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You can ask people to test your mission here, but the beta tresting should be in this other section: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/59-tdm-mission-beta-testing/ Read also: I think it's so that there are no spoilers in view for new regular players.

I can give it a spin. Like @datiswous says though it's best to create a thread in the beta test forum so we can provide feedback. Discord is another option if you use that. Or do both. EDIT: I've just sent you a PM instead.

I'm happy to announce the release of my third FM: Year of the Rat. This is my first city hub map, focused primarily on story characters and environment. It's my most complex project to date, taking its fair share of effort to make which was a good learning experience. As an experiment I opted to use no scripts and rely solely on the default entities, as well as no custom assets apart from the map and splash screen hence the small pk4. It features a few special elements, such as factions that are hostile only when the player commits crime or a decoder lockpick used to open electronic doors. The beta testing thread can be found here, thank you everyone who helped find the most obvious problems. You play as a famous thief nicknamed Black Jack: A man who's pulled many crazy jobs in his life, only to be hired for an absurd and insulting task by an anonymous employer. The objective is pretty straightforward: Be kind to the mice and feed them some cheese! Your silly quest takes you to the Lantern Light district during the Lunar New Year celebration, a place where gangs and corrupt nobles do their dirty deeds together. What ulterior motives and unexpected twists could your adventure entail? While the most obvious problems were patched during beta testing, some issues can't be easily resolved due to the complexity of the entity setup and objectives, meaning you may encounter a few inconsistencies. Most notably surrounding AI, which may float above chairs and not react to alerts or oppositely send the whole map into a panic: This is mostly due to how the engine handles AI and alarms. The map is small since I wanted to add more detail without having to work on large areas, as such some places can feel cramped while the skybox may be visible up close. I'll be busy so further updates are unlikely unless I decide to add new content later... you're welcome to report any issues you encounter, but keep in mind that if something wasn't fixed it's likely known but difficult to address or due to engine functionality. Spoilers for objectives and secrets as follows: Download 1.2: Google Drive, Mega. Screenshots with minor spoilers for the various areas:

This looks really cool, amazing work in my opinion: https://www.moddb.com/mods/thieves-guild I'm surprised that it flew completely under the radar. I hadn't heard about it until today - just by coincidence I saw it on the TTLG Discord. From the footage available I would say, a Thief game similar to Deadly Shadows created with the original Unreal Engine. Apparently, the base game is available on GOG, however, I cannot find it there. Plus, according to ProtonDB not fully functional on Linux systems. EDIT: Here is a game play trailer from 8+ years ago (the development of the game took quite some time), there seem to be RPG elements as well: Edit 2: This seems to be a project our forum member @Jetrellis heavily involved in. Congratulations on the release! You have been working 10+ years on this? Truly a superhuman effort!

I kind of miss our old status-bar on the right, where you could casually share what's on your mind or what is happening in your life right now. So, I figured, let's just start a thread for that. Let's get this started...

. THIEF'S DEN! Thief's Den is a re-release of the first Dark Mod tiny demo mission converted by greebo to work with the main Dark Mod release. Steal back your loot and incriminate the thief who double-crossed you! This was the first of the Thief's Den series in which you play Farrell. Read the notes below while you ... DOWNLOAD HERE. (3MB) Play time maybe 30 minutes to an hour first time. This FM needs Dark Mod Update 1.02 or later. This version has been modified to work with the Dark Mod released assets but is still essentially the same. The thief and thug models are updated and there is extra loot to find. IMPORTANT: If you already have the original stand-alone demo version of Thief's Den installed in the same Doom 3 installation then you must delete or move away the folders: doom3\thiefs_den and doom3\darkmod\fms\thiefs_den BEFORE you install this re-release. The original is still available as a stand-alone demo (needs Doom 3 but does not need Dark Mod installing) from http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Thief%27s_Den

I think we should create a thread where you can put requests and suggestions for Orbweaver. This thread should be NOT a discussion thread. If you want to discuss a proposal, create a specific thread for it. I want it to be only for collecting proposals, so we have an overview of what people might want to have. I guess this might also help Orb to decide what he should focus on once he gets productive. BTW: I really appreciate your effort, because we can really use this. So my personal wishlist proposal is that I would like to see a group handler. Similar like in Blender, where you can select several objects and put it in a group. When you select one or more of these groups, the objects are visible. If the group is not selected, it's invisible. In Blender and other 3D apps this is called layers (forgot the name before so I had to look it up).

I've read about this before here on the forums, even when the contest had just recently concluded, but reading about it in greater detail years later is certainly interesting. Thank you. It's a pity that it was mostly the marketing people who were involved on the Square Enix side, as I had the impression it was also the devs at EM that had played Requiem and all the other submitted missions and really liked them. I suppose it was as well, but the TDM team mostly heard from the marketing people. Yes, I wanted to note that as well. I even remember how the people over here in the TDM forums were sort of laughing at the fact that the results of the contest were favourable to TDM and had, in a sense, "proven" TDM as a worthy freeware successor to the Thief IP, with all the modding and mapping tools at one's disposal and so on, whereas Thief 4 or Thi4f or whatever Square Enix were calling it at that point, offered no such possibilities. The entire contest, while no doubt declared in good will and something I actually appreciated seeing, was such a self-own for Square Enix, ultimately to the detriment of them trying to bring back and market the reboot of an older IP. Even if Thief 2014 was a terrific reboot (which I doubt it would ever be), it would still have been hampered by people learning about modding being impossible, and looking to the trilogy and to TDM instead, to make new Thief-style stealth gaming content. Still, I appreciate they recognized the quality's of Moonbo's Requiem FM. Given many retrospectives I've seen over the years, gradually, on the 2014 Thief reboot attempt, one thing a surprising amount of them shared was noting how the game didn't feel cohesive in concept and execution, at any point. Not only not to the same level as the Thief trilogy, but also not even at the level when you consider it as an individual game, a new game on its own. Errant Signal, who's not some deep Thief fan, replayed the older games and played the reboot back when it came out, and made this exact observation already a decade ago. The reboot was just all over the place, in every department, felt clearly unfinished or rushed, and the most interesting story would be the behind the scenes at Eidos Montreal, on how mismanaged the entire project became over the course of several years. I think it's telling that, while even heavily discounted on GOG.com, Thief 2014 hasn't been selling well there, nor attracting much interest, whereas the original trilogy sells for figurative (and sometimes literal) cents on that same site - you can buy the whole trilogy for a smaller price than the reboot, which is kind of hilarious - and continues to have great sales and is considered one of the all-time bestsellers. Same here. I concur with demagogue that the actual Eidos Montreal devs behind Thief 2014, at least those who cared enough to make it at least somewhat presentable and playable - even if the actual game directors never got their act together and never decided on a consistent design apporach - those would have been much more interesting to be in contact with, even regarding the fan mission contest. The sad truth of the matter is that all too many big publishers these days, especially those formed through larger mergers, like the Eidos buyout by Square Enix, are often marketing-first, interest in developers, and veteran players and new players alike, second. I still remember the sheer amount of money spent on pointless external marketing for Thief 2014, all the while that reboot attempt never really coalesced into anything that felt consistent (rather than throwing everything at the wall, in a panic, hoping something would stick), and was also plagued by all manner of technical issues. Just an overall embarassment, and I'm not surprised that even very lenient-leaning game retrospectives of that reboot attempt. The fact that the Thief IP has been sold away to Nordic Games and Embracer in more recent years, with Square Enix no longer caring about it and other older game IPs, also says a lot. Given the Embracer Group's own woes and bad decisions, I'm not sure any new development team will ever attempt another installment of Thief, even if it was a second reboot attempt.

Since we have a Random Video of the Day thread, it seems like this is fair. Show us any article you find interesting, or funny, or surprising, or whatever else is out of the ordinary. I'll begin: http://www.dailytech...rticle33998.htm I never imagined people pissing in an elevator. Of all the strange ideas I've had in my life, that was never one of them. Personally, I suspect the thug. ... and this comment cracked me up. "Why in the world would someone pee in an elevator? Also, when the system catches someone, they don't have to call the police. All they have to do is lock the elevator doors, engage the heaters and shaking motors, and get paid ad money on YouTube for the footage. "

been a long time since I visited this thread, my life came to a fork in da road my heartfelt condolences on your loss, revelator

Back in the day, Tels managed a squad of volunteer translators for TDM. I am not Tels, and could never do that. Nowadays, language translation using AI, either traditional machine learning (ML) models or large language models (LLMs), is common and increasingly fluent. It is often used as an adjunct to speed the work of professional human translators. By itself, AI translation can be imperfect but usually sufficient. Can this "sufficient" approach be used for TDM, to expedite translations? Let's see. I gave some initial thought to a bulk-translation daemon that might range across FMs and fill in all missing translations, without necessarily involving mappers. In the future, possibly AI could tackle that whole enchilada. I was at first visualizing something more modest: a backbone in a standard programming language (I sketched out C++ and C# projects, but lots of other possibilities) that would make calls to an API (I looked at those of Google Translate and ChatGPT). However, I changed focus due to certain concerns... Different FMs, and subsets with each FM, would likely have far better translations if they were properly grouped, ordered, and translated separately, with an appropriate context (e.g., phrase engineering) added. The FM's mapper is best placed to provide this grouping and context. I'll detail what I mean in the next few posts. The mapper would not be expected to know any TDM-supported languages besides English. Instead, each translated phrase could be back-translated to English and examined. Is the "round-trip" meaning OK, even if the English words have changed? Problematic translations could have their context tweaked and rerun. Many AI systems, particularly for API access, require a billing commitment (e.g., credit card). For a professional translator, this is no problem, and subscriptions allow access to more (and putatively better) models and higher quotas. This seems less appealing for TDM. A few paid AI systems have a no-subscription, pay-as-you-go account tier. The cost per translate is typically pennies. But it does introduce quota- and expense-management, and may exclude API usage. Access via API requires an API key (or at the higher end more elaborate security regime), with attendant key-security headaches. Which AI model is thought "best" for translation? Doesn't matter too much, because we can't afford the best. Furthermore, there's endless churn among AI models, with antidotal reports that a given model fluctuates in quality over time, and successor models can be worse than their predecessors. So, with these concerns in mind, I looked for public web-based AI sites that require no billing and provide low-quota but adequate AI. The mapper would enter and retrieve data manually. I will focus on ChatGPT in this exploration, after a quick preliminary test confirmed some promise. Also, as this exploration proceeds, I hope to propose changes to TDM to make it more viable for "sufficient" quality machine translation. Problem areas are incomplete fonts, space-constraints, and layout issues for translated strings. My proposals will likely surface as separate forum threads. That's enough for now. I'll be trying for 1 or 2 substantive posts per week, as I tackle a particular FM.

Hello Everyone! I've been a fan of the TDM community for some time now. Over the last year or so, I've been chipping away at an FM of my own and it's finally ready for release. Volta 1 : The Stone Volta and the Stone is a fairly large Thief-style mission (Lord Bafford's Manor). It is the first mission of a campaign that follows the Thief and his encounter with an archaic and powerful force. The campaign will span from robbing noble houses to being hunted by malevolent creatures from beyond the Veil. The emphasis is on creating a mood and tone that will hopefully feel familiar to fans of The Dark Mod and the original Thief games. Available through in-game downloader. Or Download here. A few notes Dark Mod v2.8 Required Normal difficulty is intended for new players. Hard/ Expert for most of the TDM community 2+ Hours of gameplay Features lots of custom art/ sounds/ and intro video. If you are stuck or need help: Please PM me or post spoiler free in this thread. I will make an FAQ with hints as they come up! Thanks: Bikerdude, Oldjim, Taquito, Melan, and Goldwell for beta testing. Andrew Bartmess for the wonderful narrator vocals. (v1.2) Special thanks: to FinalBoss and Tins for early alpha testing. I hope you enjoy it!

Yes, I know. I've included some track selections from FMA in the music resource thread. The one downside is that some of the authors have since pulled their music from there or it's gone due to different causes, so not all the links I originally included still work. It can be a bit of a hassle for me to regularly update all the links to various free music databases. Even so, thank you.

MirceaKitsune, that is a wonderful mission. So much work! Unfortunately I am missing one slice of cheese (the one in the Tavern got lost apparently) so I have to start over again to see the actual misson ending. Nonetheless, great mission.

I was cautious because I didn't want it to be perceived that I was using The Dark Mod Forums to promote my mod but I get your point - we're all in this together. Over the years we've had a few different team members, but for the past few months it's mostly been just me and one other person. The Thieves Guild project started a long time ago, when Rune was still popular. We liked Thief and we also liked Rune so we combined the two games together. We incorporated all of the cloak & dagger elements from Thief but we also wanted our thief to be able to fight like a Viking. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a thief/stealth game. Through the 20 or so missions, we tell a story about a thief working for the local thieves' guild, operating within a dark and corrupt city. Under the cover of night, you are assigned a series of dangerous missions - success is rewarded with valuable items, increased wealth, and greater prestige from within the guild. To survive, you must move silently through shadowed alleyways, scale heavily guarded buildings, bypass deadly traps, and pick stubborn locks - all while avoiding detection by the city watch and roaming night patrols. One misstep can mean capture, failure, or worse. In this city, survival belongs to those who remain unseen. Thieves Guild was designed to be played on a computer using a keyboard and mouse. Rune uses the Unreal Engine 1. I'm glad you liked what you saw in "The Dark Side Edition Trailer". This video is a walk-through of The Training Mission.

For the people eager to play with the latest state of development, two things are provided: regular dev builds source code SVN repository Development builds are created once per a few weeks from the current trunk. They can be obtained via tdm_installer. Just run the installer, check "Get Custom Version" on the first page, then select proper version in "dev" folder on the second page. Name of any dev version looks like devXXXXX-YYYY, where XXXXX and YYYY are SVN revision numbers from which the build was created. The topmost version in the list is usually the most recent one. Note: unless otherwise specified, savegames are incompatible between any two versions of TDM! Programmers can obtain source code from SVN repository. Trunk can be checked out from here: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/ SVN root is: https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src Build instructions are provided inside repository. Note that while you can build executable from the SVN repository, TDM installation of compatible version is required to run it. Official TDM releases are compatible with source code archives provided on the website, and also with corresponding release tags in SVN. A dev build is compatible with SVN trunk of revision YYYY, where YYYY is the second number in its version (as described above). If you only want to experiment with the latest trunk, using the latest dev build gives you the maximum chance of success. P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support. Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

Completed in 18:46, 913/1004 loot. Short, simple, nice work! I was particularly impressed by the architecture/brushwork in the crypt and cave areas. Lots of pretty angles and light rays filtering through windows and cave stalagcgtgctmites. Good use of the smoky particle effects, and a delicate touch on the ambient sounds made this a wonderful little bite-sized dark mod experience. Most of my criticisms/complaints can be boiled down to "well, its a speedbuild chumbucket, what were you expecting lol". It felt odd to spawn directly in the middle of a church, greeted by a hostile priest - a tiny outdoor section to at least break in through a window or something could have been nice. The one brown brick texture for all the church walls got a little dull. I also feel like there could have been a bit more buildup or tension heading into I ran into a couple tiny tech/polish issues - I was able to open the offetory box in the church from the opposite side of the wall, and I found a rat friend permanently stuck in some broken barrel geometry. I've attached screenshots of both of those issues with position data enabled. I think this is a 6.5 out of 10 for me in the scope of all the thief/dark mod missions I've played, and a nice 8 to 8.5 as a speedbuild mission.

Congrats on the release!!!! Nice work on The speedbuild

I like to talk about it, but yeah it's probably off topic to this thread to get into it. But yes, it has lots of great gameplay too, so I used the entirely wrong phrasing. For the record, maybe the way to better put it is that it's more cinematic, like with the mise en scene and plot flow design, it's telling a story, which I also like. But I also really like ones that are simulationist, like you're just dropped in an uncaring world that doesn't care where you go & isn't really telling a story, but it has things happening in it that you can observe. This is all nitpicking nuance though. I still agree it's objectively great and I was happy it won & got recognized for how great it is.

This is referring to TDM's collaboration with Square Enix North America at the time Eidos-Montréal was making the game Thief (Thief 4). SE held a contest of fan material. Basically they wanted to have a contest of fan missions for past "Thief" games and fan art. They did end up having a contest. There were a few TDM entries. Some of us on the team got a free copy of Thief 4 for "participating". Well you can see just from that set up that these were the marketing people that really had no idea what Thief really was, and they definitely weren't going to understand the relationship of TDM to Thief IP, although you could clearly tell the moment when the lawyers probably got involved and they changed the rules to be only Thief inspired and they really watered it down since the link to Thief IP itself was lost, and they couldn't be in any way linked to the TDM/idTech4 engine. It probably would have been great if it'd been the Eidos-Montréal devs we were working with, since those would have been actual gamers that understand the game & us, our kind of people. But it was the marketing people, the Square Enix NA marketing people at that, and they were just in an entirely different universe. I mean completely detached from the reality of this game that they're working on. They were clearly only interested in the business side and thought of fans as shallow entertainment consumers that they were trying to hype up, like we were the core of Thief 4's target audience. They had this really unreal positivity about this contest while being so clueless about what it was really about. Our communications with them were just bizarre and otherworldly. There's another story I can tell about working with a team of lawyers that were pro bono vetting our Version 2.0 release to make sure it cleared id's & Eidos's IP (technically I guess also the asset makers of the assets we were using to replace id's) when we went standalone, or anyway they gave us a memo of all the considerations to look out for in doing it. I made a thread about it, but practically I don't know if it changed that much of what we were doing (the problem kind of solves itself just by our gamers' intuition), and obviously we released it standalone and nothing happened, so it worked out. Actually that Square Enix contest did have one kind of positive result for us, which is we got language from them in writing that seemed to assume we were clear of any claim for Thief IP violations as far as they were concerned. I've kept that message on hand in case we ever do get pushback, but fortunately we never have. Edit: I'm looking back on this message and thinking about the NoClip documentary on the making of Disco Elysium, which is still coming out these days, and I recall that NoClip contacted us once about making a documentary on our making. Or somebody did anyway. But I think the inside story of the making of TDM would be super cool if anybody did decide to make it. There are so many interesting stories like this. Well I think they're interesting. Maybe one of us should make it.

So this online store I bought a pair of headphones from decided to gift me 12$ today. Since the voucher would expire in in two weeks unless used and I had nothing else to get, I decided to spend it on a 17$ gamepad so I'd have one of these as well. I understand they should work fine under Linux these days, plus it supports both dinput and xinput so I'm not concerned. I never played any FPS or most games using something other than the keyboard and mouse, this feels like an interesting opportunity to try it out. TDM is one of the games I might enjoy playing with such a thing, especially since it doesn't require super-fast reactions till I get used to it like a deathmatch shooter. So until the device arrives tomorrow, I figured I'd ask how well I can expect TDM to run on such a thing! Especially now that we have a new rendering and input management system for the upcoming TDM 2.10. There's a few things I wanted to know. One is if both looking around as well as movement using the finger pads is supported. I remember some games allowed walking more slowly if you only pushed the pad slightly; Does this mean it's possible to sneak by only moving the pad a bit, in a way that affects how much guards hear you? Otherwise I was curious if force feedback (vibration) is implemented and used. For TDM this mainly makes sense when you take damage, are in radius of a sound that has the shake effect, and other potential situations I might be missing now. Is gamepad vibration a feature in the engine at least?

I recently found this 2022 album of environmental sound ambience (no music) on Soundcloud, by an author going by the moniker of "Cyberwave Orchestra". It's likely not royalty-free and you have to buy it and such, but I think it might be useful for FM authors if they want a few more custom ambient soundscapes for their FMs. The tracks loop. Having listened to the album, I think the most useful for TDM FM purposes would be the sound ambience of outdoors nature ("Mountain Canyon", "From Dusk Till Dawn", "The Swamps at Night", the "Cursed Lands", "Cursed Lands 2" tracks), underground spaces ("Secret Cave 2"), maybe industrial ("The Great Mine" and "The Great Mine 2", I suppose), dungeon/prison spaces ("Dungeon of Sorrow", "Dungeon of Madness", "Chambers of Hell (No Boiling)", "Chambers of Hell 2") and some of the rural ambience (the "Fishing Village", "Fishing Village At Night" ambience tracks, "Summer Night Near The Village"). The tracks with more urban sound ambience aren't bad, but might not be quite what we need for most TDM mission night time town/city ambience. IMHO, they feel like mostly daytime ambience. The two "Port Town" and "Port Town (No Bells)" ambience tracks seem by far the best fit for town ambience of TDM. "Village on a Windy Day" could work for dusk and the early evening, but not night. "Onboard the Ship (No Voices)" might work for a ship docked in port at night time, but it might feel a bit loud to FM-builder tastes. I'd suggest lowering the volumes and doing similar tweaks.

I guess this is basic stuff for you talented model-boys but now I've trudged for several hours without results and from what I have read in several forums/threads, it's even not that trivial. Therefore I dare to start a thread... I've download some models from the web but these come in some new and fancy format; (FBX, USD etc) not exactly the old and brittle format that we use in TDM So to import these into DarkRadiant I need to convert these to lwo or ASE, right? How do people go about this? I have tried to: - install Blender 5.0 and added an ASE-exporter plugin. Blender actually puts out an ASE-file but as I try to open it in DR, the model is only showed as that checkerboard error-box. Do I need to tinker with the model in a text editor first? I read something about changing something about a BITMAP-line... - use an ancient version (7.0) version of Lightwave but that program cannot even open the files (Not surprising)...

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.