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Comment by steinuil | Hacker News Reader

Nice! I can only hope the same will be done for Thief 1 and 2 (and SS2) someday.

The Thief games still have a very active community that regularly produces high quality fan missions, and one of the original engine developers has started releasing unofficial patches to make the games run on modern systems a few years ago. I'd love to read the games' full source code and to be able to play them on Linux without bothering with Wine

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Sad that this never went anywhere: https://github.com/volca02/openDarkEngine/

Amusingly, a lot of source was found in an old Dreamcast dev kit: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/12/14/shipping-receivi...

Would love to see Dark Engine games get the treatment Quake games got, or something like OpenMW

There is a really good Thief clone called The Dark Mod, but unfortunately, it's not compatible with the original games.

http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/

The community hasn't really warmed up to The Dark Mod as I thought it would. I guess everyone's more comfortable with how the original games look and feel, and I can't say I don't understand it. Thief still plays great thanks to its minimal controls and UI (much unlike System Shock 1, which feels horribly outdated) and looks nice thanks to its amazing art direction (just look at some of the screenshots in here https://twitter.com/thiefbsp), so I don't think people would feel the need to move on to a clone unless it was that much better.

Thief controls are still great, they feel "crisp". I think System Shock is fine too, I even like using a mouse pointer to aim and interact with the world. Ultima Underworld I find a bit harder to play.

In Underworld, I use wasdzxc keys for gross movement, and the mouse for finer control. 1, 2, and 3 can control looking up and down. Using the control scheme, rather than relying exclusively on the mouse, makes the game more playable for me.

Oh man, I'd love a remake for Thief 1 & 2 that doesn't stray too much from the originals. If done in the Unreal Engine we might even get a ThieveryUT with proper Thief assets!

It would also help me forget the crushing disappointment I felt with the Thief games since 2 (with the exception of the Shalebridge Cradle level in Thief 3).

>one of the original engine developers has started releasing unofficial patches

I thought it was some random user called Le Corbeau from the french forum Ariane4ever?

The dreamcast code mentioned by jeffbax is the current assumption of how he got his hands on it.

The (partial?) source code for Thief 2, SS2 etc. was leaked a few years ago. You can still find it on the Internet.

I know, but using it is not exactly legal and having to rewrite it all from scratch would be bothersome, even using the original code as reference. There's a set of C++ macros used for "scripting" the AI and the missions which I would immediately tear out if I had to rewrite the engine, and I'm afraid replacing it with something more sane while still retaining compatibility with all the fan missions and so on would take a lot of time. Plus, as you said, not all the code was in the leak (though I don't know exactly how much is missing).

The original games are still playable today and oh my, they are still awesome.

We are only starting to see some games like MGS5 surpassing the AI of Thief but most of them try to combine stealth with power fantasy and that's a bad mix.

Thief had it right with its underpowered character lost in a maze like level.

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