Judith on 2/7/2009 at 13:24
Quote:
Dirty & gritty. No "clean" textures.
This won't be that easy, actually the Dark Mod textures looks pretty sterile most of the time, but this happens with all tiling textures. Either they're clean and tile nicely or they have unique dirt and look very repetitive. Remember that in order to have a high res surface in TDS, you need to scale down a texture at least 4 times (8 times preferably). That's why I'd recommend separate "dirt maps" for unique look and clean texture as a base. It can be done in several ways, as a second surface, projection, etc.
And, about the project as a whole - I'm not too keen on such, I prefer thinking big and building small, otherwise it spans across too many years. But it would be cool e.g. to work with a team of 2-3 people over one FM with unique textures, scripts, emitters and static meshes. It would take long enough, I know that from my Cabal part ;)
CrackedGear on 2/7/2009 at 15:10
my personal experience is that you can easily join some of the maps together, being the ones that were obviously one map originally and got divided in two, such as the castle, or stonemarket. I'd be willing to work on some of those.
ascottk on 2/7/2009 at 16:22
Quote Posted by Judith
This won't be that easy, actually the Dark Mod textures looks pretty sterile most of the time, but this happens with all tiling textures. Either they're clean and tile nicely or they have unique dirt and look very repetitive. Remember that in order to have a high res surface in TDS, you need to scale down a texture at least 4 times (8 times preferably). That's why I'd recommend separate "dirt maps" for unique look and clean texture as a base. It can be done in several ways, as a second surface, projection, etc.
I was generally talking about character textures. The TDS ones are too clean & bright.
As for as other textures, adding dirt decals is the best way to go :thumb:
Quote:
And, about the project as a whole - I'm not too keen on such, I prefer thinking big and building small, otherwise it spans across too many years. But it would be cool e.g. to work with a team of 2-3 people over one FM with unique textures, scripts, emitters and static meshes. It would take long enough, I know that from my Cabal part ;)
I was there when the Cabal started & it was planned on being a 6 month project :laff: I can't wait for it though :cool: Are the Black Guards still holding up?
As for T3 Gold, what other levels could fill in the holes in TDS? What are the holes, if any, in the storyline?
Beleg Cúthalion on 2/7/2009 at 17:36
If I were...well...someone who's vote counts, I'd advice to stay away from actual changes to the content like rope arrows, water (as ascottk said, that's a matter of gameplay) or additional maps which would not only be off-canon and thus risky since we have almost no indication of what was planned except for the zombie sewers and the warehouse thing with the pagan sappling, but it would also require creative potential and I fear it would end up like The Cabal which hasn't even ended up yet. :p Same goes for textures and objects. These are - apart from the resolution - those things which didn't suffer from technical issues AFAIK and represent what TDS was supposed to be I guess. And I liked it for that. We cannot turn everything into something Thief 1/2y.
I'd vote for glueing together all divided maps, MAYBE creating a single City section map with teleporters (and this will be most tricky if you look at all the scripting/linking complexity) or at least joining all City maps close to each other (Southquarter with Garrett's home and pavelock, Auldale with Gamall's lair etc.), fixing the embarrasing enforcers by making them invisible and ignoring civillians etc., and maybe some of the MP and Thief 1/2-like changes (however somehow without making it impossible to play FMs, so the MP things better separately). That's already enough to choke off the whole T3Edding community and doesn't even come with achievement guarantee.
massimilianogoi on 2/7/2009 at 20:31
Quote Posted by ShadowSneaker
Massimiliano - Giving the water mesh the 'Texture Pan' property will make it flow. There is also a tutorial on Fleshworks for swimmable water that involves using an invisible elevator and a volume turning distance fog on and off when you enter/exit the water. It works alright except for you being able to see Garrett's body running through the water.
Forgive my misunderstanding, I understood
floating, instad
flow , so yeah, they can flow, jtr7!
And for that swimmable water, I tried but it's a crap :tsktsk: The only possibility to do something good should be importing the physics performances of Unreal into Thief 3 Editor.
massimilianogoi on 2/7/2009 at 20:35
Quote Posted by ascottk
As for T3 Gold, what other levels could fill in the holes in TDS? What are the holes, if any, in the storyline?
Have you ever heard about the warehouse section on the dock that the original designer would have to make? I wander how it would have been...
jtr7 on 3/7/2009 at 02:44
There are no holes in the STORYLINE, only in execution. The holes are mainly in the world-building fiction. Most of it is in idle talk and conversations rather than the texts as with the previous games, so most of it is never heard, and there is almost zero talk of other districts from the older titles or lands outside The City. This added to TDS feeling smaller, on top of other things, but I understand the aspects that centered on the Final Glyph, such as the closeness of the city sections to each other since they were built around the Final Glyph in the heart of The City. There is stuff that happens behind-the-scenes while Garrett is elsewhere so it wouldn't make sense to put Garrett in those situations.
If the Shalebridge architect wasn't buried in the Catacombs along with his blueprints, and if the blueprints provided more information than just giving Garrett something to make a map from, maybe a mansion mission could be squeezed out of that. The architect's mansion could've been designed by the man himself, allowing for unusual or quirky design.
I think the Docks omission would've probably been a longer and more sensible route to the Sunken Citadel. And the Citadel was supposed to have deeper water in it, but we know how that went. The Kurshok need to have a much more complicated obstacle course to the surface for it to make sense that they would be unable to reach the surface aboveworld for hundreds of years. Maybe a collapse somewhere made it possible after all that time, when it really wasn't possible before. The Rat Beasts would have to be trapped, too, or so difficult to get past. To have the Pagans walk right in to steal back the Crown makes little sense.
Beleg Cúthalion on 3/7/2009 at 08:13
Well, to make it short: I think Thief III Gold has no chance unless we provide joined levels. So I suggest all of us get themselves an additional vanilla T3Ed install (it should be possible, right, even with Thief Launcher?) and everyone tries to make a single Castle, HammerIntro etc. map. If we succeed with doing this we can go ahead and start changing scripts etc., but for the first part we just use the stock so everyone has the same ressources.
ascottk on 3/7/2009 at 16:10
Another thing we could try to fix are the glowing hair and beards. I think it's the way TDS renders transparencies. Oddly enough Doom 3/Dark Mod doesn't work well with transparencies either.
Here's another thought:
Between TMA & TDS, Garrett gets a new lightgem, the mech eye zoom, and swaps the sword for a knife so we could have Garrett acquiring those items. But the new eye explodes if you submerge yourself in water :laff: That'll explain death water ;) This could be an opportunity to bring in mechanist tech. Raid a warehouse where a few bots and cameras are on display, get the new equipment, then we're off to the Inn.
I don't remember if there are Easter Eggs in TDS. So we could put a few in the OMs.
I'll try to swap the briefings for a video if that's possible.
