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

To Thief heads who played I and II and want more of it: play The Black Parade, an enormous mod 7 years in the making that is actually an entire new game. New gigantic maps full of secrets, style faithful to the original, weird universe, new story with cutscenes and voice acting. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429 I am not affiliated, just a fan.

>This result could be less tight; for example, if you had a long corridor with many side rooms, and that long corridor was a single cell, then in Quake it would always try to render all the side rooms, whereas Thief would only try to render the entry cell to each of the side rooms (since those cells would always be adjacent to the corridor and visible), but Thief could cull the rooms themselves if they weren't currently visible. Big…

Funnily enough, I've been playing Thief recently (this one, not the rubbish new one). And wow that game is hard. It's also an absolute blast to play, and an important piece of gaming history (one of the first First Person Stealth games, helped codify 3D stealth as a genre, engine later used in System Shock 2, had some influence on Warren Spector's next game, Deus Ex). While the renderer wasn't particularly impressive for the time, the AI, sound, and lighting…

"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.