Judith on 14/9/2008 at 21:42
You have some strange machine (or it's maybe me :) ), jtr7, I can work for hours in T3ed, and nothing happens :] But I have 2 GB of ram and I deleted some of the less important things from scripts and sounds folder (e.g. I have about 1300 schemas to load in music browser, instead of 15k ;) ) I really have to screw up something badly to get some error :cheeky:
jtr7 on 14/9/2008 at 21:49
I wasn't talking about crashes or stability.;) That is something else entirely.
Judith on 14/9/2008 at 23:43
True, yet I think we've gone a bit too far with offtopic here. It was supposed to be Krypt's birthday thread, and it's ending with unrelated and inappropriate complaining plus some Italian-English illiterate babble I'm happy not to read (god bless ignore list).
I can only guess from your replies that this moron didn't know who Krypt really is/was, confused him with mission name, which was already a slap in the face (from an idiot, but still insulting), and when he finally realized his mistake, he started to complain about T3ed! Etiquette at it's fucking best... :erg: :tsktsk:
Sorry for all this Krypt, but I just guess you deserved something better from all of us. Even if you don't have much in common with Thief universe these days, you are still an important part of our history ;)
jtr7 on 15/9/2008 at 01:05
:mad:
:(
Beleg Cúthalion on 22/9/2008 at 11:33
Hey, Krypt, just in case you're still reading this and no one has asked you about it yet (and no, it's not the early Kurshok artwork):
You mentioned that the engine/xBox memory restrictions prevented everyone from doing what they originally wanted. But WHAT was planned for TDS that had to be abandoned? Was there a sort of clear concept of what should be the story or other features of Thief 3?
jtr7 on 22/9/2008 at 12:01
Good question.
For those just joining us:
Quote:
The creation of the Flesh engine wasn't really planned. Early on in the development of DX2 and T3 we bandied about the idea of using dynamic shadows for gameplay. A certain programmer who will remain nameless was given the task of adding this into the Unreal engine. He went off on his own for a couple weeks and programmed an entirely new per-pixel lighting renderer. No one really asked him to make a completely new engine, but we didn't mind at first because it looked pretty cool. This was before we discovered the crippling limitations it would put on us.
It wasn't until we had worked with it for a while after said programmer was let go that we found out how crappy the engine really was. By the time we realized how much it sucked, we were already beyond the point of no return and just had to try to make the best of it. Out of necessity our efforts shifted from design to figuring out how to get the game to actually run.
Instead of developing the game we wanted, we had to develop whatever we could get to work. We had to cut features left and right, shrink down the levels and comprimise our design because of the craptacular engine and physics implementation, and the difficulty of fitting it all into 64mb of Xbox memory.
DX2 suffered the most from this because it was our first try in the engine and we were under a lot of pressure to ship the game for Christmas. T3 fared better because we had more experience on how to get a game working and didn't have to make quite so many comprimises. Still, if we had stuck with Unreal we could have made both games a lot better, I think.
It would be pretty interesting if he could still remember what those were. Obviously, anything planned for water and rope arrows was compromised or cut or done over to implement climbing gloves and substitutions for waterways, but that was only a small portion of the levels' design. He's said the lack of swimmable water didn't have a significant impact on the game design. He also didn't join the team until after the team had begun to redirect away from swimmable water and rope arrows, so I wonder how his own designs were impacted by the 64 MB memory limitations, which he said was the most significant limitation. I'm curious to know if there were ever manhole covers and sewers under the streets, too.
I fixed (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1768001#post1768001)
that link above for massimilianogoi, and whoever.
Judith on 22/9/2008 at 12:20
Interesting question. It would be nice to hear the answer, assuming that Krypt isn't bound by any NDA in this case any longer ;)
By the way, I'm worried about Thief 4 (if it really is in pre-production) in terms of editor. Flesh might be a bit crappy, but the editor is still UE 2.x, one of the most user-friendly things ever created. I doubt that this new Tomb Rider engine will ever have such interface, as it probably wasn't build with user-created content in mind anyway. Or, knowing Eidos policy, we won't get the editor at all :]
Krypt on 23/9/2008 at 18:41
My memory on the details continues to fade as the years go by, but here's some of what I remember.
The main thing we had to cut back on due to memory and/or schedule were the total numbers of maps and the size of each individual map, as well as the numbers of characters and textures in a given map. The original city sections were ridiculously enormous, probably 10 times the size of most of the ones that made it into the game. It was good in a way that we had to cut them down somewhat because chances are that maps that huge would be easy to get lost in and have a lot of dead space. We wouldn't have had time to fill all that space up with polished content for sure. It would have been nice to not be forced to make them smaller when the design would have benefited from more space though, of course.
The only "story" that would have been cut would have been mostly side-story that related to cut maps. The only ones I can remember were a couple in the docks. There was going to be a shipping/receiving warehouse type of map where the Pagan sapling was being kept under lock and key. Garrett would have broken in through a high window and creeped through storage rooms around patrolling guards until finding the sapling in a secure area reserved for special cargo. There was some side-story involving the manager of the warehouse, but I can't recall what it was. When the map was cut the sapling ended up just sitting out on the docks. That quest was cut when the map was actually, and I was barely able to convince the higher-ups to save it by transplanting it into the docks and scripting it together on my own time. There was also going to be an extended sewer section under the docks crawling with undead that you had to fight before you could get to the Kurshok citadel. That was what the whole quarantine was about, but if I recall correctly no zombies ever actually appeared in the map and the sewer was just a really small little thing that led right to the mission entry glyph.
It's too bad we had to cut stuff, but if there's one thing I've learned about game development, it's that it pretty much never goes smoothly. There's always some sort of problems that prevent you from making exactly the game you wanted. More often you find that your original design doesn't work in practice and something else would be better. You either need to have a good team to work around the problems and make the game as good or better even though it's a bit different from the original vision, or you need infinite time to redo work and hone it to perfection (like Valve or Blizzard). At Ion we had more of the former for T-DS.
Beleg Cúthalion on 23/9/2008 at 18:51
Thank you very much for that. :) Too bad we don't have a lot of mappers around, or we (at least I) would really be tempted to create a big "patch" for TDS to get rid of those split missions and everything. :(
I guess we would already know if there was any material saved from that time (except for your little a-house-by-the-sea map)...? I'd give one of my fingernails for an unfinished TDS City section.
New Horizon on 25/9/2008 at 17:33
Hi Krypt, great to see you on here again.
I was told by someone else on the team that there was discussion of a return to the Maw. Did that make it anywhere near production?
