datiswous

Quote

So a man walks into a bar and says "uniform code formatting is a good thing" and everyone nods, mumbles agreement, even invites him to sit down.

Hearing of this wisdom, Nort rushes to the same bar, lights himself on fire and kicks in the door. "YOU GUYS ARE MORONS" he screeches, pitching a child through a window and ripping off his sweater vest, "DID U JUST CRAWL OUT OF THE SWAMP OR WHAT I CANT EVEN WITH THIS FORMATTING." He then sits down at the bar, still on fire, and asserts that everyone else there must be touched because they find his approach less than diplomatic.

(quote from Airship Ballet)

Disclaimer: This interview, or in fact any press coverage, does not serve the purpose of boosting your egos. If we find out somewhere down the line that the Darkmod team calls quits because the members have become satisfied with themselves and stop working, you will be hunted down for sport!

New Horizon: LOL that’s fair enough. I expect nothing less and would be disappointed if they didn't hunt us down in fact.

JASHIN: Great >:]



JASHIN: Role call – tell us about yourselves, your jobs, the modification, and what forces of nature implore you to do what you do.

New Horizon: Well, today we have Pakmannen, Fingernail, Sparhawk and I from the team. Sparhawk is our lead coder and Pak is our sound Lead. I'm a branch off of the sound department myself, taking care of all the AI vocal sets as well as PR duties. Springheel is our Artistic Lead and Fingernail is our founding father. We share the leadership duties between all of us.

In essence, the goal of this project is to provide a working toolset with the Doom 3 editor that will allow FM authors to produce their own Thief Style fan missions. It is also our goal to return to an atmosphere much more like T1 and 2. If you go back to the original games you'll notice that in Thief 1 and 2, the artistic style was much less cartoonish, less exaggerated. oDDity has gone to great effort to ensure that our models are more an evolution of the Thief style.

Sparhawk: My motivation is my love of the Thief game and the atmosphere it conveys, and I was pretty annoyed by the T3 extension. They changed the artistic style and made the game even easier, so I want to have a Thief game that T3 should have been.

New Horizon: Initially our goal was to provide a Thief inspired editor for the Thief community. The original word when Thief 3 came out was that there would be no editor for Thief 3. We, as members of the community, cared about this and came together to create our own toolset. While we couldn't make any references to the original material, we could make our version in a similar style that would allow fans to create their own missions. Although an editor has been announced, it hasn't altered our primary goal too much since the style of our mod tools will more closely resemble T1 and 2.

JASHIN: Really? It has? d:O

New Horizon: Yes, a few months ago one of the Thief 3 developers announced that they were working on releasing it.

JASHIN: I remember running the petition over on Evil Avatar, people were pretty real, saying that the chances were slim.

JASHIN: So who was it? Was it one of the developers still on the ISA payroll?

New Horizon: Yes, this announcement was made by Null.

JASHIN: Ah so it’s Null (FTR: Null is the designer who mapped the now infamous Shalebridge Cradle, the most talked-about level in Thief3).

New Horizon: Another reason we wanted to create the toolset with the Doom 3 editor is the flexibility of the engine. It should allow for some truly amazing missions to be built in the not so distant future. Also we wanted to provide features that were missing from T3, such as the rope arrows.

New Horizon: Of course, we're doing all this without making reference to any copyrighted material. And of course, we also respect their intellectual property. Being creators ourselves we understand what it's like to have your work stolen.

JASHIN: How do you do that? Are you renaming the Hammerites to Milletites now? Ahaha q:D

New Horizon: LOL. We've given them our own names. There is a faction similar to the Hammerites called The Builders.

JASHIN: I see, sounds good.

New Horizon: In reality though, fan mission builders can name them whatever they want.  Those are just our faction names.



JASHIN: Is Darkmod the official name?

Fingernail: Well, technically it's The Dark Mod

Fingernail: But yes, that is the official name.

JASHIN: Mmmmk.

Fingernail: We shied away from calling it “The Doomed Project.”

JASHIN: Oh I see, it's from the original Thief.

New Horizon: Yes, it's a kind of throw back to the old name.



JASHIN: Here's a broad question: how far along is the development?

Fingernail: It's a hard question to answer. We have progress in all areas, however. Features such as the light gem, arrows as well as models are starting to make their way ingame about now.
I'm very happy with the progress so far. But, we could always do with more talent... (shameless advert)

JASHIN: Naturally.

Sparhawk: We have set a developer milestone and according to this we are in good condition. I won't give any numbers or dates at this point, though because it is hard to judge against the overall requirements.



JASHIN: Aside from the obvious rendering capability, why did you choose the MOTHER of all corridor simulators as your platform?

Fingernail: It does corridors too???

Sparhawk: Well, the initial reason was because Doom 3 was there first. So we could already start on this. But since that is not enough, the major reason is, because D3 supports real dynamic lights and shadows, which is a pretty important aspect of the Thief gameplay, and was about the only thing that was really done well in T3.

When HL2 came out, we had big discussions to switch over, but it was turned down for several reasons.

• Better lighting engine than HL2
• Portability to Linux (important for me)
• Ease of modification
• A known good support from Id for modding community
• The prospect that Doom 3 will be released as GPL after some time (which has been done with other titles from Id as well and Q3 is about to be released in the near future)
• Doom 3 is designed as an engine to be sold as a basis for game development companies. This means it was designed with modding in mind. The game Doom 3 is to me just a tech demo (haven't even played it through yet), but it's the engine that counts for us anyway.

Fingernail: Indeed.

JASHIN: Oh REALLY?

Fingernail: It's actually a much more flexible engine than people give it credit for.

JASHIN: I have got a hell of a reply for you.

New Horizon: Let’s hear that reply.

JASHIN: Kiltron of The Mean Arena threw in the towel not long ago, stating that "DOOM3 is only good for making mods if they are like DOOM3. Because of the lighting limitations, there will always be many dark patches in the levels that will require some sort of flashlight or torch" and he concludes by saying that "either make them [maps] very, very dark that require a flashlight and Quake 2 [his mod] doesn't have a flashlight, or light them very well to be able to see everything, and the levels run very, very poor."

JASHIN: You gotta give the guy creditability for making the first custom map for Doom 3. So should the community be worried? What's The Dark Mod team's answer to this?

New Horizon: From what I've seen, it suits our purposes very well.

Fingernail: Well, obviously he is a very talented mapper, but he got a lot of flame from the D3 community about this.

JASHIN: let’s hear it q:P

Fingernail: It is my opinion that he was trying to make the wrong sort of game for the D3 engine

JASHIN: A Quake 2 mod?

Fingernail: Yes. But even then, it strikes me as strange. The Edge of Chaos team is producing stunningly large, outdoor, well-running and beautiful maps in the D3 engine.

JASHIN: let me take a look at that, 1 second.

Sparhawk: Proof to the contrary exists already, so this is not an issue. Apart from that, what he says there, if it were true, would be a pretty good description of Thief gameplay anyway. Thief is best played in the dark and shadows are a very important element of the game. There are already demonstration maps with big outdoor areas and a day/night cycle showing that so the above comment is wrong. There are mods which also utilize big outdoor scenes and they seem to do quite fine.

JASHIN: he claims that it'd be pitch black, due to the renderer; Thief is more midnight than before dawn.

Fingernail: As NH said, it is perfect for our needs. And it is not difficult to make maps which are not pitch black, they just require some clever use of ambient lights.

JASHIN: DOOM3's physics were under-utilized. Dark Mod?

Fingernail: Well, again, they are fine for our use. Even down to the rocket-physics for rope-arrows. D3 got a lot of stick compared to the Source engine, particularly on physics. But actually, when you do a close comparison, there are not many startling differences. Both support ragdoll articulated bodies, friction, gravity etc. However D3 lacks water physics and buoyancy, but with the SDK, literally anything is possible. Since id threw open their physics code, whereas Source merely utilizes the Havok library.

New Horizon: They may require some further tweaking, but that will come further down the road in the development cycle.

JASHIN: I was thinking along the lines of how you'd utilize the physics in The Dark Mod.

Fingernail: Well, we will have rope arrows for a start but we are interested in simulating a world.

JASHIN: Hmm sounds lovely.

Sparhawk: We have some need for physics of course. One of the important aspects in T1/T2 was stacking of crates and other objects to reach areas you are not supposed to It will also be used for other aspects of the game, of course, but we are not doing a HL2 where physics seem to be a major selling point.

New Horizon: Once we're further along in development we will have a much clearer interpretation of how the physics can interact with the player and the AI.



JASHIN: Free-roaming on a city map - I believe it was outlined by the Looking Glass folks in their design doc. Care give take a stab at it?

Fingernail: Right. A free roaming city map would theoretically be possible. The difficulty is current hardware restrictions. Anyone who has played Thief Deadly Shadows knows that the city sections are very small and limited. Much smaller than the City levels in the first two Thief plans.

Sparhawk: LGS had no such city and I don't know if they planned it. I have developed a concept for such a city which would work if we would implement it. We decided against it, because we think that this doesn't really add to the gameplay and in fact would become boring after the initial surprise. I might implement this concept later as a proof of concept, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Apart from that, you must differentiate between two things. One is the toolset that allows FM authors to design their own missions in the Darkmod world. The other is a campaign we plan to make after the core gameplay is finished (or in parallel depending on the workload). A city map in the context of a toolset doesn't make that much sense, and if it will fit into our campaign remains to be seen. Personally I was not so impressed with the city in T3 and it felt more like a cheap gameplay extension to me.

Interviewer’s note: T3 uses a hub system where a lot of loading takes place in between city sections.

New Horizon: Also depends on what plans are finalized for a campaign in the future. At this stage, we're getting the foundations laid out for the editing tools.

Fingernail: Yes, I am confident that D3 can produce larger, contiguous levels than the Thief 3 engine. There should be no need for load zones, for instance.

JASHIN: At this point I’d like to remind the team that Thief3 has an absence of rooftop missions, a disappointment for people who enjoyed those. Make sure you don't skim over them apples in your campaign.

New Horizon: I guess this would be as good a time as any to mention that we have had discussions about our main character moonlighting as a chimney sweep! You can count on lots of rooftop missions with that scenario!!!

JASHIN: Music to my ear, that's what I want to hear.



JASHIN: Realism, it's a beautiful thing. Would a thief bleed, and thus would have to bandage? The latter part is an example; please focus your answer on the former part.

New Horizon: That's a very interesting question. It's not something we have discussed in detail yet, as we are currently getting the core play mechanics into place. Once we have had time to hone the core gameplay and are satisfied with it, we could very well experiment with ideas such as that.



JASHIN: In contrast to realism, there are gameplay mechanics like the loot glint. How did you like the loot glint?

New Horizon: Loot glint. I honestly did not care for it, but I can see why it was used within the constraints of T3. The artistic style chosen in T3 did not lend itself well to having loot stand out. We've chosen to give loot a distinctive style, like the classic games, that will allow players to distinguish loot from junk rather easily.

Sparhawk: I liked the loot glint in T3, but then again it made the game much too easy. So I prefer to have no loot glint. And as NH pointed out, we are trying to make the loot distinctive, so there is not that much of a need to it.

JASHIN: Does the team have any plans to revise unrealistic aspects of thief, like the physical removal of an item when held? Remember the small tree from Thief3? Poof, gone. Garret must have eaten it.

New Horizon: We have discussed this in the past. I believe it was decided that junk would be held in your inventory, though details like this are tentative until we reach our first milestone.



JASHIN: Thief just isn't thief without the dynamic gameplay events, tell us about the AI. Thief3's NPCs have the tendency to do trivial pursuits.

New Horizon: The AI is something that I'm very excited about. Thief 1 and 2 set a very high standard for AI reactions and Thief 3 added to that considerably in some very subtle ways. Like you said, the AI did give up too easily in T3...part of that may have been due to the smaller levels. We do hope to meet that level of quality and if possible, improve upon it.

JASHIN: Who is your main AI guy by the way, it's important because doom3 has no AI.

New Horizon: Yes, they're quite simple creatures aren't they? We have several coders working on that end of things. Sparhawk is the lead coder, we also have Domarius and Ishtvan. If I missed anyone, I hope they forgive me.

Sparhawk: The AI is certainly an area where we want to make the most improvements. To me it was way too easy to take out an AI and we strive to make the AI more aware while at the same time not make the game frustrating. The goal is to make the AI react naturally to its environment so that the player feels totally immersed. That was one thing that T1/T2 did very well.



JASHIN: There's no 3rd-person view planned, why not give the choice to the player? I liked it! >:]

New Horizon: There were several reasons for leaving it out. In my mind primarily, it didn't fit the core Thief style gameplay that we are working towards. Third person allows the player to cheat a little bit Also there are many technical reasons to not include it. The team voted against it. We wanted the experience to be very personal.

JASHIN: Does that mean no 3rd-person cut-scenes as well?

New Horizon: Third person cut-scenes are a possibility, since they are not related to gameplay. However it is really up to the fan mission author as to what type of cut-scenes he wishes to use since our primary focus right now is creating the core toolset. We haven't taken time to nail that part down just yet.



JASHIN: Thief3 received an award for audio this year from gamespy. Did you know this?

New Horizon: Yes, I thought that was fantastic. Well deserved.

Sparhawk: Personally I was not so impressed with the sound. At first I was quite annoyed that there was almost none. Only after reading reactions on the forums I noticed that there seems to be a bug that prevented me from enjoying most of the audio. I heard the AI and such things, but I had almost never noticed any ambience sound, which is an important part of Thief. This was especially frustrating as I bought an Audigy 2 ZS specifically for T3.

JASHIN: Sucks for you q:P



JASHIN: Here’s the follow-up: How big of a role does ambient sound play in the gameplay? The Urban Terror mod incorporated listening into a twitch shooter, how about The Dark Mod?

Pakmannen: Ambient sound will play a big part, just like it did in Thief. We are also thinking about ways to improve it further.

JASHIN: I'm talking an ambient sound system that doubles as a warning system; by the way please elaborate on "improve it further."

Pakmannen: Well, We have already discussed how ambient sounds such as machine noise could cover your footsteps, though we still haven't gotten to the point where we can start adding those features. But our programmers are working on sound propagation right now. It will probably work a lot like the Thief games.

JASHIN: You know my fav, weapons of mass destruction; I'd hate to find out that it doesn't exist.

Sparhawk: LOL

Pakmannen: The Armageddon arrow!

New Horizon: LOL Well, I don't know about mass destruction, how about subtle destruction? You will find a healthy stash of tools to use. We've already implemented the basic functionality for broad-head, fire arrows and blackjack. Rope arrows are next on the list.



JASHIN: Anything not in the official series? Here's a novel area from the thief mythos to consider - glyph magic. I’m thinking passive, subtle forms of magic that compliment the basic gameplay.

New Horizon: Magic does exist in the universe we've envisioned. And like you said, it won't be a dominating factor. Our current goal is to get back to the basic core gameplay and fine tune it without introducing a plethora of new features. The thing about Thief style gameplay is that it can benefit greatly from a balanced approach in minimization.

JASHIN: Think about it then, because I believe fans are capable of making creditable additions to the franchise, especially this one. Take a page from Blizzard Entertainment, the master of innovative same-o same-o - they innovate in the most nondescript areas that the series stays true word for word to its name irregardless. I believe you can do the same whilst taking certain concepts further; not necessarily change, but further develop the established.

JASHIN: Unprecedented freedom is in your hands.

New Horizon: I do agree on building off of what has been established already and that is a lot of what we are discussing at the moment. Taking established concepts to their next logical step of evolution.

JASHIN: Has the team heard of Gothic? We at Evil Avatar love the game, in part because it has a stealth element, pretty unforgiving to say the least: NPCs keep grudges, they remember you forEVER. While I don't recommend this for Thief, it's something to think about.

Pakmannen: Yes, some of our members talk about it all the time. AI that climbs ladder, right?

JASHIN: Yes it's in Gothic.

New Horizon: I heard of it, but have not yet had the chance to play it. Others in our team have played it.

JASHIN: Then waste no time in getting it, it’s great.

New Horizon: We've discussed AI's climbing ladders, but there are a lot of gameplay pros and cons to sort out before anything definite is decided. Currently, the decision for ladder climbing is no, at least not before initial release.

Sparhawk: Gothic is a very good game and it has an impressive AI. I have posted examples where I was quite surprised about how well the AI reacted to my actions. One time they surrounded me in a spot where I thought I would be safe, while one was climbing up in the back and the others had me occupied. Gothic is certainly a game that I look to for inspirations on what we should avoid because they really did an incredible job. I hope that Gothic 3 will be as good as previous installments.



JASHIN: Very well then, anything else you'd like to say? Is the team on a schedule?

Pakmannen: I can report that audio is 18.3% done.

JASHIN: 18.3% huh? You cute qxD

Pakmannen: Yup. 18.3% spar set us up with a nice little management tool.

New Horizon: For my part, I'm right on schedule with my vocal set production. As a whole, I believe we are on target.

JASHIN: Cool, cool.



New Horizon: Any other questions?

JASHIN: I've asked pretty much all I can ask. Is there anything you'd like to say to our readers, BFG community, taffer community, etc.?

New Horizon: I would personally like to say thanks for the tremendous amount of support the community has shown us. We certainly didn't expect it, being the small & modest mod that we are. A sincere thank you to everyone out there

Sparhawk: I'm really impressed with the support that we get and this is quite a source of motivation to continue work on the mod.

JASHIN: Thanks a lot, keep on doing what you're doing. The franchise maybe in limbo, but it's nice to know that the fans are inspired. Nice talking to you all, good luck everyone.



Veteran EvilAvatar poster, long time reader, Thief fan, aspired modder; son of a taffer, I look forward to The Dark Mod.