Thief: The Fan Made Project  
      
 
On Saturday 2000-05-27, many Thief fans wishing for a continuation of the Thief series met on IRC in #ThiefFMP on starchat.net (irc://starchat/ThiefFMP).
You find the log of that chat here; I have divided it in three parts for easier reading - each part is between 16-25 kByte in size. Some system messages have been cut out, but none of the discussion.
My subsumption of the meeting follows:
Many volunteers had mailed me the days before, but only few could contribute programming skills to the common goal. So I as a coordinator had decided we could not afford building our own engine in reasonable time. The options left were using and adapting an existing engine for our purposes, or sticking with the LGS engines (Thief / Thief II / System Shock II).
This was paramount for all further discussion and planning: on which technical basis were we going to plan? Next step would be to find a rough frame for the story, like when in the timeline etc.
On the vote, the majority decided to use the existing Thief engines. I presume they voted this way because they were familiar with it and the associated tools, esp. Dromed. The effect is the creative volunteers can get to work right now, and we all know how the result will look like.
These are valid reasons, and I accept them. However, I feel somewhat superfluous there. I separated with the few that still wanted a new engine and let Sonance take over, who wanted to coordinate this mission-making effort.
More about why I left this mission-making effort and went with a small group which still wants a new engine, read at reasons to split. I am still a bit baffled by this split-up and the decision most took, but this is a volunteer project and we have to go the democratic way here - that is, with the majority. The majority wanted to work on the basis of the existing engines, so that's what is going to happen. That doesn't keep a minority from doing what they think is better.