Thief Petition: Release the dark engine source.

darky on 27/4/2006 at 10:24

iam only reading on this fantastic thief board, but sure you have my sign for this request. hope it helps.

nobody on 1/5/2006 at 13:02

Quote Posted by deadman

Interesting to hear about Intermetrics. And sad their owner is wasting their time with the incompetent Homeland Security ;)

just a Quick rebuttal on this point. being a Chief in the United States Coast Guard I can tell you at least some of what Titan is doing with us in DHS: Training personel in advanced electronics, fiber-optics and other highly technical skills. I personally learned how to build computers (from component level not board assembly) from a Titan contracted instructor. now as far as DHS being incompetent; it's true we've had some problems but not all of the DHS agencies have suffered from incompetencies. the USCG for example is surprisingly effective considering the jobs we do and the people we have to do it. we have less people in the USCG than the New York City Police Department yet, as we proved on 9/11, we are one of the few government agencies that can really pull through at any given moment under any given circumstances. so please don't lay a blanket accusation of incompetency over the entire DHS. also please consider what is being asked of the department before you call it incompetent. I'm not saying there haven't been problems but I think such a sweeping accusation is off the mark by a good margine. sorry for rambling on like this but I feel like I just had my career of 15+years blown off as an excercise in incompetency and I'm a little irked by that.
my on-topic question is this: Dark engine is so old is there any point having it's source code released to us? I mean what will we do with it? any engine we get is going to be outdated but Dark is more than merely old isn't it more like REALLY old? so what's the plan? why are we asking this company to give up something they own? or are we just trying to establish a precident for companies to release their source codes once the marketability has run its course for the betterment of us all?

New Horizon on 1/5/2006 at 13:23

Quote Posted by nobody

Dark engine is so old is there any point having it's source code released to us? I mean what will we do with it? any engine we get is going to be outdated but Dark is more than merely old isn't it more like REALLY old? so what's the plan? why are we asking this company to give up something they own? or are we just trying to establish a precident for companies to release their source codes once the marketability has run its course for the betterment of us all?

To ensure that we can keep the Thief games running natively on future OS's for starters. I don't think the Thief community cares whether or not it 'looks' like it just came out of the developers studio with all the bells and whistles. There are plenty of small things that could be done to enhance the dark engine. LGS were beginning to impliment bump mapping, or so the small remnants tell us. A lot of the core Dark Engine systems are still pretty damned advanced. We can already make huge levels, but this would allow us to bust the object limit, increase the texture size limits...and if some really motivated programmers were interested...they could add other graphical enhancements and engine optimizations. The engine being old is fairly irrelevant in a community that is STILL pumping out fan misssions for Thief 2. We're not after the latest and greatest graphics, but a simple sprucing up would mean the world to us.

nobody on 4/5/2006 at 14:21

Quote Posted by New Horizon

that's what i wanted to hear. thank you again NH. so if nobody signs the petition will it help? lol on my way there.