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TDM origins?


Skaruts

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I was wondering if there's any videos or pictures of the really early developments of TDM. I like seeing what things once were, to contrast with what they've become.

 

And by the way, who started it? Who's to blame for this marvelous thing?

 

EDIT: I've seen some of Springheel's earliest videos, but it already looks like TDM was in a somewhat advanced stage there.

Edited by Skaruts

My FMs: By The Cookbook

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I was wondering if there's any videos or pictures of the really early developments of TDM. I like seeing what things once were, to contrast with what they've become.

 

And by the way, who started it? Who's to blame for this marvelous thing?

 

EDIT: I've seen some of Springheel's earliest videos, but it already looks like TDM was in a somewhat advanced stage there.

*guard voice from Thief*

 

"Try this on for size !"

 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5L2GxHb3sL0MOfiRecA-BgJH1_SAyhs8 - development footage

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5L2GxHb3sL2nnHrYMfC9dD_k3JXkkfYe - pre-2.0 trailers and teasers

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5L2GxHb3sL3o6X7ihn_hQK8IPtayJCT9 - curios and experiments

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That one is the earliest trailer we ever did. The city scenes were from the second (I believe) map ever created (the first was a single room with a window). You can see it still has the Doom3 hands in it.

 

In the video you can see some of my earliest concept art, as well as a 3d concept model of a Builder Priest, and an early draft of the player model (by a different modeller than Oddity--I think DeepOmega?); never finished).

 

I believe the flashbomb model shown there is the one we currently use, we just didn't have a texture yet.

 

 

This was the year before my Dad passed away. I remember being out at their place that Christmas, sitting at the kitchen table while they slept, well after midnight, slowly uploading this video over dialup. lol

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You mean in the game? It doesn't show me any videos, just all the names. Maybe they got removed?

 

Aren't there little snippets of videos appearing in the background ?

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I think it's interesting reading those old forums. Early on, Springheel suggested using the FarCry engine, which seems to have been shot down for some fairly arbitrary reasons. Any regrets about not pushing harder to use that engine?

 

It also seems like UT2004 and/or UT3 weren't considered because Nightblade was in the process of being developed by another team. Is that why they weren't considered? I worked on Nightblade and always thought it was a shame that it never got completed.

 

It was funny reading what went into naming TDM.

 

What ever became of Fingernail?

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The FarCry engine isn't open source is it? If it's not, we couldn't release a standalone game with it.

 

But aside from that, the Doom3 Engine, with the DR Editor, is pretty great to build with, so I don't regret that choice at all. You can drop in scripts easily, there's unified lighting which has its virtues, its whole pk4 system is intuitive-ish for a game which handles lots of separate FMs, and a lot of the early foibles have been fixed or vastly improved over time. I don't know enough to weight it against the alt history of going the FarCry route, but I'm happy where we are having gone the Doom3 route.

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

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None of the engines were open source at that time, AFAIR. D3 was a good bet, since it the source was released eventually. Radiant is also the fastest BSP editor I can think of, which is also good for DromEders who'd like to switch to new engine. It's not so great for more modern workflow and content integration, but it could be worse :) Pairing up with a coder (and perhaps an animator) is most optimal choice IMO. Other engines are faster to integrate content and to work with (much better UI/UX), but BSP support is more rubbish.

 

 

 

I'd love to see this in 1080p :)

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i wonder if t4 pinched the hand positioning from that teaser trailer #1 dark mod vid.

 

As it seems to be a common immersive feature in many modern game, i would say, no. :)

 

Playing Deus Ex Mankind Divided, i wondered if its object handling was somewhat inspired by The Dark Mod, though. It doesn't have 360° object handling like The Dark Mod, but, it seems a bit similar.

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What ever became of Fingernail?

 

 

He dropped in a few months ago, actually.

 

I'm guessing it's an easter-egg that you only get to see if you revisit the credits.

 

 

If it didn't play for you the first time, that's a bug.

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He's a classical guitarist if I remember correctly.

 

 

He dropped in a few months ago, actually.

 

Is he impressed with what TDM has become? In reading his first few posts, it seems like his initial idea was almost on a whim.

 

Just out of curiosity, why wasn't UT2004 considered back then?

 

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If it didn't play for you the first time, that's a bug.

Yea there's a few bugs related to the credits. At least for me (I don't have TDM all vanilla). But I think it just doesn't play the videos while playing a mission (through "map" console command, at least). I had a few bugs related with leaving the credits and going back in though, some text was there from the previous times (also while testing a map).

My FMs: By The Cookbook

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Just out of curiosity, why wasn't UT2004 considered back then?

 

 

 

I think it was because the iD software history of releasing engine source code was a big motivation...that and the SDK release gave a reasonable amount of early access to the internals of the engine. There was also the Source Code being available for GTK Radiant as well, which supported Doom 3 map format.

 

There is some interesting history with id software and the Dark Engine as well. If I remember correctly, the creator of The Dark Engine was heavily inspired by the Quake 3 engine. Some old Quake 3 engine code made it into the Doom 3 Engine as well. In a small way, it's like there is a relation between the two engines. So it kind of feels right that TDM ended up using idtech 4.

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I think it was because the iD software history of releasing engine source code was a big motivation...that and the SDK release gave a reasonable amount of early access to the internals of the engine. There was also the Source Code being available for GTK Radiant as well, which supported Doom 3 map format.

 

There is some interesting history with id software and the Dark Engine as well. If I remember correctly, the creator of The Dark Engine was heavily inspired by the Quake 3 engine. Some old Quake 3 engine code made it into the Doom 3 Engine as well. In a small way, it's like there is a relation between the two engines. So it kind of feels right that TDM ended up using idtech 4.

Thanks for the background info. It totally makes sense and it obviously turned out to be a great decision.

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