DirkBogan on 1/12/2023 at 02:52
The conventional wisdom has been that Thief TDP was released on 30th November 1998 in Europe and 1st December in North America. These were the dates that the 20th Anniversary Contest were predicated on.
Looking for sources however, we only found confirmation of a 29th November release in France, and a 4th December release in the UK. Rather than bothering to 'prove' anything, we stuck with the date established by the 20th Anniversary. No ulterior motives or anything silly.
FenPhoenix on 1/12/2023 at 03:22
Quote Posted by Azaran
I think it's the file size, but my NewDarkloader is slowing to a crawl when I select TBP, have to wait a minute for it to unfreeze
Quote Posted by R Soul
This may be due to the file being in .7z format and the way NDL scans the file to get the mission data. Other FM loaders may do things differently or have better optimization. The .7z format creates a single 'block' of data. If the authors make the archive in several stages, with the main FM files added in one stage and things like the readme and some other files (e.g. defining mission names) added separately, the FM can be scanned quickly, but if it's all in one block, or one of the files it needs is in the main block, the loader will have to effectively decompress the whole thing to find what it needs. Most things it finds will be stored in an .ini file for quick access in future, but the first time round the delay cannot be avoided.
I suggest giving AngelLoader a try. It's more user friendly and it's still getting updates, and was made with a greater understanding of the importance of speed, whereas my desire to develop NDL has been replaced with a desire to do other things.
Quote Posted by klatremus
Same here with NDL. I had to repack to .zip, that totally fixed it.
AngelLoader handles .7z files faster than NewDarkLoader, but it's still much slower than .zip files and that's just due to the format, for the reasons R Soul described. 7z is better compression but slower, that's the tradeoff. It's generally my opinion that 7z isn't worth it for FMs, but this one is around a gigabyte so 7z is probably justifiable here.
zomfg1234 on 1/12/2023 at 03:35
Fen, are you going to jump into The Black Parade immediately, or are you gonna do a playthrough later on?
gvazdas on 1/12/2023 at 03:56
You nailed it. The aesthetic of the levels, the density of stuff to interact with, the supernatural horror, the taffer voice lines, the soundscapes, everything is absolutely on point.
By the way, whoever designed the first level is a goddamn genius. The way the moon, the factories in the background, and the architecture surrounding you blend in to give you exactly what Thief was always about couldn't have been done any better.
Emerald Wolf on 1/12/2023 at 04:07
Wow, I haven't felt this good about waking up to something new in ages.
Congratulations on the release and thank you.
Stingm on 1/12/2023 at 04:09
Thank you for the mirror as the main download don't work. I will play asap.
FenPhoenix on 1/12/2023 at 04:19
Quote Posted by zomfg1234
Fen, are you going to jump into The Black Parade immediately, or are you gonna do a playthrough later on?
[video=youtube;l5gAPPddlJo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5gAPPddlJo[/video]
clearing on 1/12/2023 at 04:20
Congrats on the release!!!
The Mike on 1/12/2023 at 04:27
Dude I'm so pumped for this.
Jax64 on 1/12/2023 at 04:28
Well done on the release! What I've seen so far has been excellent and well worth the wait.
I would imagine the initial delay in NDL to be true of solid archives in general. For the 7z format, you can actually disable this in most archivers (specifying "-ms=off" with 7-Zip), though the compression ratio will suffer. The space savings of solid 7z over zip in the case of this campaign is fairly significant, however.
