Art Style

[bob_arctor]

So far it's looking lovely. Far better than the bland and quickly ennui-inducing blue stone of TDS, one of the reasons I prefer TII FMs still.

And the models look great! Good work Oddity.

 

However I'm asking how much resources for FMs will you provide, like lots of different styles or not?

 

You seem to be going with the traditional Thief Steampunk meets medieval.

But there's lots of ways to go.

 

You could base it on England/Scotland (lots of grey granite. Rain. Snow. Wind. ) / Europe (some TII Fms have looked very European, like France or Venice some of them/ Germany for some Gothic Germanic castles/ or even stray to some mediterranean or even Middle Eastern/ North African stuff.

 

Where do you think you're going to go?

 

What would the public like to see?

[Springheel]

Our architectural style is based on medieval europe/victorian/steampunk influence. We take inspiration from wherever we can get it. We have members living in Germany, Wales, Ireland, and plenty of other places, and we have literally thousands of reference pictures from those locations and others.

[sparhawk]

As for the varietey, we try to create as much resources as are needed to create all kind of different maps. A solid foundation to build upon.

[Macsen]

No members living in Wales anymore I'm afraid. England isn't exactly dry of medieval and victorian architecture however.

 

I'm a big fan of Middle Eastern architecture but I can't see how it would fit into this setting. Unless of course we ascribed it to one 'exotic' faction, but even then it would probably look extremely out of place.

[Dram]

Also, please remember that when it's released, you'll be making maps yourselves, thus can choose whatver style you wish, of course the models/textures/etc we provide will be the medieval/victorian etc style.

[Domarius]

Yeah the most bang for our buck will be the T2 inspiration.

 

Of course it would be cool to give more England/Scotland theme and others, but this can be done later, after the release.

[DopeFishhh]

Are you planning on some sort of offical system / policy for adding new content to TDM from 3rd parties? ie someone makes a new texture for their map (or a new texture in general), a group reviews it asks the author if they can add it to the stock resources and then standardises it (naming and the like).

[Domarius]

That's a good question. I think Fingernail or New Horizon would be best qualified to answer.

[sparhawk]

Are you planning on some sort of offical system / policy for adding new content to TDM from 3rd parties? ie someone makes a new texture for their map (or a new texture in general), a group reviews it asks the author if they can add it to the stock resources and then standardises it (naming and the like).

 

I guess there will be some kind of oficial repository, but that depends on wether someone will maintain it after release. If there will be some maintainer it will be up to them to include stuff in the official branch, but since it will be freely availabe, you are free to do what you want (within reasonable limits).

[oDDity]

You are free to add whatever you want, period. There are no reasonable limits, or any kind of limts, except the limit on how much work you're prepared to do.

[Springheel]

Are you planning on some sort of offical system / policy for adding new content to TDM from 3rd parties?

 

At the moment we are trying to keep a somewhat unified style to our art assets. We have standards of quality, and a few guidelines about what we wouldn't include (nothing too modern, frex). Once the toolset is released, however, I don't think there could feasibly be any real restrictions.

[bob_arctor]

Are you going to run a site for community resources to be pooled so people don't make new textures again and again, instead they see you have one and get that?

[Fingernail]

If the money's there, we may be able to afford such a luxury.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

No members living in Wales anymore I'm afraid. England isn't exactly dry of medieval and victorian architecture however.

 

I'm a big fan of Middle Eastern architecture but I can't see how it would fit into this setting. Unless of course we ascribed it to one 'exotic' faction, but even then it would probably look extremely out of place.

 

What? have the members died in Wales?

Middle Eastern architecture would definitely not look out of place. Remember the colonies, the ottoman empire, the eastern europe, the british-built railways leading everywhere, the arabs, the whole colonial era.

 

A site would not be a luxury. All the content could be piped by "torrents". The site itself would be quite simple, just simple graphics and text and links.

[Ombrenuit]

I know there are those on TTLG who would gladly host materials for free...

[Domarius]

You are free to add whatever you want, period. There are no reasonable limits, or any kind of limts, except the limit on how much work you're prepared to do.

The issue you might be missing is - what will be included in the official darkmod download.

 

Just say someone officially adds a snow theme to the media.

 

This means the darkmod version will have to be updated, or the snow media would be a seperate, but official download.

 

The issue arises when an author counts on the player to have snow theme installed. They will have to include a message "this FM requires DarkMod version 3.4544" or "this mission requires the optional Snow theme download".

 

It could work but there probably needs to be some sort of procedure.

[Al3xand3r]

Or they can just provide them on a website as public TDM resources and FM authors will simply include them in their FM file downloads as needed... Sure you could end up having each texture multiple times for multiple FMs but I don't think that's an important issue as long as the author only includes the textures he has used and not the full collection just cos he happened to use one little thing from it.

 

The above is much more user friendly than requiring people to constantly update their TDM installation. Not to mention that if they officially added texture packs in TDM they could always wish to remove some too, for example because a new better collection of the same theme was created. This would make older FMs stop working properly (unless there was a coresponding texture for every old one and they were all named the same and saved with the same pack path/name/whatever). And you'd still get extra files anyway since you'd get the whole texture packs before any FM even used them, just because they happened to be of good quality.

 

Anyway, just saying that I don't think every little thing like that should be done by the TDM devs, a nice community site with resources for use with TDM would be more than enough, while TDM itself could just include resources made by the devs and anyone else who directly donated good-enough work to them (and have the donated textures only available in TDM and no other TDM resource place to avoid confusion). I don't think T1 and 2 suffered in any way just because there was a lack of a system like the one you describe, people still used custom content fine in their FMs.

[DopeFishhh]

Well, for anyone who wants to put something into action they would need to look at these problems.

 

The selection of content to add is one, how do you categorise the content to the differing standards? You guys want a specific theme, but others might try / want something weirder. I guess thats simply a matter of the people running the system categorising content appropriately, but it shouldn't mean that content should be excluded or ignored or marginalised because it's unusual. Censoring is another issue but thats pretty simple.

 

Content quality is another, the panel members would need to assess if the content meets basic standards in quality (like resolution for textures). but if the content doesn't meet standards what do they do with it? if it's an awesome piece of artwork but has some minor resolution issues do THEY do the legwork to bring it up to standard? do they ask the creator? do they simply reject it and mourn the loss? i don't think you could have any hard and fast rules about this but you really want to maximise the amount of official quality content.

 

How do you acquire content? do you have people roaming about searching for new things to add? do you allow people to submit content? will you only look at submitted content? if you search about thats more work but it could foster a sort of standard, eventually people will be submitting on a frequent basis (almost like a gallery or something). Ideally you want people's default behaviour to be submitting content to you so you can build up a big gallery.

 

However now you hit a big problem, plagiarism could screw the managing group over, they obviously can't search the internet to find out where texture x came from, theres no guarantee it will be on the internet. Obviously the consequences for distributing playgarised work could be brutal. Fortunately i think there could be a simple way to weed out most cases of this. If you make every piece of content have a public preview for a certain length of time before it is allowed to even be panel reviewed you can rely on the people to be your eyes and ears on the matter. not 100% reliable but again if this system is big then you will have alot of people checking for you.

 

Once a piece of plagiarised work has been identified then the user who posted the work should be banned and publicly humiliated. if however it manages to pass all reviews then gets outed as plagiarised once it made it into a distributed pack then thats a tricky problem. you will need to update the pack that it got released in so it's no longer in there, in which case packs themselves will have different versions and could cause compatibility problems, especially for those FM's that use the plagiarised content. I dont think the risk of plagiarism would outweigh the benefits of the community having a huge content base to work off, but all it takes is some litigous asshole out there to rain on everyones parade. I guess legal advice here would be handy.

 

Arrangement of the content is another issue, obviously piling it into one big file makes things awkward for everyone involved so thats a no go. monthly updates that people can grab can make things alot easier for people BUT if an FM author needs to wait a month before the shiny piece of content they made makes it into a pack and they've basically finished their FM they will be pissed. Making FM's bundle the content they used can also have problems, it would eventually bloat the FM's as content builds up and authors decide to use heaps of it and it's a problem for distribution too. I think a monthly + individual distribution method would be best, an author can bundle items not yet packaged within the FM, but once the object has made it into a pack you cannot bundle it individually (well you can't force them, i guess it all depends on how you let people view the content).

 

Finally who makes up the panel? you will need a large number of people who are level headed enough and have a few spare hours every few days to review items alot of time is involved. Also hosting it online is another tricky issue, a public review system would be difficult to run (think deviant art but smaller).

 

So what are the benefits? well FM authors will have a HUGE base for things to add to their missions, all high quality pieces of work, eventually quality of work is a self reinforcing cultural thing among the FM authors/players leading to more enjoyment for all.

 

The cons however are, hard work, potential for assholes to ruin a good thing, costs for distribution.

 

Well i rambled again, but this time i think it was worth it

[Al3xand3r]

I think the devs should just focus on making TDM as they wish. A resource site should not be expected to be created by them, as you mentioned it's a lot of hard work with many potential issues.

 

TDM itself should just offer what the developers are creating and only that. A community site, if the community ends up supporting/involved enough, can offer anything else like extra texture sets and what not without hassling the developers or putting TDM in any danger (if stolen textures were included in official packs before realising). If TDM members wish to take part in the community resource site project they should/could, but it shouldn't be considered just as official as the main TDM product, only the work of fans and the community.

 

FM authors will check the site, get any textures or models they want and include them within their FM instead of say "this FM requires the packs winter_city_2, forest_4, castle_tiles_3", and so on, when they may have only used a single texture from each pack.

IMO it's not necessary in any way to provide to the players full downloadable official content packs that FMs will state as requirements. It is enough to offer the textures and objects freely to the authors for use and inclusion in their own FM downloads as seen fit by themselves. let's just hope that the community will be big enough with a lot of talent found within it.

 

Well anyway, I guess I was gonna repeat all I said in my previous reply to this, if you want more, read that instead...

 

Bottomline, the TDM devs are doing something wonderful for the Thief community, almost creating a full game from scratch for them, they shouldn't be expected to on top of that offer a vastly different and just as huge project in the form of constant flow of official content packs. That's the community's "job", just as in any game geared towards moding. Sure the devs could and probably will add their own content after the initial releases (I'm sure their own planned campaign will require atleast some content aside from the initial release stuff) but that is different from what is asked for here.

Example: Valve offered TFC and other mods for Half-Life 1, documentation, tools, and whatever else they saw fit. The community did not ask them to on top of all that create a site like wadfather or prefabs factory or other great resource websites... The community made those themselves. So why ask this from the TDM devs?

[Domarius]

I think the best solution is - let the community do as they will. Some people will make a cool theme and host it somewhere, and another author will say "this mission requires Zork's Snow Theme, you can download it here" just like they already do with scripts and addons for T2 etc.

 

We will just have the fundamental media in the DarkMod.

[bob_arctor]

I'm with Alexander. No "you need these resources".

I meant textures etc for the FM authors to use, pick up and think "that's great, I don't have to do a granite texture myself. Makes my FM easier to do" then put that in the FM.

 

I was just wondering whether TDM team would give encouragement, could host torrents or something.

However I see now the easiest thing to do would give it a link and positive desciption to a community run resources site and we can all be happy.

 

I'd be disapointed if no FMs after a year or two did Arabic or Eastern European or Gothic or whatever style. Vivre la différence.

[DopeFishhh]

I never said it was the dev's role, infact it would be better that they didn't have much if anything to do with it so they can spend their time on TDM and be considered a wholely seperate entity incase the shit hits the fan.

 

The whole idea of that system is to centralise and assess items, so a module author could either just browse the highly rated ones, or search by category and arrange by rating.

[sparhawk]

I never said it was the dev's role, infact it would be better that they didn't have much if anything to do with it so they can spend their time on TDM and be considered a wholely seperate entity incase the shit hits the fan.

 

At least in my case I know that it will not be the devs. I certainly don't intend to spend the rest of my live maintaining TDM. So as soon as TDM is finished, there are two possibillities. Either I will help working on a campaign, or I start another game which I'm currently planning. Since I'm pretty keen on doing this, I guess it's more the latter.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

However now you hit a big problem, plagiarism could screw the managing group over, they obviously can't search the internet to find out where texture x came from, theres no guarantee it will be on the internet. Obviously the consequences for distributing playgarised work could be brutal. Fortunately i think there could be a simple way to weed out most cases of this. If you make every piece of content have a public preview for a certain length of time before it is allowed to even be panel reviewed you can rely on the people to be your eyes and ears on the matter. not 100% reliable but again if this system is big then you will have alot of people checking for you.

 

I think the onus should not be placed on the viewers to say "gotcha, that's plagiarism, i've seen it somewhere else", but on the submitters to prove "beyond reasonable doubt that this texture can be used in TDM. like where the creator says he releases it into creative commons" or the submitter should snap the texture himself. That I think would be most perfect.

 

Regarding distribution, why not get some fan people together and spend a few days creating a script and an online presence where the user downloads the FM, the script looks at which texture he's missing, and does an apt-get on them. some kind of text-get. Same for models if they're not altered.