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Thief 2 fan patch - V1.19


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http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085&page=15&p=2144391&viewfull=1#post2144391

 

HOLY CRAP, Le Corbeau connected back on Ariane4ever !!!!

 

He posted this (roughly translated) :

 

The Raven is the messenger. From his perch, he watches the shadows who found themselves back.

 

DromEd.exe @ 0x14A701 change 02 to 01

ShockEd.exe @ 0x18EC11 change 02 to 01

 

What would it do ?

 

http://ariane4ever.free.fr/ariane4ev...p=28466#p28466

Edited by jaxa
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I wonder how many people are thinking along the same lines:

 

 

Great news, maybe we will eventually get the GPL release of the source codes. Playing Thief 2 in Linux natively would be really nice. Of course, ATM all this lays in hands of some unaware lawyers who can botch the deal faster than one can blink. Anyway, if the source code goes GPL, The Dark Mod would go completely obsolete

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It's from RPGCodex forums, I believe. But I've found the same sentiment in a few places during my regular searches for TDM elsewhere on the web. There seems to be a general impression that this will allow T2 to look as good as TDM, that this will stop the flow of T2 mappers to TDM (if they only knew), that this will allow T2 to compete with TDM, etc.

 

I have to admit, I do like the look of the new T2 water almost more than ours.

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They don't know what they're talking about. The engine isn't designed to handle the workload the D3 engine can currently handle. Sure, they could spend another couple of years completely rewriting the engine but then the original missions would no longer look right. They would have to retexture and relight everything. They're two very different engines.

 

In any case. It's a wonderful release and I am happy to see the games get some much needed fixing.

 

We can only hope that the community is appreciative enough to support both platforms. I would hate to see close to a decade of work simply ignored.

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New T2 water? Are you referring to this? If so, that's nothing to do with 1.19.

 

Oh, I got the impression it was (from the title of the video, for starters). Maybe they're just saying that an earlier water mod looks better now?

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TDM will always be the home of FM's with flickering flames and torch bearing guards patrolling the streets.

 

Melan and Biker have done a great job of evoking the Thief 1 feel in their missions and I imagine that will continue but

the defining difference is always going to be missions like The Beleaguered Fence where the dashing away from moving

torchlight is a game of it's own. Only TDM has such experiences.

 

When fully dynamic light and normal maps are running in Thief 2, then let the worrying start. In fact, don't even start worrying till they start replacing AI and assets with high-poly versions.

 

I have no qualms with authors sticking with mostly static lighting situations in TDM but those who venture into moving lights, torches, etc will ensure that TDM continues to distinguish itself from Thief 2.

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 think this is competition for TDM in the technical sense (although expectations can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies) - it is an excellent facelift and expansion of possibilities and accessibility for a classic game.

 

The implementation of new assets and features will not necessarily work as perfectly as people think; add too much, and they will miss "that classic Thief experience" (and hey, lest we forget, I won that contest :laugh: ). Actually, playing the updated Bafford demo, I was looking at the high-poly objects they added to it, and couldn't help but think "hey, that doesn't look right". Maybe if they had high-res textures around them, they wouldn't stand out like a sore thumb... but then we'd need better geometry, and normals, and so on, and then "would it still be Thief"? I mean, we get that a lot.

 

This is a great accomplishment, and some people will do wonders with it, but it is not a miracle formula that will make people into super-editors. Contrary to common beliefs, it is not Dromed's bugs or limits that is the greatest hurdle before making a mega-mission like you always dreamed of. I mentioned this upthread. It is not particularly hard to make a small mission, but a "feature-length", "7000+ brushes" mission is already several months worth of work (l made two of them, one took 9 months and the other 11, and I had more time than I do now). After the simple act of building, add the increasing complexity of the design as well. Mission X would have been easier to make with NDromed, but NDromed doesn't give you the ability to just make Mission X's equivalent, "only larger and better".

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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 all of you. The people saying things like that don't strike me as having much sense of how TDM actually differs if they think this patch is on the road to "replacing" it. They're still different engines & systems. But I'm very happy to see 1.19 and knowing that T2 is going to be able to grow up with new systems.

 

Yeah it is sort of ironic that T2 gets all these updates and people are suddenly raving fans, but TDM doing the same things but even better get rage from people that think it's "departing from the original feel"! (In fairness, some people on the TTLG forums don't want to see too much change either.) I also want T2 to stay in range of its original feel... I'm ok with it, e.g., getting rid of the light banding (although that could have a stylized look to it too), but I wouldn't want to see it ditching the light baking and going to realtime lighting because that would kill its original aesthetic. And too many highpoly models wouldn't look right. The patch is still reasonable on that with what it did I think.

 

The one thing I'm worried about is that Tos's Multiplayer doesn't seem to be compatible with the patch! I really like playing coop FMs, so I really hope this gets fixed, or I'll have to just have a 2nd vanilla T2 install for it.

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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[...] Actually, playing the updated Bafford demo, I was looking at the high-poly objects they added to it, and couldn't help but think "hey, that doesn't look right". [...]

Do you mean the demo which was uploaded along with the patch? Or a fan version?

I tried to play the training mission in Thief 1 but I think the new lightningsystem destroyed the first objective: "Stay in the dark." The AI always says: I can see you. So I sadly can't complete the mission. :-(

 

I think in terms of graphics Thief 2 won't reach TDMs level of detail in architecture and technical achievements (speculars, bump mapping) at any time. I guess people are think that after 1.19 1.20 will come soon with a ton of improvements at the graphicsside as well. But who knows...

 

About the hexediting of the executables: If this is a marketing paperchase by Eidos like Valve did with Portal 2... oh boy!

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Anyway, if the source code goes GPL, The Dark Mod would go completely obsolete

If eye candy was the only difference between T2 and TDM, this may be so, but I think it misses the key difference - I mean, this patch isn't going make the AI in T2 start behaving like those in TDM. (Is it?)

 

Plenty of room for both, definitely.

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Had a quick blast on the first level of Thief 2 and it really is beautiful. Whoever did this. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!!!

 

Are there really that many noticable changes even to the normal gameplay? I thought this was a patch only for DromEders??

I normally used DDfix and stuff for playing it.

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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Are there really that many noticable changes even to the normal gameplay? I thought this was a patch only for DromEders??

I normally used DDfix and stuff for playing it.

There is a patch for Gamers and DromED'rs, and the 1.19 patch goes far beyond DDfix in man respects, but 3 things you will notice instantly are the FPS will be more fluid, the shadows wont have any colour banding and particle effects will be superior.

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Can someone please make a comparison video with and without the patch? I just bought Thief Gold and T2 (again) on GOG.com, but before I install those games, I'd like to know i it's worth it.

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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Can someone please make a comparison video with and without the patch? I just bought Thief Gold and T2 (again) on GOG.com, but before I install those games, I'd like to know i it's worth it.

 

Worth? It's free, and it's an update for Thief 1, 2 and System Shock 2. It's totally worth.

 

From the readme:

 

This is an unofficial patch for Thief II: The Metal Age (T2) which updates the game from v1.18 to

v1.19, providing improved support for modern hardware and correcting many known bugs.

 

Plain and simple. If you would like to play the game on modern hardware, install this patch. There are many reports of missions that used to lag are now buttery smooth. The patch improves performance quite a bit, especially on FM's.

 

You no longer need DDFix or the widescreen patches. It's all done natively within the dark engine now.

 

A small sample of changes and fixes

-----------------------------------

 

Renderer:

- Added windowed mode

- Added single display mode option - no resolution change between menus and game

- Added ingame support for all common resolutions, including widescreen

- Added support for 32-bit color

- Textures can now be automatically promoted to 32-bit, improving quality and effectively eliminating the palette limit

- Added UI framerate cap option to avoid GPU fan spinning up in UI

- Added DDS/PNG image support

- Added full 24/32-bit TGA/BMP image support

- Increased the maximum number of frames allowed in animated textures from 20 to 99, and increased the allowable filename length for animated textures (before the underscore) to support more than 7

- Animated texture rate can now be specified via a material file for that texture

- Fixed a bug where Transparency property didn't (correctly) apply on objects that contain transparent polys

 

General:

- Replaced video player lib with an FFMpeg based one to play cutscenes. LGVid.ax or other codecs are no longer required

- Option to use OpenAL (if available) instead of DirectSound. Includes support for audio effects in Windows 7 without an EAX-enabled driver (e.g. ALchemy)

- Added "head_bob" config var to control amount of head bob

- Added mousewheel support to options menu

- Fixed player ground contact tracking when walking off an object (caused footstep sounds to get "stuck" on previous material)

- Fixed sound cap per schema type bug and upped max sound channels to 48

- Changed screenshot output format to BMP and also added support for PNG screenshots

- Changed mouselook sensitivity to be resolution independent

- Added check to avoid trying to open files with reserved system name like com ports

- AIs now breathe from their head instead of their stomachs. They will no longer drown when up to their waist in water.

- Lowered player crouch height by a tiny fraction so he's less likely to get stuck on 4 unit tall spaces

- Added better support for binding actions to the mouse wheel (can bind wheel up and wheel down as separate actions, with modifier key support)

- Fixed star rendering

- Added "log_player_pos" command that dumps current player pos to log file (when enabled)

- Added the ability to detach from ladders by crouching

- Improved mantling a bit and added optional new mantling algorithm with lower failure rate

- Fixed a bug which limited number of sound channels to 16 even if more were selected

- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused doors to float away into infinity

- Fixed (or at least greatly improved) a bug with edge triggered OBBs sometimes failing to detect collision (in particular for slow moving objects)

- Fixed framerate dependent speed issue for camvators/moving terrain (with collision type: none)

- Added "fixed_star_size" option for resolution independent star size

- Fixed some bugs when attaching to a ladder from water.

- AIs who are facing very close to a wall will no longer turn to face south when the game begins

- Health bar drawing adjusted in widescreen

- Added option to fix arm rendering

- Added AA to rendering of loadout screen items

- Fixed pickpocket count bug that would always show 1 more maximum pickpocket than there actually was.

- Added "Blocks frobs" property, allowing objects to block frobs of objects behind them (e.g. to stop frobbing items through safe doors)

- Added option to left-align map notes text

- Made navigation of map/objectives screen a little bit more in-game friendly (screen can also be closed with space, arrow key navigation and return to switch map/obj)

 

DromEd:

- Lightmaps are now properly displayed in the editor 3D view

- Added support for HW rendering in editor viewports

- Increased the maximum number of visible on-screen terrain polies from 1024 to 20480

- Increased the maximum number of visible on-screen objects from 128 to 1280

- Added some safety checks to object scaling operations to prevent objects with 1.#INF scale

- Fixed a crash when computing pathfinding with an improperly linked moving terrain object in the mission. An ignorable assert is thrown and the object is skipped gracefully instead of crashing.

- Prevented a crash if you apply a model of one creature type to an object assigned a different creature type

- Fixed "Attempt to mark from invalid room id 0" assertion to actually show the room id that is invalid, instead of always showing 0.

- Integrated csgmerge tool into editor exe

- Added support for 32-bit lightmaps

- Fixed the bug where cloning a multibrush with particles would duplicate every object in the mission

- Fixed a bug where the game would crash when deleting a large multibrush

- Added fallback check to find Motiondb.bin in resource paths

- Fixed resource lock errors when loading TGA images (for object textures and distance art)

- Fixed solo view editor issues when going back to edit mode from game mode

- Added ability to change the brush colors in DromEd via values in DromEd.cfg.

- Added light-based transparency property

- Added ability to enable/disable eye zoom in Thief 2

- Vast improvements to editor dialogs, including crash fixes and improved functionality

- Increased brush limit from 7068 to 16384

- Increased rooms limit from 1024 to 4096

- Increased ambient sound limit from 256 to 1024

- Increased cell limit from 28672 to 32760

- Increased the maximum number of sides in a cylinder from 10 to 26.

- Increased automap location limit from 64 to 256 locations per page

- The texture rotation control can now interpret negative values

- Fixed a crash while generating reports

- Added a warning dialog when attempting to save one filetype (mis/gam/cow) as another

- Added new Windows-style texture palette (which also supports more than 256 textures)

- Added support for all editor window sizes

- Added Pendulum (/sinusoidal) curve type to tweqs

- Added DetailAttachement link type

- Added Distance Alpha property

- Added Bitmap Color property for custom modulation color on bitmap objects

- Added "Face camera (axial)" setting to Bitmap Worldspace

- Added color param, additive blending and spotlight cone falloff support to coronas

- Added "Editor Comments" property

- Added "show_vhots" command for debug visuals of vhot placement and numbering on objects

- Manually deleting links in the link view dialog no longer deletes attached object for ParticleAttachement/DetailAttachement links

- Added the ability to place graphical decals on book pages

- Corpses with Contains links no longer count as pickpockets

- The Auto-Multibrush property no longer crashes DromEd if the .vbr file was not found.

- The stimulus on existing receptrons can now be changed

- The intensity for sources is no longer reset when changing the propagator

- The receptrons list now correctly shows the max intensity value for existing receptrons

- Meshes can now be scaled with the Scale property

- Scaled objects now cast properly scaled shadows

- Objects can now obscure coronas

- Bitmap Worldspace objects can now be locally lit

- Precipitation will now collide with OBB objects as well as terrain

- The brush_to_room command can now be given a negative number, to be interpreted as an absolute size instead of a percentage (e.g. brush_to_room -0.1 would create a room brush 0.1 units larger than the selected brush.)

- It is no longer necessary to explicitly add the Hidden property to a secret object for the secret to be properly counted

- Added numeric keypad input support

- DromEd will no longer stop working after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038

- Added "scroll here" option to the right-click menu for solo views, similar to the "teleport camera" option for non-solo views

- Fixed some issues with calculating which room cells are in (which might have caused problems with precipitation and fogging)

- Increased the time range of Tweqs to 0-65535

- The same property can no longer be added to an object multiple times

- Fixed a crash when adding the Texture Anim Data property to a concrete object

 

If you're looking for some type of major overhaul where the engine suddenly looks like Crysis, then this isn't the update for you. If you're looking for a minimal update that improves performance, fixes some bugs and adds some visual bells and whistles while retaining the original esthetic of the game, then this is the patch for you.

 

I also found a setting in the .cfg file that gives the lightgem some TDM style behavior. When activated, the game will take a light trace from the top and bottom player sphere. The top sphere moves when you lean, so you can actually lean into light TDM style in Thief 1 / 2 now.

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Oh okay cool thank you people for making this clear! :) But if there are no major changes / improvements (e.g. for the ai) I don't get why they say there's no need to play TDM anymore, lol

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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