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Story: Build Time: Thanks: Download: Available in the in-game downloader, or at any of these below locations: Gallery: Hints, Tips, Walkthroughs, Spoilers(!): Disclaimers, Player Information. Thank you for playing, and a Merry Christmas to all! What did you think of the mission? I look forward to your honest feedback!

I didn't saw the video so I'm not sure, but normal mesh's in pretty much all engines I've used, are those imported from 3D tools like Blender, while the own engine geometry was called "primitives" or as you know them here brush's. Afaik the diference between a mesh and a brush, is that the former comes already pre "baked"/compiled, meaning they come already made up of triangles, while a brush is just a bunch of mathematical planes that are then baked into real triangles at level compile time (dmap in TDM). Hope this makes things more clear.

Wow. However...what he did in the first 12 minutes I can do in DR in two minutes! Pretty impressive, how fast one can create hallways/recess points and he is only working in 3D view. Grid snapping seems to be no issue here. @HMart: They talk about "meshes" in this video the whole time. Theses meshes (what are they? 2D patches?) are the equivalent to DR brushes? Apparently, portalling is no thing here? Sorry for the dumb questions, apart from DM mapping I have zero experience with other engines.

It's funny, I was just watching this video ("How Modern Game Engines Degraded — And Who’s to Blame?") and then I saw this post. That's some cosmic timing. But anyway, what you're saying is making sense. It's not even that surprising. Anybody working with Unreal 5 that was working with these old engines back in the day can see the differences in optimization smacking them in the face. For the record, the team has done serious optimization work compared to what we started with, and the examples you mention are mapper optimizations, not engine. The team is pretty small, and I don't know if they have ambitions to take the engine other places. But anyway the engine is under GPL3 and nothing it stopping people from taking it and running with it. And people have. Blendo's game Skin Deep uses it, or a version of it (as I understand it; we're in the credits), and you can find people posting about their own projects on it. I think people would encourage and help out any big project doing the kinds of things you're talking about. Like most everything, it mostly comes down to who's gonna be a champion for it. Edit: Another funny coincidence, that video I posted at the top is talking about Cryengine as its example of the better optimized older engine, which is the engine that started this thread.

Hypothetically if Ray casting was used to bake efficiency into the brushwork itself it would make the penalty of a forward renderers lighting under id Tech 4 more agreeable. If Gemini AI is even half right this state of content efficiency would make id Tech 4 10-20 times more efficient per watt than Unreal Engine 5. For mobile platforms you are sitting on one of the best game engines on Earth. Of course I've yet to find a mapper that's willing to spend 3 to 4 years refactoring an entire commercial products slop. From the 13 objects overlapping in space, to decals hidden behind walls, entire rooms unused, brush faces behind other brushes. I'm the first. The ability to automate what I've done even just 90% would take the weaknesses of id Tech 4 and turn them into strengths. There is nothing faster than precomputation. If you can reverse engineer the flexibility of modern game engines without the per frame overhead it's going to curbstomp Unreal Engine 6 in raw efficiency. You also would be taking the former Chief Technical Officer of Metas core design and making it achieve what hasn't yet by industry. They probably would be knocking at your door with offers to commercialize or at minimum rush to replicate your work. They are all in in Alternate Reality Virtual Reality. Too bad their 5% GPU utilization offended one of their best employees. It's because thermal throttling boost behavior modern game engine inefficiencies and battery life. The Dark Mod could be a technology demonstrator that can do things modern game engines super can't. My texture pack 60GB+ (Prey 2006 Remake) is entirely custom. 5120x5120, 7168x7168, 9216x9216, 10,240x10240 and beyond. My texel resolution is extremely uniform and optimized at point blank mip map 0 for human vision. So it's literally a 2002 game engine beating id Tech 8 in asset resolution. Texture streaming doesn't like custom resolutions. Nor do development teams. It's just another way id Tech 4 is superior to modern game engines in a not abstract way. The general public is not aware of how inefficient modern game engines are or how much technical debt they tolerate. It's a more interesting topic to an engineer than a entertainment seeking random individual admittedly. There are inherent advantages to the older methods that are incredibly underappreciated. If I can motivate some of the software engineers to develop this capability that would be rather useful. Especially since it's already in part been done to bake shadows into Doom 3. Which in part defeat the purpose of unified lighting. But it's an existence proof. If you would like to see my 60GB file in its development state that can be arranged. But you also better have 24GBs of video memory. Most people will opt for lower resolution packs when generated by my Python scripts. The ability to hit per pixel 4k point blank is not just overkill. It's a measuring rubric.

I bet on a blind test very few people, if at all, will see the diference between 240hz and 1000hz. People don't understand but at 240hz the monitor is already swapping the frame at 4 milliseconds already! To achieve this speed at 4k on a modern raytraced or path traced game at max settings, you will need to have more power than even a 5090 can provide. Yes you can activate FSR/DLSS and frame generation but then, you have to deal with fake frames sh that introduces artifacts in motion, for absolute no advantage whatsoever, at lest not on single player non competitive games. For me for a single player game, 120hz is more than enough and I have a 240hz monitor. Hell I even play some games at 60hz, despite me agreeing is time to go above that but with no other choice, I'm perfectly happy with smooth 60hz. And people also forget that the more speed you ask from your monitor and GPU, the less game effects you can push to the max (if you don't want to use upscalling...) also more heat they produce, more energy they waste, less time they live and more money you lose. All just you can see a big number changing on a fps counter. Just my opinion.

Anyone brave enough can try but TDM license forbids commercialization. Also the moment that happen, it would be sued by the current Thief IP holders and taken down very fast, why? Because this game is obviously very derivative of Thief. IMO the only reason that has not happen already, is not the goodness of the Thief IP holders hearts, is the fact this game uses different names and lore from Thief, is totally free and very important the makers of it and the people working on it, are not getting money from any other source, like Patreon for example. So probably falls into some safe "fair use" territory.

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

Thank you, I'll try from an earlier save and see what happens. I did try a new game and couldn't replicate the disappearance (in that spot) so hopefully it won't disappear from the old save.

Virtual Rooms Vol.1 You are trapped in a virtual simulation of interconnected rooms, each holding its own challenge. Do you dare attempt the escape? Volume 1 marks the beginning of a journey. Future volumes of Virtual Rooms will be driven by the community: rooms will be created by different authors. We will set common rules as we go. Stay tuned for the upcoming kickoff of Volume 2! In the meantime, let know your thoughts about Volume 1 and "Virtual Rooms" as a concept. Feel free to criticize and/or suggest areas of improvement. Share your ideas. This initiative now belongs to all of you, members of this community and fans of The Dark Mod out there. EDIT - You can now discuss it here: [Alpha] Virtual Rooms Vol.2 Have fun Install instructions: Virtual Rooms Vol.1 is available in the in-game mission downloader. Alternatively, go to the "fms" folder, create the folder "vr_vol1" and place inside the pk4 file that you can download here. Room names, as reference: Known bugs: Cheers!

@Thiefette I restarted the game as wolverine and started with 16 cheeses, put them all on the ground and collected them again .. and then had 15 cheeses. So 1 (buggy) cheese was gone and there were not enough left to end the mission. I tried that again and no cheeses dissapeard ... The cheeses should stay in the circles. I think you have to revert back to a save where you still have all the cheeses and maybe first put them all down and collect them again to see if if there is still a buggy cheese?

Hello Everyone! I've been a fan of the TDM community for some time now. Over the last year or so, I've been chipping away at an FM of my own and it's finally ready for release. Volta 1 : The Stone Volta and the Stone is a fairly large Thief-style mission (Lord Bafford's Manor). It is the first mission of a campaign that follows the Thief and his encounter with an archaic and powerful force. The campaign will span from robbing noble houses to being hunted by malevolent creatures from beyond the Veil. The emphasis is on creating a mood and tone that will hopefully feel familiar to fans of The Dark Mod and the original Thief games. Available through in-game downloader. Or Download here. A few notes Dark Mod v2.8 Required Normal difficulty is intended for new players. Hard/ Expert for most of the TDM community 2+ Hours of gameplay Features lots of custom art/ sounds/ and intro video. If you are stuck or need help: Please PM me or post spoiler free in this thread. I will make an FAQ with hints as they come up! Thanks: Bikerdude, Oldjim, Taquito, Melan, and Goldwell for beta testing. Andrew Bartmess for the wonderful narrator vocals. (v1.2) Special thanks: to FinalBoss and Tins for early alpha testing. I hope you enjoy it!

Well I just finished the game! 11 hours of play, including repeating an entire section that was bugged the first time round. Not a great deal for $40, but I understand VR is niche so it is what it is. Maybe wait for a sale. The game mechanics are well done - very physical (although there is a crouch button). For example, when pickpocketing a guard you have to be careful to snatch his purse but not let your hand graze into his body or he'll feel it. Lockpicking is very good (if you turn off the lockpick UI option). You have to feel for subtle vibrations in your controllers as you move the lockpicks around to find the sweet spot. It makes for tense moments. You can pick up items and throw them to distract guards, keep to the shadows to avoid being seen, loot drawers and chests - the usual thief stuff. The graphics look OK for a VR title. It looks like a Quest3 game ported to PCVR (which I'm sure it is since they will have 10X more sales on the Meta store than they will on Steam). The art style is consistent throughout, maybe too consistent. Assets don't just repeat, an entire building is reused for a second mission - yes you have to break in a second time and basically go though it room by room again. The lighting is not as well done as TDM. It's too bright overall (except for the last mission) and there's no way to adjust the gamma. It doesn't look like you should be able to hide anywhere. For me that kills immersion. There are shadows though and you have a light gem on the back of your hand to judge how dark the guards will perceive you. It works, but it doesn't have the wonderful contrast we see in old Thief or TDM. The gameplay starts out easy and simplistic (I was initially disappointed), but it does get more interesting and challenging as the game progresses. The guards are pretty dumb, but can still be a challenge to get around. They will chase you down if they see you or hear you (in game and literally). Interestingly it uses you headset mic so you can blow out candles by actually blowing into you mic, but the guards can hear it. I had a guard catch me when I inadvertently cleared my throat! Difficulty is non-adjustable though and I would have preferred more of a challenge. The game is pretty linear. Melee combat consists of parrying a guard's attack 3 times with your blackjack, then knocking him out. Not great, but you probably want to avoid that anyway. Like Thief, if there is more than one guard to deal with you will probably lose the battle. If you do get caught, you often can just run away and hide. You can eat food you find in order to heal. There is a bow and there are regular arrows, knockout arrows, water, and fire arrows. There are some heavy guards that can't be killed or knocked out though. The rope arrows can only be used in very select places (mostly just to reach loot). There are no save games - just save locations (at least they are abundant and not frustratingly spaced). Is it a worthy successor to the Thief series? Nope. It's not a bad game - I enjoyed playing it and was compelled to run my battery down each play session. I'd say it's a decent VR stealth game (a genre that is prety scarce) but it just doesn't feel like a Thief game. There isn't much narrative and it doesn't have the moody, slightly creepy atmosphere like Thief. It's lacking in ambient music. You don't get to feel the grit of the town, you just portal to a few locations. If it wasn't for the Garret voice-over (which was cool) there would be no connection to the series at all. [tldr: 6/10. Doesn't feel like Thief]

So I just read in a post about the black parade over at ttlg that someone was using a custom script to create a little challenge. You can only save your game for every 200 loot you gather. As many missions struggle to give loot a valuable sense of existence because it is only used as a mission goal (while not being part of a campaign where it would carry over), I personally found this a really good and refreshing idea. So, would this be possible in the dark mod too, either as a customizable game option or as a custom script j in a fan mission ? What are your thoughts on this idea in general ?

I guess this is basic stuff for you talented model-boys but now I've trudged for several hours without results and from what I have read in several forums/threads, it's even not that trivial. Therefore I dare to start a thread... I've download some models from the web but these come in some new and fancy format; (FBX, USD etc) not exactly the old and brittle format that we use in TDM So to import these into DarkRadiant I need to convert these to lwo or ASE, right? How do people go about this? I have tried to: - install Blender 5.0 and added an ASE-exporter plugin. Blender actually puts out an ASE-file but as I try to open it in DR, the model is only showed as that checkerboard error-box. Do I need to tinker with the model in a text editor first? I read something about changing something about a BITMAP-line... - use an ancient version (7.0) version of Lightwave but that program cannot even open the files (Not surprising)...

Yeah, we get this kind of post every few years, about porting to whatever shiny new other engine is out there. For reasons already discussed, "porting" isn't even a good term for it, since you'd just be making an entirely new game practically from scratch. Just look at the size of our source code. The reason we moved to the Doom3 engine it in the first place was only because Thief Deadly Shadows didn't allow us to properly make good FMs. But now we can make FMs and it's open source. If there is some cool tech that the CryEngine or Unreal engines have, it's gonna be about infinitely easier to just port that cool tech into the TDM engine than vice versa, and in fact we've done that for a lot of cool new tech like soft shadows and ambient occlusion and the like. So that's really the way to go if you want to update the tech. And we're open source so you can do that. Anyway, all that said, one can still make a cool new TDM-inspired game in CryEngine, and I'd even encourage that to someone up to the challenge. For example I'd love to see a cyberpunk or modern stealth game, and that'd be good project for a new engine. I just think if they're making an entirely new game already, why not just make an entirely new game. Well one thing that might be cool is if someone made a game in another engine that could parse a TDM .pk4 file and open up as a map in itself. So then once you've made it, it already as all of our maps ready to play in it. I have an idea that that might not work well though, especially for custom things people put in the map. Also again, we can already play those maps now. If you're going to all that effort, let's have a new cool game with new cool maps!

http://i1049.photobucket.com/albums/s390/sirtaffsalot/vfat3_2015-02-16_18.15.48_zpsdf13cqmi.jpg UPDATE: This is now a Campaign Pack courtesy of Datiswous: https://www.thedarkmod.com/missiondetails/?internalName=vfatc What is The Complete Vengeance for a Thief Campaign? The Complete Vengeance for a Thief Campaign is a three part campaign with a brand new installment at the beginning called The Angel's Tear. The other two installments are the previously released A Pawn in the Game and The Art of revenge with new areas, additional story plus bug fixes and performance tweaks. What are the new areas in A Pawn in the Game and The Art of Revenge? Pics The Angel's Tear: New areas for A Pawn in the Game and The Art of Revenge: Download links: http://www.mediafire.com/download/c2p0myxp32hb8sb/The+Complete+Vengeance+for+a+Thief+Campaign.zip Installation instructions: Unzip the zip file and extract the three pk4s to The Dark Mod's FM folder. Load up TDM and play them in order. Thank you to the following: Bikerdude for help with visportals in the original A Pawn in the Game, visuals in The Angel's Tear plus all the mapping advice and tech support he has kindly provided me with over the years. Beta-testers for The Completer Vengeance for a Thief Campaign: AluminumHaste, Oldjim and Cookie. Beta-testers for the original A Pawn in the Game: Grayman, Bikerdude, Nbohr1more, Ppoe and Xarg Beta-testers for the original The Art of Revenge: Gnartsch, Obttorte, Lux and Jaxa. Everyone who helps me out in the Edtors Guild of this forum. Special shout out to Sotha, Grayman, Obsttorte and Bikerdude. Apologies if I've forgotten to mention anyone. The TDM team for providing me with countless hours of mapping and gameplay fun. Everyone who contributes anything to TDM to help make it the awesome mod that it is.

The ability to automatically prune and refactor brushwork to prevent faces with textures sitting in video memory could be a research and development breakthrough that is basically the next generation (Holy Grail) of virtual reality and mobile rendering. This capability would also optimize many of your communities missions. How would this be done? Vantage in a game without wall walking like prey should be simpler. Using human effort to find the parameters of height that can be jumped relative geometry that can be gotten on top of you have a space to fire off thousands or millions of rays to determine visibility. The earliest algorithms will be imperfect. Edge cases once found would eventually lead to refinement with further development. The ability to trade compute early on for efficiency later would be worthwhile in chase of performance per watt. Is there a case study on the results of doing this? I'm glad you asked. I'm the Prey 2006 Remake modder from moddb. To parties interested I have a alpha state presentation that took literally years to make. Mappers who want to see what optimization should look like or your virtual reality developer would be my recommendation of those to look at it from the editor view. I can't directly help The Dark Mod since I'm not learning programming until my work is finished but it would be interesting to see my workflow and standard replicated by a team since it's unreasonable for a single person. And I will develop two tools for the purpose of bandwidth conservation in distribution, and automation of texture texel scaling including conversion to the optimal formats id Tech 4 and it's offspring recognize. If you can achieve this feat you would basically be making your established infrastructure capable of goals multi billion dollar companies like Meta would love to deliver on limited hardware. You have the established monolithic code base foundation infrastructure, so I think this is a reasonable goal for as many software engineers you have on your team. Specialized or otherwise.

For what it's worth, frame generation could be used to hit 1000 FPS. There's a lot of skepticism over the technology, but one of the better cases for it is turning an already high frame rate into a much higher frame rate. For example, 250 FPS to 1000. That cuts down on the motion artifacts and latency issues that would be apparent with e.g. going from 30 FPS to 120. Another possibility is foveated rendering. There are glasses-free 3D monitors coming out that use eye tracking to produce the 3D effect. In principle, such a display could use the eye tracking for foveated rendering at the same time. If that works, it could cut down the complexity by at least a factor of 2, if not more, probably working better if you're sitting closer to the screen. Foveated rendering is definitely in the cards for VR headsets, where eye tracking will become practically mandatory for varifocal dynamic focus adjustment. These 1000 Hz displays that are coming out are delivering the highest refresh rate only at 720p. It's going to be more feasible for a modern game to hit that frame rate at that resolution than 1080p/1440p. You shouldn't need the latest HDMI/DisplayPort cables for 720p1000 either. That's not a resolution anyone likes to use for gaming though, so some tricks are going to be needed to get it up. Lots of upscaling, fake frames, and foveated rendering all together could do the trick.

I say this with the utmost respect and gentleness but the original poster really doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. CryEngine and TDM Engine (it's far enough removed from D3 to call it that) are two completely different engines, designed for VERY different purposes. CryEngine uses a type of height map based method to create organic looking outdoor terrain, the TDM engine is a brush work based engine. You can't simply 'PORT' TDM to CryEngine...what you would be doing is rewriting CryEngine to be like the TDM Engine...and then you would have to recreate all of the functionality that the TDM Editor provides for level creation. The lighting would all have to be recreated. Basically, you're starting over from scratch. I appreciate the enthusiasm but it's naive. As for us not wanting 'nice things'...we already have two VERY nice things...the TDM Engine and Dark Radiant, two of the best pieces of Modded software in community lead mods anywhere! If the original poster doesn't think the TDM Engine is optimized enough for outdoor environments...the time would be better spent optimizing the TDM Engine for those sprawling environments. That being said, TDM Missions / Thief is not about sprawling missions anyway. It's about being in close quarters. Sorry but this whole thread really annoyed me. lol

We know. There is already a support topic for that. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22533-tdm-for-diii4a-support-topic/ And earlier: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/16672-trying-to-run-tdm-on-android/ And other systems: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Installer_and_Manual_Installation#Other_Systems

Ahh, thanks for the answers, boys! I now have managed to both import models in DarkRadiant and export models from Blender so I'm a bit on the road. I tried to add a copper vase and lo and behold, I succeeded, I even managed to add the correct material definition and changing it in the model file via a text editor. Yay! Now I have a small vase consisting of more polys and triangles and white lines than there are stomach acid in my belly... I thought this would be fairly easy but I guess I'll have to learn some basic Blender to be able to convert these models to lower polycounts so they are more ugly than their original quality but not so ugly they look bashed to pieces, in game... I have high hopes even an old and brittle man like me can follow Blender tutorials and be able to perform these easy tasks, and perhaps I'll get the hang of creating some basic loot and junk myself

Seems quite interesting, maybe a bit rough around the edges. Available on Steam.

============== -= IRIS =- ============== WELLINGTONCRAB TDM v 2.11 REQ Ver. 1.3 *For Maureen* -=- "Carry the light of the Builder, Brother. Unto its end." -Valediction of the Devoted "What year is this? Am I dreaming?" -Plea of the Thief Dear Iris, I am old and broken. When we were young it felt like the words came easily. Now I find the ink has long dried on the pen and I'm as wanting for words as coin in my purse. I can tell we are nearing the end of the tale; time enough for one more job before the curtain call... ============== -Installation- Requires minimum version of TDM 2.11 **Dev build dev17056-10800 (2.13) fixes several visual effects which have been broken in the mission since the release of 2.11. For that reason playing with that version or later is currently recommended** -Iris does not support mods or the Unofficial Patch- Download and place the following .pk4 into you FMs directory: Iris Download ============== *Thank you for playing. Iris is a large mission which can either take as quickly or as long as you are compelled to play. I hope someone out there enjoys it and this initial release is not completely busted - I tried the best I could!* *Iris both is and isn't what it seems. If commenting please use spoiler tags where appropriate. If you are not certain if it would be appropriate a good assumption would be to use a spoiler tag* *Support TDM by rating missions on Thief Guild: https://www.thiefguild.com/* ============== WITH LASTING GRATITUDE: OBSTORTTE - Whose gameplay scripts from his thread laid the foundation which made the mission seem like something I could even pull off at all. Also fantastic tutorial videos! DRAGOFER - Who built upon that foundation and made it shine even brighter! And whom also provided immeasurable quantities of help and encouragement the past couple years on the TDM discord. ORBWEAVER & GIGAGOOGA - For generously offering their ambient music up for use. EPIFIRE - Who lent me his fine trash and trash receptacle models. AMADEUS - Who was the first person who wasn't me to play the damn thing and provided his excellent editorial services to improving the readers experience playing TESTERS AND TROUBLESHOOTERS: AMADEUS * DATISWOUS * SPOOKS * ALUMINUMHASTE * JAXA * JACKFARMER * WESP5 * ATE0ATE * MADTAFFER * STGATILOV * DRAGOFER * KINGSAL * KLATREMUS - What can I possibly say? Playing this thing over and over again could not have been easy. Deepest thanks and all apologies. -=THANKS TO ALL ON THE TDM DISCORD AND FORUM=- ==SEE README.TXT FOR ADDITIONAL ATTRIBUTIONS & INFORMATION== HONORABLE MENTION: GOLDWELL - If I hadn't by chance stumbled into Northdale back in 2018/2019 I would probably still be trying to get this thing to work in TDS, which means it probably would not exist - though more details on that in readme. ============== Boring Technical Information: *Iris is a performance intensive mission and I recommend a GTX 1060 or equivalent. I find the performance similar to other demanding TDM missions on my machine, but mileage may vary and my apologies if this prevents anyone from enjoying the mission.* *Iris heavily modifies the behavior of AI in the game, how they relate/respond to each other and the player. So they may act even stranger than they do typically in TDM. Feedback on this is useful - as it can potentially be improved and expanded upon in future patches.* -=- This is my first release and it has been a long time coming! If I forgot anything please let me know! God Speed. 2.10 Features Used:

I fancied this nice retro game on a giveaway now on Epic.