Version 1.0 ©Alex Fung, August 2020.
Up-to-date version available at my Games page.
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In 2020, I incorporated some of the technlogies and interface elements used in my Thief 2 walkthrough into the Thief walkthrough. To avoid repetition in every mission, I have consolidated the information here. Notice that I'm talking here about the UI of the walkthrough of the missions, not the UI of this page.
Section and Excursion heading basically works like my earlier guides. You would notice that, unlike this page, the Section headings in the walkthroughs will grow a bit wider when the mouse is over them. Just another fancy effect. Excursion do not use this feature because if they get wider, the whole paragraph will reflow to adjust and is very disturbing.
The dynamics of the headings is same as before. Click the heading and the details appear, click it again and they disappear. You can also double-click the details to make them disappear (so you do not need to scroll back all the way to the heading to close it).
New in August 2020, you can interact with the headings. Right click on them and a popup menu appears. More about this in the popup menu section below.
At the beginning of the walkthrough, you can often choose the game difficulty, patch level (v1.07 vs v1.18), playing style (Cleaning vs Ghosting) together with other options. This is because these choices often changes the cumulative values (loot, picks, etc) and the path sequence you should follow. Choose what you are doing in the game, and the walkthrough will adjust itself.
At times, you also need to provide other information. For example, in Mission 9: The Lost City, you need to indicate whether you have bought the Gervaisius papyrus, because it affects the cumulative loot you can collect.
The walkthrough uses the {Gold; Gems; Goods} format to display loot values. The cumulation depends on the difficulty level, game version and playing style. First, because some objects do not appear in all difficulty levels or game versions. At times, you have have forks to jump to alternative paths. More important, on some cases you need to jump back and forth in the walkthrough depending on difficulty level, game version and playing style. Therefore the cumulation is not just done sequentially from top of page to bottom of page. Make the select the correct options at the top and the numbers will be automagically cumulated.
You also have a summary line near the end to show you the total values.
New in August 2020, you can interact with the cumulative elements. Right click on them and a popup menu appears. More about this in the popup menu section below.
Additional information is often available as tool tips. Usually they are the books and scrolls you can read. Move the mouse on the those words with bold brown styles to see the tips (no, nothing happens when you mouse over the words of this line -- none of the features are enabled on this page). These words are called the tip base. Move the mouse over them, and the tip body will appear.
The tip body disappears when your cursor moves away. To make it sticky, click on the bold brown tip base. The tip will stay visible even if you move the move away, or select the text in the tips. Click the tip base again to make it disappear.
When you are using a touch device, you would find that it is not easy to get rid of a sticky tip. When clicking the tip base does not work (such as the tip body is covering the tip base), you can doubleclick the tip body. This also closes a sticky tip.
Unfortunately, doubleclick does not work for IE. When IE is running on a touch device, doubleclick zooms the window. In those cases, there is still another method. Press the Escape key also gets rid of a sticky tip.
Some types of information are hidden in the walkthrough. They may be hidden to make the main text more readable, or to give you a chance to think or conduct experiments before reading the details.
The location of some well-hidden loots of powerups also uses this presentation. You have given hints to look for them yourselves. You can click on the keywords (again, formated in pink over grey) to reveal the answer.
In the walkthrough, you are often suggested to jump to a particular locations via the links supplied. All external links opens a new browser, so you won’t lose what you are reading. Internal links will scroll you to the jump target. The target section and its parents will be expanded automatically, so they won’t stay hidden/collapsed.
To draw your attention to where you are jumping to, the jump target will change color for a second or so. The script will also try to scroll the target to the upper half of the browser window.
Whenever you follows a jump, the return address is saved. You can use the “Go Back” action in the Popup Menu to return to where you were.
Now, location names have their own colors. You cannot interact with them. They are colored just to highlight that they are proper names and will be referred to again.
Some of the location names happen to be jump targets. Some location names are links that jump back where you are first introducted to that location. You will notice they are links because they are underlined (and highlighting when you place the cursor over them).
Frequently, walkthrough of one mission will refer to another mission, like Mission 9: The Lost City. The mouse cursor becomes a hand, and clicking the links goes to that mission.
Links can refer to anchors inside other missions, or even Thief 2 missions. It is used when the missions cross reference each other.
There are two ways to invoke popup menus (also known as context menus). Both involve clicking the right mouse button.
First, Context Specific Popup Menus are available over the following items:
Besides Context Specific Popup Menus, there is also a General Popup Menu. It will appear when you right click anything else inside the walkthrough. A list of commands that is not specific to any item will apepar.
In either case, click a command in the context menu to execute. One of the most important use of the popup menus is to access the Table of Contents, which appear in both the Context Specific and General Popup Menus. It is described in the next section.
The following commands are available to all items (ie all Context Specific Menus):
The following commands are available to structure headings:
The commands are common to loots and picks:
When the tooltip is a book or conversation:
Table of Contents (TOC) is shown on a separate browser window. You open it using popup menus described in the previous section.
When the TOC window is open, and you use the popup window to open it again, it will switch to the required page instead of creating yet another TOC window. Just like when you open the TOC the first time, the selected item will scroll to the top and flash for a second.
On the top left corner TOC window, a button allows you to switch between four different pages:
The content of the TOC mirrors the status of the walkthrough. If you change the Difficulty Level or Game Version, the TOC will be updated automatically.
Next to the page button is a font size button. You can choose a font size suitable for your screen. I find values from 60% to 90% are usually good.
When displaying hierarchical TOC, you have three extra buttons:
They control what details to show on the hierarchical TOC. Initially, they are set to display Loots and Picks but not Books.
Listed on the rest of the window are all the sections and excursions. Click on an entry and the walkthrough window will scroll to that item and flash it. If enabled, the details (loots, etc) are listed in the section they appear. Click on the item and the walkthrough window scrolls likewise.
The Loots Table shows all loots in the sequence you find them (not necessarily in physical sequence, for you may need to jump backward and forward in the walkthrough, depending on difficulty settings). Each loot item has a sequence number. Items not relevant to your existing difficulty level or game version are not numbered.
After the description, the next column shows the section where the loot is described in the walkthrough. If you click on the loot description, you jump to the loot (which will flash); if you click the section name, you jump to the start of the section (whose title will flash).
The remaining columns shows the loot value, in {Gold; Gems; Goods} and as a total. There is a leading multiplier if mutliple loot items are stacked together. Note however the total is the loot value for a single occurence, before applying the multiplier.
Similar to the Loots Table, the Picks Table shows all picks in the sequence you find them. Each pick has a sequence number. Also like loots, you will notice that some picks do not have a number, and some appear more than once.
After the description, the next column shows the section where the pick is described in the walkthrough. If you click on the pick description, you jump to the pick; if you click the section name, you jump to the start of the section.
It is a list of the books in the mission. Click a description to jump to the book in the walkthrough.
Back to the Complete-loot Walkthrough for Thief: Dark Project (TDP) and Thief Gold (TG)
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