Old and Cunning on 22/10/2009 at 09:05
Quote Posted by Irenices
I get the feeling more and more that some people just don't want to like TDM, and if they can't enjoy it they don't think anyone else should enjoy it either.
Well, I enjoyed the hell out of it. I can't say enough good about the way it looks and feels. The textures are a delight and it played as smooth as silk on my older computer, once I figured out my little install glitches. This is everything that Thief 3 should have been and wasn't.
Id and Eido should crawl in bed together and use this mod as the basis for T4. My 4-year-old machine and I would be very happy. :thumb:
Fidcal on 22/10/2009 at 09:05
I've made a small crash test. Those of you who had the crash when you went into two of Chalice's rooms and one in the trainer I'd be grateful if you could test this please. Set your graphics card how you had it before when it was crashing. Download (
http://www.fidcal.com/TEMP/pedestal_test.pk4) Anyone else I wouldn't waste your time getting this. All this is is one bare room with the pedestal model in it.
Download the pk4 into your current game folder, eg, doom3/chalice if that is the FM you have installed.
Run Dark Mod
Press Ctrl + Alt + (key above Tab and left of 1) to get the console.
Type map then TAB and it should show what maps are available.
Type space p TAB then it will select the map or just type in manually map pedestal_test then Enter
Once in game just turn round to look at the pedestal and let me know if it crashes.
sparhawk on 22/10/2009 at 09:24
Quote Posted by d'Spair
This is
not criticism as it is - you guys are not id Software, and this is not your payed job.
I think that sums it up pretty nicely. Tha major point here is, when I work for a game development company, I can choose my artists, because they get paid. If I don't like one I can fire him and finde a better one. We were doing this in our free time, so most of us had a job, or studying plus family plus the mod and not even get paid for it.
Maybe some of the art is not as good is could be, but then personally I find it still really good. Now mappers have to make use of it, to make it into impressing levels. We were providing a solid basis that can be expanded upon, not THE solution for all your problems. If you don't like the textures, feel free to improve them. That's why we made it a free project and not a commercial enterprise. So we can harness the power of the community to create an excellent product over time. The basis is there.
There were a lot of texture packs for Thief and TDS, so I hope and even expect that there will be some for TDM as well.
Hmmm.... the second image looks good, but the first one looks also rather sterile to me. Yes it has some dirt, but it still looks quite artificial. As if a clean environment has gotten some dirt applied to make it look lived in but didn't succeed.
To be honest, the only game I ever encountered in terms of really heavily used and abandonded looking environment to me was Painkiller. Personally I think that it looks so realistic, that you can really believe that the environment was used a long time for construction or whatever it's use was before it became so rundown. I have yet to see a game that rivals that. Most games look pretty clean despite some effort to make it looke dirtier, just like that batman street in your example.
I guess I should fire it up just to have a look again at those graphics. :)
Judith on 22/10/2009 at 10:11
Yup, that first screen shot was not that good example, I chose it only for those columns. There are more proper examples, I guess :)
I'm really eager to see nicely detailed environment to match gameplay and the game mechanics in TDM, which is truly great. Meshes and ambient occlussion is just one of the methods.
I was looking at the Oblivion/Fallout 3 editor some time ago, and no matter what you might think about their gameplay quality, guys at Bethesda are pretty hardcore-ish lot when it comes to design. While their work ingame looks pretty organic, in the editor you'll see that everything is a set of perfectly aligned mesh tiles, whole walls, floors and architecture parts put in sets, like LEGO bricks. Not only they're painting some dust and subtle shadows on textures but they also include them as mesh faces! Window frames or pilasters for example, have a set of planes on each side, painted with transparent texture using black gradient to imitate dust.
I tried to reproduce this method some time ago, those green surfaces around the window are the planes for the gradient seen ingame as a kind of dirt/shadow:
(
http://img216.imageshack.us/i/71725204.jpg/)
Inline Image:
http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/7434/71725204.th.jpg(
http://img44.imageshack.us/i/t3mainreleaseversion200.jpg/)
Inline Image:
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/9420/t3mainreleaseversion200.th.jpgIt might sound crazy but it's quite convenient. When you move such mesh, its "shadow" moves with it. You don't need advanced lightning, but I'm not quite sure it is such a gain in performance, for transparency also impedes it.
Anyways, there are a lot of nice tricks to break up the obvious pattern and avoid sterile look, if you master them, your missions will look great :)
RailGun15 on 22/10/2009 at 11:16
People need to relax :), the fact that some levels may not so good its not a problem of the mod itself but the mappers, not that any of the maps in the release look bad, my favourite map is outpost because it had great gameplay
Anyway here are some shots of a map i worked a while ago, bear in mind that i'm definitely not an experienced mapper (i just started a few months ago) so imagine what the results with someone who knows what they're doing :laff:
Inline Image:
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/3897/shot00006yar.jpgInline Image:
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/7057/shot00005e.jpgsparhawk on 22/10/2009 at 11:49
Quote Posted by Judith
I was looking at the Oblivion/Fallout 3 editor some time ago, and no matter what you might think about their gameplay quality, guys at Bethesda are pretty hardcore-ish lot when it comes to design.
Oh, you are right. I completely forgot about Fallout 3, which also has a very good looking world, so I should give credit to them as well. :) So it's Painkiller and Fallout 3. Of course there are also a lot of adventure games, but I don't count them in, because they usually use static screens where it is much easier to do good graphics, then in an animated world.
New Horizon on 22/10/2009 at 12:31
Quote Posted by Melan
I think d'Spair actually has a point about this particular screenshot - the columns don't look very good, the central carpet and the tiles are also blah, and the strong uniform lighting flattens the scene. Nonetheless, it seems unfair to generalise from that particular shot; the training map alone has a decent number of areas looking significantly better. If this shot is from Dram's Blackheart Manor, which it seems to be, I have seen much more ambitious screenshots from it - architecture which was the exact opposite of boxy.
Well, that particular screen shot is probably 2 years old by now.
Quote:
I can't pass judgement on DarkRadiant, since I am only experimenting with the editor right now, but I could construct some fairly decent-looking architectural features with a handful of brushes and curving patches; moreover, there is a lot of support in there to make building efficient, as I am discovering. There are some things which would be much easier in Dromed, though - the lack of proper air brushes is a bit of a hurdle, although it doesn't seem insurmountable.
Dromed is subtractive, Radiant is additive. You don't need an air brush if the world is already an open void full of air. Unlike Dromed, you're not cutting solid chuncks out of the void...you're
adding solid to the void. Different concept.
SubJeff on 22/10/2009 at 12:41
Logic disconnect. Logic disconnect.
World goes topsy-turvy. :p
Melan on 22/10/2009 at 12:46
New Horizon: yes, I understand that paradigm. I am also seeing its downsides - after all, while building a level in Dromed always started with subtraction, after that, you had a choice between subtractive and additive geometry, and alternating these methods made it very easy to build and revise. If Dromed had problems, they lie largely elsewhere (e.g. the endless time spent adjusting texture alignment). TDM has different virtues which speed up building, but it does have its costs.
It may also be a good idea to replace showcase screenshots from 2+ years old builds with more recent takes if the people working on the site have the time for that.
