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No worries mate, English is a bugger of a language to learn, even for the natives... I had to edit my last post three times to get rid of some silly typos Out of curiosity, what is your native language? I think all of your ideas are quite good, not being a coder I can't really comment on the feasibility of implementing them all, although I am curious as to how you see your idea of catching oil lamps from KO'd guards working. I like your suggestion regarding guards noticing and picking up out of place items. In Thief 1/2/3 you could drop an item softly or throw it, so I would assume that TDM will continue that tradition.

OK, I meant. *sigh* Ok, thief3 had oillamps, that u threw, guards slipped (which is great but should ony work on solid surfaces) and u can shoot a fire arrow and burn the guards. well, that was my uestion about tdm, any of that type of support? ex.: dropped oillamps break and burn, so wen u KO a guard, u gotta clik the lamp and put it down, and let the body thump, or let the lamp fall and burn (a dark hall in carpet that cant be cleaned, and acts like a blood spot. 2 other things when u pick up an item u shoudl be able to "throw it" and "put it down softly" (ex: acciedntly picked up a plate off a table, and gotta turn around and throw it on carpet, which brings my second point AI object detection- if theres a bronze plate in the middle of the hallway, the guard should pik it up, get suuspicios and put it on the neares shelf or where it belongs. and a 3rd thing- teamwork in guards needs to be more than "hey lets go look for him" it should involve "random (reality)" for example, the not-so good vision guard looks in a shadow where you are almost hidden, doenst spot you looks on, the other guard whos searching starts searching that area, and the blinder guard should tell him "hey i already looked there!", then the random factor if the better-visoned guard would chek ur area or not shoudl kick in. *sigh* ...i need 2 quite school and beta-test/codesign games, how do you do that again?

That should really fail the mission anyway - all the loot would be destroyed, along with the building... It would take a vast amount of computing power to treat fire realistically, so I prefer if open flames are used sparingly... have guards carry a lantern instead of a torch if they are in a mainly wooden building - after all, a sensible guard would take the precaution of not doing things that would put his masters property at risk of fire damage, so it isn't really realistic to have open flames in certain areas anyway. If you are going to do flammable objects, they should be restricted to a few types so as to avoid large conflagrations. But I would hope that TDM does not become a simulator for pyromaniacs, so don't go overboard with fire if you can avoid it...

I don't know how Splinter Cell does it, but we've listed many different kinds of exploits that would be possible if AI climb ladders. And from an immersion perspective, if the AI don't use the ladders intelligently there's not much point in them using them at all. AI in TDM won't be helpless if a Thief goes somewhere they can't follow, and they won't just stand around at the bottom of a ladder waiting to be shot.

If I recall, grappling hooks weren't going to be done at least for the first release. I'm not sure whether they're on the cards for later on - they're certainly not in the classic thief vein, although for a more ninja-style thief mod, perhaps they'd fit. I think, though, that one of the things TDM is going to have to replicate is the incredibly fluid feel of clambering around in TDP/MA. When you're running around the rooftops, leaping with abandon, knowing instinctively when to hit jump again to grap onto the next surface, needing only to stop for a second to shoot a rope arrow at a wooden window box... Again, it's immersion epitomised, because it's so natural. Anything new that is introduced will have to live up to this - and it's where climbing gloves didn't cut it, and TDS' general lack of clambering didn't cut it.

More than likely, as soon as he hears (another) offer for TDM to purchase his textures, he'll offer them for free again. Assuming he didn't change his mind after thinking about it. Maybe that'll serve as a, "Can we get this rolling, then?"

Hey, if you want to use an icon for TDM besides the default Doom 3 one, you can use this... The final icon will probably look a bit different since this one doesn't scale down to 64x64 without looking like absolute ass...but it'll work for a placeholder.

There were some interesting suggestions proposed in this thread. I somewhat agree with obscurus on the victorian setting, I think when you look at thief, it's clear that although it has a certain medieval flair to it, the actual situation (proto-industry, mixed with more traditional elements, like religion, magic, itd..) isn't that far removed from, say, early 19th century. However, it wouldn't be good to go al the way IMO - I'm all for anachronisms, as long as they are not silly... My (MY) idea of a nice setting would be something along these lines: The city could be based (very vaguely) on 18/19th century London, with other elements mixed in for flavour - that means, a lot of gritty industrial complexes, but the majority of architecture would still be older in origin. Also, if you look at some of the old european cities, many of them have an "old" district of some sort, which is still standing strong after centuries - plenty of medieval and renaissance architecture. I guess it could be located so that it's basically the town "core" and from there the city expands outwards, with progressively newer architecture, and you could have those big industrial districts on the fringes of the city, and then the suburbs with massive victorian mansions as well as older sections which used to be separate towns/villages in yet another architectural style but are now engulfed by the ever expanding city. That way it wouldn't even be anachronistic to have different architectural styles IMO. The bigger problem here is the life, the "pulse" of the city, which was very different in middle ages than it was in 19th century. In thief, folks are usually wearing those colourful baroque clothes, which (to me) suggest 15/16 century style. The strong religious (builders) presence would be out of place in a victorian setting, but that could be explained by the fact that they (the builders) and their teachings are quite different than, say, catholicism. They promote industry and stuff, so it's understandable that they are still going strong. Pagans are another issue - but one could explain their presence by making TDM world different from ours in a sense that there's more of a gap between "civilized" and "uncivilized" world - massive cities, surrounded by smaller towns and detached farms (or something), but further away from such habitats there's the untamed wilderness where pagans still prosper. Then you could also make some guards carry musketes instead of crossbows and they would be more powerful - more dangerous and another incentive for sneaking. Most guards would still carry swords though, because they're better for close combat. Medieval type of armor would make sense I guess, because firearms would be rare (unlike real 19th century) and most people and especially thieves and such would still be using daggers and bows (and bow is silent, too). uh.... that was just a quick brainstorm. A couple of undeveloped ideas, feel free to rebuke... EDIT: now that I took another look, I think this post would make more sense in "The Thief/dark Mod Universe" thread, so do move it, if you feel it should be moved.

This is good to hear. The more variety and options that you can grant to FM Designers (even though they may have to do a little work ) the better and more diverse their missions will be. I look forward to seeing some of Obscurus' forays into making a Victorian Era Fan-Made experience as much as I look forward to trying to create my own medieval/fantasy ones! If the D3 Engine is as flexible as I hear; it would be great to see some entirely new stuff! Imagine playing a misson where you rob the palace of a pharaoh or the Foro Romano or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon The beauty of a toolset is that it allows anyone to share their own opinion of how they think the game should be made. For me personally it wouldn't matter if certain TDM FM's had no magic or water arrows; so long as I enjoyed them. Think of the Shaleford Cradle, IMO a great map; it was full of Victorian Era elements like electric lighting, hell the idea of an insane asylum is Victorian. The Cradle was great even without fantasy elements. On the other hand in other levels I loved being able to shoot rope arrows into a beam of a high ceiling and drop down on unsuspecting guards below. So long as the map is enjoyable and well-made, magic or not-magic will become a moot point.

Yes, as far as I know you are correct about whale oil being used for lamps. I think the stories about Emperor Qin's tomb are likely myths, but not altogether implausible, if a large enough reserve of oil was used. As Thief has large numbers of gas and electricity powered lights, you could still have a realistic light source that was in the same vein as thief without being a flaming torch. While putting out torches with magic arrows can be fun, it is not at all realistic - flaming torches were not commonly used, and you would need quite a bit of water to douse one, more than would be practical for an arrow - it would probalby take 4 - 6 litres of water to put out a torch, try shooting a 6 kilo arrow with a shortbow! I don't like using "magic" as a way of getting around gameplay issues created by RL considerations. It is lazy, unimaginative and boring (for me). And I think TDM should try to differentiate itself a little more from Thief. Personally, I like the idea of a more pure Victorian setting, with less anachronistic mediaeval elements. Perhaps even going so far as setting it in 19th Century London... But can we please stear clear of lame gameplay devices like magic torches and arrows? For me there is a difference between having magic as part of your setting, and using magic as an excuse to explain away poor game design....

Burning torches were actually not a very common form of lighting in the Middle Ages - they burn out quickly, and usually produce a large amount of black smoke (depending on what oil or fat was used as the fuel). In RL Middle Ages, people used candles, large fireplaces, and oil lamps to light their way, but mostly they just went to bed soon after dark, and those that stayed up during the night just had to rely on good vision in the dark to see. People used torches as a temporary, portable light source, and only used them for as long as was required - you would never see a mediaeval dungeon or catacomb lined with rows or burning torches, they would take too much work to maintain (in RL a torch will burn out after about 20 minutes or so, depending on the size and whether or not it was refreshed by dipping it in oil). A guard in a dungeon would take a torch with him as needed, and when he left, the prisoners of the dungeon would rely on whatever natural light made its way in. I prefer realism in this case - having magical light sources is something I would personally avoid. I would rather see balanced maps where dark areas are as dark as they would be in RL. The player should be able to light torches and carry them around, and I can't see how dousing too many torches would make you fail the mission, that would be pretty poor level design, it might just make certain areas very difficult to navigate. I don't mind the idea of luminous mushrooms and plants - there are organisms in RL that do that (no mushrooms that I'm aware of though), it doesn't require magic. If TDM is going for more emphasis on the Victorian aspect of the setting, then you could use gas powered lamps to light large underground sections. Otherwise, set your maps so that there is enough natural moonlight that most areas have at least a little bit of light... You might also be surprised at just how well the human eye can adapt to darkness - a person who has spent years mostly in darkness will be able to see quite well in rooms that your average modern city dwelling, electric light using person would regard as pitch black.

That brings me back to my point... if game devs sell their games at a lower price point, they will have to sell more copies to make enough moeny to make it worth the effort. To sell more copies, they must have a much higher quality game than they get away with at the moment, and they must make an effort to make it stand out from the crowd by giving an old idea a new twist, doing something a bit differently. I never buy games anymore until the price has dropped down, even if that means waiting for 6 - 12 months after the game has been released before purchasing my own copy. I still don't have Doom 3 yet! I mostly agree with oDDity on this, I have bought very few games over the last few years... they mostly seem like the same game once you get the CD out of the packaging. Personally, I think if you aren't going to make a game that is highly original, then at least take a well used idea and improve it. I guess that is what TDM is all about - taking the best of Thief and improving on it. Sure it is a derivative concept, but that is not the point... There is a difference between something that is simply derivative, and something that is an attempt to improve on the original concept.

So, turning Thief in a Victorian 'setting' could be wrong in the same way would be Thief4 set in a 21th century world . Although as you said TDM is a Thief-mode : everyone is free to create even a car racing game based on Thief . Goodbye

Nobody forces you to play it. We don't. Good. Because we are not making Thief, we are making The Dark Mod which is inspired by Thief. Since Thief is owned and copyrighted by LGS / ION (or whoever holds it at the moment) it is good for us if TDM is recognizable different than Thief.

That really is pretty goddamned amazing, both in how it looks and this guy's design prowess. A hell of a lot of detail in that map, professional (and beyond) quality, and it looks incredible. AND, it runs great too, somehow - from the perspective of a 1.4 GHz machine, even. And I love the cathedral as well. This hints at really good possibilities for TDM maps.

That depends on your hardware - if you have up to date hardware - say a FX 6800 GT, a decent AMD 64, 1GB ram, it is absoluteley practical for a game - that is why a lot of the newer engines like UE3 are/will be using it. If on the other hand, your hardware (like mine) is a fair bit below bleeding edge, you might find your framerates dipping into unplayable territory. But by the time TDM is released, there will be no reason not to include some version of parallax/virtual displacemnt/relief mapping, as enough people should have updated their hardware sufficiently to make it worthwhile. Unreal Technology made a good decision, IMO, to break compatability with older hardware and release a purely Direct X 9 game - by spending less time and resources on implementing backwards compatability, you get a fully optimised game that supports every trick a bleeding edge graphics card can pull, and by the time the engine will be released, those cards won't be so bleeding edge (or expensive) any more... So bring on parallax mapping I say, if you do I'll upgrade my machine

It is my understanding that it was never originally designed for more than four players (I think it has now been bumped up to 8, but still that is not many), as Doom 3 was intended to be a primarily single player game, and the multiplayer side of it is fairly rudimentary. Quake 4 is the Doom 3 engine with rewritten multiplayer code, allowing for large multiplayer deathmatches etc. Fear will be released soon, that is another Doom 3 game, I dunno what sort of multiplayer it offers, and whether it would be worth modding to what you want... As far as I know, D3 would just take a lot of coding to get a decent multiplayer experience out of it, whereas it is a relatively trivial task to do what you are suggesting with UT2K4 + Nightblade. It should in theory be possible to port the Dark Mod to Quake 4 and add multiplayer stuff with little difficulty (but I am a mapper, not a programmer, so I could be wrong). If you look at the Nightblade team, going by their names, it would appear that many of them are working on Nightblade and Dark Mod simultaneously, so I suspect they have enough on their plate without coding extra stuff for TDM... I think we must all just wait patiently for Nightblade to be released, and see what it offers... In the meantime, Thievery UT is the closest thing available to what you are talking about...

I create this sample application which shows the functionality I had in mind. eep in mind that this is just an empty shell. So you can only see the functions that should be visible to the user via the buttons and controls, but they do not work apart from the buttons that will open other dialogs. Of course since this is an web app the buttons will be links instead and also the layout doesn't really matter. TDM Resource App 0.1 Take a look and tell me what you think.

doom 3 had some OK facial animation in the intro bit, but was that a sort of hard scripted animation? How flexible is D3 as far as facial animation goes? Will it be as easy to work with as UT4K's system, or a royal pain in the arse? Will end users of TDM be able to create custom animations etc without having to import models back into 3DsMax (which many of us can't afford) by using scripting instead?

I never said saving = cheating. What I said was in essence, incremental saving + random trial and error = looking up a level walkthrough, which is a form of cheating. I have never played a game that has limited savegame capacity, where I then thought it was a bad experience because there were restrictions on how often I saved. It might have been a bad experience for other unrelated reasons, but then I still felt it was a good thing for my experience that I could not save wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I like it when the game designer has made it clear that the player is expected to make a certain amount of progress in the game without dying before they earn the right of saving their progress. Thus, I am in favour of a save game system that completely (or almost completely) removes all control of saving from the player, and puts saving in the level designer's hands by way of autosaves of some form. Actually, this is how most console games work, and the people who play these, and a lot more people play consoles by the way, obviously don't all think it is a bad experience because of it (although I guess you could argue that sales of game walkthroughs indicates that a lot of players lack the patience and persistence to see things through, or that there are a lot of badly designed games out there)... The old "you can't tell people what to do, they won't play it, it makes for a bad experience" arguments are not borne out by reality - many people really don't mind, and many actually enjoy it when the burden of figuring out when to save is taken off their shoulders. I think one of the reasons people become addicted to quicksaving etc, is because they have no idea where to save, because the designer has left it completely open, and start saving everywhere out of nervousness, and this soon develops into a full blown quicksave abuse problem. They then get so used to this that it becomes a shock when they play a game that makes it very clear they have to earn their saves, and like many of you posting on this thread, become apoplectic at the suggestion that they should have to earn their saves.... And by the way, while you might think that, as a player of a game, that , in reality, very little is is up to you: the designer decides what geometry defines where you can walk, the designer decides what AI to place and where, the designer decides how much loot is in the mission, the designer decides what the game interface will be, the designer decides what kind of savegame system will be there. You as a player only have the freedom to do what the designer has allowed you to have, and the only way around that is to cheat, either by turning the gamma up, turning on god mode, looking up a walkthrough, hacking the game files, opening up the editor.... And yes I know this argument is moot, because TDM will make it optional etc, but that still doesn't mean that people who go to the trouble of taking days, months out of their lives to craft a finely tuned gaming work of art, don't have a right to say how it should be played. When I make a level, I wan't the player to know that saving anywhere other than where I let them by default is not part of the game, and I would prefer to do that by disabling a few features by default. It would still be optional what people do: they can still quicksave with gay abandon if they want, but they have to enable that option in the same way they would enable god mode or any other non-default option that makes gaming easier, or would spoil the intent of the author's design... Quicksaves etc should be optional, yes, but not the default option. Sure some people will always cheat or play in a way that is not in the spirit of the game, but there is nothing wrong with making it a bit less convenient to do so... Is that so unreasonable? How long before this thread is closed? Damn it is getting long!

So, saving your game = cheating. Hilarious. If we couldn't save, we'd still all be playing pac-man. Hell, if we're going to extremes, then why save ever, and not just play from the intro movie straight through to the end? If you fail, you fail - 30 hours of your life lost, suck it up. Just like pac-man. Maybe I should go Iron-Man my way through Ultima VII... fun! It's never up to anyone else how I do something. That's why I'm doing it, and not them. When an experience is forced on someone and they're told how to do it, you will invariably find that people consider it a bad experience. That probably has something to do with why this design paradigm is so rarely implemented - and often lamented - in game development. I understand suggesting someone try something a particular way, and I'm all for that; a friend of mine played through Thief by running(!) through areas (with AI chasing him of course) to get an idea of the layout, and then reloaded to "play for real," and it bugged me terribly. But in the end, you've gotta let people do their thing. The good part (aside from it being optional in TDM, which makes this whole discussion sorta moot), is that since the code is available, no one can force anyone to do anything, anyway, that they don't want to. So in the end, the only ones that will end up frustrated are those telling people how they should do things. Ha-ha, neener, neener.

If I recall, one of the massive advantages of the thief genre was that it was playable in more than one style. You were encouraged to play stealthily, but if you wanted to ghost, you could, if you wanted to dispatch everyone stealthily, you could, if you wanted to take sword and health potion and go on a rampage, you often could do (if you were good enough) If TDM is going to reproduce this wealth of options to the player, that goes hand-in-hand with thief's non-linearity, I believe it should really give the player the option of saving when they want. If they want to play like a tank, then quicksaving could be a boon. As has been said, ironmanning became popular in Thief, and it had quicksaves, so where is the problem? If you give the option to limit saves in these wonderful fantastic methods, those that want unlimited saves will have them. Those that feel they would be tempted won't be.

Yeah, it might be a good idea to check with the individual artists... Anyway, it would be fantastic to have VSIM type of control in TDM (or any frikken' game, post-1998 for that matter, LET'S GO, GAME DEVS! *swift kick*) but there's just no way, considering the complexity of it. The movement system in DBTS is based around the entire PhD research in physics and computer systems of Peter Akemann, so it's just a tad involved. Good DBTS reading, by none other than null, T3's Jordan Thomas

Hmm, I like the idea of 18./19. century feel. I actually always thought it would be cool if some company made a game like Thief, only set in 19. century england... With Jack The Ripper and all I always thought victorian era was actually quite gritty, perhaps not as much as medieval times, but still.... Perhaps someone will make a mod for TDM haha. Hey, that would be cool, a mod for a mod...

Send a mail to recruiting@thedarkmod.com and we will setup a contribution thread for you where we can discuss the details. Include the info from here as well so we know what you are applying for. It would be very helpfull to have a customized tool for our assets. My only hope is that this will not take longer then developing TDM itself, as this could be quite a big task really.