| 2022.07.18: | Power outages |
| The building where thiefmissions lives has been subject to weekend-long power outages recently, and these will continue for at least one more weekend. I'm surprised to see that people still care enough to ping me about this kind of thing, so I figured I would post a note about it. | |
| 2017.10.26: | Yep, still alive |
| Yes, those are updates. Just one catchup and one new mission, but still. I'm still around and if you send something to me I will do my best to get it online. | |
| 2016.12.20: | Sorry |
| Seems that some system updates kind of broke everything. Oops. Thanks to
those who mailed to let me know about it.
But yes, I'm still around and while I haven't actually added anything here in ages, I do want to make sure that everything continues to be available for some reasonable definition of forever. So, in any case, I think that maybe I've fixed the problem. At least, I hope I have. I also got rid of the whole FTP thing entirely and now rely on the web server to limit concurrent downloads. This should make things much nicer. | |
| 2015.01.12: | New server |
| If you're reading this, welcome to the new thiefmissions server. Same as the old server, but not. | |
| 2014.03.20: | Not dead! |
| Yep, not dead. Thiefmissions is now moved to a new server, though I'll have to move it again soon. And now for the inevitable catching up, and new stuff, and all that. | |
| 2012.09.15: | T1, T2, T3 are complete |
| And with that last bit, I believe the non-Dark Mod FM collection is complete.
Of course, there's always something that gets missed, and a few things are on
the edge of what you could call a playable mission that aren't here. As usual,
feel free to alert me about anything I've left out.
Next I'll work on filling in some links and such, and then start working on Dark Mod missions. | |
| 2012.09.14: | Very nearly there. |
| That was a pile of updates, and more are on the way. Another bunch of contest
missions and a few others and the T1, T2 and T3 collections will be complete.
More to come tomorrow. | |
| 2012.09.03: | Doing some catching up. |
| Another battle in the seemingly unending war to get caught up. I guess I'll do a few missions at a time and at least try to keep up with new stuff coming out. Which shouldn't be all that hard since releases are slow these days. I want to be reasonably complete before the Halloween Contest missions drop. | |
| 2012.04.03: | New server |
| So everything appears to have moved over to the new server without incident.
I'll be keeping an eye on it to make sure everything's working OK. If you're
not seeing this entry then you're still hitting the old server and I guess
you'll be a bit disappointed when I turn it off. Occasionally someone asks what kind of computer good old Thiefmissions runs on. It used to be a spare Athlon 2000+ machine I had sitting around, but for the past few years it's been one of these: Supermicro 6026TT-HTRF stuffed with two Xeon E5530 CPUs and 48GB of RAM per node. Of course, that's just the host; Thiefmissions is but one of many virtual machines that live there. Next up: actual updates. | |
| 2012.03.31: | That was quick |
| It only took a few minutes for the last gift code to be redeemed. I went ahead
and added another. Edit: And that one went as well. Check back next week for another. | |
| 2012.03.31: | Been away; maintenance |
| Been in and out of town for a couple of weeks. I didn't want to put up a gift
code for fear that someone would redeem it and I'd have the stale code up there
for a while. But I'm back now and have added another one. Need to do move the whole site to a different virtual host this weekend. There may be sporadic downtime while this happens but it shouldn't be too disruptive. And once that's done, I do have a whole bunch of updates to apply. | |
| 2012.03.21: | Heist Society |
| Decided to go back and replay Heist Society. I had
played it a while back but I remember it fondly as having some absolutely
stunningly detailed architecture. And truly, it does. The three level grand
staircase room is just so far above the standard for Thief missions and pretty
much all of the mansion makes sense and is well designed. Mansion missions tend to have a few common obstacles. Getting in is the obvious first issue, and this mission has loads of ways to get in, not all of which are obvious. Perhaps too many, but I'm not complaining. Once in, the general issue is to navigate through what is generally a multiply-connected floorplan with obstacles set about. And that's where this mission shines. There are very many pathways through most of the mansion, and there's always a way to get behind or around a watcher or a guard that doesn't turn. Loot is logically placed and secrets aren't terribly difficult to find if you're paying attention. If there's ever a push to make "HD" versions of various missions, this one sure deserves that treatment. Redoing the texturing with modern ddfix-compatible fancy texturing would really add something. | |
| 2012.03.02: | Greyfeather Gems |
| I've decided to add an occasional entry about what I'm playing. These days it
isn't usually Thief, but fortunately I have managed to get Thief running again
after, well, a really long time and am going to do an occasional mission.
I wish I could add ratings for everything and maybe I'll try to do that when I play an interesting mission, but I doubt I can keep any kind of parity with ratings of old. Anyway, currently it's Greyfeather Gems - Part 2: Rodamill. So far a truly excellent mission, definitely rates up there with the greats. I'm not done but so far it looks to be at least a 9 if not higher on my totally random scale. You should definitely play it, but be sure you play Greyfeather Gems - Part 1: The Shipment first. In fact, the author, Morrgan, has produced a nice lot of really great missions and you should definitely play them all. And keep checking back for gift codes for Thief 2. I will keep posting them randomly until I run out of money. | |
| 2012.02.07: | And now GOG has Thief 2 |
| So GOG has released Thief 2 as well. Looks like I
need to get in gear and get up to date again. As before, I may have an occasional gift code available; just check back occasionally. I'm not getting these for free or anything; I'm just a nice guy willing to spend his own money to give away a few copies of Thief. | |
| 2012.01.31: | Welcome GOG folks |
| Looks like GOG has released Thief Gold, DRM-free as always. GOG is generally awesome, and this only increases their awesomeness. | |
| 2011.09.30: | Less Outdated |
| OK, as far as I can tell, the missions that are here are all of the latest
version available. I know that missions are still missing, but when catching
up it is always most important to make sure that the files that I am serving
are at least not out of date. That should be done now. Next come all of the missions I'm missing; there are many. | |
| 2011.09.21: | URL Cleanup |
| For years I've been tired of that annoying "info.cgi?m=foo" thing in the URLs,
and for whatever reason I finally decided to spend fifteen minutes and fix it. Now it's just "/m/foo". Old URLs still work fine; no need to update the thousands of web pages and forum posts that reference the old style URLs. Of course, now most of the links here will appear to be unvisited; sorry about that. I also added forum links for all of the System Shock 2 missions. | |
| 2011.09.19: | Catching Up |
| Catching up finally begins today. I also added the ability to store wiki
links, and I need to track down as many of those as I can. Still plenty to do. | |
| 2011.07.30: | Not dead |
| No, I'm not dead. Way behind, yes, but not at all dead. See, that's an update
up there. At some point in the near future I'll need to move the site to a new VM; this wil have no effect on anything except for perhaps an hour or two of downtime. | |
| 2010.12.22: | Power outage |
| It seems that thiefmissions central will be completely without power for several hours on December 28. Lots of extra work for me, no missions for you (for a few hours, at least). | |
| 2010.10.29: | What's up? |
| For me, not much. Still buried at work and personally. I will add things to the site if they're sent to me (which is why you're seeing occasional updates) but at this time I'm not making an effort to chase down missions out of the various fora. The holidays are fast approaching, however, and I expect to have at least some free time once the semester ends, if not sooner. | |
| 2010.08.20: | And back at it |
| I guess it takes almost as much time to catch up after taking a vacation as the vacation itself lasts. I'm just now getting to all of my Thief-related email and PMs and trolling the forums for new stuff. Should be all caught up soon. | |
| 2010.08.01: | Back from vacation |
| I have returned from vacation; catching up with work takes priority but I will resume updates soon. | |
| 2010.07.07: | On vacation |
| I am on vacation until 2010.07.31. I will have sporadic network access but otherwise I do not plan on doing any updates until I get back. | |
| 2010.05.26: | Now truly complete? |
| Even though they've been hosted at thiefmissions since they were released,
occasionally I received a note that the Crap
Contest missions were missing from the archive. Of course, people just
weren't finding them in their old location, so spurred by assurances that these
missions aren't all complete crap, I went ahead and moved them into the main
archive.
With that, I believe that the archive is well and truly complete. | |
| 2010.05.13: | T3 archive complete |
| And, to the best of my knowledge, that's the last of it. It is almost certain that I have missed something, but at this point I'm moving on to code fixes. I'm sure someone will be happy to point out anything I might have missed. | |
| 2010.05.12: | T1/G and T2 archives complete |
| As far as I can tell, that's all of the T1/Gold and T2 missions. I know there are a few T3 missions that I never managed to get to some time ago, so I'll work on those next. | |
| 2010.05.11: | Dark Mod archives complete |
| Well, that's every Dark Mod mission I could find. Less than twenty T2 and TG missions to go and I should be done. | |
| 2010.05.10: | Caught up through 2009 |
| And after that marathon session, everything from 2009 should be in the archive. Of course, it's always possible that I've missed something; please let me know if that's the case. | |
| 2010.05.04: | Caught up through October |
| Well, that should be everything up through the end of October, plus anything anyone emailed or PM'd me about. There was a contest in December so getting 2009 squared away will take a bit of effort. | |
| 2010.05.02: | Catching Up |
| So I expect it to take at least a couple of weeks to catch everything back up.
This includes adding all of the existing Dark Mod missions and any of the T3
missions that were missing. The first priority is to track down any updates that I'm missing, as sending out the wrong version of something is worse than not sending it out at all. If you see something that needs updating, please let me know. Otherwise, content will fill in as I get to it. | |
| 2010.05.01: | Howdy |
| Well, this is the cheapest no-frills blog you'll probably ever see. Even a .plan file would be fancier. I just wanted to have a quick way to include some information about what I was doing to the site. So here it is. Enjoy! |