Rather than revive a couple month old thread, I wanted to start a new one. Are there any established thoughts on New vs. Old Dark in terms of submitting runs or are we in a free for all?
In my case, unless there's some good guide out there New Dark is the only way I am able to play the game. Does such a thing exist?
I can respect the desires of the community if its the case that there should only be Old Dark runs.
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.
I'll keep this in mind. I'll have to look into if I can get Old Dark working somehow. I'm not fully familiar with the differences since it's been years since I played the game in that original form. Either way I enjoy running the game and will continue to do so.
It was mentioned elsewhere, but is there any value in a New Dark category?
Since the original glitches are removed in New Dark, I don't really see the value of a separate category. As it is a fan made patch, it creates even less of a reason for it's existence on the leaderboard. Even though it's hard to run on modern systems, Old Dark should be enforced. What we need is low impact patch to make the OldDark engine playable for everyone.
In my personal opinion, definitely don't "enforce" Old Dark, as the barrier to get it running efficiently (even without streaming it) is too big a headache for potential new runners to want to tackle. That's a way to alienate people from the community all for the sake of "muh times" (me included). There should definitely be a New Dark/Old Dark tab like how certain games have N64/Emu tabs etc. It's not very hard to implement, and would create less confusion for runs currently listed.
Yes, New Dark is a fan-made patch, but unfortunately the early Thief games are a unique case in that they just don't mesh well with current systems, crashing often and being a pain in the ass to stream. Sometimes you just to take charge and make a decision, it's a feature of this site for communities to congregate and come to decisions on what they feel is best for the game. If you want New Dark to be less crazy with its mantling skips, have a rule in place for "new_mantle" to be turned off in the cfg file, not a great suggestion but one nonetheless.
I hate to say it but you have a point. Enforcing a version not playable for everyone is a great way to alienate the already low amount of classic thief runners in the community. Making a category/separation between NewDark and OldDark versions is the best way to go until a better patch/workaround for the OldDark engine is created.
I agree on not enforcing one way or the other.
I tried taking a couple hours to figure out how to get it running correctly, to no avail. I saw The_Count mention using DxWnd. I tried that but it didn't seem to want to work for me. Is there anybody that might be able to share settings or insight?
Well you could try Shadowplay. That's what I use to record the game without issues, The_Count can't seem to get it working correctly though.
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.
Yeah it pretty much is. Jake said in Baffords it should save about 4 seconds but the set up for it (jumping off and killing yourself) is really only doable in NewDark with the tree jump to the banner, but that also requires the guards at the start to actually hit you enough that you'd die from the jump.
Every other level is either too small a possible time-save to bother trying to set it up, or it doesn't work. Return to the Cathedral is the only other level to make you wait an obnoxious amount of time for it to complete, but it still makes you wait even if you die.
I would have to disagree with you with it being significantly easier on NewDark as on OldDark you can propel yourself at amazing speeds from almost any object in the game making death abuse extremely easy to execute. It can be risky if done too early however which could lead you to failing the mission.
A great example of this OldDark exclusive mechanic can be found in a run I made not too long ago:
I knew about that but it looks like it would be a heavy run killer and be really annoying to attempt in a full game run.
