This is awesome! Sometimes it's hard to visualize the full layout of 3D spaces as complex as "The Sword" or other Thief OMs in similar vein. Thank you!
Here's a side project I made: a web-based viewer for Dark Engine levels.
https://tlp.acko.net/
You can load up SS2, TG/T2, even Black Parade, and view an entire level's geometry at once.
This only works well in Chrome Windows/Mac unfortunately, because it uses the new WebGPU API. (*)
Note this won't show mesh objects like furniture and doors. There are also a few gaps (like missing .DDS textures). But overall it's pretty neat. As an old Thief fan it was a blast to see how some of these places were constructed, and it's muuuuch simpler to operate than DromEd.
You might notice the colors "pop" a lot more, because it uses a modern color pipeline. It also does something else: it can relight levels with multi-bounce lighting.
I always wondered what these games would look with more realistic lighting. Obviously it would make it harder to play, but there was nothing really preventing it, other than the time needed to bake the bounces. On a modern PC, it only takes a few minutes.
This hallway in particular always bothered me:
With bounces, it's actually gorgeous:
And same here:
The relighting is incomplete: it doesn't include any dynamic lights, and some of the static lights are missing in the source data. You also can't save or export this, it's preview only, in case you're wondering.
But it does look nice:
(*) Firefox technically works but only supports loading individual .mis and .crf files, not the entire game folder. Again, not my fault :/
(*) The tech it's built on can be found at https://usegpu.live/ if you're into that sort of thing, it's another project of mine)
This is awesome! Sometimes it's hard to visualize the full layout of 3D spaces as complex as "The Sword" or other Thief OMs in similar vein. Thank you!
The Keep for Thief 1 and 2 FMs, Shadowdark for Thief 3 and Dark Mod FMs
Cool project, this works similar to Dark Engine Viewer, but it seems a bit smoother. Am I doing something wrong though, it doesn't appear to show any stock textures for FMs?