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Particle Effects


AtariThief

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It's been a while since I last edited in Thief 2, but I think there were particle effects that you could make in the editor. In any case will there be something similar packaged with your tools or will we need a Third Party editor to make them?

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Yeah right:/ That'd be mental - tryng to make a particle effect in a text editor, it's hard enough doing it visually. The doom particle editor is very good though, you can get realtime feedback as you tweak useing multiple layers.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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That it is ASCII is great because it means you can easily tweak it with a program as well. You could write a simple program that generates random patterns, or based on parameters and such. So yes, having it in plain text format is quite usefull.

Gerhard

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id software is a company that "gets it". Open, editable text formats are easily manipulated and usable by the community, unlike proprietary binary formats like those used in TDS. If only the management at Ion Storm had understood this and produced a powerful and flexible game engine, rather than crippling the design in order to sell out to the X-Box market (and largely unsuccessfully to boot).

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Who cares? TDS was fun, we will have TDS FMs, but The Dark Mod is the future. Go Dark Mod!

 

Sure, but we're going to have to wait a bit. If TDS had been of a comparable quality (engine-wise) to Doom 3 then we would already be seeing the first Dark Mod quality FMs appearing.

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Sure, but we're going to have to wait a bit. If TDS had been of a comparable quality (engine-wise) to Doom 3 then we would already be seeing the first Dark Mod quality FMs appearing.

 

 

I don't think it was the quality of the engine used in TDS that was the problem, it was the fact that Eidos went with a very closed design and proprietry formats, rather than sticking to open formats and standard unreal engine stuff. If they had followed the normal UT2004 formats more closely, modders and mappers would have been able to do much more with it - UT2004 is a very moddable and capable game, as are most unreal engine games. UT2K4 even ships with a version of Maya that can be used for static mesh and animated model creation, and few if any game engine editors can match UnrealEd for power, versatility and ease of use. The only problem with modding the stock standard UT2K4 engine is the lack of dynamic shadows and normal maps in the renderer, which was the main change made to the TDS version of the UE. Fuck you Eidos, why did you have to ruin TDS for modders?

 

But it is very good that Doom 3 provides a nice engine with all the features needed to make a decent Thief TC, so it works out well in the end...

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i used to use unreal ed alot back in the day, but now that im modding with doom3ed, it really is much easier to use, no more adding/subtracting/getting a bsp hole no more. Just resizing brushes. Much more satisfying to work with. Though you do get the odd stuff up and thats when your pc gets an extra dent.

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These days there is not much adding/subtracting of brushes in UnrealEd - it is mostly complex high detail static meshes and very simple BSP - some maps have almost no BSP at all. I haven't yet played with D3radiant, not enough time at the moment, but I will be interested to see how D3rad compares with UnrealEd (I am quite well versed in UnrealED, I'm hoping progress on Nightblade is moving along so I can make some maps for it)

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I have one question, and though I know it's ignorant I will deign to ask it anyway :D. I'm not even sure if this is a particle effect, but I've read about some mission ideas that I found really interesting (Namely, the Victorian Glasshouse idea). Could Doom 3 support the blurr and warped feel that thick windows used to have (before the industrial age), that would distort the outside a bit? Personally I would think that would be an amazing effect, especially if used appropriately: A sky light distorting the clouds of a midnight sky and a moon behind them or looking through a window into a mansion and seeing the distorted images of guards walking by under the flickers of candlelight.

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Doom 3 even has that warped glass in the Hitech Sci-Fi Mars station. :)

 

It's a pity Doom 3 did not make more of the refraction effect. I was very impressed the first time I played HL2 and came across a door with ribbed glass that refracted the scene behind it just as a real one would, not least because I had previously assumed refraction to be impossible without ray-tracing.

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Still, I'm very impressed and excited that its something that the Doom 3 engine can support (and that it has already been done heh). I've been thinking about this all afternoon. :laugh:

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If you check out the Doom3 Can Do It Too video, you'll see some pretty impressive refraction and scattering effects. For example, those office doors with glass that is sort've frosted in a stripe pattern that distorts images on the other side of the door in a manner similar to frosted glass - ingame.

 

Here's a link to the demo video for D3CDIT:

 

http://www.pcgamemods.com/mod/10560.html

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Wow, it was quite the impressive movie, and though it Doom 3 doesn't look so great in the sunshine, it sets the perfect mood for the night. I also liked the windows in the sky scrapers that refracted the light somewhat. What I was referring to originally is how old glass used to be a sign of wealth, but also very uneven. DistortedGlass.wmg.jpg

Edited by Ombrenuit
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Yeah that's true that early, badly manufactured window glass was probably very uneven in thickness and also density, and would have effects like that.

 

You'll also see this on windows that have been around for a long time. Window glass can behave as a liquid if you let time go to infinity, so over hundreds of years it flows downwards and the bottom gets thicker than the top. The thickness variation distorts images coming through because the light gets refracted thru different distances of glass at different points.

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The reason for this is that glass IS a liquid, albeit a rather stable one. :)

 

Ah, nerdy nitpicking, one of my favorit pastimes :)

 

In Materials Science, there a number called the Deborah Number, defined as the time of relaxation divided by the time of observation. This subjectively determines whether we call things a solid or a liquid. If we look at a window for 10 minutes, the time of relaxation is much longer than that, so to us it's effectively a solid. If we look at it over 1000 years, the Deborah Number gets larger, and then we say it's effectively a liquid.

 

I think the same thing applies to hitting water really fast. If you fall from an airplane that's 2km up into water, you're going so fast that the collision takes places over a very small timescale, smaller than the relaxation time of water, so you effectively see the water as a solid. Ouch.

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