After searching the forums and even trying out a few different Google queries, I absolutely cannot find a link to download this game. The main download page here is broken, going to a "Cannot find this file!" page.

I wouldn't normally resurrect a thread like this, but this game (this very thread, actually) was linked to from 1up's annual 101 Free Games article, and there's probably going to be a lot of people trying to find this one.

I've rehosted it and put a new download link in the first post. Thanks to whoever is still hosting the torrent(!).

Off the top of my head:

Let n be the unit vector in the direction the camera is pointing, and u a unit up-vector for the camera (which you want to be orthogonal to n). Let p be the camera position.

Calculate a left (or right, whichever way it goes) vector for the camera as the cross product of u and n.

Now suppose the screen coordinates are such that (0,0) is the centre of the screen, (1,0) is to the right of the centre and (0,1) is above the centre.

If the mouse is in the middle of the screen, you want to intersect the plane with the line that starts at p and goes in the direction of n. If the mouse is at position (x,y), you want to intersect with the line that starts at p and goes in the direction n+a*x*l+a*y*u, where a is a constant factor that you can probably find by trial and error.

To find the intersection of the plane with a line starting from p and going in a direction v, let lambda be the "height" component of p divided by the "height" component of v; you want the point at p+lambda*v.

There already was one, about Lovecraft. A more broader one where someone could adapt any out-of-copyright literary work would be nice though.

If that happens, I think people should be encouraged to do short works (poems?) or small sections of works. Otherwise I foresee mostly jokey entries, which would be a shame.

yeah- there are so many ways you could go with sports that are entirely new. No one said it had to be a sports simulation like all the EA stuff...

The cool part about a sports compo would be that it would show how great a really creative sports game could be. The fact that most sports games out there are straight sims makes me think there is a lot of uncharted territory floating around out there for us to explore..

Even going just for "straight sims" isn't very restrictive, since any activity has so many levels at which you could simulate it. Both QWOP and football management games could be called sims.

I have no problem with it. If you are going to convert a book into a different medium, you don't have to take everything that there is in the book; in fact that would generally be a bad idea. I imagine they have chosen to take the general outline of the story, the imagery and the gruesomeness from Dante. Perhaps it will be disappointing that they don't do much with the other themes from the book; on the other hand, perhaps it will be a great game and these things won't matter.

Fragmentation would make me sad. 

I really love that the genres and themes can just pour into one another. Big ol' melting pot. If we break further apart, wouldn't that stop some of that? You'd have to expressly seek someone interested in a "scene" to work with you, and many would only be influenced by their own tribes.

That is the way it is already. The TIGSource tribe is mostly inspired by a nostalgia for old console platformers, RPGs and shmups and an affection for pixel art. You don't see a lot of discussion about, say, indie wargames  here.

Loving the art. I like the first orange-and-blue, sketched tunnels very much, and they look like they could be made painlessly with tiles and an aquaria-like system. The painted one posted lower down is getting a bit busy and looks less like part of an interactive game, like you said; although I wonder whether this could be changed by just reducing the contrast inside the rocks (or whatever art term is appropriate here).

What would be very interesting, would be procedurally generation of the painterly style of rock. I imagine you would give it the geometric layout of the level, made in tiles, and some raw brushstrokes and bits and pieces of the painting to look at. It would then warp these around and layer them onto the map. I'm sure this would be a lot of work to get right, but it sounds like the procedural, computer generated feeling is something that you're after.

Also, is there a good reason to be worried about memory? Just making up some numbers, say the game is 1000 by 1000 tiles, and each tile can be destroyed in one of, say, 16 patterns, then that doesn't seem to much to store.

If you edit some of the mission descriptions out of that, to focus on the story, you get this:

[Introduction and some missions]

Shortly after a series of successful missions, thugs working for the local crime lord, Ramirez, attempt to kill Garrett for non payment of tribute. Garrett turns the tables, going on to humiliate Ramirez by looting his mansion. This brazen display of skill attracts the attention of Viktoria, a somewhat mysterious independent fence. She contracts Garrett to steal a magical sword from the eccentric nobleman Constantine. Upon Garret's successful return from Constantine's bizarre mansion, Viktoria reveals that she and Constantine are old associates who were testing Garrett. Constantine offers Garrett a fortune for the job of retrieving a gemstone known as The Eye.

[More missions]

Garrett visits Constantine to hand over The Eye and collect his payment. Instead of paying, however, Constantine reveals himself to be the fabled Trickster, the entity worshipped by the Pagans. They bind Garrett in vines and pluck out one of his eyes, using it to activate the gemstone, and leave him for dead. Garret finds Constantine's notes, which tell about the titular "Dark Project" - the Trickster's plan to use the Eye for a ritual that will bring the world back to a wild, uncivilized state.

Garrett descends into the Trickster's realm, where he finds Constantine performing the ritual. Garrett stealthily swaps the Eye for its trapped copy, which explodes, striking down the Trickster.

Which is already reasonably interesting, even plainly written down like that. But the important thing is that this story is very well told in the game. To pick one thing, the cutscenes build up a weird atmosphere of foreboding around the Trickster and Hammer factions; but when the reveal with Constantine happens, it still manages to be shocking. Here's a great cutscene, from the middle of the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5mnWQi59g4

I own thief 1 and 2 but never got very far in either of them. I like them, but they never really drew me in, perhaps it's the lack of interesting characters/story.

I thought the story in Thief 1 (and to a lesser extent the characters) was amazing, one of the best I've seen in a game. On the other hand I thought the Thief 3 story was a mess, to the point where I wondered if some bug was making me miss cutscenes or was playing them in the wrong order. Frankly I could do without a Thief 4, and would rather the work went into a new game instead.

I just had my own crack at a serious-ish flight simulator for the cockpit competition: Venus Patrol. I didn't manage to finish it.

I like the ribbons and the feeling of the earth and sky revolving around you. But it's tough to control with keys; you have to keep tapping the down key to stop the nose dropping, and you have to press 3 to know what you have padlocked. Did you experiment with mouse control? That was one of the things I wanted to do in my game, and I think it came out okay. I love the cockpit sounds.

Is there any way to change the colour of the HUD, so that it's easier to see against the horizon? And what kind of flight model are you guys using? I see you've got data on roll rates for the different aircraft; is that directly built into the model, or does it come out of the physics?

I might be up for 2-3 days at the beginning of August. I've been meaning to visit Berlin.

I like the idea of the HUD stuff flickering up. Given the scale and the level of wear on the button, it looks strange that the outline of the text on it is so perfect.

Poe it up . Set it all in long-deserted libraries and studies, and make the creatures very small so that it feels like a big world. I imagine your dude floating along a dusty bookshelf in the moonlight.

I would quite like a 360, but I'm waiting until I can be sure that the hardware that I buy off the shelf will be stable.

Or maybe, looking at the image in that post, the wonky edge is just a flat polygon, given a funny shape with an alpha texture, that sticks out perpendicularly from the edge, and is coloured somehow so that it looks like part of the faces meeting there?

I had a shot at this:

It kind-of works, but getting the textures to work exactly right and the transparent polygons to behave with each other is beyond me right now.

I docked! This has a pretty nice NASA feeling to it (except that on my computer the thruster sounds aren't playing immediately; there's an annoying delay before they start).

I'm afraid the sound is spoiling it for me; I get this continuous thumping and squelching noise -- is that the engine? And I have a tree always floating in the top right corner of the screen  . Otherwise, I really like the old-fashioned feel this has of probing through a microscope. It would be good to have a few more navigation aids, just to show how you are oriented; I tried to turn 180 degrees a few times, and wasn't sure whether I had done it or not.

This was quite interesting to mess around with (after reading Noyb's hints), but the sliders to control the location of the cursor is one level of interface obfuscation too far for me.

A fun diversion. The graphics and sound are weirdly compelling, like funny-tasting sweets.

This was good fun once I worked out what the hell was going on. I kept getting into nail-biting canopy-to-canopy turning dogfights with the yellow guy, until I realized that that was me.