aesir05 on 25/3/2005 at 23:37
I was wondering about this and thought the expert modders of this forum might have a clue.
I was thinking that perhaps some very nice person could undertake the task to recreate Thief 1 and Thief 2 in the Thief 3 engine, using the new Thief 3 control setup and items.
It would be a huge task but all the voices, videos and all those other things are already available. Perhaps recreating the maps will be tough but its just a thought whether or not this can actually be done.
Gestalt on 26/3/2005 at 00:04
Recreating the content from two full games would be... hard. It would take several years and a very, very dedicated team to competently recreate and update even one of the two previous games. That's a best-case scenario.
Some people have been playing around with attempts to recreate individual missions, which is more realistic.
ascottk on 26/3/2005 at 00:52
I've been experimenting with the training mission (all of it). I started with the first part of the training mission found in (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94146) this thread and I ended up copying the second part onto the first and now the whole training mission builds and plays just fine. It's a little over 6 megs in size after replacing some of the brushes with static meshes (the unr file used to be 7.5 megs in size and it still worked after copying and pasting).
I'm a full time student so I probably won't go into this project any deeper. I'm pretty sure the original missions could run without load zones (don't quote me on that). I think there only needs to be a balance between the brushes and meshes.
As for the sword, swimmable water, rope arrows, and a younger looking Garrett (without the scar and mech eye, at least in the Dark Project), the developers found in this forum are pretty resourceful. I have faith in them to bring these elements back to the Thief universe.
The visual elements of being underwater asked in (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94559) this thread is pretty much there but the physics of actually swimming will be the tricky part. I'm starting to think the Havok physics will not play a role but it'll be a combination of attachments, links, and scripts (again don't quote me on that one ;) ).
I managed to change Garrett's eyeballs. Just right-click PlayerGarrett in the actor browser, Show Links . . . and remove the link that point to his mech eye then replace that eye with a regular one. I don't know how to change that
only for that level. Trigger scripts, I guess. Also John P's texture packs has a scarless Garrett but I'm not sure how to apply that within the editor. I'd like to see Garrett as a Keeper scribe (or similar) just for the training mission. Another idea is to expand on that mission to include more details about why he left the Keepers (replace the basketball court with a conference room?). There's still a lot of potential for that level. There's buildings all around on the outside with the potential for exploration (one of those buildings holds the key as to why Garrett left). The training could get more difficult: moving lights, forcing Garrett to avoid Keepers when training to move more quietly.
Ropes do work see (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94990) this thread. Climbing a rope does work but the animations aren't there so use a script to force first person. I also changed the Climber property to blsLadder. Using the blsRope is too funky to get around on. With some crafty triggerscripts along with links, I'm sure rope arrows will be a reality.
There is a static mesh and some references to Garrett's sword so I'm sure that'll be easy to implement.
Oh yeah! Burricks! We need Burricks.
There's my rant but if people were to reimplement the prior two games, I'm sure they could be a lot better than the originals. There's too much potential for that . . . more story development . . . more eye candy . . . more chances to implement thieving skills . . .
aesir05 on 27/3/2005 at 00:44
The first reply kinda says that it'll take a couple of years at best.
ascottk says that he recreated the training level, relatively quickly being a full time student.
I'm not one for knowing detailed info on how to mod or create maps and such, but I, atleast initially thought that it would be rather easy since almost all of the assets are already available and it would take little time to recreate the entire games and more time to add more new stuff into it.
I could be wrong but I'd still love to see something like that in the future, perhaps a level alone would be good enough.
Komag on 27/3/2005 at 05:39
Quote Posted by aesir05
The first reply kinda says that it'll take a couple of years at best.
ascottk says that he recreated the training level, relatively quickly being a full time student.
Even if we went by that comparison, they first training mission is TINY and SIMPLE, I would say maybe 8 times easier done than all the rest of the main missions. If the training mission took just one week to translate, then the other 15 missions might take a couple months each (lots of stuff to iron out, scripting, etc), which is 2 1/2 years for each game. Even if the work was divided out between 30 highly skilled editors all fully dedicated to the work (yeah right), we're still a LONG way away from functional water (if ever - I doubt we'll ever have it really) and some other things.
Besides, most of us would rather have NEW stuff anyway.
That said, I'm quite confident a few folks are right now working on some remakes, probably you'll see more than one version of Lord Bafford's Manor for example :)
silsor on 27/3/2005 at 05:50
Yes, we probably won't see any concerted effort to port the whole series over. But I'm sure lots of people will take on individual favourite missions as challenges. I wouldn't mind trying my hand at bringing a mission over, like Bank for instance, just as practice after I start editing.
deadman on 28/3/2005 at 04:19
You all forget to mention the legal pitfalls associated with such an endeavor; Krypt himself, however little legal knowledge he has, suggested against such a project, offering that Eidos (well, whoever owns the Thief rights at this time) would waste no time to take issue with it... Many of us doubt legal recourse, but if whoever hosted the conversions didn't feel good enough with a "if you don't have Thief 1/2 you can't download this" disclaimer, then it'd be a problem. Jason himself has repeatedly voiced his opposition to Thief 1 to 2 conversions and I doubt he wouldn't have a different position here. So, that's another part of it.
As Komag noted, most of us are more interested in new missions than remakes, at least to begin with, so I'd focus on that, or even trying to recreate from scratch certain locales rather than copy the brushes verbatim.
deadman.
ascottk on 28/3/2005 at 05:32
I think this community could do a better job than the original games. The graphics, gameplay, storyline, cinematics (Wait! the movies in T1 and T2 were pretty cool!), character development, voice acting (some were pretty weak, even worse with T3), architecture, mood, animations, and other weaknesses could be turned into strengths with a community like this. Now that we have the editor and we don't have deadlines, we could improve what was already great (actually from movie-going point-of-view, remakes rarely do well). Sure, some of us actually have paying jobs or are students but without pressure I think this community could do a great job. Purists may not like that idea but that's one way of treating the original games.
The reason why I'm working on the training mission from T1 is to record the gameplay and treat myself as an actor/director to tell the story of Garrett. I've done the same thing with the original games and the graphics and animations did not sit with me well. Even after I tweaked the original missions with Dromed to attach shadows to the AI and manipulate events so I could actually see Garrett (or a representation of Garrett, I used another thief AI). With T3 I don't have to add a seperate AI into the map in order to see our favorite anti-hero. In other words, I'm just doing this because I have this creative urge to tell this story and T3Ed allows me to present this story in a better way.
Eye on 1/4/2005 at 06:14
HTML:
... using the new Thief 3 control setup ...
:wot:
other than the graphics, i'm not sure what from T3 i'd like to see reproduced again ... ever. the control setup and player movement are two things i hope i never have to deal with again. :eww: i'm still hoping these are things we can change. or should i say, you guys could change. :sly:
ZylonBane on 1/4/2005 at 22:59
As I've said in the past, I'd be more interested in seeing some of the TDS missions ported into the Dark Engine. It would be great to play through what Ion's mappers created without constantly being annoyed by all the problems TDS introduced.
