St. wrote:
>     Haha, I played the demo of some version of Thief a few years ago. I 
> thought it was really VERY good! Loved the hiding in shadows and the 
> lock-picking in corridors. :)

It's a great series with a wonderful story.

>    I would love to see the level editor for it though. I wonder how it 
> differs from what I've used?

Conceptually, it's pretty cool. You start with a solid block of 
can't-go-there, then carve out the areas you can go, which is why you can't 
crawl outside the geometry.  Sky is just a texture that looks like 
perspective when you run the game.

The suckage is that there *seems* to be so little automation involved. For 
example, they make the default texture a really ugly plaid pattern, so it's 
easier to find surfaces you forgot to texture.  Instead of, you know, having 
a button in the interface that says "find surfaces I forgot to texture." 
There's nothing like "snap to grid" or any kind of alignment thingies for 
ojbects, so you're constantly finding wall scones floating a couple inches 
away from the wall and book cases facing the walls. And there's no assist in 
building holes so that you can (for example) highlight a hole and ask "can 
the player fit into this hole?"

And, as far as I can tell, there's no way to look at (for example) only the 
close parts of the wireframe.  So you get the entire city's wireframe when 
you're trying to wireframe-edit the room.

I couldn't even get thru the tutorial on how to use it, nor could I use it 
to .. well, cheat, I suppose you'd call it.  I was looking for where 
something in particular was in the level, and I couldn't even see the level 
clearly enough to figure out how to get to where I wanted to go.  (It turns 
out I couldn't find it because it was only there on the hardest level, and I 
wanted to see it again easily so I started playing the level on easy.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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