Cryengine is Free...

[chakkman]

The OP obviously knows of some super secret conversion tools which do the job for him. 

Edited December 9, 2025 by chakkman

[datiswous]

I just remembered I was impressed by the dynamic lighting in Stalker at the time and just saw there's the open source OpenXRay engine. Made for modding. I guess it's kind of off topic, but I just wanted to mention it.

[TheUnbeholden]

On 11/30/2025 at 3:41 AM, datiswous said:

Personally I think most of the necessary improvements can probably already been done inside TDM.

• Better models
• Better animation
• Better textures
• Better and more sounds
• More voices from more voice actors
• Better looking (GUI) dialogs
• More and better documentation
• Better and more tools (for example a graphical editor for editing GUI files)

 

Totally right. I'd love to see this all improved over the next few years.

[The Black Arrow]

On 12/10/2025 at 1:29 AM, datiswous said:

I just remembered I was impressed by the dynamic lighting in Stalker at the time and just saw there's the open source OpenXRay engine. Made for modding. I guess it's kind of off topic, but I just wanted to mention it.

Actually, I know a friend who is into it and...He has learned that X-Ray was NEVER meant to be open source, it was a leak, an old leak, and those who are doing OpenXRay are technically illegally using an engine, this was news like a year ago or so.

Still, with the whole legal dilemma outside...X-Ray is a great engine, but I don't think it will be good for The Dark Mod whatsoever, the architecture is old, only arguably a bit more modern than Id Engine.

So, theoretically speaking, I can't imagine a Thief-inspired game running on X-Ray...

[chakkman]

Doesn't surprise me. There are loads of such cases these days. People just pretending that it's free while it isn't. I don't even think they do that on purpose. This kind of "living in a dream world" is concerningly common nowadays.

Of course, often paired with the moral high stance, acting like "Uh, the big corporation do nothing but rip us off anyway, so, we deserve to have everything for free anyway!".

Edited December 23, 2025 by chakkman

[datiswous]

Ah ok. I heard a similar story about the "open source" Lithtech engine

https://github.com/jsj2008/lithtech

That it was leaked but the authors don't care.

Edited December 24, 2025 by datiswous

[CarmackianEmbyronicAGI]

On 12/9/2025 at 3:50 PM, demagogue said:

Yeah, we get this kind of post every few years, about porting to whatever shiny new other engine is out there. For reasons already discussed, "porting" isn't even a good term for it, since you'd just be making an entirely new game practically from scratch. Just look at the size of our source code. 

The reason we moved to the Doom3 engine it in the first place was only because Thief Deadly Shadows didn't allow us to properly make good FMs. But now we can make FMs and it's open source. If there is some cool tech that the CryEngine or Unreal engines have, it's gonna be about infinitely easier to just port that cool tech into the TDM engine than vice versa, and in fact we've done that for a lot of cool new tech like soft shadows and ambient occlusion and the like.

So that's really the way to go if you want to update the tech. And we're open source so you can do that. 

Anyway, all that said, one can still make a cool new TDM-inspired game in CryEngine, and I'd even encourage that to someone up to the challenge. For example I'd love to see a cyberpunk or modern stealth game, and that'd be good project for a new engine. 

I just think if they're making an entirely new game already, why not just make an entirely new game.

Well one thing that might be cool is if someone made a game in another engine that could parse a TDM .pk4 file and open up as a map in itself. So then once you've made it, it already as all of our maps ready to play in it. I have an idea that that might not work well though, especially for custom things people put in the map. Also again, we can already play those maps now. If you're going to all that effort, let's have a new cool game with new cool maps! 

Hypothetically if Ray casting was used to bake efficiency into the brushwork itself it would make the penalty of a forward renderers lighting under id Tech 4 more agreeable.

If Gemini AI is even half right this state of content efficiency would make id Tech 4 10-20 times more efficient per watt than Unreal Engine 5.

For mobile platforms you are sitting on one of the best game engines on Earth. Of course I've yet to find a mapper that's willing to spend 3 to 4 years refactoring an entire commercial products slop. From the 13 objects overlapping in space, to decals hidden behind walls, entire rooms unused, brush faces behind other brushes. 

I'm the first. The ability to automate what I've done even just 90% would take the weaknesses of id Tech 4 and turn them into strengths.

There is nothing faster than precomputation. If you can reverse engineer the flexibility of modern game engines without the per frame overhead it's going to curbstomp Unreal Engine 6 in raw efficiency.

You also would be taking the former Chief Technical Officer of Metas core design and making it achieve what hasn't yet by industry. They probably would be knocking at your door with offers to commercialize or at minimum rush to replicate your work. They are all in in Alternate Reality Virtual Reality. Too bad their 5% GPU utilization offended one of their best employees. It's because thermal throttling boost behavior modern game engine inefficiencies and battery life. 

The Dark Mod could be a technology demonstrator that can do things modern game engines super can't.

My texture pack 60GB+ (Prey 2006 Remake) is entirely custom. 5120x5120, 7168x7168, 9216x9216, 10,240x10240 and beyond. My texel resolution is extremely uniform and optimized at point blank mip map 0 for human vision. So it's literally a 2002 game engine beating id Tech 8 in asset resolution. Texture streaming doesn't like custom resolutions. Nor do development teams. It's just another way id Tech 4 is superior to modern game engines in a not abstract way.

The general public is not aware of how inefficient modern game engines are or how much technical debt they tolerate. It's a more interesting topic to an engineer than a entertainment seeking random individual admittedly. There are inherent advantages to the older methods that are incredibly underappreciated. If I can motivate some of the software engineers to develop this capability that would be rather useful. Especially since it's already in part been done to bake shadows into Doom 3. Which in part defeat the purpose of unified lighting. But it's an existence proof.

If you would like to see my 60GB file in its development state that can be arranged. But you also better have 24GBs of video memory. 

Most people will opt for lower resolution packs when generated by my Python scripts. The ability to hit per pixel 4k point blank is not just overkill. It's a measuring rubric.

 

Edited December 31, 2025 by CarmackianEmbyronicAGI

[demagogue]

It's funny, I was just watching this video ("How Modern Game Engines Degraded — And Who’s to Blame?") and then I saw this post. That's some cosmic timing. But anyway, what you're saying is making sense.

It's not even that surprising. Anybody working with Unreal 5 that was working with these old engines back in the day can see the differences in optimization smacking them in the face. 

For the record, the team has done serious optimization work compared to what we started with, and the examples you mention are mapper optimizations, not engine. The team is pretty small, and I don't know if they have ambitions to take the engine other places.

But anyway the engine is under GPL3 and nothing it stopping people from taking it and running with it. And people have. Blendo's game Skin Deep uses it, or a version of it (as I understand it; we're in the credits), and you can find people posting about their own projects on it. I think people would encourage and help out any big project doing the kinds of things you're talking about. Like most everything, it mostly comes down to who's gonna be a champion for it. 

Edit: Another funny coincidence, that video I posted at the top is talking about Cryengine as its example of the better optimized older engine, which is the engine that started this thread. 

[datiswous]

On 1/1/2026 at 12:29 AM, CarmackianEmbyronicAGI said:

My texture pack 60GB+ (Prey 2006 Remake)

When do you upload it too Moddb? 

[Filizitas]

I don't know why this Event is now discussed so heavily when we literally have Unreal Engine and Godot.
Look i am a fan of cryengine too, from the far cry days actually. And even i realize that we have Unreal Engine as replacement now.

[wesp5]

11 hours ago, demagogue said:

Another funny coincidence, that video I posted at the top is talking about Cryengine as its example of the better optimized older engine, which is the engine that started this thread. 

I am surprised by this, because at the time of release the Cryengine wouldn't run on systems with slow GPUs while the idTech engine was much better optimized and would run flawlessly.

[chakkman]

6 hours ago, Filizitas said:

I don't know why this Event is now discussed so heavily when we literally have Unreal Engine and Godot.
Look i am a fan of cryengine too, from the far cry days actually. And even i realize that we have Unreal Engine as replacement now.

Or Unity.

But, again, pretty unrealistic to think that you can port TDM to another engine in no time.

[Filizitas]

My point however is the audacity. That user didnt came here for constructive chatter. This entire thing was just written to bash unreal once again...

Its especially annoying because people keep trying to commercialize TDM... Give it up man. Its been 16 years. Keep this thing in community hands. TDM needs to stay standalone!

[HMart]

3 hours ago, Filizitas said:

...

Its especially annoying because people keep trying to commercialize TDM... Give it up man. Its been 16 years. Keep this thing in community hands. TDM needs to stay standalone!

Anyone brave enough can try but TDM license forbids commercialization.  Also the moment that happen, it would be sued by the current Thief IP holders and taken down very fast, why? Because this game is obviously very derivative of Thief.

IMO the only reason that has not happen already, is not the goodness of the Thief IP holders hearts, is the fact this game uses different names and lore from Thief, is totally free and very important the makers of it and the people working on it, are not getting money from any other source, like Patreon for example. So probably falls into some safe "fair use" territory.  

[Bikerdude]

Well Im gonna give CE a spin and see what's involved. The last time I tried playing with a different engine/editor was TDS and that lasted all of 5 seconds as it was so different to TDM/DR.

[Filizitas]

1 hour ago, Bikerdude said:

Well Im gonna give CE a spin and see what's involved. The last time I tried playing with a different engine/editor was TDS and that lasted all of 5 seconds as it was so different to TDM/DR.

https://scytheeditor.com

[JackFarmer]

11 hours ago, Filizitas said:

https://scytheeditor.com

 

Wow. However...what he did in the first 12 minutes I can do in DR in two minutes!  Pretty impressive, how fast one can create hallways/recess points and he is only working in 3D view. Grid snapping seems to be no issue here.

@HMart: They talk about "meshes" in this video the whole time. Theses meshes (what are they? 2D patches?) are the equivalent to DR brushes? Apparently, portalling is no thing here?  Sorry for the dumb questions, apart from DM mapping I have zero experience with other engines.

 

 

[Filizitas]

I hope to one day have the ability to try scythe out. It looks pretty hammered!
 

 

Edited January 6 by Filizitas

[datiswous]

21 minutes ago, JackFarmer said:

Wow. However...what he did in the first 12 minutes I can do in DR in two minutes!

I think there's only the make-room method (second method, but simpler) in DR, or am I mistaken?

 

I heard with Godot it's actually possible to use DR to build for/with it.

[Bikerdude]

On 1/5/2026 at 9:30 PM, Bikerdude said:

Well Im gonna give CE a spin and see what's involved. The last time I tried playing with a different engine/editor was TDS and that lasted all of 5 seconds as it was so different to TDM/DR.

Welp scratch that, there is a hard requirement to link either my Github or discord accounts to the CryekCE website. This means the engine isn't really/fully free imho and that there are still some licensing restrictions.

As I don't link online accounts for ANY reason, this is going to be a hard pass for me.

Edited January 7 by Bikerdude

[chakkman]

23 hours ago, Filizitas said:

My point however is the audacity. That user didnt came here for constructive chatter. This entire thing was just written to bash unreal once again...

I rather had the feeling that it's about ego and attention. Not in the world would I have thought that the OP or his alias above would really want to tackle such a MASSIVE task.

[chakkman]

1 minute ago, Bikerdude said:

Welp scratch that, there is a hard requirement to link either my Github or discord accounts to the CryekCE website/project. This means the engine isn't really free and there are still some licensing restrictions. As I don't link online accounts for ANy reason this is going to be a hard pass for me.

Good call anyway. If anything, I'd try Unreal Engine. Comparatively, nobody uses CryEngine.

[HMart]

2 hours ago, JackFarmer said:

...

@HMart: They talk about "meshes" in this video the whole time. Theses meshes (what are they? 2D patches?) are the equivalent to DR brushes? Apparently, portalling is no thing here?  Sorry for the dumb questions, apart from DM mapping I have zero experience with other engines.

 

 

I didn't saw the video so I'm not sure, but normal mesh's in pretty much all engines I've used, are those imported from 3D tools like Blender, while the own engine geometry was called "primitives" or as you know them here brush's. 

Afaik the diference between a mesh and a brush, is that the former comes already pre "baked"/compiled, meaning they come already made up of triangles, while a brush is just a bunch of mathematical planes that are then baked into real triangles at level compile time (dmap in TDM).

Hope this makes things more clear. 

[HMart]

1 hour ago, chakkman said:

Good call anyway. If anything, I'd try Unreal Engine. Comparatively, nobody uses CryEngine.

Don't Unreal Engine also need a account to use? The last time I tried to use it I need one to download it. Plus afaik you still need to pay Epic if your games gets profits above a certain level. 

IMO to anyone wanting a totally free, totally open source, no accounts needed and with good enough tools, Godot is a good choice. 

[JackFarmer]

1 hour ago, HMart said:

Don't Unreal Engine also need a account to use? The last time I tried to use it I need one to download it. Plus afaik you still need to pay Epic if your games gets profits above a certain level. 

IMO to anyone wanting a totally free, totally open source, no accounts needed and with good enough tools, Godot is a good choice. 

Hm...please check the video link, when you have the time. It looks as if they drag "patches" without vertices around. And they call it meshes. It seems to work like brushes, but they are...flat. Don't know how to describe it in a better way. And apparently, one does not need portals or similar things. Seems very different here from idTech 4.