Opal-Eyed Fan on 6/5/2008 at 10:20

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thank you hoots7:D
glad you like it so far.

About thieves arsenal,

the way I imagine the mod, and nothing is written in stony materials yet ofcourse, the player plays without weapons, hiding is the only way of staying alive.
That's sort of the idea.

Theives Arsenal however gives you ways of dealing with the npcs that makes the mod easier to beat, if you know what I mean.

So have I tried playing through parts of it using Thieves Arsenal, yes I have. Did I have a great time doing so despite it making things way easier? Yes, I had a great time doing so :cheeky: Easy does not equal bad, Easy can be fun too, and it's less scary, all the fancy gear made it play more like real Thief, and I got a bit nostalgic for a moment:o . i thought it was pretty cool.

So when the time comes and I release the mod I guess I'll concider making an extra esp that will be useful to you if you have Thieves Arsenal installed.

But because I use a lot of renamed lights, the water arrows scripts probably won't work all that much. I'll try to think of a way around that, but that's a worry I'll save for later.

Here is a few brand new screenies:


stairs somewhere in the mines:
(http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/8322/mines3df4.jpg)

Here is where I imagine is the last place you'll encounter hammer guards before entering zombie territory. no guards yet 'cause I'm still building the mines.
(http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/3659/mines2ya0.jpg)

This is just some obscure place in the mines, easy to get lost down there.
(http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/9421/mines1jk3.jpg)

Time to jump around.
(http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/3579/jumpingdm4.jpg)

After I redid the lights for the mansion, I thought I'd show two pics of the upstairs gardens.
(http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/263/garden2xf2.jpg)

(http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/5260/gardenqe7.jpg)

As usual, the pics are dark, very dark. This mod is about darkness and hiding in it afterall:angel:

BenNM on 11/6/2008 at 13:59

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Amazing... I know these places - like deja vu. =)

Definitely like your thinking - relatively few load zones, etc.
You can bet people will add at least some weapons, though.
Like hoots7, I'm already thinking Thieves Arsenal by scruggs.

Anyway, for my first post on TTLG I wanted to say:
~ Excellent idea - you're way ahead of me.
~ Love the screen shots; they're good.
~ Nice job so far :thumb: - looking forward to more news.

Blith_Erring_Idio on 25/7/2008 at 21:33

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So did you retexture all that stuff? or create from scratch? it looks like a lot of triangular faces that ! do not recognize from anywhere in Vanilla.

Opal-Eyed Fan on 21/3/2009 at 19:24

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Thank you BenNM:D
I'll do my best to make the mod worth playing.



Thanks biker!




The hard thing about trying to recreate anything reminding of Thief, in Oblivion, is that 99 % of the nifs that came with the game are useless.
So one has to improvise as much as one can. I do use the remaining 1% that is remotely usefull and try to be as creative as I can. Of course I'm always on the lookout for any modders resource that have anything of use for a Thief theme.

I can put details on how to make a mod like this in the readme, so anyone that wants to make something like this themselves can easily do so. And of course, if you download this mod and say hey, I want to use some of this stuff and make a mod too ... .. then get to work ;) the Oblivion editor will let you change anything you like, to create the experience you prefer.


More about the mod now: over the course of time virtually thousands of things have been deleted for fps reasons. I've deleted tons of stuff and hundreds of hours of work have gone down the drain already so I've learned a few expensive lessons about level building the hard way. For example I spent two months making the exterior to the Baffords mansion. The idea were to have a street that went around the Mansion so you could look for alternative entryways and I even had guards patrolling the roof and balconies. The thing looked so cool and gave many entering possibilities, but framerates hit rockbottom:erg: so the only thing that survived from that project is a big balcony to the left of the main gate.



Ok so what am I doing at the moment? I'm right now constructing the lower level mines. A lot of work, progress is slow. Just this morning I spent quite a few hours making a very small lake at the lowest point in the mines.
This past week I've mostly focused on finishing a sewer. Remember jumping into the well and swimming your way to the Bafford mansion? well I just reused the idea for Cragsleft :cheeky: Now you can enter Cragsleft by jumping into it's sewer system and swimming/wading your way down to the mines, and make your way back up to the surface again through the main complex. A very dark and narrow sewer that is very very long, and on occation very steep. Sewer is finished and very cool I might add.

Light issue. OK, so far this mod has been featuring total darkness in the shadows. Now this is scary, because the total darkness is not your friend., You can't see in total darkness, so even though it's scary as hell, it's impracticle for a thief. In the Theif games, there were no totally dark shadows. So there was enough ambient lighting to make darkness your friend, darkness felt safe.
Now I've introduced ambient lighting in the mod world, so even if there are no lightsources around, you can still navigate through the darkest areas.

Here are the current ambient light values that I'm using :

R 9
G 10
B 9
(remember white light has the values R 255 + G 255 + B 255)

So as you can see shadows are still very dark, unless you sit in a dark room playing the mod, there's the chance you might not be able to navigate the dark maps. In that case use those torches and pray the enemy won't spot you :laff:

About loading levels by going through doors. Well that is one of the things Ive been working on.

The way things are right now, Baffords mansion and Cragsleft mountain prison is situated in the same world space.
You can, if you please, work your way though cragsleft mines,
to the surface of the mountain,
stroll along the path to baffords mansion (yes it's within walking distance) and sneak past all those guards and find your way into the thrownroom.

All without encountering a single instance of the tired old "click on this f'toopid door to load the next cell" trick.

Of course this opens up the question, why not make the entire city... one big level, no loading of interior cells... would be ubercool... onthe upside this is now possible, but on the downaide, the workload would kill me...:erm:

Anyway that's the update so far, sorry no new screenies as all the new stuff is so dark, that I'm afraid shooting pics would be a waste of everyones time.;)

Thank you guys for commenting on the mod so far :thumb:

Opal

Opal-Eyed Fan on 29/3/2009 at 01:15

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Thanks BenNM

Update :D


I'm working on the "Noble man's Mansion";) again now.
I have to redo a lot of the guards and their routines, so this is first on my todolist.
I also have to go over the lights again.
And I have to place loot and clues at the right places for players to find.


Right now there are only 18 more things I have to work through, on my little todolist.

After I get the old Mansion up and running once more,
there will only be 13 things left,
for me to work my way through,
on my todolist before the mod is ready to be released.



Here are some good news on the progress so far:

I'm finished with the lower levels of the "prison/factory/mines".
I'm finished with the upper levels of "prison/factory/mines".
In short, "prison/factory/mines";) is 100% done:
Lighting is done,
npcs are done,
notes/clues are done,
ai-packages and adjusted alertlevels are also done.
It's fully playable.

Seriously, I could have released this part of the mod as a standalone level tomorrow:D

but I guess I want to get all the other parts of the mod done first and then release everything as a full mod.

take care.:thumb:

Opal