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You can boil them down to this yes. I don’t think they are, I was using an extream. But take the story and the interaction out ( the rpg elements) and you are left with a hack and slash, and fps with swords So do some good rpfps', Deus ex, thief splinter cell all offer multiple ways to complete tasks. Why? Take the npc interaction and the story out of an rpg and you get a big map and lots of things to kill. Which was my point, fps are becoming action adventure. They need to, on the one hand you get the Serious Sam games which some people enjoy to just blow stuff up, then the doom3 kind which adds a little plot as an excuse to shoot things. Then there is the dues ex, the Max Payne, Pariah, which add a plot and story but at the core are still point a gun and shoot games. But they have a plot a story and adventure to improve it. But that isn’t taking the story out. it is only removing the main plot I agree, But more stories (plots?) are created by the npc's, the “I lost my child can you help?” quest is a story. The endless go here kill that fetch this quests are just the same as a go to level what ever and massacre the npc's missions in an fps. The better the ai gets in an rpg the more stories are created in a believable way I agree. But there is no reason why the stories that explain in an fps (or action adventure if you will) why you have to go to point A and kill who ever, cant be as good as the story in an rpg where you are told to go to point A and kill someone or rescue someone or make a pot or what ever.

Yeah. BUt we have to find a way to transfer the data between missions.

I'm thinking of making a short campaign... Gandalf warned us not to meddle in the affairs of wizards. Garrett, apparently, never read The Lord of the Rings. Will we be able to connect our own missions in any way? Levels could be travelled foward or backward in D3, so I'm guessing so...

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the mod, we cannot use any sound files from any thief games, no matter how remixed they are. That doesn't mean that you can't remix them for use in your missions, but nothing of that sort will be included in the default set.

Those are quite neat, although the texture on the first is a little bland. However, they are quite the type of small objects we need done to pack out missions with.

We can also make a mini map as a menu. The player could go through the main door to enter the mission. Down in the cellar where all the options are stored, in the living room there are the selections for missions, etc. You get the idea. If the ways are short and simple this wouldn't be bothersome to use and may look rather nice.

A good argument already raised for the simplicity (of Springheel's mock up) is that this is a toolset which many varied styled missions will be created. Granted, they could make their own menu style if they really wanted to, but the shouldn't feel like they have to go to that extra work - they won't feel that if the interface is fairly generic and simple.

Well, hopefully the FM author has playtested their mission thoroughly before releasing it (and had others playtest it) so that problems like un-mantleable tables on a marble floor don't occur. Game bugs aside, a player who is patient, thoughtful, careful and above all stealthy should be able to complete the mission objectives without too much difficulty - not a walk in the park, just challenging and fun without too much frustration - and without saving more than a few times, and hopefully without actually needing to load from any of those saves. It is my personal preference for missions that make it easy enough to complete your objectives if you play well, but very hard to access every area of the mission and get 100% of the loot. You have to leave something for the L33T among us Whether or not playing without quicksaves makes you more L33T I won't comment on, what I was trying to get across is that if you challenge yourself, your skills will naturally improve, just like practising any skill will lead to improvement. Actually, playing multiplayer deathmatches is a very good way to improve your skill - no savegames there, and if you practise, you get better, and you also get better at single player games. Thievery is a good way to practise your skills, if you are good at Thievery, you will probably be able to get through TDS without saving at all (provided the game doesn't crash and you leave it running the whole time). And Thievery doesn't let you save, but that doesn't detract from the game at all, or make it less fun. OK single player games and multiplayer games are different, but the skills required are the same...

I don't think that's true of well designed missions. If you need to get somewhere, and it's hard, you will need to do it, and if you find the easiest way, good on you for being smart. You can load another save game later if you want to experiment. And if something is really hard and you're just curious, a good mission will reward you for exploring.

So it can be done then? Will DarkMod suport this? I guess I want a combination of Hubs and Loading zones. Do you have a rough idea of how large a level can be in terms of game world units (I am NOT talking about poly counts here)? How big is the player in terms of the maximum dimensions of the map? I want to be able to make very, very large city type maps, and I would prefer to keep loading times down, but still not have too many loading zones. The city in TDS was like a little village, I want to make something at least 4 times the size of the city sections in T2, with non-linear gameplay, with lots of little stories rather than one big one like T1/2/3. not so much individual missions, more giving the player the choice of what to rob, and can rob places repeatedly (and each time things change as you would expect for a place that has been burglarised a few times...), until the owner runs out of cash and abandons the joint... Yes, I know this will take me forever to map :lol:

That. The author can say when you deserve to save, and what parts you have to slog through without the luxury of saving. Saving becomes a reward for accomplishing something really hard to do. We all know there are missions that are "totally non-linear", but this has nothing to do with having or not having save points. Every mission has places that must be broken into, objectives that must be acheived, and precious items that must be obtained some how. Each time you acheive such a point, you definietly deserve to save. An example of other points along the way could include either side of a particularly well-guarded hallway. But it doesn't end there by any means. There are plenty of other creative ways to place save points in a rewarding manner.

I think Hylix made a pretty good case for why that should be a few posts above. PC games are by nature much more likely to be buggy and or crash than console games. I don't mind losing some time if I manage to get the character killed, but losing a lot of time because the game crashed, or a bug made it unplayable, is just silly. You can't see a crash coming and auto-save the game before it "exits," because a crash is usually not a controlled exit, the program just stops at whatever section of code it was supposed to be executing. Aside from crashing, there are a bunch of annoying bug possibilities, such as getting stuck. How many times did you get stuck in TDS or T2X even? It happened to me a helluvalot, because I like to explore and find good hiding spots, which often results in getting irreversibly wedged into geometry, and having to reload from a save. Should I be thinking "Well I'd better not try to hide in that corner between those boxes, because I'll probably get stuck and I haven't reached a save point yet!" How does that help gameplay? That doesn't make the case for unlimited saves, merely that more than one is desirable. If you can make the case that you need more than two per level (three at the absolute most), even for a very buggy and difficult game, then I'd like to see it... If you have two saves, and one turns out to be a dud because of some glitch or a really stupid error, you have another one to fall back on, in the unlikely event that also fails you can restart the level... I really don't see the problem. If you have a campaign with 14 missions, 14 save slots - 1 per mission - plus one extra in mission save should be sufficient. If you are not using autosaves or checkpoints, then the case for more than even one save slot is weak, because the player can choose to save at a safe point in the game, and is not subject to running through asave point with 15 guards running behind them, and not being able to use that save... I did find TDS could be a bit buggy when saving, sometimes I would save by overwriting the previous save, and the game would crash, losing the save in the process, so I used two saves throughout, deleting the oldest save every time I saved... 2 save slots would have been more than enough.

Your welcome. Initially when I started my post, the tone of my reply sounded as if I was insulting your intelligence. I didn't want to come off that way, so I started with a sincere compliment. I may disagree with you, but I at least get where your coming from. No, no one explicitly "said" this, but I think it was very much implied. I think the meaning of my "quote" was also implicit. Me personally, I think I'd be happy with a mission start up save, and a quicksave only option in the mission proper. At least then, I'm not chained to my computer until the missions over, or running around trying to find the Mystic Closet-of-Remeberence to save my game. Hylix.

Great idea Gildoran, you would have to be even more careful than usual where and when you saved but that would only heighten the challenge. Sometimes I admit I cheat, I play an area through using up resources with abandon, then go back to a previous save and redo the area knowing all its pitfalls. This single save option would make that obsolete, plus make every resource you burned up that much more precious. In other words, go ahead and use up those water arrows early on, cause when you find yourself at the missions end and you need four of them, you dont have a past save to fall back onto. Designers would have to be careful, but more importantly the player has to be more careful with their decisions.

They'll more than likely work like installing a regular Doom 3 map. You'll organize all your assets in their appropriate folders in a PK4, arrange them like you would if you were dumping them straight into the game. PK4 files are straight up zips, the only difference is that the file extention is renamed. If you want a working example go here and download the map, use winrar to open the PK4 (so you keep the directory structure intact), and check it out. I dunno how necessary a loader would be considering how easy it is to install FM's...all you do is dump em in doom3/base and they're ready to go. Might be cool to be able to launch all the Thief missions from one program though.

Only if there were things to do on the way, and challenges etc... just as in RL, walking across endless sand dunes will get old a lot quicker than walking through a varied landscape with forests, rivers, groves etc. But in terms of actual time spent, I have easily spent over four hours on thief missions trying to find all of the secret areas etc, getting all of the loot, and the difference between a large outdoor level that takes four hours to walk across and a small, tight level that takes four hours to complete are really down to what you can, or have to, do in that time frame, and how challenging they are. So large outdoor levels in most games I have played so far have tended to be a bit weak on the fun side because they lack detail, and because there is nothing to do besides walk for ages (and occasionally shoot things). Serious Sam only made those large deserts bearable by filling them with a ludicrous number of enemies (and that game got old quick). I think taking long walks is something I would prefer to do in RL, I'd rather rob castles and explore spaceships in computer games, because I can't have that experience in RL. I still wan't that experience to be generally as realistic as is possible though, just minus the bladder meters etc Make sense?

Guards you can see, watch their actions and plan your own actions strategically. You know that if you wait for a guard to go around a corner before you move, they can't possibly take a random look back and see you because you're blocked by geometry. It's a situation with a definite optimum solution, you just have to figure out the guard patrols and time it right and you "win" that little situation. For creaky boards you would have no warning at all to plan around. It's a no win situation, which do occur in real life, but are not fun in a game. We want to reward the player for calculating risks and choosing a strategy to avoid those risks. Wood floors are a little too common in the game to make them a potential risk without any other warning other than "it's wood" and hope to retain any sort of fun. What about the T2 missions where the entire floor of most of the building is wood? Would that have been fun if at any place you could conceivably step there would be a sudden creak unless you moved at some new "check each board with your front foot and take 1 step every 20 seconds" speed that's even slower than a crouch-creep?

Oh well. I guess I'll have to code some stuff myself I s'pose if sillhouettes are too hard, that's it. But at least coding movement modes should be fairly simple for those of us who want't it to do. Like I said, if you add it, you can just choose not to use it and unbind the key for your missions if you don't think you can make a mission that would be balanced with it in.

Note: If you do not want to read the whole thing then skip down to the last paragraph for a summary. First off I want to tell you how impressive your work as a team is. What can I say other than everything I've seen so far looks very professional and I congratulate your team's hard work and dedication. I cannot wait to be able to create my own missions with your tools and look forward to your campaign. Now on to me. My name is Jon and I live on base at WPAFB (Wright Patterson Air Force Base), OH. I am not in the military but my dad is. I currently do not have a job or go to school because I'm a paranoid schizophrenic. For those not knowing what my illness is let me explain a little. I'm paranoid because I do not trust anyone, and I always think something bad is going to happen to me or to other people. I'm a schizophrenic because I have basic visual hallucinations, and extreme auditory hallucinations. I see flashes of lights everywhere I look and I hear voices. For those wondering if I have a split personality, I do not. Schizophrenia does not mean split personality but rather split mind. Most of my thoughts that I have are dillusional. I currently see a psychiatrist once a week, and between my medication and supplements I take over 80 pills a day. If anybody is interested in exactly which medicines I take and the milligrams I will be glad to post them. I hope that last paragraph wasn't to long to read. As to what I spend my time doing, I edit games and buy either computer hardware or training videos for different applications and subjects with what little money I get from the United States Government which is not a whole lot after buying half of my supplements every month. I hope I didn't sound ungrateful to the United States Government in that last sentence, its just that I've seen more military doctors in a span of a month then most people seen in a lifetime, and only one doctor wanted to take my case. Now I need honest criticism on two textures that I've created. Please note that they are WIP. Here's the link http://photobucket.com/albums/y182/Outlaw706/ I also put up in jpeg form the diffuse, local, specular (only on the brick texture) and an ingame shot of both textures. I'm still learning about how to create proper height templates and making a normal map off of that. The local maps were created by using the 'desaturate' command in photoshop and then running the nvidia normal map plug-in filter for these textures. When I learn more about height templates I'll apply them to these two textures and every other texture I make. I know this was a long post so I'll summarize it up right here. Your team's work is most impressive and I can't wait for the tools and the campaign. I have several mental illnesses some of them I'm not going to post, so that gives me a lot of time to dedicate myself to a project, and I would love to help out The Dark Mod project in any way I can. Last thing don't forget to leave constructive criticism on the two textures I created. Thanks for reading especially if you got throught the whole post.

I guess what I am getting at is, OK you are aiming for a purist thief who doesn't train for combat (which I think is good), but I also think there should be the flexibility to have the player be an assassin (like Riddick in Pitch Black) - meaner than a simple thief, more like a mediaeval special ops guy. I am thinking of amaking a game where you can customise your character a bit before you start - you can choose whether you are a weedy little thief who will throw sand in your eyes and run away if caught, or a highly trained master of combat who (ab)uses his stealth and combat skills to commit a few crimes to pay a few bills. Or anywhere in between. My goal is to give the player choices on how to approach missions, and they will have to suffer the consequences of their choices - a big strong assassin type will not be able to hide as well as the thiefy type, will make a bit more noise, and will be too big to access some parts of the level, but will be able to take care of himself better in combat, while the thief will be able to hide and sneak much more effectively, and can get into some tight spaces no one else can get to, but will be absolutely stuffed if he gets cornered (he might have a flashbomb or salt to throw in a guards eyes though, so he can run away). Thus there will be different rewards for different choices - some loot will require brute force to get, some will require agility and cunning. I don't know how close you guys will come to what I am aiming for, but hopefully there will be a decent base I can build on, anyway, keep up the fantastic work, I am looking forward to the toolset being released!

There is no reason why you can't do this. However, since we're appealing to thief fans, we want to make sure the tools allow creation of those kinds of missions as well. It's a toolset. Use it for what you will.

While I am not keen on time limited missions, I do like the idea of Day/Night cycles, where, if say you start a mission at midnight, you have 5 - 6 hours before dawn, then things get more difficult as the shadows get brighter and fewer. But not necessarily impossible. Actually, I wouldn't mind a daylight mission, provided you did have a few shadowy sections (say you start outside a cathedral, then you end up in some dank catacombs, or like the cragscleft mine mission in T1, where it is day outside, but dark in the mines...

I want to set up a loot system that gives diminishing returns on loot - the more loot you stuff into your bag, the more likely you are to be noticed, and the slower and noisier you will be. That way the player has to make a choice between getting enough loot to make the mission worthwhile financially, and getting greedy and getting chaught. If you think about crime statistics, most burglaries involve small items that are easisly fenced - jewelery, cash, small electrical goods, cds, dvds and so on, and real thieves don't carry lots of gear around (certainly not a quiver full of sundry magical arrows, a bow, numerous flash bombs, potions etc), that way they can hide in plain sight just as easily as in the shadows. Modern thieves carry things like screwdrivers, lockpicks, maybe a crowbar, pliars and wire cutters (usually a multitool or pocket knife with all of thes attatchments is enough) . they often dress as tradesmen so their toolkit doesn't seem odd. I think random unpredictable things like floorboards creaking unexpectedly add immensly to gameplay, to me having a visual clue is almost cheating - I want the thief to have to adapt to events outside their control. Like I said, I like a challenge, and this might not be for everyone... My point is, I want to play missions where the deciding factor is the skill and cunning of the player in as realistic a world as current computers can create, not the arsenal he/she carries - if you want that play Doom

In regards to a loot system, you could also simply limit loot to stuff that is a bit more sensible - don't have lots of large loot items - maybe have an inventory system where you have a set amount of space for loot, and you have to make a decision on what types of loot you want to pick up. As in TDS, you could then fence loot and by equipment, upgrades etc (but the fences and stores in TDS could have been implemented better, IMO). If doom 3 allows for much larger level sizes than TDS, then you should, at least on some suitable maps, have a large city level with lots of fences, shops, and of course, masions to rob. This probably wont appeal to loot completists - those who absolutely have to get 100% of the loot, but if done right, it could spice up gameplay a little. If you like you missions faily linear and goal oreiented, I can see why you might not like this idea, and it is heading into RPG territory I know. Some people see Thief as a glorified game of Pacman, I am not one of them, and prefer a bit more depth and intricacy

I downloaded it from thief-universe with a download manager and it worked really fine. always around 128kb/s which is my max. downloadspeed. I'm now at the 3rd mission. ghosting everything on difficulty hard and it's quite fun however I hope the missions will get more difficult later - it's quite uncommon that I can find about 90% of the total loot when ghosting, when you consider that I even had to leave some stuff, because I didn't want to break any windows....