So now that everything's settled, what's the story behind T3Ed's release?

Aja on 28/2/2005 at 04:21

I've been curious ever since it was released: what happened that gave the admins the go-ahead to give it to us? Why is it that the German article posted stated it would be out in a week, yet we got it that day? Was Eidos involved? Who gave you guys the editor in the first place, Eidos or Ion Storm?

I just want to hear the details of what happened behind the scenes from October to now.

David on 28/2/2005 at 07:58

Late October Saam ICQs (he's friendly with ISA staff) me and says that there is going to be an Editor, which I make happy noises about.

Twenty minutes later he says "nearly finished uploading it" to which I make :o :o :D faces.
He then says that we get to beta test it, so I can pick a few people and talk to a guy at Ion (pretty sure it was Paul Weaver).

I make more :D faces and post the icon into #thief

Inline Image:

http://www.ttlg.com/dave/hint.gif
The icon went through a few revisions, standard Unreal for v1 and v1.1, the same yellow icon that the rest of the T3 exes use for v2, while v3 and v4 (which is the public release) have the blue icon.

GBM gets it - Excellent with Unreal editors (and editors in general), TTLG Admin, experience with DromEd (Benny's Dead) (not that there was any question that he'd be getting it :p)

We think about other people and settle on Ulukai as he has excellent Unreal skills (Thievery, Nightblade (I think) and a high placing in the Make Something Unreal contest) so that's all three quadrants covered:

GBM - DromEd + Unreal
Ulukai - Unreal + No DromEd
Me - Neither, well actually some DromEd back in 1999.

So we merrily create a Deadly Betatesting forum in the Game Development category of the forums and try the editor out. At this point we discover that it's broken, 100% cpu usage all the time and it takes a millenia to do anything. :(

Alex Duran is given access to our Deadly Betatesting forum and we're told that he'll be the guy coding the editor to make it releasable.
We tell him about the CPU problem and are informed that it was up to a programming mistake and he thought he'd fixed it.

Turns out he had, the EXE was just in the wrong folder so we change that over and everything's hunky dory.

We go about our attempt to destroy it, documenting a few tutorials on the way. Several revisions go by, I found that objectives could not be constructed without the sound package, so the editor is altered to let you do them.

Everything quietens down for Christmas and that's it, we hear nothing for a while after Christmas. We email Paul asking what is happening, and are assured that they're still trying hard to get it out. I wonder if at this time there were rumblings from up high that they were going to be closed.

Time passes and we get the news Ion is closing. Paul tells us that there is a final revision of the editor that works with OEM versions of Thief III and that it'd be an awesome parting gift to the fans if it could be released.

A short while later we read the Giga.de announcement, figure its probably legitimate and release all the screenshots we have collected and tell people that we've had it for a while and yes, it works.

Rich, ex-admin Fionavar, spots it on Fileplanet, tells GBM and that's that.

SubJeff on 28/2/2005 at 08:07

Late October huh? Interesting.

Thanks very much for that David. :thumb:

Komag on 28/2/2005 at 08:30

Cool story. So even in the very end you didn't know for SURE that it would ever see the light of day until it actually did, wow. :eek:

bloodyzeppelins on 28/2/2005 at 13:58

:thumb: Very cool... it was a wonderful parting gift, to be sure.

Vlad Midnight on 28/2/2005 at 14:33

Havent got very deep into the editor yet, but I just hope they got everything right. :erm: It sounds like there will never be an update if something comes up missing or crash to desktop that is found. Sort of like the beds you cant use in Thief 1/g which causes it to crash. We can live without all the beds of course, that wasnt much of a big deal. :p

Aja on 1/3/2005 at 05:57

Thanks, David.

Now it would seem fitting that someone would write an entire history of the Thief series, from the community standpoint (TTLG in particular, since it has been the hub since the beginning). It should document everything from before Thief Dark Project was released until T3Ed finally was, as well as including the developments on TTLG.

I'd love to do it, but I haven't been around long enough (started playing Thief around 2000), and I'd have to comb through hundreds upon hundreds of archived threads to get the story straight that I'm sure some could recall instantly... I think it'd be a great read though.