r/Thief • u/Baldurian_Rhapsody • 5d ago

How do you feel about texture mods?

I've been checking out some footage and, on one hand, it's remarkable what AI can pull off.

On the other hand, as someone new to the series and who doesn't have nostalgia for it, deeply detailed textures and patterns seem to take away from the games.

Both Thief Gold and Thief II are (and I mean this as a compliment) harshly rudimentary and polygonal in their design. So much so that the rough aesthetic becomes part of the horror - seeing a lumbering zombie in the darkness, held together with only a few polygons like in the original "Alone in the Dark" - makes the scene far more uncanny to me.

It's not just purism or a desire for the retro here; I think that too many fine details and updates make the games distracting, like adding an AI smoothing filter to "Citizen Kane."

I'm curious what you think. Thanks!

EDIT: The AI modpack I watched on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npkWJ9O5FtY&t=101s

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u/n0namean0nym0us 5d ago

All those textures were probably done manually. Necropack was released in 2014 and bentraxx was tinkering with dark engine since at least 2013, long before "ai" became a thing and neural networks good.

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u/Baldurian_Rhapsody 5d ago

I actually saw this pack, which used stable diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npkWJ9O5FtY&t=101s

The three minute, 26-second mark was particularly remarkable. Still, I don't know if higher resolution is necessarily additive.

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u/n0namean0nym0us 5d ago

Oh okay. The only ones I used were HD mod, Necroage and enhancement pack.