Search the Community

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.

I thought it would be convenient to collect in one place a list of all mods\addons\improvements created by the community for TDM. After surfing the entire forum I collected the following list of mods, and I present to you their list below. I will be glad if you correct me and provide any other links to mods that I may have missed. Graphic mods Fresnel Mod (MoDB link) Flame Glare Mod (MoDB link) ModPacks Unofficial Patch (MoDB link) TDM Modpack (MoDB link) (with the possibility of separate installation) Gameplay mods Augmentation Mod Wearable disguises Player Lamp (beta) Adjust player speed with mouse wheel Stealth Statistics Tool & Loot Stealth Stat (MoDB link) Textures TDM Texture Mod Small UI tweaks Reflections to all materials containing specular maps Sounds New Footstep sounds Collection of adjusted sounds by Anton Thiefier Sounds Blackjack Draw/Sheath SFX (MoDB link)

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

When I was a teen I used to play a game called Hitman: It was also a 3rd person stealth game focused on assassinations and disguises. Its main gimmick was the player stealing an enemy's clothing and dressing up as them to infiltrate, while disguised you avoid acting suspicious or your enemies would realize you're not one of them and your cover is blown. I've thought about attempting something similar in TDM in the past. Since it's impossible to customize the player model 1st person hands, I realized custom outfits are out of the question. Then it dawned on me that I could go for a simplified version, by implying the player only wears a helmet or large hat to disguise theirself, enough so it makes sense and throws the AI off. So I got to work and after 3 days of tweaking I'm ready to share my latest mod: Working disguises How it works: The player can pick up headwear and equip by using the item, making you a member of the target team when active. While worn a bar appears at the top of the screen indicating the status of your disguise: This bar slowly fills up over time... it will drain when a member or ally of the team you're disguised as sees you the closer you get, further draining if the AI is alert. When the strength reaches 0 the disguise deactivates, you must wait for it to reach 1 again for it to be active again. When the disguise is inactive the bar will be gray and the icon black, when active it's colored and the full icon shown to make that clear. By default only helmets for the Citywatch were included thus far, with the normal Citywatch helmet offering less cover whereas the Elite Citywatch disguise gives you a greater distance and time at the expense of a cumbersome overlay. It even changes the player's person type / gender / rank so AI salute you as one of them... unfortunately this doesn't seem to have an effect in practice, maybe it can be investigated why. Further more the item sets a custom head model and skin, so when the player sees theirself in a mirror the hat accurately reflects the associated head... sadly this functionality had to be disabled due to a crash that occurs if you try to modify the model of the player's head causing a -1 model index, I filed a bug report about it and hopefully it can be resolved soon. If enough people like this to motivate me to continue, my plan for the next release is to allow stealing the helmets off guards. This might be tricky as I need to make the head frobable and have it execute my script action, which must change the model of the AI's head to their non-helmet version: Unless the same crash as the player head risks occurring, this should be doable in theory... this would also allow it to be used as an universal mod (with any FM) as you no longer rely on the items being placed by the mapper. Below is the latest version: If you're a mapper maybe add this to your FM and let me know what you think! I'm eager to hear your thoughts and see a field use case, this was only tested in a simple box map not in a practical scenario. As usual copy everything in your FM except tdm_custom_scripts.script you'll need to mix the include line with your existing one. disguises_1.0.pk4

For those who have played it, what do you think of the Half-Life 1 mod "Swiss Cheese Halloween 2002"?

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.