The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)

[ronjouch]

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.

[rimunroe]

From what I've heard The Black Parade mission style hews close to the style of Thief: The Dark Project. If your tastes are closer to Thief II: The Metal Age (or you'd just like more taffing about), I enjoyed T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age[1] quite a bit. The voice acting was pretty rough in places, but I found that kinda charming. I've also heard good things about Death's Cold Embrace[2].

[1] https://www.thief2x.com/

[2] https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148371

[pawelduda]

How would you compare The Black Parade to The Dark Project?

[pawelduda]

Whaat, I started replaying the game literally a few days ago, and now I see this on HN! The graphics and obviously didn't age well, although there are some higher res texture packs, which help when you play it in 4k. The Steam version worked for me almost out of the box, after patching it with TFix

The gameplay is okay-ish, probably due to nostalgia, but the AI is not the smartest, which creates a lot of fun situations - two guards trying to hit a giant spider inside a locked prison cell with swords, hitting only the cell door, instead of pressing a button next to them to open it, while calling the spider by name of the protagonist. But I remember that it was one of the scariest games for me as a kid, when it suddenly turned into dark fantasy horror from "just a thief game". I really had to push myself to walk past some of the undead and absolutely needed to make sure I cleaned the level thoroughly to be able to walk around comfortably.

The world building, sound design (especially the ambient sound loops) and the aesthetics/general visual style is something really unique that keeps drawing me to this game and it's really telling by how well I remember some of the places, despite having not played the game for 10 years or so.

Really a shame they gutted the franchise with the 2014 game and the very recent VR one.

[tannhaeuser]

Thief pretty much defined the stealth game genre, at least it did for me, where it's game over basically if you try to go all out on enemies. I may be wrong but I don't believe cleaning a level of enemies is the way forward in later levels.

[chroma_zone]

TFix is very nice but unfortunately removes the software renderer described in this article. It's very difficult to get the original exe working on modern systems.

TFix also brings back the spatial audio / EAX support that was broken by Vista, which is a huge part of the experience IMO. Highly recommend installing and configuring OpenAL Soft for this game.

[nylonstrung]

Try the Dark Parade mod campaign. It's so much better than the vanilla missions. Some of the best modding I've ever seen

[burmask]

People talk about the graphics, but it was the crescendo and decrescendo of guard sounds/singing/footsteps in Thief that made it one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah, the graphics were honestly kinda underwhelming, in particular the models were behind the curve compared to contemporary titles like Half-Life, and this didn't really improve with later titles like System Shock 2, where half the horror was the distorted textures stretched across the faces of the models.

I think what modern games have lost, that some of these late 90s titles absolutely nailed (Thief in particular), is the sound design and ambiance, which is just so dang evocative. Even the smallest incidental sounds had so much character. Picking up an item, pulling a lever, footsteps on the floor.

Modern games use such flat sounds for everything. Sure it's more realistic, at the cost of character and vibe.

[ubercore]

It had a physically based sound engine I think?

[OldOneEye]

I really hope the author of this article can read this comment:

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the excellent games that you all built in that era. Thief 1 and 2 are part of my formative games. I played it when I was a teen. The lore, the ambient, the thrill of playing a non combat game (well, at least until you get the sword to beat the bad guys in the last stages, in Thief 1). I could never like mainstream games to the same extent all my friends did after playing Thief 1 and 2. They may have had better graphics, but they did not have the same soul, passion and love that those games had.

It was with a lot of sadness that I read about the demise of Looking Glass studio.

To add a funny anecdote to this, I enjoyed the game even though I barely understood the dialogue and text, being a Spaniard. But it was one of those games that sparked my interest to learn English (alongside Zelda, A link to the past xDD)

[klaussilveira]

Also worth mentioning for Thief fans: The Dark Mod started as a Doom 3 mod, but now is a completely standalone, free and open source game: https://www.thedarkmod.com/main/

Hundreds of missions, an amazing Radiant fork maintained by the team, as well as an active and passionate community. They are awesome.

[izacus]

What's the best way to find the high quality missions or campaigns in those lists? Ones that are closer to what the Thief 1 and 2 games were?

[hmstx]

Funnily enough, from one engine with runtime portal culling to another :)

[smitelli]

Never played Thief, but I logged a lot of hours in Unreal, 1998. I was (and still am) amazed at how full-featured the software renderer was. I always wished I could peek at the code behind it.

If memory serves, the only thing my 3dfx Voodoo3 could do that software-only mode could not was surface reflections. Maybe something with colored lighting too, it's been a long time. Point is, it was a decent enough substitute for dedicated graphics hardware.

[Aurornis]

I was too young to understand but I distinctly remember the 3Dfx version looking vastly better everywhere to my eyes. Reflections were amazing though. Could have been the higher resolution, or could have been the fact that I was playing on an older CPU at home at the time. I was jealous of the people with hardware acceleration.

[deltoidmaximus]

Did unreal have 16-bit color software rendering? Most software renderers back then that I recall only did 8-bit color and ran choppier than the 3D accelerated renderers on the hardware at the time. This made a pretty big difference especially with lighting in my experience.

[qsera]

But I remember Unreal being unreachable for me at that time because I couldn't even dream of getting a graphics accelerator and it won't even start with out a one, or was it the sound card requirement that was the blocker?

[Match451]

The (incomplete) Thief2 and System Shock2 source code was leaked years ago from a Dreamcast development kit. I imagine a Google search would find you a download. I think I saved a copy too, someplace.

[markus_zhang]

The guys in OldUnreal have access to the source code AFAIRemember. Epic gave them the source code so they can produce those patches. They also improved the UT99 engine I think.

[honktime]

I'd love a black mesa style recreation of thief. I played it recently (its older than me) and I enjoyed it a lot, but its pretty rough in parts for me and my modern sensibilities.

The Dark Project is really cool as a platform, and seems like it'd be ideal for that sort of recreation, but the community seems pretty nervous of the legalities of such a project which is a shame.

[sagacity]

For reference, the surface cache referred to in the article is similar to the one in Quake. Basically, you have a bunch of regular textures that you want to use when rasterizing your polygons. On top of that you want to blend low resolution lightmaps. These lightmaps need filtering (typically bilinear) to appear smooth when blended on top of the original texture.

It's wasteful to do this expensive filtering and blending every frame since the player typically sees those blended textures for a large number of frames when they're traversing the environment, so you keep a LRU cache of blended textures around. That's the surface cache.

[ozzymuppet]

"Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri" Oh my gosh, I remember that game. I picked it up at a computer swap meet, and it was awesome!

[Sharlin]

I'd love to see a modern interpretation of Terra Nova or Heavy Gear. There are few games about infantry equipped with powered battle suits and heavy weaponry, which I find sort of odd given how cool the concept is.

[evilturnip]

5-hour interview with Sean Barrett where he also talks about the technical details of the Thief engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1tXepGXDDM

[Eric_WVGG]

and "the Digital Antiquarian" just did a great, deep two-parter on the history of Looking Glass last autumn. (covers Thief, Thief 2, System Shock, and some forgotten oddities)

https://www.filfre.net/2025/10/a-looking-glass-half-empty-pa...

[rickstanley]

I think I played Thief 1 & 2 over 15 times in total, no hyperbole. I really, really like the atmosphere, the world building and Hammerites old-english and tenets (https://youtu.be/1gnGITh1cw8)... all of it. I even created a question to understand a specific phrase construction: https://english.stackexchange.com/q/588796. Good times.

[keyringlight]

It's interesting to see parallel development of certain features in the early 3D era and how they were used. The original Prey by 3D Realms was shown in demos in 1997/98 with portal tech including rotating it in a level prop, so it's interesting and ties into the game fiction instead of being only functional to stitch map areas together. There's likely more examples during that period when licensing an engine was less common.

[pkphilip]

I was amazed at the immersive nature of the thief game play. Used to love the game and it was quite different from the other FPS type games of that era.

[pvo50555]

I loved Thief 1/2, these games were way ahead of their time and defined the genre for years to come.

[tanepiper]

In 1999/2000 I worked on my own Thief levels using the dromed editor - it was both really fun to work with, and utterly frustrating - in a time before open source engines - there were so many small annoying bugs in the editor that would cause it to crash, so you SAVED often and even learned to version files as it was easy to screw up.

But the geometry that could be created was stunning - from courtyards to cathedrals, levels allowed clever use of light and shadow.

[djmips]

This writeup sounds a lot like what was happening at CaveDog - Props to Carmack / Id software for publishing the workings of Quake - Our engine AmenEngine also was directly inspired in the same way but didn't work the same in the details. It would be interesting to see how many modern engines have their roots in Quake.

[fabiensanglard]

This is one of my all-time favorite page.

Zero effort in presentation but the pure gold content proves that the fluff does not matter the slighest.

[nylonstrung]

Even cooler is that Entity-Component System was literally invented to create this game, in the form of the Dark Object System.

It's one of the most successful patterns in game dev and it's remarkable it came from 90s game dev where "composition over inheritance" was not at all a virtue like it is today

[Panzerschrek]

I have used this article as inspiration for my own software renderer. The portal-based clipping algorithm described in it is great, but sometimes too slow for very complex scenes.

[rimunroe]

On a related note, I believe the the engine they developed for the first two Thief games and System Shock 2, the Dark Engine, was also the first to use an entity-component system.

[programmanager]

It’s wild how much Thief achieved with pure software rendering. The lighting and atmosphere aged better than a lot of early hardware-accelerated games—especially how darkness was integral to gameplay, not just visuals. Constraints really pushed smarter design.

[FrankBooth]

Ruby coders couldn’t even imagine being this competent.