/vr/ - Retro Games

Oldfart here. Loved Thief back in 00, but then I got annoyed with the supernatural stuff. I was really just looking for some straight medieval stealth and suspense. Anyway, I've never played it since, and I want to get back into Thief. Any recommendations for good FMs that eschew the supernatural stuff?

>>9237464
Home Sweet Home
Violent End of Duncan Malveine
Feast Of The Pilgrims
Endless Rain
CoSaS 2: Mission X

WHO'S THERE? HELLOOO??

ur a taffer

>The Black Parade when

We reached the stage where even Thief FMs have reached a point where we're basically playing sequels. Now it's a matter of 1 or 2 years till the next interesting mission.
The last "big" release was Nicked's Ravensreach. After that, we only had some small FMs.
Excited for the end of the month tho. Supposedly, we will have a few good FMs bcs of the New Dark 10 years anniversary

>>9240529
>The Black Parade when
From the TTLG thread:

"It's comfortably above 95% complete and we've been actively working on finishing it off/testing it the entire time since the last update."
"Just to make things 100% clear, there is absolutely zero risk of The Black Parade being canceled. It is simply much too far along for that to happen. There have been some unexpected setbacks and difficulties over the years as with any project, but it is very very close to completion."

>>9240529
I'm as hyped for TBP as the next guy, but let's not pretend that every mission isn't another iteration of endless rain

>>9241181
That would be fucking boring to make and everything I've seen about it makes me think of the contrary.

>>9241456
>everything I've seen about it makes me think of the contrary
I've only seen the ambience videos, and they gave me that impression. iirc one of them even shows the obligatory curfew notice that skacky loves to put in his city missions.

that being said, there are some really cool locations. I'm especially hyped for the industrial areas, which are kind of underexplored by t1 FM authors. the spooky pagan/undead areas also seem interesting. pagan settings are just underrated in general, so I'm really hyped for more of those

>>9236948
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:64d8cc65e8e605446a076041da9c244c41bd1d27&dn=Thief%20collection
Torrent share encompassing games, patches and various fan missions. All fms have descriptor tags for ease of searching through fm launchers.

>>9240760
Thank you, bro. i also checked the thread on ttlg today after posting my comment.

>>9241181
>>9241456
>>9241550
I also agree that they won't make 10 missions out of endless rain, but that industrial area mission does look very endless rain-y (which I like, but yeah it would be boring to have a whole campaign of that). I think they're doing a good job with diversifying the missions.
>even shows the obligatory curfew notice that skacky loves to put in his city missions.
That's cliché, lazy and cringe lol. I hope not all city missions have this shit but to be fair, it's a really tiny detail so whatever.

I'm hoping to play The Black Parade this year! Maybe around Christmas!!

>>9241780
4 seeders and counting, that's a unexpectedly good one taffers! Don't you dare to leave, else wild burricks will dig a hole into your homestead.

Why is it that I only get the "itch" to replay Thief Gold occasionally, but I don't get the same feeling for Metal Age? The immediate associations in my mind for TG are fun and wonderment, but for T2 it's mostly just tedium.

>>9242854
I'm a Metal Age guy but I do have to admit that the game visuals look stale in comparison with TG. TG's textures look more soulful and kinda timeless. I think that specifically with the first missions of the Metal Age, you can see it looks kinda out of place.
I think this gets better late with life of the party, and casing the joint, etc. It looks more well put together.

>>9242941
I've said it before in one of these threads, but one of T2's main issues is that it failed to realise its art direction within the game engine. you see all the artwork showing a beautiful tech dystopia, and you can't wait to explore it in-game, but as soon as you start playing all you get is boring, boxlike architecture and misplaced objects.

meanwhile, T1's stylish film noir art direction saturates every single mission (only the gold exclusive missions deviated from it)

shapes up to be another year of thief (fm's) being the best game I've played that year

what's the most useful documentation for building FMs in dromed?

Are the top thief fm missions better than the top vanilla missions? I have never played fm maps.

>>9243241
It's fragmented. Nicked's tutorial is a very basic framework. There are some videos on youtube. With Dromed you can easily open up OMs/FMs and see how something is done. Most technical issues and solutions to it are mentioned in a TTLG thread one way or another. If you are really stuck or doing something really difficult you could try the Dromed Discord. In general I'd recommend to keep a notebook for your own future refence.

>>9243658
so one of my best bets is to reverse engineer good maps?
alright man, thank you! I'll get to it

>>9243658
I've been trying to make guards idle for a while at their patrol nodes for like 2 hours and I'm approaching an aneurysm. I've been trying to find occurences of this in existing missions - I remember this being the case - but I can't for the life of me find it.

>>9243761
If I understand you correctly, one example you could look at is the bowman on the balcony of Schlock's FM Shadow Play?

>>9243809
That mission does have some examples. The important thing to remember is that the Face angle on the relevant link data is in radians, not degrees.

>>9241181
They already said there's only one straight up city mission on the campaign. And if I were making those trailers, I'd put the focus on those kinds of areas to keep the rest a surprise.

>>9242960
100%, bro.
some levels are well designed and have a good art direction tho. but they are the exception.

>>9245173
imagine the smell

>>9243441
There's many FMs that surpass the originals in every way in my opinion. Try Into the Odd, The Scarlet Cascabel and Feast of Pilgrims, they're my personal favorites but there's many more that are great.

>>9245558
Summer's nearly gone. Almost time to start playing Thief again, is there a more comfy feeling?

Lost Among the Forsaken is so fucking good bros. I'm replaying it for the third time now.
I have mixed feelings about drk's other missions, but he really struck gold with this one.

great aesthetic. great architecture. his take on the sealed section is absolute ruin porn. he reuses some areas from his other missions and from T1 (mostly from Assassins). it all works out perfectly.
there's also great enemy variety.

the first area alone is a great start. you have the lit up walls and watchtowers of the barricades behind you, facing into the darkness of the sealed section. there's no enemies (yet). everything's silent. you really feel that you're on a treshold.

love the lore. drk abandons the solipsist trope that only garrett can venture among the undead and survive. in Lost, there's other thieves roaming and looting the sealed section. it's also implied that the sewers there were relatively safe at some point, and that sewer workers still worked there after the abandonment.

just a great FM. definitely one of the best for T1.

>>9246467
just finished it! And yeah, it was really cool!
The only thing I didn't like was the crypt itself. But the whole architecture, mood and lore was nice.

How well does multiplayer Thief work, like Thief 2 Co-op + Custom Maps or UT99 Thievery? Both in terms of basic functionality and how well the gameplay benefits from it.

>>9245558
Into the Odd is I think the single greatest thing to ever come out of Thief. Otherwise I kinda agree, I think some individual FMs can surpass the best OMs, but as a whole package I definitely prefer the OMs.

>>9245173
just finished the sound a burrick makes in a room or whatever, first fan mission apart from trying the dark mod a couple years ago. it was alright, mostly was happy to be playing thief again. didn't do so well, 2700 out of 4500 loot. dunno where it was all hiding.

>>9247145
Into the Odd is an absolute masterpiece but I certainly would not recommend it as a first FM.

>>9247481
Oh no not at all, I think a lot of FMs people recommend for others to start with are bad for first timers
I usually recommend Endless Rain because its what I started with and it got me hooked immediately

What do you guys think of gloomwood, an indie thief clone https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=7xWr9O9Gr1E ?

>>9247979
It's not a thief clone, but it is heavily inspired by Thief. I really liked the demo, haven't played the early access yet

>>9247998
It’s a clone in all but in name. Sure, seems like killing doesnt suck, but still seems as irrelevant as thief’s combat system.

>>9247979
We’ll see how it is when its out of EA, but first impressions feel like Dishonored more than Thief.

>>9248369
Well, name and the fact that you aren't doing any thieving in it.

>>9248414
>>9247998
>>9247979


looks much worse than The Dark Mod, even the graphics is much worse

>>9251086
>graphicwhoring
>on /vr/
shiggity diggity doo

>>9242941
I actually really like some uses of colored lighting in Thief 2. Playing it back to back with Thief 1 I was struck but how nice some of it looked.

>>9247979
Started playing it today, really good so far, but it's only a Thief clone if you like missions like Return to the Cathedral and Shalebridge Cradle.

Does anyone have that infograph of the recommended FMs saved? Got TG and T2 set up on my Steam Deck for a long trip, and I wanna cram as much good stuff in there as I can get my hands on.

>>9251086
At least there's hands now, but it's still the Dusk issue.

>>9254043

Is there a more soulful way of downloading Thief FMs than through http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/ ?

>>9254957
Why do Russians love this game so much?

>>9255363
Because It's a great game

what are the highly praised dark mod missions? it's annoying they have no user ratings and i've played a few shit ones at random.

friendly reminder Thief was trapezoid boxkino

>>9247979
I'm going to wait 2 years until it's finished to play it. Games like these you can't enjoy in the early access episodic format and have to play fully from start to finish, just like Thief.

>>9256041
The Builder granted a keystone unto us, so we may worship him by building great stable arches of stone

teef

>>9251086
on a technical level, yes. but it has vastly superior art direction. TDM's art direction is kind of awful

how hard is it to make a fan mission?

>>9259854
it's not difficult, but it's time consuming. dromed takes some time to get into. there are many good community resources for it tho. nicked's tutorial is one of the more popular ones

I like 2 more than 1. Is that normal?

>>9262215
Yes, but apparently 1 has better fan maps.

>>9262215
having opinions is a sign of sever mental illness please a doctor asap

>>9263087
it's the other way around. t1 has a more solid original campaign, while t2 has a bigger fan mission scene with more iconic missions

An early version of Thief 2 was leaked. It's from a few months before release (March 2000.) Considering the state of the majority of the levels a ton of work was done in the last few months before release. LGS had talked about how they had to throw together "this thing" for Eidos so they could give Daikatana more time but I'm shocked at how quickly this was done considering the state of everything in this.
https://twitter.com/skacky/status/1571433181856862211?s=20&t=qFmtjkOAZFIRK1BMWl1whQ

>>9266948
https://hiddenpalace.org/Thief_II:_The_Metal_Age_(Nov_4,_1999_prototype)
download link here

>>9266948
cute

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=126456&page=31&p=2035146&viewfull=1#post2035146
Oh also we got the entire source code to thief, system shock 2 and Deep Cover.

>>9267015
>deep cover
pls god let it be playable at all

The disk image file is corrupted?

>>9266948
>>9267015
So, are these the same leak? Is the Deep Cover/SS2 stuff in that 1999 Thief 2 prototype on hiddenpalace? Are they separate? All the links leading back to the dreamcast related forums that mention the SS2 dreamcast port, Deep Cover and Thief source code are dead.

>>9267015
Strange that thief was never remade by fans the way diablo or doom were. They could have added more features, better AI. Maybe even a randomizer.

>>9267397
Thief is nowhere near as popular as either of those games. We're lucky we got newdark.

>>9267157
>Playable
>Leaked 2010
>Absolutely no gameplay anywhere online
Lol fat chance.

threadly reminder that city all missions are garbage:)

>>9268897
Oh that's a very OLD leak. I thought it was part of the same leak as the Thief 2 beta stuff.

>>9266948
god i can't wait until the TDP prototypes leak

>>9268897
Deep Cover was not even a vertical slice, there is nothing except very early prototypes.

>>9243761
>>9243809
>>9243965
>The important thing to remember is that the Face angle on the relevant link data is in radians, not degrees.

Yeah, don't use face angle, just use argument 2 which is an object. It can be anything even across the map if its in the general direction of where you want them to look. Or just make a marker object right next to the patrolpt you want them to pause at and link to that.

>>9269508
not claiming to be an expert here, but from what i can tell this has nothing to do with the old 2010 dark engine leak. looking at the hidden palace dump this came from (https://hiddenpalace.org/Project_Eclipse)) there are a few random eidos cds, mostly press cds - i think we just got really, really lucky that someone happened to find a thief 2 alpha build lgs presumably sent to them, although i have no clue who bought the damn thing
>>9267397
the dark mod? thievery ut? newdark?

>>9270404
No, I mean an engine remake like openlara.

Just finished the games and now I'm moving onto fan missions. What are the absolute best of the best? Like top 10 fan missions.

>>9270540
Screenshots of Shadow Play is the one that got me into FMs in the first place and it remains my favorite. It captures something magical about TDP that other FMs kinda miss. I don't know how to describe it. There's a distinct flavor the really well polished FMs all seem to have.

>>9270487
the source code we got in the 2010 leak + newdark is *good enough* for most people, which is partially why all of the old engine remake projects like opendarkengine fizzled out and went nowhere
i don't even think openlara is a particularly good example, the lead dev seems to be busy porting it to as many platforms as possible (the gba port was cool, but i digress) instead of actually making it a faithful reimplementation of the original games. i'm over ground-up engine remakes, honestly, decompilation/reverse engineering is a better route in my eyes even if it leads to gay copyright disputes

>>9266948
>work fast to give shitkatana more time
pain

What are some of the best looking fan missions you guys have ever played

>>9271818
schlock's missions (Shadow Play, Into the Odd, Alcazar) have a great aesthetic imo.
sticks close to the classic TDP style, but with more details. lots of environmental storytellin

bump

>>9272956
sadly, threads autosage after a week now

>>9273084
*2 weeks