Search the Community

I was cautious because I didn't want it to be perceived that I was using The Dark Mod Forums to promote my mod but I get your point - we're all in this together. Over the years we've had a few different team members, but for the past few months it's mostly been just me and one other person. The Thieves Guild project started a long time ago, when Rune was still popular. We liked Thief and we also liked Rune so we combined the two games together. We incorporated all of the cloak & dagger elements from Thief but we also wanted our thief to be able to fight like a Viking. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a thief/stealth game. Through the 20 or so missions, we tell a story about a thief working for the local thieves' guild, operating within a dark and corrupt city. Under the cover of night, you are assigned a series of dangerous missions - success is rewarded with valuable items, increased wealth, and greater prestige from within the guild. To survive, you must move silently through shadowed alleyways, scale heavily guarded buildings, bypass deadly traps, and pick stubborn locks - all while avoiding detection by the city watch and roaming night patrols. One misstep can mean capture, failure, or worse. In this city, survival belongs to those who remain unseen. Thieves Guild was designed to be played on a computer using a keyboard and mouse. Rune uses the Unreal Engine 1. I'm glad you liked what you saw in "The Dark Side Edition Trailer". This video is a walk-through of The Training Mission.

Now that Cryengine is basically free to use for community projects, and has proven itself to be ideal for large open worlds with stealth gameplay like Kingdom Come Deliverance, is there anything stopping anyone from porting TDM over with support for existing fan missions? I mean legally speaking of course, as I'm sure it would be a lot of work, but there seem to be fewer barriers than ever before. It's incredible what people have done with an engine that was built to accommodate tiny corridors on ancient hardware, but imagine an engine purpose built to render large open spaces... No more compromised visions when mapping, no more endless optimization to fit a square peg through a circular hole... And if the mission files were to be compatible with the new engine, people could just keep on mapping in DR as if nothing even changed. Cryengine Community Edition https://engine.pterosoftstudio.com/

Well I think you don't have to install Linux to run TDM. You can just boot (with Linux Live usb) into a Windows pc and run tdm from that Windows ntfs disk. The Windows version of tdm includes the Linux executable I think. At least that's the way on the Linux version, but I thought I tested this method on a Windows pc in the past. Otherwise you could use the standalone version, which is for both systems. It runs it of the disk (not usb) so should be fast.

Copyright infringement aside - I'm not so sure that the former and current owners of the IP are still interested in the original lore: Neither Thief 2014 nor the new VR game make relevant use of Hammerites/Mechanists/Keepers. Probably there is nobody left working on the franchise who knows about the original story in the first place or they consider it inferior compared to their very creative new story approaches. This reminds me of another anectode: I can't remember who it was (I think it was Springs) who was even attending a meeting at Eidos Montreal at the time to discuss a collaboration between TDM/Eidos. As far as I remember, he mentioned here, at least two of his conversation partners didn't even know what “Thief” was. I rest my case.

I think games should show up in Steam when you bought them already. So you can use a vpn only to download the game. Proton vpn is free

OK, the Briefings are essentially done. As I said before, content is now distributed into 3 pages, instead of the original 2. Also, I’ve been using “\n\n” to separate paragraphs. This provides “air” between paragraphs, and also makes it easy to fit yet more text on a given page if necessary by combining paragraphs. I needed to that only once (for German). There are additional specific-character changes that I applied manually, but in the future the AI could be told to do (i.e., not generate unwanted characters). I’m discussing these in the context of AI-generated Briefings, but they are more widely applicable, including to the [English] section. * Replace long dash “–“ (U+2013) with short dash. * Replace single-character ellipsis … with 3 individual dots. * Replace double quotes with single quotes. * Replace directional single quotes (namely ‘ and ’, including latter as apostrophe) with non-directional. Regarding double quotes, replacing them with single quotes is generally best. However, you can in some cases retain a non-directional double quote, but you’d have to escape it (with preceding \ ), and I vaguely recall that doesn’t work under all use cases. Russian has directional double-angle marks as quotes, which you can use. TDM’s ”english” (European) character map repurposes the Latin-1 double-angle codepoints for other purposes. Be aware that the default briefing font renders a straight single quote as if directional. Turning to shortcomings of the default Briefing font (scaled from Carleton 24pt), certain glyphs were never implemented and appear as squares (or artifacts) on-screen. At codepoints 9c-9e (Polish lower-case n with accent, Romanian lower-case s & t with descenders). Likely upper-case 8c-8e are also problematic. Possibilities of what to do: The long-term system-level solution is to complete the font’s character coverage. Awaiting that, you could just leave the FM with the squares/artifacts. In the FM strings, replace these characters with their unaccented base letters. As an interim system-level fix, update the font’s DAT, to replace these characters with their unaccented base letters. For Air Pocket, I’ll do either (1 - awaiting) or (2) at this time. Finally, for Spanish, the TDM standard english/european character map does not support the inverted exclamation mark: ¡. Three FM workarounds: Drop the leading ¡ but retain the trailing !. Make the sentence non-exclamatory, replacing also the trailing ! with a period. (This is what I generally chose.) Likewise drop both marks, but also capitalize the phrase to indicate shouting.

It's a pity Bienie hasn't visited since late 2022, because I've finally found the time to play this mission (to conclude the Twelve Days of Christmas and the main winter holiday season) and I really did enjoy it. Though it has a fairly gritty atmosphere and keeps the Christmas-y atmosphere more on the subtle side, it did genuinely feel like an appropriate holiday mission. One where the theme and story also impacts the nature of the major and minor objectives in a believable way. As far as I'm concerned, a two thumbs up, and this is definitely joining the ranks of Christmas-themed FMs for Thief I've played in the past, as their The Dark Mod FM cousin. I don't know that many winter FMs in TDM that have an explicit or hinted-at Christmas theme (and most of those are from the older seasonal/holiday FM contest), so The Night of Reluctant Benefaction receives a high standing in my top favourite Christmas-themed Thief and TDM missions. I think this is a classic I'll try to replay annually during the Christmas season. Speaking of... My first playthrough took me around 1 hour, 13 minutes and 35 seconds, and the second playthrough after that was a speedrun, that took me around 31 minutes. I only found about one or two of the seven extra secrets, but at least there's more to explore next time, and I'm pretty good at completing all the main objectives and the three good deeds. The second playthough wasn't just ghosting-focused (with only 1 knockout this time, compared to 2 on my first run), it was also a no-saving-at-all run. Initially, I did have to restart it a few times, but I did manage a near-flawless speedrun in the end. I daresay I'd even recommend this mission as a good example of a small, but complex enough mission, that beginning FM authors can take some degree of inspiration, in terms of how even limited space is used effectivelly and how you can have plenty of verticality to a mission, even without any use of rope arrows. I was even somewhat surrpised how many windows were accessible to the player, and at least one could even have its lock picked, even if you didn't have the key. Speaking of, this mission wisely avoids devolving into a key hunt, and you have plenty of flexibility on how to navigate various areas of the mission. I'd suggest everyone pay attention to ceiling lamp lit corridors and rooms in some of the upper levels of the buildings, as those can get tricky if you want a stealthy entry and don't want to startle the locals. That's my review of this fine little holiday mission. I don't know if Bienie will ever read this review or not, but if he ever does, I can honestly say the entire FM fulfilled my expectations several times over. Good work, Bienie. Thank you.

Don't Unreal Engine also need a account to use? The last time I tried to use it I need one to download it. Plus afaik you still need to pay Epic if your games gets profits above a certain level. IMO to anyone wanting a totally free, totally open source, no accounts needed and with good enough tools, Godot is a good choice.

So I thought I had found a new and BETTER way of creating lit/self-lit windows for TDM, but discovered fairly quickly that some window textures are already using this method, but that unfortunately the vast majority are not. The aforementioned method is that we use the stock material def for the frame (so you retain the diffuse & bumpmap details), and then only 'blend add' the lit window panes which are a separate texture. An example stock texture that uses this method already - textures/darkmod/window/wooden_frame01/wooden_frame01_lit What we have above is an overlay of JUST the window panes, and its just this texture that is RGB boosted! I don't know why we HAVENT been doing this in the core mod all this time, and to quote @nbohr1more"Boosting the diffuse is a pretty poor way to achieve that effect." And unfortunately a LOT of the core window textures are using this poor method instead of the window pane overlay method. Ive already spent some time in establishments of lower affairs (the line from the gatehouse popped into my head, heh), making overlay versions for frost_salamander for his recently released FM. Please see the zip arcdhive below. @Amadeus has already had a look at and used some, in his upcoming wip - - https://drive.google.com/file/d/11168eiBj_m-Lu5d-8FLYUgM7J1MC_92h/view?usp=sharing So @Amadeus suggested that I list all the window textures that need looking at. I haven't included the ones I have already fixed in the wip archive above - textures/darkmod/window/diamond_pattern02/diamond_pattern02_*** - the lit versions from this series have a diffuse that is basically black, but thankfully the unlit version has a diffuse that can be used. textures/darkmod/window/ornate/stained_colourful_dirty textures/darkmod/window/ornate/stained_colourful_dirty2 textures/darkmod/window/pointedtop_big01/pointedtop_big01_*** - there are lit versions in this series, but they are not using any diffuse/bump. So these are perfect to use as overlays as they are. textures/darkmod/window/diamond_pattern01_*** textures/darkmod/window/diamond_pattern_andbars01_*** - So these are good candidates to be used as overlays with some tweaking, but we need a much better diffuse/bump. textures/darkmod/window/largesquare01_barelylit - poster child of why this thread was created, all the lit versions of this series are just RGB boosting the diffuse. textures/darkmod/window/roundtop_diamond_pattern01_*** textures/darkmod/window/simple_square01_***- this series also has very poor cropping on the edges. textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_4w_dirty01_*** - this series has diffuse that is basically black. textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_4w_dirty02_*** - this series has diffuse that is basically black. textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_4w_dirty03_*** - this series has diffuse that is basically black. textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_industrial_mesh_selflit textures/darkmod/window/square_pattern01_*** - this series needs a complete overhaul.

Sorry I don't have much time to see the full video but what I saw in the first few minutes where he built a room, is nothing special, I've done the exact same workflow for example in Max Payne 2 editor. What he means with mesh's, is that the geometry you work with inside that Unreal Engine plugin, is the same one you do when you work in say Blender, Maya, etc, is just triangles and quads. Meaning the geometry is not composed of simple mathematical planes like brush's but real 3D geometry. Why you don't use portals in there? Because Unreal Engine 4/5 afaik have no portal system for visibility culling. Portals are a CPU concept and are normally used to prevent to render things that the player doesn't see during gameplay, but is not the only way to do this job. I think ever since UE4? Epic's engine uses a more advanced system (but more expensive one) called GPU occlusion queries, in simplistic broad terms, it uses the GPU to do "porteling" automatically for you. btw Unreal Engine also used CPU based, manually placed portals not that far in the past. Also the idTech4 BFG fork RBDoom3BFG engine also supports occlusion queries but on the CPU, using a Intel made library, perfect for open spaces.

I think we should create a thread where you can put requests and suggestions for Orbweaver. This thread should be NOT a discussion thread. If you want to discuss a proposal, create a specific thread for it. I want it to be only for collecting proposals, so we have an overview of what people might want to have. I guess this might also help Orb to decide what he should focus on once he gets productive. BTW: I really appreciate your effort, because we can really use this. So my personal wishlist proposal is that I would like to see a group handler. Similar like in Blender, where you can select several objects and put it in a group. When you select one or more of these groups, the objects are visible. If the group is not selected, it's invisible. In Blender and other 3D apps this is called layers (forgot the name before so I had to look it up).

I think there's only the make-room method (second method, but simpler) in DR, or am I mistaken? I heard with Godot it's actually possible to use DR to build for/with it.

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

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.

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.

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)...

I'm happy to announce the release of my third FM: Year of the Rat. This is my first city hub map, focused primarily on story characters and environment. It's my most complex project to date, taking its fair share of effort to make which was a good learning experience. As an experiment I opted to use no scripts and rely solely on the default entities, as well as no custom assets apart from the map and splash screen hence the small pk4. It features a few special elements, such as factions that are hostile only when the player commits crime or a decoder lockpick used to open electronic doors. The beta testing thread can be found here, thank you everyone who helped find the most obvious problems. You play as a famous thief nicknamed Black Jack: A man who's pulled many crazy jobs in his life, only to be hired for an absurd and insulting task by an anonymous employer. The objective is pretty straightforward: Be kind to the mice and feed them some cheese! Your silly quest takes you to the Lantern Light district during the Lunar New Year celebration, a place where gangs and corrupt nobles do their dirty deeds together. What ulterior motives and unexpected twists could your adventure entail? While the most obvious problems were patched during beta testing, some issues can't be easily resolved due to the complexity of the entity setup and objectives, meaning you may encounter a few inconsistencies. Most notably surrounding AI, which may float above chairs and not react to alerts or oppositely send the whole map into a panic: This is mostly due to how the engine handles AI and alarms. The map is small since I wanted to add more detail without having to work on large areas, as such some places can feel cramped while the skybox may be visible up close. I'll be busy so further updates are unlikely unless I decide to add new content later... you're welcome to report any issues you encounter, but keep in mind that if something wasn't fixed it's likely known but difficult to address or due to engine functionality. Spoilers for objectives and secrets as follows: Download 1.2: Google Drive, Mega. Screenshots with minor spoilers for the various areas:

Lately I have started to play some of the more recent missions and some of these have lots of "own"/unique textures. Is it okay to use these assets (from released FMs) in one's own FMs? I'm referring to models/textures and sound etc, of course not chunks of the mission geometry or blatant plagiarism of readables etc. I guess some people have designed or bought assets for themselves but is it okay to use these textures/models as long as there is no explicit note in a readme etc, that opposes such "borrowing"?

I've started using Linux systems in 2023 when I got a NAS with an appliance-style OS and a router with OpenWrt, both of which introduced me to Unix concepts. Since then I've expanded to running a Proxmox hypervisor that runs various VMs and Linux containers that are centered around networking, file management, smart home and machine learning applications. I use Debian for these VMs the majority of the time, and Proxmox itself is based on Debian. Desktop-wise I'm still purely on Windows as my servers keep me busy, but feel certain the days are numbered before I switch to Linux. Debian seems too conservative as a DE, so I was eyeing ArchLinux. Another idea is Bazzite, but at the end of the day it seems the distros differ mainly in their package manager and what's on offer in their repositories.

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.

by request i have made a ucrt32 version of the msys2 mingw cross compiler for bootstrapping a mingw-w64-i686-ucrt32 compiler. this version can be used to make 32 bit ucrt versions of current mingw packages for use on vista and greater os versions. since this is a by request build it might not make it into the official msys2 repo's but ill make it avaliable for developers to add to the existing msys2 toolchain.

Looks like we need one of these. Use this to post images or teasers of whatever you happen to be working on at the moment. Sharing feels good, and can inspire other people to keep working on their own maps. Use spoilers if appropriate!

Works pretty good here with wine and can be used for crossbuilds also though it does take more setting it up. Use clion as datiswous pointed out it makes it so much better . Also allows working with cuda as the nvcc compiler has linux integration which only works for msvc on windows.