This gave the studio a good look at how the game developed before its release and subsequent success.

The remasters of classic games created by Nightdive allow new players to try out the games without downloading patches or reconfiguring the controls. They also provide a wonderful opportunity to learn new things about games we’ve always loved. Every remaster is like an archaeological dig; you never know what you’ll uncover. On Digital Foundry’s Retro Super Show, they recently spoke with Nightdive about their current project, the remastered version of Looking Glass Studio’s stealth classic Thief: The Dark Project. It offers great insight into the game’s development and the Dark Engine that powers it.

Originally known as The Dark Project, Thief was unveiled at E3 in 1997 and scheduled for release that same year. However, its release was soon postponed to 1998. Comments attached to the code suggest that development continued even before the game’s release. Despite being rushed and somewhat “hacker-like,” the Dark Engine is capable of incredible feats, such as sound, artificial intelligence, and lighting solutions that were considered cutting-edge at the time and remain impressive today. One reason it works so well is that it shares many similarities with another groundbreaking first-person game from that era. Josh Dowell, a software engineer at Nightdive, describes the two as eerily similar but says the differences are truly strange.

“Even to this day, there’s nothing else like it. We saw an outdated version control repository for the code. Most of the original team moved to different projects, and a whole new team took over for the second half of its development. My favorite part of looking through the Dark Engine codebase has been finding all the sarcastic comments left by Looking Glass and Irrational Games programmers. They say the wildest things about the code. They say things like, ‘Giant hack! Never replicate this! We must fix this before ’98!” and “E3 hack! We must delete this after E3!” Yet, it’s still there in Thief 2. The rendering technology in Thief is shockingly just a clone of Quake. The lighting is done exactly like in Quake, and the way lights are turned on and off is also like Quake.

Quake uses precomputed visibility. This means that when you’re standing in a specific part of the level, the game knows exactly what you can see. However, the Dark Engine does what Quake does during its precomputing phase. Every doorway is a portal, and the game sees the rectangle you can see through and the portals to other doors. Then, it calculates which portals you can see through. It’s super complicated, and I can’t believe they got away with it in ’98 because it’s doing what Quake did, but in real time,” Dowell said.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered does not yet have a release date.

Source: PCGamer