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Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/09/26 in all areas
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I had this idea floating in my head to try and do something similar to TDM in Frictional Games' HPL2 engine (I think the source code is available on GitHub), it was a fun idea to contemplate, cause the first Amnesia TDD had great sound and lighting, afaik. But, it was just an idea, cause I know how much time it takes to finish something like that. For example, the fanmade engine for Morrowind, the OpenMW, has been in development for 17 years and they still haven't implemented everything they want in the engine. So, for this port to even take place, you either need lots of free time OR lots of money, otherwise you'll end up with a project that takes years, and years, and years non-stop with no result in the forseeble future. TDM alreay has an engine that has a solid base for constructing fan missions. Probably not the most sophysticated engine on the planet but great for the game's purposes.2 points
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Yes, we added an extensive amount of new code to the AIs. They now recognize open and closed doors, lights on or off, react to dead or unconscious bodies etc...2 points
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I've read about this before here on the forums, even when the contest had just recently concluded, but reading about it in greater detail years later is certainly interesting. Thank you. It's a pity that it was mostly the marketing people who were involved on the Square Enix side, as I had the impression it was also the devs at EM that had played Requiem and all the other submitted missions and really liked them. I suppose it was as well, but the TDM team mostly heard from the marketing people. Yes, I wanted to note that as well. I even remember how the people over here in the TDM forums were sort of laughing at the fact that the results of the contest were favourable to TDM and had, in a sense, "proven" TDM as a worthy freeware successor to the Thief IP, with all the modding and mapping tools at one's disposal and so on, whereas Thief 4 or Thi4f or whatever Square Enix were calling it at that point, offered no such possibilities. The entire contest, while no doubt declared in good will and something I actually appreciated seeing, was such a self-own for Square Enix, ultimately to the detriment of them trying to bring back and market the reboot of an older IP. Even if Thief 2014 was a terrific reboot (which I doubt it would ever be), it would still have been hampered by people learning about modding being impossible, and looking to the trilogy and to TDM instead, to make new Thief-style stealth gaming content. Still, I appreciate they recognized the quality's of Moonbo's Requiem FM. Given many retrospectives I've seen over the years, gradually, on the 2014 Thief reboot attempt, one thing a surprising amount of them shared was noting how the game didn't feel cohesive in concept and execution, at any point. Not only not to the same level as the Thief trilogy, but also not even at the level when you consider it as an individual game, a new game on its own. Errant Signal, who's not some deep Thief fan, replayed the older games and played the reboot back when it came out, and made this exact observation already a decade ago. The reboot was just all over the place, in every department, felt clearly unfinished or rushed, and the most interesting story would be the behind the scenes at Eidos Montreal, on how mismanaged the entire project became over the course of several years. I think it's telling that, while even heavily discounted on GOG.com, Thief 2014 hasn't been selling well there, nor attracting much interest, whereas the original trilogy sells for figurative (and sometimes literal) cents on that same site - you can buy the whole trilogy for a smaller price than the reboot, which is kind of hilarious - and continues to have great sales and is considered one of the all-time bestsellers. Same here. I concur with demagogue that the actual Eidos Montreal devs behind Thief 2014, at least those who cared enough to make it at least somewhat presentable and playable - even if the actual game directors never got their act together and never decided on a consistent design approach - those would have been much more interesting to be in contact with, even regarding the fan mission contest. The sad truth of the matter is that all too many big publishers these days, especially those formed through larger mergers, like the Eidos buyout by Square Enix, are often marketing-first, interest in developers, and veteran players and new players alike, second. I still remember the sheer amount of money spent on pointless external marketing for Thief 2014, all the while that reboot attempt never really coalesced into anything that felt consistent (rather than throwing everything at the wall, in a panic, hoping something would stick), and was also plagued by all manner of technical issues. Just an overall embarassment, and I'm not surprised that even very lenient-leaning game retrospectives of that reboot attempt. The fact that the Thief IP has been sold away to Nordic Games and Embracer in more recent years, with Square Enix no longer caring about it and other older game IPs, also says a lot. Given the Embracer Group's own woes and bad decisions, I'm not sure any new development team will ever attempt another installment of Thief, even if it was a second reboot attempt.2 points
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This is referring to TDM's collaboration with Square Enix North America at the time Eidos-Montréal was making the game Thief (Thief 4). SE held a contest of fan material. Basically they wanted to have a contest of fan missions for past "Thief" games and fan art. They did end up having a contest. There were a few TDM entries. Some of us on the team got a free copy of Thief 4 for "participating". Well you can see just from that set up that these were the marketing people that really had no idea what Thief really was, and they definitely weren't going to understand the relationship of TDM to Thief IP, although you could clearly tell the moment when the lawyers probably got involved and they changed the rules to be only Thief inspired and they really watered it down since the link to Thief IP itself was lost, and they couldn't be in any way linked to the TDM/idTech4 engine. It probably would have been great if it'd been the Eidos-Montréal devs we were working with, since those would have been actual gamers that understand the game & us, our kind of people. But it was the marketing people, the Square Enix NA marketing people at that, and they were just in an entirely different universe. I mean completely detached from the reality of this game that they're working on. They were clearly only interested in the business side and thought of fans as shallow entertainment consumers that they were trying to hype up, like we were the core of Thief 4's target audience. They had this really unreal positivity about this contest while being so clueless about what it was really about. Our communications with them were just bizarre and otherworldly. There's another story I can tell about working with a team of lawyers that were pro bono vetting our Version 2.0 release to make sure it cleared id's & Eidos's IP (technically I guess also the asset makers of the assets we were using to replace id's) when we went standalone, or anyway they gave us a memo of all the considerations to look out for in doing it. I made a thread about it, but practically I don't know if it changed that much of what we were doing (the problem kind of solves itself just by our gamers' intuition), and obviously we released it standalone and nothing happened, so it worked out. Actually that Square Enix contest did have one kind of positive result for us, which is we got language from them in writing that seemed to assume we were clear of any claim for Thief IP violations as far as they were concerned. I've kept that message on hand in case we ever do get pushback, but fortunately we never have. Edit: I'm looking back on this message and thinking about the NoClip documentary on the making of Disco Elysium, which is still coming out these days, and I recall that NoClip contacted us once about making a documentary on our making. Or somebody did anyway. But I think the inside story of the making of TDM would be super cool if anybody did decide to make it. There are so many interesting stories like this. Well I think they're interesting. Maybe one of us should make it.2 points
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Impressive ! I remember playing Rune in LAN on the school computers while listening to Fintroll. Awesome times... I hope I can get Rune here in Germany somehow to try this out. Especially the AI does leave me curious. I remember it not being very smart. So I guess you had a lot of work to make it fit into a stealth game (back from hack and slash only). Or is it still the original AI and the Player just has to avoid it? (like, it doesn't recognise a body or missing torchlight)1 point
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Already a little heads-up: Both Styx games will be free on epic starting Jan, 15th. I guess I don't have to tell anybody here that they are excellent stealth games.1 point
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Right! Great FM too, although I tend to bias on the side of gameplay-heavy FMs over storytelling-heavy ones, and it was definitely the latter. But it was still objectively great & I still really loved it.1 point
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I hope you get Rune to work on your machine so you will be able to play the Thieves Guild mod. In truth I've been working on this project for over 15 years, which is crazy I know. Thieves Guild is a single-player Rune mod, loosely inspired by Thief: The Dark Project. It's a campaign driven story of about 20 missions. We tried to combine the action game style of Rune with the stealth game-play of Thief. Thanks for the shout-out - I appreciate it. I didn't post anything about the mod here because I wasn't sure if it was appropriate.1 point
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A leap back in time to Abby of St. Adrian in 2017: Fast forward, Abby of St. Adrian, 2025: The statues with the battle axes left and right are monuments commemorating St. Adrian. He is one of the great martyrs of my Builder movement and was known for his cruelty, especially towards the Undead. Truly, a daredevil! Finally finished with Mission 1. Mission 2 will revolve around the pagans. I will only use certain motifs from that section in HHI and reinvent the rest...let the battle of the patches begin!1 point
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Great to know, that my favorite fm loader now supports TDM. For managment issues I still prefer (new-)dark FM loader tools like AngelLoader, because I can sort and store notes as I wish. I'll gladly test it in the near future.1 point