Ghostly on 18/6/2014 at 05:06
Friendly greetings
Since the original Unreal engine made its first debut in 1998 with FPS game Unreal and Dark engine respectively with Thief - The Dark Project both in 1998 as far as I know, knowing how well the Unreal engine has been upgraded and maintained to be a popular choice for many games to present age.
This is propably 16 years wayyy tooo late for a discussion, but had LGS not have shut their doors down that early would they have managed the same treatment with their Dark engine like how Epic Games did with their Unreal engine?
As in refining it for betterment and increased its inheret limitations and room for that little extra portability.
This is such a dilemma I have been over thinking about for two reasons, the rendering capabilities Dark engine has and to also having been written in C++ just like Unreal engine is, the would-be choice for any future game designers to have played around with for future stealth designed games, I find it both very interesting and sad how a Thief game in todays age like Thief 4 - The Reboot sought its way to Unreal engine while Dark engine feels like pushed into its shadows from which it was born and forgotten, I came first to realise and appreciate why The Dark Mod made its way to existance.
No doubt I might propably have overlooked some other reasons that may have played their reasons and this is propably mostly just theorycrafting but how would Dark engines future have looked in a perfect world, Thief exclusive and simply been kept so or could it have ended in a similar position of how Unreal is?
One last question, was there both political or either a technical reason why Thief 3 - The Deadly Shadows was built on Unreal 2 rather than Dark engine?
P.S. I understand it was developed by Ion Storm but consisted by some of the original staff I think.
Judith on 18/6/2014 at 08:31
Thief 3 was made on heavily modified Unreal 2.x engine with an in-house renderer, since it was meant to be released on original Xbox.
I don't think DarkEngine was ever intended to be sub-licensed or even as a tool for any modding communities. It was already quite user-unfriendly and difficult to use in comparison to Quake's Radiant or Half-life's Hammer, although we have to remember that Thief gameplay required more complicated approach in comparison to a typical shooter. Also UnrealEd had an advantage - it was (and still is) a really user-friendly set of tools, that probably explains its huge popularity.
ZylonBane on 18/6/2014 at 13:49
Quote Posted by Judith
I don't think DarkEngine was ever intended to be sub-licensed
*cough*SystemShock2
Chaos on 19/6/2014 at 11:19
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
*cough*SystemShock2
LGS and Irrational were like siblings.
So it's like lending something to your brother/sister. It's not really "lending" ;)
Fafhrd on 22/6/2014 at 20:10
LGS was actually dumping Dark in favour of a new internally developed engine for Thief 3, so I think the answer to the original question is "no."
demagogue on 22/6/2014 at 23:50
I don't recall everything, but wasn't that "new" engine to be developed out of Dark anyway? They kept developing Dark Engine for Deep Cover and T2Gold right up to the end.
New Horizon on 23/6/2014 at 01:19
Quote Posted by demagogue
I don't recall everything, but wasn't that "new" engine to be developed out of Dark anyway? They kept developing Dark Engine for Deep Cover and T2Gold right up to the end.
Yeah. It was the next generation of dark engine. Siege Engine.
ZylonBane on 23/6/2014 at 16:14
It was supposed to be pretty awesome even in its early state. A completely hardware-based renderer, free of all the horrible hacks imposed by the original engine being built around software rendering.
Fafhrd on 24/6/2014 at 01:22
Quote Posted by demagogue
I don't recall everything, but wasn't that "new" engine to be developed out of Dark anyway? They kept developing Dark Engine for Deep Cover and T2Gold right up to the end.
The impression I got from the tidbits that leaked out about Siege was that they basically scrapped everything from Dark for it. As ZB says, it was a completely new renderer, and the descriptions of the editor was that it was entirely unlike anything that people were working with at the time, and maybe even still. 'No BSP' being the one thing I can remember off the top of my head that really stood out.
Ghostly on 24/6/2014 at 14:48
This is something new for me to hear about the Siege part that would have been really awesome, but thanks for some insight now I understand better some parts of the history in regards to my one question which had been nagging me.
