lost_soul

me too

I'm quite surprised they would even sell that stuff. A hard drive is what, 50 bucks these days? A hard drive from around 2000 is probably worth $5. These publishers typically have lots of cash, so I figured they would just trash the hardware. Also, I would figure they would be sure and wipe the drives before selling them off.

Ya know, it is funny. I was reading the recently opened thread about this in the TTLG editor's guild forum. The way people are talking about it, you'd think this was officially released. What exactly are Eidos's options at this point? They could eather fight the fire with a legal extinguisher, probably enraging the Thief community in the process. This would certainly turn off some folks from buying Thief 4. or They could legally sanction this and make everyone happy. This may be impossible though, if there is someone else's imaginary property in the code that they had to license during development. or (image credit: Wikipedia) They could just sit back and do nothing. In this last scenario, at least people will be able to enjoy an updated version of the games five million years from now when imaginary property rights stop being continuously extended. Sadly, this means that we wouldn't ever get to enjoy a fixed-up version of the games in our lifetimes. Are there any outcomes that I've missed?

Just another voice here who would love to see slashable banners and bashable doors. The only problem with bashing doors is that it must be restricted at some point.There were points in T1/2 FMs where I would bash down a door, only to find nothing on the other side.

I'm with the croud who is sad that the Thief community is already trying to mess with this stuff, but most never contributed to TDM. If they wanted a next-generation, cross-platform, completely moddable and non-sabotaged by the XBOX stealth game, it is already here. I would still like to see dark engine code sanctioned and a native version of the older games for my platform, but nobody is seriously going to attempt to give Thief a graphical makeover at this point, are they? It is re-doing work that has already been done. It is clinging to the shackles of a proprietary product when a free and more advanced alternative is available. I can just imagine where we would be if the whole of TTLG had jumped on TDM from the get-go. We would have tuns of vocal sets, both female and male and more FMs. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate everything you all have done here very much. It would just be like having twenty people building a house instead of ten. At least I know this whole ordeal won't affect TDM 1.03. I'm looking forward to that at the end of the month very much!

Somebody needs to get this story posted to the front page of Slashdot. All publicity is good publicity, and perhaps some long-lost taffers would help persuade Eidos to release the code.

My personal thoughts: I was never a fan of grain. While playing Silent Hill 3, I just had to turn that off. We've come so far from RF television connections (which exhibit these artifacts), only to consider simulating them in software? I always prefer a clean, perhaps hard image.

Well it really does matter. If the code is sanctioned, the community can set up an official repository and begin working on it. We could have an eduke32 or a ioquake3, but for Thief! That would be better than any modern game they can produce. I would also finally be able to execute the following command on my windows partitions, (DO NOT DO THIS!) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdxname. It will ERASE the partition by filling it with zeros.

Have you guys seen the recent updates on the petition for thief source publication on TTLG topic? If Eidos actually does release the code, I'll buy Thief 4.

One of the nice things about TDM is that the engine is very open for tweaking... and cheating if you're into that sort of thing. If you have trouble finding a way past a portion of an FM, you could noclip through it and continue. Sure, it is cheating, but at least you're going to continue enjoying the mission, (provided the mission doesn't break from noclipping). There have been T1 and T2 FMs that I just had to quit because I couldn't find a key or a solution to a puzzle. "The Vigil" comes to mind here. I've also had cases where I had to reverse-engineer the map to find my way through it. "I know I'm supposed to get in that room, but I don't know how, so I'll just no-clip in, find the correct way in, and then reload and proceed the right way".

Now this got a WHOLE lot more interesting. The machine appeared to work okay with the new card, but after running for five or ten minutes, it hard locks and the display becomes garbled again. With this new video card, the POST and desktop look just fine up until the machine completely hangs, whereas the old card produced a garbled display from startup to shutdown (but never hung). I brought a Linux installation over there on an SD card and ran the system from that, and it did the same thing. This rules out any kind of issue with Windows. Could they have shipped us a bad video card? The thing idles at 75 degrees C! The fan on the card is working though.... Could it be the motherboard? While the card has a maximum temperature of 100 C and thus should be able to function correctly at 75C, it shouldn't be that hot when just staring at a desktop, right? We don't have any other PCI-E cards to test and find out for sure, so my options are to call the card vendor, try the card in a different slot on her machine, or try to find a friend who would test the card for us in their PC.

I went with: R1 = attack R2 = crouch L1 = creep L2 = lean forward D-pad = weapon and item prev/next A,B,X,Y are Jump, use, drop item, and (i forgot) Clicking the thumbsticks leans right and left, start brings up the menu, and select uses an item like a healing potion.

I for one do not believe a tun of money can make people happy. My brother is a lawyer and has a flat-screen TV in every room in his apartment. He will soon be moving back to this town though, because it is too expensive to buy a home where he currently works and he is unhappy with his work hours. Sometimes he has to work until 8 PM or on the weekends. No amount of money would keep me working from 9 AM to 8 PM or on my supposed days off. His new job will be a straight 9-to-5 job, where he isn't expected to work so much off the clock. I personally live on very limited resources and am happy. I've got a small apartment which is easy to clean, no one else living here but me, and plenty of free time. As for material things, I don't have much. This 2008-era laptop is probably the nicest thing I've got and I do worry when I leave for extended periods of time. "Will I receive a visit from the "master thief" while I'm gone, or will the laptop still be there when I return?" Luckily I can throw it in a laptop backpack and take it with me so I don't have to worry. It ain't top of the line, but as long as it can run the things I want, it is good enough. Back to the idea of generating good will with your customers: I use a Magicjack to make long distance calls from my PC. I've got one long-distance friend that I call regularly, whom I met online a decade ago. Even though they sell you five years of service for $69, I will still pay $20 for only one year. This is because I appreciate the already excellent deal and I want to support them. $20 a year is already so cheap that it is no big deal. Compare this to the game industry, where I buy everything as cheaply as possible with no regard for the publishers. Again, a happy customer is a loyal customer. An unhappy customer is not loyal. You may remember a service called DialPad from around 2000. It was a similar system that allowed you to make free PC-to-phone calls. It shut down though due to financial issues... even the advertising couldn't keep them going.

Yep it was the video card. The new one arrived and everything works fine now. I wish I could pull that memory off the old card and use it somewhere else....

I've got TDM running with a Logitech Dual-action gamepad under Linux. I just hacked the X.org configuration so that button presses on the controller are mapped directly to keyboard/mouse input. Left stick is wasd, right is mouse, etc. Only problem for the time being is the mouse wheel bug, which makes it impossible to change weapons via a controller... unless you want to bind every number to a controller button which you obviously can't do. There are limited buttons on a controller. Not to worry though, this bug should be fixed near the end of the month.

Well my personal opinion is that any product which has "shipped" and has ANY fans/supporters at all should be allowed to have an article. Only allowing products that have been mentioned by a commercial source is just an outdated way of doing things. TDM "shipped" over a year ago, it has two official patches so far, and thirty-five+ missions. I would say that makes it relevant.

Not sure what criteria they use over at Wikipedia to determine what is allowed and what is not. Free games like Tremulous and Urban Terror have articles there (which began life as Quake 3 mods). I seem to recall some other articles about game mods getting deleted though. Hopefully there can be a TDM article, or at least a mension of TDM in the Thief articles.

@Fidcal: You are onto something here. It shouldn't just be about taking the customer for every dime that he is worth and then abandoning him with a broken product that he cannot fix. (hello TDS) Here's an example of good business. Last weekend, we went to Fry's (a big retailer similar to Best Buy). My step-dad had an ancient PC from 2004 or so that just wouldn't power up anymore. The light would blink a couple of times, but that was it. I didn't have any spare power supplies laying around or anything, so we took it in. The guy behind the work bench asked what the symptoms were, popped the side panel off, and quickly attached another power supply that belonged to the store. Sure enough, the machine fired up immediately. He didn't charge us anything. My step-dad didn't want to spend a lot of money on a new system because this computer is at a house where he doesn't stay often (he owns THREE of them!). So, he just picked up a power supply from Fry's along with an extra 512 megs of DDR1 ram for $25. I told him "you know you could get that RAM cheaper online, right?". He told me "Yes, but these guys were helpful and they deserve the profit.". At this point, I completely agreed. They didn't want $30 to simply touch the machine or try to upsell us on an overpriced PSU for an ancient PC. Moral of the story: Treat customers with respect. If you do this, they will be happy. They will be more likely to support you directly and not run to the cheapest online reseller they can find. Even if your prices aren't the absolute cheapest, good customer service can make all the difference (and the sale).

... or you can do what I do: Wait for at least six months after the game is released. This gets you the following benefits: A patched game with any glaring flaws worked out, like the TDS AI bug A much cheaper price, especially if you pick it up used A good chance that the "extra" content will be included with a "special edition" copy of the game A chance to find out what *real* people think about the game and how it stacks up (major review sites don't usually count here)

I don't watch movies anymore, but two of my favorite scary ones were "What Lies Beneath" and "The Ring" (NOT the sequel!). It seems like with a lot of scary movies (like Scream), you can predict what is going to happen before it does. This detracts from both the immersion and the scare-factor. The two movies I mentioned above have sudden scares that most viewers won't see coming.

Well I'm sure you can access it via the web connection as a web page or text document. It just makes me laugh when they play this off as simply "refusing to sell the app", when there's no other place you can actually install the thing from. If my local grocery store only stocks Pepsi, but I want Cocacola, I can go somewhere else to get it. I'm not forced to shop at only one store, and said store cannot impose any rules that affect me outside of the store.

I wonder though, would it be a good idea to have a more stressful test? IIRC when I ran this test, there were no AIs around and the environment was pretty compact (the training mission). This isn't really an accurate representation of gameplay. Many missions have larger outdoor environments with multiple guards. Perhaps we could at least toss a couple of AI fights in there to simulate being around AIs.

From the "we know what's good for you department"... http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/26/apple-bans-android-magazine-app/ This isn't as simple as just banning an app. The user can't install it, even from a third-party source without Apple's permission. This would be like my MegaGamerExtreme PC refusing to let me look at PCs from another vendor, or not letting me install benchmark utilities from the competitor. The device is my property and I should be able to read about anything I like with it, even if it is content that supports your direct competitor.

I'm sure we won't have any trouble finding the original TDM FMs ten years from now. Fans are generally quite good at preserving things like this. You can still download the original Thief 1 fan-made missions, and older stuff like Duke Nukem 3D levels too.

I never really sell games either, but I buy 90% of mine used just to deprive the industry. If a publisher is competitive with the used market and offers a cheap download that isn't malware laden, then SURE I'll support them. Most do not work in this manor though. There are games that came out four or five years ago that I would LOVE to pay $9 for and have a version without disk-checking malware and the like. The game houses won't provide this though. Thus they lose my money. I'm just hoping they don't fowl up Duke Nukem Forever by incorporating any kind of unwanted malware. I would really like to buy that game. If they do, I'll just pick it up used for a few bucks and laugh at the publisher. Gog is a great solution and I buy from them whenever they have something I want.