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I highly doubt Oddity didn't have the skills to have a clean uv map. More likely he just wasn't interested in going out of his way to make it easy for someone else to modify them. I didn't know a thing about models or textures before starting this mod, and I've made about 100 skins since then without much problem. Yes, you'd gain more flexibility with the TDS method, but then you're also encouraging the use of the same textures over and over again, aren't you? Yes, that's true. You can either increase your standards and have less people able to contribute, or you can accept less than perfection and get more done. The longer the project drags on, the more we're leaning towards the latter. Perhaps it would have been, if we had anyone working on the mod at the time who knew anything about animating. Nobody here is a professional game designer, so everyone is learning as they go. Unfortunately, that does mean some backtracking. Desirable? No. But if people had to spend time learning everything that we might need to know down the road before starting anything, the mod would never have gotten off the ground, period. Huh? All that was in the design docs about the appearance was: ...which you captured quite nicely. Quite frankly, I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that any "pros" that have the nerve to complain after doing nothing to help along the way can stick their opinions way, way up their ass. These path names aren't necessary and can be very confusing if the textures are ever moved for whatever reason (as has happened twice already). I'm not sure what Gil is doing for the 2d textures, but for models we're just using "tdm_[name]"

I actually don't have anything against gun ownership per se. While it wouldn't kill me to see guns heavily restricted, I also enjoy going out to the country to go skeet shooting or hunting. I can see how a lot of gun owners would feel indignant that they'd have to give up their guns just because a few innercity/drug user types (the statistics) can't control themselves owning them. "Why should we be punished for their criminal tendancies?" they might think ... even if it's true a gun ban might well make a noticable difference in the impact of their criminal tendencies. But like before I think it doesn't quite get to a source of the problem, which is much more economic oriented. So that's why the gun-control debate doesn't move me much one way or another; I don't have a strong opinion about it ... I could be fine with either way, but I don't think it's any real solution. One idea I heard that sounds really stupid at first but actually starts sounding good when you start thinking about it is that gun manufactuers should be liable to a tort suit for the criminal mishandling of their weapons that results in harm. That is, the person injured (or the family of deceased) could sue the manufacturer of the gun that hurt them in a criminal context to pay damages. The reason is because it's a market failure when guns, which can serve valid purposes outside the criminal context, are put in contexts where they serve invalid purposes, like crime ... and like most market failures, the manufactuer (the one that profits from it) is in the best position to make sure their product is marketed or constructed in a way that best avoids the failure. But it won't happen unless the "harm" from the market failure is internalized into their profit margins (this is true of any externality). So like corporations can be sued for foreseeable environmental damage from pumping out toxins, gun manufacturers could be sued for foreseeable criminal uses of their product (since crime is one very foreseeable possibility of gun ownership, so they can't well argue that it wasn't their choice). The advantage is, they'll now have an economic incentive to come up with ways to keep guns in the right hands; the market is always better at handling these sorts of things than the State anyway. What do other people think? (The idea comes from my tort law professor, who developed a legal theory on this idea.)

They do have a specific function (or nonspecific depending on your point of view). They can be used for meshes or walls which can't be said for the rest of tdm's textures, with a few exceptions. Sorry guys, but I'm going to rant . . . [rant] There's other reasons for pushing this idea though. A lot of people working on this mod do not have the skills to have a clean uvw map & this kind of urks me When I started looking at the textures for the models, I was astonished on how messy the textures looked, especially the characters. Another reason is I can't apply another skin to a model because the texture is model specific & if I don't like the look, I'd have to figure out how that modeler mapped the mesh & create a new texture and skin. With this idea, all I have to do is apply another gen* skin to it. The problem with a community mod is the skill levels of each person vary so the quality of the work varies. Some people submit textures that don't tile and others submit broken models. This causes grief down the road because someone has to take the time to fix these things which delays more important tasks. I can't imagine how much further this mod would be if things were close to being right the first time. For example, the character models are being redone so we can have facial expressions. This should have been brought to the table in the first place. Another thing that urks me are decisions that could have been made on certain features are not in the mod yet because people disagreed about it. UI design and the back story are a couple of those "features" that's been delayed due to disagreements. Either vote on it or just implement one of them until a concensus has been made.That's why most forums have voting features & I wonder why voting isn't utilized more often in this mod. I went against the design documents for the noisemaker because I didn't look that the design documents (I should have). But when I presented the new noisemaker design, the mod team liked it. That's one example of implementing something, without all the discussion/voting, that actually worked. It definately doesn't work all the time but it's something to keep in mind. *Good grief I have to stop complaining here, but here goes . . .* The Dark Mod is held in high esteem & high quality is expected by this mod. When those expectations are not met, people can be total asswipes: Sure were not going to please everyone but when any "pros" take a look behind the scenes, then we'll definately hear about it. I'm not saying GBM is a pro btw In short, I think we should be more consistant with voting proceedures because a lot of discussions so far have been counterproductive. Either that or just implement the damn thing. Don't get me wrong on community projects (or this one for that matter), I love them, but these problems rub me the wrong way. Sorry to keep being a thorn in the members' sides. [/rant]

I watched that movie. It was interesting. I tend to agree with demagogue that Moore sometimes puts an exaggerated view on things so can be hard to trust. After watching the movie, I was led to believe the Canadian news only talked about blue sky and roses. Yet I turn on their news through cable TV and the horrible things that happened during the day are talked about just as prominently there. It's been a while since I saw the movie, but if media-driven fear is given as the reason why the murder rate is so high, that doesn't make sense to me. How did he make the connection? If people are fearful, then they would own guns, yes. But fear doesn't make people go out and kill others. Seems like fear would lead to paranoia (close & lock doors) rather than give someone a reason to go out and kill. I have to watch the movie again, I guess. I think demagogue was trying to say that the US is doing the "morally right thing" by having so much population diversity. Demagogue, is that what you were referring to?

I find his documentaries are good for entertainment value, but the analysis (if you can call it that) is always piss poor and nothing I can really take seriously. I don't see how our media is any more "fear mongering" than other countries I've lived in, but anyway it doesn't really make sense as an explanation since mass media is by definition consumed on a mass level, whereas the violence level is of course very localized, even in the range of different city streets or neighborhoods. I tend to think that there are more basic socio-economic and demographic reasons which explain violence rates. I mean, I live in NYC, and a bad neighborhood just feels bad. Lots of unemployed young men with nothing to do but hang out on the street and get frustrated ... then you add drug pushers on the street corners and that's fuel to the fire, since it provides a reason to need money, and just creates a culture or atmosphere of criminality/violence. At the same time, about a decade ago the murder rate in NYC plummeted very sharply down, and sociologists attributed it to demographic shifts where the main perpetrators just literally grew up, got jobs and families and couldn't afford to be so adventerous, coinciding with economic conditions having to do with the 90s bubble pushing a lot of capital around that trickled down; jobs were just willing to take bigger risks in hiring. Also, one thing he doesn't emphasize is the fact that most developed States with less violence, because people just trust each other more or whatever, are because their population is just more homogenous. At least for me, this is certainly why Japan and Scandanavian countries (maybe more so 10 years ago) felt very safe to me even in the most inner of cities. It's sort of the price America pays for doing the right thing and integrating (and pushing racial diversity as a virtue, which doesn't even make sense, e.g., in Japan), but then the US has a dilemma in making sure the income gap doesn't spiral out where minorities aren't getting work and have an incentive to be distrustful. As I see it, doing the right thing helps foster the problem, so it's something of a Catch-22 that takes patient work to resolve with no silver bullets ... and Moore seems to miss that point. It sort of reminds me of the violence around Paris last year, just integrate that kind of frustration across every major city, and the US doesn't seem so unique anymore in essence, but only in degree. As for Moore, like a lot of people not actually doing politics but talking about it, I think he doesn't like the idea that much of the problem is out of a government's control, so throws out superficial possibilities as if it's worth thinking about them just so we don't feel so impotent.

I know it's quite an old movie, but I only watched it a few days ago. It was quite interesting. So far I always had thought that the reason for the high murder rate in the US is because of the high number of guns, but according to the statistics, as presented in the movie, in Canada there is an equally high number of guns available, so this could not be the cause. I was also surprised that Germany has a higher killing rate then Canada or UK. I wonder if the reason that Moore gives is correct. That medias are pushing the fear and cause this as a result of it. Fear induced by medias is not as extreme around here in Germany, but the tendency also goes in the same direction. Even Vienna, which is supposed to be quite a quiet city, I wouldn't leave my flat unlocked, so I was surprised that this happens in Torronto quite a lot. The arguments of the pro gun guys in the movie, were pretty much typical Nazi arguments. How is your view on guns? Personally I never felt the need for one, but one might say, that I don't look like a guy who would be assaulted easily, so that might be some protection. But on the other hand, I never heard of any girlfriend or woman in my neighbourhood who was assaulted either, so this doesn't really sound like a good argument.

Its detailed models on the inside (of the citywalls) and a few dozen dummy buildings on the outside. They only have a few hundred polys each, so they don't tax the engine much. Yup, for some reason the moon turns dark occasionally - we're on it. It's highly unlikely cause I'm way too lazy for that. From a performance standpoint it actually wouldn't matter much - given that you visportal it properly.

Showing it to my friend, I noticed a few more things: 1. I wonder, in the opening scene, if all of that is brushworked city, or is some of that a creative skybox. In any event, it's such a large looking area, like a real city. I hope it'll be possible to put vistas like that in-game since it's impressive. 2. it seems we've got AI hammer-bashing the PC now. For some reason, I thought that was still a ways off. 3. anybody notice the black moon?

@ascottk: Okay, here it is. I think I did everything... UVmap... set up a material... scaled it up (a bit bigger than a builder guard overall). Let me know if I forgot anything. The zip contains an ASE and a UVmap. The brace part is fully unwelded, to help it look better in light of D3's automatic smoothing of ASEs, without having to subdivide like crazy. I could reweld it if you need (or I'm sure you could too). Also, if you need a better UVmap, just let me know (if you don't want to do it). This one was built with flat texturing in mind, so I understand if precision texturing needs a better setup. It currently has a single dummy material assigned. There's no CM as I don't know how to do that in a modelling app. http://208.49.149.118/thedarkmod/models/bellset.zip I'll probably still not give up on it completely (that OCD thing), plus I just got it to look a bit better by stealing the gold from our plate (better than this crap bronze I found online), but I'd still love to see what you can do with it. I also have a highpoly version with those ridge rings around it, if you'd like. It doesn't completely work well though. Oh, and when we have something usable, we'll actually have two, because there's also a version without the wheelmount. @Pinkdot: please, feel free. I'm sure it'll come out much better than mine. There's no reason we should have only one crappy bell, simply because I did it first. I'd love to see what you could make, and I'd surely learn from it. @gleeful: Yep, as Orb was saying, the Blender unwrapper is quite nice. I guess my UVmap might be okay, or it might suck; I'm still learning. But the difficult thing is (and probably a good reason I shouldn't have made this an early project for me) is that a bell is both round and narrows as it goes, so it's distorted. Make the UVmap flat, and you'll need a distorted texture. Make the texture flat, and you need a distorted UVmap. Bah. I'll aim for more simple next time; it's disappointing that after I had all these grand plans for this thing, I can't get them working right. As an aside, I also have some question as to how to exactly pinch and distort a texture exactly, as the transform tools in PS seem... well, they don't do all that I'd expected they would. So either I'm ignorant of how to use them, or they kinda suck. If I needed to create a smooth arc of lettering (as in the above image), for instance, how the hell would I do that? I've found no way (thus, there is no detail scrolling along the rim of the bell). It seems to me there should be a tool that lets you lay one flat (or whatever) line as a reference, and then a second curved (or whatever) line, as the transform. Viola, a straight line of text is bent to a curve. If anyone knows how (or even if this exists) please throw me a clue. Anyway. I think that's everything?

You can copy a brush face texture onto other brush faces by Ctrl-Shift-MMB (you have to copy the face texture beforehand). Or did you mean something different? What I really miss is D3Ed's feature for copying brush face textures onto a patch (the MMB feature in D3Ed). I could not find any function like this in DarkRadiant, which is my main reason for switching between D3Ed and DarkRadiant at the moment. But I could imagine, that this would be a feature hard to implement.

Here, Here!!! Logic and reason, unlike FAITH and HOPE, helps methodically explain away everything I don't see or understand into something more pallatable. I start with a hypothesis, and work to prove it, no matter the cost, even if it's just a theory. Who cares that evolution is actually called the "theory of evolution", there's hard factual evidence to prove it unequivically, right? I mean, hell, after inertia, physics is a science based entirely on theories!! I bet the fact that Newton was a deeply spiritual man had nothing to do with his very scientific discoveries!! Spar's right..."religion" thinks we are the center of the universe, and even at one time thought were we LITERALLY the center of the universe!! Granted, science thought that we couldn't break the sound barrier, or split the atom, or that evolution was a relay-race from ape to man, or....but we'll get it right eventually, right? That's why I don't believe in wisconsin or europe....because I've never seen it. And, I've done the math, it's statistically impossible that it even exists or ever will. And THAT'S why science out-guns religion everytime!! This is completely unrelated, but does anybody know the definition of irony?

For stuff like that I'd say just do a search on doom3world forums Bob. They've basically got a two year archive of exactly that kind of stuff.

Alright then. Cool. Good that you guys have better things to do, like the DarkMod. And New Horizon, I'm not as naive as some may think, though I may appear to ask a bit too many questions. There is a reason behind it. But I won't get into it unless I'm sure about a few things...

Fair enough crispy. Basically Oddity sent me a PM calling me names and saying that the team members forums were slagging me off. I PM people when I want to know something usually game related, but sometimes I'm interested in the person. This seems to have annoyed some people. They should say that they are busy or prefer not to have PM's. Then it would be finished. However having a bitch in a forum where the person being bitched about can't defend themselves is below the belt. SO being a bit annoyed I decide to call Oddity some names in reply to his rude PM and am willing to call anyone else names too in defence.

I like the design, and the stone/metal combo too. The reason it looks a bit strange at the moment is probably because the gear is seamlessly merged with the hammer, so it looks like two different models stuck into each other. It should look better if you make indications of holes where the gear enters the hammer, so you get a feeling that the gear is actually worked into the stone.

There is no need to "out bible" anybody. There is a simple argument against god and the stories associated with it. God and the stories that you can read in the bible are easy solutions. It's exactly the kind of arguments anybody can come up with because they are obvious. These are the kind of answers anybody would come up with, who doesn't want to invest time to really think about the world and it's relationsships. And this solution is also a typical anthropocentric approach, which is no coincidence. History has shown that such "obvious" and anthropocentric views are usually false for a simple reason. The universe is NOT anthropocentric. Earth is NOT the center of the universe, and also the sun is not, for a simple reason. Because we humans are utterly unimportant to the universe. Why is the universe so big? Do you have a notion HOW big it really is? You know why it is so big? Because we are not important. We are a statistical happenstance and probably there is life on millions of other planets as well. It is no coincidence that people believed that the earth is the center of the universe. Because this kind of view is anthropocentric as well. We see our earth and we see stars, and the way you can observer them has to mean that everything is arranged around us. And why would a god look human like? Just look in our very nature and see the diversity of shapes. So why exactly whould a god need to be humanshaped? And why did he need to create such a big universe if WE were the center of his concern? The answer is simple. This god doesn't exist and we are NOT so important as religions want us make to believe. There is no heaven waiting for the "good" people because the universe that you can see out there is everything there is. And one other thing. Why can the universe be described by mathematics?

Well the forums are dead anyway so who the fuck cares, you half arse. The reason why more people from TTLG don't come here or you guys don't get any help is because a few of you are so up your own arses. You're decent at what you've done, Oddity, but no way near as good as you think you are. D*ckHead

Way back, yeah, but it's changed. I've got a couple new ones, if you want replacements for the site (see internal forums).

So, let me get this straight: You extol the Christian ideals of "love thy neighbour" and "thove thine enemy as thy brother", but you think it was a good thing for the Catholic church to go on a rampage of torture and murder in the name of conformity and social order? You think following rules based on ignorance, superstition and blind faith is worth murdering for? How does the presence or absence of a God make your life any more or less meaningful? I mean really, it make no difference in the sense of your life having "meaning" if you are the pawn of a deity or a transient lump of space-time. If there is a God, how am I suddenly more useful than the nearest atom? If God is all-powerfull, all-knowing, then your only possible function would be as a toy to relieve the boredom of that God. So you are either a meaningless plaything of a bored deity, or you are a meaningless bag of water and proteins - either way, you are meaningless in any cosmic sense. Hope is a pathetic and useless vice. hope does nothing, achieves nothing. If you want something to happen, you do something about it or accept that you cannot change it and move on. Oh, please, give me a break. You can hope all you like, but we are what we are. People will treat each other with kindness as long as times are good, but when the chips are down, we generally look after our own skins. Religion explots this facet of human nature to artificially put people in a state of fear, so that they can more easily be coerced into doing nasty things to each other. Riiight... Most people who profess to serve God and do nice charitable things only do so out of fear that they will spend eternity in hell if they don't, not because they genuinely want to help people. Religion explotis this selfishness to further its growth, and to justify its greed. Look, you really don't understand how science works, do you. Science is not about belief. A scientist does not believe in evolution, or quantum physics, because a scientist knows full well that nothing is certain. A scientists uses the most accurate model to understand the world with. Now, evolution is an observable phenomenon. You can watch it happen in real time, and you can observe it in the fossil record, and in the DNA of living things, and in the anatomy of living things. Evolutionary theory deals with modelling the mechanism by which evolution is driven. One such theory is Natural Selection, but, there are numerous other processes that are more accurately modelled by other theories, such as genetic drift, sexual selection etc. Creationism is not a theory, it is a fairy tale. Get the difference? No, it is not OK, you should never defer to anything other than reason, common sense and logic, and certainly not to tall tales told by dubious people who were either on drugs or schizophrenic. Sex drive - sex parts came later, they were a more sophisticated layer on top of single celled organism DNA exchange. Not the case at all. There is a big difference between passing down knowledge, and a persons personality and attitude towards others, which has nothing to do with knowledge, but everything to do with genetic predisposition and emotional experiences. People need to learn how to be really nasty, although it is normal and natural (even healthy) for humans to lie and cheat, up to a point.

Well, it should be pretty obvious he is imagined. Have you actually read the Bible in its entireity? And you still think Christianity/Islam/Judaisim aren't primitive, barbaric superstitious control structures to herd the sheep of this world around in a fog of ignorance and obediance? I mean seriously, read the Pentateuch for example, and you'd be forgiven for thinking the author(s) had gotten God and Satan confused for each other... Does a god that commands his followers to rip out unborn children from the wombs of their mothers and smash them on rocks and leave the women to die sound like a kind, loving being to you? Worth worshipping? (read the bit about what God wanted done to the Midianites, and all the other acts of genocide he commanded the Israelites to commit - makes Hitler look like a baby rabbit). What kind of God decides that because humans have started to behave in a way he doesn't likes (even though he knew full well they would not do what he wanted, being all knowing), that he will flood every living thing out of existence (barrring a few poor beasts cooped up in some rickety boat), and then decides afterwards that he won't do it again, even though it changed nothing about human nature? That is just insane, not to mention unspeakably cruel, to drown billions of innocent creatures who just happen to have the misfortune to share a planet with some hominids that pissed of their deity, and could have been dealt with much more humanely and without killing everything else off. Religion is just crazy, insanity dressed up as a virtue. You can take a few quotes of things Jesus is supposed to have said about love and kindess, but the vast bulk of the Bible is about smiting people, torture, suffering and endless human carnage. I mean really, read the damn thing properly in full, and tell me with a straight face that you really believe the god YHWH is a good being worth a moment of your time, let alone lifelong servitude. Your gross misunderstanding of evolution aside, what good does it do you to "know" that you are the helpless minion of some powerful being that changes its mind every few hundred years and orders you around like a sheep led to a slaughteryard? Quite a lot. The ability to think for your self is quite impaired when you blindly believe things like invisible men in the sky. If you read the Bible, your God is more likely to ask you to castrate and murder your neighbor than to love him or her, but for some reason, Christians like to ignore the Old Testament, except when it comes to peddling their Creationism nonesense. Wrong. It is high time all religion was purged from our societies. Religion has no place in a civilised society. Unquestioning belief in anything is highly dangerous, and must be avoided and shunned at all times. While I am not suggesting that we should be literaly "bashing the religious", we should start by not giving religious organisations special treatment, eg, ban all religion-based education an tax churches/mosques/temples etc the same as corporations for starters. Well, judging by the Catholic church for example, there is enough wealth locked away in the Vatican City to seriously help a lot of the world. Does the pope really nead all of those elaborate tapestreis and gold plated crucifixes etc? And they are more likely to abuse children than help them. Yes, you are. You are all prepared to believe in something without leaving room for doubt, and that is dangerous and ultimately leads to the sorts of attrocities that have been commited in the name of religion. Even religions that are often perceived as "benign", like Tibetan Bhudism, are really not so nice when you dig under the surface. Tibetan Bhuddists established a Theocracy in Tibet by violently murdering all of the native Shamans, and overthrowing all resistance by force. They would often skin people alive to make examples of them, and were every bit as noxious as the Catholics during the inquisition. As Gildoran pointed out, only a sociopath needs to learn how to treat others from a book, and there are plenty of ways you can structure a harmonious society without resorting to superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

Forgot to add the banner, @148 polys. For completeness: Edit: Also, http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...ost&p=84195

hey dude its not STRAW MAN argument its an example of some fact or other that would for some dissolve the reasoning behind there religious belief. this example was given to simply say that religious belief can often have more benefit than harm. And that knowing and understanding all the universe may not be as helpful as having a calm cool religious belief. Do, not for the love of god, place all religions into a box and say “hey look at these dumb people who don’t believe in this theory or that theory.” If religious belief is a part of the process of evolution or if it is the real truth and people are really just monkeys or apes or whatever, what good does it do them to know unequivocally they are apes: none. it doesn’t. . There are many such examples where we have denounced religious ideas in favor of unhelpful scientific beliefs. Social structure is necessary. What happened here was I misread orbs earlier statement that sounded to me as if he where denouncing religion as an oppressive institute. But then he made that comment about the KKK. So I am sorry for misreading and getting so excited. I owe ORB apologies for doing so great an injustice to him and not reading his statement clearly now I see it was me miss quoting him and for that I am sorry. PS labeling every argument not based on some fact or other but rather reason and logic a STRAW MAN argument is a really cool way of attempting to defeat their argument. All you have to do is say “ that argument is STRAW MAN argument and then you don’t have to use your brain and reason you only have to say there’s no facts in it., some argument s have no facts there are only reason and logic. You can go back to that seminar on Critical Thinking and really listen to the definition of straw man argument.

Well, as an individual, an observer and frequenter to the forums not in anyway associated with the team, it's sad that there are so many simple minded people out there. It's most often not even the issue at hand that gets them in a tizzy. They just enjoy vehemently playing opposition simply because they know it will drive you crazy. I'm actually glad to see he is a free spirit. It kind of fits the personality I've seen him as portrayed on the forums. I wish him luck in the future and hope he can continue pushing forward.

Yes, oDDity is no longer actively making models for us as an official Team Member. He has moved on to some other projects so he can continue to push himself in new directions, as an artist of his skill should. His membership is still active however as he may contribute a model here and there in the future and he left us with his character templates so that all of our future models will still fit with the rest of the characters. As for 'individual opinion' not speaking for the team, that has always been in place. It's far too easy for someone in the community to say, "I HATE that mod because 'such and somebody' said something sucks...so the entire team must feel that way". Unless we voted on something in our development forums, it certainly wouldn't be considered a "Team Stance". Heh...even then, it's only the opinion favored by the majority of the vote. So, you see...there is never really any hardcore team opinion and it drives me NUTS when people base a ridiculous argument on something like that.

Speaking of team members leaving--well, I read this earlier on the defunct awesome express forum (and how horrible it was...). Someone was quoting oDDity for whatever reason and it was said that he was no longer on the team, so that quoting him wouldn't reflect the team's opinions regardless, although an individual's opinions wouldn't reflect the team's anyway. I was curious though, is this true?