Search the Community

Hello and thanks for checking out this post. I'm delighted to announce that version 1.1 of my fan mission "Cole Hurst 1: Eaton" is now available to download and play. This post is spoiler free, so please don't avoid digging into the details below if you are interested. I'm just using the spoiler tags to organize this post a bit. Let me start by saying "thank you" to anyone who has either previously played - or is considering playing this mission. It really means a lot to me. I have been away for a while, but following a round of beta testing that took place some time last year, I've only just recently managed to finish this update. I'm slightly embarrassed by how long it has taken me to complete, but I wanted to make sure that the valuable feedback I received was all properly addressed. Mission description "Tonight, Eaton's wealthiest citizens will gather at Lord Mayor Zelmer's estate to celebrate the city's founding. Nobles, dignitaries, a famed musician, and even the Queen will pass through its gates. While the guests celebrate Eaton's future, Cole Hurst is looking for a way out." For those new to and/or curious about this mission: I guess I would describe it as a traditional heist-style mission - although with a couple of major plot twist along the way. It's a very large map and I think it should take most players at least a few hours to complete. Screenshots Changes in version 1.1 Countless additions and a large amount of smaller tweaks and changes have all made it into this release. I may have already forgot a few things, but here are what I consider to be the main highlights: * New secrets & optional side quests * Story tweaks and reworked readables * Subtitles * Difficulty tweaks and related changes * Stability fixes * Various cosmetic changes * Audio tweaks * TDM version 2.13 now required Contributions and acknowledgments A special thanks to all of those listed below. I'm sincerely grateful for all your contributions! Mission testers and technical support @nbohr1more, @stgatilov, @duzenko, @Acolytesix, @Dragofer, @JackFarmer, @Shadow, @Cambridge Spy, @wesp5, @madtaffer, @prjames, @suzy8track, @datiswous, @boissiere and @Bergante Story Kelly Hrupa Voice actors twhalen2600 (AKA @Benny_the_guard) and Kelly Hrupa

Here's one way in which they have something to do with each other: if the remaster is considered a stinkbomb, GOG is unlikely to pull the original version off the "shelf". Which has happened in the case of some remasters IIRC. Obviously, the community is obsessed and the games are well preserved. I see this as another aspect of that. I may have even voted for Thief Gold (don't remember). I think GOG has attempted to make bug fixes to games in the Preservation Program, but probably not to a great extent whatsoever if they can only afford a couple of programmers and often don't have the source code. In this case they will just defer to NewDark. I think not having to install NewDark is a potential benefit for GOG users, but it was probably already the case, idk.

Hmm @stgatilov @cabalistic @Frost_Salamander did someone add a de-facto reverb feature in 2.14 ? There are no def, efx, or reverb words in the pk4 yet the console claims to have loaded a reverb def and there is some sort of reverb audible in this mission...? ---------------------------------------- ----- idSoundCache::EndLevelLoad ----- 271300k referenced 6312k purged ---------------------------------------- sound: found efxs/business.efx ----------------------------------- 4005 msec to load business /mnt/Speedy/darkmod$ grep -Ri business.efx efxs.txt:sound: found efxs/business.efx ( only the condump file found ) Maybe we already had most of the code to do this when the dhewm3 port was done but some new changes activated it? Source looks like it should return a not found though... Anyway, it's better than a fully dry sound... Any thoughts? Are we just applying some arbitrary amount of reverb to all missions now?

Hello! Tracking down information on software and plug-ins that work with D3 / TDM can be a tough. So I have created a thread here where people can post what software/ plug-ins/ tutorials or other references they've had success or failure with in TDM. 3DS MAX 2013 64bit .ase - Default .ASE model exporter works. However you have to open the .ase file in text edit and manual change the *BITMAP line on each material to read something like: "//base/textures/common/collision" which allows the engine to read the correct material path. md5.mesh / animation - Beserker's md5 exporter/importers for 3dsmax. http://www.katsbits.com/tools, Importing and exporting works. The model must be textured, UV'd, with a skin modifier attached to the bones to export. PM me (Kingsal) for help with this. Imported models using the script will not be weighted appropriately, so this is not recommended if you are simply trying to edit existing tdm content. (Use blender instead) MAYA 2011 32bit md5.mesh - So far I've not had any luck with Maya 2011. I am using Greebo's MayaImportx86 for Maya 2011. I've got the importer working however I get a "Unexpected Internal Failure(kFailure)" and the import fails. This could be due to something finicky in Maya that I am not doing correctly. Will keep trying.. Blender 2.7 about - Blender is commonly used and pretty well supported on the forums/ wiki. Various versions may work as well - https://www.blender.org/download/ md5.mesh / animation Blender MD5 importer/exporter (io_scene_md5.zip): https://sourceforge.net/projects/blenderbitsbobs/files/ Sotha's guide Blender Male/ Female rigs by Arcturus - Here Edit by Dragofer: more links found in this post.

For the people eager to play with the latest state of development, two things are provided: regular dev builds source code SVN repository Development builds are created once per a few weeks from the current trunk. They can be obtained via tdm_installer. Just run the installer, check "Get Custom Version" on the first page, then select proper version in "dev" folder on the second page. Name of any dev version looks like devXXXXX-YYYY, where XXXXX and YYYY are SVN revision numbers from which the build was created. The topmost version in the list is usually the most recent one. Note: unless otherwise specified, savegames are incompatible between any two versions of TDM! Programmers can obtain source code from SVN repository. Trunk can be checked out from here: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/ SVN root is: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src Build instructions are provided inside repository. Note that while you can build executable from the SVN repository, TDM installation of compatible version is required to run it. Official TDM releases are compatible with source code archives provided on the website, and also with corresponding release tags in SVN. A dev build is compatible with SVN trunk of revision YYYY, where YYYY is the second number in its version (as described above). If you only want to experiment with the latest trunk, using the latest dev build gives you the maximum chance of success. P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

You can do: ./tdm_installer.linux64 --help Which gives you the following options: --unattended Install game without any human intervention. The most recent stable version is installed by default into the directory where this installer is located. BEWARE: it won't ask for any confirmation! Make sure to look into tdm_installer.log after it finishes. Return code should be nonzero if an error happens. --version {ver} Install the version {ver} instead of the default one. Only has effect when combined with --unattended. So pretty limited. I would say too limited.

I have a bad feeling about this remake to be honest, one of my concerns is that it's, of course, Nightdive Studios. Nightdive Studios might have made great remakes, once or twice, but they ALWAYS abandon them in the end and that really bothers me. For example, their port of Quake 1? It's terrible, it has this terrible frame latency problem that you can't fix at all, meanwhile all the other SourcePorts have much better ways to deal with it, like IronWail. They've never fixed this massive problem. And also, there's the whole issue of how they had to "remake" Blood...TWICE! And their latest remake is still not as good as the other sourceports, and they still don't have the original source code, so yet again they remade Blood by reverse-engineering it. Thief is one of those games where it doesn't need a remake, it only needs the source code so any capable fan can make improvements to it for the modern PCs, like adding multicore support, new optional shaders perhaps, improve the sound engine to modern capabilities and so on. Instead, we get Nightdive, which I do not trust. Hey ICHI, could you give me examples of how they "fucked up" Quake 2? I found it to be a good remake, unlike their Quake 1, but I've only tried it a bit, with the first mission that is. Well, rumours are rumours, but if the "new campaign" is basically, the Thief 2 Gold we never had, I'm into it...But I know for a fact Nightdive will make it an exclusive to their engine so you can't play it in good ol' Thief 2 proper.

Mandrasola is a small sized map in which aspiring thief Thomas Porter steals some herbal products from a smuggler. The mission was created by me, Sotha and I wish to thank Bikerdude, BrokenArts and Ocn for playtesting and voice acting. Thanks goes naturally to everyone contributing and making TDM possible. This mission occurs chronologically before the Knighton's Manor, making it the first mission in the Thomas Porter series. Events in chronological order are: Mandrasola, The Knighton's Manor, The Beleaguered Fence, The Glenham Tower and The Transaction. The winter came early and suddenly this year. Weeks of strong blizzards and extremely harsh cold weather hit Bridgeport hard. With the seas completely frozen, a rare occurence indeed, most of the City harbor commerce has stopped completely. Vessels are stuck in the ice and no ship can leave or enter the City, resulting in the availability imported goods declining and their prices skyrocketing. One of these imported items is Mandrasola, a rare herbal product, which is imported overseas from the far southern continents. Mandrasola has its uses in alchemical cures and poisons, but mostly this substance is used for its narcotic qualities by commoners and even the nobility. The problem with Mandrasola is that excessive use is extremely addicting and the withdrawal effects are most grievious. Many are utterly incapable of stopping using Mandrasola and are transformed into quivering human ruins if they do no get their daily dose. And now this expensive and rare substance is running out from the whole City. Me and my fence, Lark Butternose, would love to grab this monopoly to ourselves: selling the last few doses in the City would probably be worth a fortune. According to Lark's sources, there remains only one smuggling lord who still has Mandrasola in stock. The problem is that this individual maintains an exclusive clandestine operation and only supplies a few nobles. Despite our best information gathering efforts we couldn't learn who the smuggler is and where he or she operates. Luckily we have an alternate plan. While searching for Mandrasola related information, we learned that a noblewoman called Lady Ludmilla is addicted to the substance and has paid high prices for small amounts of it. We also know that she has visited frequently someone in the Tanner's Ward waterfront, and since she goes to the area personally we believe she is visiting the smuggler. The plan is simple: I must monitor Ludmilla's most likely entryway to the Waterfront and then follow her to the smugglers hideout. I'd better be very careful around Ludmilla. She must not realise I'm following her or she probably won't lead me to her dealer. Hurting her is also out of the question. After she leads me to the smuggler's hideout, I can take my time to break in carefully and steal all the Mandrasola I can find. While I'm there it wouldn't be a bad idea to grab some loose valuables as well. I've now waited in the blistering cold for a few hours already. Looks like there are a few city watch patrols in the area to complicate matters... I think I heard a womans voice beyond the north gate. That must be lady Ludmilla, I haven't seen many ladies in these parts. I'd better get ready.. Links: Use the ingame downloader to get it. WARNING! Someone always fails to use spoiler tags. I do not recommend reading any further until you've played the mission.

I think they're both very good. And, I say that even though I'm not into shooters too much. But, especially Quake 2 is a fantastic game. I know that some people complained about Quake 2 remaster, for whatever reason. There are the occasional post or two on the Steam forums as well, made by single people. Everyone else seems to thoroughly enjoy the game.

agh i just tried running the original bioshock on the nuveau driver with my 560 ti i get 1 fps in XP i get 167 fps. so i bit the bullet and popped in my old radeon x1900 and it runs bioshock at 57 fps on noveau and a bit more in XP. nvidia's driver model for linux in the old days was pretty horrid .(run files) and the drivers were newer updated for newer kernel models so even recompiling them will not work as much of the internal code is no longer supported so it just fails. so if you use an older nvidia card stay the hell away or braze for a lot of code fixing. amd on the other hand has been pretty supportive of the linux kernel models and uses a much better practice of driver installs by using the built in package managers. the radeon x1900 is a very very old card which only supports dx 9 and it works out of the box on the latest linux versions. nvidia has changed the driver models on more modern cards to be more in line with the amd model but older cards have newer had drivers updated to run on these kernels so its a clusterfuck to get older cards running on current versions. so if looking for a linux distro to use with pre pascal cards i would advise to use something like linux mint 19 which is one of the last to support these out of the box. but you might run into stability problems even so. also linux mint 19 is no longer supported so it wont recieve any updates, but you should still be able to get software that works on it.

Hello again TDM Forums. I'm close to finishing a new FM, "The Maybury Idol, Part 1: A Trip to the Museum", and I'd like to request help with beta testing. Any assistance is appreciated, thanks.

well atleast the idtech 3 engine was used for many great games but yeah a single player story would have been nice. hmm dunno about the gameplay being better but it was definatly more open world in Q2 where as Q1 mostly ran like a corridor shooter. The nehahra mod sorta put a plug in that by having some huge outdooor maps atleast opposed to what we were used to most of the time. in retrospect Q1 got popular because of its modding community not so much for its campaign. Q2 also had a somewhat large modding community but by no means as large as that of Q1. around Q3 it started going downhill in the modding community, there was still a few around who worked on it but it was mostly on the engine code, and only a few games or mods were made by the community. if i had to guess i would say Q1 got popular by modders because it was easy to work with and did not require a large team to make a game with (you could pretty much do it by yourself). atleast idtech 4 has had a good number of mods but as far as i know the dark mod is the only total conversion project and i guess you guys know better than anyone how much work had to be done before it got to this point

Unreal engine now has a tool for single-camera, markerless motion capture. Supposedly based on this tech: https://meshcapade.com/ It’s far from perfect, but definitely usable. It’s free and offline. https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/metahuman/getting-started-with-metahuman-animator https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/epic-games-metahuman-animator-markerless-motion-capture-plugin/2729293/6 Position of hands and feet can be adjusted manually to some extend using retargeting tools.

Nerfed railgun and other weapon changes, enemies rebalanced. Barrels now don't explode instantly when you shoot them, there is a pointless delay. A lot of AI changes but the maps weren't designed for it. Lighting was redone entirely, often it significantly changes the atmosphere for the worse, because it's much brighter now. Some maps were altered just for the sake of it, the rest were left intact which only creates visual inconsistency. OLD MODS ARE NOT SUPPORTED! More to that, you can't just recompile the old source code, you need to adapt it, but that is if you still have it somewhere. And who would care to port the old mods anyway? On top of all of this, they awkwardly tried to merge Q1 and Q2 universes in the newly added campaign but it feels so out of place and just cringeworty.

Please test this and let us know if anything looks worse than before, or doesn't look better when you would expect it to Note that I adjusted the TDM core GUIs, but not any FMs, so if a FM ships a custom GUI it might still look stretched in wider or narrower resolutions. (But might also look fine if it extends TDM GUIs in the intended ways, @stgatilov put a lot of work into that in the past which really helped with my changes). Report issues either way, I'll try to figure out if the problem is in the mission or the core GUIs or my code

Doom3/TDM GUIs use a 640x480 coordinate system and assume that the player uses a 4:3 resolution, otherwise they'll look stretched. Most TDM GUIs assume that they will be stretched to 16:9, i.e. pixels aren't square (which makes writing GUIs pretty painful, I guess) and when using a non-16:9-resolution things look stretched. TDM added the forcescreenaspect window variable that will prevent a windowDef from being stretched when used with hcenter that can be used to have something undistorted on the center of the screen, but it's still pretty limited (and barely used) - and as far as I can tell child-windowDefs of that will still be stretched. Anyway, CstDoom3 2.0 introduced Anchored GUIs which allow anchoring windowDefs to a corner or center of the screen and prevents them (and everything contained in them) from being stretched. Those anchored windowDefs are mostly limited to 640x480 virtual pixels (scaled to screensize, as much as possible while keeping the aspect ratio), so regardless of the window's resolution, they will remain unstretched (well, except for those anchor cases that explicitly stretch in one direction, like anchoring just to the top instead of top center or top left or whatever). This allows for example to anchor the weapon_display windowdef to the lower left corner of the screen, the lightgem to the lower center of the screen and the current item to the lower right corner of the screen. No matter how wide or tall the window is, they will remain there, unstretched. I think these screenshots illustrate it pretty well: For dhewm3 1.5.5 I ported them to dhewm3 and greatly improved them, for example they can now also be used for regular (interactive) menus, while in CstDoom3 they only worked with noninteractive fullscreen GUIs like the HUD (mouse positions weren't calculated correctly). This feature is documented in detail at https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/blob/master/docs/GUIs.md#aspect-ratio-independent-guis-covering-the-whole-screen-with-cstdoom3s-anchors Now I ported that to The Dark Mod, with just two little changes: There is no scaling of menus to 4:3 with letterboxing, so the window variable scaleto43 is not needed or even supported Most of TDM's GUIs assume that they'll be stretched to 16:9, even though using the 640x480 4:3 coordinate system. To accommodate this, I added the cstAssumes16_9 window variable. cstAssumes16_9 1 will cause the anchored windowDef, that would normally have a 4:3 aspect ratio, to be stretched by factor 1.333 (in width), just like it would when stretching to a 16:9 resolution. So when porting existing GUIs to this system, you don't have to recalculate the coordinates - if they were meant to be stretched, add a "cstAssumes16_9 1" line to the windowDef (and "cstAnchor CST_ANCHOR_BOTTOM_LEFT" line or similar, of course) and it should work in most cases. By the way, this is completely backwards-compatible, so if your .gui doesn't use cstAnchor, it will continue to work just like before. At https://github.com/DanielGibson/thedarkmod-mirror/pull/1 you can find a testbuild for Windows with this enabled, some ported GUIs, more information and the code changes. Currently this is an experimental patch, I don't know when or if it will be merged to the official TDM source. Please check it out and play around with this feature and let me know how you like it and if you run into problems! I've ported most of the HUD, but there's still a lot of GUIs that would benefit from being ported, like the inventory menu, the main menu and more. TBH those seem pretty complex so I'd appreciate help from someone who's familiar with their code

hehe yeah linux memory management has allways been a complex beast mostly due to the kernel using memory mapping instead of simple malloc calls. my thought was allways that the mmap etc. functions were used to help alleviate the complexity to some degree it is still complex but atleast not as much as if you had to write the entire thing yourself. around gcc-4 / 5 they had to up the limits somewhat due to hitting constraints (the linux kernel used a pretty diminutive kernel stack) and it has grown worse since then with more complex programs and the advent of 64 bit. you can see some of the problems they encountered over time with blender which constantly brushed against the memory constraints. in retrospect this might also explain why so many of the devs who wanted new flashier features wanted to ditch 32 bit. there was a huge resistance to using things like LAA or PAE to get around the constraints because it added to some allready pretty complex code. linux devs being hobbyist by nature did not want to spend time developing workarounds for what was percieved as a natural limit of an architecture.

LINUX SECTION: it was not really a microsoft comment, the linux world was pretty much first out to ditch 32 bit so even though you can still build something as 32 bit and make sure that your code has the best performance for that arch all dependencies like libc (bare minimum) will still not have been developed with 32 bit in mind making a good deal of what said developer does moot. its a bit like trying to fit a ferrari engine inside a beetle, it wont work to well or not at all. sure if you are adamant in bringing back the glory days of 32 bit you could go ahead and start optimizing dependencies for 32 bit (which for one person would take a lifetime or two in a worst case scenario) so it is not going to happen. even worse for 16 bit code or older which not many compilers today can handle (djgpp and open watcom are pretty much the only still developed ones with that capability and only the open watcom compiler even runs on a 64 bit OS). MICROSOFT SECTION: microsoft for all they're bad decisions have in most regards tried to keep compatibility with older software without going the way of using full fledged virtual machines. this was not like many belive to appease gamers but to keep the big companies locked in as many of them used in house tools developed ages ago which would be hard if not impossible to replace. with windows 11 that stance has changed though and most of the old cruft has been neutered or outright removed. for an example see ntvdmx64 which was a project that aimed to allow users to use the old dos mode and 16 bit vdm on 64 bit. it is now largely defunct due to them removing a boatload of old 16 bit compatibility code. you can still get it to work but instead of one VM you now need two. one is for DOS (ntvdmx64) the other is for 16 bit (WineVdm). and both require you to turn off a good chunk of the new security features because neither are compatible with core isolation etc.

I don't think a new editor would be needed. From my understanding, the Kex engine is a wrapper of sorts that runs the original game code while stripping out the outdated graphics and audio systems for modern ones. I'm curious to know if they were able to do all this the leaked Dark Engine source code. No doubt would have made it easier.

Crouched Player Hands Mod (TDM 2.14) @jivo, the original creator of the Visible Player Hands Mod, is currently absent. A year ago Jivo announced plans to further improve the mod but we haven't heard from him since. TDM 2.14 was released and his mod hasn't been updated. One of the planned features was to have the option to show only the hands (no items). This is what I think works best, at least as the starting point, and this is what my fork is about: Show at least one hand when crouching Remove the crouch indicator from the HUD DOWNLOAD (Windows) https://www.mediafire.com/file/oboazn4ohfby7e4/Crouched_Player_Hands_2.14-Win.zip/file Please note the download includes a modded TDM 2.14 Windows executable. The executable has been compiled by me using official code sources and Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022. The download also includes a copy of the changes made in the source code, which can be found inside the pk4. The zip includes: TheDarkModx64.exe z_crouched_player_hands_214.pk4 INSTALL Make a manual backup or rename your TheDarkModx64.exe (ie: TheDarkModx64.exe.original) Drop the modded TheDarkModx64.exe and the file z_crouched_player_hands_214.pk4 into your TDM root folder UNINSTALL Delete the modded TheDarkModx64.exe and the file z_crouched_player_hands_214.pk4 from your TDM root folder Restore the original TheDarkModx64.exe DOWNLOAD (Linux) I don't have the knowledge to provide a build for Linux. ---------------------------- Should Jivo be back and resume work on his mod I will ask Forum Moderators to delete this whole topic. In the meantime, I hope you have fun with this fork for TDM 2.14. THANKS JIVO FOR YOUR WONDERFUL WORK! PLEASE BE BACK SOON!

There's now an editable fan mission list on the wiki, for the sake of tracking missions made for The Dark Mod. Please read and follow the guidelines, and help keep the list up to date! Direct link, but also accessible from the wiki title page: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod Discussion of changes (format, policies, entries, etc.) can take place in this thread. --------------------------------------- There is also now a wiki page to track upcoming fan missions: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Upcoming_Fan_Missions Submissions, progress, and any discussion for missions under construction can take place here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11639-upcoming-fan-missions/

This pinned thread's purpose is to collect links to all the discussion threads for new features to be added in 2.14: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23080-214-new-and-updated-assets/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23072-214-mirrors-and-remotes-resolution-and-optimizations/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23070-214-tdm-version-macros-and-x-ray-breaking-change/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23071-214-in-game-screenshot-as-menu-background/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23073-214-interactible-projected-decals/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23074-214-new-smoke-generation-system/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/23088-214-beta-ko-non-elite-ai-after-flash/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22736-font-localization/page/2/#findComment-503417 As well as older Feature Collection Threads: [2.13] Feature Discussion Threads [2.12] Feature discussion threads [2.11] Feature discussion threads [2.10] Feature discussion threads

If token prices are unsustainable and it causes the bubble to pop and big companies to collapse, there's still going to be a number of users who want to vibe code, run agents, and do other things. They should be doing it locally with hardware that would hopefully become cheaper in the aftermath. Such as Strix Halo, DGX Spark, RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell Workstation, M3 Ultra Mac Studio or later (256-512 GB models were discontinued), etc. It becomes a matter of electricity and heat rather than tokens.

Thanks, I've committed the code changes to the darkmod_src SVN and updated executables and the modified GUIs to the darkmod SVN