Thief Deadly Shadows

There are aspects to TDS I like however they're stuff that just came with better technology. Like I mentioned with dynamic lighting. Which by itself could have radically changed how the game played. (Imagine day-to-night transitions and having to follow a shadow cast by the sun to avoid detection)

I also really like how the game is hub based and there's stuff like Garrett has to physically enter a store and buy/sell stuff instead of just having a store screen at the start of each mission. (fun fact. The reason why you lose all of your gold after each mission in T1/2 is because they noticed while testing the game players would hoard all of their gold for the later levels and end up not buying anything and not playing around with items like speed potions and flash grenades)

I also like how if the player gets knocked out in the hub world he wakes up in prison and has to break out. That's a premise that's in a ton of Thief 1/2 fan missions and it's really great.

They originally planned to include a feature in Deadly Shadows where guards would notice Garrett's shadow, and it would alert them. It was cut, unfortunately.

It's a real shame TDM's sound system and some sound effects aren't as good because it does pretty cool things with visibility with their AI, such as eyepatches and hoods affecting their vision. It's always disappointing to play a TDM mission and hearing a guard's footsteps on the floor above sound like they're right next to you because the FM creator had an open window.
I just hope eventually it'll be fixed, if it's possible, because development is still ongoing and it has a lot of potential to be really great.

On a bit of a tangent, TDM really needs a base campaign. It has an equipment buying system but it rarely gets used well because most FMs are one-shots.

I imagine it would require overhauling a lot of Doom 3's engine and redesigning parts of DarkRadiant to do. And would potentially make prior fan missions unplayable.

It is possible to do but it would require a lot of work and would be very risky to do. I can see why they haven't done it. It's one of the downsides to building the game on an engine that was primarily intended for a first person shooter.

They said they were working on one but since TDM was basically designed as a new engine for Thief it's probably lower priority. Personally i think they should just package the game with like 16 fan mission levels and just loosely connect them to a story.

I would've been more willing to give TDS a break if it didn't crash all the fucking time. I never got very far because I had to stop, not due to how bad the game was but the constant crashes.

Man, assuming that's all accurate about the sound engine, that's freaking cool. I never realized.
I'd really love to love The Dark Mod, but the AI is just way too dodgy. Guards tend to become telepathic if you're all lit up, and can see you even if you're directly behind them.

In addition to what's already been mentioned, 3rd person broke the character controls, even while in first person when you hit a button you don't directly move but an animation plays, you can be looking 'behind' yourself while in first person and pressing forward has to spin the whole 3rd person puppet around.

Both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows are getting an increasing amount of positive re-evaluations recently but the truth is both are as shit as they've always been; it's just that modern games are so bad that they feel good by comparison.

Don't forget moving in first person is awkward unless you get a mod to make it feel like normal fps movement. Then you got the blackjack which is very limited in that it can only knock out enemies directly in front of you and you can't use it to knock out an alert enemy. The dagger is worse as it's only good for stealth attacks.

There were some thief fan missions did have a store were you bought stuff. One mission had sidequests you could offer to take.

Probably a good thing due to how small the levels were.

Fan missions are still being made for the first 2 games. Thanks to the New dark engine, they are even more complex. Not sure if they fixed the extremly sensitive AI.

It's one of the reasons why the game has excellent ambiance.The devs were fully aware just how important sound was in the game. Good sound is generally ignored in games and most video games treat sound as just something that's there because it has to be.

If you wanna test the sound engine for yourself I recommend downloading the game's map editor and trying to build a level. One of the things you do in order to make the level playable is you create boxes around individual rooms that you want included in sound propagation.

There's actually a level in Thief 1 that really took advantage of sound propagation. It was Down in the Bonehoard. When you enter the level you start hearing music playing from the Horn of Quintus. Which is the artifact you have to obtain to complete the level. And the closer you get the louder the music gets. You can also notice in the level that creatures like Burricks have started tunneling into the crypt because they're attracted to the music.

It's moreso because at the time when DX:IW and TDP came out people were annoyed at how much smaller they came across compared to the originals. This was largely since the original games were PC exclusive and didn't have the same limitations.

Now though people are used to console limited games. Games nowadays are ported to PC not the other way around. So when people point out that the game is slower and the levels are small they go "wuts the big deal?"

Albiet there are genuine upsides to these games compared to their later incarnations. Like say what you will about TDP at least it was an attempt to make a game like the originals. Thi4f wasn't.

Something the Thief reboot didn't grasp was that while Garrett was somewhat super human in terms of how talented he was. He was still an ordinary person and had flaws. Like he wasn't that great in a fight. He didn't cast magic or anything like that, all of his gadgets were mostly logical. And he lives in a low fantasy world is vague with its location and lore. They took this very nuanced character and story and turned him into Dark Knight era Batman and gave you tons of pointless lore because autists get wet at the sight of it.

Thief 3 is smaller and has loading screens, which is abysmal. Apart from that, it's also buggy. I would frequently get stuck in a jumping animation and had to fix it (I forgot how). Also, having a 3rd person mode is horrible since now you can just enter a new camera angle to see around corners instead of having to lean and risk being seen.
At least Garrett's story has closure, and it set up a perfect sequel with a new character but nope :^)

I don't necessarily think Garrett's story needs closure. The character is like Mario or James Bond or Lara Croft in that you could theoretically set him in an infinite amount of stories because the game was so modular in terms of design. You can't do the same with something like Dishonored for instance.

It's one of the reasons I think the game had so many custom maps is that you don't really need to add voice acting since the character is supposed to be a silent loner and the modular nature of the game allows you to create a level with the same quality as the vanilla ones almost seamlessly.

That level was so creepy. Not just because of the zombies, either. You hear the Horn of Quintus reverberating throughout a lot of the level, getting louder as you get closer, and you can tell what direction it's coming from, too. And when you finally get to it, and pick it up–everything goes dead quiet. It freaked me the fuck out. That level was creepy in general. Stay away from my face, thief.

At least you got people talking about Thief, I guess.

I guess one thing I found that was neat in deadly shadows was that guards reacted if you took items that were along their route along with open doors. The first time I saw them react I was surprised since I never worried about that before.

games aren't really limited by consoles any more.

I'm glad it had closure in retrospect because the series went dormant and then to shit.

That's right, I liked that about Deadly Shadows. But I think ultimately the guards got bored of looking for you and then went on their way, so it didn't amount to much. It's been a while since I played, though.

nice waste of trips, newfag. lurk for 5 more years

It's a question of priorities. Developers can prioritize having large levels, or they can prioritize having shiny graphics. With consoles, they can't have both, since the hardware is fixed. Imposing that limit forced developers to choose one; too many made the wrong choice.
These days, as art assets become more detailed, the time required to make those high-fidelity assets grows exponentially. This is producing a practical upper limit on how shiny your assets can be, which allows for a higher upper limit in level size than would have been possible before–though there is still a hard limit. Just like the choice that developers made in the sixth generation, this new paradigm is something imposed on them by outside constraints.

I couldn't play it for more than 5 minutes. Something felt… off. It felt way clunkier than the older games for some reason.

That's why they show PC gameplay footage at E3 for console games right?

...

Yes they are user. Technology advances so quickly that a big reason why games don't look enormously better is because companies are too addicted to the console market teat.

A good example is that PC exclusive games generally have more content to them because you aren't limited to a storage medium. They also generally have much larger environments and process more things on the screen. You can see it with PC exclusive games like Total War where they're able to render these massive thousand person battles. A console game nowadays would render a big battle like that in the background or in an FMV. The fact that games still do FMVs nowadays is astounding to me because the only reason why it's done is to save time and money.

Then there's actual provable examples of games that were limited because of consoles. Like CD Project admitted that the reason why the Witcher 3's graphics were downgraded was exclusively because they wanted to have a single build of the game that ran on all of their platforms. You can also see it with the original Watch_dogs where they downgraded the graphics massively because they wanted to push it on a ton of consoles and even locked away some of the better graphical effects in .ini files.

these more evident examples of consoles limiting games that could be better on PC really showcase just how limited developers are with their games due to outdated technology. Like imagine if they didn't have to do shit like this, how much bigger games would be in general.

Another thing with games is that generally speaking when you compare a game from earlier in a console's lifecycle to one later. The game will look worse but have more stuff and more content in general. Like they stated one of the reasons why Saints Row 3 has so much less to do than 2 and why player customization was so nerfed was because they had to compromise the gameplay to make the game look better.

Shalebridge Cradle was genuinely scary to me the first time. At least, the first half.
I'd heard about it before and deliberately not spoilered myself and wasn't disappointed.

why wouldn't you want to show your games on the system its easiest to optimize for while they're in development? Lots of optimization work is done in the last few months of development. If you have a ton of resources to toss at something, its easiest to get it running on that instead of pre-optimizing and wasting precious development time on something like that so early in development. Use your brain idiot.

with consoles they can have both. LOD, tessellation, etc. are more than enough these days. The question of resources isn't a problem these days. 8GB of RAM is still a recommended requirement for PC games which have far more overhead than console games.

witcher 3's downgrades exist on the PC. Don't use Ubisoft as an example, that's just stupid.

lol, get some taste fag

Because you don't want people to see a screenshot of your game and go "ew why does it look like shit?"
That's the point. The game at one point looked enormously better and the reason it doesn't on PC, is because of consoles. Imagine if they didn't mislead people with the trailers. We wouldn't even know "Wow the game could've looked 10 times better and you didn't do it because of sheckles?"

because it wasn't performing well enough on consoles so they had to downgrade it on PC as well?

To be fair, those E3 showcases are almost certainly pre-rendered "target footage," where they show what the game "is supposed to look like while playing," rather than actually running. They might even use the game's renderer for it, so they can claim that it's "in-engine," which will get people to wrongly think that it's running the actual game.

This is true to an extent, but I think it's mostly because of what I talked about: the amount of time required to make high-fidelity art assets is huge, and you quickly reach diminishing returns in terms of detail per hour of work. So I think the soft limit of having to deal with finite time constraints just takes the choice away from developers of whether to go all-out on detail, or all-out on size.

CD Projekt admitted the only reason they did it was because they didn't want to have 2 builds of the game. They wanted a single build running on 3 platforms

which is why you see more of them on consoles lately. Especially the exclusives.

I guess AMD's PC hardware are "consoles" now.
please use archive.is/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-gameworks-completely-sabotaged-witcher-3-performance/
The fact is CDPR is an incompetent studio full of imported artists and too few programmers. Every bit of technology they use is licensed middleware and the truth is they were too incompetent to make a good looking game run on different platforms. They couldn't fix up their assets, the game still has stuttering issues when you're getting 100+ fps on the newest GPUs. It's a technical abortion and CDPRs incompetence is bleeding through the seams. It has fuck all to do with consoles and everything to do with CDPR being a shit studio. Not wanting "two versions" is a bullshit excuse and it's hilarious you'll buy it up here because it likely fits your narrative when I'm sure, anywhere else, you'd demand separate versions to avoid parity and to get the most out of other platforms, especially your preferred one.

You see more high-quality assets because they're more expensive? I don't understand what you're saying.

Call it DooD or nuDoom. Calling it Doom 4 implies that it's a real Doom game and not a depressing attempt at ripping off Serious Sam.
How's Facebook working out for you, Brittany?
I do have some taste. That's why I play games like TDP and TMA and not the poor excuses for games Bethesda shits out.

sorry, I didn't finish my post because I was focusing on the second half. It's easier to get these things working on consoles. You have better tech support, perfectly adequate hardware to get LODs to get the highest quality you'll want up close, and usually on those teams with technical prowess, large budgets and plenty of people to toss around. Whatever you think of Uncharted 4's game play it's a technical marvel and there is nothing on any other platform that compares to what the game is doing in real time. Theoretically possible on PC, existing, practical, and marketable? Un-fucking-likely. It can run on the garbage equivalent spec of consoles because the single spec allows you to get extraordinary performance out of otherwise terribly low end systems.

it's doom 6 tbh, the real doom 4 was on the n64. my name is Tina btw, get it right. TMAs last quarter is the worst part of the game.

Reminder that Xbox killed computer gaming by bridging the gap between consoles and computers.

PC gaming killed itself tbh

If they were able to change the sound engine, I don't see how they could not simply set up a safety net to revert back to proximity sound if the FM didn't support the new system.

I think that would be fine until an actual campaign is made, but FMs tend to vary widely in quality, and a whole campaign would ideally had a standard of quality.

I really enjoy TDM despite its faults, though. After binging on it recently, it kind of feels weird going back to T2 FMs because the AI feels less sensitive and less aware of their environment.

I'm not sure what version you were on, but I just tested this myself on the latest version and the guard didn't get alerted until I walked into his vision. TMD guard sight is determined by where they're looking, and he almost saw me when he turned his head to the side.

It's probable that this wouldn't be the only thing they'd change in the engine to accommodate this. They'd likely also need to change how the AI works and pathfinding. It gets to the point where you effectively need to make two builds of the game and it's easier to build a converter or just ask someone to fix each mod that's already been released individually

Fuck off back to halfchan

Fuck off back to halfchan

A converter seems like it'd be the ideal approach, or manually changing them with Darkradiant. I'm not familiar with Darkradiant, though, so I don't know how FMs are formed or if they can be opened with it.

Thief 4 was fine, come at me.

it was just really boring, eidos montreal can't seem to make good levels or decent mechanics.

There should be decompile utilities for Idtech4. I know Idtech4 didn't get rid of compiling. Once a bsp is decompiled it can then be opened in the editor.

In terms of how Darkradiant works if you've ever used gtkradiant it's basically the same thing except it has real time lighting

I'm one of the extremely small number of people who didn't hate it. Played on Master difficulty, with focus and the other handholds turned off, It was a decent, if forgettable stealth game. That said, there aren't a lot of actual stealth games anymore, forgettable or otherwise.
On Master difficulty, the focus really is on sneaking, and they made the combat just punishing enough that, after one fight, you never want to get into another. They also did the lockpicking mini-game very well.
That said, it had a huge need for more polish, and it had glaring audio bugs. And the light gem had three states, rather than a granular continuum of light levels, which removed a lot of the tension. It also didn't have variable loudness for floor surfaces–the closest they got was water and broken glass being noisy, and everything else being silent.
The thing is, NuThief is OK in a vacuum. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. You don't get that option when you decide to give your game the name of an already-existing IP. As a Thief game, it failed. It disregarded the lore and factions of Thief, and came up with new facsimiles that were worse. It had a plot that meandered from the start and broke down at the end. It didn't focus on sound. It didn't have the kind of big, open levels with multiple routes that Thief is known for. It replaced systemic content with one-off contextual content–take rope arrows for example, which can now only be used at designated points rather than in any wood surface, or the weird out-of-place third-person climbing segments.
I didn't hate NuThief. But I'm the exception. Anyone who was a Thief fan could reasonably be expected to despise it, and I don't blame them one bit.
Real stealth games are rare enough that I'll take what I can get. But mediocre stealth games calling themselves "Thief"? That's bold. Too bold for what they were capable of. They failed.

That's good to know, so it would be possible to go back and adjust older missions.

user, even mid-range modern PCs have 8GB of RAM dedicated to the GPU alone, and will have another 8GB for the CPU. The only reason 8GB is still the recommended amount is because "8GB GDDR5!" is all that consoles have.

Somehow this changes that the games come out completely downgraded.

its a really bad idea to use ubisoft as reference for anything, I think CDPR is the only company more technically incompetent in the "AAA" game dev world.

don't fucking lie to me. The only reason you'd need 8gb of ram for graphics is if you are doing actual rendering or other 3D work on a small scale.
newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709 4814 601201888 601203793 601204369 601296707 601301599 600494828&IsNodeId=1&cm_sp=Cat_video-Cards_1-_-Visnav-_-Gaming-Video-Cards_1

PC gaming killed itself

actually tbf you are getting mid end performance improvements for those $500 graphics cards, the entire gpu industry is a scam youtube.com/watch?v=Jd1bp9eSfwo

You could say the same thing about literally any dev in the AAA industry right now. Ubisoft is unique though because they where the ones to flat out admit they had to handicap the PC version so it could compete fairly with consoles, we can only speculate how many other companies do this. Even something as basic as minecraft had to be kneecaped when it came out on the xbox.

Pretty much all the devs that are PC-exclusive are small time indie teams who don't bother pushing the hardware because they're working within a bloated engine or making pixelshit. It wouldn't surprise me if the reason that hardware companies are doing forced upgrade and selling shit hardware marked up, is because they know full and well the only people with the resources to make a game that would fully utilize that hardware (AAA) is too busy focusing on making movies for consoles.

And the PC's power also goes beyond graphics FYI, although that's pretty much the only thing anyone focuses on since games do literally nothing to test the limits now. No, the PC's power is literally used to make lazy/untalented devs jobs easier, while the pros who have been in the industry for +30 years that know x86 architecture inside and out are stuck on consoles.

Too fucking true. Although it almost came close to reality back in the day with Aureal. Remember this tech demo? It is still amazing with headphones
youtu.be/-oSlbyLAksM

Fucking lawyers ruin everything

That's some hardcore shit

Nowadays there's fucking Game Maker games and "low poly" Unity games with higher system requirements and worse performance than Crysis.

I think the issue is that the makers of these "game development" engines assumed the best of people.

They went in with the mentality that people who wanted to make games would do their best to learn everything they can about coding, optimization, technology and so on, and wanted to make their tasks just that much easier.

Instead, as should've been expected, it just attracted the lowest common denominator composed of morons who went "i can maek gaemz too!" and hence the result.

Hah. that picture is pretty shit. The "detail" can be added with parallax or a normal map instead of increasing amount of polygons.

It's because in engines a lot of the resources are kinda general catch-all and have extra crap in them to make it so they can be used for virtually everything. Even if used correctly it'll be slower than professional devs who, in some cases, specialize every single part of the code so it will run as smooth as possible. Most indie-devs use them incorrectly, so you get abuse from shit like… building a house in gmod out of cars and cargo parts.

...

Yes they are, the entire bethesda modding community had complete chaos because the latest version of the Xbone can't even handle the average PC mod let alone the ones console players wanted to play. It was pretty funny when it became apparent console players couldn't understand basic troubleshooting. It was even more funny when console players tried to pirate the mods outright they were that stupid, thinking PC players were deliberately "sabotaging them" in some weird war or some shit.

Hilarious stuff.

7th gen mindset looking at an 8th gen industry

I don't know what version it was either (it was quite some time back), but the patrolling guards in the Knighton Manor mission were especially bad in this regard. I'm not really given up on TDM and I will most likely try it again some time.

You'd be surprised

Its a sequel that builds upon the strengths of predecessors, it succeeded and failed in many things but it atleast tried
NuThi4f is straight up streamlining and slapping shit together to appeal to the masses without caring about the past

If it wasn't an old version being wonky, it might've been sound since they were moving guards. TDM is a little different from thief with noise levels, where normal walking is pretty noticeable, but creeping makes you almost completely silent unless you're right next to their ear or on a loud surface such as gravel, metal, tile, or foliage. Crouching makes you a little more silent than walking, but guards will still hear you, so it's a balancing act between whether you find being seen or being heard more important. Of course you can do both, and this is how you can be silent on loud surfaces without moss arrows, but you'll be very slow.
In Thief, to directly compare, creeping just increases the time between footsteps and doesn't affect noise level a whole lot. Normal walking isn't noticeable unless it's on a loud surface. The only time creeping could be useful is when you want to cheat the engine by crouch walking on tile and metal and stopping before you take a step, which is faster if you use run anyway.
Webms are a map with blind guards to test sound levels and such.

It's much, much better with the fanpatch that joins the levels up from little chunks so you no longer have to sit through fucking loading screens to walk across a mission. Other than that gameplay was a bit simplified (fanpatch optionally lets you disable a lot of this) but tolerable and I actually quite liked the story. The whole open city thing was a bit underused but a nice change of pace for me and I did like the prison side-mission you got the first time guards fucked you up.

Can you tap forward like in T1/2?

When you stop you take a step, so you can't exploit that anymore. This is probably the reason for the creeping changes.

The game runs like such shit on modern systems I just can't push myself to bother, I played a few hours, it completely fucks up what made Thief 1 and 2 good, and that's the level design, but more specifically Thief 2 on that front.

Call me when someone rebuilds Thief DS in The Dark Mod.

Speaking of the Dark Mod try Volta and the Stone, it's as good as Thief 1 and 2 in terms of level design, it makes the rest of the fan projects look like what amateurs call amateur and I don't like to admit this but playing that level is what made me play Thief 1 and 2, and they were great, There's actually a mountain of potential there still, I fucking loved levels like Assasin's and The Song of Caves starting out as something seemingly trivial and then turning into something completely different, integrating this into say a hub like Thief Deadly Shadows would be amazing, unless Thief DS already does this in which case, it's still shit but good job.

Did you make sure to get the fanpatch? It fixes most of the issues you've got though obviously it can't magic the level design any better. ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607

I think TDM has the potential to be better than T1/2 mechanically and gameplay-wise if they can bring back the sound systems the originals used and got a base campaign. Story, however, probably not as good if some of the FMs I've played are any indication. They often lacked nuance, such as making Builders evil people who torture people because they're evil.
Checking out that mission you suggested right now. I pick missions at random and haven't tried this one yet.

Isn't there a chart of good Dark Mod missions? If not there should be.

They react but I don't think I've ever seen them do it in a meaningful way, even when trying for a no-knockout run in that first level.

Another good example of sound was the original Half-Life. How many games do even that basic level?

Pretty sure there is an infographic floating around somewhere.

ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106781
this thread includes t3 missions too, worth checking

dark mod maps are signed with TDM, i forgot to add

I haven't seen one. This thread is the most I've seen Dark Mod talked about on Holla Forums, but I can suggest some that I've played and other people can join in and we could make a chart of missions for future threads. I haven't played them all yet, but here are the ones that stood out so far:
William Steele series (Fairly basic but very nice, second mission is a bit linear, however.)
Penny Dreadful series (First mission is linear and short, but the second two are larger, with the third being massive, unfortunately the third also requires you to kill someone.)
Inn Business (interesting use of the difficulty setting to progress the mission, fairly small but many ways to go about it)
No Honor Among Thieves (One of the few campaigns, unfortunately protagonist is whiny because the builders tortured because they're evil.)
St Albans Cathedral (City Section + Hammer temple. Also some riddles.)

Other missions to note:
The Bakery Job (Awful, only mission I genuinely disliked.)
The Rift (neat map aside from the incredibly low ambient light.)
The Gatehouse (an adventure level without much sneaking)
The Creeps (spooky walking simulator)

There's threads for it every once and a while, I usually recommend the dark mod after someone has pretty much played thief 1-3 to death and they want more.

Quality Ion Storm coding
You also can't knock out sitting enemies for some reason.

Nice nigger proxy.

I remember DXIW also had this problem

Where the fuck can I get Thief 1 and 2?

There used to be a Russian trilogy RePack on TheIsoZone, but it's gone now.

SOMEONE PLEASE. I NEED THESE GAMES AND THEIR FIXES/PATCHES.

You can torrent the GOG versions.

Aren't there a bunch of fixes I need to get? From my understanding Thief is one of "those" games like STALKER.

I just want a complete pack with everything necessary/essentials.

The GOG versions come with those fixes, I think. I've never had any problems playing the GOG version of The Dark Project.

Not really. You just need TFix for thief 1/gold and tafferpatcher for 2. They add compatibility for modern systems along with some HD mods.

Only one patch is needed for Thief, both of them. STALKER is the monstrous bug ridden mess.

For any old game always check the pcgamingwiki page out first, it'll generally give you the basics. If that fails or is confusing it doesn't hurt to ask anons in the relevant thread, of course. However is 100% correct: ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134733 and ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=131106 will do you fine (do not get scared off by the poorly formatted/excessively details forum posts, they've both extremely easy to install and run).
It is important to know that in Thief 1 and 2 the difficulty setting you pick will change your objectives and even lock off parts of the map on lower difficulties, I'd advise going Expert as it really doesn't make the game hard in artificial terms as much as give the correct Thief experience, failing that at least pick the hard difficulty. It is also important to know that you can skip a mission by pressing CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+END: this is important particularly in Thief Gold (Thief 1 + some new storyline missions and unrelated changes, probably the version you want to play) for the Thieves' Guild mission. Skip it if/when it becomes tiresome, it's fucking terrible and adds nothing to the story (anyone who gives you shit for skipping it can be ignored too, it's a slog).

STALKER needing mods to work is a meme, if you ensure SoC is patched up and slap ZRP on it'll work fine, hell it works fine for most player without ZRP but it'd be silly not to get it.

Right, perhaps we should think about making one at some point. I have only paint-level skills but I'd be up for a terrible attempt at it in a day or two.

The hate against Thief 3 is all in the mustard race's little heads. Get this: a mission is split in several submaps, most often 2 or 3. This technological limit has no effect on the mission structure or ultimate layout of the level, it's just a minimal loading time: but in the pc cuck narrative, it becomes all the difference in the world. Serving to fight off their inferiority complex.

I played Morrowind with zero loading times thanks to fan support, and some other games that got rid of loading times for similar reasons and it really is the difference between night and day.

Easy to please, easy to cheat

Oh yeah, cool, you took away the loading times for Morrowind so you could pass through doors and use boats in .01 seconds instead of .05 seconds, PC master race in the house! Did you make the game fun and playable too?

I could make it, but we need a list first.

What is up with these low quality bait being spammed around in all threads?

Its been like this for years.

No it's been particularly bad over the last week or so.

Shit just tastes like shit to me man.

Well we could start off with and + whatever anons here have got.

Fair enough, I've just noticed a fuckton of it in the last few days and I think that user did too.

So something like picsrelated (not sure if these are outdated nowadays though).

V Man?
You always write these really long posts about Thief and stealth games.

Here's what I have so far. was just a list of missions sorted by genre, doesn't say if any are good or not.

Just recommending anything by Melan. The guy made Disorientation for T2, for that alone I would buy this guy all the beers in the world. Now he's exclusively doing TDM.

It's a good idea in general to look for specific authors I find.
wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod

Oh wow, nice work user.

Though the final version should probably include links for sites to get fan missions from like in the other two charts.

Something like this, then?

Post backlogs and favorite FMs
Seven Shades is bretty gud

It's funny because initially not having played Thief 1/2 before The Dark Mod I didn't realize that the levels were so poorly designed, there is really only one of those that is a good level, which is kind of sad.

I've only ever tried the fan patch, and it still runs like shit, it's like putting sticky tape on a weld crack.

Play Volta and the Stone, and then hope that the creator of it releases their second map.

I think this was an issue with the game being built for Xbox and then being ported back to PC, more Ion Storm being lazy as all fuck rather than Ion Storm being shit at coding.

They're missing some impressive missions that have come out since and some obvious stuff that has been missed. I'd add:
at the very least.

Oh and throw in
just to fuck with people.

I have a bigger problem with the character model freezing up gliding across the florr and the only thing to do is reload.

You mean downloading and installing like normal? also the only two ways you can

the inclusion of a third person perspective makes this the only theif game worth playing

I'm been meaning to play 2X, how is the female character compared to Garret? I'm just worried the dialogue and the character will ruin the missions.

Intro is a teensy bit edgy iirc, but it mellows out.

Alright, I'll give it a go then, her being a self-insert or terribly written always worried me about it.

Looks good to me.

I was hoping there was an actual different image, I can't really edit images effectively.

Well of course it'll never match up to 1 and 2.

I played it as soon as you recommended it. It's definitely the best looking FM I've played so far. The only other time I've seen ambient light changed mid-FM was during The Gatehouse. Great use of Patrols as well.

Huh. I did not know about this. Can you link this fanpatch?

ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 (you should always check pcgamingwiki for any game you want to play, it lists things like this).

Beware that most of those are garbage and do not follow the original aesthetic all.

Turns out my problem with staying motivated and actually having fun in Thief Gold all these years was that I was playing on Normal. Playing on Hard actually gives me a reason to explore the levels, and I'm having a blast. Neat.

The HD mod for TDP looks good, and not at all like pic related.

Expert is the only way, user. You'll miss out on objectives and other content when playing on lower difficulties.

Nah, it looks pretty shit still.

Call me when someone makes a stylized low poly Thief mod, or give me a guide on replacing Thief assets and I will do it myself.

expert of bust
there are areas which aren't even available on normal/hard.

Oh, you're just being contrarian. Carry on.

I found the massive loot requirements on Expert to be tedious. If I could get everything else, but retaining the Hard loot cap, I'd happily take Expert.

Nigger, install the Taffer patch.

There is a cheat to skip to the next map. Ctrl alt shif end when you're done.

Well this is getting interesting.

They're not massive, they're put there so that you have to take a look around at least 90% of any given map.

free GOG is safe, then?

That's what normal corridors look like user.

I did find it a bit annoying on one mission on Expert on my first playthrough, I can't remember which though (it was years back, I just remember the annoyance of backtracking after already exploring most of the map to my satisfaction). I'd still recommend Expert on the whole though.

There's one map in particular it's bad on.

It was probably The Haunted Cathedral. You know the abandoned city where you have to pick like 2k out of garbage? I remember one necklace in particular blends in with the leaves it's in. I always stop my replays there.

Well fuck.

Yeah I admit in Haunted Cathedral it is a pain since I think you need to get nearly every single piece of gold in there to meet the req and it's full of deadends, drops and little porches where there might be a small gold cup or some shit in the darkness and hard to see. It's among my least favorite missions in the series anyway.

Dunno who that is. I just read the looking glass forums. They talk extensively about the technology behind the Dark engine

I remember the last bit of loot I needed on my first playthrough was in a watchtower that you had to climb up to. I remember it because I felt like I was climbing into one of those glitchy intended-to-be unreachable areas, but no. I actually needed to go there.

It always kills my replay, or it sucks the fun out of it so much I can't even do the following missions which sucks because I remember the opera house being one of the best missions in the series and it comes way after.

Do I miss out if I get Thief Dark Project v 1.33? Or do I really need Gold?

Does TFix add all the Gold shit or not?

It doesn't add in the three extra missions, no, but that's not really a bad thing.

Where am I supposed to get this fucking game.

2 of the 3 added missions are good, one original mission has an expanded area. I'd say get TG.

How did you even find h8chan? Nobody with even cursory computer literacy has seen ads nor popups in nearly a decade.

I'm using Adblock Plus.

Thank you for proving my point.

I think the opera level is only in gold. IMO best level. A lot of people bitch about one of the other levels, but I think it's unjustified.

Ok Raymond Hill, I installed your 2 epic extensions.

Happy now?

...

Gold shit isn't worth playing anyway, also it ruins the Lost City.

Yes.

Now here, have the GoG installer for Thief Gold: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:44e17b144c28cd07ee6c58f74a2a6a5e76f9f6a4&dn=Thief+Gold

You didn't even mention Requiem and A House of Locked Secrets.

Shit taste

Doesn't the GoG version come with TFix already?

Some people are saying their version of it is outdated. Do I still need to get latest TFix for the gog version?

Yes. Install Thief Gold > Install 1.25b of TFix, and then whatever addons you want.

ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134733

I remember getting stuck on The Opera House because I didn't turn the other way in the sewer. I did listen to the bum but I didn't see the passage so I figured it must be somewhere else.

I run it just fine on my Linux partition using WINE.

Not even slightly, that shit is ugly as all fuck, you would have to be blind to think that looks nice.

Is that the same texture pack with the creator's girlfriend and himself replacing portraits?

shes a qt

...

If you didn't have an argument you could have said so.

ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=135188&page=33&p=2227195&viewfull=1#post2227195

He doesn't give a shit about accuracy. There's a different one called "canon texture pack", but I can't find an updated download link for it. There was an old ep2 file posted long ago, but at this point it's missing half the thread of work. I suppose someone could ask them.
ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140187&page=59
nameless.zanity.net/epterrain/

High def textures on low poly models looks fucking disgusting. Also enjoy half the fan missions having broken textures.

First time playing Thief, suggested difficulty level?

I've heard conflicting opinions. Most say Hard/Expert for a challenge, some say Normal so you can appreciate what harder difficulties change and add on later playthroughs.

Expert is by far the optimal way to play it but it might be exhausting if you're a newcomer, some missions might take you over a solid hour to complete. If you get into the game there's a good chance you'll want to play it more than once, so it's probably not a big deal to play on Normal for your first time.

Expert.
I started on Normal, then switched to Expert after a couple of missions. You want to explore the game anyway, and Expert gives you more things to do.

In all fucking honesty why is it so hard to find good concept art from Thief?

What is it with people and fucking ego.

What strawman, you're fucking retarded, high detail textures look shit on geometrically simple objects/environments.

It was quite possibly that one, I remember it was anyone one of the more horror/undead focussed levels. It was on my first playthrough and that was god knows how long ago.

Are you using an HD Texture Pack?

I'd say the changes Gold makes are overall for the better but no, it isn't terrible not to play it.

Yes, that level is Gold only. It's pretty great.

>Little Big World isn't worth playing

Mage Towers is lost potential.

Expert unless you're intending to play it more than once (then do Hard).

Friend of his, he doesn't actually know that much about the tech end and will tell you as much, it's more about the design/execution end for him.

V here.

Thief 3 made steps forward in the mechanics that were so smart the Dark Mod made use of them, like guards noticing loot missing as well as killed guards leaving blood behind for you to wash away with the water arrows, not to mention candles you could blow out.

But Thief 3 also made about half as many steps backwards, such as sound design (necessitating the immersion breaking third person), the absolutely neutered scale of the levels on the whole due to console limitations and the incredibly questionable overworld between missions, all while nerfing difficulty so much on average that I barely had to use any of the tools at any point and ended up with a massive fortune of leftover gold.

This would all be well and fine except Thief 3 only really has one truly great level, the Cradle (which I firmly believe may have inspired the Penumbra/Amnesia developers on some level) that ends up being buried as the penultimate level towards the end of the game while being surrounded by okay-tier missions.

It's a conclusion for the franchise, but it's no debate that it's a step down and the Dark Mod is a better successor.

Any way to change the fov? The widescreen is neat and all, but the 90 fov makes the game look way zoomed out and anything that isn't in the center looks bigger than they actually are.

I tried lowering the fov in cam_ext but it doesn't do anything in-game, it seems to stick with 90.

I mean fisheye lense.

So Haunted Cathedral ended up being fun once I inadvertently discovered you can round undead up in a pile and then blow them the fuck up with flash bombs without having to worry about holy water arrows or wasting fire arrows, but Mage Towers was tedious as fuck, and Lost City was a bit too mazelike.

Yes.

pls

Paste exactly what's in cam_ext.cfg for the fov for you.

What else are you gonna use Fire arrows on?

I end up hoarding them and using them on nothing, tbh.

Man Thief had such interesting lore and characters. The games had soul.

Probably for the best series died. Gamers of today are simple not worthy, a new Thief would be pearls before swines.

Holy fuck this opera dude in the caverns.

; FOV, specified for reference 4:3 aspect ratio, widescreen automatically adjusts this value; (default is 90);fov 90

No matter to what I set it (70, 80, 85) I don't see any difference in-game. It seems to stay at 90.

; means the line is commented out. Try removing it so you have

fov 90

Mage Towers is a nice, easy break after having to scavenge around for junk in Haunted Cathedral. But as said, it wasn't as good as it could have been. If you want a good elemental mage area, play the third mission in A Night in Rocksbourg.

Reminder that if you use anything besides rope arrows you are taffer and don't know shit about these games.

I really like Mage's Tower personally and I feel like a lot of people aren't aware of the context behind the mission

Mages Tower was originally a mission in the original design doc to Dark Camelot, the game that Thief eventually morphed into during development. A lot of Thief Gold was mostly just re-implementing things that were cut after the transition to Thief. Like a bunch of textures in Thieves Guild were taken from a sewer level they planned for Dark Camelot but couldn't figure out how to handle raising water levels for a puzzle.

In this regard Mages Tower isn't so much "lost potential" as much as the devs rescuing a level that we wouldn't have seen otherwise.

That's neat, but I would have liked to see it added onto more. Especially the towers themselves, they all more or less felt the same aside from water. It was a simple mission, not a bad one. I still stand by that the Night in Rocksbourg mage mission handled it better.

Also one other thing

Thief TDP's production was very rushed to the end, it was always planned to have more levels. In the original version of the game you find 2 talismans in two levels. (Lost City and Undercover) wheras in the Gold edition there's a different level for every talisman

this was what they planned to do for the original release but they couldn't finish it in time. So the Gold edition in this regard is also more in-line with what the devs originally intended.

I'm not one of the people who complains about gold missions. I just wish Mage Towers had more in it.

user they made a new Thief not three years ago and yes, it was predictably a bit shit.

Regardless of the history it's still lost potential. As this faggot says it's the samey feeling of the towers that really annoys me, they clearly had the creativity to do more with them. I wouldn't skip it on a replay like I would Thieves' Guild but it will always seem a wasted opportunity.

What's the link between thief 4 and the Holocaust?

It never happened.

Has anyone here tried to make a thief fan mission?

Just finished Thief Gold. To me, the game really started overstaying its welcome at Return to the Cathedral, and from that all the way to the end I just wanted it to hurry up and end already. Still, overall it was good, and I only ever had to resort to a guide once whoever placed that "Keystone Tree" switch can go fuck themselves with a cactus. I'm hesitant about launching into Thief 2 if it's just more of the same (I've already completed 3 and "4").

I tried but I hate DromED

thief 2 is notably different from the first and only goes to shit in the last quarter, it has the best and worst thief levels of the first two.

Dromed's not bad, it's a lot like UnrealEd. You eventually get used to its eccentricities.

The appeal to modding Darkengine games is that they have a wealth of scripting possibilities which are nice.

Another great aspect of Dromed is it has real time lighting. Which a surprisingly small amount of editors from this time period have.

Just started it, and after being able to bhop around at 40mph, I feel like I'm stuck in molasses.

Time will tell if I can get used to it, running around TG almost felt quake-esque.

Yeah some objectives can be really fucking cryptic. I understand they want you to explore, but it feels like you gotta check every nook and cranny. Fuck the Mystic Soul, I had no fire arrows left so I had to fight the Fire Spirit 5x times, saving and reloading until I got it. Boy did that test my sword fighting skills.

Then there's the bullshit hidden under a fire place in the Thieves' Guild level. Holy fuck that mission is a drag, lots of backtracking, being lost, so I had to look up a guide. That item placement is AVGN Castlevania-tier cryptic that I would never find without consulting a guide.

Still a great game though.

...

Fuck you too Hotwheels.

Fix your damn website

That's actually the reason they put him there in Gold: back in original TDP if you ran out of fire arrows the level was uncompletable and you had to restart (or load a save where you still have five fire arrows left). Did you work out the golden skeleton shit? It took me until my second playthrough and a helpful, if cryptic, hint from a friend to get it. What about the bow upgrade in the Alarus Extension?
Yes, skipping it is for the best.

Hotwheels hasn't been associated with this site for two years now newfriend

Thief 2 is all stealth no bullshit. Minus casing the joint. Still. It feels like it has less character than the first Thief.