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The Dark Mod 1.07 Gold Edition (Project)


nbohr1more

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HOWDY!!

 

Not that long ago, I installed TDM 1.02 to get a sense of perspective on where we are currently verses

the old TDM versions.

 

My goodness, things were bad back then.

 

The game would never keep texture quality at the level appropriate for my hardware and

would constantly set image_downSize every time I installed a new mission.

 

Menus rendered out-of-sync with words appearing at random (often before their background graphics).

 

The game was virtually silent, with no rustling AI or familiar grunts from mantling or lifting objects.

 

It was such an off-putting experience that I retreated to fiddling with my favorite TDM version prior to

the Standalone release, 1.07.

 

I'm not sure quite how some of the 1.02 issues like image_downsizing on restart were cured in this release

but 1.07 is clearly a substantially better "old version" of TDM. If you want to revisit the past, this is the one to try.

(Unless you're morbidly curious about the creaks and groans of the oldest releases.)

 

It was the last TDM release to use the Mod DLL SDK rather than build from Doom 3 sources.

 

I've always admired this release. It was well optimized compared to 1.06 and didn't rock-the-boat with

radical changes that required asset or map changes.

 

During various TDM x64 discussions, I pointed back at 1.07 as the starting point to convert to a different Doom 3

fork since newer releases would require you to reconcile TDM game code, Doom 3 vanilla, TDM engine changes,

and whatever fork you wanted. Greebo and stgatilov did all this work anyway, so kudos for that!

 

Now that we have the potential of unlimited upgrades to the TDM engine and we are fully Standalone, our

relationship with Moddb is a little strange.

 

The whole point of modding culture is to see what you can do when limited to using a commercial game

as the source material to create your own project.

 

With TDM free of this constraint, the Moddb culture has become increasingly ambivalent or antagonistic towards

TDM and many there treat us as an unqualified interloper who shouldn't be participating in their Mod contests

or rankings. We still have our core fans there and Moddb staff seem to think that we still deserve our place

there as a legendary pioneers of the early "full conversion mod" scene, so it's not all dire.

 

Still...

 

I've been thinking about a ways to rekindle the "mod" side of TDM.

 

One thing I did was offer the "Flame Glare" mod but it didn't seem to gather much interest. Maybe I need to make

more screenshots?

 

The other thing I've been thinking about is the topic of this thread,

 

What if I back-ported some of the latest TDM changes to the 1.07 and made a Gold Edition release?

 

This would allow players to play old non-standalone mission versions with some of the enhancements from 2.x and newer.

It would also grant old-school Doom 3 modders with more code examples they can more easily port to their projects.

 

Pretty crazy idea I guess.

 

But I thought it might be fun to tinker with.

 

Unfortunately, I'm stuck at an impasse. TDM 1.07 requires MSVC 2008 to compile.

 

If someone can lend a tip or two as to how I can get builds to work again, I can begin this stupid journey into the

world of obsolete TDM coding.

 

I'll post here if I figure this out...

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Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Progress is great and definitely appreciated. But you also have to laugh and "appreciate" some of the amusement from bugs that used to be there but no longer are. My personal favorite was when blackjacking someone laying on a bed, they would clip inside the bed and start flopping around violently. Then they would die a second or two later, because the game engine didn't like them being in the level geometry very much. This bug was almost as comical as blackjacking people in t1/2 and seeing them instantly pop up and then fall down because there was no animation for being blackjacked when already laying down. :)

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Yeah. This is mostly a "scratch an itch" type project.

 

I often find myself thinking of time-travel scenarios where I would be explaining something new to someone from the past.

Here I would be delivering 2019 info to the TDM team circa 2011.

 

Not as mind-boggling as my imagined talks with a Victorian chimney sweep about Cosmic Background Radiation,

but I guess there are worse things you could do with a time machine.

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Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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My personal feeling is that it could be confusing to have two versions floating around. That and there being so much left to do on the latest version.

I agree. Several versions would only confuse new players! I would rather suggest to remove all old version from there to unify the player base...

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Golden TDM releases:

 

1.05, 1.07, 2.03, 2.05, and 2.07

 

 

1.01 was a fixed 1.0 but it is every bit as cantankerous as 1.02. The only thing to say for it is that it doesn't have the mousewheel arrow selector bug from 1.02.

 

1.03 was an "iconic release" but 1.04 and 1.05 fixed all the issues it introduced.

 

Likewise, it took until 2.02 to fully fix "2.0 Standalone" but if you're gonna start with a 2.x version it might as well be 2.03.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Of course it's up to you how you want to spend your time, but this sounds like a monumental waste of effort.

 

If there are problems with the latest version these should be fixed in the latest version, not worked around by back-porting particular features to older versions that require the installation of commercial Doom 3.

 

As for appeasing ModDB — who gives a shit?

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I know the feeling but I'm also of the opinion that this will cause confusion to players, unless you find a way to really separate the two, but even so, i'm sure some people will wrongly assume TDM, latest official version will require Doom 3, just because one "new" version outhere requires it and misinformation spreads fast in this day and age.

 

Also what about missions? Will mission makers be able to port their latest ones to "The Dark Mod 1.07 Gold Edition"? Will they have to bug/play test in two different versions of TDM? Will the TDM team have to support bug reports from two TDM versions? etc.

 

This came from the necessity to appease the MODDB people, because TDM is not technically a mod anymore? If so, why care about that? I would not. Bring it to IndieDB or perhaps is time to make a forum on the official site?

 

Many important questions arise from this idea and i'm not sure this is really worth it but you are the one doing this, so if you want it and the rest of the team doesn't care, go for it.

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Also what about missions? Will mission makers be able to port their latest ones to "The Dark Mod 1.07 Gold Edition"? Will they have to bug/play test in two different versions of TDM? Will the TDM team have to support bug reports from two TDM versions? etc.

This is a very strong point.

Missions sometimes get converted to become compatible with new TDM version.

As far as I understand, old versions are not saved.

So while you can install TDM 1.07 and run it, it may easily turn out that half of the missions don't work well.

Moreover, all those missing sounds can easily be caused by moving various assets to newer places.

This point destroys the core idea of having major historical TDM versions available.

While I don't want to have anything like 1.07 gold, for the fun of it I guess you have to simply install MSVC 2008 (did it work on express version?) and it will build itself easily.
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Regarding IndieDB...

 

I did try to migrate TDM to that after the 2.0 release but apparently I did not have the authority to make that change

so it never fully completed. The IndieDB link to TDM redirects to the Moddb version.

 

I know it's not quite "worth it" as a project to entertain the Moddb crowd, I mostly added that as a justification for my crazy

desire to compare back-ported changes in the mod version to our modern build.

 

Hell, the idea of using old TDM to play old non-standalone missions is even dubious.

 

For example, these missions appear to be perfectly playable in 2.07:

 

Return to the City v1 (missing one particle effect? big whoop?... still slow as hell though)

Dragon's Claw (better in 2.07... more performance)

Winter Harvest v2

Yan's Test (better in 2.07... the missing enhanced ambient stages in some textures are now handled by normal ambient lighting)

 

With regard to MSVC 2008 Express...

 

I think I recall that the express version doesn't include MFC and that was needed to compile but I may be confusing this with

Standalone where many came out of the woodwork to complain about the MFC requirement for Tools.

 

I guess there's no harm in trying.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I mean it's better than spending your free time selling your body for crack money...

You gotta do what makes you happy.

 

I'd personally like to see more outright forks into different gameplay, like a a cyberpunk version (actually being worked on) and mutliplayer ... Well those are the two big ones, but I've also thought about a parkour version, a more outright RPG version... I have a lengthy list somewhere, actually. I'm not one to ever lecture people on what they should work on though.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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