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I've read about this before here on the forums, even when the contest had just recently concluded, but reading about it in greater detail years later is certainly interesting. Thank you. It's a pity that it was mostly the marketing people who were involved on the Square Enix side, as I had the impression it was also the devs at EM that had played Requiem and all the other submitted missions and really liked them. I suppose it was as well, but the TDM team mostly heard from the marketing people. Yes, I wanted to note that as well. I even remember how the people over here in the TDM forums were sort of laughing at the fact that the results of the contest were favourable to TDM and had, in a sense, "proven" TDM as a worthy freeware successor to the Thief IP, with all the modding and mapping tools at one's disposal and so on, whereas Thief 4 or Thi4f or whatever Square Enix were calling it at that point, offered no such possibilities. The entire contest, while no doubt declared in good will and something I actually appreciated seeing, was such a self-own for Square Enix, ultimately to the detriment of them trying to bring back and market the reboot of an older IP. Even if Thief 2014 was a terrific reboot (which I doubt it would ever be), it would still have been hampered by people learning about modding being impossible, and looking to the trilogy and to TDM instead, to make new Thief-style stealth gaming content. Still, I appreciate they recognized the quality's of Moonbo's Requiem FM. Given many retrospectives I've seen over the years, gradually, on the 2014 Thief reboot attempt, one thing a surprising amount of them shared was noting how the game didn't feel cohesive in concept and execution, at any point. Not only not to the same level as the Thief trilogy, but also not even at the level when you consider it as an individual game, a new game on its own. Errant Signal, who's not some deep Thief fan, replayed the older games and played the reboot back when it came out, and made this exact observation already a decade ago. The reboot was just all over the place, in every department, felt clearly unfinished or rushed, and the most interesting story would be the behind the scenes at Eidos Montreal, on how mismanaged the entire project became over the course of several years. I think it's telling that, while even heavily discounted on GOG.com, Thief 2014 hasn't been selling well there, nor attracting much interest, whereas the original trilogy sells for figurative (and sometimes literal) cents on that same site - you can buy the whole trilogy for a smaller price than the reboot, which is kind of hilarious - and continues to have great sales and is considered one of the all-time bestsellers. Same here. I concur with demagogue that the actual Eidos Montreal devs behind Thief 2014, at least those who cared enough to make it at least somewhat presentable and playable - even if the actual game directors never got their act together and never decided on a consistent design apporach - those would have been much more interesting to be in contact with, even regarding the fan mission contest. The sad truth of the matter is that all too many big publishers these days, especially those formed through larger mergers, like the Eidos buyout by Square Enix, are often marketing-first, interest in developers, and veteran players and new players alike, second. I still remember the sheer amount of money spent on pointless external marketing for Thief 2014, all the while that reboot attempt never really coalesced into anything that felt consistent (rather than throwing everything at the wall, in a panic, hoping something would stick), and was also plagued by all manner of technical issues. Just an overall embarassment, and I'm not surprised that even very lenient-leaning game retrospectives of that reboot attempt. The fact that the Thief IP has been sold away to Nordic Games and Embracer in more recent years, with Square Enix no longer caring about it and other older game IPs, also says a lot. Given the Embracer Group's own woes and bad decisions, I'm not sure any new development team will ever attempt another installment of Thief, even if it was a second reboot attempt.

This looks really cool, amazing work in my opinion: https://www.moddb.com/mods/thieves-guild I'm surprised that it flew completely under the radar. I hadn't heard about it until today - just by coincidence I saw it on the TTLG Discord. From the footage available I would say, a Thief game similar to Deadly Shadows created with the original Unreal Engine. Apparently, the base game is available on GOG, however, I cannot find it there. Plus, according to ProtonDB not fully functional on Linux systems. EDIT: Here is a game play trailer from 8+ years ago (the development of the game took quite some time), there seem to be RPG elements as well: Edit 2: This seems to be a project our forum member @Jetrellis heavily involved in. Congratulations on the release! You have been working 10+ years on this? Truly a superhuman effort!

Yes, I know. I've included some track selections from FMA in the music resource thread. The one downside is that some of the authors have since pulled their music from there or it's gone due to different causes, so not all the links I originally included still work. It can be a bit of a hassle for me to regularly update all the links to various free music databases. Even so, thank you.

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.

I recently found this 2022 album of environmental sound ambience (no music) on Soundcloud, by an author going by the moniker of "Cyberwave Orchestra". It's likely not royalty-free and you have to buy it and such, but I think it might be useful for FM authors if they want a few more custom ambient soundscapes for their FMs. The tracks loop. Having listened to the album, I think the most useful for TDM FM purposes would be the sound ambience of outdoors nature ("Mountain Canyon", "From Dusk Till Dawn", "The Swamps at Night", the "Cursed Lands", "Cursed Lands 2" tracks), underground spaces ("Secret Cave 2"), maybe industrial ("The Great Mine" and "The Great Mine 2", I suppose), dungeon/prison spaces ("Dungeon of Sorrow", "Dungeon of Madness", "Chambers of Hell (No Boiling)", "Chambers of Hell 2") and some of the rural ambience (the "Fishing Village", "Fishing Village At Night" ambience tracks, "Summer Night Near The Village"). The tracks with more urban sound ambience aren't bad, but might not be quite what we need for most TDM mission night time town/city ambience. IMHO, they feel like mostly daytime ambience. The two "Port Town" and "Port Town (No Bells)" ambience tracks seem by far the best fit for town ambience of TDM. "Village on a Windy Day" could work for dusk and the early evening, but not night. "Onboard the Ship (No Voices)" might work for a ship docked in port at night time, but it might feel a bit loud to FM-builder tastes. I'd suggest lowering the volumes and doing similar tweaks.

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/

I like to talk about it, but yeah it's probably off topic to this thread to get into it. But yes, it has lots of great gameplay too, so I used the entirely wrong phrasing. For the record, maybe the way to better put it is that it's more cinematic, like with the mise en scene and plot flow design, it's telling a story, which I also like. But I also really like ones that are simulationist, like you're just dropped in an uncaring world that doesn't care where you go & isn't really telling a story, but it has things happening in it that you can observe. This is all nitpicking nuance though. I still agree it's objectively great and I was happy it won & got recognized for how great it is.

This is referring to TDM's collaboration with Square Enix North America at the time Eidos-Montréal was making the game Thief (Thief 4). SE held a contest of fan material. Basically they wanted to have a contest of fan missions for past "Thief" games and fan art. They did end up having a contest. There were a few TDM entries. Some of us on the team got a free copy of Thief 4 for "participating". Well you can see just from that set up that these were the marketing people that really had no idea what Thief really was, and they definitely weren't going to understand the relationship of TDM to Thief IP, although you could clearly tell the moment when the lawyers probably got involved and they changed the rules to be only Thief inspired and they really watered it down since the link to Thief IP itself was lost, and they couldn't be in any way linked to the TDM/idTech4 engine. It probably would have been great if it'd been the Eidos-Montréal devs we were working with, since those would have been actual gamers that understand the game & us, our kind of people. But it was the marketing people, the Square Enix NA marketing people at that, and they were just in an entirely different universe. I mean completely detached from the reality of this game that they're working on. They were clearly only interested in the business side and thought of fans as shallow entertainment consumers that they were trying to hype up, like we were the core of Thief 4's target audience. They had this really unreal positivity about this contest while being so clueless about what it was really about. Our communications with them were just bizarre and otherworldly. There's another story I can tell about working with a team of lawyers that were pro bono vetting our Version 2.0 release to make sure it cleared id's & Eidos's IP (technically I guess also the asset makers of the assets we were using to replace id's) when we went standalone, or anyway they gave us a memo of all the considerations to look out for in doing it. I made a thread about it, but practically I don't know if it changed that much of what we were doing (the problem kind of solves itself just by our gamers' intuition), and obviously we released it standalone and nothing happened, so it worked out. Actually that Square Enix contest did have one kind of positive result for us, which is we got language from them in writing that seemed to assume we were clear of any claim for Thief IP violations as far as they were concerned. I've kept that message on hand in case we ever do get pushback, but fortunately we never have. Edit: I'm looking back on this message and thinking about the NoClip documentary on the making of Disco Elysium, which is still coming out these days, and I recall that NoClip contacted us once about making a documentary on our making. Or somebody did anyway. But I think the inside story of the making of TDM would be super cool if anybody did decide to make it. There are so many interesting stories like this. Well I think they're interesting. Maybe one of us should make it.

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).

It makes me really sad to read that you thought it wasn't appropriate to post about your work here. If we cannot discuss this incredible achievement from the Thief-like universe we love so much on a TDM forum, then I wonder by the Builder what else we're supposed to talk about here. 15 years? You alone (I hope not)? Could you be so kind and elaborate a little on your project? Is the game to be played with a game pad or with keyboard/mouse ? I really like the typical dark atmosphere, especially "The Dark Side Edition Trailer" provides for that.

I hope you get Rune to work on your machine so you will be able to play the Thieves Guild mod. In truth I've been working on this project for over 15 years, which is crazy I know. Thieves Guild is a single-player Rune mod, loosely inspired by Thief: The Dark Project. It's a campaign driven story of about 20 missions. We tried to combine the action game style of Rune with the stealth game-play of Thief. Thanks for the shout-out - I appreciate it. I didn't post anything about the mod here because I wasn't sure if it was appropriate.

So I guess we could fork that code over to TDM to make open areas less difficult to work with?

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.

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.

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.

A thief adventurer called Mudgeon thwarted my raid on King Aldreth's Crypt. He sold the plunder and established himself in the Bellworth district. He kept Aldreth's crown and The Chalice of Kings.. Mudgeon has had time to relax his guard. I intend to take advantage... Please post all feedback and questions in this thread.

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:

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.

Back in the day, Tels managed a squad of volunteer translators for TDM. I am not Tels, and could never do that. Nowadays, language translation using AI, either traditional machine learning (ML) models or large language models (LLMs), is common and increasingly fluent. It is often used as an adjunct to speed the work of professional human translators. By itself, AI translation can be imperfect but usually sufficient. Can this "sufficient" approach be used for TDM, to expedite translations? Let's see. I gave some initial thought to a bulk-translation daemon that might range across FMs and fill in all missing translations, without necessarily involving mappers. In the future, possibly AI could tackle that whole enchilada. I was at first visualizing something more modest: a backbone in a standard programming language (I sketched out C++ and C# projects, but lots of other possibilities) that would make calls to an API (I looked at those of Google Translate and ChatGPT). However, I changed focus due to certain concerns... Different FMs, and subsets with each FM, would likely have far better translations if they were properly grouped, ordered, and translated separately, with an appropriate context (e.g., phrase engineering) added. The FM's mapper is best placed to provide this grouping and context. I'll detail what I mean in the next few posts. The mapper would not be expected to know any TDM-supported languages besides English. Instead, each translated phrase could be back-translated to English and examined. Is the "round-trip" meaning OK, even if the English words have changed? Problematic translations could have their context tweaked and rerun. Many AI systems, particularly for API access, require a billing commitment (e.g., credit card). For a professional translator, this is no problem, and subscriptions allow access to more (and putatively better) models and higher quotas. This seems less appealing for TDM. A few paid AI systems have a no-subscription, pay-as-you-go account tier. The cost per translate is typically pennies. But it does introduce quota- and expense-management, and may exclude API usage. Access via API requires an API key (or at the higher end more elaborate security regime), with attendant key-security headaches. Which AI model is thought "best" for translation? Doesn't matter too much, because we can't afford the best. Furthermore, there's endless churn among AI models, with antidotal reports that a given model fluctuates in quality over time, and successor models can be worse than their predecessors. So, with these concerns in mind, I looked for public web-based AI sites that require no billing and provide low-quota but adequate AI. The mapper would enter and retrieve data manually. I will focus on ChatGPT in this exploration, after a quick preliminary test confirmed some promise. Also, as this exploration proceeds, I hope to propose changes to TDM to make it more viable for "sufficient" quality machine translation. Problem areas are incomplete fonts, space-constraints, and layout issues for translated strings. My proposals will likely surface as separate forum threads. That's enough for now. I'll be trying for 1 or 2 substantive posts per week, as I tackle a particular FM.

Hm...please check the video link, when you have the time. It looks as if they drag "patches" without vertices around. And they call it meshes. It seems to work like brushes, but they are...flat. Don't know how to describe it in a better way. And apparently, one does not need portals or similar things. Seems very different here from idTech 4.

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.

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

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!

Yes, there are mods to remove that limit, I'm aware of that. Not sure how well they work though.