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Greetings. I'm an avid Thief fan who found his way here and was immediately impressed by work that's being done. This looks to be an amazing project and I'm very excited about seeing it completed! I've looked through the board and haven't seen a topic on this so I thought I would post it to see what kind of response I would get. I had an idea for a Thief-like game which I'm sure has been thought of by others, but not talked about much, that being the concept of a free form world. As I know nothing of programming, or modding either, I was wondering how difficult it would be to code and create a near complete free form city or world using the concepts and tools you have now? For clarity's sake, by free form I mean a world or city where there are no painted buildings. All, or nearly all, objects can be interacted with and every building is accessible to the character, from individual homes, to shops, to the castles and mansions in the city. Obviously, all the buildings would have multiple access points, including the roof or high window and you could literally have a complete 'thieves highway' of all the rooftops in the city. Virtually all walls would be scalable as well. Naturally this would take a great deal of time and effort to do, but I was wondering if it were possible, and even desireable, at this point. My general idea is a free form, non linear stealth game where you start out as a novice thief in the city. You have a small apartment/safe house, a few simple tools, and a few NPCs on your side like a fence and a few tipsters/informants for potential mission info. As you go through the first initial missions (heists) you gain access to more risky/lucrative missions and you get more and better tools. You would also have access to more fences in different areas (possibly getting better deals for your merchandise), and more informants, possibly even a bit of political clout if you do certain missions for certain people. But none of these missions are literally required. You can just as easily walk down the street and enter a random shop or house and burgle for extra cash if you choose. Assuming you take more and more lucrative jobs, you eventually become a 'master thief' and perhaps even start your own thieves guild with you as the head, if you want to go that far. Creating a random building and/or street generator into the mix would create even more replayability since each new game would have a different city with different buildings. Naturally there isn't much in the way of actual plot, which a good number of people would want, but it would still be an interesting endeavor for those who want a little variety from the more linear style of play. Any thoughts?

Leet Character Emporium is down atm. What's up? And yeah, what is the score with NightBlade atm? It's been aaaaaaages since anything new was announced. I've all but given up on it now. I know it's there but I'm not even looking forward to it because there has been no clue as to what is going on. I did actually think it had been cancelled at one point, but then someone posted something at BCG forums about MP testing.

There is a bug in the Thief game engine that causes it to misread the amount of available hard drive space used for virtual memory. What you can do is try deleting some files on the HD where you have installed thief, or alternatively, adding files (about 40Mb worth) - this will make the game engine think you have sufficient space (I have used this method, it works - I had the same problem on a drive that had 65Gb of free space)... this bug exists because the game was made at a time when hard drives were quite small, and they obviously never conceived of 100Gb plus HDDs at the time and so hard coded a sloppy way of reading hard drive free space. There is more info available somewhere on the TTLG forums, don't have an exact link at the moment...

That makes sense Domarius/sparhawk. Remember the Doom I expansion pack, with the kooky fan missions and all that stuff? My roomate and I had two 486s networked with a phone cord, we would start playing Saturday night around 11 P.M. and not stop until 7 a.m. the next day.

Hexen, I dont know if this has been mentioned yet, but along with Thief 1/2 being incredible games, there are hundreds of megs of fan missions for T2. T1 has some fan missions but not as many, I think they are harder to make in T1. So if you drop 20$ U.S. for T2, you are actually getting +YEARS+ of fresh gameplay. And many of the fan missions are top notch too, better than the games in fact. Im not sure if the fan missions for T2 are readily interchangable with TGold, I assume they are though. Check out this site: http://thiefmissions.com/ and you will get an idea of the quantity of fan missions out there.

Here's some feedback: Open pouch: looks good, although I might do something a little less purple...it's almost a cartoon colour compared to the rest of our objects. Closed pouch: same thing about the colour. It's a little short and fat, so we wouldn't be able to attach it to a model's belt as is. The rings look good. The vase looks pretty good. The gemstones should be a richer colour so that they stand out more, especially the ruby. The diamond could be a brighter white, otherwise they'll be very hard to see. The streetlamps need work. The poles are ok, although the texture needs to be roughed up more and less specular. The tops need a brighter and more yellow look to the glass. See this pic as reference: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2208 The tiara needs a different texture. I have no problem with the long table, but I can't see a useful difference between the two dressers. This post raises an interesting question about how many variations of each model we want to include on CVS.

The editor is built into Doom3 itself. For doom 3 specific usage, take a quick look through the forums at www.doom3world.org, it will help you get started with doom 3 level editing. You can see the editor by bringing down the console and just typing editor when you have doom3 running. This isn't the best way to start it though. You actually need to create a copy of the doom 3 shortcut and make some changes to the "target" path. I can't remember exactly what you have to do at the moment and I'm almost falling asleep. If you have trouble finding the directions over there either myself or someone here will look it up.

Modetwo, who hosts and maintains the forums on our behalf, is no. 1 since he installed the forum software!

I chuckled at your post Domarius, same here. Stupid joints. I didn't know it was an exploit particularly, I just found, especially on TII, that even with slowest walking it was not silent, so ended up doing it I think. I have no idea what rubberman is. If anything TAPTAPTAP forwardleanandHit TAPTAPTAP is far worse. So tempting. I see what you are saying about the tiles but it is a game, and some areas have loads of marble, and seeing as Garrett is invisible in shadows I don't think it's too hard to imagine he can be 100% quiet if slow enough. Mind you I will try the Crouch, creep, walk forward thing next time. Calendra's, a popular map series, seemed to have very little loud surfaces. And TII missions with loads of marble are not popular.

In the last 11 pages of this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...l=limited+saves Though I think it spilled over into other threads as well.

are there already campaign maps being made or are there any plans for making them? Because from what I understand now is you first want to release the tools so others can also build there own missions and later on the team will be building their own campaign if i'm correct. also do the mappers work from a concept (story/drawings) and build a map around it or are they still trying things out?

Stop talking nonsense. You can't choose to break your life up into sections shorter than half an hour, or you'd never get anything done. You go to a movie and you stay for hours, you go to a restaurant and you stay for hours. Andthing worth doing in life is worth doing for a few hours, so there's no point cryng because you have to play a game for more than half an hour without being allowed to save. Games shouldn't be reduced to some kind of meaningless convenience snackfood you can muuch on for 15 minutes in your coffee break, they should be treated with more respect than that. The good ones at least. I don't know why you bother playing games at all since you see them as nothing more than something to fill a 10 minute gap. It's the same boss, but you have to kill him twice in the Lost Chapters version. (Another idea they stole from Baldur's Gate)

*sigh* Yes Fing, that's it. I'm only posting here boost my own ego. What ever I did to earn that level of respect from you, I sure would like to know. The reason I'm posting here is because of the times I'm playing an FM and I'm in a little simple room and the frame rate is chugging like I'm looking at the whole city (because as far as the game is concerned, I am). Or when I'm being chased by a guard and suddenly he stops at the bottom of a stair case and starts cursing me because he doesn't know how to get there (because the mapper ran the "Build Pathfinding Database" on one area of the map at a time, instead of letting it process the entire map). I'm sick of FMs runing slower than they should, and I'm speaking from mapping experience. I map, draw, animate, etc. the way I program - I try different techiques and compare the outputs against each other so that I KNOW for myself what works. In the case of mapping in DromEd, this means comparing the maximum viewable portals and polys. And because I have a slow computer, I can actually see the difference in frame rate. People with fast computers who don't bother with this step just go "yep, she'll be right, looks fine on mine so it must be fine." If you're talking about a mansion or city - what exactly about it has never been done before? There are plenty of good examples of how to best do them in the original T2 missions. I'm not talking about special cases such as the train mission which obviously require totally different approaches. The best maps run beautifully (like Calendra's Legacy) because the mapper knows what they are doing. No its not clear cut but how often have you heard the phrase "you got to know the rules before you can break them?" In Deus Ex, I played a mission where you could get to the top of a really tall crane and see the top of every building. "Oh noes they broke my rules!", right? No. Every building was a perfect, simple box. And by no coincidence, every door into every building was hidden behind another building or on the opposite side of the building, so that from the vantage point you could not see into a single doorway - so all those portals would be deactivated. This is in contrast to a complex city mission, where you cannot get onto the rooves because the streets and buildings are very detailed and the game would run to slow on the target system if they allowed that.

Well, I'm buying it so I'll let you know what I think. I also didn't care for the demo, but I'm taking the plunge and hoping for the best because I know they've fixed at least 800 bugs since it's release, and because the demo was probably a slightly watered-down version of what will be released on 10/18. There's a setting within the options screen to turn on advanced formations. I didn't experiment with them, but they offer some formations anyways. And just because you saw 3 or 4 maps doesn't mean there aren't any heavily forested maps. AoE2:Conquerors had like 20 maps to choose from, and you can build your own if you want with the AoE3 map editor. Random map generation options will also allow you some control over what types of maps get cranked out. If there isn't a black forest map upon release, I'm sure a fan will make one for download if you don't build your own. Yes, the stupid sounds irritated the hell out of me, too. But I'm hoping for the best on that; I heard they maybe didn't put all the sounds in the demo for file-size sake. If the demo actually had it all, then I'm hoping we will be able to put our own sound files in if we want. The graphics sucked on my machine, too -- but if you have a high-end system it looks gorgeous. Going from 512MB RAM to 1Gig helped a lot for me. Still a ways to go, but it was a lot better. You mentioned before you had to play F.E.A.R. at 640 x 480. Same here (when I had 512MB of RAM). So I bet the AoE3 graphics sucked as bad for me as it did for you. It's not Ensemble Studios' fault we don't have more powerful PCs. Trees also didn't fall down when chopped in the demo. I hear that was a bug and trees will fall in the final game. They've also made an option for a more minimized version of the UI (if I didn't say before. I'm too lazy to check my last post(s)).

Ah, I get it. So we are allowed to have faith in the release of an editor where we got no word, but we don't need to thave the same faith in a fan project? That it existed doesn't matter. Of course everybody kjnows that it existed, that was never the question. The question was wether it will be released. The sourcecode for Thief and Thief 2 also exists somewhere, but from our point of view it is just a myth. We can assume that it exists, but it doesn't really matter, because we don't have access to it, and we have no indication that we will get access to it. That's my point. Right now, it's easy to say, because with hindsight you always no better, but at the time the campaign was running the chances for the editor were just as existing. As I said. firsthand knowledge that is not transmitted doesn't count. So what? I't nice that some of you were contacted and in the know. That doesn't change the fact for all the others. An information that exists in some void is no information. Does a tree in the forrest make a noise if nobody is around to hear it? No it doesn't. It's as simple as that. Like Sherlock Holmes. He knows everything and it looks like a miracle, and after he explains it's its obvious. Afterwards you always know better. Since you seem to knew it, it may have been a "huuuge giveaway" but for others it was not. Making an icon is a job of about 1 hour if you don't know the tools well, so what kind of a giveaway is that? Of course. After all we were excited with the project. That's normal. If we were not as excited, we wouldn't be around now and continuing the work.

Whatever, I prefer to be refered to as a man on forums.

Since it is stated that at least one mission (not yet finished?) will be in T2 no matter what, I think that a change over to TDM might be... wow, while it's kinda scary, because it might fracture the community badly - and might even risk HI ever coming at all - it might instead have the effect of producing some serious content for TDM sooner than later, and might help convince people to "come over" to the dark side (as if that's necessary - it's perfectly possible to enjoy ALL the thief games at the same time - I do). From the look of Imperium that I've seen (and drooled - don't forget also that a lot of TDM members don't know anything about HI beyond being a watching fan), it'd be like suddenly having uber-mapping going on with the mod. There would also be contributions in art and design, which as we've all seen is quite impressive. Collecting, pooling, sharing ideas and... and stuff! is never a bad thing.

I don't get this. Are you saying that it will be quicker to do in TDM? sparhawk, I actually think it would be a good thing for HI to switch to TDM. It would be a great thing in fact. But since TDM wont be out until at least the end of 2006 (according to New Horizon) will that delay the release of HI? If HI switches to TDM it would, imo, be silly to release some missions in T2 and some in TDM. For people eager to play more FMs it would be good of course, but it will look rather sloppy otherwise. I've just realised something. There is a lot of animosity between TDM and TTLG but when TD is released they will in all likelyhood have a TDM forum. What does everyone think of that? TTLG is THE Thief forum, of the English speaking world anyway, and it's likely that more people will go there to find out about TDM, ironically. Of course these forums could become like the BCG forums. That also makes me thing about something else. Thievery is by BCG, T2X is by The Dark Engineering Guild, who are we? Just the TDM "team"? Fingernails Bad Boys? The Anti-T3Ed Crew? TFAKOT3E (Team For Ass Kicking Of T3Ed)? Oh, I can do those all day But seriously?

I actually enjoyed Diablo 2 - mainly because I played co-op with my two brothers and we had really different characters working together fighting alongside each other. For what it is (bash, get more money and weapons , bash some more) its fun. DS is more of a chore than fun. And Neverwinter Nights is not much better - its the same thing with a storyline slapped on. Setting up your own game with someone playing Dungeon Master would be awesome, but as a single player or co-op game playing the original missions - its diablo with a story line. Bleh. At least Diablo - All of the character classes are very very well balanced. NWN is SHIT becaues all the magic characters are the best, and no other class can keep up with them. Its heavily magic biased, and the community expansion pack makes it even more so. That game seems to have a huge "magic is da coolest" nerd following.

I liked it. Looked good. Of course it could use some work, but it was nice to see. I enjoyed launching fire arrows down the long hall, too. I tried to take a fraps video to post here, but after a few attempts, the smallest I could get it was 18MB. I give up. I'll just make a super short vid next time I try to capture (which I thought I was already doing... but I guess even shorter) HI switching to TDM would be cool; a good boost in getting people excited and involved with our toolset. I must admit, however, I'd also be a bit bummed to not see the T2 engine used. I still like that engine. Breaking MI up to have the first mission (or two or three) to be in T2's engine and then switching over to TDM for the rest would be a nice transition. Yeah, right... I have a feeling that engine will be used and appreciated for a long time to come.

Yep, pretty cool. It's pretty crazy that his candles in this screenshot look a lot like BlackThief's: http://home.planet.nl/~kolk0405/3D/levelde...ll/d3_map3d.jpg I will maybe try his map out later tonight. If he is into that type of atmosphere, surely he would want to have our ravamped AI and stuff to work with for a more stealthy type of game? Heh, I just read that he based his map partially on the Rose Red movie. The mansion used for that movie was this one that I posted about a while back: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=39472.

Could be hyperthreading problem (if you have hyperthreading, launch T2, then alt-tab and open up the task manager (ctrl-alt-delete), right click the Thief2.exe process, and set the Affinity to one CPU or the other (CPU 0 for example). Or could be that safe textures problem. There should be an FAQ on getting it to run at www.ttlg.com/forums , under thief general discussion.

Well, the games I am waiting for at the moment are - F. E. A. R. and Quake IV(why not heXen III) on 18 October, pretty soon, then HoMaM V somewhere in winter, than there is Dark Messiah in summer, Oblivion and Gothic III somewhere, Age of Empires III, but I didn't like the demo much. Well, Im quite delighted - a lot of games to wait for, in addition to the heXen Edge of Chaos mod and yours, of course. I wonder if H EoC will be shorter than Half-Life 2 - they made 80% already, that worries me, in fact, no information but 9 screens and a bad movie with one sceleton in it - that is quite distressing. I tried to talk to them on mIRC, but they just don't say anything, the only thing I managed to pull out of them is that the wraithwerge weapon from heXen beyond Heretic will be connected to the storyline, and the character who carries it is a new class, along with Half-Life 2 gravity gun disguesed as telekinesis... Speaking of Fable - I like the game, it maybe somewhat childish, but not pokemon, just try to adjust to it, and ignore the beginning.

Any small loot items, like spectacles, golden hammers, or small statues, would be good. You can also check this post: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2266 Also, if you wouldn't mind, could you upload your new models to CVS and post a screenshot for them? I'd like to get all our finished models onto our master list.

I know of Heretic and Hexen. BUt it didn't catch so good with me. I played Doom at that time and we had a lot of fun. I carried my machine and my monitor over to a friend several times to have death match sessions over the weekend. And I downloaded tons of missions made from fans. Ah! Those were the times ...