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The Dark Mod 15th Anniversary Contest! To celebrate our 15th year, we are holding a fan mission contest! The Dark Mod project trundles onward for it’s 15th year in a row. In that time we have improved our game engine in countless ways and have grown to over 170 missions! To celebrate our perseverance and the years of improvements to come, we are hosting a contest to mark 15 years since the 1.0 release! Now is your time to demonstrate the mission design that best exemplifies your personal style and capabilities! Please consider entering this event! Unlike most recent contests, there is no defined theme and we are simply going to score based on our standard metrics of Story, Gameplay, and Visuals with our standard weighted scoring: Max Possible = Total Votes * 5 (Outstanding) TotalMaxPointsPoss (TMP) = AllCategoryVotecount(ACV) * 30 Full Weighted Score (FWS) = (Gameplay score*3 + Visual score*2 + Story score) / TMP Contest Submissions should be provided before October 16th so that players can start playing and celebrating on the 17th! The players have been keen to relay that they would like really creative missions so it may be worthwhile to examine our “Community Unusual Contest” to get an idea about the wild range of possibilities we offer to designers. Also, since the contest submission is in October, there will probably be an increased desire for Horror themes. The Dark Mod 2.12 was just released so including new 2.12 features is strongly encouraged. Finally, it might be nice if authors name their protagonist Corbin to match the included missions. ( None of the above suggestions are requirements for the submissions. ) Please post your intention to enter in this thread. Thank you! The Poll on this is to demonstrate the intended design used in the mission release threads.

This is my second time opening Dark Radiant in another computer. When i open it i see this: ( i don't know why the image appears blurry here ) So far i see the Grid and the Camera are not scaling well. Notice that i am using fractional scaling in Ubuntu (Resolution: 2560x1440 - Scale: 150% - Refresh Rate: 165.00 Hz) System info attached system_info.txt

The Numbers don't lie. It has been 15 years since the release of TDM 1.0 in 2009. I think we should consider a contest to celebrate this. Further, the contest goal should be with the intention of motivating the completion of a campaign that can be deemed official. Here are some possible ways forward: Proposal 1: Middle mission(s) Authors are asked to create a mission that expands the story between "A New Job" and "Tears of St Lucia". This can involve escaping the heavily guarded city perimeter, stowing away on a ship or caravan, attempting to recruit a partner for St Lucia and failing, getting caught by Builders before arriving and having to escape their compound, getting lost in haunted woods on the way there, etc. Any interesting way that the connection between the two official missions can be expanded. Points are awarded for making explicit references to Corbin, St Lucia, and any story elements in the two official missions. If the resultant mission is of high enough quality, it can possibly be made into an official mission. If we get a number of excellent submissions and they do not cause logical inconsistencies, we might even be able to add two or more to the official list. Proposal 2: Intellectual Property distinct approximation of TDS missions Over the years, many have asked that we recreate Thief 1 \ 2 in this engine. Obviously we cannot do this due to copyright law but we could create similar missions and stories that approximate the Thief 1 or 2 designs. That said, I think that most of our audience has played these missions to death so it may be underwhelming to see them arrive in approximate form anyway. What might be better would be to develop a similar story to TDS and make missions that resemble what T1 \ T2 players were dreaming would arrive when TDS was announced and the first screen-shots were shown in gaming magazines. So take any TDS mission you like, examine the story arc and wildly re-interpret something similar but on a much grander scale. Since it's possible that two or more contestants will choose the same mission to re-interpret, we have a slot system were authors need to claim their preferred mission and if it is taken then they must select another one or lose some story points. The slots represent a sketch of what the mission author might try to do rather than a blueprint. If authors can come up with a mission that has almost no resemblance to any TDS mission but would make for a compelling story development in a similar story arc then that can be claimed as an alternative to a slot. Proposal 3: Same as proposal 2 but we stick with Thief 1 rather than TDS. Wildly re-interpret T1 based on what you may have dreamed of when reading the gaming magazines or playing the demo. Slots system to prevent duplicate submissions. Maybe with either proposals 3 and 4, we still require the use of Corbin as the protagonist and a connective enough story that they could also be adapted as middle missions for the official campaign if the team agrees on it. Proposal 4: Another "Connections" Contest. We just allow authors to connect any two missions with each other or expand the story of an existing series or single mission. So those are my thoughts. I'll leave it to players and mission authors to suggest other proposals and if we have some sort of consensus about the most popular proposals then we will make a poll. Realistically between now and October we may not be able to hold a contest with any strict guidelines ( and tricky issues with maintaining a distance to Thief IP ) so proposal 4 may still be the easiest option.

We are proud to announce the release of: The Dark Mod 2.12 ! The 2.12 development cycle introduced many large code overhaul projects. Most of these were to lay the groundwork for future fixes and optimizations. The final release is yet another leap in performance over the already impressive 2.10 and 2.11 releases. A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include: The Dark Mod 2.12 is a major step forward for mission designers! The culling system has been extensively overhauled to ensure that your CPU and GPU are not wasting resources rendering unseen geometry, lights, and shadows. Some of our best map optimization experts have achieved similar performance gains to what this new culling system does but it is a rare skill and we have even managed to improve performance on missions that were generally regarded as “well optimized”. Mission authors both new and old can follow standard mapping practices with no need to dive deep into sophisticated optimization techniques even for some pretty challenging scenarios such as wide open areas and long views. Players will immediately notice many missions that have made their system struggle with FPS now may be running much more smoothly! Smoother controls for players! Also during the 2.12 development cycle, work has been done to make controls more seamless and accessible. Frob can now use hold or click actions to use items. Once you get used to the mechanic, it will be hard to go back to using a separate “use key”. Mantling is now smoother, faster, and less prone to cause the player to clip through geometry. Leaning is now more subtle and less prone to cause motion sickness. To reduce the tedium of shuffling knocked out AI around to search for loot, you can now configure TDM to automatically loot any frobbed AI. A special thanks must go out to community member Geep! Over the course of 2.12 development, Geep has created subtitles for nearly all AI barks along with developing testing tools and procedures for this gargantuan task! You can see these changes in action by changing the Subtitles setting to “On” ( rather than “Story” ) on the Audio settings page. Geep also provided substantial feedback for our GUI and subtitle design process and edited font data to improve text quality overall. Datiswous has complimented the massive work by Geep to create AI bark subtitles by creating mission story subtitles for a large number of missions. Thank you! Turrets are now natively supported in The Dark Mod and can be paired with Security Cameras! Finally, the nasty 2.11 bug that caused AI to allow arrows to pass through them at certain angles was fixed by Joebarnin! Your assassin style play-throughs should be far less frustrating. See also, our 2.12 Feature discussions: 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 2.12, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.12 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.12. Use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates.

Whenever I try to open The Dark Mod, it shows a grayish-white Screen when opened, then when I click on it it lags and shows me the not responding popup, so I try to close it. I have reinstalled it 3 times. When I first installed it, It worked properly for the first week or so, but has been reoccurring since then. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, I install it the right version (I have a Windows 10 64-bit desktop), I try to do everything correct, and it still won’t work properly. I have a video, link related: https://youtube.com/shorts/csugorI4jkU?si=TuxhoWOU2XkHFhPm

Just got my Ally a few days back, quite amazing how great this thing performs. Night and day difference compared to the Steam Deck. Definitely worth the purchase.

What sort of diseases and parasites exist within the world of The Dark Mod? Is there an equivalent if the Black Death? Can zombies spread through bites? Are there any magic-originating plagues concocted by vengeful pagans or sorcerers?

I have been out of this for four years (cancer, diabetes,COVID) but am trying to RE-learn Dark Radiant, and going back to the mission I started to create back then. But no matter what I add, delete, change in DR it does not show when running the FM! I can see the map file in the map folder under the FM is updating. I have also tried loading it via console, but same problem. Another issue is the dang AAS files. No mater how many time I DMAP it still says out of date. No AAS files show up in the map folder either, which might be why. Can someone help this old guy out? GRRRR

Version 3.14.15926 General Changes: Added a new game mode where all AI are replaced with clowns. All loot items now make a "boing" sound when picked up. All in-game text has been translated to Pig Latin. Players now have a 50% chance of slipping on banana peels. Guards now have a 50% chance of sneezing, alerting nearby enemies. AI Changes: Guards now randomly break into song and dance numbers. Thieves now occasionally stumble and trip over themselves, making them easier for guards to catch. Zombies now wear silly hats. Level Design Changes: The player's objective is now to steal a giant rubber chicken from a noble's mansion. All buildings in the game world now have exaggerated, cartoonish proportions. The game now takes place entirely in a giant ball pit. Audio Changes: All sound effects have been replaced with foley sounds created by mouth noises. The soundtrack now exclusively features kazoo covers of popular songs. Bug Fixes: Fixed a bug where players could get stuck in a wall by crouching and jumping repeatedly. Fixed a bug where players could "swim" through the air by rapidly jumping while falling. Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes try to speak in emojis.

FAQ: https://cataclysmdda.org/steam_faq.md Storepage: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330750/Cataclysm_Dark_Days_Ahead/ Reddit:

It's Steam Demo days and i would recommend you guys to try out the demo of Dark and Darker. It's a Dungeon Crawler, Battle Royale, slow paced game - in which you have to hide in the shadows from other players from time to time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2016590/Dark_and_Darker/

Now that The Dark Mod 2.11 is out, please share any thoughts, issues, or well-wishes here. Thank you!

We are proud to announce the release of: The Dark Mod 2.11 ! The Dark Mod 2.11 is primarily a bug-fix release. The majority of development time was dedicated to fixing or improving long-standing bugs or problem areas with the project rather than focusing on new features. That said, some of the improvements that were introduced to address these issues could very well be classified as new features in terms of the amount of changes required to bring them to life. A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include: Major gameplay improvements! For players, Stealth Score and AI alert behavior has been improved to better detect tactile contact with AI and proximity. An older TDM release introduced a grace period feature that was overly broad and made some AI ignore players that were right in front of them. This has been substantially improved so stealth scoring and AI reactions should be a lot more consistent and logical. Players will also have a new Blackjack experience with better cues about whether a blackjack attack will succeed and improvements to the way that the blackjack attack is executed. Players can more smoothly transition from climbing as the player is now permitted to be crouched during the climb. There is a new multi-loot feature which allows you to pickup multiple loot pieces by holding down the frob button! Performance Improvements! The new volumetric light feature has been improved via a new blur phase. This means that you no longer need to increase the samples to reduce or remove banding and performance should be substantially improved. Before 2.10 ( dithering and low sample count): After 2.11 ( blurred and higher default sample count ) : Soft Shadows now utilize scissors and tile-based evaluation in stencil mode so that Anti-Aliasing no longer need be applied to the entire shadow buffer. Shadow Maps have improved mipmap, LOD and texel utilization. There should be fewer artifacts and better performance. Large models are now evaluated via a BVH structure so that they can be split for lighting and culling optimizations. AI think cycles have been optimized and perform less work per-frame. GLSL programs have been rewritten to have better performance on AMD graphic cards. Included mission improvements! Mission 1: A New Job now features subtitles! Mission 2: Tears of Saint Lucia has been improved with EFX reverb and a few bug fixes! Asset fixes and additions! Dragofer has fixed hundreds of assets that were missing setup definitions or other components that would cause the console to flood with errors on TDM launch or on the launch of missions. In addition, he has added hundreds of new and old assets from both TDM team members and members of the TDM community. Improvements for Mappers! The Engine now supports Obj model format Material Shaders no longer require you to add frob stages. Frob is now auto-generated. You can still add custom frob effects to materials if preferred Missions can now include decls that override those in the core TDM without using an override file to replace the entire core file. GUI scripting has been overhauled with better syntax and error reporting Dmap precision has been increased and Dmap T-junction performance has been optimized Please see our Moddb article for the full developer blog entry: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/the-dark-mod-211-is-here 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 2.11, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!