Using both T3ed and Doom3 editors

Fingernail on 12/11/2005 at 19:07

I expect they're all headed to Ethiopia. Common mistake. :rolleyes:

SubJeff on 12/11/2005 at 21:30

Quote Posted by Fingernail

So it would be best to plan exactly what shape the buildings are, on paper probably, and then how they would look from a street or rooftop, then work out how to craft air brushes around them. As opposed to creating a few air brushes to describe a rough block shape. Very few buildings are actually square or rectangular or aligned with each other.

This is exactly what I do.

OptimusPrime on 13/11/2005 at 17:52

(This is going to be a bit long)

Hello all. I did a lot of work with the original DromEd and count it as some of the best fun I've ever had on a computer. (Yes, I'm sick.) But that was a long time ago.

I've been thinking of creating my own game for awhile now, and after much research and reading and downloading and installing and uninstalling software, I'm realizing something. The feeling that inspires me to create my own game is closely associated with the workflow I remember from DromEd. I know it was an engine-specific editor, so I didn't have to worry about hooking up anything to a generic editor and making it work.

It also had tons of pre-scripted content like paths, AI, projectiles, inventory... everything that makes a game something more than a space to walk around in. I didn't need to know how to program anything in C++ or Python or HALscript or whatever. I just looked up the functions I wanted and tweaked them to taste.

I REALLY liked that environment and have had no luck at all finding anything similar. Only after lots of research into game development have I learned enough about the nature of it to know that DromEd was a luxury that is not representative of how things normally get done. Kind of a My First Video Game envrionment - when you outgrow it you don't just get a more powerful version of it - you go out and learn to do things the Grown Up way, which is to find a level editor, find a graphics engine, find a physics engine, and create your models and textures, then duct tape it all together, learn a programming language, and start coding.

(I have <cringe> yet to play Thief 3, so I don't have any idea what the editor is like except for reading through these threads a bit. If it's what I'm looking for, I'll buy it.)

I'm getting the sense that there are 2 ways of doing things in this new Thief world. One is (W) but you can't (X) and you have to watch out for (Y). The other is really (X) but (W) is a pain, and although you don't have to worry about (Y), you do have (Z) to deal with. I hope that makes as much sense to you as all this is making to me right now. Meaning, hardly any.

So. If I had a point, it would likely be that I miss my old DromEd but I want something more powerful, prettier, and less buggy/crashy/infuriating. I don't have any desire to learn programming and the thought of having to build everything more complicated than a wall in 3DSMax makes my skin crawl. I just wanna sit down with my Unified Game Making Program and make a game. And not some dorky Zelda clone. A game like Thief 2, but better.

I learned on Subtractive editing, of course, so that's where my head was when I stopped. I don't mind learning Additive. Whatever is the quickest path to making the coolest game/world/mod that is the most customized I can make, that's what I want to work with.

Sound unreasonable? I'm sure it is, but I know there are hordes of unreasonable people out there who want exactly the same thing. Why can't someone release a package that has all the things Thief has/d without having it be tied to a particular game? Just a powerful editor with a beautiful engine and a ton of useful scripting and models that people could constantly add to.

Is that what I'll find here? Will I ever find that?

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Bardic on 13/11/2005 at 19:38

I think you will like either of these editors. There are still a lot of things that can be unlocked and figured out in T3ed similar to the growth that dromed had. The DarkMod will be more powerful when it is finished if you know coding because you could write nearly anything you wanted for it.

What types of missions do you want? Currently you could make Thief missions. I'm big on mods and conversions, so maybe sometime in the future I will try putting all custom textures and smeshes into Thief and making a tropical island mission with natives, or a present day mission, or an underwater Atlantis type thing, but all with the sneaking thief dynamic that you just can't get if you try to do a conversion in other games.

Some of that could be done in T3ed just by replacing textures smeshes and sounds, but for other things I would have to design in Doomedit and learn more coding to program dynamics that just aren't available in T3ed.

deadman on 9/2/2006 at 21:39

Quote Posted by OptimusPrime

Sound unreasonable? I'm sure it is, but I know there are hordes of unreasonable people out there who want exactly the same thing. Why can't someone release a package that has all the things Thief has/d without having it be tied to a particular game? Just a powerful editor with a beautiful engine and a ton of useful scripting and models that people could constantly add to.

Is that what I'll find here? Will I ever find that?

Thanks for letting me ramble.

(Thread Necromancy? Oh well)

There's this engine here, called (http://www.tenebrae2.com/) Tenebrae 2 someone linked to a while back. According to this description on the site for (http://industri.sourceforge.net/) Industri, which amusingly switched over to the Doom 3 engine,

Quote:

The Tenebrae engine is an Open Source (GNU GPL) modification of Quake that brings per-pixel lighting, stencil shadows, hi-res textures, bumpmap and normalmaps to the gaming experience.

I'm not too informed about this whole Open Souce engine area, nor would I have the expertise to take advantage of having the source code in front of me, but as a fan-made creation (and again, this is coming from an ignoramus), it looks neat.

After reading Krypt's eye-opening expose on Flesh, I'm starting to think I might want to try getting on the "wave of the future" bandwagon with UED or the Doom 3 editor (Hammer, anyone?). It is slightly depressing, especially with all the game assets being tied up in Flesh. There's always the Dark Mod in two or so years time (long wait! :eww:), and I guess any spattering of fun Thief 3 FMs in the meantime. It is just really unfortunate what happened happened and devs couldn't fix the engine or go back to Unreal before building/releasing Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3.

Almost brings to mind the wisdom (or lack thereof) of building a house on an unstable foundation (*Hammerite starts droning:* "If thy foundation is weak..." ;)) and then adding new floors and extensions onto it. In this case, the FMs and mods will be the additions, when, essentially, it's all built on a burning house. I have no doubt we can make do with what we have, and as with DromEd, come to surpass even the originals (granted, we have more time and cause to expand on the engines), yet, it's unfortunate nonetheless; we will have to work harder than others with yet another engine and editor that can't stand up to their peers in many respects.

All along I honestly thought the PC game suffered solely from its being co-developed for the X-Box, yet had no idea many of the limits originally came from one bad coder implementing per-pixel dynamic lighting. Ugh, with the results, I'd much rather have a less crippled engine without the lighting.

As someone suggested, is the franchise not cursed? Maybe the forces that be are testing our mettle before they let Thief blossom :p

deadman.

scumble on 10/2/2006 at 11:53

It's possible that it may have been better to update the dark engine rather than patch a lot of it into Unreal. In most cases where developers work with Unreal they tend to break editing functionality or add too many proprietary tools on the side - T3ed is really quite good on the whole with integration.
Considering the lighting engine was rebuilt, I wonder what benefits Unreal 2.5 bestowed on the final result on the whole. With an updated interface, Dromed could still be useful, if it lost some of its doslike characteristics.

New Horizon on 10/2/2006 at 14:13

Quote Posted by scumble

Yeah, and considering all of the Thief style systems had to be created from scratch in UnrealEd, I would have imagined updating Dark would have been a much wiser thing to do. Just build on the existing foundation.

GlasWolf on 10/2/2006 at 18:13

The indications seem to be that they started off with the intention of "modding" the Unreal engine but ended up rebuilding virtually every part of it except the editor itself. I'd guess therefore that basing everything on Unreal got things off to a nice quick start but the uniqueness of Thief's requirements soon made it a millstone.

deadman on 10/2/2006 at 23:28

Quote Posted by GlasWolf

Well, to quote Krypt's "eye-opening expose,"

Quote Posted by Krypt

It's sort of a funny story how that happened really. The creation of the Flesh engine wasn't really planned. Early on in the development of DX2 and T3 we bandied about the idea of using dynamic shadows for gameplay. A certain programmer who will remain nameless was given the task of adding this into the Unreal engine. He went off on his own for a couple weeks and programmed an entirely new per-pixel lighting renderer. No one really asked him to make a completely new engine, but we didn't mind at first because it looked pretty cool. This was before we discovered the crippling limitations it would put on us.

It wasn't until we had worked with it for a while after said programmer was let go that we found out how crappy the engine really was. By the time we realized how much it sucked, we were already beyond the point of no return and just had to try to make the best of it. Out of necessity our efforts shifted from design to figuring out how to get the game to actually run. Instead of developing the game we wanted, we had to develop whatever we could get to work. We had to cut features left and right, shrink down the levels and comprimise our design because of the craptacular engine and physics implementation, and the difficulty of fitting it all into 64mb of Xbox memory.

Elsewhere, he actually says they were planning on updating certain aspects of the Thief 3 engine for Thief 4. Building on an engine they knew was crappy? Doesn't make much sense to me. Now, lacking the source code (which we all know we'll never get), we'll have to really fight to make Thief look and perform much better than the original game, which, as anyone can see, plainly suffers from the "crippling limitations" Krypt mentioned. We can't even use specular maps effectively, can we? From reading through this thread (and Krypt mentioning that it was a "big framerate hit"), it sounds like the verdict is that we can't.

As I said above, overall, I'm just depressed these limits aren't self-imposed to cater for the X-Box, but rather, built in by a crappy programmer.

Krypt on 11/2/2006 at 02:33

It does seem pretty nonsensical to continue to use the same engine that had brought us so many problems, and you may be right. However, by the end the engine was in a pretty servicable state (I wouldn't say good, but not as awful as it had been throughout its development) and we were confident that we could fix it up and make it better for the next projects. We had learned a lot about how to work with the engine and design around it so we don't always have to fight against it. By the time we reached this understanding the damage had already been done to DX-IW and, to a slightly lesser extent T-DS, unfortunately.

I guess we figured it would be best to make use of the engine we had spent so much effort to get working. I think the next generation of games built on Flesh could have been cool, despite my overall pessimism regarding the engine :p