Recently, the Digital Foundry team released a new episode of the "DF Retro Super Show" podcast. It featured specialists from Nightdive Studios, which is currently developing Thief: The Dark Project Remastered.
My favorite thing is when I'm going through the Dark Engine codebase, finding all these snarky comments left by the Looking Glass or Irrational Games programmers. They write absolutely wild things about the code: "Giant hack. Never do this"; "Need to fix this before E3 1998"; "Delete after E3."
And, according to the developer, some of these things eventually made it into the game code of Thief 2.
The original developers had an advantage – the people who wrote all this code were nearby. But the Nightdive Studios team, 30 years later, has a much harder time:
It's much harder for us to get into all of this and change something, because first you need to study the systems, understand their weaknesses, and figure out the hacks that were added there. And I think that's what always makes Nightdive's work so high-quality: we really dive into the old code, explore it, understand how everything works, and then kind of rebuild the system and make it better.
You can add Thief: The Dark Project Remastered to your Steam wishlist by following this link. The developers have not yet announced a specific release date.