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ttlg - stuck in the past...


Bikerdude

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I just played through Circle of Strain for T1 this morning. I don't see TDM vs Thief as some sort of "Them vs Us" mentality. It is more of a "The mainstream industry won't provide us with a *modern* platform for stealth FMs, so some folks made one themselves."

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

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Bikerdude: Yes.

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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There are some nice people that ain't play Thief before.

 

Nbohrimore and rich_is_bored are nice guys.

 

But I'm getting surprised when reading posts like :" looking good,how to make this guy work with TDM ???? " or " Every T2 mapper must try DarkRadiant !!!

Edited by Shadowhide

Proceed with caution!

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Talking about the Thief series:

better get this one : "Thief - The COPMPLETE Collection" from Amazon.

For 9.95$ you get : Thief GOLD, Thief 2 & Thief 3

 

 

 

I added a review to it, should help raise its rating a bit!

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There are some nice people that ain't play Thief before.

 

Nbohrimore and rich_is_bored are nice guys.

 

But I'm getting surprised when reading posts like :" looking good,how to make this guy work with TDM ???? " or " Every T2 mapper must try DarkRadiant !!!

 

Thanks.

 

~~~~

 

Let's put it this way:

 

If you were on a team that creates sand sculptures and you passed by a home that had a terrific snow sculpture in the front yard, would you then wonder about inviting the snow sculpture artist to join your sand sculpture team?

 

Of course you would.

 

Dark Radiant was designed to be an interface that is welcoming to Dromed veterans in comparison to Doom 3's editor.

 

I can guarantee that almost any seasoned TDM fan will spend at least a few moments of idle speculation about the arrival of their favorite Thief FM author to this scene. It's not a slight against Thief, it's just a desire to see talented folks push TDM to it's furthest potential. Sure, there's a chance that the skills wont translate. Someone may be a master of distributing visuals over low-poly architecture or can paint static lighting in ways that don't fit in Doom 3's high-poly dynamic world. But that will never stop the imagination from wandering to the what-ifs of seeing an old master try out this new tool-set. If just one more TDM mapper of Fidcal, Komag, or Melan caliber is found amongst the Thief mappers then we would be tremendously fortunate. Of course we should never put-down the works of active Thief mappers. But that asking Thief mappers to try TDM is never intended as an insult to that community or their work. It is merely a natural curiosity about what TDM could be like if supported by the best of the best.

 

Do we need any more Thief veterans?

 

Hell no! The existing stable of authors are TERRIFIC!

 

It would really just be an extra bonus to see any old Thief masters arrive here to boost the numbers.

 

~~~

 

As much as this mod is built on the FM tradition, I think the true goal should be to attract NEW authors. Simply scavenging from the TTLG crowd is not a fruitful way forward.

 

We need authors who have an affinity for the subject matter but may come from different gaming backgrounds.

 

TES is a good starting point...

 

Are there any other realms of players that fit this affinity? I am dread to check-out World of Warcraft forums but it's certainly possible that they would like the pseudo-historical setting of TDM. What about Guild Wars, The Witcher, Dragon Age, Age of Conan, Everquest II forums? What about The Hitman series forums?

 

~~~

 

Rant (as if the above weren't one :laugh: )

 

One place that I know that has been positive about The Dark Mod is nvnews.net.

(Likely due to Doom 3 having a reputation for working better on nvidia...)

 

I was planning on reminding them about the progress of this mod but it appears I've been flagged as someone who is unworthy to post in their forums. This is likely due to my long-standing membership at Rage3d.com and my outspoken criticism of nvidia's dirty tactics in the GPU business. I find it doubly reprehensible that nvnews has added me to the banned list for my opinions when I consider the fact that Rage3d openly accepts amongst it's ranks die-hard nvidia fans.

 

If anyone meets the requirements to enter their little "censored walled-garden nvidia utopia" :wub: , please find the old "The Dark Mod" thread and revive it with current news.

 

Thanks.

 

Rant over

Edited by nbohr1more

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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If you were on a team that creates sand sculptures and you passed by a home that had a terrific snow sculpture in the front yard, would you then wonder about inviting the snow sculpture artist to join your sand sculpture team?

 

Of course you would.

 

why I would ??? this is compulsion ?

 

Yes,I left dromed behind and working with DR but its my own decision

 

Dark Radiant was designed to be an interface that is welcoming to Dromed veterans in comparison to Doom 3's editor.

 

you completely wrong.only conversation editor and stim system remind me of dromed,nothing else.these are two different editors and I think dromed is much more functional then DR

 

Dark Radiant was designed to be an interface that is welcoming to Dromed veterans in comparison to Doom 3's editor.

 

are you sure ? for example Fidcal's T2 mission "Night Watch" is much better than any TDM by him (at least for me)

 

Someone may be a master of distributing visuals over low-poly architecture or can paint static lighting in ways that don't fit in Doom 3's high-poly dynamic world. But that will never stop the imagination from wandering to the what-ifs of seeing an old master try out this new tool-set.

 

believe me , some T2 missions leave all currently TDM missions far behind by size and "dimension"

 

 

 

 

Any TDM player who never play Thief 1/2 before TDM will never feel this feeling.And trying to play first Thief's after TDM is unavailing,because T1/2 will looks like low-poly shit after TDM

 

Nbohrimore,you just don't know what you lose

Edited by Shadowhide

Proceed with caution!

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I have no problem at all with the visual fidelity of Thief or Thief 2.

 

I am pining to have the free time to play everything Thief I can get my hands on.

 

I liked my first taste of the game long ago and now TDM has made me appreciate the game style even more.

 

I know it seems that I have completely written-off Thief in favor of TDM but my main interest here is the wonderful ways that these developers continue to stretch the Doom 3 engine. Even if there weren't any big technical achievements here, it's truly wonderful to see TDM's art assets show-off the varied visual possibilities of Doom 3.

 

Don't mistake these fascinations with a foolish disregard for the past.

 

I am actually more archaic than you would realize. I am still getting over my 8-bit gaming era compulsion to play and replay missions without ever using "saves" which have always felt like a crutch to me from my arcade era background. So putting down the "old" Thief games (1998 still sounds futuristic to me :laugh: ) is not really my intention.

 

Someday, my wife will get off my back and my kids will be more self-sufficient, and I'll have more free time to dig through the old Thief Fan Missions and you'll see me raving over them. Until then I will be silent on the topic but don't mistake that silence for a disrespect of the game.

 

Also, don't mistake me for Aidakeeley or Aprilsister. I may post like crazy around here but I have never advised that anyone abandon playing Thief fan missions in favor playing TDM.

 

Since Aprilsister appears to be gone, the last person here that has been openly critical of the Thief 1/2 platform is Sotha.

 

He has earned the right to be critical though.

 

Think of it this way:

 

You might love the sound of a Stratocaster guitar in the hands of someone like Eric Clapton. But then some new guitar sensation might come along and find ways of squeezing new sounds from a Jackson guitar. This new wunderkind might say "Stratocasters suck" because he cant get it to make the music he likes. Even though it's a matter of opinion, the new player has some validity to criticize the old Stratocaster because it can't help him fulfill his musical vision.

 

Sotha could probably make some great Thief missions but that platform just doesn't hit the right tones for his style of music...

Edited by nbohr1more

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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Well, those are 2 things that were ADDED to DR, and they were added in a fashion so as to mimmick what Dromed had.

 

But I don't think anyone aimed to make DR a 'copy' of Dromed, just to make it as compatible as possible.

 

Dromed isn't more funtional, sorry to say. It has fewer functions. Some things like timing of brushes were really nice, but aren't needed in an engine that can do more to start with.

The only major difference other than interface and Dooms ability to handle more polys/dynamic shadows is the portal system.

It was nice that Dromed did that automatically for sure, but room brushing in Dromed wasn't exactly easy and that's not required at all with DR.

 

Portals can be a little tricky, but if you plan well they are much easier than room brushing in Dromed imo.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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d3 engine better than DE,but we talking about editing tool right ?

 

for example you have crazy idea : you want make mission where player playing as frog or undead revenant.You need to do a lot of work in d3 for this . if you want make it dromed , you need just edit PlayerFactory link a little....

 

 

Proceed with caution!

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Since Aprilsister appears to be gone, the last person here that has been openly critical of the Thief 1/2 platform is Sotha.

 

Sotha could probably make some great Thief missions but that platform just doesn't hit the right tones for his style of music...

 

Huh? Just to clarify, I do think that T1/T2 are great games, make no mistake. The atmosphere and gameplay are great in those games.

 

I found TDM no substitution for those games, but TDM seemed to hold great promise. That is why I became so interested in this.

 

That was BEFORE Grayman's work on TDM AI. After Grayman improved the AI from getting constantly stuck I now think that The Sneaking Game trophy belongs to TDM. TDM is improving at a drastic pace, T1/T2 do not improve as fast. Soon TDM will surpass T1/T2 in many aspects. Hardware requirements is probably the only field the future TDM cannot beat T1/T2.

 

That's the way I see TDM as the 'future' and T1/T2 the 'past.' Additionally: like someone else here on the forum said, it is really difficult to get T1/T2 even run on a modern machines. That further diminishes T1/T2 future outlooks. Once D3 gets opensourced, the engine can be kept afloat indefinately (Please correct if I'm wrong).

 

So all in all these comments do not mean that I don't like T1/T2. They are great games, that will never go away. I like those games. But eventually TDM is getting better and better and if the team keeps pushing new updates and improvements at the current rate, TDM will surpass old thief games very fast.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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That's the way I see TDM as the 'future' and T1/T2 the 'past.' Additionally: like someone else here on the forum said, it is really difficult to get T1/T2 even run on a modern machines. That further diminishes T1/T2 future outlooks. Once D3 gets opensourced, the engine can be kept afloat indefinately (Please correct if I'm wrong).

first :

That's the way I see TDM as the 'future' and T1/T2 the 'past.'
That is it.

second : we have Dark Engine source,s so engine will be modified and enchenced

Proceed with caution!

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for example Fidcal's T2 mission "Night Watch" is much better than any TDM by him (at least for me)

 

believe me , some T2 missions leave all currently TDM missions far behind by size and "dimension"

 

The reason for these two things is because we haven't seen many TDM authors being as ambitious as Thief authors yet, in planning and making really big and ambitious FMs. (We've seen a few already, of course.)

 

Fidcal can speak for himself why his TDM FMs haven't been as ambitious as Night Watch was... It might have something to do with just being older with more stuff going on, and the TDM set is still young so people are still feeling out building with it, and your first FMs on a platform might not be as ambitious as later ones. (He was the original one with the mantra: build your first FMs small.)

 

As for the relationship between that and DR. First I don't think there is that much relationship. I think when an author wants to be ambitious, they get inspired and will figure out their vision for whatever there is to build with.

 

But if anything, it might be that DR is so much *easier* to work with than Dromed that people can work on it to build a minor FM very easily... Whereas the challenge of Dromed weeds out some of that, and there's a bit of natural selection for ambitious projects getting through. But anyway I think TDMs ambitious projects are coming too. It's just a matter of the right authors getting the right inspiration at the right time for them.

 

Edit: I have high hopes for the Thief 2 source code too ... It'll be great to see it updated for modern machines, maybe some enhancements. Though I think I'd like it to stay largely vintage at this point, so I can play it as it was 10 years from now like I play Nintendo games on an emulator now.

 

Edit2: I said before, but I love Thief 2 & TDM FMs without any thinking one needs to dismiss the value of the other. So the whole "partisan" way of thinking is just alien to me. The one issue that comes up is probably just getting the controls mixed up when I switch between games, and things like the way mantling is harder in T2, the variation in the leaning, how nice the soft shadows look in T2 after seeing hard shadows for so long, but how clunky the T2 AI models, etc.

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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See even Sotha is a Thief 1/2 fan.

 

Sotha's blunt language ("primitive" :laugh: ) may sometime lead to the wrong impression but we are now clear that there was really only ever one Thief antagonist at these forums.

 

When Bikerdude brings up Thief in any critical way, it's always T:DS and not T1\T2. The same as any hardcore Thief 1/2 fan. And even there Biker has admitted that some of the T:DS FM's are well made and rival TDM.

 

So that should settle things.

Edited by nbohr1more

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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I don't know myself why my TDM FMs have not yet been as ambitious as NightWatch. I just do what comes to hand and the FMs write themselves somehow.

 

NW began as a tiny test FM inspired by Komag's tutorial with just the courtyard and then the kitchen and no story and grew and grew as ideas flowed.

 

Den 1 was written while I wrote the A-Z and only intended to exemplify that tutorial. At that time it was not possible to produce a finishable FM. But I improvised a Mission Complete gui and some other stuff and soon TDM was pushed a bit further so it could be done properly and released as a demo.

 

Chalice was done quickly I think so we had some FMs to release with TDM1.

 

Heart began as a speedbuild test but again ideas took over. I was fooling around with loot placement. I put various gems and stuff on a dresser to see how they looked and noticed that two red teardrop opals together formed a heart. How poetic is that! Everything else came from that.

 

Alchemist came from browsing abandoned stuff to see what I could steal ;) draw inspiration from and so on.

 

So there's no policy or intent. In the future I'm considering producing some very small FMs serialized once a month: "Farrell and the Reckless Lord", "Farrell and the Pit of Ultimate Despair", "Farrell and the Lost Cause" and so on as a kind of quick and dirty non-ambitious fun. But it will probably end up as a mega 5 year giant marathon story or something. I just don't know. Once ideas take me over I can't stop. :laugh:

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second : we have Dark Engine source,s so engine will be modified and enchenced

Modify and enhance it enough, and people will start to murmur - "yes, it is nice with the new brush limit and 1024x1024 normalmapped textures -- but is it Thief?"

 

WRT mission sizes, a large one always takes more time, and it is not even a linear equation. After a while, things become conceptually, technically and architecturally complicated in a way they don't in small and medium-sized FMs. Which adds to building times. Here is what the Night Watch readme had to say:

Build: This is my first mission started as a small editing practice mansion heist not long after doing Komag's Dromed tutorial (and it shows!) early 2003. But I got carried away as ideas started to flow. Contents of missions 1, 2, and some of 3 rough finished as one mission sometime in 2004 but there were massive frame lag and render problems so it was all totally abandoned for months. Restarted, split into three missions, and patched and bodged off most of the severest problems. Virtually 'finished' early 2006 but Mission 3 then split into 3 and 4. Finally 'finished' end August 2006. Alpha test playing through September, October, into November. Beta testing and polishing till early months of 2007.

That is more than three years. Wow. :huh:

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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That reminds me I'd given up on dromeding after that bug wrecked all that work. I'm not sure but I think I'd stopped playing Thief. Then a relative asked if there were any TDS FMs. After talking it over and looking at various Thiefy things on the net including my own abandoned FM he said why don't you split it into different levels? I said I'd already considered it but couldn't see how to split it because it wasn't linear. But that one conversation started me thinking about it again and eventually I could see a way to do it.

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Fidcal: What about to remake your Night Watch FM for TDM? Perhaps, this won't be as interested as this was long time ago, but, I believe, this will be a step in the right direction: technically, TDM is much more powerful than the Dark Engine, and your remake of NW could demonstrate it for everyone.

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Fidcal: What about to remake your Night Watch FM for TDM? Perhaps, this won't be as interested as this was long time ago, but, I believe, this will be a step in the right direction: technically, TDM is much more powerful than the Dark Engine, and your remake of NW could demonstrate it for everyone.

We have discussed this before. The idea is entirely impractical.

  • First, redoing years worth of work doesn't fit most peoples' idea of entertainment (and editing as a hobby is entertainment).
  • Second, game levels are inherently shaped by the technology and assets used in their construction, much like your materials and tools would limit what kind of house you could build from them. You would have to do something different with sacks of cement and a pile of iron girders than from a bunch of bricks and iron logs, and even a very basic plan would have to accommodate their characteristics.
  • Third, a reworked level would almost certainly be less interesting to people. (It might generate some specific interest as a comparative piece, but this wouldn't be likely to compensate the loss elsewhere.)

All in all, efforts are better placed in new projects - and people can judge them and compare them all the same. You could, for instance, compare Prowler of the Dark to its sequel, Return to the City - or when it is completed (hopefully soon), my other speedbuilding project, Fiasco at Fauchard Street, as missions of a similar scope. Reconstructing the first is just not worth the investment in my eyes. It might be if I still had as much free time for my hobbies as I did a few years ago. But I don't.

Edited by Melan

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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