System Shock 2 - Thief 2, Unofficial Patches

I've bundled these together rather than writing two, essentially identical, newsbits. Vurt writes in to point out Unofficial Patches that have been released for System Shock 2 and Thief 2. The fixes enable the games to work well on modern hardware - including widescreen support - as well as a slew of other fixes. The patches originate from "Le Corbeau" on the French forum Ariane4ever but we'll pick it up from the TTLG forums, in this thread. Kotaku also has a newsbit, with some brief impressions. A snip from the lengthy patch notes:

Renderer:
- Added windowed mode
- Added single display mode option - no resolution change between menus and game
- Added ingame support for all common resolutions, including widescreen
- Added support for 32-bit color
- Textures can now be automatically promoted to 32-bit, improving quality and effectively eliminating the palette limit
- Added UI framerate cap option to avoid GPU fan spinning up in UI
- Added DDS/PNG image support
- Added full 24/32-bit TGA/BMP image support
- Increased the maximum number of frames allowed in animated textures from 20 to 99, and increased the allowable filename length for animated textures (before the underscore) to support more than 7
- Animated texture rate can now be specified via a material file for that texture
- Fixed a bug where Transparency property didn't (correctly) apply on objects that contain transparent polys

More information.

The word on the TTLG forums seems to be that these patches are an absolute miracle, they've come pretty much out of nowhere and add a huge amount of possibilities to Thief modding (and presumably to SS2 modding also). Plus the new Thief 2 patch is being rolled up into the existing Thief/Thief 2 unofficial fixpacks to provide "complete" installations that sorts everything out to run on modern hardware, with bells and whistles attached.

Some people are talking about Thief 2 now being capable of being modded to the same graphical quality as the Dark Mod, which is pretty damn exciting.

Originally Posted by coaster
Some people are talking about Thief 2 now being capable of being modded to the same graphical quality as the Dark Mod, which is pretty damn exciting.

The engine still lacks bump mapping unfortunately, but Shadows and lightning looks pretty good. It's now also possible to use objects of much higher poly count and its possible to create levels with more objects than before.