T2 FM: A Nice Game of Chess (2013-04-16)

[kdau]

Version 1.0, released 2013-04-16

Download: (latrunculi-1.0.zip, 31 MB)

• Southquarter
• Thiefmissions

Description:
The factions of The City often resolve their bitter conflicts with senseless bloodshed at the expense of innocents. What if they could settle their differences with a nice game of chess instead? This FM is a real, playable computer chess game, set in the Thief world with appropriate AI "pieces" in three different battle scenarios. The Fruit 2.1 chess engine determines the computer player's moves.

Scenarios:

• The City vs. Blackbrook: This is the final, decisive conflict of the two powers' long-running war, fought on a misty rural battlefield.
• Hammerites vs. Undead: The Old Quarter is secure, but now the Order must retake another necromancy-infested temple on a snowy night.
• Pagans vs. Mechanists: In this alternate history, Viktoria managed to resurrect Constantine, allowing the Pagans to hold their own against the Mechanists in their rainy forest home.

Details:

• This FM can be played in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, or Spanish.
  
• The NewDark patch (1.19 or higher) is required.
• If you have never played chess or don't quite know all the rules, this FM is a good place to start! Read the "Rules of Chess" book on the table in-game for a refresher on the key rules.

Thanks:
Special thanks to my beta testers, Tannar, Notesthes, fibanocci, CMD, itllrun10s, Eiji, and Darklady; to the translators, Azaran, Notesthes, Smallman_647, and Soldi; and to the voice actors, Phantasmagore, saxmeister, and Random Taffer. Thanks too, of course, to the entire community here whose 14 years (!) of work continue to make our little world run. A full list of credits is included in the mission readme file.

[nickie]

Congratulations on the release kdau. I've been looking forward to having a go with this.

[Gloria Creep]

I can't seem to DL it from there.

[Renault]

This is going to be fun to try, haven't played chess in years. Here's a mirror:

A Nice Game of Chess

[kdau]

Congratulations on the release kdau. I've been looking forward to having a go with this.

Thanks!

I can't seem to DL it from there.

Please try the new Southquarter link, it should work better. Oh, and there's someone waiting for you in the Pagans vs. Mechanists scenario. (She's hiding under the table, since she doesn'ts likes Mechanists. )

This is going to be fun to try, haven't played chess in years. Here's a mirror:

A Nice Game of Chess

Thank you! I've updated the post.

[Tannar]

Congrats on the release! It's extremely well-done and you should be proud.

[Cardia]

Cool a chess game, its been a long time i don´t play chess, i bet this will be very fun...downloading

[DrK]

Damn, fantastic work there, mind blown !
It really works, it's so fun and interesting to play. I lost twice though, on easy. I suck at chess
That's gonna be a great way to train for me.

I don't know how you did it, but it's very impressive

[Azaran]

Congrats on a brilliant concept, and a new milestone in T2 fan missions

[kdau]

Congrats on the release! It's extremely well-done and you should be proud.

Thanks, and thank you for all your feedback during testing!

Cool a chess game, its been a long time i don´t play chess, i bet this will be very fun...downloading

I hope I can encourage a number of taffers to start playing again.

Damn, fantastic work there, mind blown !
It really works, it's so fun and interesting to play. I lost twice though, on easy. I suck at chess
That's gonna be a great way to train for me.

I don't know how you did it, but it's very impressive

Thanks! To be honest, I suck at chess too. Making this was training for me. As for the technicals, it's all custom scripting (which usually consists of 60% C++ and 40% duct tape).

Congrats on a brilliant concept, and a new milestone in T2 fan missions

Thanks! I don't know if it's any milestone, but I do hope it encourages people to explore alternate gameplay genres. Captain of the Guard is another cool concept in that vein.

[DrK]

As for the technicals, it's all custom scripting (which usually consists of 60% C++ and 40% duct tape).

100% black magic for me. I'm not a script guy, at all.
It's the fact you transcribed the fruit 2.1 into the DarkEngine which baffles me.

[kdau]

100% black magic for me. I'm not a script guy, at all.
It's the fact you transcribed the fruit 2.1 into the DarkEngine which baffles me.

Ah, the secret there is that I didn't. My script spawns it as a separate process and communicates with it over anonymous pipes using the UCI chess protocol. You can actually just replace the engine.ose file with a stronger UCI engine, if you want an extra challenge.

[Random_Taffer]

Congrats on the release, I'm about to fire it up!

Thank heavens for the mini board on the table! I'd never have been able to focus or plan well without it.

[Gloria Creep]

Got it now!
Thanks for putting in something for me .... eh what could that be? YEAH!!! Thank you!!!

[clearing]

Congratulations on the release, kdau

[SlyFoxx]

This is so ******* cool.

[HipBreaker]

Absolutely amazing.

[kdau]

Thanks everyone!

...
Thank heavens for the mini board on the table! I'd never have been able to focus or plan well without it.

I'm glad it's useful. It was surprisingly hard to find decent low-poly chess piece models (and then simplify the meshes even further to Dark's ultra-low-poly standard). By the way, how weird is it to hear yourself as you're playing? It would drive me crazy.

[Sensut]

Is simply amazing, kdau! Just wondering how it works?

[Random_Taffer]

By the way, how weird is it to hear yourself as you're playing? It would drive me crazy.

It bothered me at first a long time ago, but I kind of got used to what my voice sounds like so it doesn't bother me anymore.
I mostly don't mind it at all now so long as the lines aren't corny. The cringetastic intro to Nostalgia does drive me up the wall, though.

[bikerdude]

I agree with others, this is extremely impressive.

[kdau]

Is simply amazing, kdau! Just wondering how it works?

Well, basically there are three custom scripts: one that controls the AIs' special behaviors, one that controls the interface on each square of the board, and one big script managing the game as a whole. The mission files just contain the surroundings with a few carefully placed markers, while the gamesys holds special archetypes for every type of piece (e.g. ChessPieceK6 = Karras, the Mechanist "king"). My scripts take over from there and create all the pieces, the interface gems, etc. and keep them up to date. I wrote a basic chess logic system that tracks the board position, finds possible moves, etc. The computer opponent is provided by a bundled external program.

The cringetastic intro to Nostalgia does drive me up the wall, though.

Hey, I thought that intro was pretty decent.

I agree with others, this is extremely impressive.

Thank you!

The interface is even better than I was expecting. And the ability to select what the next mission will be seems like something new in Thief to me, although I'm sure it was feasible before. How did you do that exactly, Kdau? Although this question might seem more appropriate for the editors guild, so maybe just cite something if you must. Just a Dromed noob here.

Anyways, excellent work on the FM. The effects are awesome, and later I wanna try out the other 2 modes. I did the Mechanist and Pagans first.

It's a NewDark feature, unfortunately available only to custom scripts. Specifically it's the IDarkGameSrv->SetNextMission method. I definitely couldn't have done any of this without NewDark. There are a few other new script-only features that still need to be tried, including changing fog and weather settings mid-mission and drawing custom HUD elements.

[Basso71]

What a nice idea, I really liked the battle The City vs. Blackbrook, nice setting there! At the beginning, sometimes I had the problem to recognize the character of the enemy so I lost my player. However, I lost every game, yeah, I'm not the best chess player

Hats off to the technical implementation(how did he do that?)

[InfinituS]

Wow congrats Can't wait to play some chess

[Yandros]

Looking forward to playing this soon!