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Just wanted to say, Hello! From reading through various posts in the forums it seems like a great community and I hope to become a part of it. So I got the hankering for some Thief as of late and stumbled on TDM through some googling. After purchasing Doom 3 through Steam and instaling TDM, I have been nostalgiacly playing through many of the FMs and have also decided to d/l the Radiant editor and start making a mission, maybe many, we'll see. As it turns out also, I just started (today!) my 1 week vacation from work and intend to dive in to the Radiant editor and am currently going through the A-Z wiki on it. A bit of background on me, I 'used' to work in application support till the economic crash a couple years ago and was laid off and am now running a machining center at a local machine shop, using Mastercam daily, 2D/3D stuff and have always wanted to make a mission/game, and decided since I've always enjoyed the Thief series and stealth gameplay so much, this is where I would start. After getting to my third year in Mechanical Technology I changed my major to Information Technology (should have went with straight Computer Science but ahhh hindsight). I've always loved building things and designing things and also really enjoy computers, art, audio, and the entire visual experience as presented to a user. I have created a couple playable maps before using the older source engine editor so I'm vaguely familiar with 3D modeling, skyboxes, lighting, AI pathing, etc. That's been over 10 years ago though. I got familiar with 3dsmax, ProE, Autocad, and Mastercam in my first major during school so that helps a bit when familiarizing with a new editor and as previously mentioned I've dabbled around in the Valve Source editor. I'm also very much looking forward to the Crucible of Omens campaign created by the marvelous talent at TDM and would like to help in any way I can once I'm familiar with the Radiant engine. I can also do many many voices, I've often thought about moving out to Cali from Indiana and finding work in voice-overs, voice acting, etc. All this started as a youngster with little friends, time on my hands, and imaginary friends. Wow that's hard to admit. So anyway, I've been working on a shadowy Garrett voice, and can do guards and some women characters with old, old english, gruff, slippery, sneaky, terrifying, voices and personalities. Just thought I'd mention that as it may be a way that I could contribute early on and would also enjoy. So anyway, too much about me and not enough A-Z wiki, back to the tutorial! Glad to be here and hope for good things to come.

Hello all. Since I'm new to these forums, first a little intro. I've been engrossed in DM editing for about a month now and thanks to the excellent tutorials find it fairly smooth sailing, tho' at times mindbendingly complicated. I've done Doom and Q2 editing in the past so have a bit of related experience and the The A-Z beginners guide was perfect for the job. I've never done Thief editing but have always loved the game - in fact I was replaying the original T2 for the nth time when I came across the Dark Mod. Now my little problem. I've been copy/pasting scrips found in tutorials and fms to create new materials, learning higgledy piggledy about the effects of changing some variables. I've now gotten some projected lights shaders to work so can start experimenting with that, too. However, tho' my shaders show up in Dark Radiant under my_fm folder and I can apply them, after dmapping Dark Mod will then hang when I press 'attack' to start the mission. After I rename lights.mtr to e.g. lights.bak so Dark Mod can't find it the problem vanishes, Dark Mod starts up and my projected shader is working just fine. Danged if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong! Here's my setup. I have everything in my_fm folder immediately under Doom3, set up as A-Z directs me. I have lights.mtr in the materials subfolder. An example definition is: lights/my_fm/textures/lights/win31_l { qer_editorimage textures/my_fm/lights/win31_l_ed lightFalloffImage makeintensity( lights/spot01) { forcehighquality map textures/my_fm/lights/win31_l colored zeroClamp } } "win31_l" isn't defined elsewhere, in some other materials.mtr Thanks for any help canopus

For the last 1-2 weeks the forums have been really slow and unresponsive for me, when I type a post half the time it just sits there etc.. is anyone else having the same issues..?

One feature often requested by DarkRadiant users is a graphical material editor, that would allow easy management of Doom 3 materials and textures. I have always resisted suggestions to add such functionality into DarkRadiant itself due to its primary nature as a consumer of Doom 3 resources, rather than a producer, but I think there could be a strong case for a standalone application for this purpose. Here are some of my thoughts regarding the potential scope and design of such an application: Code from DarkRadiant could be re-used, particularly in the areas of parsing and managing the hierarchy of materials, textures and skins. Separating such code into a library would be one option, although simple copying might be easier given the fairly static nature of this code. Initial functionality might be to display the tree of materials and allow their properties to be inspected via a GUI rather than as text, for example using checkboxes for global keywords, a subtree of material stages (with stage GUIs) and so on. Previews of the textures could be shown in a suitable widget. A distinction would need to be made between materials in editable files, and materials inside PK4s which are not easily editable. For editing an in-PK4 material, the options would be to either save an edited copy of the material outside of the PK4, or integrate functionality to update the file within the PK4 itself using ZIP tools. More advanced (but potentially extremely useful) functionality could involve allowing external tools to integrate with the material editor, perhaps by invoking it with command-line options, or some form of inter-process communication. This would allow the further development of plugins for 3D applications such as Blender to allow Doom 3 materials to be directly accessed and applied to objects inside a 3D scene without the tedious process of editing and re-writing texture paths. Taking (4) further might involve adding similar support for inspecting the model tree and allowing models to be edited with a chosen 3D application (likewise for skins). In this case the "material editor" would become a more general Doom 3 resource editor. If starting a new application from scratch I would probably go for the Qt framework as a toolkit; I use this extensively at work and have concluded that it is in fact a lot more powerful than GTK as well as being a native C++ library rather than requiring C++-to-C bridge techniques. Qt's inbuilt support for sockets, IPC and the like could come in useful for point (4) above. None of this functionality is in any way Dark Mod-specific, so the tool would be useful to the wider Doom 3 editing community as well as TDM mappers. Just throwing some ideas out there, in case anyone has any comments or better suggestions.

Does anybody else have this problem? In the (European) evenings the forum is unbearable slow. The server is delivering about 8Kbyte/s, sometimes less and usually stops midwhere during loading the page. Sometimes you can't even get the index page, sometimes you can log in, but then only get half of the overview etc. In the mornings everything is snappy.

I've upgraded IPB to the latest stable version, and since this was a major upgrade (from 2.3.6) I also had to re-do the forum style. Most of the new stuff is in place, but I bet that the logo will be changed. One of the many new features in version 3 is rating of posts and also a "report spammer" ability which will make it easier to single out spam bots and ban then at sight. Hopefully this will stop some of the spam threads we've seen recently. Make sure to empty your browser cache if you're experiencing any problems. And please report any errors etc in this thread. Cheers, ~m2

I've been working with materials, and I've run into a bunch of materials with quoted descriptions, as quoted surface types which are not needed as far as I can tell - thus far I've just been converting them, i.e "flesh" -> flesh eg: models/md5/chars/thief/tunic //shadowcasting { qer_editorimage models/md5/chars/thief/thief_d_ed "flesh" noselfshadow diffusemap models/md5/chars/thief/thief_d specularmap models/md5/chars/thief/thief_s "description" "herpa derp" -> description "herpa derp" eg: fogs/real_fog { noShadows blendLight "description" "A blend light instead of a foglight. Works best when covering the entire map and bound to the player, but can also look better (no artefacts) than real foglights. Does not fog any postprocess surface, like water or sky. These need to be colored sep. to match the fog color, either by using custom materials on them, or by putting a patch over them with textures/darkmod/fogs/real_fog_layer_moving on it." { blend add map textures/fog/realfog zeroclamp // make sure it doesn't bleed over the edges } } Is there not perhaps a reason they were used? I know that TDM specific surface types need to be quoted. I see that DR shows both "description" and description - however I think it's easier to just use the intended, unquoted form. On the up side : If I can get my solver to better respect tables, I should also be able to clean all of our materials and simplify a bunch of redundant/inefficient stuff, a few more human touches (like removing terrible id style literals, "-.3" :argh:). At a later date we can most likely use it to remove workarounds from ambient/tdm specific stuff once tech4 is out, with a bit more control than the id internal stuff.

So... What was up with the forums all day yesterday..?