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Tomorrow ! Holy crap I'm old I honestly never expected to live this long

I've been working on a small moodboard as I go through the missions. A lot of stuff still holds up IMO, especially the outside lighting.

Hello thieves, the other day I realized my last Volta release was in 2017! Time really flies. After years of fiddling with this project, I'm ready to announce the remaining missions in the Volta and the Stone Campaign: Volta 1 : The Stone* Volta 2 : Cauldron* Volta 3 : Gemcutter Volta 4 : The Lost Forge Volta 5 : Buried Streets Volta 6 : Traitor * I have redux versions of Volta 1 and 2 in the works. More on those later. I'm going to start beta testing Gemcutter and The Lost Forge this summer, so those will be ready this year. Buried Streets and Traitor are coming along, but won't go into beta until sometime in 2024. WIP screenshots! Seeya around- Kingsal

Oh that's your problem, you can't mansplain a women around like that with path nodes!

xash3d a half-life clone engine was also based on darkplaces though on a much much older version than what is currently up for grabs. had they used the newer engine then xash would be close to source engine levels of photorealism but the newer engine sources are pretty hard to work with if you are not into toying with the darkplaces source code regularily mostly because the code no longer resemble the quake source code anymore. It was also the first quake engine to support portal culling though not the first to support real time lighting and bumpmapping that honor goes to tenebrae, havoc did catch on quickly though and his implementation was far superior to the tenebrae model which used hacked entity lights (sprites basically). darkplaces uses rtlight a variant of the old lighting tool from quake supporting real time light sources, quake itself does not however support realtime lighting so the lightsources are parsed from an external rtlight file containing the positions of lightsources in the map if you dont have these it can approximate the lightsources much the same way as tenebrae did but it is very very VERY slow, in mods it can be compiled into the map. it also supports bsp2 a new map format allowing much more complex levels and a skeletal model format instead of the blocky mdl1 format. havoc has not had much time to do work on darkplaces in later years (works for ID software now) and got married some years back to one of the other devs from the now defunct inside3d where i used to frequent, but i heard she would probably take up work on it again shortly. Would be rather cool to see where that might lead having worked with the ID dev'ils she might actually make an engine that becomes a serious contender to them heres a shot from quake 1 with all the mod bells and whistles on skeletal models real time lights hd textures you name it it is probably there.

Btw. anyone seen this other System Shock remake? It's now in beta. Made in Unity: https://www.indiedb.com/games/citadel It looks even more old-school: I thought some of the dead animations look cool, because they look quite like the original sprite-based animations, but now in 3d form. I don't remember seeing anything similarly done elsewhere, https://www.indiedb.com/games/citadel/videos/citadel-enemy-status Edit: found a gameplay video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1onXeWRwxch7GWyb7UksnZxem5sE3685W/view

I agree with you mostly, but I do have a certain minimal requirement nowadays considering graphics. I think for example Metro: Last Light is graphically for me still good enough to fully immerse me.

Nintendo is a pretty abysmal company in many respects, but this is one area where their priorities are better put together than their western competitors. They show that you can actually make ends meet by focusing on gameplay and atmosphere over graphics. In fact it's hard to dispute that that is the key to their success as a company. It seems like the only times they ever get into real difficulty is during the generations where they try to modernize their consoles. They've also survived for over 20 years in the console wars against two global mega corps. It's rather surprising none of the other AAAs are really tying to challenge them for that apparently quite reliable niche. On the other hand maybe that is the point. Nintendo is the beloved king of gameplay focused, low-fi franchises. If an Activision or a Sony tried to muscle in on that territory and Nintendo decided to fight back there can be no doubt of who would win. Nintendo has years of developer experience, a positive track record, and a loyal customer base. I do think there is more to it than that. If you have an XBox, Play Station, or gaming PC there is nothing stopping you from getting almost the full Nintendo experience via indie copycats, but no such luck for the Switch-only owner who wants to dip into AAAs. Anyone who wants the best of both is going to go for the high fidelity consoles, and once you have the graphics card you might as well use it, even if it costs extra. In that sense I suspect the AAAs are rational, but its still interesting that they don't hedge their blockbuster bets with a lot more reliable low fi offerings. You'd think it would pay off in the long term, even if only by nurturing talent to tap for their big projects (like how Hollywood still finances marginal projects despite the summer blockbusters being their bread and butter).

I think we all agree that good graphics are nice. The thing is, though, that a significant amount of work and budget has to be done for the shiny visuals alone, the hardware has to work hard to display it, and the games are getting a massive size on the hard drive. And, IMO, shiny visuals is the wrong way to go. The gameplay and atmosphere (including, and, epecially, the game's soundtrack and audio) are, in my eyes, much more important that high definition graphics (my best example for that would be System Shock 2. I already get goose bumps when I just play the intro of that game.). It's a shame to see the development over time, with people only caring about graphics. Every second game is trashed because of bad graphics or performance these days. And games like Assassins Creed, whose gameplay is as shitty as it gets, and requires absolutely zero skills (and gives you zero achievement that you've done something special), are AAA games with tens of millions of sold copies. It also shows the Zeitgeist, and the shallow mentality of the target audience these days. It's really sad to see. But, I guess it's the fate of most things which get commercially interesting for companies. At some point, it's just doing professional work, for a safe investment return. Instead of the creative "Let the game designers go wild!" in the early days (thinking Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock etc.). Also happens with most musical genres. Over time, they get less and less interesting, more professional, sterile, less creative, more professional handicraft.

If you want Thief to look amazing again, just play it on a giant OLED. I am doing that now. It's like how the designers would have wanted it to look; as though you are actually sneaking around in the *dark*, without the bright halo of a nightlight illuminating everything.

kinda surprised by the size less than 10gb thats quite a small footprint for a game of today even though it is a remake. by comparison the final fantasy remake (which btw is far from finished) is several times bigger.

Hey, Excellent mission. I love how creative you are, it's like you're pushing boundaries and taking the game to new places. This one was extremely challenging for me, had to go all the places of the map over and over to figure the puzzles. Eventually got slowed down by ghosting and started knocking everyone down to make travel faster. Had to read a bunch of spoilers here otherwise I think I'll still be stuck. I had a glitch, though.

There is an asset rip hosted on the contest page for people to pull TDS assets like textures and sounds into TDP/T2 specifically that we are not eligible to use. Honestly the same “thorny copyright issues” apply when you’re taking any copyrighted assets from a game and repurposing them - there is no exception I am aware that applies simply because TDS and TDP are part of the same series of games. I am not so sure this makes them more “ok” to use in a T2 vs a TDM mission in the strictest sense of the word - neither of these would have been permitted by the copyright holder. Practice is pretty common in thief to reuse assets from older games, redistribute assets acquired under licenses which don't technically permit this, etc where as yeah I don't think anything is going to get hosted on the TDM mission database that knowingly uses these types of assets without permission. This isn't a criticism of the broader fm community btw - it is just different in this regard.

TDM missions are eligible to enter the TDS Anniversary Contest:

I tried this as well and couldn't get it to work either. Same result as you. It works if it targets another AI, but not the player. Would be interested to know if anyone else got it to work.