Introduction to this blog

Hi, and welcome to my Thief Blog. As you might have guessed by now, this blog is for fans of the video game Thief (The Dark Project, PC, 1998), and its sequels. Down below on the right side I have some external links you may enjoy. Even after the original Thief game came out roughly 10 years ago (since this post was made, 2008) the fan following has stayed strong and is still enjoyed to this day by many thief fans. The most notable activity in terms of modern thief players is enjoying thief fan missions; or simply put, "FMs." These FMs pave the way for re-playability. Since Thief 1(and its rereleased thief gold, as well as its successors, thief 2 and 3) many FMs have been built by loyal fans using (the now defunct) Looking Glass Studios' DromEd editor. In addition, a near commercial level quality pack of FMs called Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age (released 2005)created a new character and story within the Thief 2 Dark Engine made by a group of dedicated thief fans since thief 2's release in 2000. Despite its shortcomings, DromEd has been a rather easy to learn editor (okay, maybe not, especially if you aren't technically minded but for some people it's not so hard) and has allowed thief fans to create new experiences for thief, Thief 2X being a huge example. To us thief fans, it will always have a place in our heart, no matter how old it becomes! Thanks for reading, and if you want to learn more about these games (I am assuming with this post that there could be people who never heard of thief or are not familiar with FMs or how popular it still is) please check out the external links.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Surprise Patch for Thief 2 and System Shock 2

Arriving completely unexpected, an unofficial patch has been discovered for Thief 2: The Metal Age and System Shock 2. As reported by DrK on the Through The Looking Glass (TTLG) forums, a poster known as Le Corbeau on a French forum board called Ariene4ever posted about a Thief 2 version 1.19 patch and a System Shock 2 version 2.4 patch. The reason this is a big deal is because of the list of changes it boasts which sound so hard to believe, you'll have to see for yourself. Here's an excerpt from the TTLG post, which has an excerpt from the readme included with the patch:

" Renderer:
- Added windowed mode
- Added single display mode option - no resolution change between menus and game
- Added ingame support for all common resolutions, including widescreen
- Added support for 32-bit color
- Textures can now be automatically promoted to 32-bit, improving quality and effectively eliminating the palette limit
- Added UI framerate cap option to avoid GPU fan spinning up in UI
- Added DDS/PNG image support
- Added full 24/32-bit TGA/BMP image support
- Increased the maximum number of frames allowed in animated textures from 20 to 99, and increased the allowable filename length for animated textures (before the underscore) to support more than 7
- Animated texture rate can now be specified via a material file for that texture
- Fixed a bug where Transparency property didn't (correctly) apply on objects that contain transparent polys"

And that's just for the renderer. There's also changes for dromed, such as hardware rendering in editor mode! The implications here are very significant for Dromed level designers. Before you go tinkering with trying to install the patch, you can test the game itself with the Thief demo which has the 1.19 patch changes included. It should be pointed out that the 1.19 patch has no need for ddfix, a previous fan patch for thief 2 that was separate from the main game and ran along side it. I've also posted a mirror for both the Thief 2 and SS2 patches, seen here.
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