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Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary Contest


Wellingtoncrab

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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

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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.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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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. 

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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 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. 😄

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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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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 by peter_spy
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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.

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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.

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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! 😑

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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.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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