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TDM no, but about Thief 2 an entire campaign.....T2X FM:T2X Shadows of the Metal Age - Dark Engineering Guild | Thief Wiki | Fandom Are you all really old guard taffers (so you of course remember T2X) or just old? On May 25th, 2000, Looking Glass Studios closed down. Shortly thereafter, a group of 60-100 designers, artists, audio talents, writers and programmers from the gaming community, contributed their talents to realize a fresh new Thief experience. With their own story to tell, they joined to form TTLG's Dark Engineering Guild. The designing and development took five hard years, and finally, in 2005 the result was an unofficial Thief II expansion pack titled Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age. Based on the critically-acclaimed Thief series, T2X builds on the same technology and universe that made Thief 2 a classic.

EidosMont/Embracer game design deciders or WTF these guys are called have truly improved amazingly: take a niche game, piss off the original fan base by completely redesigning the game, wait 10+ years, then use the annoying redesign once more and make it even more niche by making it VR. But with them, nothing should surprise you anymore. It's a pity, actually. I think the idea of the eye and a thief who finds the thing a few years after Garret's demise would have been quite good... if it had been set up sensibly after the end of Deadly Shadows in the well-known steampunk-medieval setting. The best thing about the trailer is that it contains the warning that the game is being created “in collaboration with Eidos Montreal”. I didn't think those responsible would be so honest. End of announcement.

Luckily, TDM is one of the few games I bother to play. So I ask here, in 2025, how much VRAM do TDM missions need at highest settings? I guess there could be some large variance since mappers are free to use custom models and textures, and pack more stuff into scenes.

Just to complicate your life, there are 3 additional aspects to consider about the circa-2014 Mason files, and subsequent circa-2017 improvements to the 'english' version perhaps applicable to your work. (These issues are covered in the wiki "Mason Font" article, with a bit more in my "Analysis of 2.12 TDM Fonts", https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/. The 2017 changes can be seen in the *current* 2.13 TDM English Mason files.) 1) Need for custom DAT-scaling on certain Mason characters The source TTF had upper-case and lower-case characters that were early-on considered too similar to size. So (before 2014) in the DAT, selective per-character scaling was used to differentiate them. See https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Font_Metrics_%26_DAT_File_Format#Per-Character_Font_Scaling for details. As you add new characters, you should do likewise (relatively easy with refont). 2) Creating the "glow" of mason_glow How Tels created the glow (for 'english' carleton & mason) is discussed in reasonable detail here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/5/#findComment-262661 That could be done for Russian too, which I recall currently fakes a glow, and possibly would require a minor GUI or engine code change to use. Note: To best accommodate glow and retain GIMP-visualization-alignment between base and glow characters, Tels moved some base characters within their bitmap, to keep their glyphs 2-3 pixels away from any bitmap edge. You should consider this when placing new base glyphs. Note: For the 3 mason bitmaps doubled in size circa-2017 as discussed next, the mason_glow bitmaps were also doubled. 3) Extensive bitmap editing to solve main menu character jaggedness. On Oct. 5, 2017, @Springheel in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/19129-menu-update/#findComment-412921 said: "Looking at the Mason fonts, it looks like they were super low res to begin with, and were then just resized [presumably referring to per-character scaling], making them even worse. I'll see what I can do." [Further on, referring to fonts in the TDM menu system:] "It appears that resizing the dds file to make it higher res is possible, so I'll proceed." Later, on Oct 13, 2017, he concluded within a "More detailed list of changes: "Updated the menu fonts, which were surprisingly bad before" Unfortunately, I couldn't find details on how this work was actually done. I assume the bitmap editing was all done in GIMP. It started with doubling the size of certain bitmaps from 256x256 to 512x512. This was done for the first 3 bitmaps (i.e., those with ASCII, some Latin-1). Then characters were made more crisp and smooth-edged. How? Dunno. Also, some odd but harmless artifacts happened within GIMP (noted in https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22427-analysis-of-212-tdm-fonts/page/3/#findComment-499660)

Or, just get in contact with the owners of the IP and ask them since just because an IP lawyer in one jurisdiction says it would be okay, doesn't mean it would be okay globally. There are several packs out there of scripts/definition files which are licenced under free licences (CC0 and WTFPL mostly) and claim their freedom by recreating them using "clean-room way". In fact, I used them in getting TDM running with mostly free licenced files by selectively choosing which had clearly been written from scratch albeit with reference to the originals, and which were just direct copy and paste with claimed free licences (I didn't use them). Then it was a case of finding/replacing the core engine textures, sounds, etc. the engine required to launch with free alternatives (again checking the packs since some were just copied direct from the game files and claiming to be free). In the end, the only non-free licenced files that were still required were those from TDM itself. The result of this TDM version is the screenshot I posted some posts ago here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22346-libre-version-of-tdm/page/3/#findComment-500642 However, you will notice the giant cursor on the screen in the screenshot, why? because the only reference to hiding the cursor is within the UI files which come under the game eula, so I didn't add in the command to hide it in game. In the case of the script/def files, this "clean-room" approach has stood up in a court of law when I looked online, however you wouldn't really want to end up being in the position of ending up in court defending yourself in the first place. The flaw in the def/scripts that were recreated are that they all wrote their files using the originals as reference. So if the originals are under the game eula, and if the information contained is in some way protected, then all these "clean-room" files revert to the original game eula, as the authors didn't have the right to change the licence. I believe (with a pinch of salt )that if the core scripts/files were made GPL by idSoftware/Microsoft then as files based off of or using them as parents (basically all TDM scripts/defs as far as I can make out) then all of the TDM scripts and def files would automatically become GPL as their authors could also not claim their work was NC-BY since it was then based on GPL work.

I suspect intentional, since the release appears to be more about modifying Doom 3/BFG to see what enhancements can be made to its engine base for the game and less about it being a release of the idTech 4 engine. As to why I believe this is likely the case, below is the Doom3-BFG repositories read me: So, I'd say they still wanted you to own the game since the scripts and def files are game data.

@chumbucket91Not sure if in the code you can see anything that might cause some of the other polish issues with the flashbombs - such as the bizarre hit detection , "blinded" animation not looping properly on affected ai, and blind timer seemingly not working at all (the default duration for ai to blinded is supposed to be 8 seconds base + 1-4 of random time, but they seem to come out of it in maybe 4)

Regarding the existing Russian version of TDM's MasonAlternative font, this had a different origin than those Russian fonts processed by Riff_Keeper. Tels created this in 2012. He started from bitmaps of an ASCII Mason font, then used his Perl patch program to copy selected ASCII glyphs (that resemble in some way Cyrillic) to new font "MasonAlternative". See https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274617 In GIMP, he flipped or otherwise hand-edited to make them Cyrillic. He said, "There are still a few dozen missing, but this is enough to render the two headlines we have (New Mission and Setting)" https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/15/#findComment-274623 This accounts for the incomplete coverage. Speculatively, he took this approach because it couldn't find a Mason-style TTF font with both Russian characters and an acceptable license (e.g., public domain, or at the least freely redistributable for non-commercial use). @kalinovka,I wonder what the licensing is for your masonchronicles3.ttf.

Evidently a significant portion of the Cyrillic work was done by Keeper_Riff (in conjunction with Tels) back in 2011. These folks are not active in TDM these days. Keeper_Riff outlined a workflow, starting with FontLab to edit TTF files... https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/12/#findComment-271548 Specifically Carleton: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/12863-translating-the-tdm-gui/page/4/#findComment-262135

Hi! Thanks for your reply. I am not a programmer at all (I graduated foreign languages faculty 20 years ago), so these things look tricky for me. Bu I will try all my best to patch the font. It is interesting that Carleton font has been already converted to dds with all cyrillic letters. But who had done this work, I was not able to find. I temporary changed Mason to Carleton, but I don't like the result. So I will continue my experiments. The task of mission translation seemed simple for me, but for months later it look like a real quest. If it happens successfully, at least it allows to update fonts in the next version of TDM.. One more question - may you tell me how to transform dat files to dds ? I used the refont ulility, but it creates only a dat file. What should be done next ?

Hi! Since the winter of 2025th I have been translating the "iris" mission. The translation is ready, but one thing - a problem with the Mason Chronicles font - prevents it from being published. May the forum society help me with it's localization into russian language ? Now it looks like this: The file, that comes with the game, contains some letters. But not all of them. Wiki says: So the font modification was not finished 4 years ago. Ok. I found russian version of Mason font in TTF: And tried to converi it with ExportFontToDoom3 and GIMP. I typed the command: ExportFontToDoom3 masonchronicles3.ttf -size 12 -size 24 -size 48, It worked, but TGA font files contain only english letters: Where is my mistake ?

Made Daraan's texture pack, (books, plaster & misc), TDM ready, I would welcome testing - - Linked removed for now, verifying CC compliance of plaster textures, because in typical ttlg style, its not clear.

Using the TPU conclusion as a template - Good: Available at MSRP - an 8GB should be under £250, like the 4060 is (https://uk.webuy.com/search?stext=RTX 4060). Multi Fake Frames - low end 8GB card, pointless. Base FPS needs to be 60fps+ (ideally100fps) for FG, let alone MFG. Good experience, with the right settings - and there is the rub/tradeoff, 8GB of vram is limiting the card Energy-efficient/low temps - this is indeed a plus point, but the 4060 is 50W lower, for almost the same perf. Bad: Only 8 GB VRAM - as Hardware Unboxed have been saying for years, this is not exceptable on 2025. Only small gen-over-gen improvement - the 4060 is practically the same perf. PCI-Express 5.0 x8 interface (not x16) - This IS an issue when paired with PCIe 4.0/ or worse PCIe 3.0 slots, where you will see a huge drop off in perf. See Intel Arc and AMD 6400XT. Stupid naming convention - the 5060 should have been the 8GB (10/12GB) card and the 5060Ti the 16gb card.

Made Skackys T2 texture pack, TDM ready, I would welcome testing - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JWZ9fQYnMpEAB6pEnpiTPmqbFZHQOn5-/view?usp=sharing

Yeah, I find it understandable people are disappointed given what the expectations were. I felt it as well. Marketing, although they tried warning this will not be another Skyrim, still basically advertised that the main difference will be a hub-based half open-world and a more action centered combat. Which led me, and i guess many, to think that this will still be primarily an RPG with a good lean on immersive aspects. They also did not quite quell comparisons to Dark Messiah, another vastly different game. So yeah, was a big surprise that it's void of much meaningful interactivity. I find the end product to be more of a classic 10 weapon fantasy first person shooter interwoven with a Point and click game's narrative depth. So yeah unfortunately all that entails among other things meaningless loot at the level of booster pickups, or simple point scoring. But i don't think its result of derailed development or a happy mistake. As for what it is, it's much better designed, far from a late afterthought. I think why i brought this up here in this forum is that the base layer mapping, the level dressing and the loot placement is really fun and well done.

https://skyboxgen.com https://www.blockadelabs.com https://tools.wwwtyro.net/space-3d/index.html https://lab.rosebud.ai/skyboxes https://openart.ai/generator/skybox --- https://screamingbrainstudios.itch.io/cloudy-skyboxes-pack

User @kalinovka has been working on a Russian language translation of -= IRIS =- which is now available in an initial beta release here: https://cloud.mail.ru/public/J3VG/U3nKuMieC There is still a lot of work to do - so feedback from Russian language speaking users would be greatly appreciated!

idTech4 engine has used on Doom 3 already had a destructible entity system for the destructible barrels, was that removed? In Doom3 you can create debris entities and they become physics entities, never heard of this "flinder" stuff so I assume is a new TDM entity type. Don't know if this is useful for TDM, if not ignore, but who knows could give some hints. This was how I created a simple destructible wood barrel in Doom 3 engine. First I defined the broken debris peace's: (yes they are individual entities and models) entityDef debris_woodbarrel_1 { "spawnclass" "idDebris" "mins" "-3 -3 -3" "maxs" "3 3 3" "model" "models/maps/temple/mapobj/pipo broken/pipo_debri_1.lwo" //"skin" "skins/exp_barrel_red" "health" "0" // amount of damage projectile can take if damaged (0 means it can't be destroyed) "velocity" "1 1 450" // how fast the projectile leaves the gun (or distance if fuse is 0) "random_velocity" "1" "angular_velocity" "105 215 10" // how the projectile is rotating when it leaves the gun "thrust" "0" // the rate of acceleration (always in the direction of the projectiles model) "thrust_start" "0" // when to start accelerating "thrust_end" "0" // when to stop accelerating "linear_friction" "1.0" // "air" friction "angular_friction" "0.1" "contact_friction" "0.9" "bounce" "0.1" // how much speed a projectile retains when it bounces off of objects (coefficient of restitution). 0 means no bounce. "mass" "50" "gravity" "1066" // how much gravity affects the trajectory. gravity direction is same as the entity that fired it. "fuse" "10" // how long before the projectile is removed or self-detonates. Use 0 for beam weapons (velocity == distance). "detonate_on_fuse" "1" // whether projectile should detonate when it's fuse runs out "detonate_on_death" "0" // whether projectile should detonate when it's "killed" (health runs out) "detonate_on_world" "0" // whether projectile should detonate when it hits an obstacle "detonate_on_actor" "0" // whether projectile should detonate when it hits a character in the game "smoke_fly" "debristrail.prt" // particle effect while in the air "snd_bounce" "tray_impact" // parametric particles -- temp "model_detonate" "" "smoke_detonate" "" // particle effect when detonates "smoke_fuse" "" "smoke_bounce" "" } entityDef debris_woodbarrel_2 { ... } etc, then I define the main entity: entityDef moveable_woodbarrel { "editor_color" "0 .5 .8" "editor_mins" "-16 -16 0" "editor_maxs" "16 16 48" "editor_rotatable" "1" "editor_usage" "Moveable woodbarrel. Works just like a func_moveable. However the barrel" "editor_usage1" "has special handling to make it appear more round. This version also explodes when damaged enough." "editor_usage2" "Only add model, model_detonate or model_burn or health to override defaults" "editor_var burn" "number of seconds to burn before exploding." "editor_model model_damage" "model to leave as damaged base" "editor_model model_detonate" "ips model to switch to for explosion." "editor_model model_burn" "ips model to show when on fire." "editor_var def_debris" "add as many as you like, debris1, debris2, etc.. " "editor_var health" "how much health the barrel has, default is 5. If burn is set to 1, the health is effectively doubled so you have to kill it twice to get the explosion" "editor_var respawn" "if non zero the number of seconds to respawn after killed" "editor_var respawn_range" "no player in distance range to actually respawn - default 256" "editor_var respawn_again" "try again in seconds if player in range - default 10" "editor_var triggerTargets" "if set to 1 will trigger targets after being killed" "editor_mat mtr_lightExplode" "light shader to use for explosion" "editor_mat mtr_lightBurn" "light shader to use for burning" "spawnclass" "idExplodingBarrel" "density" "0.02" "friction" "0.2" "bouncyness" "0.4" "def_splash_damage" "damage_moverCrush" "ignore_player" "1" "model" "models/maps/temple/mapobj/pipo.lwo" "def_debris" "debris_woodbarrel_1" "def_debris1" "debris_woodbarrel_2" "def_debris2" "debris_woodbarrel_3" "def_debris3" "debris_woodbarrel_4" "def_debris4" "debris_woodbarrel_5" "def_debris5" "debris_woodbarrel_6" "def_debris6" "debris_woodbarrel_7" "def_debris7" "debris_woodbarrel_8" "def_debris8" "debris_woodbarrel_9" "health" "35" "snd_explode" "wood_barrel_breaking" "snd_bounce" "woodimpact" } This was the effect: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lsXwNssxp-QO3MZKOmUiBd1DWhd0V7HY/view?usp=sharing Hope this helps.

I just released a prototype Windows-desktop app, LangPeeker, for quick lookup of translation strings associated with #str_ values. For the whole enchilada, see the new wiki entry https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=LangPeeker

Not that I'd want to discuss about what's the "best", but, there are a lot of insanely good fan missions for Thief and Thief II out there. For some examples: The Scarlet Cascabel, Malazar's Inscrutable Tower, Behind Closed Doors, Windows of Misfortune, Lost Among The Forsaken. That said, Iris is great, and surely up there with the best TDM missions. I must admit I had more fun with Thief and Thief II missions as of late though. Something about the original game's base which has a bit the edge over TDM in terms of atmosphere and character, and, also FM authors which really know about fun gameplay and mission architecture.

And some info can be found on this forum topics and wiki. Wiki article: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Parallax_mapping Topic: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22574-experimental-support-of-parallax-mapping-in-213/

Here is a texture pack that players can install into their darkmod folder to address this: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/tdm-213-mipmap-hotfix-for-lowend-players

Thank you for continuing to develop and update The Dark Mod. I plan to revise and update Turkish translation, including three official missions. Most likely around the end of the year. It has been a long time since the last update due to my other works and private reasons. From now on, I will keep Turkish translation updated.

Thank you! I'll add that it was decided that the latest font and texture mipmap fixes were held back for inclusion in 2.14. The team decided that another beta round might just spur more reports of other texture and font problems and keep the beta process going for another month or more. I fixed missions that were impacted by the mipmap issue and will post the list of broken textures this evening so mappers can avoid them or pack fixed versions with their missions.

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