As of October 17th. 2024, 15 years have passed since the TDM 1.0 release!
In that time, we evolved to most or all of the features that players were asking for since the concept of TDM was first mooted in the TTLG forums in late 2004. Campaign Support, Soft Shadows, EFX Reverb, Multi-Core Rendering, Uncapped FPS, Ambient Occlusion, Subtitles, are among the roster of perennial requested things that have been brought to life by the development team in addition to the core Thief 1 \ 2 game-play items like the Lightgem, Rope Arrows, Swim-able water, lock-picking and ( of course ) advanced AI enemies.
To commemorate this occasion, please join us in celebrating the Release of 5 missions for our 15th Anniversary Contest!
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The Imperial Sword
Bikerdude was encouraged to reclaim an abandoned version of his older mission and rework it into a new one. Now the formerly lost work is a glorious new experience with scripted dialog, special events, and a decayed imperial cityscape!
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The Wizard’s Treasure
TheBigH has made yet another bite-sized mission with a focus on quality game-play and challenge. The mission is extra impressive for the scope and visuals achieved since his decision to join the contest was fairly late compared to other entrants.
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You Only Fly Thrice
DeTeEff has continued his progression of high quality and complex releases. Another relative late comer to the contest, this mission is a tour-de-force of excellent game-play ideas and is quite handsome with excellent volumetric lighting and modular asset usage.
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Volta 3: Gemcutter
Kingsal has decided to release his long awaited Volta Series sequel to be included in the contest. DO NOT MISS THIS MISSION!
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Pinnacle: A Test of Talents
UncertainTitle and TwilitWitch decided to risk their first mission release to be included in the contest roster. The use of both modular assets and many custom models give this mission a familiar yet refreshing visual appeal.
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Please join the celebration and vote in the forum threads for each respective mission based on their contest criteria
( Game-play, Story, Visuals ).
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The Dark Mod 2.13 “Developer Build”
The Dark Mod 2.13 is still a few months away from release but we wanted to highlight the fact that a few more of the long requested changes have been added in the upcoming release!
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Parallax Occlusion Mapping!
In the above video, you can see a that TDM has finally incorporated the long requested effect. This wont be applied to all textures since there may be some problems with visual anomalies and performance but we are already preparing for a future where lots of textures use this new and more three dimensional surface effect.
Better AI sight!
While the AI have always been good at seeing the player due to the lightgem ( sometimes “too good” so we had to nerf their sight ), AI have had various challenges seeing things like bodies, missing objects, opened doors, weapons, blood, etc. This is because it is not practical to give all entities \ objects their own lightgem. Instead we have used very simple math to represent lights which don’t match shadow and light textures. In 2.13 a new sampling approach aims to improve this so that AI can better see ( or not see ) items and bodies in a way that better matches the actual lighting in the mission.
Mission Search!
There is now a search window where you can specify the mission author or title to help you find your preferred mission rather than scrolling through over 170 missions. You can also change how mission titles are rendered with either the original title or the title with prefix words like “A, The” moved to the end.
Improved Training Mission!
The Training Mission has been upgraded to include a Vine Arrow tutorial, a Slow Match tutorial, EFX Reverb, Volumetric Lights, and some performance optimizations!
Translation Packs!
Between TDM 1.06 and 2.0 Tels and the translating community started translating many missions but these translations required that the original mission be altered in a way that made it harder for the mission authors to revise. The meant that translation packs were in limbo being hosted by 3rd party sites \ forums along with their orphaned old missions. The translators over at the Darkfate forums came up with an solution by including not only the translation strings in the translation pack but also the altered map files, GUI defs, etc that had translation work done to them. This would leave the original mission untouched but allow translation packs to override some parts. We have gone through the old archives of these translations and have reworked them to work with the latest version of TDM (and the associated missions). Most of the translations are Russian ( due to the continued work of the Darkfate people ) but many of the early TDM missions also have German, Italian, French, etc translations too.
Subtitles!
Datiswous has been creating story subtitles for many of the existing missions in the TDM mission database. Most authors have incorporated these into their official releases, otherwise players can still add them to the FM folder.
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Hidden Hands: Blood and Metal Campaign
Just before the 15th anniversary entries were starting to arrive, JackFarmer released an enormous 5 mission campaign that continues his well regarded “Hidden Hands” series!