New Horizon on 9/11/2013 at 04:20
Quote Posted by voodoo47
discussing what is possible or not is completely pointless - we have no idea what kind of plans the Raven has, and what he is capable of.
That's not the topic at hand though. The poster assumed GOG could simply release Thief for Mac and that is definitely impossible. Who knows what the Raven could do.
voodoo47 on 9/11/2013 at 10:02
they could - IF the Raven drops it on the 'net first, that's what I was trying to say.
sparkle_motion on 10/11/2013 at 13:36
It IS possible for GOG to release for mac... they did it with SS2 (after a period of having it available for windows only).
They essentially use a stable Wine wrapper but include it in the download so it works straight away rather than through tweaking and manual wrapper-shaping.
And what it more - I NOW HAVE THIEF RUNNING ON MY MAC! Took me a day of tweaking wrappers after I posted this thread, but I now have 1, 2 and 3 all working perfectly.
Oh, and I own a Mac for my professional needs. So far have got most of my old favourites running.
Blastfrog on 11/11/2013 at 18:26
Quote Posted by Brethren
This is pretty much like petitioning for Marathon to be released for the PC.
Un-possible.
Not a very apt comparison. M2 was already ported by Bungie themselves in the 90's, besides which, the source has been open for some time, leading to Aleph One.
voodoo47 on 12/11/2013 at 09:37
ah, I was talking about a native linux port. a wine wrapped windows version ala SS2 should not be a problem.
sparkle_motion on 12/11/2013 at 17:36
Quote Posted by voodoo47
ah, I was talking about a native linux port. a wine wrapped windows version ala SS2 should not be a problem.
Suffice it to say I have had a wondrous weekend playing Thief. :)
TheKeeper on 12/11/2013 at 19:25
Quote Posted by kdau
NewDark works on Linux more or less out of the box with recent versions of Wine. I'm not familiar with the current state of the OS X Wine ports, but Thief shouldn't be any more trouble to set up than any other game.
It's been my experience that Thief 1.33 generally works with Wine. The only issue that I was aware was the infamous mouse tracking issue that has yet to be resolved. This was in software mode though and I cannot remember how well hardware mode worked.
TheKeeper on 12/11/2013 at 19:49
Unless the team behind New Dark has access to source code that was not in the leak, rebuilding the original Thief in its entirety is not going to be possible. For starters, the original Direct3D 6 rendering code is not present. Not that anyone would want it, but it's not there. Also missing is the resource system used for Thief. Not a show stopper because it basically loaded zip files. I don't think the source code to the Thief script modules are present in the leak either. It's been awhile but I don't remember seeing any of it.
My point is that a stock gold master Thief 1.33 is not ever going to be possible without a full release of the final source tree. Even if that happens, the Dark Engine is not really portable. It is heavily dependent on COM which is not supported on Macintosh or Linux. It's ironic though because the COM standard was established for the sake of portability. Just from early research, it looks like Thief 1.33 was built with Visual C++ 4.0 and 5.0. It would take work just porting the engine to a modern version of Visual C++.
Considering that others have released their game sources, a Dark Engine release would be entirely appropriate. It's no longer competitive and does not pose a threat to any business model that I know of.
Anyways. That's my opinion.
voodoo47 on 13/11/2013 at 08:48
well, the DX6 renderer is definitely still present in NewDark, it can be reactivated by commenting out use_d3d_display in cam_ext.cfg.
TheKeeper on 13/11/2013 at 23:54
Quote Posted by voodoo47
well, the DX6 renderer is definitely still present in NewDark, it can be reactivated by commenting out
use_d3d_display in cam_ext.cfg.
Interesting. I was just thinking about this last night.
I'm not sure how many leaks are out there, but I only know of the source tree with Thief2/SS2 and the associated support libraries. Apparently, it was supposed to be the remnants of a Dreamcast port of the Dark Engine. This was my understanding of it anyways. The problem is that it is missing anything related to the Dreamcast as far as functionality. For example, there is no PowerVR code in this source tree. This is the video card that the Dreamcast used.
I performed a string dump on the Thief 1.33 binary and these files are not present in the source tree:
Code:
x:\prj\tech\libsrc\lgd3d\d6Frame.cpp
x:\prj\tech\libsrc\lgd3d\d6Render.cpp
x:\prj\tech\libsrc\lgd3d\d6Prim_s.cpp
x:\prj\tech\libsrc\lgd3d\d6Sts_s.cpp
It is possible that this functionality was rewritten but I could find anything related to Direct3D 6 at all. It's possible that the DirectX stuff was removed and the PowerVR code never made it into the leak.
Another possibility is that the source leak was tampered with or there is another leak that I'm not aware of.
