Search the Community

Yes, you really do need to spend the cash on a good power supply. It is probably the least glamorous component, but is arguably the most important part to spend big on. Antec make good power supplies, as do SuperFlower. Look for one with a single large fan and a large grille area on the back - they are quieter and more efficient at cooling your PC. Good PSUs feel quite heavy when you hold them in your hand - cheap ones use dodgy capacitors etc. which are very light-weight. A cheap PSU is a bad idea - if you buy an expensive graphics card and the cheap PSU craps out and fries your graphics card, you will be spending a whole lot more in the end. Don't risk it. Don't worry about the CAS timings on the RAM, it makes a negligible difference in real world applications if you have CAS 2, 2.5 or 3 RAM - it might equate to 1 - 2 FPS difference in Quake IV at most. Otherwise your plan looks pretty good. Stay away from Maxtor hard drives, they are shit.

Cool, will the missions be translatable?

We're also using a crawling version of the werebeast. Mandrasola uses it, but I don't know if any of the newer missions do (I haven't updated my reference map set the past few months).

Yes,. that's good, except for the big white buttons. This idea that we have to make our menu bland and generic becasue people will be making different missions is nonsense. 90+% of people will be making the same type of thiefy missions set in the same world as ours, and that's what this toolset is intended for. Anyone moving drastically away from that style should not be taken into consideration. We can't start to guess at someone using the toolset to make a puzzle game set on the Moon. THe only other argument here is 'This one is simple and easy to do', but if we're starting to use those criteria for our decision making, then we may as well give up now.

I feel the exact oppisite. Apart from Komags Swing and FMs by Fieldmedic and Shadowhide all TDM FMs are what I would consider "Usual missions". I voted for manor Heist just so I could enter my next FM. If that doesn't win than I'd really like Alternate reality or Unusual Gameplay to be the theme of the contest.

Voted for creative objectives and unusual gameplay because I think TDM has a lot of room for experimentation with new worlds and lore outside strict thief conventions (shadowhide's missions are a good example of strong personal vision); and mostly, voted for a team contest - there is great potential in people joining forces to come up with a more complete work where one alone would have to compromise and simplify due to shortcomings. Not only that but it is my impression that many experienced contributors and mappers are too busy right now with various projects to devote themselves to a full mapping effort, and to participate in a team might be a good way to map without the whole load being on your back.

I voted for mansion heists, unusual gameplay, and double teams. I love mansions, and thus far in this mod, when people have built missions together, they have been great.

So, if I understand you correctly, all of the missions for TDM are text based and equivolent to source code, where they could technically be modified by the end user? Contrast this to Quake, where they were pre-compiled and all geometry that the player didn't see would be stripped out of the level, making editing very difficult, but increasing performance? That would explain why an SSD doesn't really shorten TDM load times. I personally am hoping for better multi-core support out of this. Right now, you can't have more than 8 AI in a room without performance starting to suffer. If you could dispatch 5 AI per CPU core or something, that would be a great start at improving things.... Wonder how many folks still play TDM on a single-core system? As for headsets, I've used one before. It was WAY back in the 90s connected to a Super Nintendo. I wouldn't trade my nice big monitor for one, but a headset like that would be great for plane rides.

Have just finished ( well sort of , could never find the optional 'evidence from God' to put on Trumble's bed.Could someone put me out of my misery with a clear hint! ) All I can say is wow , and another wow for good measure. Thank you so much grayman for a superb mission , I must say it's the most enjoyable I've played to date. From the owl hoot which made me jump and the scrunchy snow to , a complete delight. On a par , dare I say , with the old original Thief 2 missions for objective fun and detail.Top marks from me.

I can't find an answer to this so I'll ask on both forums: What is the difference between a cube and a mesh? When would you use one rather than the other?

yeah, don't be afraid to post "newbie" questions to the forum if you can't find the answer anywhere. I've hit several roadblocks on my nooblar DR journey, even following the very basic tutorials, but as TDM and DR are ever-evolving, sometimes the info on the wiki pages get outdated and you can still get stuck. Or you just can't find the right wiki page at all, or it doesn't exist yet. I've posted a few of my problems to the forums, and theres always SOMEBODY that has a solution.

Aah, I was thinking along the same line. Why not bake ambient occlusion this way? Visuals would definitely drastically improve. I had also started a thread that talked about baking AO in textures: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/10720-texture-creation-suggestion-the-generation-leap/page__view__getnewpost__fromsearch__1 Right now AO like effect on map geometry is achieved by painting grime decals which is very cumbersome and time consuming. We can follow above approach to obtain AO for map geometry.

Heyas TDM, My name is Thest....but you can call me jester. I know you guys have about three concept artists if im correct? How about a having a fourth? It seems that TDM has alot of character models finished along with some maps...So atm, i dont think you guys really need any more conceptual artwork. But ive been following this mod for a bit, and looks very impressive. Besides that im a huge thief fan A sample of my work? Sure, im currently working for the only F.E.A.R mod in progress entitled "Awaken" as a Lead in the Art department, and a Texture Artist. You can find some of my artwork on the media page http://www.freewebs.com/fear_will_awaken/media.htm (we're in the progress of putting up our official site. So we're currently using Freewebs until its up) What are my current modding abilities? Conceptual Artwork: (Characters, Creatures, Weapons, Environments, and Vehicles) Skinning/Texturing: (Characters, Creatures, Weapons, Vehicles, and Buildings/props) WebDesign: (Layouts, Ideas, and graphics) Voice Acting: (Im constantly talking over the radio where i work, so i do a bit of "Acting" when theres nothing to do) ------- If you need to see more, i have my portfolio on my pc (Dont have a portfolio site up yet, but will soon) so just catch me on msn messenger, aim, or yim. IF you would like to get in touch with my privately, you can do so by sending me an e-mail electricguitar00@msn.com Hope to hear from you guys soon... Thest

sounds also nice, especially as the new hitman seems to go with the "making games easier to avoid challenging the player" flow the missions could than be rated by the creativity of possible execution methods (I'm thinking about poison or disguising the murder as an accident) @flood: you may add this to your list (and also my creative gameplay suggestion )

Yep, also a fan of the first game. Let me know if this one's any good.

There are a few things I would like: Better readable graphics Selective maps to be carried with you for some missions - perhaps to be found. Compass Player thief lantern/torch AI lanterns/torches. Forward lean (to look down over balconies,ledges, etc. A workaround is turn sideways and lean sideways and look down. Shadows to have more effect in concealment even if not to the extent of Thief. Foliage and 'corner edge' concealment so long as less than say 5 or 10% of you is showing. Return to Cathedral Tower spoiler:

Sounds tempting. Like you, I was a huge fan of the original TR, but was completely put off by it's endless parade of inferior sequels. If it manages to capture the feel and style of the original, I'll be all over it like a hobo on a ham sandwich.

Both of your bullet comments are true. By inefficiency I meant that for ordinary prefab the same piece will not necessarily fit everywhere. Staying on the grid means the module fits tightly everywhere, which means a nice looking corridor could be built in minutes rather than tens of minutes. Of course there are pros and cons for both methods and I am not arguing that the modular approach is universally superior to any other mapping style, I'm trying to say that it is something to consider trying out. The ultimate result might make it easier to produce nice looking maps by people (like me) who don't like to spend a lot of time to decorate their missions.

I can see what you are meaning. But wouldn't such a contest then not be the perfect way how limited in reference to creativity and non-repetivity this approach really is. By now most if not all of the released missions were build up the "traditional" way. So everybody knows that this approach leads to good results. But there are no maps that are almost completely build up from modules. It's hard to make well-founded decision if you only know one of the sites. So if some maps would be made this way, and everything that comes out is just crap, than you can say that modular building is a dead end and we should stay with the old ways. It's more like "I've always browsed on this field, so why should I leave!". IMO we should just give it a try.

Not looked at the map but for the light this is out of my head: Make a cone shaped brush or patch (see http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Dark_Radiant_Keys ) Turn it on its side and make it a rotator (I think it's func_rotator) and solid 0, noshadows. Move the origin to its peak. You probably need a new texture, transparent and self-lit (see eg, self-lit window textures) A projected light. I dunno about performance. If nothing passes through most of its volume but just the end then the project light might just be a shallower cone at the end. bind the light to the rotator. Experiment with that. Good ocean water is more difficult. Here is one experiment I came up with and give more info if any good. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/10686-community-requests/page__view__findpost__p__210206

Yeah, I've suggested as dark as possible/confortable before, my own "In remembrance" walkthrough videos are pretty dark because thats the way the game looks good to me. I do NOT enjoy the washed out shadows you can find in many missions with too high a ambient light, it does make you loose the perception of what a dark area is supposed to be and why you should be there instead (it gets immersion breaking, specially when you play without the light gem, which I dont use).

yup, of course it can, if the mapper isn't to lazy to do that but this is than the fault of the maper, not of the approach btw. yeah, there seem to be a misunderstanding what I've meant in my first post was building maps from modules, so modular, as grayman explained, NOT procedural I'll change that yet another btw.: mappers also use the same set of textures in all their missions (most commonly), instead of creating new ones for every single map so it is more an expansion of an already established way of working, that CAN if rightly used enfasten the workflow without lacking on eye-candy or atmosphere, so the mapper can take the saved time spending it into special sceneries or enriching the before mentioned I've played Halo, too but as mentioned one of the criterias would be the usage of the prefabs, therefore also the way of hiding/avoiding the repetivity EDIT: changed first post, so now we are talking about a MODULAR MAPPING CONTEST

what I may add as it doesn't seem to be perfectly clear hear is, that all I did was to offer a suggestion for a contest, not a doctrine of how to build up missions and I did so because I think it is a good way suitable for attracting new mappers

i hope procedural mission will not take over the "classic" missions because if the do - darkmod has no future

Yep, all the works are available to everyone when I release this map. The most important aim with these modular blog entries, is to give other mappers some pointers: you do not need to build everything by hand if you just modularize a bit and use some time to think how you set things up. If every piece you build is reusable, the mapping process should be greatly expedited: more missions, easier to build. This is used in commercial games too: just look at DXHR toilets. Exactly the same toilet model room used everywhere with or without accessible air vents. All the mapper probably needed to do was to smack the toilet into place and connect it to the corridors. So this is not about giving the building blocks to people. It is more like showing people that if they change their workflow a bit, modularize and build their own blocks, their mapping projects will be easier and faster.