Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary Contest

[Wellingtoncrab]

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152224

There is a new mapping contest over on TTLG for the Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary and the organizers were kind enough to include The Dark Mod along with all of the Thief games as an options for making a mission to submit as an entry.

The deadline is a year from yesterday and the rules are pretty open. I recommend going to the original thread for the details but I will summarize here:

Rules:
- The mission(s) can be for Thief 1, Thief 2, Deadly Shadows or The Dark Mod.
- Collaborations are allowed.
- Contestants can use any custom resource they want, though TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack.
- Contestants can submit more than one mission.
- Contestants can enter anonymously.
- The mission(s) can be of any size.

Using prefabs is allowed but the idea is this is a new mission and starting from an abandoned map or importing large areas from other maps is not allowed. Naturally this is on the honor system as we have no way of validating.

Mission themes and contents:
There is no requirement from a theme or story viewpoint, however contestants might consider that many players may expect or prefer missions to be celebratory of Thief: Deadly Shadows in this respect: castles, manors, museums, ruins inhabited by Pagans and the like, with a balance of magic versus technology. This is entirely up to the authors, though, to follow or not - it is just mentioned here as an FYI and, while individual voters may of course choose to vote higher or lower based on this on their own, it will not be a criteria used explicitly in voting or scoring.

Deadline: May 25th, 2024 at 23:59 Pacific Time.

See the TTLG thread for details on submissions and the voting process.

Provided I can make the deadline I hope to participate. It would be nice to see the entire community do something together, and expressing our complicated relationship with this divisive game seems as good a pretext as any.
 

[Amadeus]

Thanks for asking the organizers about including TDM! I am not sure if I can participate as Real Life (ugh, who needs it) demands a bunch of my free time right now, but we'll see

[datiswous]

We might need a climbing gloves mod for tdm...

[Wellingtoncrab]

3 minutes ago, datiswous said:

We might need a climbing gloves mod for tdm...

There are some good particle options in both Iris and SLL for integrating loot glint as well if anyone wants to snag them.

[jaxa]

Imagine a three-mission campaign that used T1/T2, TDS, and TDM.

Also, this makes me feel really old.

[thebigh]

I have an idea of a mission that might fit. I very much doubt whether I can compete with the master mappers around here though.

[Wellingtoncrab]

20 minutes ago, thebigh said:

I have an idea of a mission that might fit. I very much doubt whether I can compete with the master mappers around here though.

Well I would definitely like to play it!

[LDAsh]

21 hours ago, datiswous said:

We might need a climbing gloves mod for tdm...

And oil flasks, it was an amazing gameplay mechanic.

[peter_spy]

On 5/26/2023 at 3:29 PM, Wellingtoncrab said:

Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary

Shit, we're old.

Too bad T3Ed and its workflows are way too unstable (at least for me, on win10) to even think about making something for it again.

[demagogue]

In a weird way TDM can thank TDS for its existence, being so mod-unfriendly.  

That's reason enough for us to be part of this contest. 

 

9 hours ago, peter_spy said:

Too bad T3Ed and its workflows are way too unstable (at least for me, on win10) to even think about making something for it again.

Then you should be happy to know you can make an FM in TDM for the contest. 

[peter_spy]

An entire FM is probably a no-go, since my spare time is focused on something else these days, but I thought about doing a tiled material pack inspired by T3 textures. Will post it, if I come up with something worthwhile.

[datiswous]

On 5/27/2023 at 6:32 AM, thebigh said:

I very much doubt whether I can compete with the master mappers around here though.

You can team up with someone. Then you also take that competition away.

Edited May 28, 2023 by datiswous

[demagogue]

I don't think a material pack would be judged as part of the contest, but I'm sure it'd be appreciated and in the spirit of the thing. I think it's a great way to be part of the action. I also don't think you'd need to make a full FM. Just a demo of the material pack and/or a nice T3 inspired environment would probably be cool too. Well do what you like. We're talking about being fans of a video game at the end of the day. 

[kingsal]

Oh that's fun! thanks for posting this @Wellingtoncrab.  Can't believe its been 20 years 

[chakkman]

Me neither... I recently (few months ago) played through TDS again (I think for the fourth time in total). Still great.  Especially with the Sneaky Upgrade.

Edited May 29, 2023 by chakkman

[jaxa]

I tried to play a copy from GOG, and I was unable to lockpick the first door in the tutorial, so, game over. I think I need to throw some patches at it.

[chakkman]

This one is really essential: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 Should work fine with the GOG version.

Edited May 29, 2023 by chakkman

[datiswous]

On 5/28/2023 at 5:25 AM, demagogue said:

In a weird way TDM can thank TDS for its existence, being so mod-unfriendly.

What makes it mod unfriendly?

 

Edit I see there's also an editor patch:

Sneaky Upgrade Editor Edition

Edited May 30, 2023 by datiswous

[peter_spy]

3 hours ago, datiswous said:

What makes it mod unfriendly?

Everything is closed source, there was a low property limit, and a mechanism slowly adding to that property count during mission making, so FMs don't compete with OMs too much (removed by Snobel years later), and the only way to make any custom content is to have a very peculiar version of 3dsmax (5.1) and other odd tools (e.g. MilkShape for animation).

Edited May 30, 2023 by peter_spy

[demagogue]

You can probably find the postmortem about it.

They were using the Unreal engine whichever version, the same used for DX:IW, which was already kind of cramped with memory as you can see in that game, although still worlds better than Dromed! But one guy on the team implemented real time shadows IIRC on his own initiative. So they moved to that new version and got sunk into it before realizing it came with some heavy costs, like the memory use was so tight they had to chop the levels into parts with load zones, performance was a constant problem, and a lot of features had to be cut for related technical reasons like rope arrows, swimmable water, etc. And by then the original guy had left the company and I think know one knew the inner workings well enough to know how to fix it. Something like that.

Then all of those problems just got compounded with the editor version for people making FMs. It wasn't even out that long before a group of editors and fans started looking for an alternative engine they could make a total conversion just for making FMs the way the game was meant to be, and the Doom3 engine fell right at that time... And that ultimately led to Darkmod.

[peter_spy]

The Unreal Engine 2.x, at least the rendering portion of it, was ripped out. The replacement was called Flesh, and IIRC the guy that implemented it was probably an external contractor who did his job and left, but noone asked him to leave any documentation on it, so he didn't. They also used the first implementation of Havok for physics, literally like version 1.0, which was buggy as hell, and they couldn't get water and rope arrows to work.

Memory constraints were an original Xbox thing, but it's hard to tell how PCs from that era would handle bigger levels or no loading zones.

[demagogue]

Yes, and speaking of memory, yours is better than mine. But in fairness, the whole point of the contest is that we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of the game!

[peter_spy]

Yup, and I had plenty of fun with T3, and with making maps for it, back in the day Replaying it right now to see which parts I liked most

[wesp5]

"TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack." There is a Deadly Shadows resource pack for TDM?

[thebigh]

IIUC it is for the original trilogy. It might be technically possible to convert the assets for TDM use but, because TDM does not take place in the Thief universe, there'd be thorny copyright issues in doing that.