Thief 2 mission: Time Outside of Time

Lord McMutton

Here's what I'm currently working on in the Thief department. It takes place in a nobleman's residence, which used to be an outpost. Except, the family living there disappeared two years ago. The actual level is darker, but I had to brighten the screenshots so you could actually see them.

The courtyard, still being worked on


outer porch area


A hallway



break room, or something like that


main atrium


another hallway


a lounge


a gallery


a library


guest rooms



another gallery


servant quarters


I'm going to edit the textures on the objects sometime.

Uly

Haha You're a brave man for using DromEd. Geo is looking great, seeing what a bitch that editor is.

I'll give some critiques after work, but for the meantime, your lighting & composition could use a lot of work. But it is a great start.

Steve Schulze

Looking ok so far. What sort of limitations do you have with regards to geometric detail in the Dark Engine?

Lord McMutton

Erm... layman's terms?

Xaltar

Looking pretty good but I agree with the lighting and comp comment by Uly. You should also look at making your textures compliment eachother more, like in the shot where you can see the light celing. Try to get your grime and dirt to match each texture in each scene. The last shot looks closer to what I mean than the rest Another thing that may help is using your textures to give the illusion of colored light (I don't know that engine but I'm assuming colored light's not supported). Have the planes where the torches are seperate from the rest of the walls and use a copy of the wall texture with either a decal or a painted version with the lighting baked in (painted on to the texture). Just some tricks I used to use modding old games in my early days of modding. Hope this helps.

Oh and the pros can feel free to tell me to shut my stupid mouth and stop talking shit if there are better ways lol.

Steve Schulze

[ QUOTE ]
Erm... layman's terms?

[/ QUOTE ]How many polys do you get to play with?

Lord McMutton

Well, concerning the environment, it can have up to 700 polygons rendered without slowing down. The objects can have around 1000 polygons, unless there are a lot. And the AI's can have around 3000. Not exactly sure about those figures, but they're what I've gathered from some threads at a Thief and Dromed forum. Colored lighting is supported, Xaltar.

HonkyPunch

Was thief 2 really that dark?
I dont remember it being that dark

Joseph Silverman

I'd say you should do more with lighting. Right now everything looks solid, but you need to think more in mood and style. Take:



The room's neat, but until I really studied it I wasn't drawn in at all. What about some long patches of light coming from windows behind the camera, or a lit torch in the back left corner, or something? As for your other rooms, consider ways to lay out things in interesting manners -- this is a game where players need to stick to the shadows, so, why not use patches of light and dark to lead and focus them on key points?

Keep it up, anyway.

zenarion

Congratulations on the engine choice Looks nice.
Thief2 WAS that dark. And it was awesome.
There is a Doom3 mod that recreates the Thief series. Have no idea if they are still alive though. "THE DARK MOD" I think it is called. If you want a graphical update of Thief, check it out. Doom3 is old, but still looks nice.

Lord McMutton

Yeah, that's still going.

Lord McMutton

I've started making the library more interesting.

Lord McMutton

The master bedroom. If you can't tell, the bed goes into an alcove in the wall.


It has an inglenook fireplace


I can't figure out where I should put a torch in this room. Any ideas?

Lord McMutton

Added a staircase leading to a second floor in the library.


And the second floor

Lord McMutton

Added some reinforcments to the ramparts in the courtyard

hawken

too dark

http://cantseeshit.ytmnd.com/

gauss

hawken is likely not familiar with the particular milieu of Thief 2 levels. the brightness seems entirely consistent with the originals.

coincidentally, you're a braver man than i, gunga din. working on a thief 2 level is a labor of love--more power to you

Lord McMutton

The great hall

Lord McMutton

I'm getting more done outside, but the walls of the building itself seem very boring. Anyone have any suggestions on how to make them more interesting?

Steve Schulze

There should be some tapestries in the Thief texture library. That sort of thing would be handy for adding some more interest to your bare stone walls. Once you get some real torches in the pools of light and colour should help make things a bit more interesting too. The thing about thief is half the time you're inching along in almost complete darkness anyway, so the wall textures aren't going to be as important.

At this point it might be a good idea to map out your entire level on paper and work out where you want your guards. Once you've got that considered you'll have a better idea of where to place the different types of light sources.

Lord McMutton

What do you think a garden that hasn't been tended to in two or three years would look like?

Steve Schulze

Climbing plants are usually good for showing that kind of thing. Start with some arbours or trellises and then have the wysteria or ivy or whatever plant you like climbing all over everything. Tricky to do with your limited polycount but not impossible. you'll probably have to go with a simple alpha mapped plane, but that should be workable if you're using ivy

Having some plants growing up through cracks in the flagstones would be another probaly easier to achieve way to represent an overgrown garden.

Ott

I'm still confused why "That's how the original maps were" is reason enough to keep your maps uninterestingly too dark?

Just because the original maps were that way doesn't mean you shouldn't improve on the basic concepts of design, especially if you are modding them. The entire idea is to take the original concept and make them better, new, or different.

Sticking to the same boring dark motif only makes me think you have no interest in doing any of the above. Lighting can make a world of difference on an otherwise uninteresting environment...which in my opinion this currently is.

Small Example 1
Small Example 2

Steve Schulze

The darkness in Thief is intrinsic to the gameplay. A lot of the game is based around extinguishing torches (which I'm assuming Banana just hasn't gotten around to adding yet) and then sneaking past guards or knocking them out cold.

Lord McMutton

No, I've added the torches. They just don't have flames, since it's a haunted place.

John Warner

hey man, first of all, it's looking pretty good, and it's pretty cool how much work you've got done on it. keep going, I'm sure it's going to be great . props for doing a thief level btw, i loved that series. also cool idea for a location.

as far as the lighting thing goes

[ QUOTE ]
The darkness in Thief is intrinsic to the gameplay. A lot of the game is based around extinguishing torches (which I'm assuming Banana just hasn't gotten around to adding yet) and then sneaking past guards or knocking them out cold.

[/ QUOTE ]

heh this is only fun when there is light to avoid. dark only exists as a contrast to light. lighting like this will only make the game play non-existent. not only that, but it completely flattens out the shots and removes ALL sense of interest. there's nothing in any of these shots that my eyes are drawn towards... which is a shame when i'm supposed to be running around stealing shit.

oh, and thief was not lit like this:
http://www.student.tue.nl/p/f.a.m.smeijers/sfp/pic/thief2ss1.png
http://www.justadventure.com/reviews/Thief/thief2a.jpg
http://newdigitalreporter.net/gallery/ma..._serialNumber=1

contrast is the only thing that makes things interesting. as far as i can tell, it's how our mind works...

Jacus0

Im giving you a thumbs up and a High five for just do something related to the Thief series.....your ok in my book!!

Lord McMutton

More stuff.

Updated courtyard


Main gate


Garden


Cellar



Some Silent Hill
(their are barbed wire fences in this room, but the wire is too thin to see right now)




About the lighting, since the mission is so dark, I have to brighten the pictures, which makes the light not look as good.

Ryusei Baku

Typical of you, you do everything else right, but spell they're wrong :P.

Great job anyways, tell me when you make progress and lemme' play your mission. By the way, don't forget Captain Falcon.

JDinges

Ryusei Baku wrote: »

Typical of you, you do everything else right, but spell they're wrong :P.

Now that's irony.

"there"

Polynurb

To me I think it would add depth to the rooms if there was some kind of light/dark contrast between forms or walls and ceilings. Something kind of like a faked occlusion painted in to give forms depth and a feeling of scale. Right now the walls and floors just seem to all blend right in with one another.

Baddcog

Funny to see Dromed pics posted here at polycount.

The mission is looking good so far Marshall. I do think you need more lighting though that actually casts shadows and shines on stuff more, that adds alot of depth and contrast which seems to be missing in those screenies IMO.

A little info for those not too familiar with Dromed to answer some questions I saw.

Darkness: Dromed's ambient light levels can be changed on a per mission basis. You can have bright sunlight or pitch black, although pitch black is pretty much known as a nono becuase you can't feel you way around a mission, you need some visuals no matter what.

So it does really vary alot between Fan Missions and Original Missions. Some of both are very dark or very bright.

Polycount, max polycount in view for world terrain is 1024. Above that things will start to not be rendered and/or crash.

I have gotten objects up to about 5,000 polys in Dromed, but the conversion tools can be fussy at that point, even before that. If you don't build clean 'hulls' but use floating polys then the conversion tool basically does booleen type cutting and polycount skyrockets.

Once you get somewhere around 20,000 object polys on screen you'll probably crash. There is a limit of 125 objects on screen at once, then crash.

---

Darkmod

Yep, Darkmod is still alive and going strong. Mostly programming touch-ups and stuff right now. Ai fixes etc...

The main page is down at the moment for some reason but the forums are still working fine.

We released a playable demo (very small and not perfect by any means) a few months ago. But it's a good way to see the progress that had been made to that point and it is pretty fun. Alot has been done since.

Doom 3 is getting old but a huge improvement over Dromed. We are also pushing the polycounts, etc... from Doom so there will be more detail in Darkmod FM's than there was in Doom3.

Also, the Dark Radiant editor has had many improvements made to it from the Doom 3 editor, so it's easier to use and has alot more functions.