What Exactly Are You Guys Doing

[TazmanianDevil]

I came across you guys myself a short while ago and I'm pretty excited. I get all giddy when I hear someone talk about writing a game by Thief fans for Thief fans, especially when I know there are no big corporate types standing over your shoulders telling you what the rest of us would like to see in a game :-).

 

On that note, I was wondering if anyone would mind filling in some of the details from the FAQ I don't understand about what you guys are doing. I have to confess that I've never used or seen any of the existing editing tools for the Thief games or for Doom 3.

 

I understand that you're creating a library of textures, AI behaviors, scripts, objects and other common things an FM might want to combine together. Is that what mean mean when you say "tools"? What I'm confused about is the editor part.

 

You say you're writing and editor. But Doom 3 has an editor, so are you writing something completely different? Are you writing plugins for the Doom 3 editor or modding it in some other manner? Just curious, but does that involve writing stuff in their scripting language or do you get to use something more widely known like C/C++/Java/Pick a Language?

 

- Just a curious fan

[New Horizon]

Thanks for dropping in.

 

Essentially what we're doing is making a total conversion of the Doom 3 editor. When we are finished it will provide FM authors with the tools they need to construct missions. It's likely going to be another year before we see the toolset released, but hang in there.

[TazmanianDevil]

Sorry if I'm being pestering, but as a software developer, I'm interested in the details. What exactly is a "total conversion". I could either take that as putting a new interface on existing editor engine or it could be your way of saying you're writing a whole new editor. Are you writing code against the Doom 3 engine's API? Or are you working with the editor API? Is the editor open source so that you can make changes to it?

[sparhawk]

A total conversion means that you create an entirely new game based on a particular engine. Thief and Doom 3 are both first person, and that is about as much similarity as it will get. Everything else will be coded by us or converted in such a way that is suits the new game mechanics. The difference between a TC and a mod is primarly the scope. A mod extends on the existing game while a TC creates an entirely new game in all regards.

This is basically the same thing that game companies are doing when they are licensing an engine.

 

As for the tools. This is not THAT clear right now. Many things can already be done with the existing tools, because they are much more flexible then I thought. Of course we are still pretty much in the beginning, so we have to feel our way through. The first priority is to get the core game mechanics to working. This includes the lightgem, sound propagation, improving the AI, extending objective conditions and all these things.

Once we have the core gameplay working, we can focus on making this things a more or less smoot ride for others to use our assets to create thief style maps.

Thjis could mean that we just need to write a howto and explain how to set up i.e. frobable objects, or it could mean that we need to write a third party editor in order to setup things that are not supported by the D3 editors directly. Of course the ideal solution is to write plugins for the editor, which is possible, but I'm not sure if we have the tools for this, as Id didn't release everything. So I know that plugins can be written, because Id uses this as well, but if the interface is not available, we can not do it.

[oDDity]

For example, Thief Deadly Shadows was a total converson of the Unreal engine. Fortunatley we don't have to rewrite the renderer though. The Doom renderer suits our purposes vey well.

[TazmanianDevil]

Cool. I think that answers my questions. Thanks!