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Stephen Russell and Dan Thron as Dumb Guard/Benny and Smart Guard will be missed in Thiaf. Benny's first line in that great vid by Albi is from a First City Bank & Trust convo. The rest is from a convo made for Masks, but is broken and isn't heard in-game. Here are the two in full: sg30702A: Ya' ever wonder, looking at all this--? sg50702B: Wonder what? sg30702C: Well...where all the money for the fancy marble, an-an' the carvings, and the art comes from? sg50702D: W--from all the people who give the bank their money. sg30702E: Noo no no. If the bank spends it on the fancy stuff, what if they want it back? sg50702F: W-w-well, maybe some of them die first and never ask for it back. sg30702G: Well--could be. I keep my gold home, locked up, myself. Safer that way. sg31201A: UNUSED: Hello, up there. How goes yer watch? sg11201B: UNUSED: Not too bad, just catching a cold. (Sneezes) sg31201C: UNUSED: Nasty weather we're havin'. Makes me wish I was inside guarding one a' them exhibits, instead of out here in the rain. (Whining) How come we got stuck on outdoor guard duty again? sg11201D: UNUSED: We're guards--that's what we do. (coughs) sg31201E: UNUSED: Do you know anything about the ex-hibitions? I've heard stories that the masks they're gonna bring are...are 'magical.' Aaaand 'haunted.' sg11201F: UNUSED: (Angry) I don't know and I don't care. We go through this all the time. You ask these stupid questions and then something goes wrong. Lord Bafford, Lord Donal, Sheriff Truart--We've worked for all of them and always gotten fired because someone broke in, something got stolen, or someone got killed! I'm always gettin' distracted answering your stupid questions! When this job is over you're on your own. I'm done with ya. sg31201G: UNUSED: Hey! No need to get all...heated about it. sg11201H: UNUSED: Taffer! (Coughs) Nothing in TDS came close. The saga of the festering wound was all of it, and it ignored the fact that there are health potions in that universe, not just as power-ups.

I understand the frustration, but the sticking point is, and has always really been, the fact that the major software one needs to play Thief FMs is already on hard drives, and the software is welcome and wanted before the mod is applied, and for around a decade. Help from established friends and acquaintances is readily available, in an established and known and comfortable system. The Dark Engine, while improvable with mods, is the finalized version. For the settled-in and contented FM lovers, the Dark Mod never seems finished, and doesn't feel familiar enough, and causes TDS flashbacks. It requires foreign and unwanted software, which hasn't been free for most of its life, and for some it hogs resources on old systems. There are veteran taffers playing FMs who've demanded specific versions of FMs for a lack of know-how in getting even vanilla Thief to run on their systems. FM players in large numbers prefer a sense of episodic content to download and load up and go, with no struggle of a new feel, new mechanics, altered basic mechanics, etc. None of this has anything to do with all the hard work and great accomplishments, nor the vision, philosophy, spirit, or unpaid time. It's grossly unfair to you, but you are unfair to categorize the naysayers in ways that don't address what's really at the heart of the snubbing. The Dark Mod is not home sweet home, no matter how marvelous. To the content, you are advertising a redundant product that is fundamentally a different animal, and people don't want unnecessary change. Why is this necessary enough to warrant the learning curve and huge install? In case anyone forgets or doesn't know, I personally have TDM functioning on my own system. Unfortunately, I'm not a gamer, but I have it to beta-test a specific FM when the time comes, by special request and as a favor to a gracious friend. Those blackjack gameplay vids...I have no idea what I'm supposed to get from them. I see the player blackjacking people, but it doesn't translate the feel, and maybe it's framerate or the speed of the animation, but I can't see the impact sites or sense the zones, so it just looks like action/movement/action.

The only time I see archers with their drawing hand palm outward, is when using these release aid devices:

No. It's about keeping Thief alive on modern systems and for the future, which TDM is a surrogate for, and which FMs aren't addressing directly, because they are best used to explore new ideas, so that's well covered, though not thoroughly. Until we see whether T4 brings Thief into the present and how much further beyond that, or not, there is no gaming experience like the official games, but the official games, and keeping them available for whenever one wishes to revisit, like putting on a favorite movie, looking through a family album, taking a walk through the woods, listening to a favorite band's old album, having a get together with longtime chums, being able to play a favorite game now, and hopefully at least once more in the future, is nothing unusual and not even sentimental in many ways, but one of a thousand sources of guaranteed joy and comfort for little while. Playing any game to death is just gluttonous. There's no faith in, and no evidence for, more games coming that will provide more of the same for as long as the person finds them enjoyable and meaningful. The fact that video games have a shelf-life and expire before those enjoying them are ready to give them up--unlike most other kinds of games, played all one's life, passed on generation to generation for centuries, never get old and aren't taken away from most in a brief span of time--is something that someone needs to find a way to improve, or games should be dumbed-the-hell-down so they don't linger. The copyright issue of porting whole games is that it would mean no one would have to buy the original game ever again, since they could just play the ported mod for another game. It's a threat to future sales. And then there's the potentially unpaid, unaccounted for usage, of pieces and parts of the originals.

Taffers own the Thief games, have them installed, and they only need to download an FM and run it through DarkLoader/GarrettLoader. TDM is like starting over, and I don't know how to crystallize the concept for some of you, but you'll continue to have to convince people to purchase and download entirely different software to reside on old hard drives alongside the established and working Thief FM system people have down to an art. Taking up new time and space, spending more money on a game that takes up drive space (don't assume money and technical proficiency are common and in decent supply, nor online purchasing)--a game that has no interest or value in and of itself to those taffers, and a very different market a good portion of taffers frown upon. It's not about being stuck in the past. That crap is frikkin' old, I'm so sick of hearing that spew. It's about being comfortable in the present and future as far as one can see. An analogy: Comfortable shoes that feet never tire in, or a different brand of shoe that needs breaking in? It's not about Garrett. He's an old "friend" that is nice to see, except when he's obviously an imposter, and it's not about how stunning the mission is, but there is a pacing and feel that people like and feel most at home in, and that feel, more than the character, can be called "Garrett." You can't force anything, and any posts that scoff at sentimental rigidity are a guaranteed image destroyer. Each game has it's legendary myths and facts, and the correct information needs to be repeated. There are taffers that don't want FMs in Thief Gold or T3Ed, and there are taffers who don't want T2 FMs. Quite a lot of them are burnt out on the OMs, but thoroughly enjoy regular FM contributions like a weekly television series. Just don't tell them the channel they love is old and outdated and that they should try another channel. They are comfortable where they are, and not looking tot he past at all. If you pay attention, you will see that with nearly 1000 FMs, they only really care about the next ones coming and even claim to be bored, even as they extol the virtues of any of the hundreds they could still load up and play!

That statement by the friend was pretty harsh, but true, and what this story is missing are the talks about health and the father's smoking and attitude about it during the friend's visits, etc. There's easily a possibility of anger in the friend at the father for grieving the son, and seeing this coming from who knows how far away. We don't know any of that, if it ever happened. If the best friend had little history regarding the father and is just lacking empathy, that's going to take some working on. For example: I got sick of watching a friend's mother waste away by choice, watching television all day, eating fat-loaded foods while decrying sugar as evil, laying in her chair like 300+ lbs. of soft-serve piled up. And when her diabetes led to neuropathy, and my friend and his father had to heft her out of her low chair, and in and out of the bathroom so she could relieve herself and be bathed, I had no sympathy for her, and mentioned once in awhile in the years before it ever got that bad that the two healthier men needed to do something now to prevent what was sure to come. Hearing my friend tell of her moaning and wishing to die week after week, and how he wished he could escape into alcohol but his own heart couldn't take it, while he and his father did all the physical work to allow her to continue on her path, and only screaming at her as the course of correction, my anger and coldness came to include him, because the sympathy and empathy I had in the first year of this hadn't amounted to anything constructive. Ironically, but not too surprisingly, the father died first two years ago, and she's alive in a home. They lost the house they were in for nearly 40 years, to city planning, and they moved out of state. My father had diabetes and died from all the organ damage at 41 years. And while I understand how hard it is to make major lifestyle changes, especially when it's all boring and bland and takes up a lot of time from what one enjoys and loves to do, it's the only way to not be culpable for the grief and pain to come. I speak, of course, ignoring all the things that can happen to an individual and group in life. There may be more to the story, and trying to be the better friend is not a good approach. Be a friend, not competition. Leave the "best friend" out of it. Seriously.

Eidos bought up much of the Looking Glass assets and the T3 team at Ion Storm-Austin (made up of several former LGS members), found their old systems ready for them at their workstations, including their old desktop wallpapers. But then, after ISA shut down, I haven't heard what happened to those assets after that. Two days ago, this link worked, and now it doesn't (so much for the Wayback Machine's reliability): http://web.archive.o...gs_auction.html From here (scroll all the way down, or search for "Looking Glass Assets To Be Auctioned"): http://rpgvaultarchi...ive/arc78.shtml Auctioned off were: Also, MoroseTroll did not get a copy of the code. She contacted devs until one discovered he/she had a copy in his/her collection afterall, in February. At MoroseTroll's suggestion, this person contacted Rene at Eidos-Montreal, gave a copy to him, and offered to clean out the SS2 code to remove legal issue with Electronic Arts. Rene gave it over it to legal department and no one heard back from EM or Rene since March, until October, when Rene's replacement, Kyle Stallock, only repeated exactly what Rene said back in March, that it's in the hands of the legal department. Meanwhile, this guy at dreamcast had purchased a dev kit HDD years ago, and once he finally found an adapter to install the HDD into his system, he found it was not empty. He's on dial-up and uploaded the Thief 2 and SS2 Betas for us, months ago, and just recently, uploaded the source code. MoroseTroll contacted someone and they uploaded missing libraries for the Dark Engine. MoroseTroll is not sitting on the code, but she is indeed instrumental, but really a liaison between us and at least one person who has a copy of the code, whom we shall protect by not seeking the identity of.