Permanent link to the Thief Speedrunning Discord:

https://discord.gg/vjyQXjH

I think someone made a custom save file which was technically NG+ and allowed you to play on professional, but only had the starting items, no money, and no unlockables. If anyone knows who made that file or wants to make one themselves, that would be a great thing to add to the resources.

I never said that I am "ok with New Dark." In fact, I've said time and time again, to everyone in the Thief community, that if it were solely up to me, there would be no New Dark on the boards at all as it is simply a fan-made mod that fundamentally alters the gameplay. But like Count said, it exists only because people have been unable to get the original game working. Since the decisions as to how the board are run are not solely up to me, New Dark is allowed. I get that you are new here and all, but don't try and put words in my mouth.

Also you have resorted to a very dangerous logical fallacy which is that just because cheating is possible, we shouldn't bother to try and make it as difficult as possible, and limit the possibilities that potential cheaters can exploit. "Cheaters gonna cheat" is not an excuse to relax the rules and is not an argument for allowing a mod. That's why competitive sports have ever-growing banned substances lists. They don't just say "well, everyone CAN take steroids if they want, and the ones who want to will find a way around the rules, so screw it! No rules!"

Also like I said, if buying a used game to you is a "horrible waste of time" and "inefficient," then I actually do fear your faculties. You're right, it's not 2002 anymore. Anyone who wants to buy the game can have it on their doorstep in a couple of days. If that's enough to "scare them off," then to be honest that's not the kind of person we want running the game anyway. If they are so impatient that they aren't willing to spend a few bucks to play a game that will give them hundreds of hours of enjoyment, they're the kind of person who would cheat to get that gold trophy next to their name because they don't want to grind for 200 hours to actually be the best.

And Amorphous, you can call me rude, elitist, or condescending. That's fine. But consider that when you spend money on steam to buy the original Thief series, none of it is going to the original developers anyway. It's going to two multi-billion dollar corporations (Valve and Square.) If you send me evidence that you mailed one of the original devs $20, I'd never throw shade on people stealing copies of Thief ever again. But you won't, because you're fighting tooth and nail so that you don't have to spend $5 on a CD. I'm also still curious: do you never sell any of your possessions? I can't imagine you would want to burden the buyer with the guilt of supporting you, Joe Random, rather than the manufacturer of your old furniture and VHS tapes.

Maybe I'm just too old for this, but the absolute aversion for spending money on your hobby to make sure that you are enjoying it as legitimately as possible strikes me as both immature and dishonest. Every time you incorporate a new, fan-made mod into the equation, you create uncertainty as to whether or not the game you are playing is representative of the original, and in many cases it's not.

All serious and highly-populated boards have rules pertaining to emulator usage. SM64 has side categories. OoT has the 10% rule. Ninja Gaiden requires you to populate the screen with every single possible variable to prove it's not an emulator movie. These rules would not be necessary at all if emulators were a non-issue. But they are, because anything that is not the original cartridge or CD is making an uncertain concession to accuracy, and the same is true with Thief. On the Driver board for instance, the world record was an emulator run which was 25 minutes faster than the fastest console run and stayed that way until someone finally started a poll in the driver discord to separate the categories. It's a gross example, but some people are content with this kind of nonsense. I'm not, and I don't want to see Thief speedrunning look like that.

I'm not even going to indulge the argument that Joe Random, who himself payed money to purchase the game and support the developers initially, is somehow the undeserving recipient of a miniscule fraction of the original price for the courtesy of giving someone else the chance to experience the game instead of letting it sit on a CD rack gathering dust, because that logic is so disconnected from reality. Have you never sold something you don't use anymore before?

If someone who wants to run the game is scared off by having to buy a used video game, I fear for their functionality. When I first started playing Thief in 2002, that was the only way you could actually play the game in the first place, by buying it from a store. You had to get in a car and drive 25 minutes on the freeway to the nearest Best Buy only to realize they didn't have the game you wanted and you had to drive to the next one. Nowadays you don't even need to bother with such inconveniences as going outside, you can get the same product delivered to your door next day without ever leaving your fallout shelter. I realize that this must be a strange and alien concept, not chopping up your games with mods to make it more "convenient," or spending money to play video games. But trust me, it's not as horrible as it sounds.

Thief speedrunning should be as true to the original as possible, and the board should not be the entity which bends towards illegitimacy. It should be the players who bend towards legitimacy. That's your responsibility as individuals who ostensibly care about upholding the standards of the board.

As to why Voetiem and Alderius are supermods, they are series moderators meaning they put in the application for the Thief series to be added to SRC, so they still retain their default status on all the games they added (T3 wasn't included for some reason). I think Voetiem submitted it and added Alderius because at the time he was the foremost T1 player. At first there was only "site administrator" and "moderator" status, so all moderators got bumped to supermod when the split between supermod and moderator was added.

I think someone brought up GoldToDark a while ago when they were trying to get TDP working but couldn't and saw it as an alternative since almost everyone owns the digital release of Gold. But at the time our favorite file swapper was also switching the TG Downwind Thieves Guild guards, who had a lower alert threshold to make the mission playable, with the assassins in Assassins to make that stage easier. In vanilla TDP that wouldn't work because the character doesn't exist (although you could conceivably go through the effort of moving those files over too), but it's trivial in GoldToDark. I think he got the idea after someone suggested you could model swap in DromEd on the SDA forums, and he deleted or unlisted it after Lot or someone commented on the youtube video calling him out. So that alone made me skeptical about it, but I have no experience at all with using the mod so I don't know if it is a direct clone of TDP or if it plays differently somehow. That kind of sideways cheating is always a possibility though.

I'd love to see more people playing TDP because it definitely is a better speedrun than Gold. PC gamers are used to getting everything for free and I understand that, and I also understand that not everyone has CD drives anymore. But it's not "impossible" to buy TDP legitimately at all. You can still pick TDP up used on eBay for less than $10, or less than $20 for a new-in-box platinum edition copy, which is the one I would recommend because it's patched and significantly easier to install. There's 30 copies listed right now, so they aren't scarce (yet). And consider that in many other games, your time would be relegated to a side category if you used an emulator instead of an original cartridge or CD and console, and that requires a significant up-front investment compared to Thief. Be glad you don't have a burning desire to speedrun Harmful Park or Earthbound.

That said, there are digital copies floating around, but posting them here is not a possibility. Square renewed the copyright on the Thief license when they were planning to make Thi4f. If the games were abandonware, then that would be a different story.

Do whatever you want, they're different categories

I'll do a load remover for TDP/Gold, I just need to dig around in the pointers for a bit. What version is everyone running? I only have 1.33 (platinum edition discs). The load remover is dependent on a string which may or may not change based on version. So if I make one that works for me it might not work for everyone else.

Since we've programmed the load remover for Thief 2 to only begin timing when you've gained control of your character, and loadless time is the current metric by which the boards are organized, the loadless time actually begins when you gain control anyway, you don't technically need to start the timer at all until you gain control. It's not something I even thought about until you brought it up, but it will actually be better to change the Thief 2 rules to specify that time begins when you gain control rather than change the Thief 1 rules. It makes much more sense to start on gaining control, and maintains said continuity.

"Gain control / Lose control" is the most general and least arbitrarily-defined timing method possible. The only conceivable human interference is in the human/keyboard interface where you might hit either split too early or too late, but the player is never in doubt as to exactly WHEN they should be splitting.

When you start to say things like "when the eye starts exploding" or heaven forbid "when you're safe after doing x," you've just introduced an arbitrary and vague convention to the timing which can only cause problems. When exactly do you split? When the eye starts glowing? When Constantine stops talking during the glow? When the explosion sound effect plays? When Constantine hits the ground or when his body becomes a frobbable object? These questions are all rhetorical of course because none of them makes any more sense than the others or represent a clear "end" to the game. On top of that, for most of the above situations you can still shoot Constantine and fail the mission, and if the possibility for failure still exists you can't consider the game over. There's also no practical reason to end the time earlier, unless that 20 seconds at the end is so valuable that you want to quit out early. You still have control and the in-game timer is still running, so you're still playing. Defining when the player is "safe" after placing the eye is so arbitrary I don't think it can even be considered. You may deem yourself "safe" in a position that truly isn't, but there's no way of knowing you won't get seen until AFTER you've waited through the entire sequence anyway, so you still have to sit there for the entire duration anyway. This is a serious problem because players, guided by and in control of an arbitrary timing standard, will be trying to stop the timer as soon as possible, cutting closer and closer to unsafe positions to save time.

It also sets a negative precedent for "waiting" not just in Thief games but in games across all other genres. For instance, in Starcraft 1 speedrunning, there was a proposal to allow players to use a cheat code to skip the third Terran mission, which is a 20 minute defense mission. Thankfully that got unanimously shut down by the community who recognized it as an illegitimate and lazy attempt to skip a "waiting" segment. Imagine if we had the same for Eavesdropping where we would just skip it with debug because you have to wait for 5 and a half minutes and how ridiculous that would be. That's exactly the way I view early stoppages of timers to avoid the maw scene, except it saves far less time and is therefore even less important.

If you're doing co-op, time starts when both players hit "ready" on the first inventory screen. At least that's something the rules used to specify, and the way we've been doing it for years. If you want to snake a few seconds, I guess you could start when you gain control of your character because people have been doing that recently.

Comparing your time versus other difficulties is as easy as selecting your difficulty from the drag-down menu. That's a far better solution than having six different tabs with most of them being completely neglected. And trust me, no EX Foxhound player will care if there's a very easy run on top of the leaderboard, lol.

For a time, I was running the Old Dark version of Thief Gold with the Dark Project downgrade patch. This was before I got my big box TDP from ebay, never did a run on the downgrade patch for obvious reasons but it allowed me to practice while I waited for my CD's.

Trying to play Old Dark on the original TDP disks is nearly impossible in Windows 10, by the way. You want the Platinum Edition. It was a version of TDP that came out before Gold and is a patched version of the original. Finding Platinum is not nearly as difficult as tracking down original so try to get your hands on one of those boxes. No idea why a 20 year old patch makes the game run easier, but I'm not about to go messing around to figure out why when my version works.

I was sort of thinking about this for a while but there was no real interest in the game until recently. I'm not extremely knowledgeable about the version history and the minutiae of the packaged New Dark versions, but it seems to me that except for a few specific places (Keeper's Training), full game runs of New Dark are just slower. It seems they fixed many of the glitches that made Old Dark fast. I'm of the opinion that New Dark will be the slower overall run unless something crazy is found. We already allow New Dark for Thief 2, primarily for the reason you mention which is the difficulty involved with getting Old Dark to work on a modern PC. Ideally, nobody would ever run New Dark for either game because it's a fan-made engine integrated into a fan-made patch, which is really shady and I can't think of any game where that would be accepted. But seeing as it's the only way most people can play these games there isn't really a choice. So sure, New Dark runs are fair game.

Part of the reason this makes me so uncomfortable is because there's so much broken shit in New Dark. The New Keeper's Training route is not possible at all on Old Dark, so individual levels in New Dark shouldn't be allowed because they were never part of the original game. Even if the changes were not intentional (and I'm sure none of them were), I see it as no more justified than just editing the source code yourself to yield an advantage.

Take this as an example of why New Dark is a bad idea in general. It's similar to the Complete Resource Fix Pack 1.1e issue in Thief 2. That patch is STILL included in Tafferpatcher to this day. It literally moves the end level trigger on certain missions (most notably Ambush) letting you get ludicrously fast IL times, even though it's not possible to do a full game run of the normal route because it breaks the whole blowing-open-doors trick. So exactly like Old vs New in Thief 1, it's not possible to do the fast full-game Old strategies in New, but certain tricks and IL's are faster because of illicit fan-made modifications to the game. So for the time being, I'd say it's okay, but it's a "cautious" okay which is subject to change if it becomes an issue.

Welcome to the RE5 community, probably one of the worst in speedrunning for that very reason. It's inundated with people just like that, childish losers with nothing better to do than to shit on other people's effort and hard work. Do the smart thing, get your time and get out.

Yeah a race would be good fun as well, the only downside being the Eavesdropping key which is random for each player and can lose over a minute, so it would definitely be a less-serious kind of race. I treat my Thief 2 marathon runs that way anyway since sometimes there's really nothing you can do but lose time for nothing.

Right now Thief 1 is considerably less active than Thief 2, and it's mostly focused on individual level runs. I'm the only person touching The Dark Project because it's very hard to get working on a modern PC. Pitp0 ran Gold in the past and at ESA but I don't know how long it's been since he did a run. Most of the other older full game runners (alderiusx6, skacky) don't play anymore as far as I know.

EDIT: I also have complete routes for The Dark Project Expert as well as Thief 2 Hard and Expert. I can put the finishing touches on those as well if there is interest in seeing those runs.

I would definitely be interested, I can do The Dark Project and The Metal Age; I don't have much practice with Gold or Deadly Shadows. OneginIII would be the guy to get in contact with if you want a Deadly Shadows run, he basically routed the entire game himself and is the preeminent expert in that game.

There was discussion going on as to whether allowing anything but single-segment runs on the IL boards, and the current consensus is that only single-segment runs will be verified, just as in Thief 2 for the same reasons listed there - questions of legitimacy and timer accuracy. You can thank the myriad of non-disclosed spliced/multi-segment/engine hacked runs that have been submitted there for the stricter rules, but when cheating is so rampant, we have to scrutinize every run extremely closely and multisegment runs are simply out of the question.

The rules have been updated to reflect this change. Full-game runs remain unaffected.

It's a pretty bad speedrun for a GDQ to be honest. If you do NG+ you just blow everything away with infinite weapons and everyone complains that there is no challenge just like they did for the RE4 NG+ run. Even if you do NG the run is 90% running past everything with no glitches to speak of and buying rocket launchers to one-shot every boss. The most exciting things about it are a couple boss quick kills at the very end and the fact that it's co-op. On top of that it's a violent game with a >1:30:00 estimate, which is becoming increasingly rare at GDQ.

In my opinion it does not have a popularity problem, I've run it co-op at several online marathons and it always gets a great reaction from people who remember it fondly for its co-op experience. But I can't see it displacing a REmake run or a PS1 run because it's not seen as a "real" RE, and none of the active runners are GDQ royalty. There are already a sizeable number of people submitting RE runs to GDQ who would get three runs into the marathon before an RE5 runner got one, if you know what I mean.

Everyone just needs to stop complaining about the rules. Just scroll down to the locked forum pages to see how many times this exact same issue has been raised. That's not to pick on you specifically Danscheman, but every time this issue comes up it gets the same response and is forgotten about. Follow the rules and submit your run. If you don't like the rules, learn to deal with them. I agree with you that there is literally no logical reason why the tactical reset rule exists for RTA (the argument of blanketing nonsensical rules onto runs where they don't apply to protect new runners is idiotic, if they don't read the rules for the run it's their fault if it gets rejected), but that's the way it is.

No, OBS will not work for capturing Old Dark without using something like DXTory.

For verification purposes I would say that including just the end screen is insufficient for verification purposes as it is way too easy to splice in a fake end screen. We had a certain someone uploading bogus runs with shopped end screens for Thief 2 IL's. So I would say without definitive evidence that it's the same end screen, all in a single recording with mouse movement and everything, I'd reject the run.

Thief Gold features completely different patches which mostly contain bug fixes, meaning bugs which are present in The Dark Project are not an issue in Gold. Therefore I would say submitting footage of Gold for TDP runs is unfair.