System Shock 2 and Thief 2 get ninja patched

is this worth buying for a Thief noob? never played anyone of the series, but have always been curious to try it
 
Thief 1/2 are amongst some of the best games ever made, period.

There has never been a stealth'em'up anywhere near as good as the Thief, if you're a fan of this kind of thing then despite how old and crap they look they're still well worth playing.

Also this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avb6xWQ_F8I
 
Thief 2 is my favourite PC game of all time.

There was previously a way to make Dark Engine (Thief 1/Thief 2/System Shock2) run properly in widescreen but this now appears to make it easy to do by default, even the movies, which is great. Also a lot of great editor changes. I wonder how this patch happened.
 
Just finished Black Mesa Source and been playing Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines and Morrowind with graphic enhancements mods on and off for the past few years. Glad these two classics are getting a modern makeover, getting both first chance I get. I recall System Shock 2 was amazing, but somehow it faded into obscurity in my mind thanks to Quake at the time. Long live the modding community!
 
System Shock 2 / NewDark engine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCrH2D4Nqlw

Now the real question, why doesn't GOG have SS2, am I seriously going to be forced to torrent it in order to play this mod? Also should I get the GOG version of Thief 2 or Steam for this patch?
 
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You can still find SS2 on ebay and actually Half Price Books (sometimes).

Must play.
 
Ticker305 said:
Now the real question, why doesn't GOG have SS2
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they've stated in the past that it's their most requested game...I also wish they would make the game available...maybe the game is difficult to make compatible with Windows 7?
 
It's probably in dispute with some publisher or law firm. IP rights in the game industry are a bit of a mess.
 
I have been looking for a copy of System Shock 2 forever. I don't really want to buy a physical copy, but I may have too.
 
Ticker305 said:
Now the real question, why doesn't GOG have SS2, am I seriously going to be forced to torrent it in order to play this mod? Also should I get the GOG version of Thief 2 or Steam for this patch?
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LeninGHOLA said:
It's probably in dispute with some publisher or law firm. IP rights in the game industry are a bit of a mess.
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Ding ding ding!

An insurance company in Michigan owns the IP rights and apparently are demanding way more money that SS is worth to any dev or publisher who are willing to buy. Till that changes, no SS for anyone outside of the original boxed copies.
 
MatDef said:
Ding ding ding!

An insurance company in Michigan owns the IP rights and apparently are demanding way more money that SS is worth to any dev or publisher who are willing to buy. Till that changes, no SS for anyone outside of the original boxed copies.
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Ridiculous, isn't it? They would at least be getting royalties for each sale on GoG instead of "holding out".

Strangely, I know quite a few people who never played it in the first place. They ask me about it and I say "Uh, think Deus Ex, Bioshock and Dead Space mixed ... sorta, but better" and they respond "OH SHIT I WANT IT".
 
MatDef said:
Ding ding ding!

An insurance company in Michigan owns the IP rights and apparently are demanding way more money that SS is worth to any dev or publisher who are willing to buy. Till that changes, no SS for anyone outside of the original boxed copies.
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Whoa, whoa, what?
When did EA give up the rights? Ken Levine said they would not sell it to him, so he gave up trying to acquire it. What is this insurance company I've never heard of?
 
I wasn't into PC gaming back when SS2 was big. I really would like to catch up and play it after all I've heard about it and after this thread.

The earlier Thief games? Same story. I liked Deadly Shadows. How have the older games fared age wise? Could I get into them?
 
Q-BZ said:
I wasn't into PC gaming back when SS2 was big. I really would like to catch up and play it after all I've heard about it and after this thread.

The earlier Thief games? Same story. I liked Deadly Shadows. How have the older games fared age wise? Could I get into them?
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I play System Shock 2 on a yearly basis.
No other game gets that attention from me. Still one of the greatest game ever made, period.

We had a big thread for it a while ago, let me see if I can find it....
 
Q-BZ said:
I wasn't into PC gaming back when SS2 was big. I really would like to catch up and play it after all I've heard about it and after this thread.

The earlier Thief games? Same story. I liked Deadly Shadows. How have the older games fared age wise? Could I get into them?
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The first 2 Thief games are considered the best, by a large margin.
 
I don't doubt that Square is busily looking around for someone to sue over this. Can't have your loyal community taking leaked source code, putting in hundreds of hours of effort to get it compiling, fix bugs and improve the experience for your customers, of course. Can't have that.

ironforge said:
What all is included with the System Shock 2 ninja patch?
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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

General:
- Replaced video player lib with an FFMpeg based one to play cutscenes. LGVid.ax or other codecs are no longer required
- Option to use OpenAL (if available) instead of DirectSound. Includes support for audio effects in Windows 7 without an EAX-enabled driver (e.g. ALchemy)
- Added "head_bob" config var to control amount of head bob
- Added mousewheel support to options menu
- Fixed player ground contact tracking when walking off an object (caused footstep sounds to get "stuck" on previous material)
- Fixed sound cap per schema type bug and upped max sound channels to 48
- Changed screenshot output format to BMP and also added support for PNG screenshots
- Changed mouselook sensitivity to be resolution independent
- Added check to avoid trying to open files with reserved system name like com ports
- AIs now breathe from their head instead of their stomachs. They will no longer drown when up to their waist in water.
- Lowered player crouch height by a tiny fraction so he's less likely to get stuck on 4 unit tall spaces
- Added better support for binding actions to the mouse wheel (can bind wheel up and wheel down as separate actions, with modifier key support)
- Fixed star rendering
- Added "log_player_pos" command that dumps current player pos to log file (when enabled)
- Added the ability to detach from ladders by crouching
- Improved mantling a bit and added optional new mantling algorithm with lower failure rate
- Fixed a bug which limited number of sound channels to 16 even if more were selected
- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused doors to float away into infinity
- Fixed (or at least greatly improved) a bug with edge triggered OBBs sometimes failing to detect collision (in particular for slow moving objects)
- Fixed framerate dependent speed issue for camvators/moving terrain (with collision type: none)
- Added "fixed_star_size" option for resolution independent star size
- Fixed some bugs when attaching to a ladder from water.
- AIs who are facing very close to a wall will no longer turn to face south when the game begins
- Health bar drawing adjusted in widescreen
- Added option to fix arm rendering
- Added AA to rendering of loadout screen items
- Fixed pickpocket count bug that would always show 1 more maximum pickpocket than there actually was.
- Added "Blocks frobs" property, allowing objects to block frobs of objects behind them (e.g. to stop frobbing items through safe doors)
- Added option to left-align map notes text
- Made navigation of map/objectives screen a little bit more in-game friendly (screen can also be closed with space, arrow key navigation and return to switch map/obj)
 
I'm thinking about picking up Thief 2 on Steam. I love stealth games. Can anyone tell me off hand if it has RPG elements (being able to buy new equipment and has factions) and a good storyline?
 
You buy equipment on a per-mission basis (using gold you acquire during each mission), but it isn't persistent across missions. Thief: Deadly Shadows is slightly different in that regard.

GOG also has Thief Gold and Thief II, and they include the manuals and other goodies. Using the D3D9 renderer (as default), Steam Overlay works. I'm working on creating a decent set of custom artwork for Steam Grid View and will post those when they're done.
 
Thief 2 has a fucking fantastic story. You are able to buy equipment. It is not an RPG. It is a heist FPS action game focused on breaking into places and pillaging them as you follow the storyline. Literally 80% of the missions in the game are the kind of epic legend shit you will never forget, and the other 20% are extremely solid. Play on the hardest difficulty for the proper experience (and access to all the objectives and secrets).
 
Q-BZ said:
I wasn't into PC gaming back when SS2 was big. I really would like to catch up and play it after all I've heard about it and after this thread.

The earlier Thief games? Same story. I liked Deadly Shadows. How have the older games fared age wise? Could I get into them?
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Love 3 as well.. It gets too much hate. Has some of the best levels ever.
 
requiem99 said:
Thief 2 has a fucking fantastic story. You are able to buy equipment. It is not an RPG. It is a heist FPS action game focused on breaking into places and pillaging them as you follow the storyline. Literally 80% of the missions in the game are the kind of epic legend shit you will never forget, and the other 20% are extremely solid. Play on the hardest difficulty for the proper experience (and access to all the objectives and secrets).
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Will do, thanks for the suggestion. played Thief 3 a while back but it didn't run well on my computer at the time (cheap dell haha). I'm going to pick uo Thief 2 on Steam as I love stealth games (MGS, Deus Ex, any stealth really). I love the whole idea of sneaking into someones castle or rich area and stealing their loot and/or assassinating people.

Funny thing is that I personally feel that if Assassins Creed was more based around stealth and enemy's could kill you easier, it would be one of the best games/series of all times.
 
Sovern said:
Funny thing is that I personally feel that if Assassins Creed was more based around stealth and enemy's could kill you easier, it would be one of the best games/series of all times.
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Agreed. I love the AC games for what they are but I wish the emphasis could have been more like that as well.
 
LeviathanZERO said:
I play System Shock 2 on a yearly basis.
No other game gets that attention from me. Still one of the greatest game ever made, period.

We had a big thread for it a while ago, let me see if I can find it....
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same here, I do a ritual play through once a year.
 
OK, now that I've had a chance to look at all the changes, this patch is INCREDIBLE!!
I have no doubt it was an old dev or team. It has to be. The community has long given up on fixing the many of the limitations of the dark engine, and just things that wouldn't work. This person, or persons, COMPLETELY overhauls the engine adding 32 bit color(from 8-bit), redoing the game EAX to run on win7, adding OpenAL support, the engine limitation of a few hundred polygons on screen at once to 20,000. Added support for 32-bit lightmaps.

WHAT?$!!! *HEADSPLODES!

Impossible.
This guy had source code. This guy was a dev.
from ttlg.com forums said:
There's some buried gold in the new cam_ext.cfg file. I found a "d3d_disp_scaled_2d_overlay" setting that lets you set the HUD overlay to any "virtual" resolution you want. So now you can set the game to modern resolutions without having to bust out a magnifying glass to read the HUD text.
Also, screenshots now go into a "screenshots" folder. And the PrintScreen key actually works for taking them. Neat!"
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That right there was impossible in dromed. IMPOSSIBLE. This was a dev, just incredible. (oh yea, yay for printscreen, lol)

- DromEd will no longer stop working after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038
Bug fixes, too? LOL

Now see why 32 bit lightmaps is huge for these games:
BEFORE:
xavs1F.jpg


AFTER:
dump003-1540827683.jpg

Wow.

OH, one more thing.
EYEFINITY WORKS
Very Large Pic

The significance of this is amazing. Not just the technical genius here (especially if its one guy!), it just shows you how special these 2 series are in their innovation of game design, the amount of passion people/the fans have for the games to do something so huge on their own free time with no expectation of anything in return.
Truly amazing. I can't describe it as anything else. A true developer who is deeply in love with his craft. A rarity.

Well enough of this, it's cfg editing time! :)

Bigbacon said:
same here, I do a ritual play through once a year.
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It's starting early this year!

wonderfield said:
Square
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Huh?
 
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