To celebrate our 15th year, we are holding a fan mission contest!
The Dark Mod project trundles onward for it’s 15th year in a row. In that time we have improved our game engine in countless ways and have grown to over 170 missions!
To celebrate our perseverance and the years of improvements to come, we are hosting a contest to mark 15 years since the 1.0 release!
Now is your time to demonstrate the mission design that best exemplifies your personal style and capabilities! Please consider entering this event!
Unlike most recent contests, there is no defined theme and we are simply going to score based on our standard metrics of Story, Gameplay, and Visuals with our standard weighted scoring:
Full Weighted Score (FWS) = (Gameplay score*3 + Visual score*2 + Story score) / TMP
Contest Submissions should be provided before October 16th so that players can start playing and celebrating on the 17th!
The players have been keen to relay that they would like really creative missions so it may be worthwhile to examine our “Community Unusual Contest” to get an idea about the wild range of possibilities we offer to designers.
Also, since the contest submission is in October, there will probably be an increased desire for Horror themes.
The Dark Mod 2.12 was just released so including new 2.12 features is strongly encouraged.
Finally, it might be nice if authors name their protagonist Corbin to match the included missions.
( None of the above suggestions are requirements for the submissions. )
Please visit the Fan Mission Forum to declare your intention to join and to discuss anything related to the contest. Thank you!
The Dark Mod 2.12 is a major step forward for mission designers!
The culling system has been extensively overhauled to ensure that your CPU and GPU are not wasting resources rendering unseen geometry, lights, and shadows. Some of our best map optimization experts have achieved similar performance gains to what this new culling system does but it is a rare skill and we have even managed to improve performance on missions that were generally regarded as “well optimized”. Mission authors both new and old can follow standard mapping practices with no need to dive deep into sophisticated optimization techniques even for some pretty challenging scenarios such as wide open areas and long views. Players will immediately notice many missions that have made their system struggle with FPS now may be running much more smoothly!
Smoother controls for players!
Also during the 2.12 development cycle, work has been done to make controls more seamless and accessible. Frob can now use hold or click actions to use items. Once you get used to the mechanic, it will be hard to go back to using a separate “use key”. Mantling is now smoother, faster, and less prone to cause the player to clip through geometry. Leaning is now more subtle and less prone to cause motion sickness. To reduce the tedium of shuffling knocked out AI around to search for loot, you can now configure TDM to automatically loot any frobbed AI.
A special thanks must go out to community member Geep!
Over the course of 2.12 development, Geep has created Subtitles for nearly all AI barks along with developing testing tools and procedures for this gargantuan task! You can see these changes in action by changing the Subtitles setting to “On” ( rather than “Story” ) on the Audio settings page. Geep also provided substantial feedback for our GUI and Subtitle design process and edited font data to improve text quality overall.
Turrets are now natively supported in The Dark Mod and can paired with Security Cameras!
Datiswous has complimented the massive work by Geep to create AI bark subtitles by creating mission story subtitles for a large number of missions. Thank you!
Finally, the nasty 2.11 bug that caused AI to allow arrows to pass through them at certain angles was fixed by Joebarnin! Your assassin style play-throughs should be far less frustrating.
To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder.
Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.12, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.12 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.12. Use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates
