Search the Community

Author Note: Shadows of Northdale is a new campaign that takes place in a city called Northdale that is situated up in the mountains of the western empire. Across the campaign the player will traverse through the varying districts of the city with each mission featuring it's own unique location as well as different locations in the city hub to access. ACT I is the first mission which is designed to introduce the player to the city hub area and the new mechanics available to them. During the first night in the city hub section there are a couple of places to explore however this will expand and open up further as you progress through the campaign's missions. This mission features some aspects which are different to the usual dark mod FM experience which are: - Food is an item that is picked up and stored in your inventory, pressing the use key with the food item highlighted will cause the player to eat it and gain 5hp - There is an ingame fence where you can purchase gear using any loot you may have found during the mission, you can visit him as many times as you wish but do be mindful of your loot goals - Also inside the fence's shop are contracts, these are readables which detail tasks that a client wishes you to complete for an agreed sum of gold. Upon completing them you will be rewarded with the designated sum immediately - Because you are not a wanted criminal (yet) the citywatch will only attack you if they catch you breaking the law or find you near the scene of a crime - Candles are pinchable in this mission, frobbing them causes Corbin to pinch them to put them out rather than pick them up The mission was designed and tested on 2.05, if you are playing on any other version there may be bugs present. If you enjoyed the mission please feel free to leave a review, I enjoy reading them and it gives me inspiration for my next projects. Tell me what you felt worked and what you felt could be improved for next time. Have fun taffers! - Goldwell. 2.06 UPDATE INFO: If you are experiencing any path finding issues (AI walking around in circles or getting stuck) on 2.06 then please enter the following console command to resolve these issues cm_backFaceCull 0. Thanks goes to Nbohr1more for solving that! Testers Crowind Epifire Kingsal Random_Taffer Skacky SquadaFroinx Voice Actors AndrosTheOxen Goldwell SlyFoxx Custom assets Andreas Rocha Bentraxx Bob Necro Dragofer Epifire Freesound Kingsal MalachiAD Tannar And a very special thank you to the following people without whom the mission would not exist: Epifire for creating some amazing detailed custom models that help bring a unique layer that wouldn't be possible without it. Seriously go check out his modeling page! Dude is very talented https://sketchfab.com/Epifire Grayman for helping to debug a lot of critical bugs in the mission, without him there wouldnt be a mission Kingsal and Skacky for helping out with excellent tips on level design, flow and lighting Moonbo for lending his writing talents to help optimize the briefing video script Obsttorte for making the majority of the scripts featured in this mission, and for dealing with my constant nagging about issues and bugs, you are awesome! SlyFoxx for lending his vocal talents and making the fence character come to life and sound great SquadaFroinx for providing thorough beta reports (that are equally hilarious as they are useful) And finally a huge thank you to Tannar for drawing the fantastic looking ingame map Available via in-game downloader MIRROR File Size: 295 mb

Author note: It's hard to believe it's already been a year since Act 1 came out! Well during this mission the player will be following Corbin into the Grimwood district to followup on a lead from last night (Act 1) .. the mysterious tablet! This mission is my first time including full EFX support as well as a HD briefing video file, additionally a new script has been added crafted by the talented Obsttorte which has loot flying towards the player when you pick it up. On a level design front I have tried to change things up a bit by really catering towards a number of play styles, this mission can be completely ghosted or you can use the tools at your disposal to wreak havoc on the citizens of Northdale. For the first time I have tried to create more sandbox environments which don't offer clear answers handed directly to you, so if you're having trouble figuring something out try a different method. This mission takes between 1 - 2 hours to finish depending on the difficulty you play on and how thoroughly you explore. I hope you enjoy your night in Northdale! - Goldwell Voice actors Fen Phoenix Goldwell Random_taffer Yandros Beta testers Amadeus Boiler's Hiss Cambridge Spy Chakkman Crowind Epifire Kingsal SquadaFroinx Custom Assets Andreas Rocha DrK Epifire Grayman Kingsal MalachiAD Obsttorte Sotha Springheel SquadaFroinx Purgator With special thanks to Epifire for creating a large collection of custom models, Grayman for helping out with coding, Kingsal for drawing the ingame map and Moonbo for his script revision on the briefing video. Available via in-game downloader MIRROR File Size: 417 mb EDIT: If you are having performance issues please consult this post by Nbohr1more which may address your issue http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19936-fan-mission-shadows-of-northdale-act-ii-by-goldwell-20190320/page-2?do=findComment&comment=436271

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152224 There is a new mapping contest over on TTLG for the Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary and the organizers were kind enough to include The Dark Mod along with all of the Thief games as an options for making a mission to submit as an entry. The deadline is a year from yesterday and the rules are pretty open. I recommend going to the original thread for the details but I will summarize here: Rules: - The mission(s) can be for Thief 1, Thief 2, Deadly Shadows or The Dark Mod. - Collaborations are allowed. - Contestants can use any custom resource they want, though TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack. - Contestants can submit more than one mission. - Contestants can enter anonymously. - The mission(s) can be of any size. Using prefabs is allowed but the idea is this is a new mission and starting from an abandoned map or importing large areas from other maps is not allowed. Naturally this is on the honor system as we have no way of validating. Mission themes and contents: There is no requirement from a theme or story viewpoint, however contestants might consider that many players may expect or prefer missions to be celebratory of Thief: Deadly Shadows in this respect: castles, manors, museums, ruins inhabited by Pagans and the like, with a balance of magic versus technology. This is entirely up to the authors, though, to follow or not - it is just mentioned here as an FYI and, while individual voters may of course choose to vote higher or lower based on this on their own, it will not be a criteria used explicitly in voting or scoring. Deadline: May 25th, 2024 at 23:59 Pacific Time. See the TTLG thread for details on submissions and the voting process. Provided I can make the deadline I hope to participate. It would be nice to see the entire community do something together, and expressing our complicated relationship with this divisive game seems as good a pretext as any.

Historically, there were several inefficiences in the way stencil shadows were combined with antialiasing. The first improvement landed in 2.10, and fixed most of the slowdown (not even tracked, I suppose). The second improvement landed in the just released dev16617-10107 (5851), and further reduced bandwidth. Now turning antialiasing on increases stencil bandwidth by constant multiplier. So regardless of scene, the different between antialiasing Off and 2x and between 2x and 4x should be more or less the same. Another improvement is about soft stencil shadows (6076), also landed in dev16617-10107. It can be turned on and off by cvar r_softShadowsMipmaps (turned on by default). Unfortunately, this cvar can improve performance, but sometimes it can worsen it too. It would be great if players could test it in various scenes and various hardware and report their results. Here are the gory details about the new optimization:

Shadowhide has released his TDM FM and it needs a release thread here. I'll quote from his release thread on TTLG. Edit: Shadowhide has released v.1.01 now which is compliant with TDM2.0 & a few other changes (like the music and loading screen). Here's the new download: http://rghost.net/48078929 http://darkfate.org/...ceptive_shadows

@stgatilov In Written in Stone at 308 -1768 123 -13.7 68.3 0 (noclip) using stencil shadows (r10166), the FPS drops from 60 to 45-50. There is no FPS drop with r9853/2.10; it's 60 fps. I found that enabling Frontend Acceleration improved the situation and FPS was a steady 60 fps. Summarized: Frontend Acceleration enabled r10166 stencil 60 fps Frontend Acceleration disabled r10166 stencil 45-50 fps r10166 maps 60 fps r9853 stencil 60 fps I thought you might want to investigate this scene. Maybe there's an optimization that can be done.

As of the title, If I turn on Ambient Occlusion, shadows are turned into pitch black. Cannot see things, It feels like being a real guard in the game. Any solution? AO is too nice, I want to keep this. (Turning it off is a simple solution for it, though) My gpu is AMD RX6700XT and its driver is almost latest version(adrenalin 22.9.1) Sorry for my poor English.

Hey, I'm having a problem running TDM 2.07, I can't run newer versions due to Opengl as version 2.08 won't even start. But using version 2.07 that I found on Moddb, I can at least start the game and start some missions. The problem is with shadows and lighting, I can't actually see much of anything as the shadows keep flickering in a weird way. I will upload a screenshot that will hopefully explain the issue better than I can. I tried changing most if not all the settings in-game but I cannot get it to run properly. Any ideas how I can fix this or what version of the game can run on my laptop? I'm running it on a pretty old laptop but I believe it has the necessary "graphic" chipset i.e an Intel HD 3000.

I recently switched from a 27" FHD screen to a 34" 1440p 21:9, and now I see this : https://i.postimg.cc/t4Xb2gV0/ws5-2021-04-07-20-37-05.jpg

So I was interested in how the soft shadows work in TDM and came across this video. At around 40 minutes in he starts discussing the stair stepping in the soft shadows and supplies a fix. What he does is use bi-linear interpolation on each PCF sample, instead of nearest neighbor. He says it is a hack but the result looks great. I have a AMD RX 580 and using higher settings of soft shadows brings the GPU to its knees. Using soft shadows is a huge performance hit ~25%. Lowering the shadow map resolution to 512 does not help much. But using this method should allow using low soft shadows and low shadow map resolution and still enable smooth transitions from shadow to light.

Thief’s Shalebridge Cradle mission taught me to fear asylum/orphanage combo platters This still scares the pants off me A new Polygon article that brings back some old memories, and yes it's true, that was one scary ass mission! I remember it very well. I am considering playing this again now while we have slow new mod releases lately. https://www.polygon.com/2020/10/11/21509328/thief-deadly-shadows-halloween-scary-level-shalebridge-cradle

In memory of Closemouthed Shadows I modified the original version (from 2008) to run with TDM 1.07. Keep in mind that this is a very simple, old and small mission. Compared to todays missions it's crap but it was the first fan mission ever and it was the only fan mission available in 2008. Big thanks to b1k3rdude who has helped me to bring Closemouthed Shadows to TDM 1.07 (and improved some text and visuals). Download: http://www.thedarkmod.com/missiondetails/?id=57 http://www.mediafire...xhayr66apsp2elv

Here we are, free download. http://thepathofshadows.com/

https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5055 There seems to be an issue with shadow rendering in the engine: When enabling both Stencil Shadows and Soft Shadows, shadows get incorrectly mapped and are stretched across the screen in front of the camera. I have no issues when using Stencil Shadows without shadow softness, nor when using Map Shadows both with and without soft shadows. I'm running TDM 2.07 x64. My operating system is Linux openSUSE Tumbleweed x64. Kernel 5.2.14. Mesa 19.1.7 (amdgpu module). My video card is an AMD Radeon XFX R9 390. I attached two screenshots from the FM Full Moon Fever: The first shows stencil shadows without softness (normal results) and the second is stencil shadows with softness (corrupt shadows).

Guys, this really looks magnificent! I think 10 minutes of my 2 hours stream I was playing with light and checking shadows https://youtu.be/gMAvaK2zqxo?t=5360 Soft shadows add volume to the scene it looks more natural and believable. Where can I read about stencil shadows and maps? From what i've seen map looks much better. Then why stencil exists? Now my tiny dream to see a daylight mission with the fast-moving sun that will cast shadows from every building and character.

Addressed towards every idtech4 aficionado @ the TDM forums and in particular towards the TDM Engine Development team... Both engines use Stencil Shadows but the devs at Ion Storm IMO came up with the significantly more elegant solution to the "Shadow Polygon Popping" issue that comes with the Stencil Shadow rendering technique... I remember back in the days around Doom3's release (August 2004) how John Carmack mentioned having added "noselfShadow" material flags specifically to combat the problem of "Stencil Shadow Polygon Popping" which would appear on Characters and Monsters when selfshadowing would kick in which resulted in my first mini-mod "UEQ" basically just commenting out all "noselfShadow" flags for all Doom3 Character/Monster material shaders... I have recorded some footage to illustrate why I think Thief3's solution is indeed more elegant in the hope that some of the senior GFX engine programmers like duzenko and the rest of the TDM Engine Development team might point me to a direction of implementing a similar solution within idtech4... The Problem (within idtech4): When a character in idtech4 is rendered without disabled selfshadowing in the material shader, quite some noticeable "Shadow Polygon Popping" can be observed (In this sample scene you can see it happening around Garrett's Hood and Shoulder area). The more elegant Solution (within Thief3): Notice how the character still casts and receives selfshadows without any "Stencil Shadow Polygon Popping" occurring. The shadows rather "slide" across the model surface instead of harshly popping in and out of existance... Now of course idtech4 is highly configurable by default so I started tinkering with the stencil shadow parameters. In particular I would change the value of the CVAR "r_shadowPolygonOffset" from the default value "-1" to "-2000". Now that still doesn't look as "clean" as in the Thief3 sample footage but at least the self shadows stopped harshly popping in and out of existence and instead (similar to the Thief3 footage) now slide smoothly across the model surface. Mission achieved you might think and wonder why I am still flagging this an issue... Well the problem becomes apparent when we start to move around the environment with these new settings ("r_shadowPolygonOffset -2000"): Watch the shadow on the right side of the Windowframe increasing in size/volume as I approach it and decreasing in size/volume as I move away again from it: This now happens with every selfshadow in the world around me (within idtech4 with "r_shadowPolygonOffset -2000"). On the other hand, within the Thief3 engine a similar behavior but much much more subtle in scale/resize of SelfShadows can be seen: When you observe the shadow at the left side of the door... (it actually might be difficult to notice) but you can see that that shadow also changes size/volume depending on my distance to it but like I mentioned the change is way more subtle in scale compared to the idtech4 showcase.

Time for some Dark Mod.

The comparision with TDM is not at all favourable Loot is far too easy to find Frobbing loot or extinguishing candles takes place way out of reach Frobbing doors doesn't work if you are a bit out of position (too close or at the wrong angle) Blackjacking - you need to get far too close Lock picking is an absolute doddle Always run is really stupid Light gem versus being seen is a bit problematical unless it is completely black Lean doesn't work at all - the guards etc. spotted me every time I tried it Mantling is very iffy Picking up an object - it changes to a small icon - sheesh!! and you can't put it down quietly on a normal surface This is a back handed way of saying thank you to the TDM developers and FM designers

Not so long ago I found what could make a pretty good profile picture and decided to try it out on these new forums. But I couldn't find a button anywhere that would let me change it. I asked on Discord and it seems Spooks also couldn't find anything anywhere. So I logged into an old alternative account and, lo and behold, that account has a button. This is on the first screen I get when I: 1) click on my account name in the top-right of the browser -> 2) click on 'profile'. Compared to my actual account: Are you also missing this button on your account? It'd be very much appreciated if that functionality could be restored to any of the affected accounts.