Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Darkmod: Inspiration thread


Bikerdude

Recommended Posts

This is Belgium! What a fascinating place

 

s5R2M3S.jpg

Edited by Goldwell
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Is that rendered or painted and is it of a real place..? its very good.

 

I'm not sure but I think its a painting

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, it looks like one. Very beautyful.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, it looks like one. Very beautyful.

 

Agreed! It's actually my current background desktop, seeing as we should start seeing some snow soon I think it's most appropriate for the season

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Zombie over at Id Tech Forums showed an example lighting setup for a city scene in Id Tech 4.

 

Thread:

 

http://idtechforums.fuzzylogicinc.com/index.php?topic=125.0

 

(he's taking modder requests for content too...!)

 

 

Probably not as inspiring as old architecture but interesting nonetheless:

 

9dKOzXG.jpg

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

......BTW, how do mappers do, practically when working on maps with others. Do you set an interval of time when one person can work and then send the most recent map so the other can work, or do you work on completely separate sections of the mission so you don't "collide" with the same rooms?

 

One of the best coops I was involved in was way back in quake 3 days. 5 of us got together to decide to build

a map together. The way we did it, was one person started, showed screenies as he went, then handed it

on to the next guy. We each basically did an area, and was one of the best experiences I've had mapping.

It was a lot of fun, and we were all itching to get the map. I was last on the list so it killed me seeing all the

work that was being done, knowing I had to wait till last to do my bit lol. Well worth doing.

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, we do have all the required textures. I am in fact thinking of incorporating the building into my current mission. Not as a prefab, though; it is too distinct for that.

 

Yeh you'd do a better of job of it than me atm, so yeh you should do it. Also I think you are right though, it's

not really suitable as a sort of generic medieval buildikng used in maps. Nice for a ruin though.

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just had a thought--if anyone happens to find good clips of animations (either from games or RL) that would be suitable for TDM, that would be appreciated as inspiration. I'm trying to get back into animating and find I spend a lot of time trying to track down reference clips. I found a great one showing off all the animations in Skyrim, but would love to see others, especially of guards searching or things especially suitable to TDM.

 

https://www.youtube....YfAfmQ&index=17

 

 

If you are looking for ideas, I can suggest some for you.

 

Would be nice to have the wench doing some kitchen duties, ie washing dishes, stirring a pot, or

cleaning. Also be nice if they actually had something in their hand (not sure how hard this is).

 

Another nice idea I saw in Styx Master of Shadows was each time a guard passed a fruit bowl

or a keg, he'd stop and eat, or take a drink. This is how you kill him, by poisoning the food/drink.

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We talked about expanding the idle state to allow full-on jobs once, like maids wandering around finding things to clean and cooks finding things to cook, but I think it might have been going too far (in terms of how much work it'd take), compared to just discrete random animations. And if a mapper really wants a complex practice for gameplay reasons they can still use conversations. But I still like the sound of that old idea anyway.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here's some textual inspiration to go with all these images. From the introduction to the book "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville:

 

Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark.

 

We rock. We pitch in a deep current.

 

Behind me the man tugs uneasily at his rudder and the barge corrects. Light lurches as the lantern swings. The man is afraid of me. I lean out from the prow of the small vessel across the darkly moving water.

 

Over the engines oily rumble and the caresses of the river small sounds, house sounds, are building. Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain.

 

They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick.

 

The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water.

 

How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller?

 

It is too late to flee.

 

The man murmurs to me, tells me where we are. I do not turn to him.

 

This is Raven’s Gate, this brutalized warren around us. The rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted. The river smears slime on its brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay. There is a vile stink here.

 

(I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then, if you came at it on the wind you would see it from miles and miles away like a dirty smear, like a slab of carrion thronging with maggots, I should not think like this but I cannot stop now, I could ride the updrafts that the chimneys vent, sail high over the proud towers and shit on the earthbound, ride the chaos, alight where I choose, I must not think like this, I must not do this now, I must stop, not now, not this, not yet.)

 

Here there are houses which dribble pale mucus, an organic daubing that smears base facades and oozes from top windows. Extra storeys are rendered in the cold white muck which fills gaps between houses and dead-end alleys. The landscape is defaced with ripples as if wax has melted and set suddenly across the rooftops. Some other intelligence has made these human streets their own.

 

Wires are stretched tight across the river and the eaves, held fast by milky aggregates of phlegm. They hum like bass strings. Something scuttles overhead. The bargeman hawks foully into the water.

 

His gob dissipates. The mass of spittle-mortar above us ebbs. Narrow streets emerge.

 

A train whistles as it crosses the river before us on raised tracks. I look to it, to the south and the east, seeing the line of little lights rush away and be swallowed by this nightland, this behemoth that eats its citizens. We will pass the factories soon. Cranes rear from the gloom like spindly birds; here and there they move to keep the skeleton crews, the midnight crews, in their work. Chains swing deadweight like useless limbs, snapping into zombie motion where cogs engage and flywheels turn.

 

Fat predatory shadows prowl the sky.

 

There is a boom, a reverberation, as if the city has a hollow core. The black barge putters through a mass of its fellows weighed down with coke and wood and iron and steel and glass. The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling.

 

(Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.)

 

The engine slows. I turn and watch the man behind me, who averts his eyes and steers, affecting to look through me. He is taking us in to dock, there behind the warehouse so engorged its contents spill out beyond the buttresses in a labyrinth of huge boxes. He picks his way between other craft. There are roofs emerging from the river. A line of sunken houses, built on the wrong side of the wall, pressed up against the bank in the water, their bituminous black bricks dripping. Disturbances beneath us. The river boils with eddies from below. Dead fish and frogs that have given up the fight to breathe in this rotting stew of detritus swirl frantic between the flat side of the barge and the concrete shore, trapped in choppy turmoil. The gap is closed. My captain leaps ashore and ties up. His relief is draining to see. He is wittering gruffly in triumph and ushering me quickly ashore and away and I alight, as slowly as if onto coals, picking my way through the rubbish and the broken glass.

 

He is happy with the stones I have given him. I am in Smog Bend, he tells me, and I make myself look away as he points my direction so he will not know I am lost, that I am new in the city, that I am afraid of these dark and threatening edifices of which I cannot kick free, that I am nauseous with claustrophobia and foreboding.

 

A little to the south two great pillars rise from the river. The gates to the Old City, once grandiose, now psoriatic and ruined. The carved histories that wound about those obelisks have been effaced by time and acid, and only roughcast spiral threads like those of old screws remain. Behind them, a low bridge (Drud Crossing, he says). I ignore the man’s eager explanations and walk away through this lime-bleached zone, past yawning doors that promise the comfort of true dark and an escape from the river stench. The bargeman is just a tiny voice now and it is a small pleasure to know I will never see him again.

 

It is not cold. A city light is promising itself in the east.

 

I will follow the trainlines. I will stalk in their shadow as they pass by over the houses and towers and barracks and offices and prisons of the city, I will track them from the arches that anchor them to the earth. I must find my way in.

 

My cloak (heavy cloth unfamiliar and painful on my skin) tugs at me and I can feel the weight of my purse. That is what protects me here; that and the illusion I have fostered, the source of my sorrow and my shame, the anguish that has brought me to this great wen, this dusty city dreamed up in bone and brick, a conspiracy of industry and violence, steeped in history and battened-down power, this badland beyond my ken.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

That looks like it's been carved from the cliff rather than built from stone. Very cool.

 

100 people, a heap of chisels, and a LOT of time :D

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thats bloody awesome dude, is that stone texture a mix of two stock textures? as its very good.

 

Thanks! The cliff face is a large patch with the jagged_rock texture and another patch with ivy_bush_hanging stacked on top.

 

It doesn't look quite as good from other angles, because I just wanted to try and copy that photo in TDM :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Biker

 

Really cool, tried to do something with that.

 

Image one

 

Image two

 

Hey that's really cool... would love to play that map. Sort of reminds me of a Famous Five book by Enid Blyton eons ago when

I was a kid called, Five go to Smugglers Cove.

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • Recent Status Updates

    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 1 reply
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
    • OrbWeaver

      I like the new frob highlight but it would nice if it was less "flickery" while moving over objects (especially barred metal doors).
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      Please vote in the 15th Anniversary Contest Theme Poll
       
      · 0 replies
×
×
  • Create New...