A few questions on TDM

[Nightstroll]

Hello everybody. Hope this is the right place to post.

I am a T2 DromEdder, and as TDM release is for pretty soon (well, end of 2008 is pretty soon ^^), I'm envisaging to change of editor and have a look at DarkRadiant. But before this, I'd like to know some crucial things :

 

- I did understand that TDM doesn't take place in Thief universe, for, between others, questions of copyrights. But will other users of DarkRadiant (DarkRadiers ?) be able to set their FMs in the City, with Garrett as the hero, with Hammerites, Mechanists and such ? For me, the most interesting aspect of Thief is its steampunk side (electricity and such in a medieval context), without that, well...but I'm pretty optimistic about this point, as I've seen threads about that.

 

- Is translations planned ? I'm a French player, and I must say playing a game with characters talking in subtitled English (like TDS, which has never been translated because of the flop of T2 in France) is all but entertaining and considerately weakens the atmosphere.

 

- About DarkRadiant more precisely, shall we be able to have very long sight of lines ? (to my mind the thing that misses the more to T1 and T2).

 

Thanks for your answers.

Edited August 21, 2007 by Nightstroll

[Springheel]

For me, the most interesting aspect of Thief is its steampunk side (electricity and such in a medieval context), without that, well...but I'm pretty optimistic about this point, as I've seen threads about that.

 

The Dark Mod universe is also a medieval(ish) steampunk world. While the 'official' setting has limited use of electricity, it does exist, and there's no reason mappers can't make maps full of electrical devices and machinery.

 

As for using the tools to create maps that use Garrett or other Eidos IP, that does infringe copyright, so obviously we don't recommend it.

[New Horizon]

- I did understand that TDM doesn't take place in Thief universe, for, between others, questions of copyrights. But will other users of DarkRadiant (DarkRadiers ?) be able to set their FMs in the City, with Garrett as the hero, with Hammerites, Mechanists and such ? For me, the most interesting aspect of Thief is its steampunk side (electricity and such in a medieval context), without that, well...but I'm pretty optimistic about this point, as I've seen threads about that.

 

TDM provides medieval, steampunk assets for building missions. Stylistically, our characters look a bit different...but we also tried to make it obvious who they were meant to represent. The Builders are our representation of The Hammerites. It would be unwise to call them Hammerites in a fan mission, as that would be against Eidos copyright for those characters. That being said however...what's in a name? Just pretend TDM is an alternate universe..which essentially, it is. Thief was about the gameplay...our characters are similar enough to the originals that the can still be used for the same purpose without having to call them Hammerites. If they look close enough to a Hammerite, without actually being one...they will serve the same purpose.

 

- Is translations planned ? I'm a French player, and I must say playing a game with characters talking in subtitled English (like TDS, which has never been translated because of the flop of T2 in France) is all but entertaining and considerately weakens the atmosphere.

 

We aren't planning to do any of the translating ourselves, that can be handled by the community. Getting all the english speaking characters ingame is more than enough work. I would suggest that the community provide separate language packs, to keep the downloads smaller.

 

- About DarkRadiant more precisely, shall we be able to have very long sight of lines ? (to my mind the thing that misses the more to T1 and T2).

 

Dark Radiant is simply the User Interface for editing, it isn't the game engine...the game engine is still Doom 3. That being said, yes...but within reason. Like any modern engine..you'll have to build your maps carefully...but the D3 engine is much better for that sort of thing than T3 was.

 

Thanks for your answers.

 

You're welcome.

[Macsen]

- Is translations planned ? I'm a French player, and I must say playing a game with characters talking in subtitled English (like TDS, which has never been translated because of the flop of T2 in France) is all but entertaining and considerately weakens the atmosphere.

You only need two words translated: ¡Pare, ladrón! Arrêtez, voleur! Stoppen Sie, Dieb! Arrestisi, ladro! Pare, ladrão! Atal, leidr! And so on...

 

But will it be possible to translate the menu screen?

[New Horizon]

But will it be possible to translate the menu screen?

 

The community will be able to translate whatever they wish with a translation package.

[Nightstroll]

Well, I asked the question cuz' the French "active" community (that's to say active members of ariane4ever) is tiny, and limited to around 50 persons (I said T2 has been a flop in France ^^, TDS too), on these 50, about 5 can handle recording, the others don't have a mike / the time / the voice / the talent...that makes 2 feminine voices, and 3 masculine, a bit limited for a re-recording of all the lines.

 

BTW (general question) : Inventors ~= mechanists ?

[Springheel]

Inventors ~= mechanists ?

 

Inventors are not very similar to mechanists. The only similarity is that they both create steam-powered automatons. You can read all about them on our wiki page: http://www.thirdfilms.com/darkwiki/index.php?title=Universe

[New Horizon]

...or if anyone 'really' wants to make some more 'Mechanist' type characters, they could simply edit the Builder clothing textures and name them...oh, I don't know...'Constructors' or 'Industrialists'..or something like that.

[Nightstroll]

Ok, thanks for your answers.

 

P.S : Yop, I doubted the Inventors were as fanatical as the mechanists.

Edited August 21, 2007 by Nightstroll

[sparhawk]

Concerning the translations: Doom 3 has support for language independent setup. The strings for all the menus and such are usually in a file that provides the english titles. I'm not 100% sure that we actually made use of this mechanism, but it shouldn't be to hard to put the strings into this file and reference them in the GUIs from there. So it should be possible to have different language setups with only a "small" effort. Of course the soundfiles would have to be installed seperately.

[Domarius]

Well, I asked the question cuz' the French "active" community (that's to say active members of ariane4ever) is tiny, and limited to around 50 persons (I said T2 has been a flop in France ^^, TDS too), on these 50, about 5 can handle recording, the others don't have a mike / the time / the voice / the talent...that makes 2 feminine voices, and 3 masculine, a bit limited for a re-recording of all the lines.

Darn, I thought there would have been a lot more of you given the quality of that Thief 3 parody video in french.

 

Well technically you probably should only need 5, but of course you have no other choices if they are not as good at voice acting as you want.

 

I think it really is up to you guys

[Komag]

About the long sight lines, Doom 3 is certainly able to make HUGE long distance views, so long as you keep it simple (such as Thief 2 quality). If you want to make higher quality, especially regarding lighting/shadows and AI in the area, then you will need to make areas smaller.

[Domarius]

Actually from what I've seen, huge long distance views drastically drop in frame rate, disproportionatley to the size, once you drop a few enemies in. It has to do with the path finding.

 

With no visportals to break things up, it gets very nasty very quickly.

 

This post links to this image, which is no longer online, but for those of you who remember, this is the picture of the huge "city" roughed out in Doom 3, the maximum map size with a bunch of oblong cubes put in to represent buildings, and a cyberdemon standing on one of them in the distance. I said "That's all well and good, but untill you place some AI in, all you're testing is the video card's ability to render a few polys, not how well the game handles that size."

 

I don't know where the thread is, but someone finally dropped an imp or two into that map, and it instantly became unplayable. I assume the pathfinding algorithm blows out, because it must be relying on visportals to break things up in some way.

[Ishtvan]

It might be because the pathfinding area will tile an entire flat area with a grid of uniform spacing. The AAS graph in memory must be huge for a huge area. Then when you stand at the opposite end from an imp, and it tries to pathfind to you, it's doing so over a huge graph. You'd think there'd be some optimizations for that situation like making super-groups of grid points, but maybe not since vanilla D3 AI never had to deal with that situation.

[Domarius]

A game I worked on recently had a similar issue, but to do with octree colision.

 

The octree algorithm would analyze the polygons of the entire map, and you gave it a "max polygons per cell" value, say, 1000, and it would look for the smallest location of 1000 polygons, and then the cube size of the area they occupy becomes the cell size for the entire octree grid, since all the cells have to be the same size.

 

This meant that if you had some huge map, but some small location in the map was packed with polygons, the cell size would be very small, and with all those small cells covering a large wide open map, you'd easily blow out the memory of the console very quickly.

 

But the maps were broken up into chunks, so this only spans one chunk, so you could have chunks of varying size and detail, but yes you still had to be careful not to blow out the memory allowed for a single chunk.

 

I guess with Doom 3 AAS graph, since you specify the cell size (correct?) it relies on vis portals to help simplify things somehow.

[Ishtvan]

I guess with Doom 3 AAS graph, since you specify the cell size (correct?) it relies on vis portals to help simplify things somehow.

Yeah, I believe you specify the cell size, although they can end up being more densely packed than that cell size if you have several different vertical levels close to eachother like a staircase, because it seems to tile each vertical level separately. Also, yeah it might have some portal optimization. It's been a while since I looked at that code, but I remember seeing "clusters" of nodes mentioned. I'm not sure how they defined which nodes were grouped into a cluster.

[Tch]

Darn, I thought there would have been a lot more of you given the quality of that Thief 3 parody video in french.

Where is this interesting-sounding parody? I searched both here and the TTLG forum for "parody" and "french" and found nothing.

[Domarius]

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=...9630224285&

[Tch]

Thanks!