New Horizon on 22/6/2011 at 01:37
Quote Posted by deathshadow
I REALLY have to call bull on that -- 100% horse manure.
Having been part of a team that has built a Thief inspired game from the ground up, I can tell you that a Thief game is nothing like a GTA game. Sure you can stream textures, landscape and spawn AI on the fly in a GTA game on something like the original xbox...but good luck doing it with a Thief game. The AI, sound propagation, light and shadow calculations, stim-response system, all of it takes a huge chunk out of the system resources. It would take something a little more sophisticated than whatever streaming they used in GTA to pull off a Thief game. All of that stuff has to be tracked and monitored...unlike a lot of games where you can just switch it off when the player is out of view. As we learned on Dark Mod, Thief games are intensive beasts.
The reason they can stream those games is because the throughput is so much smaller. On the old xbox, I can totally see a Thief game bottle-necking pretty quickly.
Krypt was one of the developers of T3, he definitely knows what he's talking about...and at that point in time...streaming a game like Thief just wouldn't have been possible on an underpowered system like the original xbox.
Renzatic on 22/6/2011 at 02:55
Quote Posted by New Horizon
Krypt was one of the developers of T3, he definitely knows what he's talking about...and at that point in time...streaming a game like Thief just wouldn't have been possible on an underpowered system like the original xbox.
They would've had to plan and build accordingly, but it might've been possible to stream in that much detail even on the original Xbox. Problem was, they didn't have any other choice but to work with an engine that was far too unwieldy to fit comfortably inside the Xbox's paltry 64MB of ram. By the time they learned as much, it was too late to reverse course and begin again.
I think the worst tragedy with T3 isn't that the game was "dumbed down for the konsole kiddies", rather that it could've been so much more. The fact they pulled a fairly decent game out of a near untenable situation is impressive enough. But imagine what they could've done if they had an engine that would've allowed them the room to do what they originally wanted. The Thief 3 that could've been.
It probably would've looked like Beleg's map up above.
GlasWolf on 22/6/2011 at 13:29
I'm sure I remember one of the team (null, maybe?) over at the old Ion Storm forums saying that they looked at streaming technology and it just didn't work with a Thief title. I'm guessing NH has it just about right.
pwyll on 1/8/2011 at 03:18
I'm so glad that there will be new TDS missions soon. My fingers are itchy. I need to steal something!
Beleg Cúthalion on 4/8/2011 at 08:43
Very nice, this looks somehow unique. But ERH+ should take care about the geometry and design not being too cube-based. A square block in DromEd is a room, but in TDS it's obvious that it's just a square block. That's why the TDS designers put in a lot of vault and rafter meshes to "break" the image of a flat cube-like ceiling or wall. This makes the architecture far more organic, which is what he needs IMHO for this kind of mission.
Beleg Cúthalion on 17/9/2011 at 19:40
This looks like it's getting Baker Streety. :thumb: In my FM I've tried to create the same fake "beams" with the help of a very small photo-based texture (just a section of a single row). But of course it only works with horizontal rows on walls.
I'd love to see a mission using these Victorian styles at a greater extent.
