A Few Unrelated Questions

Yandros on 21/5/2017 at 00:55

You will probably need to figure out what's wrong because in my experience (and I also just checked in my current mission), I only get distant art if I have NewSky enabled, and not if it is disabled.

GORT on 21/5/2017 at 21:25

I thought distant art only works when NewSky is enabled. If you can't get to work with it disabled, you might be able to have an object attached to the player that acts like the distant art. I'll need to test this theory. This does work with NewSky, though. I use this trick in the 10th mission of TROTB 2. I use a sphere object to get the far mountain range in there. Using distant art made it look like crap. Here's a picture of what it looks like.
(http://s10.photobucket.com/user/xGORTx/media/dump201705211523160_zps0sg8gfdp.png.html)

Inline Image:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a110/xGORTx/dump201705211523160_zps0sg8gfdp.png

The nice thing about going this route is that you can change it for different areas.

DavidMcMurdo on 21/5/2017 at 21:56

That looks amazing. I've no idea how I'd even begin to do what you describe so I think I'll leave it haha. Thanks though. How many polygons are we allowed to show on screen at once now? I've read so much DromEd material from different time periods that I've seen all kinds of numbers. I assume that most of the community here make maps that even people playing vanilla Thief 2 can play.

Yandros on 22/5/2017 at 00:34

Depends on what you mean by vanilla Thief 2. If you mean OldDark, then no - pretty much everything released nowadays requires the latest version (at time of release) of NewDark. If you mean with no mods installed, then it depends. Missions with lots of custom assets are better played without any mods, but those with mostly stock assets can be played with mods on.

DavidMcMurdo on 22/5/2017 at 08:16

Quote Posted by Yandros

I own three copies of Thief 2—my original CD version, a GOG version, and a Steam version.

When I was preparing to get into map making for the game around a month ago, I assumed that the GOG version already had the Taffer Patch since it allows for higher resolutions. This doesn't seem to be the case however, since I couldn't get anything to work right without installing the Taffer Patch. As far as I can tell, the Steam version is exactly the same as a patched CD version. I kind of assumed that NewDark itself was a mod, but maybe not. I've played Thief 2 to death, but haven't had any reason to get into the technical details until now.

So if someone were to buy Thief 2 from Steam, say, would they be able to play the fan maps here? Not sure how they'd load them actually. During the course of my experimentation I tried several programs to run fan missions. One was GarrettLoader, which was fine, but I ultimately decided to stick with the FMSelector (I forget its exact name since I set it to run automatically at the game and DromEd startup) that comes with the Taffer Patch, and from what I can tell from reading these forums, that seems to be what most people use. Not sure even how you'd load a fan mission without some extra.

Yandros on 22/5/2017 at 14:19

You can install FMs manually if you really know what you're doing, but most people use FMSel or NewDarkLoader these days. A few diehards still use the old DarkLoader but it has issues with some missions and especially if you use any mods.

gamophyte on 23/5/2017 at 22:44

Quote Posted by GORT

I use a sphere object to get the far mountain range in there.

I swear you are going to write up a tut for this ;)

I also thought about doing a sphere close to player face for a blurry water effect. I have no idea how though. I will tackle this later when I come to it.

GORT on 24/5/2017 at 06:48

@gamophyte
It's actually not very hard. You can physically attach the sphere-like (or a half sphere-like) object to the player. With NV's script, it can be done with NVLinkBuilder. You can also do this with a conversation event.
The nice thing about this is that you can give it joints for things like maybe fake flying objects.
The important thing that you need to know is that you want this to be only visible in outside areas. So, I make this object quite huge and have my sky settings (NewSky only. Haven't tested it with the skybox) a bit bigger that the object. Since these setting are very huge, I usually don't see the object anywhere in the mission but in outside areas.
Although I didn't do this in TROTB2, the best way to have your object might be with replacement textures. That way you have control of it in case you want to change it when the player approaches a different outside area. With this situation, I would probably be switching between Meta-properties with the textures I want.

gamophyte on 24/5/2017 at 14:08

@GORT, I know we talked about this before but I am super novice still. I guess I'll get it as I read more. Additional to the water blur play attachment I'd like the player to look up at the city from my docks and see it's basic structure almost like a distant view but really it's a simple move-with-player object. Thanks, will post video when I get to it.

GORT on 24/5/2017 at 20:52

@ gamophyte

I'll try to make that tutorial with a demo when I have more time. As for the blur play attachment, I would have to do some tinkering. I'm guessing it may have to do with using materials, heat disks, or a combination of both to get a good effect. One thing about heat disks is that having too much of them tend to hurt the frame rate in-game.