As a potential future level editor, I had a few questions about the D3 engine. I have never played the PC version of the game (for lack of a qualified video card) and have only played the XBox version (I will probably be boo'ed off the boards for that confession). So far as I could tell, all of the levels were fairly small, much smaller than most of the levels in thief 1 and 2. I was wondering if this was a constraint of the Doom3 engine, or if this was a product of the meager RAM in the standard XBox (I have heard that the levels in thief 3 were broken up into small areas because of the memory limitations on the XBox version). I suspect that any modern engine, especially such a professional one as the Doom3 engine, could handle any concievable level size. I am concerned because the larger exterior maps in Thief (notably the abandoned old quarter in Thief 1) seem to be much much larger than the levels in Doom3 were. Has anyone tried making a level as large as any of the Thief levels? Is there any noticable performance hit as compared to many small rooms? This leads me to my next question: exteriors. In doom3, all the levels take place in fairly confined spaces (as per the nature of scary games). The only case I can think of that involved rolling hills was the terrain outside during the monorail ride. Fortunatly, Thief tends to have the same sort of enclosed areas in many levels, but it did have large open spaces as well (the Bonehoard was all underground, but still had some *huge* open areas. Now that is the kinda burial I want!). I was wondering if the Doom3 engine's brute force method for rendering visible sectors took any performance hits in such vast open areas? Sorry to ask such simple questions, I suspect that these were all taken into consideration when the Doom3 engine was decided upon, but my experience with D3 has raised a few doubts. (I hope this is not a repeat question, I searched the forms and found nothing relevant). Normally, I would just make a few test levels and run some benchmarks myself, but with just a GeForce4 MX, the doom3 demo runs about about 1fps, which makes my eyes bleed. Keep up the good work, and thanks for keeping the Thief legacy alive! John
