for propagating thru typical indoor spaces (rooms, hallways?). Also, I assume this gives sound in dB, that is : sound( r_0 + r ) [ in dB] = sound( r_0 ) * 1/( |r|^2 ) [in dB] (for free space sound starting at vector r_0 and propagating to vector r). Also, for later on, for a room that absorbs a lot of sound energy upon reflection from the walls/floor/ceiling (eg, a carpeted room). If you had to account for this by multiplying by an additional loss per unit length, [dB / m ] what do you think this value would be for various lossy materials on the floor/wall/ceiling? (eg, carpet, wood panneling, tapestry lined wall). Any help is appreciated, and again there's no hurry, I'm still writing the code framework, and tweaking values to reflect reality will be the last step.

I think we would still see a fur silencer, maybe not in the drawing animation, but in the "non-drawn" state when you have just selected the bow and walk around without drawing. Looked for illustrations of the "silencer," and so far what I found was this: So one of these near the top of the bow would probably be fine if we wanted to add fur silencers (the player probably never sees the bottom of the bow) Again I don't think we NEED this or anything, I just remember a thread a while back asking about why the "twang" of the bow wouldn't give you away, and these things supposedly reduce that noise to a fourth of what it is without them. It makes sense that someone wanting to be quiet would use them. Also, I wanted to get this suggestion in while the bow modeling is going on. [edit - So for now, it's a non-issue, but maybe when the modeling for the final in game bow is being done, it could be considered ]

The player arms.

That depends on where the player shoots it. It shouldn't stick into the floor, so this means that the model has to be cut dynamically. There is a thread on Doom3world about how to create meshdata on the fly or manipulate meshdata in game. The length should be about 2 and a half stories at maximum.

What length does this rope model have to be? Does it have to be the maxium length a rope can be in the game? Are we having a maximum length for the rope arrow, or can it stretch any distance? There was a limited ditance in Thief wasn't there? How many times the hieght of the player should this maximum distance be? These questions and more, all answered in next months edition of Modders Monthly.

Yeah, alright, ok, we 're not complete idiots you know, I've already got a character in the game, but yes, I will need to lookminot the whole AF thing, for characters as well as some weapons. I'm working on the player arms model and the bow and arrow models and animations ATM, and will do the rope arrow next.

Make high poly for all objects. I can Uv and normal map them. Texture normal maps and geometry normal maps are two different things, and one is no substitute for the other. I'm modeling the player arms and bow right now, and I actually have two bump maps blended together on it, a normal map generated from the geometry and a grayscale heightmap generated from the textures. THis is a very useful thing D3 has given us, so we should use it. Especially for models with an amount of specularity, normals maps make quite a differece to how rounded and high poly they look.

The player will see the rope arrwo when he picks it up from the map. Going from your argument we don't need any arrows at all. Just the broadhead design would do then. And the image of the inventory item is the model that is used also for the real arrow. So it makes sense. Also, it's all the little details that makes a game good and immersing.

THe player isn't going to see the arrow until he mounts it on the bow ready to shoot, so I'm not sure why the arrows all have to be visually distictive. Any picture icon of it in an inventory will be coupled with text saying this is a rope arrow'. Making a distictive head for each arrow is sufficent, that's all that will distinguish the rest of them anyway, so why make an exception for the rope arrow.

I don't try to give a good explanation for a rope arrow. The point of the rope arrow design is: The player should immediately see on screen which arrow he has knocked, and the arrow should look interesting. That's it. So making it thicker might be more logical but adding a coil where the rope is winded up would make the arrow look more interesting. Since we are doing a game, the objects should be functional and interesting to look at.

Well there really isn't a problem with them just dissapearing into your inventory when you frob them, in fact, i'de prefer that over anything else. Though we could possibly have some wood splinters fly out as it's "pulled" from the wood. Do you really think we're going to have the player re-wind the noisemaker when they frob it?

Yesh..I'm not shure about the pool table though... (that's my famos Sean Connery impression) I'm modeling the bow now along witth the player arms.

Lets start out by assuming that the AI and sound source are separated by at least a few rooms and hallways. So if I understand right, you're saying it's probably okay to use the ray propagation model (1/|r - r_0|^2) for sound propagation to AI over long distances? Trying to model the propagatin of the diffuse field also adds in the complication that sound would be propagating thru several rooms with different reverb characteristics, and if sound is anything like light (that I do know a bit about), there would be geometry-dependent coupling losses going from room to room. Is that coupling loss what you were modeling with the 1 / (const * number of portals) equation? In reality each portal would have a different coupling loss based on geometry right? As for propagating sounds to the player, we don't have that much choice in that matter, other than you guys using soundshaders and stuff. The soundengine that generates sound for players is something we don't have access to in the code. (of course we can do some faking of things by placing new emitters, but that's low priority on my list right now)

I'll just model the player arms and a new bow while I'm at it. THe bow's easy anyway , 15 minutes work at the most. A short bow, right?

Mnnnrrrrrrrr.... I'll reply to this more fully when I haven't just spent 13 hours in a technical rehearsal... Basically, there are two essential models, and the truth is a bit of one plus a bit of the other... 1) The 1/r^2 thing refers to ray propogation, and is pretty much true for the propogation of the initial impulse (less so for lower frequencies, and less still when the environment is small enough for the early reflections to arrive within 2 ms of the initial impulse, and thus be psycoacoustically indistinguisable). 2) You then have "diffuse field" calculations, i.e. reverb level in our terms, which is far less distance depentent. Am too knackered to go in to detail, but for a given frequency, you have: SPL = k x ((rate of emission-rate of absorbtion)/volume of space) (k is some constant) My recommendation would be to keep (1) for the playback of a sound, but for the reverb send level, make LEVEL = l / (m x (NumPort+1))^2 (l and m are also constants, NumPort is the number of portals the sound has to pass through to get to the player. Will go to bed, then repost...

NO, it's different animations for the player. First person perspective. Basically just animating disembodied arms. I think I'll install Thief 2 and check out the bow anims, and maybe even T3. Were the bow anims in T3 any good?

Exactly! So did I! But did it ruin the experience for you because you didn't know for sure? It didn't for me. Sometimes it's good to let the player's imagination run with things. Giving the *illusion* that things all have a purpose and make sense is different than actually planning them out in advance. It's similar to the principle of a book vs a movie. When you read the book, your imagination is totally engaged, because you have to fill in most of the details yourself. In a movie, it's all done for you. And it's ONE person's vision. The chance of it being as appealing to you as your own personal vision is not high. I think the same principle applies here. Some people may have imagined the glowy balls were magic, as you said. Some other people who don't like magic might have imagined they were some kind of new electrical resevoir or something. Do we need to tell one group they're right and the other they're wrong?

I guess now that I think about it, that might be a lot to code. What I'm trying to say is, if I were a player, I would be pissed off it halberds clipped thru walls and hit me. That leads me to say either implement them realistically or not at all. If that means putting them off 'till the next release, then so be it.

I think we can take on board Dave's point about making at least the mercenary elites physically bigger and more intimidating, and about making our thief smaller and slight. I think the riot police comparison is best for the city guards. These are the guys called in to do the tough jobs. They should have shields and better helmets and better weapons, and maybe a litle heavier armour as well. The regualr Watch could have short bows, and the elite have longbows with more damage and longer range, and they'd be more accurate with them as well. ALso I think the regualr watch should have only short swords while the elites have a halberd and a short sword. That way they have everything covered from long range, to extended melee, to close combat. I'd love them to be able to trip the player with their halberd (they were used for this in RL as well) The mercenary elites would be big bruisers, with big weapons - bastards swords and a dagger and a heavy crossbow. I'm thinking of keeping them light armoured, just chainmail and a tunic with the no-BJ helmet as well. THese guys actually enjoy killing (as do the reguaklr mercenary)and this should be reflected in their barks, whereas the city watch/elite are far more professional about their business. We dont need to worry about weapons now, no, any AI can use any weapon we make at a moments notice, by being given the correct animation set, but it's best to get the concept of how the various AI are armed cleared up.

I realise you understand now that you don't need to coat him in so much armour, but I want to say that; ANYTHING that looks different will be enough to let the player know they're up against something new and they should be careful. Even just a different helment (but you'd obviously want to change more than that to make it interesting). Back in the old console game days, all they had to do was change the colour of the enemy, and after the initial caution, you then associated that colour with "harder". The colour just "looked dangerous". The same thing happens when you see those "full helmet" guards in Thief 2. Their helmets are only slightly different, but after that first encounter, you really learn to HATE that helmet.

those spikes are not much polys.. anway it wouldnt be too good if player couldnt shoot and arrow between two spikes.. these fences may be used not only on the borders of the map..so

Wouldn't it make more sense to make the top of the wall with a flatter cube stretched along the wall and then add the spikes with a texture using an alpha map for the lenght in between? After all, we are adding a lot of detail because of I don't really think that this will achieve much. How is an alpha map interpreted on collision? Will it allow the player to climb through in these places, where the alpha is? If that is the case, there would be even less sense to actually model these spikes in full.

** MOVED FROM THE OLD JOURNAL THREAD ** 07/01/2004 -------------- Uploaded more sounds to the FTP: underground/ cave_wind.ogg forest/ animal_bird_owl01.ogg animal_bird_owl02.ogg wind_trees1.ogg scary/ wind_creaking.ogg wind_creaking_quiet.ogg 04/01/2004 -------------- Uploaded some sounds to the FTP: city/ animal_dog01.ogg animal_dog02.ogg factory/ fire01.ogg fire02.ogg steam_blow02.ogg 03/01/2004 -------------- I changed some details to the already uploaded wannabe-church theme church_theme1a.ogg in my home ftp directory. I think it might be too dramatic and hence distracting the player, let's see what Pak says. 27/12/2004 -------------- Messing with the soundtest1 map, doing some tests and re-affirming I'm one sloppy asshole after I realized the "problematic" speaker was "problematic" because I put it inside a fucking wall, that's 1 hour wasted. I'm glad Pak doesn't oppose my committing fetish and lets me commit my own things. Speaking of which: darkmod/sound tdm_factory.sndshd,1.2 tdm_ocean.sndshd,1.2 tdm_weather.sndshd,1.2 darkmod/sound/ambient/factory power_low1_loop.ogg,1.1 darkmod/sound/ambient/ocean harbor1_loop.ogg,1.1 harbor2_loop.ogg,1.1 ocean1_loop.ogg,1.1 darkmod/sound/ambient/weather rain2_loop.ogg,1.1 rain2_roof_loop.ogg,1.1 rain3_loop.ogg,1.1 wind3_loop.ogg,1.1 26/12/2004 -------------- First soundshader commit: darkmod/sound tdm_city.sndshd,1.1 tdm_factory.sndshd,1.1 tdm_forest.sndshd,1.1 tdm_mansion.sndshd,1.1 tdm_ocean.sndshd,1.1 tdm_underground.sndshd,1.1 tdm_weather.sndshd,1.1 Currently working on some scary sounds. BRR! EDIT: Uploaded some sounds on FTP, waiting for Pak to approve them city/various_crowd1_loop.ogg factory/various_powerline_loop.ogg ocean/harbor1_loop.ogg ocean/harbor2_loop.ogg ocean/various_ocean1_loop.ogg weather/rain2_loop.ogg weather/rain3_loop.ogg weather/trees_wind1_loop.ogg