grinch2020 on 5/7/2007 at 15:47

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Hi all. Long fan of the thief series but quit for awhile and thinking about coming back. Im trying to figure out what the state of the mod community is for Thief 3. It seems that an editor was released allowing fan missions to be made? Im not real sure as it seems to me from looking around that Thief 2 is still the most popular and Im curious as to why. I may be completely off here so let me know. I will have to re buy the game either way and Im just curious if it would be worth it at this point.

Ziemanskye on 5/7/2007 at 17:25

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There are more TMA fan missions because more people can run TMA, it's engine is better understood (and yes, easier to work with and add things to), and it has a bigger community.

Quite a few people were working on TDS missions and got slowed down or stopped by real life issues: higher detail engines mean higher detail FMs, which require an even higher time expense to create. Also, it seems quite a few get put off by the fact that 90+% of ttlg will seemlingly be nasty/rude/dismissive of people who liked TDS and want to work with it.

If you couple that with it largely being a requirement to use illegal software to add content that didn't come with the Editor to the game and you end up in what is really quite a poor, unfriendly, and inconvenient position. Multiply by the defections to Doom3 for the DarkMod and everyone seemingly giving up on reverse-engineering the obtuse fileformats, as well as some built-in limitations and some rather odd restrictions and you end up with very few people hanging around for more than doing Komag's tutorial for the editor.


Are there still missions being worked on? Yes.
Are there still people playing these missions? It's hard to be sure, but there's a small but regular flow of people asking when the next mission(s) will be out, so there is an audience.
Is it worth trying to get into the scene?...

That depends on what you want out of it, because you wont get widespread accolades or recognition for it, it will take a long time and probably require learning a lot of new skills to do well at it, and once you've done it you'll likely find that the beta-testers are pretty much the entirity of your audience.

But that doesn't stop making maps and solving problems from being fun: you'll just have to accept that it's a lot smoother and easier and more accepted to work for the older game, or move out to Not Thief Because We Don't Want To Be Sued (ie, the DarkMod)

grinch2020 on 5/7/2007 at 21:50

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Thanks for the replies. Thats sad news. Although there were things I liked better in T2 gamewise, the engine for T3 was pretty good. Not to mention the fact that it can be hard to find T2 anymore. I guess I will help that something comes of this "Dark Mod".

Springheel on 6/7/2007 at 00:47

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Hi grinch. If you'd like to help out, or just want to see what The Dark Mod is all about, check here: (http://www.thedarkmod.com/)

Ziemanskye on 6/7/2007 at 22:00

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You need 3D Studio Max 5 or 5.1 to add materials (not flat textures, but if you want alphas, or normal maps, or material based sounds even, it's got to go through Max), Static Meshes - which are a huge part of mapping for TDS, and with a lot of effort, apparently it is possible to add characters, so long as they come through the special ActorX variant that only works with said old, unsupported, and not so officially available anymore versions of Max.

We can add sounds without Max. You just need Python and people willing to install extra bits after installing the map to get them to work, or being willing to dl 2Gb of sounds they've already got as well as the new ones. There's hope we might find a way around that though.

Text, like readables and non-blocking stuff is easy, and cutscenes just require being turned into Bink video files once you've made them elsewhere as far as we can tell.

Scripts are based on a limited but quite flexible in-Editor scripting tool. It's not perfect, but it can do quite a lot.

Conversations and Objectives, well, that's mostly just Text and Sound as covered above, so as easy/hard as you want to make it.

And no, later versions of Max don't work, because Autodesk/Alias/Discreet/whoever they were at the time changed the plugin formats between 5.1 and the 6+ set, so they don't work with the later versions and no-one has (publicly) worked out the formats things get turned into for making other converters. Given how important proper Materials and StaticMeshes are, that's a pretty serious drawback for the community.