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We are proud to announce the release of The Dark Mod 2.09! https://www.thedarkmod.com/posts/the-dark-mod-2-09-has-been-released/ TDM 2.09 marks a new phase of performance improvements aimed lowering CPU overhead in the graphics engine. A whole new graphic backend has been created by Cabalistic which uses modern OpenGL features to eliminate the need for the CPU to constantly issue commands to allow the Graphic Processor to render scenes. This gives TDM some of the performance advantages of rendering using a low level API like Vulkan. Stg

That's definitely a huge leap^, both visual and in terms of delivery! I'm trying to keep old stuff around to remind myself how far I've come. It's really helpful, when you feel burned out or when you feel like you haven't made much progress. The shot below is from March 2017, those were my first material tests The second one is from mid-2020.

Update on Shadows of Northdale: Act 3 and Act 4 are coming along! Slowly but surely. They are both double mission releases, so essentially i'm working on 4 missions at once. It's taking longer to cook in the oven than expected, but hopefully it'll be something very special once both acts are finished! I'm unsure if i'll do a double release or if i'll release Act 3 as soon as it's done and then Act 4 shortly after. As with anything to do with development things change a lot. Just ask poor Dragofer, Moonbo, Skacky, Epifire or Kingsal as they're often victims to my endless design questions

I've been researching transparent glass. It's probably the hardest material I've done so far, but I think I have a solid foundation for any color I like. I can control how dim the glass is, and strength of both specular and cubemap reflection. The most common uses would be the slightly dimmed natural, blueish and green bottle. I did red because I could Now onto some more fancy object for a video follow-up.

Still experimenting with glass shaders, this time for some more complex shapes. The transparency sorting problem is quite visible here, and even with dark color, the material is too see-through IMO. Going for opaque version and perhaps some sort of glowing crystal a la TDS might be a better option overall. Edit: got a small breakthrough with translucent materials this morning. This is heavily reliant on actual lighting, so getting it right will be hard. But this is one step closer towards some nice magic glowing crystal effect Also, I had no idea you can actually get tr

I decided to post a video today where i show alot of the things i have worked on these past 2 months. Its a major spoiler video.

Another bit of virtual carpentry. Should help with presentations for smaller objects.

The announcement about 2.09 release will come soon. I'd like to thank everyone who took part in this beta phase! With so many people taking part in the beta phase, we can make official releases more stable, and ready to be run on diverse machines that players have! Not to mention: with the diverse set of FMs we have In order to switch from beta build to the official 2.09 release, just run tdm_installer with default settings and allow it do what it wants. You can restore config file at the end of update: it is perfectly safe this time. Please check that tdm_installer

More pix, to celebrate Lunar New Year - Year of the Ox - and Valentine's Day

Hello all. Been a while since I've stopped by here (darn real life obligations mixed with forgetfulness), but the fairly popular Youtube channel OutsideXbox just today posted a video of "7 Fan Mods That Totally Transformed The Game" and The Dark Mod was one they covered! Their videos usually get between a quarter and a half million views, so I'd imagine we'll see a decent number of new people trying the mod. Pretty positive impression they give of it too, as well as some amusing commentary. The Dark Mod section starts at 10:48:

Just skimming through the topic here so I may miss some of the nuances of the conversation. I've been part of the Thief community since 1999. From the very beginning, mappers have made use of existing assets and often modified them...for better or worse...for use in their own missions. Generally, most asked permission and mentioned original authors in their credits. I've seen horrific modifications made, but those modifications have no bearing on the original assets...whether they were core mod assets or borrowed from an FM, the original versions do not magically get overwritten

3 days w/o power in texas. Froze my nuts off. But, power's back on. Upgraded to 2.09, then messed with shaders some more. Mainly the glprogs/stages/interaction/ ... common & ambient, b/c they control bulk of lighting. broke out diffuse & specular lighting from each other again.. and figured out why specular was getting cut-off seams last time. It's because I didn't mul specular by light source, which takes attenuation into account. Did that this time. ambient.fs specular is generated from world light shining straight down, so was creating a spotlight under player on

[Just posted this on Discord, but I think it'd also be good to post here since the FX system seems to be almost unknown.] I've just (again) come across the fx system, which is quite a neat way of coordinating a sequence of particles, sounds, lights etc. to appear without having to script or make a cascade of trigger_relays. All it takes is an fx definition like this: fx fx/sparks { { delay 0 duration 0.5 restart 0 light "lights/sparks_sound", 1, 1, 1, 96 offset 0, 0, 0 } { delay 0 sound "security_camera_spark" duration 2.5 } { delay 0 duration 2.5 restart

Tadaa! Thank you @peter_spy and everyone else who helped ( @HMart) This is from peter_spy's test:

I get the sentiment here, I really do. However, if someone wants to take models (my own included) and change them for better or for worse - I consider that their problem and not mine. Thats just the nature of contributing to a free mod. We're not going to boot model exporting.

Loosely following the discussions on Discord, I think I know where this topic is coming from. The conclusion to solve the past problems by removing the model export functionality from DR is wrong on so many levels, my answer just has to be nope. Besides the technical discussions, I personally find the thought of artists being that retentive about their work a bit strange, at least in the context of this community. If all the folks contributing to the mod had thought this way, there simply wouldn't have been a The Dark Mod at all.

Thief 2014 started out quite exciting, with that big hub-area, but after some time, you notice its problems and so it gets boring quickly. Linear level sections Inability to return to previous level sections (that's a big "no no" for games that revolve around finding loot) Extensive viewport animations whenever you grab something (makes me dizzy) Magic escape dodge doesn't feel very stealthy

2021 should be quite a good year, as a glance into the betatesting forum and various other places on the forums and Discord would suggest.

Not bad, about a mission every 1~1.5 months for 11 years straight. As time goes on, we get more very ambitious ones too.

I think what drives most of the large FMs to be as voluminous as they are is that they contain custom assets which don't get used. Mappers might try out various ambients before choosing one, download texture packs and only use some of them, re-export the same model multiple times and so on. In such long projects, assets come and go, and I think more often than not they never go. More major factors would be briefing videos, which can easily become gigantic if one isn't careful with the quality settings, and mappers not adhering 100% to conventions, i.e. converting as many .tga images as po

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/the-dark-mod-209-is-here

The "OpenTechEngine" team added "Crazy Eddie's GUI" ( CEGUI ) to replace the Flash based GUI of Doom 3 BFG: https://github.com/OpenTechEngine/OpenTechBFG/tree/master/neo/cegui http://cegui.org.uk/ If we were to embark on something like this, we would need to have it available in parallel to the existing GUI system until GUI files can be ported or the syntax of the Doom 3 GUI can be reconciled to that of the CEGUI system (alias tokens, etc). @stgatilov has already dabbled in improving the GUI code but I doubt he would be enthusiastic about this option.

Biltmore Erstate

How about some fresnel highlights then? Red-shaded areas show the highlight... Pic below is a velour-style that highlights more as the surface becomes more parallel to the view angle. Here's the effect applied to .rgb Next is an ambient "spotlight / backlight" effect that slightly brightens the area around the player based on surfaces perpendicular to the viewing angle Here it is applied to .rgb It's a subtle effect. It simulates ambient light reflecting off the player back onto surfaces. When combined with velour fresnel, it helps a

The only thing that was well done in Thief4 was the the visuals (and that's only if you ignore the terrible character designs). The story was a complete and utter trainwreck and the writing was full of cliches that clearly weren't edited by a native English speaker. The voice acting was painful (and especially galling given that they could have had Stephen Russell--I only recently discovered that he voiced Corvo in Dishonored 2) . The constant player animations were clunky and annoying at the best of times (I stopped picking up scissors because of them) and in the worst cases ac

Pretty proud of myself to have finally contributed to this number Hopefully I'll be able to get another one out this year too

I guess I'm the main source of this attitude. Yes, that's mainly because of maintenance burden. TDM has reached the state where compatibility is much more important than development. We cannot say "we have upgraded this feature, but as the result these FMs no longer work, and we decided that breakage is well worth it", that would be betrayal of TDM mappers. But since we want to do some development in future too, we have to constantly think about how to avoid getting locked by backward compatibility. And that's the main reason why I was so pissed off by GUI customizations. Yes, I agre

Those are three very different things. The first one is a classic maintainability vs flexibility dilemma. The second one is simply a bug (that admittedly devs don't care too much about, but nbohr1more still appears to have fixed it). And the third one - well, actually I still don't know why we did that. I opposed the change

I've been working on a small-ish mission that takes place in a warehouse. I've got pretty much everything blocked out and built up with modules, and I'm currently building out the other gameplay elements such as the main lighting and AI routes. I took a little detour to dress up this corner of the warehouse for overall feel, but there's plenty more to do...

Beyond all threads about feedback and criticism, I think it's also nice to congratulate people for a job well done. I have an old legacy laptop which I sometimes enjoy using for running older games. I had TDM installed on it, however the CPU-heavy demands of the game would make it impossible to run on long stretches, causing it to overheat even when multicore mode was enabled. I am happy to report that since release 2.09 I've had no overheating problems in my old machine, and that loading times are also greatly improved! Finally I can play TDM on the go! For the record my spec

I've made a temporary solution for Windows 10. After applying everything dark radiant looks like this: Here are the steps: 1. In dark radiant in the menu "View" > "Colours" select "Black & Green" 2. Create a default_colors.reg file by just creating a text file and renaming it and insert the following into the file: (you can also export the reg file of your system by going to the address HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors in regedit and export for safety reasons) File: https://das-kartell.org/files/darkradiantdarkmode/default_colors.reg Win

Oh absolutely. And just to be clear, my interest in PBR isn't really in giving TDM a stylistic overhaul, "next-level graphics" or any such nonsense I'm more interested in if it could make our artists' lives easier, as peter_spy hinted. As an "industry standard" in some sense, it has better tooling and potentially a more consistent look across different scenes, which might need less tinkering. But again, that's all speculative

Hi, thanks for the responge.... first I tryed TDM version 2.08 and still the same problems , but i checked Bienies page and read, the Problem with the lever behind the Door occurs only when you have selected in the Options "open on unlock --> NO". Change the Option to YES solves the Problem. Good tip to look at Bienies Page , I could have thought of it myself xD, Thanks Im not a Coder so i have no idea how to change the classname of "atdm_teleport_10" to "func_remove, xD but... THANKS both of You for your Help and your Magic Programmer Witchcraft have a ni

I've found some value in this, specifically in order to combine several models into one. I over-modularized some pieces in my walls, and once I was sure of the sizing I was going to use I combined a wall, window sill, horizontal spacers, etc into two different 3-story wall slice models which are still highly reusable but much simpler to place. I've tried to avoid too much premature performance optimization but I also expect combining models to sometimes be a valid technique for reducing entity counts and drawcalls if modules or detail/clutter models push things over the edge. I

Ugh, no. DarkRadiant is a mapping tool, not a DRM enforcement system. Disabling or removing features because someone, somewhere might use them to violate someone's copyright is the sort of rubbish we saw when the late-twentieth-century RIAA and MPAA wanted to ban MP3 players and CD writers because people might use them to copy commercial music. Then those models are not compatible with the CC license used by the Dark Mod can cannot be used as part of the mod, full stop. Our CC license requires sharing alike and restricts commercial use, but no more. There are no restrictions on fo

I'll add to that by saying they placed far more importance on quick time events, and motion capture than they did on making a 'game'. That's what irks me about a lot of so called 'games' these days. They're not games, they are moderately interactive, casual entertainment. They were trying to make Thief a AAA title. Had they narrowed their focus, reduced their budget and simply focused on a well crafted 'game', they could have pulled off something amazing.

Oh i did alot of things in the past yes. I dont want to brag about it. Once the demo is out you can truely find out what the state of my skills is. Only a proper demo will prove if i am worthy

Having followed this mod/game for roughly 8 years or so, I have to say that the general quality of first-time submissions from new map authors is really, really good. I don't know if the increased availability of tutorials and other resources has contributed to this, improvements to the editor, or maybe just a desire to keep standards high, but I am impressed with almost every new author's release these days. If I don't like a map it's generally due to the gameplay not being my preference rather than the quality of the map itself.

Looks like we're keeping this wonderful project going! I'll be happy to contribute a few under 2021 as well!

Hi all! I've just built my first FM and would like to invite some people to beta test it. It's a small, traditional city/mansion style mission. Once I have a few replies I'll start a thread in the beta testing forums. Note: I am also on Discord, but my username there is Frost_Salamander. Admins: is it possible to get my username here changed to that? @greebo @taaaki ?

This is the worst time in years to buy any new hardware. Maybe check things out in late 2022 or 2023 if you are fine with what you have. Around that time the multi-chip module (chiplet) GPUs will be shaking things up and raytracing performance will be much better.

I've recently started looking into the security camera after noticing that core TDM's version of Epifire's camera doesn't work, while there is a useable .pk4 in circulation. Ticket 0004731 and this thread show that there are also some issues with the coding, such as skins and the spotlight being hardcoded and therefore not customisable by mappers. There is also room for improvement, such as making the camera follow the player once he's been sighted or detected to make escape less trivial. Having recently looked into the source code, C++ seems familiar enough to me now that I may be a

beta209-06 is available. Don't forget to check "Custom Version" on the first page of installer. This beta is "release candidate", meaning that unless something very bad happens, it will become final 2.09 release. It has only a few minor changes compared to the previous version. However, there are several important differences between this beta and the previous ones: The archive with 32-bit executables can be (downloaded from here | not any longer) . It should be unpacked into the installation directory, and includes both Windows and Linux 32-bit builds. It is important t

Which is to say, even in "retirement" greebo (who codes DR) is still one of our most prolific workhorses.

@Jedi_WannabeFracking cool! Please, please, send me the latest version; I want to see how you did that! Jack

Fixed the triangular particles bug in svn rev 9100.

As I leave my crimbo vacation and return to my work duties I can feel that my time may be severely cut for mapping, so I may as well have you guys take a look at what I've been working on (you know, per the thread title and everything): I really wanna finish this one but RL is a bit volatile atm! Fates be kind!!!