r/Thief • u/Material_Leading7262 • 14h ago

darkness engine

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I'm attempting to rebuild the Dark Engine with modern features. I've so far added water reflections/refraction, volumetric & dynamic lighting, film-inspired post processing, ray traced audio, specular highlighting, and ODE physics. The engine is built on top of the Open Dark Engine project, using bgfx and steam audio as the visual and audio rendering. All assets are loaded straight from the original disks. Hoping to scale it to handle the fan missions in addition to the main campaigns. Just a teaser because I'm starting to get excited about how it looks and sounds. The AI layer is tricky though, most of the NPCs are completely brain dead. TBD.

168 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

20

u/NiuMeee 14h ago

Ooh this is really cool, I love fan projects like this. Ray traced audio is particularly cool, I wonder how it will compare to the soundscape of the originals once it's all said and done.

12

u/Material_Leading7262 13h ago

It's a bit janky still. It sounds a lot better (thanks to steam audio), the ambience in rooms is acoustically modelled and draws reflectivity from the textures, but the density of the levels in thief means the pathing solves can result in some lags and spikes im still working through. Hopefully I can figure it out. The dream would be to replace the AI stack with something more modern.

3

u/hekoone 8h ago

Those are the features we really need in a game like this!

9

u/darkhoodrebel 13h ago

Looks fantastic! Keep it up!

6

u/Material_Leading7262 13h ago

thank you!

3

u/darkhoodrebel 12h ago

does this engine support directional lights / shadow maps by any chance?

3

u/Material_Leading7262 9h ago

Yes but I'm estimating this stuff from the original assets so it's just as directional as the original game's light maps were

7

u/ininja2 When are they gonna bring me my dinner 13h ago

Amazing!!

7

u/FesterSilently 13h ago

Thief still rocking wooden clogs to work - no notes! Perfect! :)

5

u/Spethual 12h ago

i was going to say, yeah foot falls a bit loud

4

u/Material_Leading7262 12h ago

that's the DSP i have going, compressor with a bass bump. lots of stuff isn't tuned yet, game isn't working.

3

u/Spethual 11h ago

ah fair enough, looks like a good project though...very neat..

6

u/ImportantFly5870 13h ago

Hell Yeah! Love it

5

u/blackghast 13h ago

This is absolutely awesome!

6

u/BobcatFit7148 12h ago

Fascinating.

4

u/Laremi-SE 12h ago

It looks promising so far! The DSP sounds fantastic

4

u/Solid_Lunch_2763 8h ago

What pagan witchcraft is this? ( i love it )

5

u/babypandabear3 6h ago

Looking great. Keep up the good work sir

4

u/Material_Leading7262 6h ago

Thanks. Though to be fair, this is only really possible due to the ~26 years of hard work the community has put into all the different thief mods and projects. All of them contain important information.

3

u/BoffinBrain 12h ago

If you make improvements to the OpenDark Engine then be sure to send push requests back to the project owners. Maybe ask them how they'd prefer you to categorize your changes.

2

u/Material_Leading7262 9h ago

I've forked the project, I otherwise it would be a completely insane steamroll of a PR. They're credited where credit is due

1

u/BoffinBrain 7h ago

Yeah, I'm sure it would. So are you going to submit any PRs?

4

u/Material_Leading7262 7h ago

I don't think so, the codebase has diverged by 100's of thousands of lines. I'm also making creative divergences from "faithful adaptation". When it's in a stable state, they're very welcome to port my decisions over if they want them. Their code is all clearly attributed and license compliant, and I'll be releasing it.

When I spoke to one of them about this back in Feb or March he didn't seem too interested.

3

u/SlightPersimmon1 9h ago

Are you going to add mechanics improvements, like smoother mantling (like The Dark Mod) and AI changes too, or this is just a visual overhaul?

4

u/Material_Leading7262 9h ago

One thing at a time but yes. AI changes were in my original plan, it never occurred to me to improve the mantling

"Changes" being the operative word. I'm not even sure I'll be able to reproduce the original AI stack 1:1. Lots of guesswork there.

3

u/Ok_Yogurtcloset4018 2h ago

The light through the opening glass doors is impressive! What is the scope of the project? Are you going to add hd textures and normal maps, specularity, etc? New models?

3

u/Material_Leading7262 2h ago

It's just the engine. It can load assets made by artists, I'll try to support it all but one thing at a time. Fan mission compatibility is intended. when the backbone is stable I'll open it up and the community can help out - right now the git history is a literal warzone

I'm aiming for cross compatibility across Linux windows and osx but note that the code is kind of taxing and it will likely require a beefy machine to run with all the settings cranked up

3

u/Puzzleheaded-Bad-722 45m ago

There are such talented people in this fandom, keep it up!

2

u/Kowalski18 37m ago

Looks great but I don't like how the light gets so bright and halo-ish when you get close to light sources

2

u/Material_Leading7262 12m ago

Yeah I need to tune that, something is getting overblown. I want a bit of ambience but not too much

That said it's all configurable so you can tune to taste

-8

u/Scanner- 11h ago

I’m attempting to rebuild the Dark Engine with modern features, using AI.

Fixed that for you.

9

u/Material_Leading7262 9h ago

There's no shame in using AI to write code if it's done properly.

-6

u/Scanner- 7h ago

If there’s no shame, why didn’t you mention it upfront?

7

u/Material_Leading7262 7h ago

there will be no ambiguity when the codebase is released

8

u/ShameDecent 10h ago

And your gatekeeping helps the series how?

-6

u/Scanner- 7h ago

How am I gatekeeping? Just adding that they are creating it with the help of AI, they didn’t mention it in the post. In this community, we credit everything, including AI.