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I don't have linux, but maybe it's the same: when you're running the D3 radian simply press F2 and you get the D3 mainmenu - now open the console and write testmap xyz if you haven't compiled the map yet. when you're done with testing - open the console and type 'exit' --> back to radiant.

Just watched the lightem ingame and this classic one looks REALLY great! Perfect! Now I have one other question. Ho can I get the hands back? I want to see them for the lightgem testing because they perfectly show the state the lightgem should have and so I can match it.

actually there was one major weakness to the T: DS way of doing it over T1 and T2 - there were no "unpickable" doors.. sure you might say a master thief like garret could lockpick anything, but then again in the first mission of T2 he is not portrayed as such, and has to rely on basso to open the door holding Jenivere. This is just my opinion, but in T1 and T2 unlockable doors greatly enhanced the gameplay. it meant that there wasnt one surefire way to get in anywhere, and required actual hunting for keys and clues to complete a mission. The whole concept of unlockable doors melded into the game remarkably well too. The importance of this shouldnt be underestimate - while a lot of freedom was given to the player, thief missions did not reflect real robberies - they presented the player with lots of unrealistic albeit fun stumbling blocks that required a change of appraoch. This diversified the gameplay somewhat, and unpassable doors were one very popular way of stopping the players advance. They also gave mission designers far more freedom to make interesting missions which people didnt fly right through. The darkmod doesnt have to emulate the Thief 3 way of lockpicking. Im sure there could easily be a way to make unpickable doors, but it would be more challenging to meld this concept into the actual game without creating disbelief - after all, once the player has to exercise skill to pass an obstacle, they expect that skill to be able to pass another obstacle of the same type. A detached approach as in thief 1 and 2 ensures that the player never percieves the bypassing of the lock as being in their full control, and so isnt as frustrated when it is not possible. In Thief 3 doors would become a testing ground for how fast you could get through them, and not being able to pick them at all would have proven very frustrating. I think each approach needs to be looked at in quite a lot of detail, as it does make a large difference in the game. A detached system such as in t1 and t2 can be made to be very simple yet just complicated enough to give the player the sense that they can speed the process up in some way. In thievery players would only use one set of picks and frob a door for the required time. This proved infinitely more boring than the pretty simple system of having 2 sets of picks that require switching. The advantage of a system like this is that the player never feels that they ought to be able to get through any door and therefore isnt frustrated when they cannot, the system is simple and melds easily into the game, is relatively easy to do yet satisfying while avoiding the random frustration of a more involved system. This is because a more involved system involves chance as you scout for pins, and missing the mark repeatedly can be very frustrating - the player is relying on their skill, and having youre picking time slowed down due to mistakes is not going to go down well. In essence the T1/T2 system is a very DEFINITE system - you can switch picks quicker, but other than that theres nothing you can do to speed the process up - it doesnt require much concentration, yet is still quite entertaining. It melds in easily enough, and seems very similar to using a key - this is important as similarities between picks and keys should be emphasised to create credibility. Finally the player isnt frustrated when their options are limited by unpickable doors, as they never had all that many options for unlocking doors in the first place. The player also never gets the feeling that they entered a minigame. An involved system such as in Thief 3 invariable requires a lot of concentration and ends up quite complicated. Compared to T1/T2 system, it is far more prone to chance, and at the end of the day never really stops the player getting through the door. All that such a system does is provide an interesting minigame and a chance to influence picking times with the players skill and a little luck. This is gonna create large disreptencies in the picking times between players. This type of system has almost exactly the same result as the more simple model - that is to open a door - as it is unlikely to involve so much skill as to make some doors impossible to pick. However, it does so in a more interesting, rewarding and deep, albeit more complicated and frustrating way. In the end the important thing is that player's experiences on this subject in thief 3 differed, so players should be given an option as per springheel's post. However, even in such a case it may be more difficult to include doors that cannot be bypassed by lockpicking without creating disbelief and/or frustration. This is a stiff negative. Another negative is the inherent difference in operation this will likely create between using a key and lockpicking, again taking away from credibility and detracting from the feeling of a common, universal and intuitive way of doing things. The third option is to create a system that is so scalable and yet so difficult at the high end that only highly skilled players will be able to pick the best locks, and yet even the lowest skilled able to pick simple locks. This would most reflect the real process of lockpicking, where an unskilled user will take a half hour, if at all, to pick their front door lock, while a highly skilled pro will pick almost any lock in under 30 seconds (personal experience!). However, it is a bit much to expect that such a system could indeed be made in a game without extra sensory inputs. I agree with Oddity that it is mostly improbable that the skill associated with lockpicking in real life can be even partially translated to a game. This system would also prove very complicated, frustrating and difficult to meld into the game, but would be very rewarding. Nevertheless, ruling the last system out, it comes down to which abstraction would prove most fun and flexible for both players and map designers. Both will serve no other purpose than to abstractly make the player feel that opening a locked door takes time and is difficult, creating tension and atmosphere. This is their primary role. Giving the player a choice as to which system to employ is probably the safest bet, but when you look at the purpose of lockpicking in the game in this way, it seems illogical to make an involved system so easy as to involve almost no delay in breaking in at all, and likewise illogical to prove slower than doing it the good old fashioned click and wait way. This combined with the difficulty of making an involved system convincing and not seem like a minigame means that even a system giving the player a choice is not going to be easy to implement. This is a very long post and probably excessively long, so i apologise to those who have managed to make it even half this way. I hope some of this helped!

Sure. Do you still believe in Santa Claus as well? Guess what happened when CDs were introduced. Nobody could copy them for quite some time but there was no drop in game prices. You know why? Because they claimed that the development prices are so high so that they had to take the extra fee to put out much better games. If they can make more money out of it they will simply take it. You don't really believe that they will lower prices if there were no pirates? The only thing that will cause prices to drop is if other games would take over the market they want to reach, because they need to compete with them. That was meant to be sarcastic. I certainly don't hold the position that "the greater cause" will warrant any action to enforce it. That's usually the claim of people like Bush, or companies who want have more control like Valve. Funnily enough Vlave is rather closely related with Microsoft, which is also not exactly know for their care for the customers rights. Public disconsent worls only where public opinion really counts. And also only then if there are enough voices raised which would matter. Obviously this is not the case, because despite the many complaints about Steam people buy like crazy, which means that they are happy with Steam. They pay to get this and they get it. So they shouldn't complain either, bnecause they get what they pay for. If Steam locks them out of their legally bought games, then they shouldn't complan because this is what they payed for. This is what Steam is designed to do, and what it doesn, and obvsioulsy it seems to work quite well, otherwise there wouldn't be so many complainers. So far my "conspiracies" seem to be turning out quite well. Let's see. When they built the Berlin wall there was one famous quote which seems to fit very often. From one of the people in charge at that time "Nobody wants to build a wall here." IMO that was said a few weeks before they started to build it. Now in Germany there was a toll system introduced for trucks ONLY which didn't work out to well in the beginning. I was of the opinion that this automatic observation system (which it is) will be not only used for toll collection, it will also be used for private cars and other purposes in the end. Now let's see. The system was not even in place when a politician already "thought loud" about using it for *UH!* private cars! Wow! What a conspiracy guy I am for thinking. And now guess what. They are even thinking to use this system for the police, because it is perfectly suited for it. All for the greater good of course. A few days ago a guy was murdered in Munich who was kind of popular there (or at least he was made popular). So they found out his murder about three days later because it happened that they had a DNA registered from him from som earlier testing. When I heard that news I said to my wife that this will now be used to level DNA analysis on a much broader scale into the police methods. And guess what. Not even one hour later when I heard the next news, they already "thought" about using more DNA analysis. Now lets read the EULA from Valve. There are some reall niceties in there. For example that they can introduce or change fees whenever they like without you having a say into it. Well, that is not even legal in Germany, but that's not the issue right now. Now tell me. Why do they write something like this into the EULA? Because they accidently put it there? And guess what happens to your SINGLE player games. That stuff, they shouldn't have a claim about fees and such crap because what fee could they mean when you just want to play a single player game (like I usually do)? Seeing what success HL2 had in terms of sales this would indeed be pointless. Because what I would get (if I would get anything) is a standard form saying something like "We apologize for any inconvenience but you must anderstand that the evil pirates force us to take such harsh actions and we do everything that we can to make your gaming experience more pleasurable nevertheless. blablabla". More likely I will not get any answer though.

Yikes. They both look really nice. I'm still unsure about the remnants of the housing on the ring. I don't want to see anyone to end up wasting an excessive amount of time on this, but it is important that it look right. I suppose we could somehow make it that when you toggle the compass off, the gem image is replaced with the one having part of the housing still intact. At any rate, I would like to test both ingame. BT, if you use the citytest2 map and just run down the middle of the street, you will get a very smooth transition on the gem. That's how I've been testing it with yours and it works beautifully. Transitions are very smooth. Great work. oDD. I would also like to test your version ingame as well, to see if it looks good without the additional housing.

Looks pretty snappy all the same BT. When you're finished up with them, would you mind if I had a go at testing them?

Nah, I think it's likely because I had the files in my folder, for testing purposes, and neglected to remove them before I did an update with CVS. I'll just have to clear them out and let cvs update them again.

I can't remember the exact Zbrush workflow I tried to be honest, but it's just good practice to make sure things are working right in Doom before putting too much effort in. Usually things will ONLY work ONE way in Doom, do it another way and you're fucked. I did the bow animations in Maya before testing them out in Doom, and then realised the bone hierarchy and parenting/pivot points I'd setup were wrong, and didn't work in Doom, so I had to rig, weight and animate the whole thing from scratch again) Which 3d app are you coming from with your low poly model? Wghatever, we're working in lightwave objects now, so at least download Deep Exploration from www.righthempisphere.com and convert you're model to .lwo You can just put your model in as a static for now to look at it. I like to add a func_rotating and attach the model to that and set the speed to about 20 so I can see the lighting changes of the spec and normal map as it spins. I wrote a tut in the tutorials section of this forum about getting models into Doom, and there's also a video tut I made which deals with normal mapping in Lightwave as well on the FTP.

I don't think the 4 joint in this rope will be enough though, it already looks pretty angular over a short fall, but I have no idea how to make my own rope AF rig using more bones in the mesh. I'll try to work it out sonme time, but this should do for testing anyway.

I was under the impression that bows 400 years ago would not last very long anyway. Maybe a few months at most. THey'd be easily cracked or snapped, or just lose their spring. It's not like this is a family heirloom or anything, it's a functional item. I intentionally kept it as simple and rugged a desgn as possible. None of these things have to be the final game version though, but they'll do for now in testing.

I created this room(not in Doom...) for testing wand, floor ceiling textures...

Hmm, I guess the "tell by location" would be similar to the object stim comments. There would have to be some way of placing a trigger where the AI knew where they were and selected the appropriate resonse. I wanted to cover as many bases as possible with the test set for Sparhawk. If we end up not using them, no great loss...but they're available for testing all the same. We just need real maps to test them in.

Since Oddity said he currently want to make some static mesh models instead of characters it would be great if he could create the lightgem. The version that we have can not be used. What I need is the following: It is acutally two models. One should be the gem and the other the compass surrounding it. The gem must be created in such a way that it has 16 textures associated with it, showing all states between dark (not black but very dark so that it still can be seen) and the brightest level. Since this will be pre-rendered it doesn't matter how complicated the model is or the material to create the lighteffect on it. It will just be displayed as an image. The compass model should be rendered in such a way that it seems to fit the gem or surround it. When both are properly placed on screen they should look as if they are one model. Even though the compass may never be seen from bottom, it still must be a solid object as D3 can NOT render doublesided polygons. I guess this will be only an hour of work at most for Oddity, so I hope that I have a nice gem soon. My own version is rather crap to look at. Yeah I know for testing it doesn't really matter, but it is still more fun to have nice graphics.

Hi I was wondering if there was anyway I could help with testing or programming I haven't done much in the way of prgramming in visual C ++ but I had created a couple of different calculators for another game system in VB. I have little programming background but I learn fast and I can find problems most wouldn't think of. well if you need help don't hesitate to PM me. Morian

Well, Atti, there's a bit of contention on this topic. I've been using .ASE, since it's basically the most simple, clean export format that Doom3 accepts - but apparently, some others have had frob-related issues with it? There's not much else 3DStudio can export to that'll work. So, for testing purposes, try ASE, but we need to (as a team) pick the official format. Also, FTP anybody?

A percentage figure would be misleading. THink of it more like a ball rolling down a hill which gathers mass and speed over time. For example, I'm currently figuring out the best way to implement our characters in Doom, this takes quite a lot of study and testing, but once I'm happy with the best workflow to use, the characters can all be done surprisingly quickly.

Ok, if the gem is a sperarate object and pefectly spherical, and is the only thing in the 16 bitmaps then it will work. SOp the bitmaps will just consist of 16 spheres for dark to bright. Everything else has to be part of the 3d model, and we'd want to keep that 3d model as llw poly as possible. This one is 50 triangles, though it doesn't exactly look uber. This one is pretty drab looking just for testing. We can use normal and spec maps for HUD items, right?

I hope some of you keep a slow system, because we will need this for testing and optimizing. As for the drive. Such a tempreture shouldn't be a proboem, but to make sure you shuold look at the sheet that it is accomapnying(brlblrnjkfd). Or you might look at the manufacturer site.

The lightgem suffers from the same problem. I created now a much more streamlined gem for testing. Of course this will not look as good, but it should work. It has so many vertices concentrated in some areas and apparently even without any proper faces attached. Maybe somebody could take a look at it and clear it up.

Oh yes, we did create them,( kudos to BlackThief) but they were based on Thief 2 textures. I should also add that they don't include the texture for the model, just the wireframe. They're very low poly, 90% of the details from those old models were in the texture work. Only reason I suggested them is that the basic shape is what we're looking for and any one of the models could be hacked and carved into an ultra high poly model of what ever we wanted. Just an option that I wanted to present as either a tool, or for testing purposes until we get our own models. We certainly would not present any ingame shots to the public with these models in them. That would be suicide.

Yeah, just a suggestion since I had all 99 characters here in .3ds format. I thought the same thing about copyright issues too, but at the same time there would be nothing left of the original models by the time we're finished with them. When you think about it, it's not so different from what we are doing with some of the textures that are based on Thief 2 textures. Some of those textures are essentially high res versions of the old ones. It would be a much greater difference between the models than the textures. Anyway, I won't edge us into oblivion with that suggestion, but they're here if we would like to play with them. I think copyright issues could only be laid against us if we were to import the exact model...poly for poly...skin for skin. Still, won't hurt to use them internally for testing purposes. I do believe we're aloud to do that.

Well so there are scripted ones in it for specific effects - but the ones that aren't scripted are VERY good. Like the one Jay mentioned in some other thread - shoot one of the lights hanging by chains in Site 2 (I think it is) and it reacts bloody awesomely. And you just have to get to the part where you use the remote control metal claw to pick up and drop radioactive drums into a waste disposal - sorry for the language, but f*ck, I have never seen ANYTHING like this in any other game. If you tell the claw to lower, and it isn't precicely centered around the drum, then when the claws close, the ones on one side hit first, naturally, causing the claw to pick it up on an angle. Raise the claw, and it is actually carrying the drum in an akward way!! This stuff just can't be scripted! There are too many possibilities Regarding the AI, it is actually not even worth comparing Doom3 to Doom 1 and Doom 2. Those D1 & 2 monsters only ran directly toward you in a bee-line, wether there was a wall there or not. Their pathfinding was limited to sliding along a wall or edge if they happened to run into something along the way. Doom 3 is the real deal. Once an enemy is present, it will chase you anywhere, no matter how complex the path you run, no matter how far away (well, there is a distance limit, but you have that in all games). I have even been testing this myself with my own maps.

With the help of Jay and some threads on D3world I finally managed to create my own custom model and import it into D3. And it is already frobable, but that is probably to be expected now. Don't expect to much, because it is just a simple bowl, and I think it might be much t heavy for such a simple object. It's a drab bowl and it has 84 faces. The problem is that i don't know how to lower the polygons while maintaining the detail. Maybe somebody could explain that to me. At least it is a start and I can now create my own objects for testing until I get good models from our artists. Are there any still around, or did they all leave now?

I was thinking last night about the most effective way to get some of our models into the game for testing purposes. Then I remembered that our plan was to use some of the zombies already present in the game (since the model and animation are already done) with modified textures. I've also been looking for ways to try my hand at skinning. So in a brilliant flash of synthesis, I thought I would try my hand at creating custom skins for one of the zombies. Since I'll be modifying something that is already created, it won't stretch my limited skills as much, and we should be able to use it fairly easily in our mod tests once I'm done. However, I need someone's help, because I have absolutely no idea where to look for the relevant files. I need the UV map, the texture map at a minimum...I can make my own normal and specular (if they even use that). Can anyone tell me where to find those files? I'm thinking of the thin zombie with pants and no shirt (although the fat one will do in a pinch).

Testing out my new Wacom tablet... made some coins (loot): Click here for slightly larger version