Decline Thiaf Pre-Release Thread

I wonder what impact will it have on Thiaf's sales...

 

Fuck yes TDM 2.0 ahead of schedule!

 

Somewhere between zero, "what?" and "we're too busy to spam our website with news about another AAAA crap and don't care about some basement virgins' crap",

 

Day1Download

 

"Spiritual successor to Thief? lolwat, Thief isn't even released yet, those people are weird."

 

It would be hilarious if on Thiaf's launch day that there would be more interest(page clicks) in TDM than it.

 

Just wait till the TDM campaign is released...

 

Might this be a good place to mention that the Crucible of Omens campaign is in need of talented cutscene artists? (Static, probably B&W or sepia images)

As well as, uh, people who aren't swamped by IRL work, nursing infants, or turned into burned out, hollow shells of men.

 

Damn that last point, I thought I'd qualify.

 

Yo just played a bit "Vengeance of a Thief Part I". AI is definitely less glitchy, but also a wee bit too hypersensitive. VOs have been improved. Too bad the mission load always crashes when I have EAX 4 enabled. This sucks because I want reverberation.

Nontheless, this is gonna have to do 'cause Thiaf will be an insult.


Quintessential Thief to me:

 

I'll just practice a bit with the editor and make a mission or two of my own before I volunteer for any projects that require people who know how to work with it.

 

That's not a problem. In fact, I think people are really itching to play a lot of small-scaled, releatively simple missions. If I weren't working on the campaign, that's what I'd also be doing. You can get up to a tolerable level pretty soon with the editor if you do the basic tutorial, and I think you could get a decent mission out with about two weeks' work.

Picture, because why not:

(from the excellent and versatile Not an Ordinary Guest, which supports three widely different playstyles)

 

Oh yes. I loved that mission when I first played it, and grew to enjoy it even more on subsequent playthroughs. The level design was just so good and realistic (believeable).

 

Impose certain constraints (tech, time, budget) onto talented folks, and watch them how they completely route the Montreal factories and their $100 million budgets through creativity, hard work and heartblood.

I once created and released a Quake 3 map some ten years ago (The Eternal Prisoner, DM) which was received quite well, QERadiant was the editor. Quite a little efficient BSP based editor back in it's time, but not comparable to todays modern solutions. But boy did I have fun with figuring out solutions to things that the Q3 engine/pipeline didn't support by default. It's these limitations that makes you push the limits.

 

exactly - too big of a budget makes the levels more of a graphical gimmick showcase. They start designing the levels around particularly interesting graphical elements to squeeze the 'cool' stuff they managed to code, forgetting that a level has to has solid foundations in inteligent and creative design, before such flashy effects can be added.

 

I hear you. Level design just isn't the same anymore. /oldfag

Nowadays, you got film set creators and Hollywood experts in charge. Game levels are dead.

 

It's educational to read the documentation that came with Dromed. It outlines simple but very precise and mature ideas about building levels that support both good performance and Thief-friendly gameplay. Although a lot of Thief's development process comes down to creative accidents, at the end of the road, the designers knew a damn lot of stuff about their game. I wonder if that kind of systematic thinking is still around today. Browsing mapping sites like Mapcore, it looks like a lot of people build missions as a purely visual exercise, or to polish their portfolios as prospective game designers. The pro stuff is even worse, since it either rests on a cinematic, not gameplay-based approach, or only accommodates linear action.

 

Unfortunately most of the stuff these days is really focused on visuals/aural aspects and forget about the whole gameplay part. Why have some beautiful levels when there's no fun in them? I'd rather play an ugly mission with excellent and well thought-out gameplay rather than a superb but shallow map.
I don't know if you guys need a hand with level design on the Crucible of Omens, probably not at this stage, but I can dust off DarkRadiant if you need me.

JarlFrank Melan has written a neat thread on speedmapping when he made Fiasco at Fauchard Street, you should take a look: http://modetwo.net/darkmod/index.php?/topic/12568-fiasco-at-fauchard-street/

EDIT: And what do you know, there's already a new FM released that's called Requiem: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/...leisher-2013106/page__pid__321550#entry321550

 

Thanks! My current plan is to make a small-ish castle mission with relatively simple architecture as my first mission. I already did play around with DarkRadiant a year ago or so and know the basics, so I just need a good plan for the mission design.

Also, how does DromEd compare to DarkRadiant? I'd like to do a mission or two for TMA but I read it's less easy to use than DR. Although NewDark should've brought some improvements there.

 

DarkRadiant uses an empty world so you basically have to seal everything hermetically otherwise you'll have nasty surprises. Making a scene look good in DarkRadiant demands more time and effort since TDM uses a modern engine while Thief is rather ancient and can get away with it. DarkRadiant is quite easy to use overall. DromEd on the other hand is quite ancient and a bitch sometimes, and it uses a solid world, so you have to carve basic geometry and then add brushes. It's simpler to create stuff with DromEd but I think it really lacks something important: vertex editing, something DarkRadiant can do. Other than that they're both rather easy to use but they're totally different.

Heh, on an unrelated note, I stumbled upon this:

 

Dromed's difficulty is greatly overstated. It uses odd language, and it has a late 90s user interface, but it is not particularly hard to learn. Once you get the basic concepts, it is fairly powerful, because it has a consistent internal logic you can apply to in-game tasks like a programming language. You can use that the "wrong" way, and it will still work - for example, if you give a cupboard the basic archetypes of a sliding door, it will inherit all the required attributes to make it slide away and reveal a secret passage; or you can turn a tree into a container and allow Garrett to loot it like a chest. That's how people build all the complex stuff, through hacking.

DarkRadiant would probably be easier to approach. My one big regret with it is the lack of a reliable 'subtract' function, which I used a lot in Dromed, but otherwise, it's the bee's knees.

 

I haven't been following the Dark Mod but now that it's a standalone game I see no better time to try it out

I also have a nice idea for a mission I might put together

 

Hey guise, since I am lazy to download the mod now, can anyone test a number of things for me? I'll throw you some things I have left since my Doom 3 mapping days, I wonder if my LT chain will work in Dark Mod.

 

Dubstep in a Thief trailer, I think we've reached a new low:



P.S: I think TDM's standalone release deserves a thread of its own.