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I'd just like to point out that the idea of a "realistic" thief simulator is silly in itself. In "real life," the biggest part of a master thief's job is casing out the place he is going to rob, which can easily take weeks or even months. That would certainly be no fun in the context of a game. And even if we assume all of the casing has been done ahead of time, the missions themselves would be boring. In a good robbery, there isn't even anyone present. And even if the thief had to deal with patrolling guards, he certainly wouldn't carry around a bundle of silly arrows to douse torches from a distance. There are almost no situations where something like the "gel arrow" oDDity proposed would be remotely useful. If the situation was so desparate that he needed that torch out that badly, then something must have gone badly wrong and the best thing the thief could do is to get the hell out of there. So it's really a moot point whether our thief carries gel or water arrows, since the whole idea is rediculous to start with. Personally, I like magical arrows better than oDDity's MacGuyver arrows, just because it's simpler and it doesn't feel as much like a badly justified excuse for something we know wouldn't work in real life. But again, it doesn't really matter that much. It's a game, and in a game liberties will be taken.

The point is, you have no idea what sort of mission somebody is going to make. You should allow them the most options possible. For all you know, it might be that while exploring some crypt, the player accidently picked up and wore a cursed ring, and the rest of the missions deal with trying to figure out how to remove it. It wouldn't make sense if the player could just remove the ring in the loading screen.

Care to point out which OM had an object that ... 1. you got it right at the start. 2. is mission critical. 3. fails the mission on exit if not existant. IMO ALL the missions either give you something to do somthing with it, OR they are acquired during the mission and need to be carried to the end.

Simple example is if its a plot specific item. This is not a new concept in video games - plenty of them have un-destroyable craft, people, etc. because they are required for the plot. Thief OMs and FMs have been no different. Bottom line is that the FM author should be given the control, we shouldn't restrict them to what types of missions they can create.

Maybe it would be good to have an 'update_time' flag for entities? We could trigger a script function for timer updates on entites that have this set. This way it would also be easy to make timed missions or other time related stuff, like objectives expiring or similar.

Hmm, hadn't heard of that one. I'll have to check it out. Though, can you give me a quick spoiler? Don't say anything other than yes, or no: Is it an all out zombie fest? I don't really like zombie-laden missions. If there are a few zombies, that's okay. But I don't want to spend an hour in a crypt or anything. Don't clarify and tell me, "There are just a few zombies," or "there are no zombies." I don't want that to be that spoiled. Just say yes or no to whether or not it's an undead zombie fest. Thanks! PM me if necessary.

People have requested that feature because they want to have some choice over what they take with them. Some people don't want to be forced to take weapons. Others want to try iron-manning missions with no equipment. How hard is it really to add?

First the bad news: No landing on planets at all, except a few cut-scenes, and the physics are not very realistic - so in that respect no improvement in two decades, it's the same as the original Elite game. Apart from that, I'm really surprised that you hadn't heard of it. In fact I was surprised that I hadn't heard of it when someone at TTLG was talking about X2. Quick history: X was released years ago, then followed X2 and now X3 was released a few months ago. Gameplay: Same as Elite, free play as you fly around in first person perspective and dock at various space stations in various systems, trading goods and buying better equipemnt and better ships. Two big differences between Elite and X are that in X you can own more than one ship at the same time, and you can even buy space stations (factories) and start making serious money, if you can deal with the supply problems and such. Of course there are pirates etc and first-person space battles galore. In X2 you could fly around inside the space stations, but the trips from the station entrance to the docking bays became tiresome and so in X3 you always dock externally at space stations. You travel from star-system to star-system via 'star-gates', although later in the game you can get a jump-engine. There is an optional plot where you can accept a string of missions for the terra-corp company which make the game a bit more personal.

Thanks for the feedback guys, feels good to be back in biz. Pak: All of the vocals on Ruins. All I could do there would be to cut the sample up and rearange it, but I honestly don't see the point if the length remains the same... I understand DF's point as well as I see possible copyright issues. I uploaded it anyways because if it can't be used in the official release, there's always the possibility people can use it for their "private" missions. As for uploading the older ambients, it feels wrong to leave a thread with dead links, so if it's cool with sparhawk I'm gonna do that (about 21 Megs, that ok?). SubjEff: This got me thinking... when we're going for the the toolset approach, maybe more "conservative" Thief-style ambients were in order? I mean, if we want to reach as many people as possible, shouldn't the ambients be "more true" to the original style? I can certainly try to do that, but - Eric Brosius I am not. On the other hand, that three different people liked each a different ambient of those three best is certainly a good feeling. Thanks!

We certainly might be able to tie the independent missions together in a loose narrative of some kind. That's a good idea. We do plan on a serious, multi-mission campaign as well, however. That's the one that will need a great deal more time and energy.

From the perspective of making FMs for Thief, the value of the OMs is that they defined both the mythology and the gameplay. From the perspective of making FMs for TDM... well, let's be perfectly honest here-- the mythology of TDM is basically Thief with the serial numbers filed off. There's no need to establish it because in essence it's already established. So the pack-in campaign for TDM can treat plot as a secondary concern and concentrate on pure gameplay. Someone mentioned how different people like different aspects of the Thief universe. Don't fight that... run with it. Do something like "The Dark Mod: Chronicles" where the campaign is just a collection of unrelated missions, perhaps presented in flashback format. That would give the mappers the freedom to do whatever themes they want, without concern for any overarching plot.

Why do they need to be forced together into a campaign? That stifles the unique creativity of the individual mapmakers for no reason. Individual missions are just as useful for demonstrating new settings and features.

The existence of a campaign along with the release of the tools would serve an extremely valuable function-- establishing a baseline "style" for any future mods. Yes, it's great that FM authors will be able to customize practically everything about their missions. But from the player's perspective, it's also great to be able to start a new FM with certain valid expectations about how the gameworld will function. Things like how visible torches make you, how much noise footsteps make, how fast guards run, that sort of thing. If elemental things like that vary wildly from mission to mission, it will just annoy and frustrate most people. As Doug Church himself has said, "Thief is a game about territory. In each game the player and the AI have their safe zones, but to get to the player's goal they need to adjust that territory by changing the environment." Thus, to effectively influence the environment, players need to know the rules. Discovering the rules should be part of the learning curve for the game itself, not a challenge that every single FM poses. That's why an introductory campaign would serve to lay the groundwork for what the "expected" rules are, and then let FMs deviate from that on a special-case basis instead of for every little thing. That's pretty much how things developed with Thief FMs, so it should work just as well here.

We hope that FM authors will respect the Thief property and use Dark Mod to create 'Thief Inspired' missions. There is really no reason to use established characters. Providing you have a good story, the FM shouldn't need to 'borrow' from the Thief universe.

Hmm I wonder if I can get hold of a typical mediaeval helmet? There are some mediaeval societies floating around. If I can find a helmet, and I get organised enough, I could do some recordings and SPL measurements of various objects striking said helmet. A sufficiently padded helmet (and all mediaeval helmets I have seen were worn with felt or similar padding for both comfort and absorbing force), with the padding firmly attached to the inside of the helmet will significantly absorb the force of a fairly substantial whack to the head. A leather blackjack filled with shot will also distribute much of its force over a wide area. It wouldn't make that much noise, though it would probably be audible from 20 feet or so, depending on the accoustics of the area. Though audible, it wouldn't necessarily sound obviously like someone being attacked, however... A blackjack of the type in discussion hitting a padded metal helmet will distribute its force over a wide area, and the helmet will absorb a lot of the force and distribute it to the neck. The likelihood of this impact causing a knockout will largely depend on the angle of the blow - from behind the head, it will cause the head to move forward suddenly, and if the brain sloshes enough inside the skull, a knockout will occur, but realisticly, this will happen less than 30% of the time. If the blow is from directly above, the force will cause the vertebrae to compress and possibly break, and the result will be that either the neck is broken, resulting in death, or that the victim will be in excruciating pain, and will likely start screaming blue murder. Noisy guard running around looking for help! In any case, blackjacking someone wearing a helmet or not will be extremely risky in RL, as too much force will kill or severely maim the victim, too little force will simply cause momentary annoyance for the attackee. Therefore, blackjacking helmeted guards should have a random chance of success with a probability of about, say 10% (my guess without actually doing a series of tests) of actually causing a knockout, if you want to be at all realistic about it. and taking into account individual human variation (some people are more prone to blacking out than others), this guestimate should probably be even smaller. since I rarely used the blackjack in Thief (only when the game forced me to, like the first level of T2), I don't care that much, as long as missions don't force me to use the damn thing. Personally it is one of the things I would like to see excluded from TDM, but hey, I'm the minority here so I'll live with it... As far as I am concerned, oDDity is correct: helmeted guards should be extremely hard to KO, to the point of not at all.

I did something similar and then notched it back a bit. Ive uninstalled T3 though I MIGHT check out some of the few FMs that have come out. I take it as a sign of editor problems that there are only four missions on CheapThief, fact there is a dedicated link to the T3 FM tech support thread on Cheaps homepage. Anyone here tried out the FMs?

I am, however. I guess it depends on what sort of 'gameplay' you want, and what you mean by playable. For me good gameplay means sneaking around is just as difficult as if I were in a real, populated mansion trying to sneak around. For me good gameplay means using cover to hide behind, rather than being invisible in shadows. Shadows should help, as they do in RL, but you are not invisible or undetectable in them. I've played Thief to death a zillion times, and I now find wandering around invisible in shadows somewhat boring and unchallenging. I guess you could say I find it excessively playable. It is ridiculously easy to prance around in the shadows without the AI seeing you, even though you know that they should if they were real people in the same situation. That is bad gameplay IMO. I want the option to jack up the realism of the game to a level that is generally approaching what I would find in RL (as far as is possible with current technology). I want a much, much, much more intense challenge. I want daytime missions where there are no shadows to save you, and careful timing and patience are the only option. I want an extremely frustratingly difficult game that takes hours (days) of painstaking sneaking to finish a level. I want AI that will see, hear sense me as easily as a real human opponent would, in much the same way a real human would. I want to do it all without the use of weapons, and limited gadgets. I understand that I am probably in the smallest minority, and that I can't expect anyone to cater purely to my eccentric tastes, but it would be nice if at least there was the option (through difficulty settings or what have you). And if there is an implementation of sillhouettes that is not going to kill my framerates totally, even if it is not perfect, I'll take it.

Argh, this has been discussed a lot before. Yes, some team members have concerns that keeping track of silhouettes and AI lines of sight would be too frustrating, and others disagree. That's why, if we ever do find a way to implement it, we'll do extensive playtesting before putting it in the final version. Even simple hacks introduce a lot of complications if you think about it: How does the system know a doorway is a doorway? Are you relying on mapper placed brushes? If so, this is going to make the mapper's life hell, and may lead to maps with inconsistent behavior between missions and in the same mission if the mapper inconsistently placed the brushes. Those are the main reasons why special case brushes are bad. Even if the mapper did place some entity for every single bright surface, how are you going to update this in realtime to match the dynamic lighting? You might find a way to update for torches getting extinguished (although it would be hard since you'd have to make sure the torch was definitely casting on the object and you'd still have to take into account other light sources that were still on), but what about moving objects in front of light to cast a dark shadow on a surface that used to be bright and have a silhouetting entity? There wouldn't really be a way to detect this, since again we don't have access to the renderer to check if the surface is still bright or not.

oDDity is right - blackjacking every single guard in the level then running around free is no different than killing them all. I have a lot of fun on the missions where the blackjacking is restricted to a certain number. Way more tense, movie-like exciting things happen as a result. The problem is, without that arbritraty restriction, thief is to easy to reduce to a simple game of walk-behind-guard-whack, for each guard, till the level is empty. As far as gameplay is concerned, blackjacking is just killing without blood. Hopefully with our ideas to make it harder it won't be so simple.

They did fail to create a true stealth game - If you practise at swordfighting in Thief 1&2, you can become proficient enough to consistently kill every guard you come across, without any significant risk at all. Once you have figured out the AI and the swordplay mechanics, it is quite trivial to ironman your way through the game, and only on the levels where it automatically fails you for killing or being detected is it a problem. This is why there should be no swords (or weapons in general) for the player - they are not the weapon a stealthy, weedy thief would carry, they unbalance the game and turn it into a FPHF (First Person Hack-Fest), and they are generally just daft. If you want to play thief as a stealth game, dont pull out any weapons unless you have to. To really up the challenge, don't buy any gear between missions, and fire off all of your arrows at a wall when you start the mission so you can't use them in the mission. Don't use your sword, and only use your blackjack in the sections of the game that force you to (there aren't many). Only then you are playing a true First Person Sneaker. Install the difficulty mod that Ombrenuit mentioned.

Make Dark Mod missions?

I have to discent with general opintion on this one. I loved Morrowind. I liked digging into the story and having to track down different people's opinions to try to get some sort of ideas as to what was really going on. I guess I could see how it would be possible to get lost, since no one person could really give you a definitive answer. You had to talk to various characters and read between the lines to figure out what "really" happened. Even then there are some uncertainties. I'm going to say this, and probably take alot of flack for it, but if you play the main game the whole way through and talk to enough people, you'll find that Morrowind has one of the best plots of any game in recent memory. It has more to say about our modern world and the nature of "history" than any college course. The term "Apographia" doesn't even begin to cut it. As for the missions, some of them were a bit boring, but I guess i enjoyed a great number of them. I enjoyed the fact that I could go off and ignore the main plot for a while and just work on climbing the ranks in some petty factoin if I wanted to. Even if you didn't like the game though, you have to admit that Bethesda are the masters of mixing computer generated fractal worlds and overlayed content. They always are struggling to find the balance. In Daggerfall there was alot of fractal (in the Elder Scrolls Pantheon "Anu") and in Morrowind there was more overlayed human written content (in the Elder Scrolls Pantheon "Padomay"). I was tickled when I figured out that the residents of Tamriel had a cosmology and mythology that touched in places on what there world really was.... Particularly when I red the Redguard description of the "infinite snake that curls around itself, eating itself" and the world as "its skin". Pretty cool tribal description of a fractal procedurally generated universe. Anyway, enough fanboyism for the moment.

Well, to bring it back on topic..... I'm going to prepare to take a few rounds in the "War on Violence" and say that I actually liked some parts of GTA: Vice City. There was just something about driving aruond a city at a breakneck pace, running fromt the police while listening to Kate Bush that I couldn't get tired of. Note, that I particularly liked the driving around, doing stunts etc... There were parts of the game, like the freeform assasination missions, that I just skipped because I found them too objectionable. Still, the driving gameplay was fun for me. I spent alot of time doing the ambulence and pizza delivery mini-games. I was surprised at that, since I don't generally go for much in the arcade-action category, but I enjoyed the "emergent gameplay." Now, keep in mind that in real life, I'm a peaceful person who does positive volounteer work in the community and doesn't own a gun. (Ofcourse, as a side note, in some parts of the USA that makes me irresponsible for not being able to defend my neighbors against the government) I generally prefer more intellectual content in my games, but I do put up with a certain amount of "crap" because I figure it is the only way the makers can earn a living. For example, I enjoyed the Fallout series of RPG titles immensely. The first one had a very nice tragic arc. However, to play them you had to put up with alot of gratuitous violence (which was kind of part of the plot, sort of). I remember when I read the advertising copy about "turn your opponents into blood sausages" I almost didn't buy the game.

Okay... I think we can take it as a given that people will want to create TDM missions starring Garrett, or even recreate entire OMs. But of course, including Garrett's speech files or any other Thief assets in a TDM FM would be a copyright violation. So how about this-- Would it be possible to code TDM so that FMs can use assets stored in the original Thief CRF files? I'm certain this would be legal. It's exactly the same principal that's been protecting emulator authors for years now-- they prodvide the emulator, the end users provide the LEGALLY OBTAINED ROM DUMPS (wink-wink). So for TDM, end users would just copy SND.CRF, etc. from their (legally obtained) copies of TDP/TMA into the Doom3 folder and go. The CRF format itself isn't even proprietary-- they're just renamed ZIPs.

Do you guys have any plan to include any sort of multiplayer support to the dark mod? I'm sorry if you have said anything about this before but iv always dreamed of a game like thief, though i know this mod is COMPLETELY different, but with coop so i could take on the missions with a friend.