peter_spy on 15/1/2025 at 19:48
Quote Posted by snobel
There's now a materials import plugin for Blender and a tool for converting T3 meshes to OBJ format, so I've managed to make all the modified meshes I needed:
Wow, this looks like a massive improvement, if you could bypass 3dsmax 5.1 for modeling and making materials, this should open up many new possibilities for T3 :)
snobel on 16/1/2025 at 13:37
It's an improvement - but annoying that 'old Max' is still needed for the conversion.
Currently the materials plugin is only for import, you can't set up new materials in Blender and export as .mlb.
Owl2 on 16/1/2025 at 18:19
Quote Posted by snobel
It's an improvement - but annoying that 'old Max' is still needed for the conversion.
Currently the materials plugin is only for import, you can't set up new materials in Blender and export as .mlb.
this is incredibly cool. you can import thief 3 assets and edit them o.o that is wild! please share that with me <3
peter_spy on 17/1/2025 at 08:04
Quote Posted by snobel
It's an improvement - but annoying that 'old Max' is still needed for the conversion.
Currently the materials plugin is only for import, you can't set up new materials in Blender and export as .mlb.
That's a bummer. I wonder if it would actually be more viable to update the engine/renderer to use more modern formats for meshes, like .obj, rather than to wrestle with old formats that required DX8.1 to be displayed properly... I know, easier said than done, it's not like Thief 3 source code is available. Someone could finally leak that one, it's been so many years ;)
snobel on 17/1/2025 at 13:41
That would be much harder, unfortunately. I haven't completely given up on a mesh export plugin for Blender but it's on the back-burner, now that I have what I need.
As for source code - yes, please... :D
RangerXT on 22/1/2025 at 20:43
Quote Posted by szmotsu
As i told you before @snobel its awesome project, really impressive, with great possibilities for whole community. I was playing T3 City mod for Metal Age in the past and experience from walking through seamless City streets was amazing. Its good to hear that peter_spy is working on some models for this, he is really experienced in doing objects for T3 and Dark Mod (if im rights he is also known as Judith who created some great samples in T3ed like Material museum). Last time i was working on rewritting part of the render in order to implement some nice graphic effects like soft shadows or AO (generally to use modern 3d libraries ex OGL3.2 /DX11) but frozen this project in awaiting for NVidia RTX Remix as its may offer even more possibilities,)
There's a section dedicated to Thief Deadly Shadows in the official RTX Remix discord if you're interested in hanging out there. Not much work has been progressed on it due to severe incompatibilities. If you actually had the experience to write a new renderer for it to improve compatibility that would be a huge win
snobel on 23/9/2025 at 11:11
Project update: I've been working on the script fixing tool - and it's going pretty well. Currently it's capable of converting a triggerscript file to a text format that can be edited (or auto-patched) and then converted back to a working triggerscript file. Some more functionality is needed but most of the work has been done.
That work had to be paused, though, because reading some old notes I rediscovered another issue with the game which needed fixing if the combined map is to behave the same as the original parts. As T3Main.exe will tell you:
Quote Posted by Viktoria error
Error Message
________________________________________________________________________________
Two ACitySectionPopulationInfos exist in your map. Remove one or you shall surely perish.
Well, there's not two but five CitySectionPopulationInfo objects in the City map... While it would
probably be possible to emulate the behaviour of several CSPIs using scripts (and I think I can hear Adsk1 saying "hold my beer") it would add a lot of complexity to the already complex scripting. So I had a go at patching in a multi-CSPI feature.
That turned out to be somewhat ... complex. :) But it appears to be working now, at least well enough. You can have many CSPIs but only one can be active at a time. For testing I made a small map with six arenas, each with its own CSPI, where Hammers and Pagans would continuously fight and respawn. Every minute the active CSPI would change, so that the fighting moved to another arena.
Initially it would crash after some minutes and of course I thought I'd screwed up somewhere. But the original exe file behaved the same way (with an adapted map with one CSPI but similar activity). As it turns out, several functions needed a null-pointer check - luckily it was possible to add those in. Now it consistently crashes on a failed memory allocation after about half an hour and ~750 dead NPCs...
So as a nice side effect the game may be a bit more stable now, at least with heavy fighting going on. Getting memory problems even with a small test map is disconcerting, but since the original exe is no better, I'll leave it for now.
There'll be an updated City map (
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152854) over here for testing this, probably next weekend.
