Elenkis on 25/2/2005 at 08:12

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I want to see people designing some cool maps that make use of the Climbing Gloves. Yes, it's sad that rope arrows are gone and I'd love to see them back... But I bet some of you crafty mission designers can put those climbing gloves to great use!



I think of the new object physics as being much more significant than swimable water, but that's me :)

mol on 25/2/2005 at 11:21

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Dafydd gave very good reasons as to why water would've been important. It would've added to the variety of gameplay and allowed for different types of gameplay dynamics, which is what it's all about. Also, it's kind of a natural element in the world, especially considering that there's a big friggin' river flowing through the City.

But Krypt has been very kind and forthcoming in providing us some of the reasons why it never made into the game, and while I miss the water, I can appreciate the constrains that the devs were working within. The fact is, there's no water in TDS, and that's the end of it. No use getting all worked up over it. And who knows, maybe some crazy taffer will come up with some ultimate hack for it -- Builder knows (yeah, I'm a Thief geek) that this community has surprised me in more ways than I remember before. :)

But you know, we only just got our hands on 'The Builder' a.k.a T3Ed yesterday, and give a few months we'll all be much wiser as to what can be achieved with it! I'm anxiously waiting to get back home and start getting familiar with it.

sparhawk on 25/2/2005 at 12:42

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As T3Ed is never meant to be a SDK or total conversion tool, it's pretty obvious that such things may not be able to be done with it. The design of TDS was obvsiouly never planned for modding. This can be easily seen how tightly integrated the editor with the main program is. 300MB COMPRESSED download just for the editor because most of the stuff needed to be extracted and resubmitted, without any additional code or tools, speaks for itself IMO.

sparhawk on 25/2/2005 at 14:13

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I would say that it is pretty obvious from how it is done. If TDS wasdesgined to be modable it would have been designed quite differently. So either the games was never mean to be modable when the basic design was planned OR it would mean that Eidos/IOS found the worst possible system architects/programmers for doing this job. Since I'm pretty sure that the programmers are not THAT bad, and knowing how game development works it is pretty logical to assume that it was not planned and not that the devs screwed up so badly.



That depends on the definition of mod. I know that some people use the word mod for practically everything. In my opinion a mod is only a mod when it changes certain aspects of the application that were not part of the initial game. So creatin gnew game maps is obviously not a mod by this definition, because you only create more of that game. Furthermore, the maps that are created would be exactly the same that the devs would have been created if they would have implemented this particular map. Now if you implement a rope arrow (just an example) the code which would do this would qualify more like mod, but that also depends on how you had to do it. In case of Doom 3 (I just take this engine because I know it, not because I want to pimp the TDM now) creating a broadhead arrow just takes tweaking of the existing definition files. Changing some parameters but no code changes. The rope arrow is an entirely different thing because there is no way it can be done with the game out of the box. You need a compiler to change the behaviour of the arrow in order to spawn the rope. Which would qualify as a full mod in my opinion.

As long as you can do stuff with scripting in the existing engine, it is IMO a gray zone could qualify as mod as well as just an extension. But of course that is just my definition for "mod" and not everybody might agree with this. Since T3Ed doesn't include plugin extensions through real coding (like it can be done with other engines) this indicates to me 1) it is NOT an SDK and 2) it was never meant to be one. The third option which could exist would be that these plugin interface DO exist but were not opened/documented to us by the developers because they might have planned to do some add ons and wouldn't spoil it. Seeing how it stands with ION and Eidos and considering the commercial success this is not THAT likely, but it would be an alternative.



I don't what is really possible with the scripting. If the scripting is a real full blown programming language there might be found a way to do much more then what the devs could think of in their short time. Don't forget that they had to work under schedules, so they might not have the time to fully explore all the capabillities. On consoles you can see this effect because later games are usually better because the devs had more time to explore the machine. The TTLG crowd doesn't have time constraints and might well come up with a viable solution. Even if a real rope arrow is not doable, an extending stick where the player could climb up serves the same purpose for the first approach.

And also the devs are not allmighty anyway. I talked to a Doom 3 dev when I started to implement the lightgem because I explored several approaches. His basic comment was that it probably can not done because we need access to the render engine. Now I still found a way how to do it and make it as acurate as possible even without the render engine access. And the solution that I implemented looks to be as correct as the original rendercode is.

deadman on 25/2/2005 at 17:25

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Hear hear! :thumb: