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as i understand it performance degredation depends on how many hops a raycaster has to go through ?. so a performance hit can atleast be developer controlled to some degree. the question is will it preserve the feel of the game as well as provide more natural lighting / reflections without sacrificing to much ?.

How you can help depends a lot on what skills you have. I can Record Video Recording "Let's Play" videos or simple walkthroughs of existing missions and posting them to Youtube is great exposure for the mod (see example .) Be sure to let us know so we can link to them. If you have some editing ability, Video tutorials, where you explain how the mod works, or how to use specific tools, would also be great. Video trailers, showcasing interesting places and features, are also great for publicity. An example is . I can Write Writing reviews for missions are always nice, especially if they include good screenshots. Not only does it give us something to post on other forums, but it makes mappers feel good when their mission gets attention (especially if it's positive). We have a collective thread to post reviews in: http://forums.thedar...s-walkthroughs/ Writing reviews of the mod as a whole, targetted an an audience that doesn't know much about TDM, is also very useful. You could also try offering your services to mappers to create interesting readables, or to proofread for their mission. I can Act and Record Audio We are always on the lookout for good quality audio recordings for vocal sets. If interested, you can pick a few different lines from this script: http://wiki.thedarkm...t:_Average_Jack and send the recordings to Springheel, who then writes a script based on the type of voice you have. I can Translate We could always use translations of our menu/hud into more languages. Also, only a few FMs are aavailable in more than one language, so there is a lot of work there, see the I18N Translator's Guide in the Wiki. I can Model Great! Take a look at the model request thread:http://forums.thedar...-requests-here/ and pick something that interests you. Or just post a, "Hey, anybody want a model?" thread in this forum and I'm sure mappers will get back to you. I can Animate Fantastic. We can always use more good animations. Our current character rigs use a Maya skeleton. PM Springheel for more info. I know C++ Have a look at our coding section in the wiki, pick an issue or feature from the bugtracker of the mod or the leveleditor, download the recent sourcecode release (or better ask for an SVN checkout) and get cracking. Make sure nobody is already working on that specific issue and feel free to ask questions. I can Edit Images We can always use completely new textures and/or improved versions of older textures. How to get started and how to import them into the mod. I can Take Photos Good quality photos of useful textures (medieval-ish building facades, dirt, rocks, wood, etc) are always welcome. The fewer directional shadows and higher resolution, the better. I don't have any skills Even if you can't do any of the above, you can still help out. Talk about TDM in other forums; share your (preferably positive) experiences with other gamers you know. Last, but not least, compliment people when you like their work. Saying "thanks", to a developer or, "I really enjoyed your mission" to a mapper will make their day. -------------------- I'll update this further as more things occur to me.

it would be slower thats for sure but how much ?. the Doom3 game is pretty old so maybe not so much, one could get an idea of the overhead by trying out DoomRTX. funny when it came out control was a pretty nasty experience on cards of that time and only the biggest beefiest nvidia card like the 2080 ti could run it decently. nowadays i can run it with all bells and whistles on at 4k and still get <> 75 fps on my rtx 3070. so it might not run to bad .

Wouldn't this add a ton of system requirements to TDM? I never played a game with Raytracing, which wasn't a complete ressource hog.

From what I read Stalker engine supported light baking, which I guess helps with big daytime scenes like that. That's something Darkmod doesn't have. What else is missing? That is something that's testable. You could make concrete comparison of the same 3d mesh lit in different (non-pbr) engines.

Hey I just wanted to create a Thread where everybody can post his improvement wishes. I Personally love this mod. There are so many features in it, and because it is a mod created by a community, why not write what could be improved. My wishes are: Some special weapons. I loved T2X and the variety of weapons. Some really hard to find special weapons, like the confusion arrow or a special bomb would be cool. But they have to be very special, for example as a result of a side quest - or maybe a usable torch for easier killing the undead More enemies, I think there will be an improvement, we just got spiders and zombies, but a higher variety is always good. More (custom) conversation. Thats one of the main parts I'm missing - so much flair and atmosphere is getting lost without them. Also some comments from he main charakter would be nice. For example when a guard gets knocked out "hah, now who's the taffer" ... better AI when the hear a voice. They start looking for you, but most of the time I just sneak into another room or a higher area and just have to wait, they should at least get someone with a torch or call other guards for help These are only small parts of the game which could be improved and are only my points of view, maybe it's either not possible to create or it fits not in the design of TDM.

I always had my niggles with TDM too, but, overall it's very good (not perfect), and, I wouldn't dare to call the developers incompetent. Actually, what they did with the Doom 3 engine is amazing. And, the item handling is some of the best I've ever seen in a game, paid or free. The blackjacking is still my #1 problem with the game though. It's just absolutely random and unpredictable.

A lot of people expect TDM to play and feel just like Thief with better graphics. Then they get thrown out by things behaving a bit differently and get their butts kicked. None of the easy, cheesy things learned from 20 years of T1 and T2 work and then they get ganked by a guard who'd have been trivial to KO or avoid in a Dark Engine game. Most people react with, "hey, this is actually a completely different game, I should play it on its own merits" and not "AAAA! IT'S SHIT! HOW DARE YOU! RAAAAGH!!!"

Kann ich alles nicht nachvollziehen was du da von dir gibst, auch nicht das du dich extra in einem Forum anmeldest nur um rumzustänkern über ein Spiel das dir kostenlos angeboten wird. Ich bin auch kein professioneller Spieler und auch mit weit über 70 erlebten Sonnenumrundungen von meinen Reaktionszeiten junger Spieler weit entfernt, aber bis jetzt hab ich jede Mission mit einer Überzahl von Pfeilen beenden können. Sehr zu empfehlen mal in die mitgelieferten Übungsmissionen vorbeizuschauen um Zielen und Schiessen zu üben. Das Schwert hab ich bis jetzt nur sehr selten gebraucht, aber wenn, dann auch erfolgreich, aber damit einem erfahrenen Soldaten bekämpfen zu wollen zeigt nur das du auch nicht in der Lage bist den Sinn von "heimlich" zu begreifen. Dazu braucht man eben nur ein wenig Intelligenz, Geschick, Planung und Strategie die in dem Spiel nunmal notwendig ist. Ein wenig Respekt und Erziehung zu lernen wäre auch nicht falsch ---- I can't understand anything you're saying, including the fact that you're registering in a forum just to complain about a game that's being offered to you for free. I'm not a professional player either, and with well over 70 trips around the sun I'm far from the reaction times of young players, but so far I've been able to finish every mission with an excess of arrows. Highly recommended to take a look at the included training missions to practice aiming and shooting. I've only used the sword very rarely so far, but when I did, it was successful. Wanting to use it to fight an experienced soldier just shows that you're not able to understand the meaning of "stealth". All you need is a little intelligence, skill, planning and strategy, which is necessary in this game. Learning a little respect and education wouldn't be wrong either

Hell no! One of the ugliest engines ever made IMO. It never looked natural and didn't even try to look natural that's the worst thing about it.

I use the nice existing mod for TDM which is extremly usefull, anyway I think that TDM is on eye level or even better than much commercial games and by far the best free game I know in almost all aspects. Bugs? yes, naturally exists, but normal and mostly with a fast fix in the Mission updates. Somewhat strange that in last versions the holy water not longer work with water arrows, but on the other hand it's more effective to eliminate an undeath, but this, one bottle per undead, not as before an effective weapon for certain time with the water arrow. Well, adapting the strategy fix it, not a problem.

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

It's a Thief-like game, not AssCreed.

Can someone remind me which mission didn't start with an in-game map, but rather the player has to pick it up..? I ask because I am looking to place map inside a building, and only want to player to have the map at that point.

Just like the game itself. Shame, because, those games could be very interesting (also Dead Island 1). Instead, they're boring, repetitive hack & slash action games. But, I assume that that's exactly what the modern crowd wants.

some older engines are just not a good fit for raytracing i reckon. even in quake we struggled with just doing old style real time ligting due to the massive ammounts of indirect lights tanking performance, it also looked dreadfull. darkplaces hacked around this by providing code and a set of scripts to place static light sources (rtlight files) and turned off the old ligting code when rtlight was enabled. this helped immensly as you can guess. if you want to know just how fugly it was just try enabling real time lighting without rtlight scripts and see what i mean. it can still calculate realtime lighting without the scripts (the old ligthing code is only disabled if it picks up rtlight scripts for the map) but due to the massive ammount of them it becomes a slideshow and looks like crap.

I finished a small project today that made me want to quit my current game project and make a stealth game. Imagine if Thief had a second gem, a sound gem. It shows how much environment noise is there to drown your own footsteps. Then in addition to turning off lights and dousing torches, you have to turn on machinery, wait for thunder to cross a tile floor, etc.

Any idea why this isnt playing in-game? Its was 29mins ling Ive since cut that down to 3 minutes, but still dosen't play.

https://www.gog.com/pl/game/total_chaos_mod

Take a look: You know what drew my attention? Around 1:10 he says something similar to "it's mission based but at the same time it's very sandbox in nature. Every mission you are given a huge map to explore and no particular path is forced". Does that ring any bells? Looks like a nice game

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/

@JavaGod Stencil shadows were performance heavy and kind of ugly. We have shadow maps now so that's solved. What the game could use is some kind of dynamic indirect light system. Probes or screen-space global illumination, screen-space reflections. Switching to a full blown PBR was deemed too ambitious, but having proper image masks in materials would be nice. There's plenty of little things that could be improved and bugs that could be fixed on the rendering side and also AI.

Ok, that is your opinion, but, fact is that it was praised all over the place for its lighting back when it was released. That's why it was such a good decision to take it as an engine for TDM, because it did things with lights and shadows no other game did back then.

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