A gift from the gods of gaming

[burgeranacoke]

A bit of background...

 

In 1998 a gaming company called Looking Glass Studios released a game called Thief: The Dark Project. It got great reviews and had pretty good sales. Two years later LGS released Thief: The Metal Age. Again very good reviews and good sales. Unfortunately LGS had massive debt and folded late that year. Before they died they released a bit of a revised version of TDP (Thief Gold) and very importantly DromEd, a map editor for creating missions. The series was picked up by ION Storm and they released Thief:Deadly Shadows in 2004. Deadly Shadows got so-so reviews and the fan base hated it. But the fan base still adored TDP and TMA.

 

If you are not familiar with the series they are STEALTH games set in a fictional late middle-ages/victorian mix with a steam-punk feel.. You play the role of Garret, a master thief. The game was described as a "first person sneaker". The best play style is to not harm anyone and rob the bad guys blind. Light and sound are the two most important aspects of the games. The use of sound was hugely innovative. There are really no other games like these two in play-style.

 

Back to the fan base. DromEd! Fans of the game could create their own missions, build their own worlds. Fantastic! These missions would soon be called FMs... Fan Missions. these FMs soon became very complex and entertaining. Over the years many many FMs exceeded the gameplay that the creators envisioned or probably even thought possible. Creative story lines with multiple FMs of "expansion pack" were createdA forum was created called Through The Looking Glass http://www.ttlg.com/forums/forum.php , companion-ed with an archive and ratings of FMs at a site called Thief: The Circle http://www.thief-thecircle.com/ . These are still very active sites.

 

A Problem:

Old PC games do not age well and with this series especially TDP, had some problems. Over the years the video codec that it used no longer existed. And if you could get a copy it did not run well as more modern versions of Windows progressed. The fans continued onward and cobbled together patches and work-a rounds to all the issues that afflict old PC games and fantastic FMs kept being produced even through a few slim years. To get to play the games in the last few years meant a lot of hard work and head scratching and still they were buggy and far from perfect. Systems had become diverse and the games were just not designed to run on a modern OS. If you really wanted to play at a decent frame rate and decent graphics there were probably hours of tinkering to get it to run, yet fans did.

 

A Solution:

 

There were rumors of holy grail proportions by the fans of a disc containing the source code for the games. The rumors floated for years and nothing became of them, just a story....

Obtaining the games was still possible, some company out of who knows where still printed the discs and you could copies from time to time and last year Steam made them available. I downloaded them almost immediately and tinkered away at getting them to run on a 64 bit OS. the results were OK but buggy, I was still glad to be able to play my favorite game of all time. Then in late September of this year an extraordinary event happened. An anonymous post by "Le Corbeau" on a French fansite contained links to what he/she called a 1.19 patch. No one had a clue, not even the most dedicated fans. The changes and fixes were HUGE. The renderer was totally revamped to 32 bit, support for modern screen resolution implemented, maximum number of frames allowed in animated textures from 20 to 99, 32 bit color was now supported and these are only a very tiny tip of the iceberg. The game looks beautiful, (It can even be run in 3d) sounds great and runs smooth as silk on my WIN 7 64 bit OS and heck they even built an FM loader. No one in the fan community knows who released this or how it was accomplished and I am sure the creator(s) want to remain anonymous for legal reasons. There effort and result is just jaw-dropping. The result, two of the great PC games well over a decade old are more than playable, they are a joy to play.

 

A few notes.

The patch was a super easy install.

This patch also affects a game called system shock 2.

I use a bit of a different patch than 1.19. TFix for thief Gold and Tafferpatcher for TMA. Both include 1.19 patch and a small amount of other tweaks.

I also installed OpenAL. which allows the defunct creative soundblaster code for EAX to perform. really kind of a big deal for this game. http://connect.creat...ows Vista™.aspx