People talk about the graphics, but it was the crescendo and decrescendo of guard sounds/singing/footsteps in Thief that made it one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.
It had a physically based sound engine I think?
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The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#22I loved Thief 1/2, these games were way ahead of their time and defined the genre for years to come.
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#23People talk about the graphics, but it was the crescendo and decrescendo of guard sounds/singing/footsteps in Thief that made it one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.
Yeah, the graphics were honestly kinda underwhelming, in particular the models were behind the curve compared to contemporary titles like Half-Life, and this didn't really improve with later titles like System Shock 2, where half the horror was the distorted textures stretched across the faces of the models.
I think what modern games have lost, that some of these late 90s titles absolutely nailed (Thief in particular), is the sound design and ambiance, which is just so dang evocative. Even the smallest incidental sounds had so much character. Picking up an item, pulling a lever, footsteps on the floor.
Modern games use such flat sounds for everything. Sure it's more realistic, at the cost of character and vibe.
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#24Never played Thief, but I logged a lot of hours in Unreal, 1998. I was (and still am) amazed at how full-featured the software renderer was. I always wished I could peek at the code behind it. If memory serves, the only thing my 3dfx Voodoo3 could do that software-only mode could not was surface reflections. Maybe something with colored lighting too, it's been a long time. Point is, it was a decent enough substitute…
But I remember Unreal being unreachable for me at that time because I couldn't even dream of getting a graphics accelerator and it won't even start with out a one, or was it the sound card requirement that was the blocker?
Everything up to (and including) Unreal Tournament had software rendering. It was one of the selling points when its competitor (Quake 3) was Hardware-accelerated-only.
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#25Also worth mentioning for Thief fans: The Dark Mod started as a Doom 3 mod, but now is a completely standalone, free and open source game: https://www.thedarkmod.com/main/
Hundreds of missions, an amazing Radiant fork maintained by the team, as well as an active and passionate community. They are awesome.
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#26For reference, the surface cache referred to in the article is similar to the one in Quake. Basically, you have a bunch of regular textures that you want to use when rasterizing your polygons. On top of that you want to blend low resolution lightmaps. These lightmaps need filtering (typically bilinear) to appear smooth when blended on top of the original texture.
It's wasteful to do this expensive filtering and blending every frame since the player typically sees those blended textures for a large number of frames when they're traversing the environment, so you keep a LRU cache of blended textures around. That's the surface cache.
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#27"Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri" Oh my gosh, I remember that game. I picked it up at a computer swap meet, and it was awesome!
I'd love to see a modern interpretation of Terra Nova or Heavy Gear. There are few games about infantry equipped with powered battle suits and heavy weaponry, which I find sort of odd given how cool the concept is.
Helldivers 2 is probably the most vogue infantry with powered battle suits and heavy weaponry game right now.
Also I suppose almost the entire Halo franchise was always about that.
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#28To Thief heads who played I and II and want more of it: play The Black Parade, an enormous mod 7 years in the making that is actually an entire new game. New gigantic maps full of secrets, style faithful to the original, weird universe, new story with cutscenes and voice acting. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429 I am not affiliated, just a fan.
From what I've heard The Black Parade mission style hews close to the style of Thief: The Dark Project. If your tastes are closer to Thief II: The Metal Age (or you'd just like more taffing about), I enjoyed T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age[1] quite a bit. The voice acting was pretty rough in places, but I found that kinda charming. I've also heard good things about Death's Cold Embrace[2].
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#29Whaat, I started replaying the game literally a few days ago, and now I see this on HN! The graphics and obviously didn't age well, although there are some higher res texture packs, which help when you play it in 4k. The Steam version worked for me almost out of the box, after patching it with TFix
The gameplay is okay-ish, probably due to nostalgia, but the AI is not the smartest, which creates a lot of fun situations - two guards trying to hit a giant spider inside a locked prison cell with swords, hitting only the cell door, instead of pressing a button next to them to open it, while calling the spider by name of the protagonist. But I remember that it was one of the scariest games for me as a kid, when it suddenly turned into dark fantasy horror from "just a thief game". I really had to push myself to walk past some of the undead and absolutely needed to make sure I cleaned the level thoroughly to be able to walk around comfortably.
The world building, sound design (especially the ambient sound loops) and the aesthetics/general visual style is something really unique that keeps drawing me to this game and it's really telling by how well I remember some of the places, despite having not played the game for 10 years or so.
Really a shame they gutted the franchise with the 2014 game and the very recent VR one.
Re: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
#30To Thief heads who played I and II and want more of it: play The Black Parade, an enormous mod 7 years in the making that is actually an entire new game. New gigantic maps full of secrets, style faithful to the original, weird universe, new story with cutscenes and voice acting. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429 I am not affiliated, just a fan.
How would you compare The Black Parade to The Dark Project?