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It's nice to get back to modelling sometimes. Probably one of my last ones. Original painting by AB, virtual carpentry by me.

A quick demo video of using a fire arrow to blast jump up to new heights. It may be loud and harmful to the user, but it's still a fun option! Done on the mission "Tears of St. Lucia" on Expert... which thankfully doesn't seem to affect the self-damage.

Love that sjybox....

That looks interesting. Nice, thanks for letting me know, I will definitely give this a try! Didn't now that. Never mind then

Aight well if I'm poking around posting fm reviews, code change suggestions, and asking for tech help I might as well also put up my work. Putzing around with DarkRadiant is quite fun. Not sure when or if I will produce a full map but, considering that I haven't touched dromed or made maps for other games before, I'm really happy with what I've got so far. Kudos to the tooling designers for making something reasonably idiot-friendly. One of the first things the A-Z tutorial tells you is to not use 0 0 0 for ambient lighting, and I immediately said nuts to that lol. I'm really enjoying the harsh darkness and the contrast from light sources. I didn't intend for it to happen, but I've ended up with something that looks like it crawled straight out of TDS. It also makes traversing the level have an interesting trade off - you need light to see, but enemies can see you carrying it and if its in your hands you have to drop it to pull out the bow or mantle stuff. I'm trying to build a whole level around this "mechanic"/"gimmick".

And we know exactly how well it works out when tech-illiterate lawmakers start dictating the functions of technology they don't understand. "We don't care about this physics shit! We passed a law that requires you to provide faster-than-light travel and you nerds better figure out how to make it happen!" I don't even understand what these petitioners are asking for. Do they want a law that compels providers of online games to keep the servers running forever (even if the company goes bust)? Provide a refund if the servers have to be switched off (even if the company has already gone bust, and has no money to pay for it)? Implement an offline mode for games like WoW where it makes no sense? Or just never provide online games in the first place? No matter what they're asking for, I'm pretty sure what they're actually going to get (if the law is passed) is games publishers simply not selling into the EU/UK market at all. Just like the web sites which are now blocking UK visitors because the dumb fucks who passed the "Online Safety Act" mistakenly believed they had the power to regulate the entire internet.

While all the quality of life improvement on game preservation that this would imply is nice, i think the key takeaway is the part that says: "prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers " So as not to actively disrupt usability - Which should not be a technical problem, the worst it implies is that one should revert to at least being able to run the game in the launch status on systems it was meant to be run on. For disc software that is literally to not allow for 'disabling remotely'. for online bought, it is conserving for access -or allowing users to conserve for access- a working launch or/and a designated patched/stable version. For example i do want to retain the option to be able to play an original version of a game after its been remastered.

Awesome, thank you very much for the help!

Hi there I've been playing the dark mod for a while and have been taking notes on a few things that I feel if changed, would make for a slightly better and more enjoyable experience. 1 - Moving sideways when climbing ladders, pipes, nets, vines, etc, is ridiculously slow. Garret does it way faster in Thief 1 and 2... hell, even I can move sideways faster while climbing ladders and I'm no thief! Speeding it up a bit would make for more satisfying maneuvering, and also more fitting given that Corbin is an agile and experienced thief. 2 - There is no falling to your death sound. I was playing The Painter's Wife a while ago, and I fell to my death multiple times, and it always felt so weightless and anticlimactic doing so. In Thief 1 and 2 you could hear your bones being crushed whenever that happened. Having a sound cue like that would make me very very happy, or at least less frustrated from dying, which I do, a lot, because I suck. 3 - On the topic of dying, it would also be nice to add an option to enable a loose camera with physics instead of the Doom 3's standard tilted perspective and pointing 80º or so degrees upwards whenever you die. It looks so jarring to me that I feel even a standard camera animation pointing downwards like in Thief 1 and 2 would look better and more fitting than that abrupt cut. 4 - This is a small nitpick, but the water footsteps sound a bit off. Everything else in the sound department is generally very good, but the water footsteps sound as if someone dipped their fingers on a bathtub and is moving them around. It lacks impact. Thief 1 and 2 sounded better IMHO. 5 (bug) - And lastly, there is a bug that I want to report. For some reason you can't see your compass underwater. You can scroll through and view every item in your inventory (you can even read underwater!), except the compass that for some reason completely disappears. I noticed this when trying to navigate through a maze of underwater tunnels in a FM a while ago. That's all folks.

Hi ClockWood, Yeah, besides that there are a couple of player dying sounds that are also very anticlimactic. Yes. Fortunately @SeriousToni came to the rescue with his Alternative Footstep Sound Package

Just finished this amazing mission. I really like how dense the world is, and the story intrigued me. It is a very good one! Personally I believe this mission to be my favorite. Overall, thank you all who worked on this map for that amazing experience! One question, however, bugs me a bit.

It's possible that cvar isn't archived or something like that. Whatever the reason, you can probably get around this by adding that cvar to your autoexec.cfg in your darkmod folder.

Fall 2025

And for my fellow authors out there, some DR shots -

I played on my old ex work machine which doesn't have a very powerful graphics card but it manages most of the time, I should have played on my new laptop really It's a Dell Precision T1700, 8Gb Ram, Intel® Core™ i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz × 8, NVIDIA Corporation GK107GL [Quadro K600], running 64 bit Zorin OS 17.3 Core I did look at upgrading the graphics card but decided on getting a laptop instead, I really need to use the laptop more, I did get it for games after all Regarding volumetric lighting, I just turned off volumetric effects in the advanced video menu, reloaded the game, went back to the stairs & there's no noticeable framerate drop, so as no one else complained I'd say don't worry about it, I'll play with that setting, thanks for asking though

still in my "lethal bread” series a nobleman dying with style... and that just reminds me of lethal weapon movie gif version : pict version :

yes keep the silly pict tradition alive

I encountered incorrectly configured target_set_frobables in drawers of a desk at 1677.2 -74.09 218.25 (Hoppie Hypo). They're (only) triggered when the drawer opens. However, the way they work, each time they're triggered their state is toggled, so if they're currently disabling frobability and you trigger them, the items within it are made frobable - fine so far, now it's in the "enable frobability" state. But if they're triggered again, they will disable the frobability. This means that every second time a drawer of that desk is opened, the contents become unfrobable Solution: Also trigger when the drawer gets closed. Furthermore those drawers are missing the "successfully unlocked" sound. --- Otherwise great mission so far

I had already checked there and picked open that lock. I think both of them should have required a key, but maybe that would have been annoying to try to find. This mission is done a disservice by Dark Mod not having a map that supports note-taking. Thank you for making us a City section to play in, and helping us here!

and an other It´s in so called sewer area --- so not really the wrong place - and he will see where the last drop falls down

Thanks @taffernicus for activate this thread ( it´s in my favs now ) so i have a place to show my short story If a lady is upset - then you better not disturb her.

Okay. I'm on the top floor of the warehouse, and a guard starts coming up in the elevator. He comes about 2/3 of the way up, then goes back down again. I presume the other downstairs guard is pressing the downstairs call button? This repeats many times. I look over the edge of the lift shaft to see what is going on. The guard in the elevator sees me, and tries to throw something at me. this rebounds off the side of the lift shaft, and hits him instead. This repeats many times. At which point, a) He DIES, and b) I lose the game because he died(!)

truth be told a lot of game sources with third party propriarity code has allready solutions to work around those. bink and derivates > ffmpeg, 3ds > lib3ds, tons of cad format libraries and physics libraries some with even better support than what was there at the time. so its not like the community cant handle only being given parts of a code base. for some stuff we have atleast workable solutions for other stuff we have something even better hehe. but over the years the modding community somewhat died because of a new breed of modders who wanted to use the code a lot of us worked our asses of to replace broken engine parts to make money and newer share they're own work. so a lot of us either retired or hid away in obscure parts of the internet.

Ampersat 100% off on Steam, ends July 6, 2025 at 1pm ET https://slickdeals.net/f/18416488-thru-7-6-ampersat-pc-steam-digital-download-free-via-steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/1356040/Ampersat/ Don't confuse with the option to add the Demo version instead of full version.

More and more games these days do work natively on Linux, and for those that don't you'll find things like Wine and Lutris can get them going with low-to-moderate tinkering. Old Dos games obviously just need Dosbox. The list of games that cannot be made to run on Linux is getting pretty small these days.

XD

Not around ambient I don't think. Other people had issues because of missing 2.13 materials though. Maybe @Jnon used a darker ambient as well? Either way it shouldn't be problematic. Do you have screenshots to share or anything?

A lot of questions, and a lot ifs and buts. And, that illustrates the problems with this thing. I doubt that anyone would want to use Windows 7 or Linux to make stuff work. Everybody wants stuff to work with the lates OS on their computers. Which just wouldn't work, when the games were never designed to run on it. And, again, it also denies the fact that software has a shelf-life, like everything. You can't magically keep things working. The best thing you can hope for is some modders modifying the game to work with modern hardware, and, that happens a lot, fortunately.

Hey! Thank you for playing, I'm glad to hear the story resonated with you, too! As for your question:

Wonderful map. Brutally difficult on "difficult", which of course I like. I'm curious if the mission is any easier at the lower difficulty settings or if it only changes the loot objective. I only managed 4048, so clearly I missed a lot! I only really got frustrated when I ended up using noclip, which I have never done before. I replayed that bit with the gamma turned up after reading another player's post. I found the way, so I could finish without resorting to cheating Thanks for the great mission! [EDIT] I went back in and found I missed ended up with 7088. Well worth retracing my steps for that.

ANOTHER mystery! In the tavern/inn there is a switch on the wall next to the door of one of the rooms which you can pass thru to get to an open window. I have NO clue what the switch does! When I frob up or down, I cannot see or hear any reaction. I don't think it's critical to the mission, but... does anyone have a clue as to what it does?

A hearty congratulations on the release! Two FMs in one week?? We're getting spoiled

Yum... = )

I see your power plant and raise you my own! Relatively safe to your body. Additionally, part of the vent system, And finally, a a pair of complete mystery images that I leave to speculation. https://imgur.com/UXw9PoR https://imgur.com/brhpBVA https://imgur.com/DMEwWCE https://imgur.com/hx7VP3I https://imgur.com/fgvu49f https://imgur.com/Q28PZ2I What a treasure trove Bikerdude... Wonderful to see

Coming along nicely...

As you suspected, activating g_lightQuotientAlgo 0 makes AI notice missing objects again. Whatever the issue is, it seems tied to the new light estimate system.

Here are some screenshots of Skacky's textures that Biker and I have been trying to make TDM-ready. We could actually use some testers to if people would like to try them out:

First of all wow so much impressive stuff recently in the thread. I can't compete at all. What I've got is definitely rough, and I am well aware that certain textures are muddy at the moment. Second, this isn't quite abandoned yet, but don't get your hopes up. I'm usually very tired from work and if my stuff gets finished at all it will be a miracle. Yes, I am disregarding the advice to make your first stuff simple. Yes, I am being a hardhead. Gamma and brightness adjusted to make things more visible in the screenshots. It's a prison break-in mission with a twist. No interior to the prison yet, just exterior walls and a safehouse far in the countryside. Not exactly "Victorian" design. I'm going for a feeling that the institution is more modern than most stuff we have seen in TDM. The "death antennas" surrounding the walls are just cobbled together from previous contributor's work. An upside down water tank on a steel pole, with some high voltage transmitter looking stuff on the sides.

Maybe you can test with these cvars: Because maybe it could be related to the new AI vision system that is implemented since 2.13

Bug Report created, and can be found here: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6623

Thanks! This was it, the typical old remnants of a dev build causing graphical errors. Turns out this GPU is surprisingly capable at TDM, rendering the whole Perilous Refuge harbour at 50+ fps @1440p, albeit without fancy settings like AO, soft shadows or shadowmaps. Edit: ran out of VRAM at these settings, unfortunately.

Finally! A new member. Welcome new member.

The Dark Mod 2.13 has been released! A new era in accurate AI Vision! When id Software released the Doom 3 modding SDK, The Dark Mod team saw the potential for something more than a multi-player cops vs robbers game like Thievery UT. The sheer amount of access to essential game-play systems meant that a true Thief style experience could potentially be created. One of the first things the team did was to investigate how a light-gem system could be implemented. Having a good way for both the player and AI to know when the player is visible to others is a crucial part of the Thief experience so if we couldn’t build it then the dream of a Thief style experience was over. Fortunately, there were enough parts of the AI visual logic and more than a few stub pieces of the Render code that gave us the ability to build a robust system. The downside of the light-gem system was performance. Even though we did our best to limit the viewport and resolution of the light-gem image captures, often the light-gem would cut FPS in half ( or less ). This was pretty painful, especially since most computers could just barely run vanilla Doom 3 at acceptable FPS. After this system was fully functional, other aspects of AI vision were investigated. Obviously, we could not afford to run the light-gem render for every object or body the AI might see so it was decided that the AI would do a more simplified light-gem calculation for things other than the player. This meant that ( to the AI visual scan ) all light volumes would be either cubes or pyramids with perfect exponential falloff. We would run a line-of-sight check to the objects then ( if it hit ) calculate the pixel brightness by the location of the spot in relation to the center of the light(s). This was far cheaper than rendering the whole scene but heavily impacted accuracy. Many solutions were proposed to improve things but a solution evaded us for years. 2.13 changes things! Now we have a "stochastic sampler" model that does regular measurements of the actual light volume pixels and builds a "running average" of how illuminated different entities are. The days of seeing knocked-out AI in the middle of a bright spotlight get ignored are over. Now all AI and loot entities (etc) essentially have their own light-gem and it performs excellently! Magnificent Mission Management! Daft Mugi has drastically improved the GUI menus for mission management. The Dark Mod mission list and in-game downloader now have a search filter window that follows modern conventions of reducing the listed items as each new letter eliminates a possible matching mission name. Both lists can be sorted by actual name ( The Rats Triumphant ) or Chicago Style ( Rats Triumphant, The ). Additional mission details ( readme data ) can now be scrolled so players can see more information about the mission without having to navigate to the darkmod/fms folders. The menus have also been tuned with smaller font sizes for more practical mission listing and have been hardened against buggy order of operations issues so that you will be far less likely to encounter strange issues or crashes when downloading and installing missions. Parallax Occlusion Mapping! Stgatilov has added the oft requested POM feature to the latest Dark Mod release! WellingtonCrab has coordinated with him to provide examples and check the functionality and quality. Now The Dark Mod is ready to offer a quantum leap in perceived geometric detail with all sorts of surfaces realistically showing 3D parallax rather than the flatter looking normal maps we usually offer. WellingtonCrab also created many texture variants that are tuned to look better with POM enabled. Other Graphics Goodies! Now cubemaps \ environment maps respect more stage keywords. This means that faked reflections on water shaders can now move in relation to the water texture movement offering a more convincing illusion! Subviews ( cameras, portals, mirrors, xray, etc ) can now be nested. You can now have a skybox render in a camera view, etc. Volumetric lights and particles now render in mirrors! Alpha-tested surfaces get alpha shadows in Shadow Maps mode. Tone-mapping now supports range compression to prevent unwanted overbright areas. Arcturus has introduced some new metal materials that use improved cubemaps as well as skyboxes with clouds that use POM! Stability and Performance! The console variable system ( CVAR ) has been improved to be thread safe. This should resolve some rare crashes that involve weapon scripts that rely on CVAR values. We now automatically detect the number of CPU cores and allocate Jobs based on the detected specifications. Level loading has been given more parallel execution optimizations including optimizations for loading audio samples in parallel. Uncapped FPS is enabled by default so Linux players will not have a poor first time experience and many audio and video playback timing bugs that occur only in classic capped mode are avoided. Finally, Linux vsync support has been greatly improved. Improved Training Mission! The Training Mission is supposed to help players understand the basics of Dark Mod game-play and controls. It was created to coincide with The Dark Mod v1.0 and was not significantly altered until TDM v1.08 ( when Bikerdude did some texture replacement for 2.0 standalone and improved the overall visuals ). As such, many new game-play features that were added since 1.0 were never included in the mission. Now the mission has been upgraded to include more game-play features such as the Vine Arrow as well as getting further visual upgrades and EFX Reverb! Drunken AI! Now that the AI have better visual accuracy, Amadeus decided to balance things out by fixing many of the broken behaviors of Drunken AI so that they are more reliable and consistent for use in missions by default ( no need to extensively customize the defs or use scripting to improve them ). Potions! Dragofer and Amadeus have completed the work on the Slowfall potion originally prototyped by VanishedOne. They also incorporated the invisibility potion by Kingsal ! These now have pre-defined slots in the gameplay menu as well as the default shop menu design. Assets Galore! Along with new POM textures, we now have: A new modular pipe set A new Lampion entity Some new Factory Machine entities Ornate wood and stone relief textures A new AI praying animation A new AI smoking animation And many fixes or improvements to existing assets EFX Reverb Location Preset! Frost_Salamander took some time away from his continued work on the excellent “The Lieutenant” series missions to make EFX reverb setup easier for himself and other mission authors. You can now add EFX preset spawnargs to location entities rather than having to use the EFX def file. Translation Packs! Between TDM 1.06 and 2.0 Tels and the translating community started translating many missions but these translations required that the original mission be altered in a way that made it harder for the mission authors to revise. That meant that translation packs were in limbo being hosted by 3rd party sites \ forums along with their orphaned old missions. The translators over at the Darkfate forums came up with an solution by including not only the translation strings in the translation pack but also the altered map files, GUI defs, etc that had translation work done to them. This would leave the original mission untouched but allow translation packs to override some parts. We have gone through the old archives of these translations and have reworked them to work with the latest version of TDM (and the associated missions). Most of the translations are Russian ( due to the continued work of the Darkfate people ) but many of the early TDM missions also have German, Italian, French, etc translations too. Also Nolok contributed a brand new Catalan menu translation! Subtitles! Datiswous has been creating story subtitles for many of the existing missions in the TDM mission database. Most authors have incorporated these into their official releases, otherwise players can still add them to the FM folder. A detailed list of changes can be seen here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What's_new_in_TDM_2.13 To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder. Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.13, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.13 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.13. Before upgrading, set TDM to use one of the built-in missions ( Training Mission, A New Job, Tears of St Lucia ) then use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates

People do make old-style briefings. As for video briefings, they have some new effects. For instance, in "The Hare in the Snare" there are several things which cannot be made with mere fading and transforms, although the video looks very much like typical GUI briefing... I don't think people get to 300 MB yet (luckily). The largest video is in my opinion in Volta 2, which has size ~= 120 MB for 1:45 duration (1080p), i.e. 9 Mbps bitrate. While this is a bit above recommended bitrate by youtube, I think our briefings should be much better compressible (most frames have no changes), and this is probably overkill. Variable bitrate encoding is very important: while 80% of time video is black of shows lazy transform over picture, some of the rest 20% need high bitrate for good quality. Volta 1 has 132 MB video of 1.5 minutes duration --- 11.5 Mbps. Looking at "The Hare in the Snare", there are 66 MB for 3 minutes, which is 3 Mbps. I think it pretty good balance. Although video still takes 50% of the FM size