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Guys, please plan this step out carefully - just saying. I was there at the last reorg, doing a significant amount of work (it's safe to say this without patting myself on the shoulder) and this is gonna take away a lot of energy and concentration (plus time). Also, whoever is going to be involved with this, please study the wiki articles well. There is already a lot of information sitting there, and we're discussing things here that have been nailed down in the past (like the addnormals issue). Whoever is going to convert these, please make sure you know what you're doing and you know about DXT1/3/5 compression. Otherwise you're in danger of wasting work and time. DDS diffuses and speculars without alpha channels: DXT1. Everything with alpha channels use DXT3. Use ATI's compressonator, it can be used from the command line too, if this is really necessary (I believe it's not necessary, because you can Ctrl-Click-Select the files that need to be converted). You won't be able to pull this off with just a script. DDS textures can not be used with addnormals() or other mapexpressions. This is important for the models like the gargoyle or other stuff which is using "stock" darkmod textures/normals plus mapexpressions. You need to check whether models use this kind of trickery before you can convert the textures. Watch out for dependencies of models on default darkmod textures. Normalmaps need to be compressed with ATI's compressonator. GIMP is not compatible, as far as I know. You'll need to test it if newer versions of GIMP support saving of DXT5 RXGB normalmaps. This is a D3-specific format, so you really need to make sure. I have strong doubts whether this can be pulled off before release. If you ask me, postpone this after release and plan this properly.

Btw, the progress is tracked here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...st&p=153102 Currently I am teaching the Games::D3::Parser to correctly parse material definition files. Once it can do this, it will be easy to extract the diffusemap/specular/bumpmap for each material and then figure out the DDS vs. TGA file from it. (That's the theory, anyway

pretty much. here are some examples of (yea, some of them are sorta long, but even if you just skim, you'll see the uncanny similarities) Example 1: "Deus Ex 3 first concept art AND Thief 4 confirmed Told ya so x 1 million. Thief 4 info here: http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=76374 Concept art for Deus Ex 3 here: concept" Example 2: "Must I explain everything? I have done much research to draw my conclusions. This isn't just jumping the gun. The whole point of Eidos Montreal is to create AAA games. They have clearly stated that their goals include reviving of old franchises. It is not Tomb Raider because that is Crystal Dynamics deal. However Crystal Dynamics devs are working with Montreal since they are using the Tomb Raider engine for Deus Ex 3. By the way the next Tomb Raider is already under development and there are a few screen shots out there. It is Thief 4. Do not believe me if you so wish but you will see I was correct. Whether or not is in the future is yet to be determined. My prediction is that it's a 50/50 deal. The future might get the game to sell more but the past will keep the hardcore fans in check. Just to conclude I firmly believe it is Thief. All signs point to it. It is a question of why not rather than why. " example 3: "The reason why Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief 3 were gimped was because the engine they chose. (Ionstorm Austin) The man in charge of Invisible War was Harvey Smith. He hired a programmer to write a lightning renderer. Instead the fool wrote a complete engine. Harvey Smith being inexperienced in leading picked the engine without knowing it's limitations. Halfway through Invisible War they realized how limiting the engine truly was. Being too late to back down they did what they could. Having more experience with the engine yielded a better game with Thief 3. However upon further research the consoles did have significant impact on the game. Regardless Harvey Smith is not involved with any of these projects. The good news is that since it's Thief 4 they might bring back the talent pool from Looking Glass Studios. Just to conclude the engine they haven't talked about it. However it might be the Tomb Raider Engine. The good thing about this is that they have tons of experience with it and are tailoring the engine for Invisible War. Here in some info on the latest build for the Tomb Raider engine. http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=74916 You can see very detailed weather effects which no doubt can be used for Invisible War and Thief 4. I know many people were disappointed with Invisible War and Thief 3. However knowing what I now know I am putting my faith in Eidos Montreal. They will not fail. Come early-mid 2009 be prepared for a hell of a game in Deus Ex 3. Further rumor on Thief 4: http://clanbase.ggl.com/news.php?nid=284137 " and my favorite: "Mock all you will but Eidos Montreal will serve you with some kick your ass pie when it is released in 2010 or 2011 ."

are you MageofFolenn on Black Cat Forums? B/c if you aren't, you must be soul-mates, or long lost twins or something.

Good question Ishtvan. That's certainly something we hadn't anticipated, and I think our coders should be reprimanded for not having their thinking caps on straight! We'll settle this issue in the private forums!!!!

@oDDity - when I discovered the layers feature of MotionBuilder and asked you about it, you didn't know what it was really for, which is why I made the annendium to your video in the Wiki. It's been a year since then and I've learned a lot. http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/...uilder_tutorial You could explain how I can achieve the same effect with curves, that would be more helpful than your usual mysterious and patronising comments. Until then - @squill & oDDity - If you want to layer on an overall motion that happens to use existing axiis as the many smaller motions, without layers you won't be able to easily adjust that overall motion, you'll have to edit all the keyframes of the individual smaller motions - takes longer, harder to get a smooth result, end of story. It's like once upon a time they didn't "need" splines, or even tweening, but things called innovation happened along the way and let us to better work, in shorter amounts of time. I'd like to believe you, but where are these controls and how are they used to get the same effect? I said movement cycles - walk, run, search, even with varieties, don't make up of most of the animations. And even they can benefit from using layers, I used them to make adjustments to the overall pose of the search cycle without editing every single keyframe... I'm going to give the Maya layers plugin a fiddle this weekend hopefully. I would certainly like to see the workflow optimised, and if this layers plugin is everything the web page says it is, then it is the only reason I've been using MotionBuilder and if it was ditched it would drastically cut down development time and possible complications with changing the rig.

I hate to treat this place like my personal FAQ or something but this another question that has kept bugging me and clearly I'm not using the proper terms because searching here and the wiki and doom3world and their wiki has been no help. If it weren't hindering my efforts at learning this editor I wouldn't bother. I want to combine a bunch of brushes (technically, stairs) into one unit that I can move around/copy. This seems really simple and its discouraging that it seems that hard to do (for me anyways). I've tried all the combine/group commands in D3ed that seem promising but I cant find that they actually do anything at all. What is a good way of doing this? I thought maybe to make it into a prefab or something like that but I've never done this and it seemed there had to be an easier way to do it. Hopefully pestering threads will give answers to someone behind me. It might be worthwhile asking another question here while I am at it. Another issue that seems it should be easy that has eluded me is selecting multiple brushes easily (as in not the shift+click method). It seemed there should be a drag-select method or some such thing. I've experimented with the selection menu and select touching etc but none of those really quite do it. Thanks and sorry for the constant questions!

Yes, it has. Angua and me considered these implications in our designs from the very beginning. The elevator handling is separated from the AI state/alertness. Just operating an elevator doesn't change an AI's state, of course. However, it doesn't always work in all state/task combinations so far, that's what I'm currently working on as I type. As with doors, the original AI code couldn't handle such complex "intermediate" movement tasks like opening doors or operating switches to reach a goal, that became possible after we introduced this State/Subsystem framework. At any rate, I expected these kind of glitches, as our AI system is quite complex, but I expect to get it stable very soon. In case you're interested in the TDM's AI framework, I've put the basic concepts on our wiki: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/AI_Framework

There is no custom texture as such but I found the best texture for this purpose is... textures/darkmod/stone/flat/smooth/ceramic_tile_tan03 which gives a great grid pattern in-game almost like 3D graph paper. See.. http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/...Getting_Started Though I don't know if you have access to that texture? I use it now and again for smaller projects too like recently I am in the middle of creating some stairs for a grand hall.

Im playing around with skyboxes in D3 ROE and Im having a little trouble figuring out how to assign the material of portal_sky to a brush. I've looked through the TDM wiki but as these portalskies are not native to TDM or vanilla D3 there isnt much there. This probably stems from my lack of understanding of materials in general. I know they coorispond to class-definition like things in the code and you can create your own (I messed with creating textures as well), but as far as the editor Im a little stumped. To make a normal skybox you just go to textures/skies/ and pick one and it seems to happen automatically, but I cant find one for the portal_sky. I guess its important to note that Im just using d3radiant and not darkradiant right now (sorry if this is darkradiant only forum). The d3world wiki only says to do it but not how. Does anyone else know? Thanks for any help!

Sorry, but the answer is no. That is not our focus. There are already Thief Styled Multiplayer Mods...Thievery and Nightblade. To my knowledge, we are the only mod recreating a Thief Styled single player experience. That makes our project somewhat unique, wouldn't you say? Aside from that, why compete with Thievery and Nightblade? They're already providing the same experience. In addition to that, check out the forums at ttlg.com/forums. There is a small group working on getting the multiplayer code working in Thief 2. One thing is inescapable, Multiplayer Thief is a very different beast than single player Thief. When we fully release our source code, other teams will be able to create a separate multiplayer codebase if they wish, but we won't integrate it into the core mod.

OK, thanks. Started a placeholder wiki article at.... http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Difficulty_Levels I'll rewrite/add to that later on........

Starting reorg this morning and started wiki placeholder at http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Prefab_Comments

Confirm that entity inspector panel size now saved and re-opens OK and convert to func static feinted out if just surfaces selected. Thanks. Erm... What's a layer? Can't find any info on the wiki. I've tried selecting items and making a new layer but can't see what it does. Is it supposed to store a selection for later re-use? If so, how? Not obvious how to use this.

So....how many of the changes I just finished making to the mesh two weeks ago are now obselete? http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=151102

I think there is some misunderstanding about my problem with the entity list size in my post @ http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...st&p=142541 It's not the panel size (though that needs saving as well) but the entity list itself (see the image of waste space in the picture in that post and the tiny entity list.) So this problem is still present in the latest snapshot. I only see 2 or 3 lines of entity properties with a very large empty panel. Does nobody else see that?

Thanks for that...but now I seem to be having another problem I'm trying to follow the skybox instructions in the wiki. But instead of a sky I see just a pitch black surface. I just can't see where I'm going wrong. The map is lit with one ambient light.

Hm, no I don't think so. According to this information, I would read it that the animation data is actually coming with position information included: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/...ion_Information That's probably why there is a -scale keyword in the first place.

Here is the information on the wiki (from ascottk): http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/...ating_AI_Meshes

I've put this in the models forum as they seem the nearest thing conceptually to prefabs: the mapper selects and inserts a structure into his map. Organization: As the collection of prefabs grows I've started a few new folders but now there are enough prefabs to make it essential to start organizing the folders properly as many prefabs are just in the root. Even my own prefabs have been overtaken by new folders where they ought to be. It seems the model folder structure is ideal for this : architecture, building parts, chimneys, stairs, etc. This is not an immense task like the texture reorg nor can it break anything and I can do this if nobody objects to me moving some prefabs about into new folders I can probably do it in an hour or so. We need to raise awareness and hopefully anyone uploading any new prefabs will see the folders and place their prefab appropriately or create a new folder or subfolder. Comments: Some of my own prefabs could use a few lines of comments to help mappers. Not all do but occasionally it would be very helpful. I've been thinking of starting a new wiki article: Prefab Comments. But wondered first if there is any way that comments could be added somehow in Dark Radiant like the entity descriptions and spawnarg comments. Not easy to see how. Maybe a .txt file in the prefab folder with the same prefix as the prefab and the DR prefab dialog maybe displays those in its file list, perhaps shows the text somehow if selected, perhaps in its console. Anyway, just a thought. If that is not realistic then we need a wiki article I think.

The Briefing screen is now part of the New Mission gui chain (after you Start the mission, before Objectives). The Briefing text is read from an xdata. Details at the wiki: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Briefing Thanks to greebo for figuring out some xdata issues.

Fidcal also has been working in this, you can see his thread in the member forums below

Bit confused how to make a mover door now In 094 I make a model door and change it to atdm:mover_door. This is how I've always done it. But now it is not visible in-game even though it shows in the editor. if instead I choose a mover door entity then change its skin - that works in game but shows the wrong skin in the editor. Is the latter is the correct way now to make a door? If the skin thing is fixed in >094 then no problem and I'll catch up at the next update. Probably need to rewrite the A-Z on making a door. Actually, looking at the main Doors wiki article my original way still seems to be valid so what is the situation? Why is the door not showing in the game?

I don't think anyone's done exactly that yet. Congratulations, you're a pioneer. From a quick read of the wiki, seems like locks aren't separate entities; all the lock info is defined directly on the door itself. So you might want to try turning the lock entity into a "door" which doesn't actually move when it opens or closes. When the door is "opened", it will (by default - see wiki) trigger its target. The challenge then is to figure out how to disable the functionality of the buttons. Scripting it by targeting the door to a target_callobjectfunction and following the instructions here is the most obvious way.

These libraries should all be mentioned on the wiki article ("DarkRadiant compilation guide"). I guess the readme.linux is just not complete yet. The plugin is using a home-grown communication system to let two programs call remote methods. I used this to let DarkRadiant call methods in the D3 SDK code and vice versa. But... 1) seeing that this causes so many headaches is a minus in my book 2) boost/asio had been included in boost 1.35, whereas I had to copy all asio headers into that plugin back then 3) people are not really using it, I guess. So I'm inclined to remove that plugin from the codebase, if there are no huge arguments against that step. For now, let's just skip the compilation of that plugin. That being said, if you are willing to look into that problem (or any other DarkRadiant problem, to be precise) feel free to have a go at it. We can always use a helping hand, but that goes without saying.