Things that could be improved

[demagogue]

- and the Stealthscore is pretty useless atm: I suggest smth like this:

 

I'll repeat my idea for the record again. The problem with subtractive scores is that every FM is different, some long, some short, so the same score would mean different things, and you lose all the score information for long FMs that go under 0. A better idea IMO is for it to be additive, more like a golf score, and different FMs have different "par" values you want to stay under. Perfect is always 0, a higher number is bad, but there is no upper bounds.

[Melan]

I agree with demagogue. Something like: 1st level alerts ("Is that...? ... Just rats again."), 2nd level alerts ("Hey! Is someone there? Come out!"), 3rd level alerts ("You! Freeze!"), KOs and kills. A counter for each.

[lost_soul]

I have a feeling I already know the answer to this, but... Would it be possible to have all of the windows in a mission (like Sotha's new one) be translucent? I understand about the "sectioning off of the map for performance", but it would help immersion IMO. Will computers eventually get powerful enough to just render the whole world, or will the Doom 3 source be modified in the future to allow this?

[Fidcal]

Yes, with a specially designed FM you could have all windows transparent. It won't work with most FMs because of performance.

 

There's nothing technically difficult but having a transparent window is just having an opening so the game has to render more. In my own FM for instance it would be near impossible because it would just grind to a halt. I have a large outdoor area with a big mansion with dozens of windows so in some views half the mansion interior would be rendered as well as outside.

 

You would need to keep things small and simple. It's a trade off. Would you rather have small views and less detail with views through windows into simplified rooms?

[nbohr1more]

I have a feeling I already know the answer to this, but... Would it be possible to have all of the windows in a mission (like Sotha's new one) be translucent? I understand about the "sectioning off of the map for performance", but it would help immersion IMO. Will computers eventually get powerful enough to just render the whole world, or will the Doom 3 source be modified in the future to allow this?

 

You could create a Camerspace Cubemap of the interior in a technique similar to the example for a Cubemap water reflection in our wiki article. There is an extreme example of this technique here:

 

Interior Mapping

 

If you are talking about having shadows animating in the windows, then ROQ GUI animations could be used for this if having a real AI walk behind a real two-sided translucent material is more expensive. (Or a 2d AI impostor could cycle behind the real translucent material).

 

See Thread:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11515-real-translucency-anyone/

 

There are a number of ways that this could be pulled-off without the TDM team having to lift a finger or having to wait for Open Source.

 

(I also think I saw that Doom 3 supports ROQ animated Cubemaps...)

Edited November 10, 2010 by nbohr1more

[nbohr1more]

Yep...

 

The animated Cube Map method could be done, but you'd have to record the ROQ video with an fish-eye FOV that matches the envshot FOV...

 

It'd be a bit difficult...

 

textures/skies/animatingSky
{
discrete
forceOpaque // so transparent windows can draw on top of it
{
blend add // so transparent windows can draw on top of it
texgen skybox
videoMap models\skies\e3outsideskyrender\render\skyroqCM.roq // because this has a height = 6x width, it will be a cube map[/b]
// cameraCubeMap test\skyroq
// cameraCubeMap env/boxsky
}
} 

[plasticman]

I have a feeling I already know the answer to this, but... Would it be possible to have all of the windows in a mission (like Sotha's new one) be translucent?

...don't have much to prove my point, but I have a feeling that too many window-sized visportals near each other are prone to bugs. Could be a technical issue or just an effect of the raised chances to introduce vis-leaks.

[Ishtvan]

...don't have much to prove my point, but I have a feeling that too many window-sized visportals near each other are prone to bugs. Could be a technical issue or just an effect of the raised chances to introduce vis-leaks.

 

The more visportals you have off of a single vis-area, the more calculations have to be done to check occlusion of all the visportals. At a certain point, this extra calculation outweighs the benefit of visportals, so you're better having no visportals at all rather than a lot branching off of one vis-area. Fore example, if you had a huge manor with 50 windows, all connected to a single "outside" vis-area, performance would almost certainly be terrible.

[Tels]

The more visportals you have off of a single vis-area, the more calculations have to be done to check occlusion of all the visportals. At a certain point, this extra calculation outweighs the benefit of visportals, so you're better having no visportals at all rather than a lot branching off of one vis-area. Fore example, if you had a huge manor with 50 windows, all connected to a single "outside" vis-area, performance would almost certainly be terrible.

 

That depends how much area the visportals close of when they are not visible. If you have no visportals in the windows, the outside gets always rendered (or culled) even if you look away from the windows! With visportals, the area is in your back, so it closes off.

 

I found that having a dozend or two of visportals for windows isn't as bad as having none of them. Having opaque windows is of course even faster. I wonder if it might be a good idea to have a "fake-window-displayed-when-visportal-is-closed", and the forcible close the vizportal on when the player is > 500 units away AND there is no light in the room behind the window AND the door is closed. That means if the door is open or there is light => vizportal open => potentially player can see silouette of AI. Door closed, light off => vizportal closed, static window is displayed => player doesn't see anything anyway.

 

But even this might be way too complicated than just having 24 windows with vizportals and let the engine handle the culling.

[Aprilsister]

Would snakes be harder or easier to model and animate than four legged things?

[New Horizon]

- "Pockets picked: X" should be: "Pockets picked: X out of Y"

- also, a "Secrets found: X out of Y" would be great.

 

These two I don't really like for a very simple reason. Why should the player be privileged enough to know how many 'ingame' secrets or 'unpicked pockets' exist? Yes, I know it's a game...but why make it any more of a game than it already is? Part of the allure and excitement of the original Thief games was not knowing how much loot or how many secrets were left to be found. Deadly shadows took the percentage route...X% out of Y found...giving away the surprise at the end of the level and effectively reducing the future replayability of the levels.

 

I like the other suggestions, just not these two.

[ungoliant]

dont forget, we need statistics in the mission debriefing about the percentage of headshot hits for all weapons. The stealth score doesn't need to be revamped, it needs to be replaced with achievement trophies for amazing feats like "longest time played without quicksaving" and "ninja"

[Serpentine]

dont forget, we need statistics in the mission debriefing about the percentage of headshot hits for all weapons. The stealth score doesn't need to be revamped, it needs to be replaced with achievement trophies for amazing feats like "longest time played without quicksaving" and "ninja"

 

We need to finish the Item Shop (for character hats, bow upgrades) interface and social network gateway for commenting on mission stats etc before we can get on to that.

[Diego]

We need to finish the Item Shop (for character hats, bow upgrades) interface and social network gateway for commenting on mission stats etc before we can get on to that.

 

Really? or are you being sarcastic? What's this social network gateway thing?

[Midnight]

A Facebook plugin that lets you "blackjack" friends instead of "poke"?

[Serpentine]

Really? or are you being sarcastic? What's this social network gateway thing?

 

Everything said was completely sarcastic, dont worry! I just have a distinct dislike for item shops(i.e $ for game stuff) and social networking(i.e Bob Smith just finished some quest and got some item [like+][digg][murder while asleep]) in games... because I'm a horrible elitist troll at heart.

[Diego]

lol ok

As far as 'online elements' go, I wouldn't mind some kind of highscores for each mission.

[Tels]

These two I don't really like for a very simple reason. Why should the player be privileged enough to know how many 'ingame' secrets or 'unpicked pockets' exist? Yes, I know it's a game...but why make it any more of a game than it already is? Part of the allure and excitement of the original Thief games was not knowing how much loot or how many secrets were left to be found. Deadly shadows took the percentage route...X% out of Y found...giving away the surprise at the end of the level and effectively reducing the future replayability of the levels.

 

I like the other suggestions, just not these two.

 

I am impartial on liking/not liking it, but my technical mind says it might be very hard to even have the actual number there unless the mapper provides it. That is because the engine can't really know in advance how many things to pocket or secrets there are, because theycould well be constructed dynamically at run time.

[OrbWeaver]

Yes, with a specially designed FM you could have all windows transparent. It won't work with most FMs because of performance.

 

Depending on how you set it up, you might be able to make windows that looked translucent but didn't actually render very much, for example by showing only a small fake internal room rather than cutting through to the main interior.

 

The more visportals you have off of a single vis-area, the more calculations have to be done to check occlusion of all the visportals. At a certain point, this extra calculation outweighs the benefit of visportals, so you're better having no visportals at all rather than a lot branching off of one vis-area. Fore example, if you had a huge manor with 50 windows, all connected to a single "outside" vis-area, performance would almost certainly be terrible.

 

It would be interesting to know where the actual crossover point is in real terms however. My feeling is that you would have to have a lot of extra visportals before the cost of performing the 2D intersection tests (a rather simple operation compared to all the other stuff the engine is doing) became prohibitive. Obviously the cost/benefit ratio would also depend on how much geometry the portals were actually discarding.

[Ishtvan]

It would be interesting to know where the actual crossover point is in real terms however. My feeling is that you would have to have a lot of extra visportals before the cost of performing the 2D intersection tests (a rather simple operation compared to all the other stuff the engine is doing) became prohibitive. Obviously the cost/benefit ratio would also depend on how much geometry the portals were actually discarding.

SneaksieDave did a test of this very early on in the mod. I don't think it exists anymore but it was something like test/city, a bunch of buildings on a city block, all enterable with visportals, and it ended up running better when the visportals were turned off. That was also the first map we eventually put working AI into, and the first AI was the Revenant. Ah, the memories.

[stumpy]

making all windows transparent would be a pain in the arse, cos you would then have to add extra rooms for all windows, that are on the edge of the map, there would be a libral use of frosted glass with a picture of a fake room behind it if you were to force all windows transparent, and that would be the same picture of a blured room.

[lost_soul]

One of the things that made my jaw drop back in 1999 were the graphics in Sonic Adventure. All of the rooms/windows/shops appeared believable, with depth behind them and environment mapping applied. They used simple box geometry behind the windows with a simple texture or two applied to the walls inside the rooms. It makes the player feel like they're in this giant world, rather than just an environment with painted textures. This sort of thing could probably be done in a TDM city-style mission, but if the non-essential buildings look too believable, you'll start getting questions like: How am I supposed to get in there?

Edited November 20, 2010 by lost_soul

[Mr Mike]

Zombies.

 

In TDM I find Zombies incredibly disappointing. It seems they try to mimic Thief's zombies in most ways but feel incredibly gamey and their noises just annoying, almost laughable.

 

Until recently I thought that this was just because I'd become so accustomed to zombies in computer games but Amnesia: The Dark descent proved that utterly terrifying zombies were still completely possible. They seem to brainlessly patrol in a more convincing manner than TDM's but, when alerted are able to pick up some pace and catch a slow thinking player. I've never seen their run animation as I'm usually trying to frantically find somewhere to run in blind panic, only to be spun around and visually see their clawing motion cut across the screen in a bloody mess(I thought Doom 3 also had such visuals with certain enemies but TDM just seems to highlight the edges of the screen in a red, watery puddle?!).

 

Are there plans to improve this in TDM? Perhaps someone can suggest a Blender tutorial on how to animate in Blender for Doom 3 so that others might try to improve this?

[Chiron]

There are plenty of tutorials on Blender and such, start here:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Using_Blender_for_Doom_3_Modeling#

and specifically on animating:

 

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Advanced_Tutorials/Advanced_Animation/index

http://wip.global-illusions.com/d3tut/quick%20Tutorial%20-%20Doom3_PPM.htm

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread?t=26561

 

The problem is that animators are very hard to come by, it is hard to learn and even harder to produce realistic results.

You are welcome to try and improve the zombies

[plasticman]

Thought about the same just the other day. ATM the woo seem to depend heavily on native doom assets which is a little unbecoming, imo. Makes them look like placeholders until the REAL zombies arrive.

 

This is sad, because the undead were one of the outstanding world defining elements in Thief (with T2X even boosting the experience). The distinctive sound design played a major role here -- up and down pitched voices, played backwards and forwards while echoing in both directions of time and asking you to JOIN THEM. Even the tiny cemetary in Eavesdropping makes use of these voices, merely for the ambience (there are no undead).

 

I think recording sounds like that is easier than doing actual vocal sets. Is there something like a script for a yet to be recorded zombie vocal set?

 

Animating undead is propably an easier task for beginners than animating other characters or animals. When it loooks unnatural it's just right!