Search the Community

Well, I finally have the game loaded and the editor working. Man, this is a bit different from T3ed. 2000 chairs in a giant room with 1 giant light (since there isn't an ambient light setting) gave me 7fps, which is a little better than the 5fps I get from T3ed. No idea how chairs in here compare to chairs in T3ed poly wise but I think lighting in here will lend itself to huge outdoor missions better. I had a little worse performance with 36 individual lights because I allowed the to overlap a bit. All in all, kinda fun.

I think everything should be active at all times, and scenarios should exploit that feature. Furthermore, Since gamers already shell out $300 for a decent video card to run D3 and stuff, they could just buy an additional physics card. Can't remember the name of the company at the moment... Another thing that I've been thinking about for the last few months. What is the measurement system? The dromed units were ok for making imaginary missions but will it be possible to use metres, feet, radians, degrees, etc? The plan: go around {victoria college, trinity college, the protestant church on bloor and university, etc...} with a measuring tape and a photo camera recording all dimensions and textures, and then re-create that exactly in DM. Or, go around {same set} with a mini-sonar sensor and a digital camera connected to a pda or a laptop with appropriate software and very quickly copy the building into DM and then file off some corners, stretch somethings, and otherwise optimize the polygons. Without having normal measurement dimensions in dromed it was rather hard to re-create houses. Since the sound propagation was shortened in distance to compensate for the wide-angle rendering view I suppose that everything is natively in metres and this question is redundant.

While the City remains an interesting locale to explore, one of my biggest complains with the Dark Project is the lack of the environments outside of the City: the forests, the marshes, etc. I believe nature offers an interesting oppertunity for stealth and a definite atmosphere. Fog, realistic trees, water, razer grass (not just blocks! ), cat tails, insects?, storms, etc. could make for some very interesting maps. A haunted forest done right could make for one of the most memorable missions. While I imagine this has been discussed regularly, it is my request for the Dark Mod team to not neglect these aspects of the Thief world. And thus I give you the screenshot that inspired this post: http://mods.moddb.com/gallery/image/18724/ Anyone else care to help elaborate on this topic?

Just got around to reading all of this- Beastmaster anyone? Sounds like a fun idea that could (should?) have a campaign built around it sort of like T2X. Having the rat around all the time, or having it show up for just one mission would just be wierd, and loose it's appeal quickly, but a series of interconnected missions set in thier own reality where levels are designed for the rat's use could be really fun.

There really hasn't been any discussion thus far about pagan design, but personally after I glanced at the concept art of a "Elite Pagan", I have to say I was a bit disappointed. I think the single biggest element that pervades the thief universe is mystery. The enemies, the factions, and all the members of this City always seem to have a mysterious quality about them. I wouldn't find it so much intriguing or fun to sneak past William Wallace clones, no offense. It's my honest opinion. However, like oDDity's five Builder characters--if he wishes to do the same number of pagans--I think the five pagans, of course, should be unique. The mark of the pagan is their affiliation with nature, and reminiscent of the movie, The 13th Warrior, I remember that the tribes that Beowulf was fighting were "Half men"--or so everyone thought. The reason these enemies were so terrifying was that one could not tell they were completely human. This was because their central feature was their animal-like Headdress that at first appeared to be their head until closer observation. I believe that each type of "Pagan" should be marked by a Headress of an animal, much like the tribes of South America. The Warrior Pagan should be marked by a Wolf Headdress, a wolf head worn on his head obscuring his Human features with animal fur on his cloak. There could be a caster Pagan that could wear the headdress of a Parrott or other great bird with exotic feathers as a central feature on her cloak as well. In this fashion they would appear to be more "Half Animal" then fully human beings, and the role they play in their tribe is distinguished by the animal headdress they wear. Another suggestion for a headdress could be an Ox skull for an Assassin-like NPC, but the options are fairly limitless. In a shadowed field with the harvest moon underneath you see the figure cross a camp fire. It appears to be human at first, but suddenly it's head--the snarling form of a Coyote--is illuminated by the glowing coals as the "thing" adjusts its cloak in the darkness. This could make pagans terrifying and VERY memorable enemies, and I think should be considered. Pagans are also more nature oriented and I believe that another mysterious quality that should be added is the feature of a cloak, as they are travelers and a weatherworn, almost nomadic people in a way. Finally, I might add that it would be very interesting that opposing the all male "Hammerite" group, there should be many female "Pagans". (If you wished to change the name of this faction, you might want to consider something along the lines of the "Gypsies", the nomadic people shunned by "civilization" who lived in nature for much of their existence in Europe as nomadic exiles). Many Indian tribes were Matriarchal, meaning they were ruled by women, and I think the female should play an important role in the "Pagan" culture. This is my two cents, but I think it would add some serious spice to the "Pagan" recipe, and I can tell you right now, I would be much more excited to include pagans in my own missions if they were simply more mysterious. Also, because this isn't Thief I think we have more freedom with the concept, while I don't propose that they all have headresses, it would be distinct if a few did. It would also be interesting to give them a name much like the Gypsies because I think it would add a certain flavor in the game (I still think you should consider calling the Inventors Guild the Watchmakers instead ). I hope it's taken into consideration, and I hope that it inspires some new ideas.

The great thing is that there's plenty of room in the Dark Mod City for all these ideas. It's a huge hodgepodge of different styles and races. The FM author can do anything he likes without really worrying about continuity with the other missions. It just contributes to the City's image as a massive, culturally varied jumble of life.

I thought about having a robe-clad "Eastern" pagan sect similar to Arabic tribes, but it hasn't gone any further than my head until now. Perhaps later, that'd be a cool model pack. Start to see Aladin style missions pop up everywhere: STEAL THE MAGIC LAMP ZOMG

A bludger mate?! Don't think so! An ozzieism if ever I saw one. I'm impressed, that looks like a city mission type city to me, and quite detailed for one at that, for someone used to TII missions there is a lot of detail, for a low detail city I just expected some textured boxes, with crappy textures, those are very nice. Make the game FASTER. I want to be able to walk those screenshots. I get the same feeling with STALKER, however you guys seem to work faster than them.

and advantige to D3 is that its going to be realy cheap soon:). i already have it so whatever but for all of thos who dont have it at least they wont have to spend 30 - 50 $ on the game just to play TDM. its true that you still see alot of games with old engines like half life. so many still play 1.6. i do valve's new source engine has potential but they are greedy and lazy. they have abandoned CS:S and HL2. not fixing any bugs. and then they make more games to make more money and not fix the old ones. bunch of fucking panzys. but are you guys going to be releaseing the dark mod realy early to a select few. ( not the full thing ) just what you have done. giveing it to sertine thief moding groups and updateing them with new textures and materials every month or so. that way when it is released we have some good campains comeing along. cause lets face it, even a good sp mission takes months. maybe a year. id hate to have it and have nothing to use it for. it would be cool to have a few missions at release. and some good campains on the way along with all the moders makeing FM's. just a little sugestion. and have you guys used john P's high res textures in thief 3. shit it makes the game twice as good. along with the minimalist age it turned out to be a good game.

I chuckled at your post Domarius, same here. Stupid joints. I didn't know it was an exploit particularly, I just found, especially on TII, that even with slowest walking it was not silent, so ended up doing it I think. I have no idea what rubberman is. If anything TAPTAPTAP forwardleanandHit TAPTAPTAP is far worse. So tempting. I see what you are saying about the tiles but it is a game, and some areas have loads of marble, and seeing as Garrett is invisible in shadows I don't think it's too hard to imagine he can be 100% quiet if slow enough. Mind you I will try the Crouch, creep, walk forward thing next time. Calendra's, a popular map series, seemed to have very little loud surfaces. And TII missions with loads of marble are not popular.

are there already campaign maps being made or are there any plans for making them? Because from what I understand now is you first want to release the tools so others can also build there own missions and later on the team will be building their own campaign if i'm correct. also do the mappers work from a concept (story/drawings) and build a map around it or are they still trying things out?

*sigh* Yes Fing, that's it. I'm only posting here boost my own ego. What ever I did to earn that level of respect from you, I sure would like to know. The reason I'm posting here is because of the times I'm playing an FM and I'm in a little simple room and the frame rate is chugging like I'm looking at the whole city (because as far as the game is concerned, I am). Or when I'm being chased by a guard and suddenly he stops at the bottom of a stair case and starts cursing me because he doesn't know how to get there (because the mapper ran the "Build Pathfinding Database" on one area of the map at a time, instead of letting it process the entire map). I'm sick of FMs runing slower than they should, and I'm speaking from mapping experience. I map, draw, animate, etc. the way I program - I try different techiques and compare the outputs against each other so that I KNOW for myself what works. In the case of mapping in DromEd, this means comparing the maximum viewable portals and polys. And because I have a slow computer, I can actually see the difference in frame rate. People with fast computers who don't bother with this step just go "yep, she'll be right, looks fine on mine so it must be fine." If you're talking about a mansion or city - what exactly about it has never been done before? There are plenty of good examples of how to best do them in the original T2 missions. I'm not talking about special cases such as the train mission which obviously require totally different approaches. The best maps run beautifully (like Calendra's Legacy) because the mapper knows what they are doing. No its not clear cut but how often have you heard the phrase "you got to know the rules before you can break them?" In Deus Ex, I played a mission where you could get to the top of a really tall crane and see the top of every building. "Oh noes they broke my rules!", right? No. Every building was a perfect, simple box. And by no coincidence, every door into every building was hidden behind another building or on the opposite side of the building, so that from the vantage point you could not see into a single doorway - so all those portals would be deactivated. This is in contrast to a complex city mission, where you cannot get onto the rooves because the streets and buildings are very detailed and the game would run to slow on the target system if they allowed that.

I actually enjoyed Diablo 2 - mainly because I played co-op with my two brothers and we had really different characters working together fighting alongside each other. For what it is (bash, get more money and weapons , bash some more) its fun. DS is more of a chore than fun. And Neverwinter Nights is not much better - its the same thing with a storyline slapped on. Setting up your own game with someone playing Dungeon Master would be awesome, but as a single player or co-op game playing the original missions - its diablo with a story line. Bleh. At least Diablo - All of the character classes are very very well balanced. NWN is SHIT becaues all the magic characters are the best, and no other class can keep up with them. Its heavily magic biased, and the community expansion pack makes it even more so. That game seems to have a huge "magic is da coolest" nerd following.

I know of Heretic and Hexen. BUt it didn't catch so good with me. I played Doom at that time and we had a lot of fun. I carried my machine and my monitor over to a friend several times to have death match sessions over the weekend. And I downloaded tons of missions made from fans. Ah! Those were the times ...

No oDDity, I wasn't just saying that they would be useful in outside missions but that they would be useful there as well. If you are on any level that has a sewer or underground water sources or even just pools of water you can leave water crystals there. Same with any plantlife and moss crystals, or fires and fire crystals. It just means you have much more flexibility regarding in-mission finding of arrows. The reason to put them in now is that they can then be used for the campaign. And that is the only reason. Other people will put them in for FM creation afterwards anyway. Believe me, if it weren't for this flexibility I'd say mechanical 100%. I thought the explanation of why the mechanical versions exist by Springheel were perfect and should be slipped into some random guard speech or notes lying around in the campaign. Yes sparhawk, that is a TDS rope arrow. All the components are there in T3Ed for it, the animation, the object, everything. They seem to be having trouble getting it to work though.

One of the things that we haven't seen yet in a Thief mission, in either of the 3 official games, is a proper outdoors mission. I'm talking country sneaking, a forest, a camp, perhaps a hamlet, perhaps a solitary ruin on the top of a hill. But with the sneaking really all going on outside. I always thought a mission where you have to sneak into some nomadic warlord's camp would be nice. Or the edges of a the camp of some large army. You cannot do this in T3Ed. My FM was originally set outside. Obviously I wanted to simulate the outside since T3Ed cannot handle huge open spaces. But even then in order to make it look like the outside you have to use some relatively large open spaces that make T3 choke. Original screen: http://www.thiefpetition.com/images/thief/towerbase.jpg See that draw distance behind the tower? It's a choker. So it's been completely redesigned and the entire structure altered to fit the constraints of the editor. My point? TDM has the potential to provide this untapped area for FM settings. Or so I understand from the way the editor works. And in such a setting arrows of a mechanical nature cannot be just found. Hence we would need crytstals. It's not just for pagan missions. I think this is pretty important but then it could just be my ideas about FMs. PS. Talking of arrows, check out the animation on this. Not bad, not amazing. - http://home.comcast.net/~ascottk/files/mov/T3RopeArrow.wmv

I'm only opposed to the clockwork designs if they veer off into some cumbersome construction system. Perhaps they're powered by crystals and without the mechanical interface they're useless. I don't know. The useage of the arrows remains the same, it's simply an asthetic change...my only concern is that we come up with an elegant way for FM authors to populate their missions with replenishment without having to swap crystals or mechanical devices based on the environment.

Wow! I lose track of this thread for a few days and look what happens!! Heh. Well, New Horizon sums it up well for me: And as Springheel hinted at, inventory management is not something I want to be overly tasked with when I'm playing a thief-style game. I think System Shock had certain things that you had to mix and match in your inventory and it's just tedious work for an FPS style game. I say, "Save that for a 'true' Thief RPG, if one is ever made ~ not The Dark Mod." I think Morrowind did it, too. It's more acceptible for a game like Morrowing; but it still didn't appeal to me. Thus, manually creating arrows is just not my preference at all. And as for the elemental crystals appearing in their natural habitat; I love this. The key is to make them rare in a level though. Finding a water crystal forming in the trickling flow of a tiny stream in a cave, or a moss arrow deeply embedded in the bark of an old-growth tree is much funner to find than one in a toilet; I'll give you that. In our supporting documentation to FM builders, we could be sure to state these 'obvious' things to help them make their missions better and funner to play. Some people just need the obvious stated sometimes.

I am actually planning on using the toolset for one of either: A stealth based thievery game set in Ancient Rome, complete with dialogue in Classical Latin (I will need to assemble a whole mod team for that, so it might not happen); a Stealth based sci-fi adventure game largely inspired by the old Core Design graphic adventure Universe; or something else entirely. I am not planning on releasing many missions based on Thief (I have a Mission trilogy worked out on paper, but that is it), I will leave that to others. So the more generic the Toolset, the better as far as I am concerned. A limited toolset is of no use to anyone - by all means limit the content that comes with it, but limiting the toolset itself is like making an electric drill that only takes one size of drill bit because you only hapen to want that size yourself, instead of making one with an adjustable chuck. You never know what you might want to do later on, so keeping your options open is wise. If you are going to publicly release a tool, there is no point doing so unless it is going to be as flexible as possible. Would you use Lightwave if it only offered modelling with cubic primitives, with no splines or patches or booleans etc? Of course not. You would use Lightwave because it is an open ended tool that allows for a great diversity of modelling, animation and rendering possibilities.

No. Since WE are doing a toolset, we should make sure that this toolset allows creation for all kind of missions, not just the one you happen to like. A toolset is a toolset and it should be generic enough to limit freedom as less as possible and only where it is neccessary.

I wouldn't want to see a system where you become a chef mixing ingredients to get the right kind of arrow. That's too involved. As for the value of crystals, everything costs a ridiculous amount of money in Thief. Even broadheads were 25 gold (your equipment at the beginning of a mission was often worth more than your total loot take for the night). And it isn't going to immediately occur to a servant that they could fish that crystal out and sell it on the black market to a thief. Even if there was something of a market for crystals, the thief is finding ones that have only recently grown. As for doing away with finding equipment entirely, that ties the hands of FM authors somewhat, who may know that the player will need a certain piece of equipment to be able to complete the mission. It also limits the number of interesting things they can place for the player to find in outdoor or cave missions (how many loot crystals can you pick up before it gets boring?) Let's be sure we're making decisions that are best for gameplay, rather than going with what looks coolest.

As I said in the other thread, this would certainly be limited to city type missions, but I think it could add some additional atmosphere, because it makes the environment more alive. I always think of Gothic I and II when I think about a real good example of "wasted" time which has been put into making a more believable gameworld.

I'm definitely okay with just throwing this in the 'maybe some day' thread. I realize it might not ever be done, but I think there's enough interest in it by people to at least consider it again at a later time. Even if we just use them in one or two missions of our campaign, it's those extra touches that makes good games or levels really stand out sometimes. I'm just sayin'

To me ratings don't pose much of a problem. If some kids goes out and blows up a cop car or whatever after playing GTA, i would say that he is somehow mentally imbalanced anyway; and if GTA didn't set him off who knows what could? The colour red, or seeing a clown; who knows? But GTA as a game I thought was crappy anyway; I mean what's the point of it? The entire objective of it was basically to drive cars around and kill a few people. After the first few missions i forgot who the hell my character was; and every mission after that was just one blur. It had no sense of class or style; its big kick was that it was a modern and graphical crime simulator. And the Sex Simulation? I still don't understand why the hell Rockstar put that in. They're a bunch of juvenile deliquants the lot of 'em. Who the hell wants to watch poorly rendered graphical pornography? All their games have this massive amount of negative hype generated about them; which is what gets their sales. At first I thought the gameplay was fun; but after a few hours i found it to be overly boring and repetitive. One game i did like in the style of GTA was Mafia. This game was set in 1930's chicago; it had a good blend of action and driving, was classy and had a passable storyline. If you like (or don't like) GTA try Mafia; its a whole new league above. Heh; now we need a worst games ever thread.

Okay if the AI is good: Make a mistake, go hide in the water/climb ladder to pointless bit you can't access elsewhere/mantle up a bit, the AI guard follows you. He could stay guarding, shoot, get help. You go back to the place you messed up at -Oh no you can't because there was a small army waiting for you to get down/out and they killed you. D'oh! Or did you get around the army, maybe using a water arrow, invisibilty potion or flashbomb (I would actually use those last two in that situation, I never needed to in Thief, always found plain stealth better somehow, even if it meant reloading). Of course this could increase chances of quickload but if you gave an Ironman bonus or 3 reloads and under bonus (no benefit just a Well Done) in the finish screen that would be cool. I would do it. Or optional objective. Just for fun really, like setting myself a 1 or 0 blackjack limit on T2x missions.