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Bumping this thread. I was trying to parse the code for LibreCoop recently, the multiplayer coop mod for Doom3, or Dhewm3 more exactly. The main alternative is OpenCoop, but I think LibreCoop is more developed. Anyway, it got me thinking how much work would have to go into a coop mod for TDM. It's still my biggest wish item. The idea I got was one has to basically walk system by system through the code and think about the client and server side of packet swapping. TDM has a lot more and more complicated systems than Doom3, but once you start getting a feel for it, I think the basic system doesn't change that much. In a way it reminded me a bit of a pared down save/load system, what you need to update a game state, except you're streaming it in in real game-time, and you using tricks to fill in gaps to ease the load. The other thing I noticed is that maps themselves need their scripts tweaked and anything else happening in the world. But I wonder if there's a way to procedurally do that when a map is loading, so one could just use the FM files as released. It looks like it'd take more than a year or two if one were working steadily through it, although I think one would get efficient at it over time. Like I was noticing, there's a consistent logic to it. But most of all I think it'd be worth it. I really like Thief coop, and I think it'd be great for TDM. I'm just FYI'ing about it now because I was browsing through the other coop mods. Not even soliciting opinions or anything. Just thinking aloud (avisible?) about it.

The real St. Alban was a pagan who became a celebrated religious personality, this All Saints Day 2010 The Dark Mod places its own spin on this mythical figure. Screenshots: Intro: "'Business' has been slow lately, even more so after most of my gear got snatched during a Watch raid... I've since been forced to hit the streets and pick pockets for a living. But my luck was about to change, last night I was approached by a red hooded figure with a proposition... As we sat down in a dark corner of a nearby inn, he told to me that the Builders of St. Alban's Cathedral in the Old Quarter had recently unearthed a discovery that might lead to the final resting place of some saint." " But before I do anything, I need to get my tools and stash from the evidence room at the local watch station." "with the hawks, doves will congregate they will drop honey from the cliffs wine will surge over the earth the sheep will wander harmlessly with the wolf then the wicked will rise, but to retribution" - 'scripture of St Alban' There is a new version out now, see the following thread St Albans Cathedral version 1.6 Build Time: about 2-3 months. Thanks:- Huge respect to the Dark Mod team for such a great mod and for all the hard work they put into it and continue to put into it. Special thanks to Fidcal, Serpentine and others for their help on the forums and to Testing:Ugoliant, Baddcog, Grayman, Lost soul, Bjorn and Baal (for doing all the Vp work in the town. Readables: Ungoliant and Mortemdesino for all awesome work on the readables. Resource: Fids, Grayman, Ungoliant - guis, models & images. Misc: Loren Schmidt - the author of the map I based the cathedral on. Info: # Like Thief2, some things are climable, pipes, wall vines etc.. You can also drop some of the keys, some door that are frobbabe mean there is another way inside - explore u taffer! # Due to TDM being a lot more of a resource hog than T2 I have been forced to limit the number of Ai in the mission, but they have better placement than my last mission. # On all difficulty levels the player starts with vertualy no tools/weapons, there are weapons to be found - read, read, read! # For the love of all that is holy, read the briefing otherwise you will problems completing the mission. Known issues:- # This mission will have less than optimal fps at a few points on the map, mid range DX9 card(X1900/GF7800) or higher required. # On low end PCs I recommend, V-sync is off, AA is off, Aniso is 4x or lower and that any and all background apps are closed.

Yes, all images, models and sounds would be gone. Even if you made a barebones replacement that only provides a very limited selection of assets you would need to create thousands of files just to achieve basic game functionality (movement sounds, guard clothes and speech, menus, tools and weapons etc.). It's probably orders of magnitude more work than when TDM got rid of all Doom3 assets for going standalone in v2.0. Technically it's probably possible for an FM to contain a full game's worth of assets, except for the code itself. IIRC some Doom3 mods had custom .dll's to extend the base code, though.

I know, it's just the only easy way I can think of. Fixed script names is what we have now, tdm_custom_scripts.script or tdm_user_addons.script: Every mod will use them up and thus take them away from other mods. We need something that's dynamic and unlimited. A better alternative is a prefix to indicate you want auto-running of that script: Anything called "scripts/include_*.script" would be a good one, just use an unique name and call yours "include_mod_something.script" which will work if no one else names theirs "mod_something". Even better: Have a keyword at the beginning of the script! Like how scripts in Linux start with #!/bin/bash so file managers know how to preview them: Similarly we could add something like #autoexec at the beginning of ours, though this approach requires the engine looping through all script files to detect this keyword. We could imagine making tdm_user_addons.script unique per pk4. But I haven't even mentioned this one as it goes against how the file system works: You can't have multiple files with the same name and different contents, the latest archive in alphabetical order must always override a file loaded by an earlier archive. What gets close to that is a special text file in each pk4 like a package.txt which references the inclusion script as a flag. FM's kind of do that with darkmod.txt: When each pk4 is iterated by the engine at startup, it could read a script name mentioned there and execute the file referenced. But this seems more complicated than necessary unless this configuration is used for more stuff, maybe to list loaded mods in the main menu with their title / description / author / version the same way missions are?

This is most excellent news! Break the Modpack or any other add-ons / mods in the process if you must. We shall gladly rebuild them! Set up a good foundation. The most exciting and ambitious mods will require config files and dedicated guis, but we aren't there yet.

I blame tdm_custom_scripts.script... which may not be at fault for all such cases, but I blame it none the less as I hate it being a requirement I'd prefer all scripts being auto-loaded like defs and everything else, in alphabetical order so the pk4 with the last name overrides older versions with ones in the FM directory having higher priority: This would finally make it possible to include mods with custom scripts as a simple drag-and-drop pk4, no need to have FM's integrate it or a separate mod installer. Speaking of which: Why not have a mod section in the vanilla installer itself managing those mods? I haven't used the mod workshop yet but understand it relies on its own tool, which is likely not hard to use but we already have an installer which could include these just as easily so more people can find and enjoy them.

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

No dumb questions from you. I get the game to crash with and without mods but I don't use mods for these tests. I did manage to crash a fresh virgin 2.12 pretty easily. My TDM 2.11 isn't fresh but I make sure no modifications are present during the tests.

Very interesting reading, Welli. Here is a different spin when it comes to new players. The number one selling point of TDM within its genre is content. Thanks to talented and dedicated artists such as yourself we now have around 175 self contained stories. I would say TDM crossed the barrier from medium to high selling point with the 100th release. From this point on it doesn't matter if the game offers a hundred or a thousand maps. A hundred maps is A LOT already. Want content? Look no further. Requisite fulfilled. The number two selling point is... you tell me. Free? Open Source? Multi OS? Map editor? Being maintained? Just like with any form of entertainment people will either love TDM at first sight, tolerate it and even get to like it, or simply dismiss it. No amount of small tweaks can fundamentally change TDM and certain changes may end up dividing the community. My ultimate goal here is to make this community aware of the potential of a healthy modding scene to attract artists and experts in all departments and feed hungry and demanding players. Mods can be the second selling point of TDM: thief it your way.

aye there are a few mods using DGengine might be worth a look :), the glide wrapper is not needed with DGengine it uses opengl also supports native resolutions like D2R but a whole lot more moddable when it comes to interface elements (could roll your own hud and menus if wanted it uses json format).

had a hell of time finding it again but the mod i was thinking about is here https://www.moddb.com/mods/reign-of-shadow have to say the grim dawn mod looks very good the author should be proud.

I haven't played any Thief mods before or even looked at the game since probably 2000. Going back to the old Thief graphics was a bit of a turnoff at first, but the gameplay more than makes up for it. Wow, this mod is massive. I'm over 20 hours in and just started The Jaws of Darkness (mission 8 of 10). Really enjoyable so far, great maps. It can get pretty intense at times, but in a good way. I ran into a couple of frustrating places where I couldn't find the objective and resorted to google (that sprawling mansion early on was easy to get lost in). Overall, very fun though.

Mods is the answer. The scripting system in TDM is like nothing I've seen before. I hope it expands further and further... Mods can bring new blood, new ideas, new mechanics, new sounds, new models, new textures... and who knows, new core features eventually.

Ahhh, got it! I wasn't sure if it's for universal mods or FM specific mods only: We get deeper customization in some missions but rarely any global mods you can run with every FM. Very happy global modding is getting some attention! In that regard I once made a complex damage system which allows taking damage per limb, inspired by the first DeusEx game. It later included support for augmentations that give you special abilities as you upgrade them... problem is I think that part remained unfinished, and the upgrade items would have to be placed by maps which is an issue. The two scripts should be easy to separate though... I guess I'll share it too in case anyone can make use of my final work on it.

We didn't make the holidays (such a busy time of year) so here's a New Year's gift, an unusual little mission. Window of Opportunity Recover an item for a regretful trader out in a wilderness setting, and discover more! Available within the in-game mission downloader or: Download: http://www.thedarkmo...ndetails/?id=79 Alternative: https://drive.google...WTMzQXZtMVFBSG8 Some unorthodox gameplay on regular/ghost difficulties. (Arachnophobes might prefer short mode...) Please expect to need your lantern in regular and ghost modes! Short ("easy") mode is a smaller map, so if you are looking for areas others reference below, or 100% of the loot, you'll need to play on another mode. I wanted to create my first mission before I became influenced by too many others' ideas, and limited myself to what has been done before. As such, this mission is not set in a city/town, and has some features that are likely to be provocative. There's a section some really like, which others don't, either way I kept it short to not last too long. That being said, I hope you do find it fun! :-) Special thanks to those who provided valuable testing and feedback: Goldwell, Kyyrma, plotzzz, 161803398874989, PPoe & Bikerdude (who also contributed a sound). (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] If you are having trouble finding the main objective, here's what to pay attention to in the mission for hints: There is a spot it's possible to get stuck on the ground in the corner by the cliff/rockfall where there's a rope laying on the ground, please take care if you poke around there!

Beta 11 Fix finished-on state auto-update was unreliable Slighty improve scanner title/author detect Tags are now named some whatever regular-version-looking thing to force GitHub to put the newest at the top

That's weird. I just tried it with the exact same setup (linux, dev16829-10455, fresh install from the in-game downloader) and I am not getting that bug. Are you using any mods? I don't use any except the stealth stats one, and I haven't tested the map with various mods installed. Maybe one of those is interfering.

So I recently had a hankering for the TDM OST, and really wanted to get all those ambients loaded nicely into iTunes or on my phone for easy listening. That means getting them in .mp3 format rather than the .ogg files that come with the mod. After some digging, I found a very old version of the OST available for download on Mod DB: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/official-soundtrack-vol-1 However, it dates from way back, and is even missing the iconic main menu music. I subsequently found that VLC Media Player is a good way to easily convert the files myself, and I've started happily doing so for my own use. This got me thinking, though: would it be worth compiling and releasing an updated soundtrack?