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.
snobel on 16/11/2025 at 09:49
Project update: Fixing scripts and other issues is well underway. The triggerscript 'auto-fixing' phase identified almost 400 potentially problematic scripts and split them into dedicated scripts for each section where they were used. As expected, most things went back to behaving normally after that but also as expected, there were some issues that needed to be fixed manually. Mostly minor stuff, like things visually disappearing when you crossed a section border, but there were a couple of more difficult issues.
One was connecting Lauryl's two patrols, where I took the easy way out and just let Lauryl 2 take over from Lauryl 1. It's not a perfect transition but good enough, at least for now.
The other major issue, which is still not 100% fixed, is the 'festering wound' multi-part conversation. There are five parts, four of which are now in one map, assigned to the same NPC archetype - which causes some problems.
Because the conversations are triggered on player proximity they'll all play one after the other, as long as you stay near the guards long enough. This is easy enough to fix. Worse, if you miss a part, then at the next part one or both guards will often (but not always) be standing in the A-pose until you get close enough to trigger the convo. This is of course quite immersion breaking!
Part 4 is not a problem because the next part is in Auldale. Part 3 is also not a problem because you can't really not trigger it. But parts 1-2 are quite easy to miss. I've 'fixed' the issue for part 2 by slightly extending the activation radius for part 3, so that it gets triggered when the guards are still just out of sight - so you never see the A-pose. For part 1 the best fix I could find is to trigger the convo when you frob a mission glyph on day 2 (because going on a mission will increment the game day, which means you'll miss the convo anyway). But the problem remains that if you exit the mission briefing and go back to the current map, then the convo will be playing and you'll miss all or parts of it.
If you have ideas for improving this, please chime in... A proper fix I'm sure would be to have four separate pairs of identical guard archetypes and assigning one convo to each. But gamesys changes are not allowed.
Auldale has been merged too. I've played through the main City storyline a few times now and it seems to be working fine. I'll do some more testing and hopefully release the final test map next weekend.
Beleg Cúthalion on 16/11/2025 at 17:12
Great update! Regarding the festering wound convos, even though I have probably forgotten all the important details: Why do you need to work with the archetype instead of specific actors in the map?
