d'Spair on 21/10/2009 at 09:21
I played it last night. It's magnificent. Apart from a few annoying issues (very complex item manipulation options that actually make operating objects more difficult than in the real life, which is always a fail in any game; the need to press three buttons in order to creep with Alwyas Run ON; some really boxy architecture here and there, that looks quite poor by Doom 3 standards; some problems with leaning), it is a great achievement.
It really feels like a new, stand-alone, decent quality game on a Doom 3 engine, that looks almost like Thief, but has its own flavour. I really like how the game flows in terms of movement and physics - much more fluently than TDS. Mantling onto objects is perfect - I mean, it takes 10 times to climb inside a window in Thief, while in The Dark Mod it works right away on the first attempt. Doom 3's ability to separately set up gamma and brightness is a blessing for a Thief-like game. Water is magnificent. Climbing arrows and ladders is flawless. The bow works better than the original dilogy. I haven't yet tried fighting, though.
Of course the key thing about the future success of the Dark Mod is the ability to work rewardingly with the Dark Radiant. So far it's a pain in the ass: I loathe id's Radiant from the bottom of my heart. My God, DromEd's interface is a blessing compared to Radiant. (Selecting brushes with Shift + Alt + LMB, my ass! Selecting individual brushes when a map becomes complicated is a curse.) I wish it was Dark QuARk instead :p By the way, the amount of Radiant tutorials in the wiki is astonishing; now that's what I call a dedication!
Anyway, it's a magnificent achievement worth of giving some of The Dark Mod's authors good jobs in the industry. Though I remain highly sceptical about the quantity and quality of the coming Dark Mod missions (how many people would dare to battle through Radiant's interface and learn everything from the scratch? how many of them would risk to sacrifice years in order to make properly detailed enviroinments that would fit modern graphical standards?), I think that for those people who would use it, it would be a fantastic tool to play with for years to come.
I seriously recommend Eidos Montreal (not only their community manager) to take a look at it.
Thanks to everybody who contributed to making this great new addition to Thief games series.
morgan on 21/10/2009 at 09:44
Quote Posted by bukary
The problem: every time I open some door the game freezes for 2-3 seconds. It seems like it tries to load data from hard drive then. That is really annoying. I had no such problems with Doom 3, Saint Lucia, or training mission. Any ideas?
There is also one more thing: each time I try to load new mission after installation it returns to main menu during loading. Than I have to load the mission for the second time and it works.
I also have those 2 same problems hope you guys can fix it.
Fidcal on 21/10/2009 at 11:06
d'spair: I think I speak for everyone in that we totally disagree with you about Dark Radiant. I've never heard a single one complain about the selection keys and I am completely unconscious of using them I find it so instinctive. Are we talking about the same program? To imply that it would take years to get to grips with DR is frankly absurd. I recommend anyone to try Dark Radiant and follow the wiki tutorial and you can produce a tiny demo FM in days.
[edit] re-reading your post maybe you are not talking about Dark Radiant in which case I'd emphasise that if I were you as it might discourage people from trying to produce FMs. :)
Neb on 21/10/2009 at 11:22
Greetings from the land of Blender, where right mouse button is the selection button.
I'm getting used to shift-alt-LMB now. :p
irR4tiOn4L on 21/10/2009 at 11:30
Ive finished all the misisons and was trying get a good stealth score by ghosting Chalice but had a crash that corrupted my quicksave (Arrg!). Ive had a total of two crashes to desktop which isnt much at all but still, better to save properly every so often!
Id like to know how the stealth score works, and whether guards can be 'locked in'. I tried stealing a key from one and locking him out but that didnt seem to work, and for stealth score ive only seen 0 (knocked most of the guards out the first time)
Did i mention how awesome this game is? It doesnt feel like Beta at all
242 on 21/10/2009 at 11:35
Quote Posted by d'Spair
Of course the key thing about the future success of the Dark Mod is the ability to work rewardingly with the Dark Radiant. So far it's a pain in the ass: I
loathe id's Radiant from the bottom of my heart. My God, DromEd's interface is a blessing compared to Radiant.
I think you should try Dark Radiant yourself, it's different from Radiant. From what I read it seems it's much more convenient than DromEd.
Quote:
Though I remain highly sceptical about the quantity and quality of the coming Dark Mod missions (how many people would dare to battle through Radiant's interface and learn everything from the scratch? how many of them would risk to sacrifice
years in order to make properly detailed enviroinments that would fit modern graphical standards?),
You may be wrong here too, people can quickly construct it from 'blocks' and objects which already are detailed, they don't need to construct high-polygon environments polygon-by-polygon. At least I think so.
From The Outpost's readme:
The Outpost
by angua & greebo
This map was supposed to showcase what can be achieved in one week using TDM's stock resources.
Except for the Briefing and a few custom light entities everything in this mission is using "vanilla" TDM content.
Total mapping time: about 60 man hours including concept, creation, readables and bugfixing (divide this by two to get the mapping time per person).
sparhawk on 21/10/2009 at 12:48
To be fair angua and greebo are rather experienced mappers, so they probably can do a lot more in 60 hours, than mere man. :)
However, I'm certainly not an experienced mapper, but I always found Dark Radiant to be rather intuitive and easy to use. I don't know how far Dark Radiant was already deviated from Radiant at the time I used it, because that was still rather early in it's development, but even back than it was easy to get into it just by reading a few tutorials and experimenting a bit. And the situation has improved a lot since then, so I don't really expect "years of training needed" to make decent FMs from prospective mappers.
New Horizon on 21/10/2009 at 12:56
Quote Posted by d'Spair
I loathe id's Radiant from the bottom of my heart.
...I remain highly sceptical about the quantity and quality of the coming Dark Mod missions (how many people would dare to battle through Radiant's interface and learn everything from the scratch? how many of them would risk to sacrifice years in order to make properly detailed enviroinments that would fit modern graphical standards?)...
I can respect a personal opinion, but I think it's fair to say you are coming into Dark Radiant with a huge personal bias against any strain of Radiant editor in general.
You make it sound like it's this awful tool to work with, when it really hasn't been for many people...many who are dromed users. I can understand if you simply said
you didn't like it and left it at that, but you're painting such a horrible picture of the editor...it's almost like you're trying to scare people away from even trying it.
It's a powerful editor. Can't really be helped if it's not your cup of tea.
Chances of 'you' ever liking it might be slim since you hate all forms of Radiant, however we have several dromed users on our team who love it, and don't report any such issues of it being a "pain in the ass", in fact...quite the opposite. They find it extremely easy to use, and very fast to learn and produce good content with. So, while I can understand your personal skepticism I don't think it's going to be as big an issue as you're making it out to be. Sure, some won't like the editor...that's to be expected, but the majority of those who have tried it, love it.
Quote Posted by Fidcal
[edit] re-reading your post maybe you are not talking about
Dark Radiant in which case I'd emphasise that if I were you as it might discourage people from trying to produce FMs. :)
No, I'm pretty sure he's talking about Dark Radiant....unless he's confusing the built in Doom 3 Editor with Dark Radiant, but that's not likely.
bukary on 21/10/2009 at 13:05
Quote Posted by morgan
I also have those 2 same problems hope you guys can fix it.
"Good" to know I am not alone with these problems. I am trying to find some solution, but nothing seems to work.
Years ago (as TDM beta mapper) I was aruguing with various people how great performance might be achieved with this modifiaction in spite of "many lights hitting one surface" problem. I would have never suspect that I will fall the victim of some kind of "texture loading lag" problem (although my system can run some newest games - like Arkham Asylum - on highest settings with no problems). Strange. It must be something obvious or I am really doomed. :(
So many years of waiting and now I can not even play fluently such mini missions like Outpost. (It's really nice, by the way).
