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I like the new noise maker. At least, I think it is heading in a much better direction. Having a 'reed' like a penny whistle is a much more convincing reason for a whistling noise than lots of holes. I like convincing. I'm in the porcelain please camp too.

The reason I am so excited about helping out with this project is because I love the Thief series its one of my favorite, I have played the first 2 several times! But I haven’t kept up with the series since then, just haven’t had the time to play many games, all work and studying to get in to the game industry. I would prefer not to post to some free art archives, like deviantart after carefully reading there user agarments, they can retain the rights to uploaded works. AKA it now belongs to them! I will have a host soon, and will try to display as much of my work there as is possible. Till then I would like to start on some Concept Sketches of Environments. Then after you approve of my ideas I will Model, Texture & Normal Map all the recourses needed for sed environment. (design before you implement right?) Then with the peaces of a map in hand I could design a level or 2 or 3 using the assets. To help me better understand what your project needs: Are adventurer(the Thief)’s desire for wealth leads him to loot Ancient Ruins and raid Dens of Evil Creatures. Or duss the hero have other motivations? Have areas already been decided on, or should I just make a place up? Do you have a story I should try to follow with my concepts? What creatures have an influence on this environment? Hum built it and why? Ext… If there is already a design in place pleas give me what information you think would be helpful in making concept for you as a test to prove my self. Thanks for giving me a chance to help with this project. Regards, Maus

Yeah, thief model first. Also, something is bugging me about his hip/leg area that I can't put my finger on. Seems skinny or small for some reason. Maybe missing some hip and thigh volume?

Wow, a man of many talents. Coming up with concepts for furniture by doing some research into the relevent time periods is something that needs to be done. I like the museum stand for that reason. The concept art for T3 involved a lot of dynamic sceans and good use of colour, that gave designers a lot to work from. In comparison, that shot of the room with the light on the wall is really bland, in terms of colours, archetecture, and overall feel. When the concept art was drawn with the camera at a really dramatic angle, you might think "well, the camera angle itself isnt' saying much - your viewpoint moves around all the time in the game", but what you really should be getting out of the image, is looking at it at a whole, and it gives you a feeling, and then you say "well, how can I somehow translate that feeling into the game, and give the player that feeling when they play the game?" I think that is the true power of concept art. We need something that says something new. Well not real new - we know what the Thief world is like - dark and moody, with brooding shadows and atmospheric lights, and ominous sillhouettes. But see how the concept art took that "theme" and gave it its own character? It's not easy but that's what I think we should aim for. A unique style of our own. I can see these sketches are just drafts, but they're a good start.

Thanks guys! I think it has potential also!! I need to play through Thief 1 and 2 again soon to try and re-capture the feel of some of the aural delights they had. I'm sure you already did this, but while listening to my tracks, close your eyes and try to envision differen't scenes/moods/situations that could be happening. There are a few bits of sounds in there I've noticed, for example, that might work well for machinery -- especially when looped. The piano & strings music sound used in the 'Darkness_Falls-1.mp3' file (about :45 seconds into it) is very similar to the one used in the mansion level of TDS (the level where you could see lightning flashes from inside.) That's the only reason I did that. And, no! Honestly, I've never played Silent Hill. Does it use similar ambience? I watched a friend play a little bit of SH2 on the PlayStation2 many years ago, but I seriously don't remember what the music/ambience was like. I love working with audio, so I'd love to try and help out with the audio portion of things. PS: I've edited my original post to now have the revised URLs. Thanks Renzatic!!!!

Ok... Link me to 1 place where password protection was compromised and people got in on oh so secret developer info. I guess the blog was made for the same reason huh? =P If you had that much time, maybe you could spend it on learning better HTML. Assuming you made the site.

Excellent, NH! In comparing my Microsoft Word to the J.D. font on your screenshot, though, the spacing between characters seems to be closer in Word for some reason. Was this because of some of the issues you were having with character spacing that they're farther apart in your example? Regardless, good job on the minimalist project. I'll be sure to use it whenever I play TDS again. PS: I tried to download that Charleton zip file, but I get an error. ("Server returned an invalid or unrecognized response.")

Needs to be cleaned up towards the center, it's obvious that the texture was flipped down the center and it looks a little weird. Beyond that it's good. I've started adding basic single color surfaces today, stuff that looks alot like Thief 3 textures actually. Kinda come to realise that we need to put some restriction cap in on this, otherwise we'll end up with a pk4 file that's almost a gig in size by the time we're done...I'm adding these things left and right just for variety. But anyway, it looks like this. We also need to resize these textures properly. Almost all of them are 512x512, which probably contributed to me oversizing my map. Thing is 256x256 makes it look sloppy and low res and the normalmapper doesn't like 384x384 for some reason...

I've been involved in a few UT/UT2K3 mods, and a few Deus Ex mods. Oddly enough, even tho I've been doing modelling and animation for four years or so, I've never been an artist before this mod. Hmm. As for releasing this if TDS gets an editor - we're all in agreement here. I'll lay it out flat: Doom 3 has an incredibly powerful engine. It is the first of the Nexy Generation. It runs more efficiently, can have bigger levels, and is built with future hardware in mind. Can you say specular and normal maps? How about full-on pixel shader control, even without an SDK? Normal mapping at a reasonable resolution? There ain't no reason to drop this project.

Whoa, holy hell...my scale is way off. I figured that the characters chest would be about even with the top of the wood panels. Guess that explains why the little scale marker on the Z-axis window is smaller than it was in Vampire...Doomguy is alot shorter than what I'm used to. Oh well, it won't be that difficult to fix. Also, the reason it leaks isn't because the walls are too thin, walls that are 2 grid units thick are about the average for Id's maps, it's because my lights are too big at the moment. I'm still learning the in's and out's of D3's lighting, and right now they're too large considering the size of the room. I have cleaned up the geometry in my most recent mockup, though...so it shouldn't have any gaps. Edit: Now that I think about it, the fact that the lights have to be bigger than what they need to be might be a good indication that the room is too large...I'll have it fixed up over the next few days. Edit 2: New map (non shrunk, what's shown in my most recent screenshots) is available here. I would've uploaded it to our regular FTP, but I can't seem to access it at the moment. Since the geometry is cleaner than it was in the first rev no BSP errors should pop up.

Since we started with this project I haven't heard anything about which license we will use. This is IMO quite an important decisision, as some memebrs may not want to use one license modell while others may and still others don't care. As we have seen in the case SCO against IBM this issue is NOT so trivial and can potentially affect everybody here. This is also important to protect our project against copyright claims or others ripping off. So I would suggest to discuss this BEFORE we start to create to much content and afterwards being dissatisfied with the decisions. One question: If we code for D3 what resctrictions are there for our mod? As with DromEd we had the restriction that all FMs had to be free and were not allowed to be commercially used without permission. I expect that a similar restriction exists for D3 mods (but then again it may not) so this already might affect the decision on which license model we can use. There are also other considerations, because if we choose i.E. GPL or any other open source compatible license model (there are several of them) we can register for services like webhosting, shell accounts, CVS services and others, which may not be available for closed source developments. I think it is better to use such existing services instead of relaing on private resources, because this gives us a major advantage. If there ever is a break in the private resources we will have to find new resources where to translocate them. If we use public resources, everybody has access and we don't need to worry over uptime or accessability or support. That doesn't mean that we can NOT use private resources as well, but it gives us many advantages for free and serves as a seamless backup. If this is comptable with D3 restrictions therfore I would suggest to use GPL/LGPL or a similar license model and I think there is also an Open Content license for art so we could put this there as well. Since this is a community project and we want to use community resources as well, I think this would be a fair decision. One reason why I also want to have this clarified is, to protect our work (I already have seen such a thing happen). If i.E. somebody writes a good AI code and suddenly decides that the code is so good that he no longer wants to offer it for free, then we are screwed. In this case we woould have to start from scratch and rewrite all this code from new. I don't want something like this to happen, so we really should decide an a license early on, so everybody knows what he can expect or not expect from the project. Of course this is also true for art (images, sound, models, levels, etc.), despite me writing mainly about code because I'm a programmer myself.

Actually this is exactly the reason why I said we should synchronize our tools.