[Tels]

sparhawk, on Jan 18 2008, 06:45 AM, said:

Yes. Tels will host one, greebo said he will also join and I will also set it up when I get home later. So there will be at least a few torrents available until it is picked up for good. I keep mine running 24/7 anyway.

Minor correction: There will be one torrent, but multiple people seeding it. (I think sparhawk wanted to say this. Just wanted to clarify that people won't need to choose a torrent, they will be all part of the same swarm. The swarm is mighty! We are one! Come join uuuuss..er sorry wrong game.. :ph34r: )

[sparhawk]

Yeah, that's what I meant. Hosting individual torrents for the same file would be quite pointless. :)

[New Horizon]

Broken Glass Studios is proud to present Thief's Den, a short alpha demo of The Dark Mod. Thief's Den is just a few rooms but it is a complete, fully playable mission, and includes a good selection of the main Dark Mod features. Keep in mind that The Dark Mod is still a work in progress and this is reflected in the demo. Voices are temporary placeholders, for example, and AI behaviour is not yet fully developed. You will certainly find bugs and glitches but we hope that doesn't spoil your enjoyment too much.

Any flaws or failings in this demo do not necessarily indicate limitations in The Dark Mod's potential but just this particular demo — which was originally begun as a very rough accompaniment to a mission development tutorial. It was never intended for release as a playable mission but was modified into a workable game so everyone could see the current state of progress and have some fun.

Instructions for installing the alpha can be found here.

http://modetwo.net/d...p/Thief%27s_Den

Further gameplay info

http://modetwo.net/d...7s_Den_Gameplay

Dark Radiant info, for anyone who is smitten and would like to look into TDM mapping.
http://modetwo.net/d...php/DarkRadiant

Beginners Guide:
http://modetwo.net/d...e_Start_Here%21

Without further delay, here are the links!

http://www.shadowdar...fs_den_v1.0.exe
http://bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/
http://208.49.149.11...fs_den_v1.0.exe
http://www.southquar...fs_den_v1.0.exe

Torrent:
http://bloodgate.com...1.0.exe.torrent

[Chiron]

Thanks!

I'll take the torrent and seed it till monday or so

[mangrove]

woo!

pulling it off shadow dark and will add to the seeds when its down.

[sparhawk]

My torrent is already seeding and I already got connections. :)

[Tels]

sparhawk, on Jan 18 2008, 09:31 AM, said:

My torrent is already seeding and I already got connections. :)

Me too (it says 2 seeders and 6 leechers :)

[Eilhan]

Congratulations on a very nice pre-beta release! Ghosted through it a couple of times without finding any bugs that weren't already mentioned in the Wiki.

Gonna have to play through it again, as I'm still missing 100 loot, and that really irks the perfectionist in me...

;)

[Briareos H]

What I said about it over at TTLG :

I'm very satisfied with the basic gameplay mechanics as well as with the graphics.
The only unexpected issue (?) I encountered was the unability to apply any display settings I changed in the menu such as resolution and antialiasing without restarting the game (or is it a standard behaviour with Doom 3 ?).

Combat, AIs and dynamic shadows need a lot of work but that was in the FAQ. I found mantling and movement superb. It's sometimes hard to frob or interact with objects (specifically : picking up the crates and opening the chest), but that wasn't much of a hassle.

In terms of design choices, the mood is a sort of blend between TMA and TDS which I found rather appealing. The textures are nice, I really liked the street floor with the running water, as well as the interiors. However, I found the grey brick texture for the outer den's wall much less convincing. Also, aren't the normals for the red brick walls of the streets the other way around ?

Finally, I know I would enjoy the mood even more with stronger contrasts and a better lighting range. I didn't quite manage to tune the gamma so that areas which should be very dark wouldn't turn grey if I wanted to keep the average level of lighting satisfying. But I realize this probably is a gripe with the way Fidcal put his lights in the level. A very small one but almost on par with TDS levels ;) Good work !

All in all, impressive and satisfying. Keep up the good work, I think it was a great idea to release a working alpha.

This post has been edited by Briareos H: 18 January 2008 - 10:44 AM

[Thief-Playah]

Briareos H, on Jan 18 2008, 10:31 AM, said:

The only unexpected issue (?) I encountered was the unability to apply any display settings I changed in the menu such as resolution and antialiasing without restarting the game (or is it a standard behaviour with Doom 3 ?).

That's normal DooM 3 behavior. But, opening the console (Ctrl + Alt + ~) and typing 'vid_restart' will apply the changes without having to restart.

File's done downloading. Time to play!

[phide]

Briareos H, on Jan 18 2008, 07:31 AM, said:

The only unexpected issue (?) I encountered was the unability to apply any display settings I changed in the menu such as resolution and antialiasing without restarting the game (or is it a standard behaviour with Doom 3 ?)

For now, you can apply new video settings you've entered in the console by using the cmd 'vid_restart', without requiring you to exit and restart the game.

EDIT: Playah got it mere seconds before me. Rat!

Briareos H, on Jan 18 2008, 07:31 AM, said:

Finally, I know I would enjoy the mood even more with stronger contrasts and a better lighting range. I didn't quite manage to tune the gamma so that areas which should be very dark wouldn't turn grey if I wanted to keep the average level of lighting satisfying.

Doom 3 has cvars for brightness (r_brightness) and gamma (r_gamma). If you want a little richer contrast, use r_brightness to up whites and color (you can get a good bit more saturation with that) while maintaining a consistent black level, then set gamma to something like 1.2 or 1.3 to bring the overall gamma down a tad from the default (the 'reference' gamma is probably in the ballpark of 1.1). The plan is to eventually implement a good way of previewing the affects of brightness and gamma right in the menu.

You can also use color correction on your NVIDIA or ATi/AMD card to help out a bit.

[Land-Vogt]

Somehow I've got some Performance-Problems. Had to play it on 800x600, even Doom3 itself runs more fluently.
And Some of the textures looked like 10 years old :blink:

But overall very nice Preview. Keep on the good work! :wub:

[Redface]

Yeah, strange performance problems. Runs vanilla D3 fine on high, this was quite laggy.

[Springheel]

TDM does FAR more processing than Doom3, so you can't expect to get the same performance if your specs are close to the minimum for D3. However, even on an average machine you should get quite playable rates.

[phide]

Land-Vogt, on Jan 18 2008, 08:04 AM, said:

Somehow I've got some Performance-Problems. Had to play it on 800x600, even Doom3 itself runs more fluently.

The AI is one of the big hitters at the moment. It currently needs a good deal of muscle to do what it does.

If you're running on the default High setting, try scaling back anisotropic filtering via the image_anisotropy cvar. Try disabling it or setting it to 4 (2 may also work on some cards, but not others). Also make sure you're properly configured if you're on a multicore AMD X2 or Opteron system. Losing a core because the AMD drivers, hotfixes and optimizers aren't installed, or weren't installed correctly, can shatter performance.

[Tels]

phide, on Jan 18 2008, 10:49 AM, said:

Doom 3 has cvars for brightness (r_brightness) and gamma (r_gamma). If you want a little richer contrast, use r_brightness to up whites and color (you can get a good bit more saturation with that) while maintaining a consistent black level, then set gamma to something like 1.2 or 1.3 to bring the overall gamma down a tad from the default (the 'reference' gamma is probably in the ballpark of 1.1). The plan is to eventually implement a good way of previewing the affects of brightness and gamma right in the menu.

This is actually already implemented in the menu. The two sliders "Brightness" and "Gamma" in the video settings menu manipulate these c_vars and have a preview.

[New Horizon]

phide, on Jan 18 2008, 11:49 AM, said:

The plan is to eventually implement a good way of previewing the affects of brightness and gamma right in the menu.

You can already do that phide. :) The gamma and brightness sliders are right there in the menu.

[phide]

I thought we were going to do a sort of Thief DS preview sort of thing with a screenshot?

Oh, well nevermind ;)

[Springheel]

I think the key word is "previewing". Eventually we plan have a in-game image to help tailor the gamma, rather than the numbers. :)

[New Horizon]

Land-Vogt, on Jan 18 2008, 12:04 PM, said:

Somehow I've got some Performance-Problems. Had to play it on 800x600, even Doom3 itself runs more fluently.
And Some of the textures looked like 10 years old :blink:

But overall very nice Preview. Keep on the good work! :wub:

Redface, on Jan 18 2008, 12:06 PM, said:

Yeah, strange performance problems. Runs vanilla D3 fine on high, this was quite laggy.

Come now, this should all come as no surprise folks.

1. It's an alpha, so it's hardly optimized.

2. We have far more processor intensive things happening than vanilla doom 3. The lightgem has an impact, the ai has an impact.

3. The textures - for performance reasons, we set the doomconfig file to use 'compression' to increase performance across lower end systems.

If you would like to have the textures spruced up a bit...go into the Thiefs_den folder, open DoomConfig.cfg in wordpad and change the following settings to this:

seta image_useNormalCompression "0" - currently 2
seta image_useCompression "0" - currently 1

You'll get a noticeable impact on a lower end system.

[Thief-Playah]

The object handling is quite TES: Oblivion-ish, but with more control thanks to that there object rotation.
Rearranging the furniture of nobles' houses will be fun!
I find it somewhat amusing that I could see better in the dark in this map than in vanilla DooM 3. :P

The AI seemed more acute in their hearing than I was used to. And they waste absolutely no time in chopping me down.

I was pleasently surprised when I discovered you could relight torches with a candle, and also burn away moss from moss arrows with the candle. Though, I saw the actual burning part wasn't fully implemented.
I was half-expecting to be able to burn the furniture or AI. But alas, no.

This taste of The Dark Mod was a very delicious flavor, and I look forward to more samples!
Now, I go hunt for all 904 of the loot...

Quick question. Odds are, you guys do have it planned, but just to be sure... Will there be support for using 'Ctrl/Shift/Alt + Key' for controls?

This post has been edited by Thief-Playah: 18 January 2008 - 01:30 PM

[SneaksieDave]

[copied here to answer the post copied here]
@Briareos H:
Thanks for asking. Actually, the normals are not inverted on that texture (you're first to ask out in the wild, but definitely won't be the last). I'm working up a new version of it (quality reasons; it's not good enough), and we do have an 'inverted' variation of that texture for authors to use should they prefer, but the normals are correct on this one, the mortar does ooze out of the cracks. I took the photo.

[Tels]

Thief-Playah, on Jan 18 2008, 01:28 PM, said:

The object handling is quite TES: Oblivion-ish, but with more control thanks to that there object rotation.
Rearranging the furniture of nobles' houses will be fun!
I find it somewhat amusing that I could see better in the dark in this map than in vanilla DooM 3. :P

:D

Quote

The AI seemed more acute in their hearing than I was used to. And they waste absolutely no time in chopping me down.

We adjusted the amount of damage and their speed quite a bit, but in all the excitement we forgot to add some initial delay their reactions. But you should have seen them a week ago :)

Quote

I was pleasently surprised when I discovered you could relight torches with a candle, and also burn away moss from moss arrows with the candle. Though, I saw the actual burning part wasn't fully implemented.
I was half-expecting to be able to burn the furniture or AI. But alas, no.

These little details are what makes it so interesting, and nice to see someone noticed them - even tho not everything is fully implemented :)

Quote

This taste of The Dark Mod was a very delicious flavor, and I look forward to more samples!
Now, I go hunt for all 904 of the loot...

Did I just hear somebody yell "Go back to work, you imbeciles!"? :D

Quote

Quick question. Odds are, you guys do have it planned, but just to be sure... Will there be support for using 'Ctrl/Shift/Alt + Key' for controls?

The controls and keys are definitely something that needs a bit more refinement, but there are also limits on what you can do with standard D3 controls. Adding our own keyboard/button handler was simple not yet possible with our time constraints.

Thanx for liking our work :)

[lowenz]

Here's a video made by me with gamma@1.2 (XviD+Lame MP3)

ATTENTION: TOTAL SPOILER OF THE MISSION!

Spoiler

http://www.megauploa.../it/?d=3IO6N5BW

Great work, now it's time for "tune" the mod and make it THE mod of the 2008! :)


P.S.: the audio in my video is poor because of Fraps channels remapping, in game it's perfect ;)

P.S.S.: the loading screen of the mission is not very "in theme" imho: i suggest to remain close to the menu GREAT style: i really love it!

This post has been edited by lowenz: 18 January 2008 - 03:54 PM

[phide]

Thief-Playah, on Jan 18 2008, 10:28 AM, said:

The object handling is quite TES: Oblivion-ish, but with more control thanks to that there object rotation. Rearranging the furniture of nobles' houses will be fun!

Especially thanks to the fact that objects don't float inches above other objects as they do in Oblivion :)

Thief-Playah, on Jan 18 2008, 10:28 AM, said:

I was pleasently surprised when I discovered you could relight torches with a candle, and also burn away moss from moss arrows with the candle.

You know, I'm not sure if we even have that documented sound-wise. Hmm.