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After playing various Dark Mod FM’s, I become hooked to the game, like I was with Thief (and its FM’s). So, like I do to all games I love, I tried to find ways to improve it. Since my first contact with DM and after playing T1 and T2 with the fantastic “HD Mod”, it became apparent that graphically, TDM struck me strange. Of course, it is clearly a BIG improvement over T3 and it’s not worse then Thief 2014 -- if you remove all those post processing effects, the textures are actually very bad for today standards – but it could be a little bit better. So I started to change a texture here, a texture there, whenever I found a texture that could be improved. Initially, I made this for my own amusement, while i was playing, but as the changes increased, I started to think I it would only be fair to share it with the community. As a note, I really appreciate the amount of work done by the contributors to TDM. It’s amazing how an open source project of a game whose genre is unfortunately condemned to target a niche player base could attract so many talented people to work together and create what essentially is the Thief 4 we never had. So this is in no way a mean to disrespect the contributors and their work. What changed and how Currently, around 530 files were changed. The changes end up in one of the following categories: NOTE: “texture quality” noted below is subjective and represents only my point of view. Again, It is in no way a mean of disrespect for the original author and its work. The texture is good but is in a low resolution – upscale it using AI image enhancement methods. The texture is poor and low res, with poor AI upscale results – try to replace it using various free PBR or raw Image sources (1) or create my own. If necessary, adjust the image using (colors, saturation, contrast, …) The texture has a good resolution and its not quite good but can be improved – improve using gimp (ex: on textures with bur, use sharpen, noise reduction or/and other features) (2) The texture depicts an horrible stew – change it to a decent and delicious stew, because my Portuguese roots forced me to do it. Additionally, specular and normal maps were added to some textures. (1) Free textures and PBR sites already discussed on this forum (texturehaven.com, 3dtextures.me, cc0textures.com and so on). (2) Finding the right texture is not always easy. I always tried to follow the same “feel” and appearance of the original image, but i confess that this is not always the case. Again, very subjective. New version 2021.01.08 * Around 170Mb of textures processed Some tree barks enhanced Stucco change more enhancements on doors, paint paper, fire places, ground textures, curtains .. and much more Screenshots and Comparisons It’s obviously undoable to show the comparison for all changed textures, so keep in mind that the following screenshots are just a very small example of the whole project. Also, very important, keep in mind that there is so much you can do with screenshots and in game the differences are much more clear than what is shown below. Sir Talbot's Collateral https://imgsli.com/MTI2NDE https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzY https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzc https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzg https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mzk https://imgsli.com/MTI2NDA WS3: Cleighmoor https://imgsli.com/MTI1OTE WS1: In the North https://imgsli.com/MTI2MTY https://imgsli.com/MTI2MTc WS2: Home Again https://imgsli.com/MTI2MjM https://imgsli.com/MTI2MjQ https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjc https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjg https://imgsli.com/MTI2Mjk https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzE https://imgsli.com/MTI2MzM New (version 2021.01.08) Briarwood Manor https://imgsli.com/MzUwNDY https://imgsli.com/MzUwNDg https://imgsli.com/MzUwNTE https://imgsli.com/MzUwNjc The Builder's Influence https://imgsli.com/MzUxNjM https://imgsli.com/MzUxNjQ No honor among thieves: forest https://imgsli.com/MzU0ODE https://imgsli.com/MzU1NTQ https://imgsli.com/MzU1NTk How to install 1) download the pk4 file from here 2) drop it on your TDM game folder (where all the other pk4 files are) 3) Play! Uninstall Just remove z_TDM_HD.pk4 file from your TDM install folder. Disclaimer If you are a purist, please don’t use this texture mod. Don’t bash it for not being “exactly the same as the original ones but hires”. If you find some texture that is copyrighted, please let me know and i will replace it. Fell free to suggest changes, but please don't make requests. Understand that i am doing this while playing and if i start feeling that i'm working instead, i will probably start to loose my interest. PS: I really don't know if this is the right thread to make this post. Let me know if i need to change it to another thread.

Hey all, we are a team of Game Design students at Breda University working on a stealth game called "Levis Umbra", currently in pre-production. We would like your precious help and knowledge in order to get some insight on what type of players engage with this kind of games. It would be great if you could answer some questions about your experience with this genre: it's going to help us shape our project by understanding better, among other things, players' archetypes, needs, motivations and finally create a User/Player Persona. This survey takes about 3~5 minutes to complete. Link to the Survey We won't collect any data, but there's an option at the end of the survey to leave us your e-mail, in case you want to stay up to date with the development. Thanks a lot in advance, we will greatly appreciate any feedback and I'll try to answer any question you have. Best regards, Knutto

I seem to recall talks in the old forum about implementing parallax occlusion mapping in TDM, but i'm not really sure if the work was ever done. So IMO the team should seriously discuss this again, why, because is a petty that something that has the potential to improve some textures depth even more is just forgotten and today GPUs are much faster for it. Also especially when there's already made shaders for it for Doom 3, Prey 1 and Quake 4, but those are ARB shaders. But the idtech 4 engine i'm using, fhdoom, supports relief mapping and is a GLSL engine, someone from the team could look at it and transfer it to TDM. I would if I knew enough about rendering code, that I don't.

I like those high contrast wallpapers! That said, I think the bumpy wallpaper design was meant to be a showcase of the lighting system. Bumpy wall papers work well in dark areas where AI or the player have movable light sources. We currently have done some tentative work to get RGTC normal map compression working so perhaps we will have more VRAM for better diffuse textures eventually. The down side (of course) is a major reason for getting better texture compression was to lower Load Times. Keeping the long load times while increasing texture quality is sure to irk many long time complainers about that issue...

That is always in my mind when i change some texture with another (bigger) one. Specially if it reaches 2048x2048 or more. I didn't notice any performance issues with them, but i didn't benchmark it. From my experience on multiple FMs, the lags that are there also happen with the original textures and result from the lighting system, not from textures. My rule is simple: if i don't notice performance issues and the new texture quality is noticeable ingame compared to the original one, i allow it to be 2048x2048. You can see one example in the guard screenshot. I stand corrected and will update the post. There is no displacement maps in this mod. Only normal and spec maps. It's certainly not advisable

I was asking this simple question because .dds images are heavily compressed (usually with DXT1 mode), with some inevitable artifacts. Unless there's an ML dataset used to account for this, you're working on a lossy image and if you save to the same .dds format, you're adding another compression on top of it. As for the wood texture, this is how often wood looks like in games. Normalmaps are mostly supposed to represent microdetails, and if a surface looks too shiny, you change a specularmap, not normalmap. In general, I'd be wary of AI upscaling in this case, it's not a simple case as with Thief 1-2, or even 3. You have to think with surfaces and materials here, not with just textures. Btw. I hope you remember that normalmap is not a bitmap in traditional sense, so you can't apply traditional 2d image techniques to it (e.g. sharpening).

Thank you @Dragofer for you tip. I didn't know that. I will see if i can make them work that way and re-upload the modded pk4 files.

Thank you @freyk! Tree reasons i did not offer the pk4 files: - the download size would be much bigger - sharing as i did will allow you to see what was exactly changed by me - i think it is not fair to the original texture authors (or legal, probably?) to just replace the original textures with my textures and just deliver the modded pk4 files About the 7zip files... its open source and pretty much everybody can use it (windows, linux, mac, ...). But i will take that in consideration in the future.

Hi @peter_spy! Please note that i never said that this was mean to replace (upgrade) the original textures and as you surely read from my post, this was just for fun, not a professional work. I just shared this because i think it's better to share than to be only on my disk forever. So, about the workflow, more that what i already pointed in "What changed and how", i really can give you more. About the screenshots you mentioned, I personally like the my versions better but this is a matter of taste (you can go as technical as you like about it, but in the end, its always a matter of taste). So if you want, install it and see the real differences (like i said, screenshots are screenshots), Another thing is that as you know, the textures are shared by multiple meshes and so, what looks perfect in one mesh could not look that good in another. Your are right about the marble texture though. My idea was to have a cleaner one (the file name is called "smooth_marble_greenish.dds" for god sakes... its supposed to be smooth ). About the floor you mentioned, the issue is that it does not use the original or an upscaled version of the normal map, but a new one. You can check the old vs new floor here. Why i did not use the original or an upscaled version of it? Because of this. I really don't think that is how a wooden floor should look like in the real world. Too much details.. it looks like plastic to me. Again, thank you for your reply and feedback peter_spy.

I just finished this FM and i am quite impressed. The level design is very good (although sometimes confusing -- that is, until you get used to it) and after i finished this FM i was amazed by how big it was. For me, a good FM should have a good amount of lore (i really like to read) and this FM didn't disappoint me. Sure, most of it was not important to finish the game, but it is what makes a FM a good thief game. I also appreciated that touch at the end of the mission - you don't fell an abrupt end with the default (and immersion breaker) "mission completed" screen and gives us a smoother experience. So i really enjoyed it and i must thank grayman for the time i spend on it.Next stop: WS2.

I really liked this FM. The music was well chosen and contributed to the dread and sadness feeling of the mission. The areas were always great to look at and that denotes an attention to detail that sometimes is lacking on other FM's. The only improvements that i noticed that could be done, at least in my opinion, are in the following two areas: 1) the number of npc's should be higher. Although the ambient was done well, I personally never felt a sense of danger through the mission. 2) maybe a more elaborated background and lore couldn't hurt, both by extending the text of current books/scrolls and by adding new ones. On a side note, i don't know how it was done, but for the size of the map, the loading time of this FM was very fast, compared other FM's of the same size. And that is always a plus. Thank you for a work well done, Jesps!