User 205 on 20/2/2018 at 17:52
Thanks for posting, I would have missed it otherwise :thumb:
SubJeff on 20/2/2018 at 18:45
Came here to post this.
bjack on 20/2/2018 at 19:25
Very cool. Thanks for the post! :)
Aja on 20/2/2018 at 19:46
Also came to post this. I love his story about hiding from a guard when he was a kid. That's exactly the feeling the series captures so well.
Purgator on 21/2/2018 at 17:15
Brilliant! Thanks for sharing.
henke on 21/2/2018 at 17:50
Great story, indeed. Sounds like Lead Programmer Tom Leonard is largely to thank for really pulling it together in the end.
MoroseTroll on 22/2/2018 at 05:48
Moonbo: Thanks for your post :). It's always interesting to know something new about LGS.
Starker on 22/2/2018 at 06:21
Quote Posted by henke
Great story, indeed. Sounds like Lead Programmer Tom Leonard is largely to thank for really pulling it together in the end.
He writes more about it in this Thief postmortem:
Quote:
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https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131762/postmortem_thief_the_dark_project.php?page=3)
What Went Wrong
1. Trouble with the AI. If one thing could be called out as the reason Thief's gameplay didn't come together until late in the process, it would be the AI. The AI as a foil to the player is the central element of Thief, and the AI we wanted wasn't ready until late in the spring of 1998. As lead programmer and author of the final AI, I take full responsibility for that.
The original AI for Thief was designed by another programmer before the requirements of the revised stealth design were fully specified. Six months after it was begun, the project director and overseer of the system left the team, and the most of the programming staff was temporarily reassigned to help ship another game that was in trouble. During the following months, development on that AI continued without any oversight and without a firm game design. Soon after, the programmer working on the AI also left. While the core pathfinding data structures and algorithms were basically sound, the code that generated the pathfinding database was extremely buggy. The design of the AI decision process was geared towards an action fighting game requiring little designer customization, rather than a stealth game that needed much more customization. Even worse, the high-level decision process in the AI had drifted away from a rigorous design and the code was extremely brittle. The whole situation was a disaster.
These might not have been serious issues, except for one key mistake: I didn't realize the depth of the problem quickly enough, and despite concerns expressed by programmer/designer Doug Church, I didn't act fast enough. I think highly of the programmer involved with the initial AI and wanted to avoid the natural but often misguided programmer reaction within myself that I should just rewrite it my way. So, I took the position that, while buggy, the system as a whole was probably sound. Several months and many sleepless nights later, I concluded that I had been sorely mistaken.
By November 1997, I had the basics of a new design and began working on it. But all work had to stop in order to pull together an emergency proof-of-concept demo by the end of December to quell outside concerns that the team lacked a sound vision of the game. This turned into a mid-January demo, followed by an early February publisher demo, followed by a late February make-or-break demo. During this time the only option was to hack features as best we could into the existing AI. While better than losing our funding, constructing these demos was not good for the project.