Thief 3 Infobits
Thief 3 Project Leader Randy Smith paid a visit to the Thief series board at the Through the Looking Glass fansite on Wednesday to post a lengthy message updating fans on additions to the team and progress in general, and also to post several visuals:

update: Hello Thief fans,

This is Randy, Project Director on Thief 3, at (what is currently known as) ION Storm Austin. Holy cow, its been a long time since I posted to the fan sites. The team has made a whole lot of progress in the 7 months since the last update, so let’s jump in and tell you all about it.
First of all, here’s a roster update:

Sergio Rosas – Lead Artist – Serge has been making video games for many years, and most recently was an Art Director at Digital Anvil. Serge is a strong art director, a great manager, and a very talented artist who really gets the Thief vibe.

Alex Chrisman – Programmer – Alex comes from Konami where he worked on secret projects he can never reveal. He’s been on point for interface and player movement programming, which for Thief 3 involves some cool, innovative stuff which I will not expound upon yet.

Jeremy Graves – Designer – The guy who hit Warren’s car and a master of UnrealEd. His level work will make you weep with envy.

Raby Hampton – Artist – Raby comes to us from Retro Studios, where he worked on environments, characters, and animations. We think he is the subject of a graffiti sticker found around Austin entitled “Who is Raby?”, the origins of which are a mystery.

Frank Teran – Artist – Frank is our on-staff concept artist. He’s originally from the comics industry, and he’s the one that made those spiffy illustrations you may have seen in PC Gamer’s August ’01 edition. Having Frank’s concept art for all the spaces and characters is a wonderful blessing.

David Riegel – Designer – Known to TTLG as “Sledge,” David is the only person from the fan community hired to work on Thief 3 (so far, anyway). Congratulations to him and to us, since he’s ours now, bwa ha ha ha!

John Harries – Programmer – John is a game programming veteran from way back who has worked at Kinesoft and Digital Anvil. Right now he’s hacking at complicated engine revisions, after which he’s going to recreate the engine’s lighting model from the ground up.

Brian Sharp - Programmer - Brian comes to us fresh from college, during which he worked for CogniToy and 3dfx and wrote for Game Developer Magazine. He just started a couple of weeks ago, but he's already working hard on engine revisions, after which he'll be building us a Thief-caliber sound engine.

William Wallace – Audio – At 16, William is the youngest developer in the games industry (maybe). He’s a summer intern doing some great work helping out in the audio department and fighting for freedom.

..we also hired a couple of Mikes to help out with the PS2 version of Deus Ex 1. The long term plan is for these guys to join the Thief 3 team after that ships. They are artists, and their names are Mike Dean and Mike Washburn. I’ll tell you more about them when they join the team officially.

..and here’s a quick review of the team members you already knew about:

Nate Blaisdell - Designer
Alex Brandon – Audio
Terri Brosius - Designer
Kevin Daugherty - Artist
Ian Dunlop – Lead Programmer
Rob Kovach - Artist
Lulu Lamer - Producer
Terry Manderfeld - Artist
Emil Pagliarulo - Designer
Randy Smith – Project Director
Warren Spector – Studio Director
Paul Tozour – Programmer

So, let’s see. What have we been up to?

Well, the programming effort has long since switched from planning to implementing. In addition to the usual engine enhancements and tool modifications, we’ve made a ton of progress on interface, player movement, and AI. That’s right, Thief 3 already features guards who patrol, see and hear, search for you when they detect you, and say “must have been rats” afterwards. Paul, the AI guy, is clearly wasting no time. Furthermore, you can be Garrett in the game already; you can sneak him around, hide in shadows, and even shoot arrows. It’s not quite right yet, of course, but since we have so much of a headstart, we’ll be able to tune it to within an inch of its life before ship, which is great.

Three missions are currently close to the end of their first development pass. These missions are a testament to the value of our R&D; efforts, since they look spectacular. They have just the right Thief vibe, but rendering-technology-wise, they look many years ahead. This is due in part to our level-building workflow, which pairs artists and designers together to handle aesthetics and gameplay, respectively. Once these three missions wrap up, we’re starting the next four.

Story writing and mission planning have come a long way. We know the game’s story, and we have a list of missions to go along with it. We won’t reveal any of this stuff just yet, but some later releases may contain low-key spoilers, the kind you’d find on the back of the box. I know there are some hardcore types out there who prefer to go into a game knowing nothing about the story, so be warned.

You may have seen our press release about the Unreal engine. We’re very psyched to be working with it, since Unreal’s renderer is a crucial ingredient to the polished quality of the mission development we’ve done so far. Starting with Unreal has saved us countless programmer-months which we get to spend implementing Thief gameplay instead. The Dark Engine, which was used to create Thief and Thief 2, was also a wonderful piece of technology, but its renderer was far too dated to be used again. Unreal isn’t perfect for us right out of the box, but we’re making all the changes it takes to make Thief 3 a great game. One thing to keep in mind is that engines are all tools, and they can often be used fairly interchangeably, especially when you have the luxury of making lots of modifications, which we do. The real value of a game engine is in how efficient of a tool it is, and Unreal is a superb tool, especially for creating missions.

If you’re interested, check out the “Thief 3 Screenshots” post in Thief Series General Discussion, where I show some more screenshots and talk more about the PC Gamer stuff and Unreal stuff.

To wrap it up, Thief 3 is going really well. The team is full of very talented developers and is still growing. Pre-production went great, development is on-track, code is being written, missions are being built. It’s still very early in the process, but you can see the new Thief game starting to emerge, which is totally cool. This office is a great place to be, and collaborating with and watching the Deus Ex 2 guys in action is pretty exciting, too. Stay tuned, and we’ll give you more updates in the future!

screenshots: Here we go (I hope!), sorry again for the delay...
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Hey there. I wanted to discuss the Unreal and PC Gamer stuff a bit more, but I didn’t want to make the post to “Developer’s Announcements” too big. So I put it here instead.

First of all, I mentioned that engines are fairly interchangeable. Check out the side-by-side screenshots of Dromed and Unreal for an example of what I mean.

Rendering-wise, Unreal can do whatever the Dark Engine could do. The biggest difference between these shots is lighting, and we’re rebuilding Unreal’s lighting to be perfect for Thief 3. Now check out this screenshot of a Thief 3 bedroom.

Unreal also has power to render some stuff that the Dark Engine could never have hoped to render. The environments in Thief 3 are going to feel like you can reach out and touch them, thanks to Unreal. This is an actual, in-game, Unreal screenshot from a Thief 3 level currently in production. In this bigger version, you can see the details better. The poly counts are about right, but the texturing and lighting is very placeholder. Put the cathedral shot (see below) and the bedroom shot together in your mind to envision what Thief 3 will ultimately look like. For more Unreal stuff, check out: http://www.epicgames.com/UnrealEngineNews.html and http://www.unreal2.com/gallery.html and stuff like that.

Here are some quick answers to questions about the PC Gamer screenshot stuff. First of all, this cathedral

is a piece of R&D; Serge made in Lightwave, the goal of which was to test some new rendering technology. The vibe isn’t quite right (this isn’t intended to be a Hammer church, for example), but we expect the world in Thief 3 to be rendered to basically that level of fidelity. That’s all realtime 3D with tiny details when you get up close. You may gape now. I told you our stuff looks good.

This dude:

is not Garrett but rather one of the Keepers. These dudes:
http://209.39.200.200/images/paganimage3night.jpg
(link used instead of image because i can't have more than 8 images in a post. :( )

are Tricksterites / Pagans who play a role again in Thief 3. This:

is concept art of a secret Keeper meeting in progress. The Pagan concept art was done by Frank Teran; the Keeper concept art was done by Dan Thron, the artist who created the cutscenes from Thief and Thief 2.

Lastly, I’d like to show you the transition from concept art to in-game art. Working with a concept artist is great, and I’m really impressed by how well our guys work together to create a common vision.

One of these is Garrett concept art from PC Gamer, and one of these is an Unreal screenshot from a mission in-progress. Can you tell which is which? Yea, sure you can, but they are pretty close, huh?

Anyway, that’s about it. Enjoy!