Thief via FRAPS - TTLG Forums

ejsmith on 1/10/2005 at 23:38

Yeah, there's no way this would qualify for a speed-run, and with all the literature stuffed into it, it's more like a 150% run.

I'm still happy with the video. It's pretty much what I was wanting.

noah on 2/10/2005 at 17:25

I can't thank you enough ejsmith for doing these...they are exactly what I was looking for too...and more.

Any chance we'd see a Thief II or III set?

ejsmith on 2/10/2005 at 18:15

I'm planning on getting TMA knocked out. The main problem is the ugly sky, and the Nvidia texture dithering.

I'm almost certain it's a combination of DirectX and the drivers, so I grabbed my "old" box and am using a default install of WinXP (DirectX 8.1). I'm going to see what the Radeon 9800pro looks like. I might just slap an old Geforce Ti4200 in there and see if that's any better. I'm also prepared to try out Win2000 (DirectX 7) and the Radeon/Ti4200.

I know I got that pretty sky at some point with that Ti4200, and after fiddling around with drivers and an old Geforce 2Ti, I know that DirectX is part of the problem. I just don't know if 8.1 or 7.0 is the key. Plus, there's some..........hardware issues with the box. Pulled a cracked CPU waterblock, and dual-channel clock rate is giving me hassle right now. Soon as memtest gives me acceptable results, I'll start shooting the trouble.

noah on 2/10/2005 at 21:03

Excellent! I recently used an ATi card and there didn't seem to be any issues with the sky that I could tell. The dithering is another matter...I was never able to get around this, either with nVidia or ATi...good luck, and thanks again.

ejsmith on 5/10/2005 at 21:46

But only a little bit. More like frustrated. I've brought up this topic (pretty sky) several times, but nothing has ever worked.

For the record, I've tried Win2000 (default with DirectX7) and a Geforce 2Ti card. Ugly sky, ugly textures. Even with the Detonator 29.xx drivers.

I'd been hoping to get WinME installed and (possibly) get the pretty sky working. I don't know if it's the 1GB of ram (WinME has some known issues with anything over 512MB) or the drivers. It seems to take the mainboard drivers ok (Nforce 2), but the video card drivers make it hang. I'll try one more WinME load, using a GF4 Ti4200. If that doesn't work, it seems like I'm going to have to use ordinary WinXP and the Radeon.

Which means ugly sky, but decent textures and fog. I'll just use some old Catalyst/DNA drivers to get the fog working right through Rage3D.

Fig455 on 7/10/2005 at 10:21

Looking forward to the Thief 2 videos. Dl-ing Bafford's now.I have an ATI 9800 PRO. I get great looking fog w/ATI tray tools, clean textures. The only thing I notice is in the sky there is "banding" and it's very noticeable.. Any fixes for this? I would be willing to let you borrow my spare Radeon 8500 PCI card if you needed it. Let me know.

noah on 18/10/2005 at 18:02

Hmm...I just noticed that the HQ .ogm version of Mission 11: Undercover appears to be missing from your archive ejsmith.

ejsmith on 20/10/2005 at 19:28

Oh hell, you're right. I'll upload that one this weekend.

It's funny, but I know exactly why that one is missing. With KDE, when you hit ctrl-A to select all, it unselects the current file if you've just browsed into the folder (it automatically selects the first file upon entering a folder). And sure enough, the HQ version of that is at the top of the folder. Anyway, it'll just have to be it's own little bastard file off to the side.

Thanks for pointing that out! :)

Old Man on 21/10/2005 at 10:55

Not sure if y'alls are interested and excuse me for not reading the entire thread but I have tried videotaping Thief: The Metal Age and it works quite well. I've got a ATI AIW card and can record direct to the videotape machine. Then playing it back again I can record it as .avi on the computer. But TV quality is quite poor compared to svga and so on. Not sure if that's what you're looking for. It's fine for just viewing. Anyhow, it records everything that way, the menus, the books and scrolls. And it can be edited to remove all the video crap. Just another possible method that may solve some of the technical issues.

Oh, and I'm not offering to do this. I don't have the time. Just an idea.

ejsmith on 23/10/2005 at 21:06

I got Undercover uploaded, and it's in queue.

Old Man: I thought about using an MPEG capture card on another computer. FRAPS captures really well for me, plus I load all those movies into an editor and put the literature in there. TDPG has the literature, and TMA will have the literature. I catch all the conversations as closely as I can, which means my run through the level might not necessarily be as efficient as it could be. I put in the "proper" sound effects as well, such as page turns and the background noise of the main menu and the blowing wind during literature. Plus, the high quality is 800x600@30fps and I work with as much uncompressed video as possible, up until I'm ready for the final transcode. I'm pretty happy with them.

TDPG gave me absolutely no problems playing through the levels and finding loot. Capturing and arranging the movies is going to be the easy part for TMA; I don't need a video camera, I need a god damn mission that has all the loot in it. :laff:

[edit: (ftp://ia300129.us.archive.org/1/items/thief_gold_m11/) Here it is. Thief Gold, Mission 11, Undercover.

Also, I'd like to mention that the Linux processor requirements for the HQ video are actually very light. You can easily play the HQ video with an Athlon XP 2000 (something like 1.6ghz). Using Suse 9.3 and Xine, I use less than 50% of an XP2600 (something like 1.9ghz). The requirements I listed on the movie page are for Windows machines, and the movies definately take that level of processor to play smoothly.]