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So, what are you working on right now?


Springheel

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I like the looks of that crossbow repeater!

 

@SH: Is this a Flooded Quarter mission?

"No proposition Euclid wrote,

No formulae the text-books know,

Will turn the bullet from your coat,

Or ward the tulwar's downward blow

Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—

The odds are on the cheaper man."

 

From 'Arithmetic on the Frontier' by Rudyard Kipling

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@ SH - the size of the windows on the roof of the building thats facing the picture are different sizes. The ones in the middle are huge and the ones on either end are tiny. I'd get rid of the textures on the end and replace them with one of the windows from the middle on each side. Plus the one's on either end look squashed and too small to fit that surface area.

 

Also the plaster section, like the window the middle bit is too big compared to the ones at the side. Scale them up to something like 2 by 2 so they fit in with the ones on the side.

 

The brick section looks just horrible. Is the scale wrong or is this just because it's in the daylight? If it's because of the daylight then there must be another texture that looks better in it.

 

Plus why are there only windows on the roof and nowhere else?

 

The red brick texture on the left looks stretched too. Also no windows.

Edited by Sir Taffsalot

"I believe that what doesn't kill you simply makes you... stranger"

 

The Joker

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Pagan village

 

I would also suggest taking a look at good old Iron Age europpean settlements (castros in portuguese, fortified villages) like this:

 

http://trilhos.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/castro-de-santa-trega-galiza-espanha/

 

como-viviam.jpg

 

Even though you are going for the tree house idea (which seems pretty interesting to me, in a kind of fantasy style adventure), this could give you ideas as to how to organize the interiors or even the whole thing - for one, I would make my village very crowded like in the pics, this makes for a far more interesting interactive environment than a barren, sparse place (we also know we cant really compensate with other content, as AI is expensive and not really equipped for being NPCs at all, so geometry is still the best bet for interactiveness).

 

@ Shadowhide - I like the idea overall, but I agree with everything Sir Taff said, and also with nbohr1more about the lights, I would decrease the ambient light considerably, darken the water if possible (so it wont be so clear), and rely on sun light with dark shadows mostly. This will diminish the washed out feel of the textures. Ive used spot lights in specific situations to simulate bounced moon light and it worked good, if you can keep it very subtle - but its hard to use it normally for obvious reasons, they will also light you up artificially whenever you pass in front of them, so Im keeping them on the background so far.

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I was thinking more along the lines of the village from Thief 1. The one where the tree houses are linked with elevated wooden bridges and you (Garrett) are following the blood trail. I am considering going to be placing them closer together and linking them with bridges. I may even change them to be huge tree stumps which have been carved out to form the dwellings.

System: Mageia Linux Cauldron, aka Mageia 8

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New idea, loosely based on the Thief 1 tree huts. There will be an upper level with bridges between. This is just the first draft.

shot00140.png

Tree with natural(?) split near the base, hollowed out with center post and 2-unit thick bark layer.

 

shot00141.png

Another angle.

 

shot00142.png

Close-up showing bark and inner wood.

 

shot00143.png

Interior with circular ring pattern on the crosscut floor.

System: Mageia Linux Cauldron, aka Mageia 8

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Nice. The thing is now, would the pagans with their wood carving skills be able to get that smooth & processed look of the interior? Maybe a more rough wood texture would suit the interior better?

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Yeah, like I said this is a first draft. I'll be shaping the patches and making it look more rough... the floor needs grime etc. I used that texture to match the type of tree, but will be trying to make it look less smooth... it certainly will not remain so rounded in any case.

 

Now that I take a second look, I'll need to place a solid brush under that floor, or at least revert the FS back to worldspawn... the dude's foot is sunken into the wood.

Edited by PranQster

System: Mageia Linux Cauldron, aka Mageia 8

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Hopefully it will make it easier for people to fix .ase models as well. :rolleyes:

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The models it exports will work in DR, however it, itself is not a part of DR.

 

Doom3 contains some extremely simple obj support (tho I think it's actually been removed in the gpl release, along with another ascii lanscape format), it doesnt really make sense to use objs as they require two files per model and is a veeeeery loosely bound format (you can add pretty much anything to the files, there are a number of ways of storing vertex colours for example).

 

That said, I dont think it will convert DR made ASE's to anything else, as the DR ASE's are actually incorrectly formatted and not standard at all. This is more for getting things from blender and other tools into TDM cleanly.

 

I could make a simple plugin for DR to offer an interface to the commandline tool, but the current viewer app seems good enough - and lets you adjust settings and see results more easily.

 

Anyway, just adding in the last few sections and then I'll need to do some testing.

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post-8474-0-81764200-1327842300_thumb.jpg

 

Here's a very non-revealling pic of my first map, it shows the use of moonlight to create dramatic shadows over the game world and make it pretty hard for the player to cruise around protected by continuous darkness. This area in particular is still going to be decorated (mainly vegetation, it's an abandoned back patio), but at least it's a peak into how the project is striving to look. The point was to create a somewhat realistic looking world, with more of a gothic/medieval feel to it than the victorian/steampunk visuals that is usually associated with Thief or TDM. Beware that the light levels are still bright, for testing purpouses, it should be dimmer on release. Good news is that the ambient light + constant moonlight + scattered lights combination (apart from the decent complexity of many buildings and rooms, and some big open areas) are not registering a very big impact on my play tests so far. Since a lot of decoration is still missing, say around 50-60%) and also some AI (so far I've placed around 60% of them, without paths yet), my fingers are crossed I wont run into any major performance issues - my laptop is medium to low range by now (was good back in 2009), so if I can make it run normally on mine, most people will also be able to.

 

PS: Im looking for info on how to rotate the Moon position hehe - as the default skybox renders it to your east, and my parallel light comes from north-east. ;)

 

The pic seems to have lost quite a bit of quality on upload... Does the forum also compact images when attaching?

Edited by RPGista
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post-8474-0-81764200-1327842300_thumb.jpg

 

Here's a very non-revealling pic of my first map, it shows the use of moonlight to create dramatic shadows over the game world and make it pretty hard for the player to cruise around protected by continuous darkness. This area in particular is still going to be decorated (mainly vegetation, it's an abandoned back patio), but at least it's a peak into how the project is striving to look. The point was to create a somewhat realistic looking world, with more of a gothic/medieval feel to it than the victorian/steampunk visuals that is usually associated with Thief or TDM. Beware that the light levels are still bright, for testing purpouses, it should be dimmer on release. Good news is that the ambient light + constant moonlight + scattered lights combination (apart from the decent complexity of many buildings and rooms, and some big open areas) are not registering a very big impact on my play tests so far. Since a lot of decoration is still missing, say around 50-60%) and also some AI (so far I've placed around 60% of them, without paths yet), my fingers are crossed I wont run into any major performance issues - my laptop is medium to low range by now (was good back in 2009), so if I can make it run normally on mine, most people will also be able to.

 

PS: Im looking for info on how to rotate the Moon position hehe - as the default skybox renders it to your east, and my parallel light comes from north-east. ;)

 

The pic seems to have lost quite a bit of quality on upload... Does the forum also compact images when attaching?

Looks good, but you should add a trim around that balcony/window/thingy.

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Thanks guys. Indeed, no light gem (I never play with them anyway, it's a lot funner not knowing for sure if your hidden) but I took some damage getting down there, so we see the health bar.

 

There'll be a fair amount of complexity in the map, that's basicly what I set out to do, a small, simple but richly modeled mission. Well, its not that small/dense anymore, but thats basicly because the spaces need to be of a certain size to allow for AI movement, that made the whole thing grow around 20% from initial models (not in rooms, just in size).

 

The textures are indeed almost all from the cobblestones group, they are the only ones that can really remind you of irregular stone masonry mized with mortar, which is the main construction method for the generic medieval building. Most of the brick group is not adequate at all to the visual style I was going for, Im afraid, they are often either regularly cut stones (very unusual for anything but major buildings like palaces and churchs, and even then...) or are that kind of "loose stone" mix, mostly used for non-bearing walls, We are also kind of short on granite, gray materials, which tend to look the best in my eyes. Wish I could create textures, but anyway the cobblestone ones and a lot of the wood ones are incredible, I like them a lot.

 

Nosslak, nice catch, definetly forgot to add a frame to the botton part of the window.

 

@ Sotha - I was having trouble getting parallel lights to work, untill I imported a working one from a Katsbits tutorial level. The biggest problem with using them (or big spot ones, for that matter) is that you have to be careful with your modeling work on the facades, and the building volume itself - cut brushes, intersecting brushes, some models (specially if intersecting with world geometry), they all have high probablities of screwing something up and you end up getting all kinds of light artifacts or strange "leaks". It took me weeks to solve one in my opening room, because I had no idea of the source of the problem (basicly ditches the whole offending building and remade it entirely out of patches). It will render amazing complexity, as long as you remember to keep the geometry simple and create most of the details with patches, patches are a life saver, they work flawlessly everytime.

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RPGista: interesting work; I like the effect the distant building creates in the background.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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parallel moonlight is very nice, I have used it before and love it. You simply need to move the actual position of the little moon cube in the skybox (and make sure to fix the texture on it if you mess it up - hint: lock textures before moving cube to make it easy)

shadowdark50.gif keep50.gif
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@ Melan - Thanks, the main action takes place on the other side of the wall actually, where there's more architecture. This patio being an optional space inside the mission. You can see the facades are lit, in the background. A very wide no-shadow spot light (2-3 points higher than the ambient) is lighting all those facades just a bit, to simulate bounced moonlight. There's a lot of work to do on getting the light level right though, so I'll stop talking about my mission so much untill then haha.

 

@ Komag - awesome, going to test that tonight!

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I use them this way all the time, basicly because I didnt know that the word cobblestone means that this texture is not designed for being use on buildings..=)

 

Finaly the language barrier did something positive for me.

He was sneeking silently in the night, moonlight was his enemy.

(Im not a native speaker, sorry for all miscleanous caused by my english..)

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