The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project | Hacker News Reader

The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project

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112 pointsukdm15 comments

"The techniques used in Thief were never written up and I thought it might be nice to write them down for once, even if they're now totally irrelevant."

No Sean. To someone who's currently reverse-engineering Thief for the purposes of remaking it for modern platforms, this is a wonderfully helpful document. Many thanks.

This indeed made my gloomy Tuesday morn a little bit brighter... I love Thief and I love game engine renderers. This reminds me to bust out my old pc and play it again.

My wife asked me why I still keep this one old laptop. I said it's the only way I can still play Thief. I've had no luck with VMWare, VirtualBox running XP or Windows 98, wine, CrossOver or native XP. That's Just Wrong and I'm going to change this state of affairs if it's the last thing I do.

Hopefully GOG.com will get it sooner rather than later.

You can still buy Thief, Thief Gold and Thief 2 from various outlets and you can certainly get it working on a modern win32 platform judging from the responses on the game's forums. But it's a brittle process with no guarantees (as I know only too well) and only getting worse with time.

GOG might well come out with a version and I'd be ecstatic if they made a bundle which could run predictably on a modern platform. It would certainly save me a bunch of work :)

I've had success with Thief/2 on Win7 x64/Phenom II 965/Radeon 5770, thanks to setting the processor affinity and applying DDFix and the Enhanced Resolution Patch. They look better than ever and the lack of resolution change when displaying maps/books improves the immersion. http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=121449 http://www.thief-thecircle.com/guides/hyperthreading/

jegub I'm actually replying to you because there's no reply button under your comment for some reason.

I'm jealous - I really am ;) I know the process - hyperthreading fix, DDFix, DarkLoader, T2 meshes in T1, safe texture manager switch, reload the codecs and so on - works well for some people. I guess I'm scratching a (very large) personal itch.

If I'm not mistaken, the reply button takes longer to appear the more deeply nested a comment is, to discourage long, drawn-out arguments which detract from the value of a thread.

Oh man, I remember my first games industry job - having to write a billion different combinations of pentium hand-optimized polygon renderers. (Convex/concave, textured, gouraud, textured+gouraud, etc...).

We did some similar occlusion stuff in our (admittedly terrible) game ("Assault Rigs", Psygnosis). We sliced foreground object geometry along a plane where necessary to resolve sort issues with the background - and also to allow the scenery to cast "fake" shadows on parts of the object. I also came up with bitfield-represented PVS independently of the Quake guys :)

If I remember correctly, I did a special-case constant-z renderer for big scenery polys, but the in-game geometry used self-modifying code to set the constant U/V gradients for the spanline. Ugh.

Of course on the PS1, there was no software rendering anyway, and we just had to subdivide foreground polys to avoid affine-mapping artifacts. I'm still not sure how we dealt with all the seaming issues that that can introduce.

Ah, happy days :)

Ah, Thief. That was an interesting engine to create levels for. I seem to recall that it tried to use real-world measurements which helped a great deal in terms of sizing things as compared to the player. Plus how the levels were created (subtraction from a solid world) was puzzling but then Unreal did the same. I always preferred Quake's level creation method.

But my favorite bit of the engine? Sound. It was so vital to gameplay you had to consider it heavily while creating a level. I don't think I had to consider how sound travels through a level since.

Just seeing Thief on here makes me go all gooey inside.

Dromed brings back memories. http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/upcoming.htm -- The Garden, 2002, FM under development by mr_luc; screenshots here: http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/ej/gardn/ -- wow, way back.

Dromed was a bear. I remember the 'water brush hack' -- you couldn't make a cylinder with more than a certain number of sides (8)? But if you made an air brush with 8, a water brush with 8 but rotated, and then a water-air, and then a water-solid, you could make columns with lots of sides. I did that process over and over again to make a dome, and then to hollow it out on the inside, too.

I started programming for money around that time and had to leave it all behind. But every few years I've downloaded all of the Thief FM's and replayed through both games and the standout Fan Missions.

Except recently. I can't get it to work on Windows 7, with VMware or any other way.

The impressive things about the game engine were 1) the sound; 'room brushes' to apply different acoustics to areas, which promoted sound design to a first-class citizen of level design, 2) the object system. It was surprisingly flexible, and you could do a lot of very programming-like things because there were various stimuli and stimuli receptors you could attach to objects, be they AI or elevators or other things ...

DromED is probably the least friendly map making program I've ever used. It made Worldcraft (now Hammer Editor) look amazing in comparison. :P

The sound propagation in Thief based on the various room types was amazing! It's a shame that modern games don't put as much focus on sound. You can do some cool stuff with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJwUVCXH-gM

I couldn't really follow this article. But looking back at Thief, it was really ahead of its time. I think games nowadays still cannot match up with its stealth gameplay implementation. I would include Deus Ex in this as well. It made a great use of light and allowed the player to affect the light as well as the sounds they made. Really great game.

Don't forget System Shock 1 and 2. It's not a stealth based game, but it's made by the same people by as Thief and even System Shock 2 even uses Thief's engine.

System Shock 2 is still one of the scariest games around.

Thief was/is one of the best games i've ever played. Thief 2 as well. Thief 3 was a bit too narrow, but still decent.

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