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Well, I have ATI and have had no issues with Rift crashing. Or any other map for that matter. But I have been meaning to look at one texture. The stones up the side of the church tower were black for 2 of my testers, but they are white/speckly to me like they should be. That was the only issue I'm aware of though and nobody else mentioned it. And the only custom thing included was a skin (gold texture on rock).

nbohr1more got it right the first time. boy do I feel dumb for some reason I thought my version of Doom3 was pre-patched. yeah I'm a dummy today. so it is working now, thank you very much for the help but I have another question. I have a wide 18~ish inch monitor and the game doesn't display all the way out to the side. the top and bottom meet up well but there's close to 2 inches of black nothing on either side of the game. my screen resolution is 1680 x 945 the closest I can get the game setting to that is 1680 x 1050 but the black side don't seem to change any from me adjustingz resolution or aspect ratio. the game seem pinched side to side to me. is there any way I can get the game to display fully from side to side? thanks again

I finally got around to installing The Dark Mod 1.02. Been meaning to for a long time. The mod looks superb from what I've seen so far. However, the mod was somewhat tempermental to get running well. At first, I had the "menu is a black screen" problem. It seemed to occur the first time I set the window to be full screen. I've also had the issue with the game crashing after several quick saves. But my main reason for posting was to mention the rendering issues I've been having. I'm mentioning a solution I found to one of them, in case anyone else runs into this specific problem. My setup: Win 7 x64, Althon X2 6400+, 2 GB, Radeon 3870, Catalyst 10.6, 1680x1050 resolution. I was having dramatic framerate drops similar to what's been mentioned in this topic. This happened during the training mission included with the mod, in the practice area where you learn mantling and using rope arrows. My framerate was being annihilated whenever I approached the gas lamps near the beginning of that area, after mantling the crates. I knew it had something to do with the lamps, because whenever I specifically approached them the game slowed to an absolute crawl. While up until that point, everything was smooth even at 1680x1050. After trying countless tweaks, I finally found the solution. For Performance Tweaks on the Dark Mod Wiki, it mentions something to try if you get framerate drops around water. On a hunch, I suspected this same setting might help with the lamps. Sure enough, after creating an AutoExec.cfg file with this command, the massive framerate drops disappeared. I'm not entirely sure how this command is detrimental to the image quality of the lighting that the lamps cast, as I don't notice that much of a change. (I think the lamps aren't casting rays on the walls or self-shadowing?) But without it, the game became unplayable. Unfortunately, I've noticed that using this command causes water surfaces to disappear completely for me. No matter what other settings I change. But it was worth the tradeoff. This topic mentions another problem I'm having. The sky isn't being mapped correctly. But Catalyst AI enabled or disabled, it makes no difference. (In fact, I don't notice a difference in loading times either.) Can't seem to find any solution to this. Does anyone have any other ideas? It's not too big of a distraction, though. Maybe I just need to wait for another Catalyst update. (Staying away from Catalyst 10.7.) Oh, and a new tool that ATI owners may find useful is RadeonPro. It's the equivalent of nHancer, for ATI cards. Lets you control and/or force AA, AF, VSync, Catalyst AI, Triple Buffering, and so on.

Guys, I'm having crashes in TDM sometimes. Today was the first time I managed to see a TDM error message (as opposed to just a black screen). It read as follows: IdMovable 'IdBarrel_ATDM:Movable_Junk_WBottle01_Broken_1027': Cannot Load Collision Model Models/Darkmod/Junk/WBottle01/Broken.LWO The crash happened in the third NHAT mission, while trying to open a drawer in a room in the upper floor. Just before doing that, I had snatched a golden bottle from a table on the opposite side of the room. Does anyone have any idea what causes these crashes, or where the error message is supposed to point me to? P.S.: I'm experiencing this kind of crashes in other FMs, so it's definitely not limited to NHAT 3.

Another question: While video_restart there is a gray screen. What do I have to do if I want the screen in another color, like pitch black. Or is even a picture possible, like TDM-logo?

Bit of background first: when I first downloaded TDM v1, I suffered the same symptoms: after the first start or two, the main menu would be always completely black. The music would play, and you could click on the menu options if you moved the invisible mouse cursor to the right spot, but still obviously a game breaking bug. At that time, running the updater fixed the problem, and I figured it was probably a corrupted download. Now the problem is back. Just now I've installed a new FM, and the program rebooted itself to a completely blank black main menu screen. Everything behaves the same way, with one difference: running the updater does NOT fix it. In fact, the updater says my installation is up to date. Help would be appreciated. System specs: WinXP Dual Pentium CPU 4 GB RAM GeForce 9600 None of this has changed since I last played, so I doubt it's a hardware problem. EDIT: I've downloaded the torrent (non-updater based) version and overwrote my previous installation with it. It fixed the problem - at least for a short while. I now suspect the problem is integral to one specific FM, namely Glenham Tower. Will post more if I have anything. EDIT: Turns out the issue was most likely that Total Commander automatically puts brackets around certain (hidden?) directory names, and I thought they were meant to be an actual part of the name, so the installation of the FM went wrong. I think, anyway. Problem no longer around.

As said, it's mostly just textures/material shaders. That said, black isn't very attractive and you need a pretty high base brightness on stuff to keep the game from being annoyingly dark, you also have to take into consideration that the 'blacks' on 95% of the target audience will not be as good as they were 10 years ago when everyone had CRT's. In very low ambient light the contrast between lighter surfaces and solid colours increases quite dramatically, however the balance of "what is light and what is dark" is outside the scope of my "give a damn", making sure that say, walls and floors have similar brightness as to avoid "bad" contrasting in the same environment, well that's very important (i.e you can feel free to report it)! It's one of those areas that realism is really quite bad in terms of enjoyable experience, the example looks fine to me. At the end of the day, perceived brightness/realism/your eyes/your monitor/your software config/your screenshot adjustment will all play a role, the best thing you can do is adjust your gamma in TDM to match what you would want (and when testing to release a map, make sure to test the defaults )

If I understood correctly, it's not a problem with the engine but with the laws of physics If it were completely dark everything would be pitch black, but if you add just a tiny bit of light, the whiter objects would pop out before the darker ones. Edit: Except the lights! those have an evident shader problem.

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04, 64-bit. I have doom 3 installed in an unusual directory, but it is symlinked to /usr/local/games/doom3. When I play TDM, the light gem is totally black (except for during mantling). The guards cannot see me. The console is constantly flooded with "cannot open ../../../../dev/shm/tdm_lg.tga" or something like that. Any ideas? I checked, and a file exists in /dev/shm, but it is blank. When I installed Doom 3, I just restored it from my external hard drive, rather than running the installer again. Could this be the problem? Doom 3 plays fine.

Is the tick a light grey one or a black one?

Odd, generally its caused by not having write permissions. Please try : Go to D:\games Right click your doom3 folder -> properties Untick "read only" (i.e a blank square not a light grey/black tick) It should ask you about subdirectories and perhaps hidden files - yes to everything.

I think a technical support sub-forum would be great as crashes,black screens, install problems seem to overflood the main forums. Also i think its kinda alarming for new ones to the mod who come here to look for infos only to see that crash logs are allways floating on top of forums.

I ran into two initial problems when trying out TDM. I have a fix for one that I'll share in case anyone else encounters the same issue. TDM Update CrashesRunning tdm_update.exe results in a crash: 'tdm_update.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.' This happens shortly after the copyright line of text is displayed. A zero length tdm_mirrors.txt file is created. If I manually obtain a correct tdm_mirrors.txt file and run with tdm_update.exe --keep-mirrors, the same crash happens just after 'Fetching checksums from server...'. To workaround this problem, I used the torrent to get the game. Following the wiki suggestion of cleaning out %temp% did not solve this problem. Second start of game = Black screen with sound, invisible menus, and generic grey mouse cursorThe new 'DoomConfig.cfg' created after the first run of the game had a setting that would cause this error. Through trial and error I determined the setting I needed to update: Change seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "0" to: seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "1"

Hi i am back again, before i start building my map any further i wanted to play the fms, now the shadows are pitch black no texture visible, i had it before but cannot remember what it was, i think it had something to do with direct x? I searched the forum for the topic that solved my problem but i cannot find the post anymore HELP and it is not bloom i turned it off already. for the rest it runs great, only shadows are pitch black spots where no obj or textures are visible. Ty for your help in advance.

I managed to get the saint lucia demo working a wile back in the year. I'm almost certain I had a problem with it at first but did play through the demo a few times. I wanted to discover if the mod would work for me and it did. Trouble is now the demo doesn't work. On top of that back when the demo did I tried to obtain the full mod. The TDM updater didn't seem to be able to connect to the file server and just as soon as the dos prompt window opened it would close, giving me little time to read the text. What I could tell was that it couldn't find the file server. I can download the full mod without the updater but I need to know that the mod will work first. I can do that with saint lucia. I'm running a 64bit windows 7 with stock ati chipset for a new medium end computer. It's pretty basic but it can handle some old games that aren't to graphic. After I tried out the saint lucia demo I spent some time playing all sorts of other things, and downloaded a host of other mods and maps for doom. I'm half convinced that some of those mods made things inhospitable for TDM to work. Running TDM crashes doom3 but in a way where the screen remains black and any window that pops up can be selected with the mouse (which remains visual on the pop up). I can provide error information for doom and the mod as both seem to have an entry in event viewer. If it helps I'll screen the doom3 and base folder if there's anything relevant that could be gathered from that. EDIT: I recall that saint lucia ran well enough. I didn't study it carefully though.

I have just downloaded TDM using the installer/downloader but I'm having a problem that doesn't appear to be listed anywhere. I've searched these forums, I've gone through the installation guide and the FAQ but everything that seems to be for the problem I have hasn't helped. Basically, when I load the mod I get the music playing but the screen is totally black. I can see the mouse pointer and I can hear the sounds as I pass it over the buttons but I can't see a damn thing. When I bring up the console I can see that there were 166 warnings during loading saying 'could not load image', so my guess is that the game can't find the images and so it's just using blank ones instead. I have followed the installation instructions, I am running the 1.3.1 patch, I've added commands into the DoomConfig.cfg file as mentioned in the FAQ, I've also switched the Thread Optimisation off under the NVidia control panel. But it's not working... Any help would be greatly appreciated. [edit] I just thought, someone is probably going to ask for my system spec, so: Intel Core 2 Duo - 3ghz, 4 Cores 4gb DDR3 (that's physically installed memory) NVidia GForce GTS 250 1gb (driver version 197,13) Windows XP Home (32bit)

Hey there! Ingame all object textures are missing and replaced by plain black color. Only the textures of NPCs and floor/wall/ceiling are displayed. I am not sure if the problem lies in my hardware ... every time i start the updater it claims "size mismatch, getting it." at most of the .pak copies in my tdm folder. My specs are: Intel Core 2 duo processor T8100 - 2.1 GHz ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT 2GB DDR2 What is your suggestion how to solve the problem? Greetings, .jdb

This can be cause by a number of things - the first is please try starting doom3 and putting in the CD key there. If it accepts the key, restart d3 and make sure it doesnt ask again. If this happens chances are that TDM will be fine. If that doesnt work, I remember someone had the same situation regarding gamex86.dll as happens with some people getting a black screen... but try making sure doom3 is happy first. Starting the map directly will skip a lot of 'nice' things, so it isnt really recommended.

I have identified my brand of the black screen problem. Basically, after having gone through the briefings of an appearingly randomly selected number of fms, it gives me a dialogue box saying that the map files cant be found. Which would indicate a problem with the download. I later found out that the problem was caused by me having put spaces between fm names with multiple words when downloading them (i.e. sons of baltona.pk4). Writing sons_of_baltona.pk4 or sonsofbaltona.pk4 completely got rid of the problem.

I had tried deleting the "doomconfig.cfg" file alone but I still encountered the Black Screen problem and not until I deleted both the "doomconfig.cfg" file and the "gamex86.dll" file did I have any success in getting rid of the Black Screen problem. I realize a new "gamex86.dll" file is created each time the game is launched. I'm assuming that the first "gamex86.dll" is somehow corrupted after the first launch and that's why it needs to be deleted so a new and clean "gamex86.dll" can be used on subsequent launches.

I was finally able to fix my Black Screen problem. I had tried all the solutions listed in this thread but I still wasn't able to get TDM to work without the dreaded Black Screen so I decided to improvise and combine a couple of things that other people had found successful. This is exactly what I did: I renamed my Doom 3 directory to Doom3. Installed the torrent version of TDM and installed the 1.3.1.1304 patch. Launched TDM but didn't install the training mission nor any other mission instead I went directly into the "Settings" and changed my video settings. I then quit the game completely and then relaunched TDM and that's when I encountered the Black Screen so I quit the game (Alt+F4). I then went into my darkmod folder and deleted the "gamex86.dll" file and the "doomconfig.cfg" file. Launched TDM again and it worked fine. Note: I'm not sure if renaming my Doom 3 directory to Doom3 really helped but I noticed that someone else had tried this and I noticed that some of the documentation referenced Doom3 not Doom 3. Additionally, I didn't install the training mission or any other mission because on a previous attempt to fix the Black Screen problem I had installed the training mission to initiate the Black Screen and then I ended up having to delete the training mission and any files associated with that mission in order to get TDM to work. I just found it was simpler to initiate the Black Screen by going directly into the "Settings" and making some video changes. I'd hazard a guess that you could fix the Black Screen problem by just going in and deleting the "gamex86.dll" file and the "doomconfig.cfg" file from your darkmod folder but I'm too tired of messing around with this thing to test out that theory. I hope this information is helpful to someone.

Thank you HiddenCoast. I will try this one. Springheel, I really don't know why you struggled with my question. I just wanted you to tell me what you thought was the best way to solve the Black Screen problem. It seems like a simple request. If you didn't have a suggestion then I wanted you to tell me what post from this thread seemed like the best solution again, seems like a simple request. It's true I said I have tried the suggestions in this thread but I also said that I would be more than happy to repeat a suggestion that looked promising to an expert such as yourself in the event that I didn't correctly follow the instructions the first time. I just wanted some Dark Team Mod advice.

I disagree, I think it is the same problem. Just because people are finding different solutions to the problem it doesn't mean that it's not just one problem with a few different solutions to fix that one problem. I do research for a living and I often find there can be numerous ways to a problem but usually there is an easy way to fix the problem and many hard ways to fix the same problem. Yes, I have run TDM without any other Doom 3 Mods installed and still had the same Black Screen problem. I also completely uninstalled Doom 3, patched it, and installed TDM but I still got the Black Screen. Why don't you just tell me what you think is the best solution to this problem? Of all the solutions posted in this thread which one seems like the best solution? I assume with your knowledge you can easily weed out the good ideas from the bad.

Thanks Myagi for the suggestion. Were you also experiencing the Black Screen bug and did this fix your problem? It seems like there are a lot of people experiencing this same Black Screen problem. There is a lot of speculation and a bunch of different ideas but does anyone have a definitive solution to this problem? Again, we all seem to be describing the exact same problem so it seems fair to think that there should just be one solution to this problem. I've tried the solutions listed in this thread but haven't been able to get TDM running. I might have missed something so is there one solution listed here that really should work?

It doesn't appear that I'm going to get an answer from the Dark Mod team which is odd since this problem seems too large to ignore. How about this, does anyone know how to fix the black screen problem? I've tried the above suggestions but they didn't work for me. Any help would be greatly appreciated.