Thief general thread

What do you guys think of the Dark mod? I can't get into the first thief games so easily, the graphics make deus ex's look good.

Just finished Blackmail, and so far every level has been shit. I almost prefer Thieves Guild to this shit. Where are the good levels in T2? You told me there would be good levels.

Trail of blood is bretty gud, later on you get to play Life of the party.

I think Dark Mod is pretty great. The controls are nicer such as mantling being more reliable and creeping actually affecting noise level. The AI is pretty great too, if the FM creator takes full advantage of the capabilities, that is. However, the sound design isn't as good.
TDM uses visportals to emulate what Thief did with sound and it works most of the time, but it doesn't matter if you can't hear guard footsteps from further than 15 feet. Tile is also way too quiet for something with the highest noise level, and it sounds like a quieter stone.
If the sounds were fixed, I'd say it surpassed Thief on every level except mission design, which is a fault of it being FM only.

I hope so, this is a slog.

Oh boy how fucking exciting.

Wasn't there some user a few days ago who was making a list of FMs worth playing like the infographs posted?

Okay this level is pretty good.

It's fun as long as you know where the hell you're supposed to go.

The Opera-level in 1 is probably my favourite.

I hated the Return to the Cathedral and the one where you're locked up in Constantines mansion and need to escape. It was just too much so i ended up looking up speed-runs on it to just beat it.

Yeah, that was me. I haven't added any more yet since I started replaying T1/2. If anyone has recommendations I'll add more.

I'd more look forward to Casing the Joint and the climactic heist

Should have played TDP, all the new stuff Gold added was shit (yes, even the singing insane meme man).

There were worse missions in TDP such as Return to the Cathedral and Escape!, at worst gold missions were just tedious.

Just started that, and it's another "you can't knock anyone out" level. I hate this game.

There's a patch to take all the Gold content out of the game, isn't there?

Besides expert difficulty and ghosting/non-lethal runs, I realized there is something more important and often overlooked thing to make Thief playthroughs more interesting and fun.

Saves. Stop relying on saves, its cheap. Abusing saves before every hard encounter or jump is a bad habit because it makes you careless (if i mess up i can just reload) and it doesnt build up your survival skills. The best way to make your experience more rewarding and intense is to not save at all (only if you have to stop and continue another day) or limit your saves.

I play with a self imposed challenge never to save, beating the mission in one go. Mistakes? Spotted? Lost a lot of health? Tough luck. In the end it makes you a better player because and it forces you to think of contingency plans. With saves a lot of tactics fly out the window because you can just do the same thing over and over till it works.

Tl;dr dont be a save-scummer, limit your saves per level (1, 2 or maximum of 3) or if you are really hardcore dont save at all. Makes beating missions more satisfying.

Why are the burricks so adorable?

I started playing T2X the other day and I'm not really enjoying it. I don't know why they decided to change the footsteps, they're worse than TDM's. The light gem, too. Protagonist sounds really whiny like she's about to cry, Erin from Thi4f sounded like this as well.
The missions themselves aren't particularly bad, but for something that supposedly 60-100 people worked on it seems like work was put into the wrong things like changing item models rather than making fun maps to explore. Every other mission feels very linear, with the most obvious one being the train mission.

My niggers.

Just use the skip level cheat like any sane human.

I'd prefer if more games let you set a hard limit on saves or did that automatically with difficulty level like Hitman.

I think that's the main weakness of the stealth genre. It relies far too much on a binary state of undiscovered/discovered, and once you are found out there is little point in trying to keep going because the game actively punishes you for it. Then again, there's plenty of other games that do feature failure state continuation (like Wing Commander or Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries) but few people bother with them because we are so conditioned by games to win. I wish there were more games that actively taught the player that losing is okay and brings its own rewards.

Anyone ever play Thief Gold on linux? Fucking GOG installer hits an exception in wine. Do I have to find some unpacked torrent or what?

Absolutely casual and also triggers my OCD/perfectionism.

Better faggots skip it than give up on the game entirely.

I think Hitman started this cancer by having a stealth score.

i cant pass that theives guild level (thief 1), i have to steal some vase but cant find it, i bunny jumped many times arround the level searching for it an i cant find it.

Thieves was really bad because you needed to find a secret to complete it on the hardest difficulty. Other than that it was pretty cool. I don't get the hate.

It's also ugly as sin. I don't know what it is, but there's some uncannyness with the game. It has the same effect those HD-texture modes on gamebanana had.

The Gamma is not tweaked properly, it should be darker

Some objects are really cryptic as shit, so just use Thief-the-circle or Lytha walkthrough. In other words Google it.

Read scrolls, listen to what guards say, they give out hints as to where things are.

Reuben has the key to Donal's mansion which has the vase

A lot of characters have warped and ugly faces, yeah, not sure what's up with that. As for the general look of everything else, I'm guessing it's actually the shadows that are triggering your uncanny sense, they're really crisp looking and I know that turned me off at first.

I didn't adjust the gamma at all because I play in windowed, if it looks too light, it's either your gamma or the FM just has a higher ambient light setting than you're used to.

English is not my native language and i can barely understand what the guards and other peaseants say because of their accent, as if they talked worse than a drunk australian

I think it's a combination of bad high-res textures, weird lighting and the gamma being fucked.

It's not the gamma. It's probably the ambient light being high. A good example of ambient light is The Ravine mission, where it's so low you can't see beyond your nose, it's something that can be changed per mission and through scripts.
First image is the default ambient light of the mission, second is after I raised the RGB values of the ambient light.

It's not the gamma. It's probably the ambient light being high. A good example of ambient light is The Ravine mission, where it's so low you can't see beyond your nose, it's something that can be changed per mission and through scripts.
First image is the default ambient light of the mission, second is after I raised the RGB values of the ambient light. It has a similar effect that raising gamma has.

It's not the gamma. It's probably the ambient light being high. A good example of ambient light is The Ravine mission, where it's so low you can't see beyond your nose, it's something that can be changed per mission and through scripts.
First image is the default ambient light of the mission, second is after I raised the RGB values of the ambient light in the FM's file. Since it uses RGB values, it can be used to change the temperature of the atmosphere as well, which is done a lot in Volta and the Stone as seen in the third and fourth image. You can see the ambient light changes once a threshold is passed, but I think most FMs don't use a color tinge which could also be what looks odd.
5th image is a screencap from Thief 2 where I cranked the gamma all the way up. It looks normal because gamma isn't captured in images, it's how how your computer displays relative luminance.

Add "Something to Prove" to that, one of the finest I've ever played.

I can't seem to find it anywhere.

Shit, sorry, meant to say "A Score to Settle"

I played Thief 2 first, so it's a much better game in my opinion. My favorite level is The Bank Job.

Also both missions by Dragofer are some top-tier scary shit.

Here's my Thief Gold installation with TFix and NewDark. Everything's already installed, it even has my saves.
mega.nz/#!ESwH3KbY!dpe3GnCK1jFNPGvnpz_6Qb1FNVP3B-Ez8azWMlBTFw0

The normalmaps are way too strong, so most textures ends up with too much local contrast (look at the robes on the skeleton versus the floor).

There we go.

Disclaimer for poster ID: I'm 812fd8 on a separate IP at the moment.

Groovy, nice man.
I want to say the Thomas Porter series is good but some of those missions are just hellishly difficult with no real justification.
Glenham Tower, Beleaguered Fence, the Death of the Lich Queen are all solid, the rest are something I'd ask you to judge for yourself.

Ulysses 1 and 2 are GREAT, can't wait for the next one by Sotha, although they're both assassination missions with higher difficulty bend.

Make sure to add "Sir Talbot's Collateral", the guy who made it worked on it for a year and it shows in the balance and use of space.

I love the Hammers.

"Vigilance is our shield, that protects us from our squalid past. Knowledge is our weapon, with which we carve a path to an enlightened future."

Pagans > Keepers >>> Hammers >>>>>Mechacucks

Constantine go away.

The Woodsie Lord did nothing wrong.

Fact: Living in a bitchin' tree hut with your waifu and communing with nature is objectively better than getting gassed.

I wouldn't worry about some games in a series being bad if most of them are good, or if there's very notably good ones that make up for the others. Penny Dreadful is like that, first mission is garbage, but the second two are pretty good and the third is massive.

I'll work on adding them to the list soon. I gotta take screencaps for each mission and I like to play them a little too so I can label them, so it takes a bit of time.

It's a shame T2X was really pozzed about Hammerites. It made them evil because shitting on religion in general is a progressive thing to do, to the point where Hammerites were threatening to torture a little girl because she drew a hammerite in her coloring book. This kind of outlook on Hammerites happens in TDM FMs sometimes as well with their Builders.
Hammerites were pretty much good guys, and it's only the Mechanists who split off that did evil deeds.
Pagans on the other hand, there's not much to say. They're tree hugging hippies who live outside the city and follow a demon lord. I guess they're not necessarily evil, but when they do get their demon lord they are.

All right, by the way I have to ask, are you known on the TDM forums?

Also, any missions that are actually bad?
If I had to nominate any I'd say Living Expense.
Confusing layout, limited approaches, bad puzzles, boring setup, EXTREMELY blocky and empty-feeling environments.

Hammerites did evil shit but in general a problem you'll have in Thief is showcasing good things any given religion or organization does since you're largely focused on the behind-the-scenes deeds.

You're right about it being unimaginative as fuck, though, the only two less creative ideas I can come up with is an evil corporation of some kind and a grand conspiracy of some sort of controlling nature.

I don't have a TDM forum account. I might make one eventually, but for now I haven't found the need to. I sometimes browse it, though.

Bad mission? Worst one I played was The Bakery Job, it was really small, which isn't too much of a problem, but the goal item was hidden too well with no clues on where to find it so I was wandering around in a 2 room map for about an hour before I just gave up and looked up the location.
The Ravine was too dark and the cave maze in the beginning was unnecessary, but the actual meat of the mission was cool, so I'm unsure if I can say it was really bad.
The Creeps was just a spooky walking simulator.
As for Living Expense, I hardly remember it at all but it looks like I did play it a while ago.

The Bakery Job was an exercise in minimalism, so it's not a surprise.
I wanted to like "A Matter of Hours" but the difficulty on looting some of the shit was absolute hell, you could tell it was a speed build in the worst way in that regard.