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ttlg - stuck in the past...


Bikerdude

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Well, the whole Garrett thing is usually one of the main arguments at TTLG. He was a great main character and all, but I really don't understand clinging to him so much. Like you said, and I've argued at TTLG, once you're in a mission and playing I really don't feel the need to be Garrett or any other specific thief. If the author just called me 'thief' I'd be satisfied.

 

I know Garrett has the whole story line behind him and everyone is familiar with it, but it also leads to a lot of 'conflicts' in existing missions, either with the originals or FM to FM. Everyone always puts in their own pieces to the puzzles anyway, and only a very select few authors really try to stick to the original plot/story to a T, and even then they can conflict each other.

 

When I'm robbing a mansion I'm not thinking the entire time 'I'm Garrett'. I'm just playing. To me it's more like reading a book about thieving that I enjoy more than reading a book about Garrett thieving.

 

I guess that's one thing I really enjoy about TDM. We are no longer stuck in that mold, it's more open and free without as many noteable conflicts.

 

It's funny because the Garrett argument always came up a lot. And having not played Rose Cottage I had no idea it wasn't Garrett. But I do know how everyone raved about that mission, so it seems there's a bias of non-garrett in TDM, but non-garrett in T2 is fine so long as the mission is stunning.

Now maybe we haven't peaked with 'stunning' missions for TDM yet, there are some pretty good ones. So does the lack of Garrett still apply to those same people? And TDM missions are only getting better.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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I don't really think the "lack of Garrett" has much to do with it. Some of the most popular and memorable Thief fan missions had nothing to do with Garrett or thieving whatsoever, such as Rose Cottage where you play a paranormal investigator with no thieving background (IIRC). If people aren't flocking to the Dark Mod it is most likely due to more practical concerns, like the need to obtain and set up a new game and learn a new toolkit. I don't think anyone really expects a total overnight abandonment of the classic series in favour of TDM, any more than the whole world is going to stop using Windows in favour of Linux just because it is technically superior in some ways.

 

+1

 

Never underestimate the power of conservatism. Thief is the thing that is. TDM is the thing that will be. Of course they will reject the new things...

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Now maybe we haven't peaked with 'stunning' missions for TDM yet, there are some pretty good ones.

 

I'm quite sure that's entirely true. There are indeed very good missions, and they do get better, but I don't think any of the existing ones even approach the limit of what could be done with the D3 engine, particularly with regards to lighting, modelling or textures.

 

Never underestimate the power of conservatism. Thief is the thing that is. TDM is the thing that will be. Of course they will reject the new things...

 

That is true to an extent, but I think there are more understandable reasons too. It is still early in the TDM's history as a released toolset, and we are still fixing and improving core functionality such as blackjacking and AI behaviour, not to mention the things which are still on the to-do list like making mines work reliably. There probably is a feeling that the mod isn't really "there" yet, and that gameplay strategies that are taken for granted in the Thief series may not work well in TDM because of bugs or unimplemented features, leading to a frustrating experience.

 

There is also the fact that TDM's system requirements are higher than vanilla D3 and much more demanding than classic Thief, probably even T3 in some cases. This might well put people off with lower-end systems who are used to getting fairly good performance of the original games.

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...I have a feeling, since T4 and any future Thief-s won't be moddable, that Dark Mod is the end of the line for Thief-like maps, which is why it's good it's open source so we can continue to develop on our own. ...

So thief 4 won't be moddable? No fan missions? Will they use their crystal dynamics engine?

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I thought I read somewhere they were already leaning against moddability, but I don't know really and can't even remember if that was a credible source (might have been from when they were still talking about the CD engine too). I shouldn't have worded it as a given, since it's not AFAIK. But I was mostly going off their past history with previous games.

 

But it's worth noticing that maybe they didn't allow modding in their CD engine games because it's not an easy engine for it, whereas Unreal is better with so many resources already publicly out there. But I'm still a bit pessimistic. A lot of Unreal-based games have come out recently without the ability to mod, and again they don't have the history for it. That said, Mirror's Edge wasn't really made to be moddable either, but people still managed to make maps in the Unreal Editor... So anything's possible. And if they do, I'd have to admit I'd be curious to see the kinds of T4 FMs that come out... I'm not the dogmatic partisan type at all.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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I'm surprised that other recent Eidos properties engines' aren't speculated about wrt T4:

 

Kayne & Lynch 2

 

Modified "Glacier" engine from the Hitman series. Advertises dynamic light and interaction capabilities

 

 

Just Cause 2

 

"Avalanche Engine 2.0" created by shader programmer extraordinaire "Humus"

 

 

Though neither look any more mod-able than the current prospects... :wacko:

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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It's funny because the Garrett argument always came up a lot. And having not played Rose Cottage I had no idea it wasn't Garrett. But I do know how everyone raved about that mission,

 

 

Holy crap you haven't played that mission, go play it, I beg of you, for the good of Rose Cottage, and for yourself, you owe it to yourself to play. The opening sequence will make you say, *Holy Shit*, well maybe not you, it did me. Its stunning, absofrigginlutely stunning. And the best opening AVI...ever......period. Hell man do you even have T2 installed?

 

Here you go. Here is the Intro on Youtube. If that doesn't make you want to play, I don't know what will.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc9KbM5N850

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Heh, I have that video separately on my harddrive just to watch it, and I do ... along with the final video for Calendra's Legacy.

 

And Rose Cottage is awesome. It came out on the same day as my FM, so that makes it even cooler for me.

 

Sat never got to finish 7th Crystal 2, but did you know, if you open up the final mission of 7th Crystal in Dromed you see he went ahead and actually built the prisons underneath the courthouse, as if revving up for the prison break already then. I thought that was sort of cool.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Taffers own the Thief games, have them installed, and they only need to download an FM and run it through DarkLoader/GarrettLoader. TDM is like starting over, and I don't know how to crystallize the concept for some of you, but you'll continue to have to convince people to purchase and download entirely different software to reside on old hard drives alongside the established and working Thief FM system people have down to an art. Taking up new time and space, spending more money on a game that takes up drive space (don't assume money and technical proficiency are common and in decent supply, nor online purchasing)--a game that has no interest or value in and of itself to those taffers, and a very different market a good portion of taffers frown upon. It's not about being stuck in the past. That crap is frikkin' old, I'm so sick of hearing that spew. It's about being comfortable in the present and future as far as one can see. An analogy: Comfortable shoes that feet never tire in, or a different brand of shoe that needs breaking in? It's not about Garrett. He's an old "friend" that is nice to see, except when he's obviously an imposter, and it's not about how stunning the mission is, but there is a pacing and feel that people like and feel most at home in, and that feel, more than the character, can be called "Garrett." You can't force anything, and any posts that scoff at sentimental rigidity are a guaranteed image destroyer. Each game has it's legendary myths and facts, and the correct information needs to be repeated. There are taffers that don't want FMs in Thief Gold or T3Ed, and there are taffers who don't want T2 FMs. Quite a lot of them are burnt out on the OMs, but thoroughly enjoy regular FM contributions like a weekly television series. Just don't tell them the channel they love is old and outdated and that they should try another channel. They are comfortable where they are, and not looking tot he past at all. If you pay attention, you will see that with nearly 1000 FMs, they only really care about the next ones coming and even claim to be bored, even as they extol the virtues of any of the hundreds they could still load up and play!

A skunk was badgered--the results were strong.

I hope that something better comes along.

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Quite a lot of them are burnt out on the OMs, but thoroughly enjoy regular FM contributions

There are also people, like me, who can't enjoy the Thief games at all anymore because they played them for years and need to play something new. I can only speak for myself but I think many feel the same way.

And, in the end, it's not the players but the people who build the missions that decide which game "dies" or doesn't.

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Don't get too worked up there jrt7, don't forget many of us were authors for some of those FM's and we all enjoyed the series and many of us still do.

 

And sure, we get the whole buying new system for a game thing. But a lot of people have new systems that run Doom3/TDM fine.

 

But you can't say the Garrett thing doesn't come into play. If I wanted to waste my time arguing it I could dig up all the responses at TTLG that say that exact thing. It's not everyone sure, but for some people that IS the determining factor. For some people it's hardware, I think we can all agree that buying a new system isn't cheap and not everyone can do it, I really don't think too many people argue that point at all. But as far as Doom3 being too expensive IF they have a system capable of running it IS a bit far fetched. $10 really isn't very much at all for a game these days.

 

I'm completely fine with people doing whatever they want, still doesn't mean I don't understand why they are so locked on Garrett that they refuse to play TDM because it's 'Not-Garrett' when the gameplay is practically identical.

And 'stunning' missions DO have something to do with it. It has always been the case, if a mission is not Garrett and not very good people voice opinions about that, if it's stunning and not Garrett they still rave over it.

I was around TTLG making mission long before you showed up to play them, I know the forums quite well.

 

And maybe read into the thread a little better. Sure the title is 'TTLG stuck in the past', but that was the OP's opinion, much of this thread is discussing if it is/isn't, why, and other things like what is the future of gaming.

 

You seem to think it's an all out assault of TTLG when it's not.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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I don't think it's Garrett per se, but something of the "spirit" of a game. People want to tap into some kind of authentic connection with this experience they had when they first got the game, and still capture its spirit. I can understand it. But others here have a point when they say it's basically the same gameplay. And spirit (or a person's intuitions about it) can blind as much as inspire if you don't stay open minded. Sometimes something new can have just as much spirit and heart involved, which Dark Mod does IMO. And great spirit can be tucked away in hidden corners. That's the cool thing about exploring the hidden corners of cyberspace, which I think Dark Mod still is as well. (Also there's the idea that new spirit doesn't diminish old spirit. Quite the contrary, in this case it honors it.)

 

I remember the big debate when people were moving from T1 to T2 FMs and, if you can believe it, some people were complaining that Thief 2 FMs weren't authentic enough!! It's true. Insane, but true. I still remember Komag making the strong argument that T2 is basically exactly like T1 just better (graphics, AI, scripts, etc), so there's no good reason to really build on T1 again; just make the same FM in T2. He got flak for it, but it was a good argument once you took it with an open mind. Dark Mod is of course not exactly like T2, but it is the next generation, and many systems are better just in virtue of taking advantage of more processing power in the current generation of computers.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Heh, I have that video separately on my harddrive just to watch it, and I do ... along with the final video for Calendra's Legacy.

 

"This video contains content from SME. It is not available in your country. "

 

Oh well..

 

And Rose Cottage is awesome.

 

Since I don't have a working T2 installation, I don't think I will ever play :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Taffers own the Thief games, have them installed, and they only need to download an FM and run it through DarkLoader/GarrettLoader.

 

Tell this to the MacOS or Linux users... who have a working D3 installation - but can't get T1 or T2 to run (or don't even own it ;) Btw, where do all the younger people buy T1 or T2?

 

 

In any event, I don't think the argument "but it needs D3" holds any value. Because even if it was a standalone free game, people who haven't played TDM will find any other argument like "but it is such a huge download", "I don't have the space", "my computer is not fast enough" etc etc.

 

While in reality they just try to argue why they don't want to try it - and at the same time waste their time missing out on TDM.

 

In addition, I still don't understand the fixation on "old Tx die-hard fans". TDM should instead try to catch new players, they outnumber Thief fans probably by 1:100 or even more.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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I remember the big debate when people were moving from T1 to T2 FMs and, if you can believe it, some people were complaining that Thief 2 FMs weren't authentic enough!! It's true. Insane, but true.

Hi. That story is true. That guy is me. Me, me, me. Thief 2 is lesser Thief. Not technically, but spiritually. It is less raw, but also less visionary, less Lewis Carrol mind-bending, less authentic in its themes. It substitutes detail work for genius.

 

I hope people are happier now that I have cleared things up. You are all welcome! :P

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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\m/ \m/

 

Pretty hardcore Melan... :ph34r:

 

(So instead of the opportunity to rectify T3, Melan sees TDM as the chance for an alternate universe T2... :laugh: )

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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The *game* was spiritually lesser. I thought so too. The Dark Project was just a magical experience through and through, and T:MA was a technically interesting and fun stealth game with a good story, but not the same magic and mystique.

 

But Komag's whole point was that for making an FM none of that really matters. What matters is that the T2 version of Dromed is better for making an FM, and T2 the better platform for playing it. It's the SAME FM just better. Then maybe some people got into the assets themselves not having the same magic, like the actual texture art direction, where I thought the argument just starts to break down from there. (I also happen to think that as far as FMs go, T2 actually has the larger share of really great ones, but that's another thing.)

 

The unfortunate mixing of "game" and "platform" is I think something Dark Mod runs into again and again, too.

 

BTW, the one I was thinking about going on about T1 was I think Spike14(?), the kid that made a very detailed Tutorial for T1, and people wondered why all that otherwise very appreciated attention and detail when the momentum had clearly shifted to T2 Dromed for practically everybody... And then Spikey would just put his foot down like it was just out of the question he'd do a tutorial for T2 Dromed and he insisted the FMs weren't as good IIRC. That same kind of bizarre & curiously passionate resistance is what I sense in some of the reaction to Dark Mod, bizarre just because if you really love stealth gameplay it's hard to understand how you could love one version of it so passionately and be so fiercely resistant to another. It's an apt comparison I think.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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But Komag's whole point was that for making an FM none of that really matters. What matters is that the T2 version of Dromed is better for making an FM, and T2 the better platform for playing it.

Which is why I made all but one of my FMs for Thief 2, even though I originally wanted to go with Thief 1. Some things are still missing in the T2 code, like vantage points, which made archers in the original game much more dangerous and hence intersting, but you can get reasonably close if you'd like that.

 

Also, Spike14's tutorial was very good. Komag's could teach editing very well, while Spike14's was just full of practical advice for implementing specific features in missions, including really complex ones like the trail the assassins objective or complex time locks.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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I agree with the folks who say there was something magical about T1. Part of it was the ambient sounds, part of it was the vocals, and part of it was probably just because I played that game first. I've played a lot of T1 FMs and T2 FMs. While there are lots of great T2 FMs like Wicked Relics, Saturio Returns Home and Heist Society, there have been a lot of FMs that were just too linear. Some felt like cookie-cutter levels out of a console game like Halo where we're just going from point A to point B. This isn't meant to insult anyone because I'm not mentioning any of the names of these FMs, but I didn't see as many linear missions like this for T1.

 

I really believe that for an effective stealth mission, there must be at least some form of player choice of where to go/how to proceed with the objectives. It can't just be "go through that sewer over there, climb up in this one room reserved for you, work your way through the house to the front by going from room to room, and then come back out the same way you came. It leaves no room for experimentation. What if I want to enter from the roof? What if I want to try my luck with the (usually heavily guarded) front door?

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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but I didn't see as many linear missions like this for T1.

 

I don't think this is that fair of a thing to say, not because T1 doesn't have non-linear FMs or T2 not have linear FMs. But when we're talking about literally 100s and 100s and 100s of FMs, probably 100s of them linear and 100s of them non-linear for both, I don't think you can just make a blanket claim like this that means much.

 

Especially when T1 has like 150 FMs total and T2 has like 700, the meaning of the numbers is already going to be off. T2 may have twice as many non-linear FMs as there are even T1 FMs out there, and you could still say that's less than half of them, but even that is a big thing. (And I suspect it's more than half anyway. Actually I have no idea.)

 

But even allowing for that, I'm not sure it's right that T1 is more non-linear all around than T2. A lot of T1 FMs were people still learning how designing a stealth map even works, whereas when T2 hit its stride people had a lot more experience with it and I think they knew to keep maps open and non-linear, at least mappers that were aware of it. (There were a lot more authors for T2, so maybe less hardcore for the average author than T1 authors, but still probably more hardcore mappers for T2 too.)

 

I think you're just thinking of maybe a few dozen examples, which is fair to compare and there your comment makes sense, but just for those FMs, not the entire set of all T1 & T2 FMs I think.

 

As for TDS & Dark Mod, there have been so few FMs released so far that it might not be fair to make any general claims at all.

 

............................................

 

Edit: Moving back to a completely different topic, you know what else I'd really love in my dream game engine/editor? A built-in 3D modeling program like Lightwave ... maybe even zBrush if we're lucky. I'd love to just be able to throw down a sphere into a room or on a building, with lots of pixels I can push and pull until it looks like exactly the object I want there, map a texture on it and I can manipulate the shaders on it right there (Unity like), make a quick clip copy around it, maybe a lowerpoly version with the higher poly textures baked in. Then I can have objects fit just for that scene without any program swapping or pipeline. I think if I could do that, I might go wild and make an outrageously elaborate baroque little artistic world one room at a time, maybe only getting a dozen rooms done, but they'd look epic.

 

I'm not even thinking yet of a built in animation editor, though of course that'd be the next step. At the end of that road, you might have the whole pipeline start to finish in one system, modeling, directly painting the model, weighting, rigging, & animating AI, with direct access to the ancillary stuff like shaders and scripts. And never having to leave the editor through the whole process. (Ok, I'd be fine with leaving sound and ambient music to other programs, and some Photoshop stuff, things like that.)

 

BTW, I recall the talk that with megatextures you can custom paint them right through the editor. Then when they talk about voxels virtualizing geometry in a similar way (?), I wonder if you can push and pull whatever their version of polys is to arbitrary levels of detail in the editor and get the feature I'm thinking about... But I don't really know about it. Just dreaming of what would be cool.

 

Edit2: Just saw a video of the Crytech 3 editor and it has the zBrush idea, along with some other cool stuff. Might be fun to build with it if the gameplay made it worth it (which it probably won't).

-

more on the editor itself. Does look fun. (Seems that's for cinema, not gaming, but it shows what will come eventually.)

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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voxels dont use polys, its a dot, or a point with no faces. the engines render what dot can be seen from your view and dont draw the dot that cant be seen, that one dot exists once, but redrawn millions of times, so it uses the amount of processing power to render the one dot.

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voxels dont use polys, its a dot, or a point with no faces. the engines render what dot can be seen from your view and dont draw the dot that cant be seen, that one dot exists once, but redrawn millions of times, so it uses the amount of processing power to render the one dot.

 

Yeah I remember it as something like that. That's why I used the weird (probably unfortunate) term "whatever its equivalent of pixel is" (it doesn't really have an equivalent), but I meant you'd be pushing and pulling abstract location values. But the way you described it was my basic point. Molding it would be like painting on a texture... very easy to arbitrarily shift around the values without any (or much) extra processing-load to process it since it's virtualized and the value is already there, nothing extra putting it here vs there. A vast complex rugged terrain would be like a flat plain, and you could mold the whole world into as fine detail as you like without worrying much about it. (I think about that video with the perpetual zoom-in into a mini cave system.) That's what I understood, anyway.

 

I was just thinking about the potential (and fun?) of building such a world with such attention to unique detail, similar to the potential of painting a megatexture into as much unique artistic detail as you like. OTOH, sounds like a lot of work.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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