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Return to Wolfenstein had ladder climbing AIs, which was nice for immersion, until you realized that ALL the AIs were climbing the ladders and you could sit atop the ladder and blow their heads off. A suggestion I floated on TTLG a while back was that only a handful of AIs on a map could climb up a ladder to chase the Thief, while the majority cannot follow him up. So imagine the Thief is being pursued by guards but he scoots up a ladder. The majority of the guards cannot follow, for some rational reason like their armor is too heavy, but a few of them are more lightly armored and they can pursue the Thief up a ladder. So its actually a much tougher situation for the Thief, he has a pursuer coming up the ladder after him as well as guards on the ground looking for him. He cant lead all the AIs up the ladder then jump down or something, nor will stopping halfway up the ladder and hopping off utterly confuse the AIs either. It may confuse the climbing AIs but that wont really help the Thief too much.

I like to say that I'm not the type of athiest who questions the existence of God, Im the kind of athiest who doesn't think to ask such questions. And God help you if you pull that "Its a matter of faith, not reason!" argument out in my presence. Many a Christian have I crucified on those very words. Obscurus, at least in Europe the numbers of the faithful are declining sharply in the last several decades. Wasnt there a poll of Britains religious beliefs in which the majority penciled in "Jedi?" Trapped over here in this swamp of superstition, where I have seen school children work on projects studying genetically modified crops while simultaneously working on banners stating "Angels are watching over us!", its easy to lose sight of the fact that in the majority of industrialized nations religious belief has been fighting a losing battle. Of course, this is hardly worldwide, but its a start.

We will certainly do that and thats also the reason why we have already beta mappers (or rather alpha if you prefer), but we are certainly not giving it away now just to collect hundred reports of bugs we already know about or help poeple to get it running on all kind of systems, right now. We will open it to the public as soon as we think that it is stable enough that people can try to use it, and I know that even then we will get a lot of bug reports. But it doesn't make sense right now.

From what i remembered this was both a project to create a toolset and a set of missions, are you refering to both parts, or just one of them? Also if you guys think that progress is impaired by either a lack of programmers or having to sit there and debug a lot of shit, perhaps it's a good idea to come up with a prototype that everyone can download (even if it only does a few minor things) along with code so people can help bugtest and fix. Getting out a prototype early so that people can poke holes through stuff early is a good way of keeping on track, but you don't necessarily have to disclose the full source code or disclose any changes as a result of the prototype until the next prototype. So in effect it has the benefits of open source and of keeping tight control of the code.

Beta mappers are supposed to do maps with our tools. One aim is to get early feedback about stuff that may be still needed, that we may have forgotten, or that we simply did wrong. Another aim is to have maps as early as possible when we release, so that players wont have to wait another two years until the first playable map appears. Of course we try to change not to much, so that beta mappers constantly have to change their maps, but this is a risk that you must take as beta mapper, even though we try to minimize it. Depending on the changes we may be able to help with some scripts to automize some changes, but in worst case you may need to redo a part of your map because we may need to change something if it doesn't work as intended. So far this didn't happen though. Of course it is ok to answer. I just responded here because it was brought up here. As for your application, since Renz said it is fine, it is also ok for me.

Wouldn't completely lighting up the player balance it being unlimited? Although it would be a complete pain to program, if guards could notice and investigate moving lightsources (or ones that aren't supposed to be there) that would also help balance it. The way I see it, is that a portable light-source increases a mapper's options for lighting, more than it increases a player's abilities. Heck, it could make life harder on the player because hiding loot in dark corners suddenly becomes a little bit more legitimate if the player has a light source. BTW... this seemed like a good place for the following request... Some games have a calibration picture by the gamma slider so you can play the game how its creators intended. Usually they say something like "You shouldn't be able to see the word 'dark' but you should be able to just barely read the word 'dim'." Could the DarkMod include something like that? Although stealth/gameplay and the light-gem should probably prevent maps from diverging too wildly, it's still not hard to imagine someone who always plays with the gamma up making darker maps, or someone who plays with it down making brighter maps, each person having done so under the assumption that the player will use a similar gamma.

He means people might want to take any code we come up with and use it or modify it for their own doom projects, not help us - in which case there's no reason not to make code availalbe whether it's finished or not, or when the lghtgem is done, or the rope arrows are done, or the mantling is done, release that code a bit at a time instead of making people wait until the entire game is finished. You'd assume that anyone wanting unfinshed code would be capable of finishing it themselves, for their own ends.

Well, it is open source in the sense that anyone can apply for a position and help us out but we won't make the source public right now. This is simply the way we have decided to proceed with the project. Open source and closed source both have their benefits and drawbacks. I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. We won't release the source until we feel that the project has been finished and we have created a pollished, focussed product. Anyone who is interested in working on the project can email me at recruiting@thedarkmod.com and I would be more than happy to bring them into the application process.

Wth some antialiasing might help it..

Awesome crits, thanks. Exactly what I was waiting for. I'll get to work on it all either tonight or tomorrow. And yeah, I wont mess with the camera anymore. I thought the white background would be a good thing though because it might be easier to see the silhouettes. I'll make the clips black background from now on though. I'll set the material to 100% self illumination too, that'd probably help. I'm still having trouble logging in here for some reason. Almost all of yesterday I wasn't able to log in. I don't get any error message or anything, it just doesn't log me in. Getting frustrating when I need to check stuff and can't log in. I got lucky this time though. It probably has something to do with Norton. Damn you Norton.

That's where wall flattening would actually help you realistically [ Edit: Also, hiding in alcoves on the side of a hallway, behind load bearing columns on the sides of the hallway, inside curtains on hallway windows, etc. Again, it's up to the FM author not to screw up the gameplay in their mission. If the author puts in a long, absolutely straight hallway with flat walls (nowhere to hide on the sides) and a brightly lit wall at the end, then yes, it would be hard to go down that hallway and remain unseen, just as it would be in RL. I think the original Thief's deliberately put darker areas at the edges of hallways also to kind've simulate the fact that you're less visible when you stick to the edges of the walls, even tho their engine wasn't up to calculating silhouettes. ]

I hope no one would actually play the game with the shadows off, and I hope that the visibility code does depend somewhat on the renderer so that people don't have that sort of cheat available to them... That would utterly defeat the purpose of playing a shadowy stealth game... I do hope a computationally affordable method can be found to take sillhouettes into account... That would really make a difference to me at least Don't forget about AMBIENT LIGHT people, that is the big advantage of lightmaps, they help to give you a more realistic set of shadows, because you can do a realistic global illumination calculation with radiosity or photon mapping. Downside is they aren't dynamic. I guess realtime radiosity is still a while away, but you can simulate it to a degree in Doom 3 with careful use of ambient lighting and non-shadowing fill lights. Unless your map is set deep underground, there will always be a tiny bit of ambient light in a room, even if there are no obvious light sources, so always make sure you adjust ambient lighting in each room to an appropriate level. Does the Doom 3 engine allow you to trigger ambient light levels with a script, so if you doused a torch or switched an electric light off, you can change the ambient light level accordingly?

I notice that there are lots of models that have been created, but haven't really gotten past the screenshot stage. It's probably easy to forget about them in the flurry of other things to do. Consider this a reminder to upload a low and high poly version to the ftp site whenever possible. I'll be keeping a list of what's there now, which should help us get through them faster. This is a pretty old image now, but there are still lots of models here not on the ftp site.

The width is fine for me. Doesn't seem any wider than before. I'm on 1280 x 1024. I'd actually prefer it even 'wider'! Maybe have the layout use width percentages rather than fixed pixel-widths, to help accommodate the variety of resolutions and browser settings people use? There is so much wasted real estate on my screen with this site. Well, it was virtually the same before, but thought I'd bring it up now. I have a 19" CRT monitor and there is 2.5" on either side of the forum body area that gets unused. Vertically span this up the entire browser screen and that results in a 2.5" x 8" strip on either side that gets unused. In the end, on one screen, that's forty (40) square inches wasted on my screen!! Yikes! Another GUI thing that got changed with the new forum that I don't like is that the top header area is a bit bigger than before. I don't know if it's because of a thicker gray border, or if the Dark Mod banner uses a bigger picture now, or if there's an extra <p> tag at the top somewhere, or if wider rows are now used, or what -- but it's definitely bigger. Thus, you have to scroll down farther on each forum page to get to the posts and other forum info. Just mindless ranting. It looks good otherwise. Thanks!!!

I don't think abolishing copyright would help too much. The problem isn't that the creator's of the content have no imagination, its the consumers that are the problem. If the producers could cut loose an artist, and still get a return on their investment they would be happy. However, nobody can make a living doing that because most people would rather pick at their athlete's foot than watch a movie, read a book, or play a game that isn't exactly what you hate. The problem always has been and always will be that most people just don't get all that involved in sophisticated content. In fact, they don't LIKE sophisticated content. I know that its an elitist thing to say, but the more I see of life it seems all the more true. Its not a matter of intelligence, many of them are very bright. It requires more effort and involvement than they feel like applying. Its kind of like me and wine. I don't drink much, so I think all wine tastes the same. If I drank more I'd probably start to appreciate certain wines... but I just don't feel like spending all that time drinking wine. Most people are the same way about content in games, movies, and literature. They already enjoy the ones they like, and they don't need anything beyond the hollywood hack to get the sense of entertainment they want. (Just like me and wine... yeah its bitter tasting and got me drunk... yay). In conclusion, sophisticated taste is a disease resulting from prolonged exposure to a type of stimulous and desensitization to its typical attributes. Finer qualities of the same stimulous are required the more you are exposed, until you wind up whining on message boards because nothing is good enough to give you a fix. We need a clinic.

Who's the modeller/animator? I need some help please , please pm me on reading this thread, I'll give you my msn email. I really appreciate this

Yeah I'm hosting this site hostage if no one responds to my demands Sry for the poorly phrased post above, I was half asleep when I typed that lol. Yea I need some talented people *bootlicks* to help me out with modelling, and where else to look than *points to TDM team*. Just need some tips and advice, and I wont bother you guys ever again Serious

Ok cool. Just rendering em out and I'll send them over to ya. Still a bit of tweaking to do here and there and it'll definitely help if people can critique them and such. I'll add in a bit of camera movement so everyone can get a better look at them.

Jotting my key poses down into flash seems to help a lot. Another quick shot at the overhead hammer swing. Might be a bit low but easily fixed. In my sketches the back arches sometimes look pretty exaggerated but it's mostly just to emphasize it so it helps me keep it in mind when Im doing the animation. It's like a little note that says to me "the back arches THIS way" heh.

I agree with what you're saying but I do think that posing is also more of a technical thing as well since a lot of it has to do with things like weight and balance. So I feel that all the practice you can do to help you with that is a definite good thing especially if you dont have as strong a natural talent as Beethoven did with a piano hehe. I'm sure Beethoven's endless hours of practicing wasn't what made him a master but I'm fairly certain that it helped. He had the brilliance inside his head and his skills and practice allowed him to produce them on to another medium that others could experience as well. I do know what you mean though. I just don't think its completely one or the other, but a combination of both as well as many other things. But I just think that if you aren't all that very intuitive when it comes to posing you can make up for a lot of it with experience and that comes with a lot of practice. Practicing posing through gestures, life drawing, and teachings/guidance from someone always helps in my opinion. It's funny you mention the Animator's Survival Kit because it's sitting open right beside me hehe. I was actually going to mention it as well. Great stuff in there.

No worries, I'll help out. It's all about the features and efficiency - not to mention phpBB is resource hungry.

Yes, the old styles are there. But keep in mind that you cannot use it for IPB 2.x, as lots of things have changed between the two versions. I can help you out with it. I'll see if I have some time tomorrow.

Can anyone hook me up with some websites, image galleries and so one? If there are any sites with architectural drawings it would be a great help Thanks for your time

Nice, I could model that. Although it'd help with contrast (it's all quite dark) if you could get the lamp on a white background.

Thief 1/2 has become my standard too, with the exception of Ground Control and Homeworld, ( I know, Sierra) but they are mooch-o immersive. But they are such different genres anyway. For FPS, its Thief. Drakon, your list is identical to my own. I just replayed Red Fracture for the cool weapons, the only really good part of the game. The AI layouts were stinky, it was like they had all been waiting for you to arrive the entire game. BG1 was pretty fun, NWN was dull,the Planescape mod thingy was pretty bland too. And I though all the Diablos were crappy. With DarkMod, I want to make scenes that will haunt the player (mongst other things). Not necessarily gory, but dark, spooky, ALIEN shit that makes you forget you are sitting at your desk. Not space alien, but weird. Id like to develop recurring characters, in different FMs you meet them as opponents, allies, and sometimes even just cameos. I wrote something about this at TTLG. A vampire character, one that works with, against, and sometimes along the Thief. Think of the immersion, if you play an FM against a powerful undead badass, the battle is unresolved, then two, three FMs later you bump into him/her/it again, just for a brief moment on the rooftops. The vampire greets you with a laugh and reminds you of some petty detail from the last mission, then is gone for three more FMs. Course, it doesnt have to be an undead thing, a Detective from the Hammerlikes, sometimes after the Thief, sometimes calling for assistance. Little details can be used to create a web of memories around a character that build depth. You help the Detective out one night, save his ass, and ten FMs later he slips you a lockpick set while you sit in the pen. Add a few character models, a few good scripted scenes (D3s cutscenes are pretty damn cool), and you have yourself a little character development, which pays off big time. That being said, I dont want tons of flash, simple, dark, direct scenes with compelling dialog (hopefully). If I can get a little Lovecraft feel in my FMs, mmm, thats good stuff. Come to think of it, those ancient statues in Thief 1/2, the figure with the squid head, is none other than Cthulu. Hai, Cthulu!!! Hai Yog-Shothoth!!! If someone wanted to look into such a project Fingernail after a well deserved rest, they would have my eternal gratitude for one. I dont think the fact the NB exists, bless its soul, should stop anyone from making yet another game. Make seventeen if we can, cause no one else is making good games anymore.