Search the Community

You don't need to modify the source for TDM to do this. If you don't like it in a map you can easily change it yourself, and since we provide gameplay options as well, you don't even need to change it in a map or def file, you can simply go to the gameplay options and set No KO's in the GUI. In fact, this makes this discussion even more annoying, because Oddity is well aware of these settings, and thus there would be no need to rehearse it again and again except to sow discension.

@oDDity: Since TDM is open source, there's no reason you or others couldn't make maps with helmeted guards being unKOable.

Really? I knew sometimes that they would get curious and start stalking around, but I didnt remember it making them actually go over to it without going into search, I thought I had tried that recently What about the rest of it? Any plans to put that into TDM?

With a graphics card like that you would do well to upgrade anyway, not just for TDM.

With a 2.3G processor you can't even install Doom 3 because it already needs about 3G for the base installation and then add another 0.5G for TDM.

We do have one untextured game model bot which wasn't made by me, but by Deep Omega. and the concept was by GIMG (I think) If they want to show you that they can. As for the T2- ish bot concepts I designed, you can find them (and more TDM stuff you havent' seen) at my website (in my sig)

Which is what we should avoid, as we are the creators of the TDM universe and we set the standards. We should do this now before we do a release, and since we already have beta mappers working on their maps, it would be good to tell them such details, so they can fill them in in their backgroundstory.

In-game text prompt, that is. This is a quick question just to test the waters and see if there are any fish. Ever since I noticed you could type text in-game in Thief with the command line ( cntl+; ), I had this idea that it might be possible to add commands in-game through a text-prompt, sort of like IF-style or the old AGS games (kings quest, space quest, etc.) built into the game, where you could say particular things to NPCs -- like saying a particular password or answering a question to get past an NPC (i.e., the input triggers some AI movement), or "ask X about Y" to learn new info (i.e., the input triggers a screen-text or voice file), where the text itself is triggering things in-game -- and I thought if done right, it might really add to the richness of the game's interactivity, push it more in the interactive fiction direction, which is good IMO. I've played around a lot with parsers, so I could do a lot of the work if the basics were in place (and even pretty unsophisticated parsing can add to a game), but getting the basics into place is what I don't know. Of course, everything concerning the command-line in Thief is beyond access. But what about TDM? Is it reasonably possible to get a text prompt in-game and link it to in-game tools, enough that an enterprising FM-maker could take care of setting the links up by hand? Where on the possibility scale is something like that? Keep up the good work, gentlemen. I salute you.

Don't know if you know about ReactOS at http://www.reactos.org. This is an open source clone of Microsoft Windows operating system. Last time I checked it's states it was at the very beginning, and it looked like a dying project. This was about two years ago I think and I was working a bit on Wine at that time. it seemed like a great project idea but nothing that would really come to pass. Now I checked this site again and I must say I'm pretty impressed. Apparently they reorganized and started actual work. The screenshots show Unreal Turnament and a lot of other apps that I use like Xemacs, working. I'm already thinking of giving it a shot with Doom 3 and see how it works. That is definitely a project to keep track of, and if I should loose interest in TDM, this would definitely a project I would like to contribute.

After playing Darwinia (You guys not in the Uk know what that is right? Google it, worth getting, coming out on Steam now) I have had a thought. Few games bother with making the sky good. Darwinia did in its own interesting way, Thief put loads of effort in for the time, and Boiling point had a quite a cool day/night sky. But Thief (classic natch, TDS had only one state of sky) is still the best (Blast you Nvidia card!) with moving clouds going over the moon like in real life. Think about other games, like Vice City or other GTAs. That had an amazing city maybe but a CRAP sky, really low res, a massively overdone sun and moon, all stretched and fuzzy. So modern games only do a skybox image for the sky. Rubbish. Not good enough for Thief. But will TDM have a cool sky with moving clouds and stuff, maybe a few different types, high res, etc. despite the doom3 engine?

I just installed Thief Gold on my notebook, and after playing some time I realized, that by standing in an area where my lightgem is completely dark, I'm fully invisible. In fact, I can only be seen if the guard is running somewhere and I'm hiding in front of him. Otherwise, I'm fully hidden, it doesn't even require time to pass. That makes the game more interesting, though, but not realistic... So will TDM have such invisibility in shadows, or it's something buggy from Thief Dark Project?

I have sever installations on my machine. Two W2k and two Linux gentoo setups where I can switch between them via bootloader. Since I currently work a lot on TDM I don't bootup Linux to often, so yesterday I did once again and suddenly one of my harddrives were gone. The freak thing was that it showed up well in the BIOS bootscreen and there was no indication of a problem, but when I booted into Linux it didn't work and I could see an errormessage that teh drive was detected, but timed out during initialization. I checked the cables, and swtiched the drives, to see if this is a fault of the harddrive or motherboard or something else. Then I booted into a gentoo installation disc from CD and suddenly the drive worked fine. I realized that the real problem was that I was booting a very old kernel, I still had in the bootmenu, that I used for driver development, but it wasn't updated in a long time and so this setup was screwed up. When I booted the correct kernel it worked fine. The shocking thing was that, that in the beginning I thought that the drive was giving up on me and I had all kind of important documents on this drive without a backup. Needless to say that the first thing I did was a backup. I was quite frustrated when I noticed the failure, and I already thought how expensive it would be to send the drive to a data rescue company for retrieving the files from it. Somehow I doubt I could have afforded it. So I wasted a whole evening because I just had an old entry in the bootmenu. This was the first thing that I removed when everything worked again. The morale: Always keep a backup of your important data.

i was just trying to make spar defend himself hehe.. i don't truly believe he will leave, at least not until the coding of tdm is done But yeah, i might try reactOS too, install it on a separate partition or something, its very intriguing.

That's good news, and makes it sound pretty straightforward to implement by an FM-maker (or someone releasing a generic script later on FM makers can build off of) without any extra work on you guys' part in development. That's a really great thing and I hope something that FM makers start using ... it was definately part of DX's magic. I still wish that I could get a functioning text-prompt in-game... (This is now my own, out-of-play meta-comment ) I've long had this dream that fps's and IF could be somehow integrated. And if you think about it, there are really just two main missing links (that I can think of), since most kinds of movement and most kinds of basic object manipulation are already in FPSs ... 1) is open NPC interaction. 2) is maybe non-standard (open) object manipulation, using objects in non-intuitive, novel ways. Frobbing an object, or an object to another object, is a pretty blunt instrument, but then again a good designer can do a lot with just that, as I've seen in many a creative T2 FM. And adding much more complexity only marginally opens up the kinds of interactions you can have for the trouble. 3) Edit, maybe three. Also, there's non-standard (open) player movements like lying down, sitting down, dancing ... again, interesting, but only marginally so for most games, esp given the trouble it'd probably cause. But NPC interactions, and in particular *open* NPC interactions, seems almost fundamental to getting really immersive / interactive (IF-level) story-telling & puzzle-solving off the ground. So really #1 is the main missing link that could make a difference. The difference between menu-based and open/text-based dialogue/interaction is maybe how much you want to lean towards the console side vs. the IF side of NPC interaction ... You can tell where my sympathies are. Anyway, TDM just rekindled my ideas and made me wonder if it's possible and what would have to be done to get there. Thanks for replying, all. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Edit. On reflection, it occurs to me that most (even seemingly open) NPC interactions could be taken care of with a menu that comes up when frobbing an NPC. Along with a list of pre-provided phrases for various AI, there could be also a more open menu system that could allow the player to "ask" the AI about a particular listed topic/object/person/place (not all of them with answers, of course; Q: can you modify a menu list so that new objects you discover can be added?), or "command" an NPC to do a listed action (create a distraction), or even a nice list of "stock-phrases" ("What the hell are you looking at?", "shhh....", "evening") ... open enough that there's lots of room for experimenting and creativity, but closed enough to make it functionally manageable ... just a lot of links to take care of, time-consuming at worst. The more I think about it, the more it seems there's something to this idea. For my own gratification I'll think about it some more, look at how different Adv games use dialogue menus in different ways, and see what I come up with.

I liked opening a lock in Still Life. Is TDM the same?

D3 scripting is VERY customizable... IMHO, this is the sort of thing that could easily be done on a map-by-map basis without much (or any?) support from TDM. Well, maybe something like a func_pressure_plate might be helpful. But things like locks which trigger/disarm traps should be doable assuming the lock code is well designed to interact with scripts.

I should point out that a large number of the ambient sounds and sound efffects in the original thief series are actually commonly available sample sets, many of which are already in the public domain. I've played around and analysed some of the samples, many of them are bit for bit IDENTICAL to samples used in Unreal (Unreal uses mostly public domain sound FX - I've heard the samples in Unreal in all kinds of TV shows, films games, particularly low budget ones, which suggests they are either free or very cheap), DF:Jedi Knight, and a host of other computer games. The sample in Thief played when you eat a food item is a typical example - I don't think anyone knows who (if anyone) owns the copyright on this sample, I recently heard it on a television commercial for a food outlet for example, and it was a small restaurant, I doubt they spent any money on it. If you trawl around on the web, you might come across it, but I doubt anyone knows where it originated from. Also, samples that are under a certain length (typically 30 seconds in many jurisdictions) are not covered by copyright - they are often deemed too small to be worthy of copyright. So apart from the voice acting and ambient music, you could probably rip and redistribute most of the samples in T:TDP, T:TMA, T:DS without any legal consequences, because the samples are either already Public Domain, they are too short to be copyrighted, the original copyright holder is unknown, or they are not distinct enough that anyone from Eidos is going to notice that they are there. Most game companies use a lot of PD samples because it is cheaper than paying a foley artist to make new samples. Almost every conceivable sound effect has been done, so it is generally cheaper to use as many freely available samples, and fill the rest out with commercial sample CDs, and do foley and voice acting as a last resort. Unfortunately, the voice acting and ambient music samples are definately protected by copyright, so that part of the sound crfs would not be redistributable. Besides, like I've said many times, TDM should be a distinct game, and should avoid resembling Thief too much.

That's not what I said. Distributing copyrighted game content with your FM is flat-out illegal. It's something that can be gotten away with for the most part, but TDM is in a position where such reuse would be subject to particular scrutiny. What I DID say is that, basically, however the end user obtains the required CRFs is their own business. This distribution model (if you can call it that) has worked exceptionally well for programs like MAME. No reason it wouldn't work here either. New Horizon, I'm not talking about AI barks. I'm talking about things like Garrett's quips, or conversations between characters, or even just really cool ambient sounds. Things that would be easy and desirable to reuse.

I don't think this would work quite so easily. We would almost have to design for two different foundations. The Thief vocal sets don't have exactly the same counterparts in TDM. Some of the projects being discussed at TTLG would be far better suited for this, as they are aiming to recreate the dark engine but in an updated form. Their AI states and vocal keyset would directly mirror Thief 1 and 2. Ours doesn't and would likely take quite a bit of retooling to have the correct responses play ingame. Not really worth the added work when you think about it.

Not installed. The files can be copied directly off the CDs, if I recall correctly. So you'd only need the CDs, which I feel safe predicting the overwhelming majority of TDM players will already have. For those who don't have them, there's eBay. Or for those who just want the CRFs... well, let's be honest here... there's always P2P. And I don't see anyone getting too worked up over it. Game publishers are far more concerned about piracy of current games, not niche titles that are almost a decade old. CRF is ZIP. PK4 is ZIP. The sounds are WAV files (screw the old graphics, I'm thinking about the wonderful sounds). Formats shouldn't be a problem.

if the crf is just a zip, perhaps you could tell the person to just rename it to a pk4 (the pk4s in doom3 are just renamed zip files). sounds like a very intriguing idea then you could recreate the OMs from thief 1/2/3 but in tdm and legally too. At least, this would be legal in AU afaik.

I can see two sticking points with this approach: 1) If the mission author was to avoid copyright infringement by distributing his mission, it would be necessary for all players to have the Thief game installed as well as Doom 3 and the Dark Mod, which seems unduly burdensome when the author could just have used original content and avoided the issue. 2) The old Thief assets would be noticeably inferior in quality to what players familiar with the Doom 3 engine are expecting. Textures and models would be a non-starter, while sounds might be OK but even those are probably poorer quality to what TDM players will be used to. Obviously, it may be that this is not even technically feasible (I don't know whether the SDK allows you to load different formats) in which case these points are moot. What WOULD be possible is to create a custom script that converts the SND.CRF into a PK4, so that the sounds can be imported manually, but I don't know how many authors would want to do this when they would not legally be able to distribute the resulting mission.

I just noticed that the soundshaders use the prefix "tdm" instead of "darkmod". I guess this should be changed. No point in using different prefixes everywhere.

These days security systems have gotten so advanced that it is very difficult to become a master thief like in the days of old - it is usually brute force methods (like using a 4WD and chains to drive off with an ATM) and violence that will get you some petty cash, or electronic fraud, like using automated malware to continuously siphon off half cents from internal bank transactions and deposit them in an offshore bank account.... But here again is the case for not having weapons for the player in TDM. Real master thieves don't use them, and if we are to suppose we are playing a master thief, as opposed to some rough second rate thug, there should be no weapons, and minimal tools. There. I've said it again.

Well the arrow would be either magical or have some chemical which gives it those properties. I believe the normal settings that were going to be in TDM were if a guard was alerted by a player they would remain alerted, the difference between the rock and the arrow is the arrow will reset their alertness but the rock will just set them off and not give them any closure on the matter. They won't even find the arrow or the rock. Which could be a whole new arrow in itself, the peacemaker, hitting a guard with one will basically render them unawares that you are something to kill, they still know you are there but they won't do anything about you. Until you do something to them and then they retaliate.