Roadmap for TDM in 2020

[freyk]

no, he is one the creators of the doom 3 engine, that tdm uses as its engine. you are asking for a port to another engine. 

how tdm is created, the version you play now, is a sequel of other versions.

about a city hub. see this topic about it.

it would be nice. you have to find a mapper who are willing to create a hub to connect some maps. but the mission downloader is easier. 

Edited November 30, 2019 by freyk

[mcmike1489]

Oh ok, thanks for the info. I would learn so much about mission editing and learning how to create something from scratch, but it does take patience and dedication to come up with something new.

Edited November 29, 2019 by mcmike1489

[Petike the Taffer]

For my own peace of mind, if we can complete the female player vocals project within the coming months, with all the polish it needs, I'd be happy if it could become part of the core game by the time 2.08 is out. Certainly a more minor thing, but I feel anything that adds to new stuff in the core game always pushes it forward somewhat.

[freyk]

mcmike, petike,
The only thing people need is time (to do it yourselfs, to speed up things).
Because the tools & data you need, are already there.

For example, for those female-player vocals:
Copy and convert the existing female-entity sound samples, to the player ones.
(or create a new one, what Petike and others are doing now)

1. Get your soundeditor software (like Audacity), watch some audio editing videos on youtube,
2. cut/edit/rename the sounds from "tdm_sound_vocals07.pk4\sound\voices\".
   So it sounds like the samples in "tdm_sound_vocals01.pk4\sound\voices\player"
3. add/change soundschemes textfiles using notepad
   in tdm_sound_vocals_decls01.pk4\sound\tdm_player.sndshd
4. compress them to zip-package and rename the fileextension from zip to pk4
5. test them.

And do all this, on Sunday evenings or vacation days?

 

Edited November 30, 2019 by freyk

[mcmike1489]

So, adding female vocals for the female servants and guards? Well, when I have the taffing time to figure this out. I don't know how the taff to use Audacity, I'll have to watch a tutorial first on Youtube like you say. But, otherwise this sounds like a fun project.

[freyk]

Yes, but to spoil your experience,

 

I have listened to the soundsamples in the package.
Everything you need is already in the package.
just cut/edit some samples and change the soundscheme.
Or better yet, create another female vocal package, what Petike is doing now on his project.

Edited November 30, 2019 by freyk

[demagogue]

Speaking of Carmack and "upgrading TDM", the id4 engine that TDM uses is actually special because Carmack coded a unified lighting system, and he himself claimed it was the most elegant engine he's ever coded; more so than the Rage engine. A lot of other engines use mixed approaches to lighting. Since light is so fundamental to our gameplay, having a unified system is pretty cool for us, and we'd lose that "upgrading" to a new engine. Id4 is also really modding and scripting friendly. I guess Unreal is too, but the point is we already have that now.

Oh, and id4 is still built around brushes, whereas most new engines are being developed around modeled architecture. That makes a big difference when we're talking about individuals making single maps within a few months. Id4 caters pretty well to that, whereas newer engines cater more to 100-people teams with million dollar budgets and decades of man-hours of work.

I mean the id4 engine was in a sweetspot between advanced enough to look really good but not so advanced that it's prohibitive for individuals to make good maps by themselves. AND we have the opensource sourcecode to upgrade by ourselves (which we've done for things like soft shadows).  We're still not doing too bad sticking with id4, even speaking of relative merits with other contemporary engines and we pretend it wasn't prohibitively difficult to port.

[chakkman]

The engine is fine, even though i still wished it would rely more on the GPU, and not the CPU... it's quite heavy.

What i rather would like to see, with a current engine, is a Deus Ex style mod, like TDM for Thief. I wonder why noone ever picked up on that (i know there are some people who worked here on something like that for id4, but, it seems like it's dead). Unfortunately, it seems to be a too big task for most. Which i can understand, of course. But, really, Deus Ex is, like, the coolest game ever, and, the reboots, while good, can't really touch the original IMO. 

Anyway, i won't hold my breath. I doubt that there ever will be something like that.

Edited November 30, 2019 by chakkman

[mcmike1489]

Don't worry, you're not spoiling anything for me.

[kano]

12 hours ago, chakkman said:

The engine is fine, even though i still wished it would rely more on the GPU, and not the CPU... it's quite heavy.

What i rather would like to see, with a current engine, is a Deus Ex style mod, like TDM for Thief. I wonder why noone ever picked up on that (i know there are some people who worked here on something like that for id4, but, it seems like it's dead). Unfortunately, it seems to be a too big task for most. Which i can understand, of course. But, really, Deus Ex is, like, the coolest game ever, and, the reboots, while good, can't really touch the original IMO. 

Anyway, i won't hold my breath. I doubt that there ever will be something like that.

Closest thing to a fan-made Deus Ex game was The Nameless Mod, and it was fuckin' great. Even had some obscure references to real products in there. On one mission you had to plant spyware on a company's servers. The spyware device was called GATOR. And what is the significance of that name? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation

 

I had to deal with that Gator program personally back in the day, so the reference made me die with laughter when I saw it in the game. TNM has no fancy engine or anything, it is just a mod of the original game, but like I said, it is amazing.

[mcmike1489]

What does Deus Ex have to do with The Dark Mod? You're off topic dude.

[demagogue]

There are at least two cyberpunk total conversions for Dark Mod. One of them uses (or at one point used) a lightgem I made.

They're WIP and I haven't seen an update in a while, but I would be a big fan if they could be completed.

I've said my biggest wish many times. It's multiplayer so you could play missions coop with friends, and we could (ideally) have thieves vs. guards maps. On the one hand it'd be a pretty structural change that wraps its fingers into most systems, so a big task. On the other hand, once you've done that, the game itself and most maps would be really fun coop as they already are, so that's all you have to do.

[freyk]

To me my project is dead.
but if people want to pick it to working on this (and combine this with mircea's project) i can give/download them the data.

For the creating nice features in the roadmap, I hope that the team/community can find more creative people to help.

As you all know, i tried to create a "deus ex-based"(=> cyberpunk) themed mission, called "The Dark Mission"
(files can be downloaded from there)
But if you want to succeed in this, you need to find other creative people who are willing to create/share/help things to combine.
I found people who wanted to share their art, but i didn't find people who want work together on this project.
(and there is Mirceakitsune with his project,..)
To me that most important thing for reaching goals in a project. 

Edited December 1, 2019 by freyk

[HMart]

On 11/29/2019 at 8:24 PM, freyk said:

no, he is one the creators of the doom 3 engine...

Afaik John Carmack is the single creator of the id tech 4 engine, other programmers from id worked on the gaming part of the c++ code and the game scripting itself but the underlying engine, was totally written by John Carmack. Ok with a small intervention from Creative, because of a patent lawsuit they won against John, they implemented EAX 4 into the engine.

Btw TDM team removed EAX and implemented EFX instead, is exactly the same thing but the latter runs totally on the CPU. 

Btw is funny how John changed from procedural C to OOP C++ in mid development, so you have a engine code that has both C and C++ OOP coding philosophies, but man is a fantastic code base, everytime I see the pure c++ OOP code of other engines sources, the more I appreciate the way id tech 4 was written.  

[mcmike1489]

I never thought my post would get this far into possibly making the game better, well sorry guys. All of you are on your own without me. I just don't have the time to be part of this to be honest.

[Petike the Taffer]

On 11/30/2019 at 11:33 AM, freyk said:

Copy and convert the existing female-entity sound samples, to the player ones.

This is all sound advice (pun intended) and I agree with all of it. However, the thing is, "stealing" from these existing samples does not cover the entire range we need for the female player's vocals. E.g. are there any NPC female sounds for mantling ?

In the voice .pk4s, I could only ever find spoken lines by NPC characters.

 

4 hours ago, mcmike1489 said:

I never thought my post would get this far into possibly making the game better, well sorry guys. All of you are on your own without me. I just don't have the time to be part of this to be honest.

Sure you do. Even small contributions are welcomed. Only work on them bit by bit, in your free time.

Edited December 1, 2019 by Petike the Taffer

[mcmike1489]

Well, when I’m ready. I’ll let you know.

[stgatilov]

On 11/30/2019 at 2:06 AM, mcmike1489 said:

Interesting John Carmack is the creator of TDM, I didn't know that.

He is the creator of Doom 3, and TDM is using game engine of Doom 3.

Simply speaking, the most important part of the programming code of TDM was written by the team led by that guy more than 15 years ago.

[mcmike1489]

2 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

He is the creator of Doom 3, and TDM is using game engine of Doom 3.

Simply speaking, the most important part of the programming code of TDM was written by the team led by that guy more than 15 years ago.

He is a big fan of the Thief franchise like us, so he would create something out of a spin-off from the original game.

[stgatilov]

5 minutes ago, mcmike1489 said:

He is a big fan of the Thief franchise like us, so he would create something out of a spin-off from the original game.

John Carmack only worked on Doom 3, he did nothing specific for TDM.

If you are wondering who worked on TDM, better see the page on website. If you are looking for founders, pay special attention to people who started before 2009.

[mcmike1489]

Oops, sorry maybe I should say he was inspired from the original Thief games that he had an idea of creating a game similar to playing as Garrett, but thanks to the other team members that made it possible, special thanks goes to Springheel who was the creative director now retired. He lead the team to creating this amazing masterpiece!

[demagogue]

The original idea and push came from Fingernail, who wasn't really involved in a technical way, just a big cheerleader to get the ball rolling. The guy that did a lion's share of the original coding that really made the game what it is was greebo (a lot in partnership with his wife Angua), so if anyone is our version of Carmack, it's him/them. But a lot of other people were also doing some heroic lifting, including Springheel and Sparhawk, and then later people like Grayman and stgatilov, and well everyone on that credits list. It's actually pretty amazing and inspiring how much time and energy and high-quality work from so many people has been lovingly poured into this game. 

By the way, it's worth noting that the TDM code-base is something like 3 times bigger than the original Doom3 code, and things like the AI code, player code, and world systems are significantly more complex. All we really take from the original Doom3 code is really core stuff like graphics rendering, the sound system, scripting, etc. 

[mcmike1489]

Oh wow, very interesting. By the way, since Eidos made the Thief franchise, I also know Tomb Raider was made by the same company. To stick with the same topic, like Dark Mod is a spin-off from the Thief series. What about Lara Croft, did anyone make a spin-off game from the Tomb Raider series as well?

[freyk]

no, people at looking glass studios made it. eidos publisched it. people at core design made tombraider and eidos publisched that too. 

Edited December 2, 2019 by freyk

[mcmike1489]

Oh yeah, that's right. All credit goes to Looking Glass Studios for Thief and Core Design for the original Tomb Raider games.