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Old March 4th, 2004, 01:37 AM

Targa Targa is offline
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Default Re: Kingdom of Karan and Targa

Well, I guess it behooves me to reply in some fashion, since Zen has "let the cat out of the bag", so-to-speak. First, I'd like to thank all of you for the positive feedback. It's nice to know that all that effort is appreciated. To be quite honest, I was somewhat disillusioned and disappointed at the lack of response when I released the Kingdom of Karan map. IIRC, there were only perhaps five people who commented at the time of its release. I think it's unfortunate (from a modder's perspective) that Illwinter doesn't have some kind of "download counter" for each item hosted on their site, as this would give modders a rough idea as to how popular their work is.

My own personality (call it a flaw if you wish) requires some form of encouragement, interest, and positive feedback to keep me interested in something. I have a feeling, however, that the vast majority of people who create "fan works" do so with one hope in mind: That it be used and appreciated by the players. I can't imagine that many people would continue to put untold hours into fan-works if they weren't being used by anyone.

If properly motivated, I can bury myself in my work, as you can see here:
http://www.thiefmissions.com/targa/

That was when I was playing Thief 2, and became an active member of the Thief community. Players create "fan missions", in which they like to employ new objects and graphics that weren't released as part of the original game, so I was able to find my niche as an "object creator". To this day, I still receive e-mails about that work, and the site is now mirrored in several places, including a translation and host in German and Russian. I'm not egotistical about it, but I am happy that the countless hours of unpaid work that I put into it has made it a valuable resource to the gaming community.

Unfortunately for me, I prefer my games to be a bit less cerebral than Dom2 turned out to be, and I stopped playing it at about the same time that I released the Kingdom of Karan. This, coupled with the less-than-enthusiastic response to Karan's release, drove me away from the computer and back into the arms of fantasy novels.

To answer a few specifics:

@Norfleet: The latest map is Orania-sized, roughly twice the size of Karan.

@Torvak:
Quote:
Same here. I hate him (her?) for that.
"Him" would be the proper term here.

@Ragnarok-X:
Quote:
i guess it must be hours if not days to make a map like this
More like hundreds of hours.

It's interesting to note, now that I think about it, that during all those hours I spent making objects for the Thief community, I very rarely actually played the game. I guess I'm more fond of actually working with graphics than I am of playing games. Anyways...that's enough rambling on my part. Thanks again for your kind words. On to the big question, which is all you really care about anyway, isn't it? Will I make more maps? Probably, now that I know there's life out there. Don't hold your breath though. With Spring fast approaching I'm probably going to be busy with other things around the house, so my computer time will be of necessity limited.

While we're on the subject, though, you could give me your thoughts about the next map. I started one that's the same size as Orania. Compared to Karan, should I go smaller or larger, or make another one of the same size? The Orania-sized one will take a long time, since everything is done by hand...
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