A new era in accurate AI Vision!

When id Software released the Doom 3 modding SDK, The Dark Mod team saw the potential for something more than a multi-player cops vs robbers game like Thievery UT. The sheer amount of access to essential game-play systems meant that a true Thief style experience could potentially be created. One of the first things the team did was to investigate how a light-gem system could be implemented. Having a good way for both the player and AI to know when the player is visible to others is a crucial part of the Thief experience so if we couldn’t build it then the dream of a Thief style experience was over. Fortunately, there were enough parts of the AI visual logic and more than a few stub pieces of the Render code that gave us the ability to build a robust system.

The downside of the light-gem system was performance. Even though we did our best to limit the viewport and resolution of the light-gem image captures, often the light-gem would cut FPS in half ( or less ). This was pretty painful, especially since most computers could just barely run vanilla Doom 3 at acceptable FPS. After this system was fully functional, other aspects of AI vision were investigated. Obviously, we could not afford to run the light-gem render for every object or body the AI might see so it was decided that the AI would do a more simplified light-gem calculation for things other than the player. This meant that ( to the AI visual scan ) all light volumes would be either cubes or pyramids with perfect exponential falloff. We would run a line-of-sight check to the objects then ( if it hit ) calculate the pixel brightness by the location of the spot in relation to the center of the light(s). This was far cheaper than rendering the whole scene but heavily impacted accuracy. Many solutions were proposed to improve things but a solution evaded us for years.

2.13 changes things! Now we have a stochastic sampler model that does regular measurements of the actual light volume pixels and builds a running average of how illuminated different entities are. The days of seeing knocked-out AI in the middle of a bright spotlight get ignored are over. Now all AI and loot entities (etc) essentially have their own light-gem and it performs excellently!

Magnificent Mission Management!

Daft Mugi has drastically improved the GUI menus for mission management. The Dark Mod mission list and in-game downloader now have a search filter window that follows modern conventions of reducing the listed items as each new letter eliminates a possible matching mission name. Both lists can be sorted by actual name ( The Rats Triumphant ) or Chicago Style ( Rats Triumphant, The ). Additional mission details ( readme data ) can now be scrolled so players can see more information about the mission without having to navigate to the darkmod/fms folders. The menus have also been tuned with smaller font sizes for more practical mission listing and have been hardened against buggy order of operations issues so that you will be far less likely to encounter strange issues or crashes when downloading and installing missions.

Parallax Occlusion Mapping!

Stgatilov has added the oft requested POM feature to the latest Dark Mod release! WellingtonCrab has coordinated with him to provide examples and check the functionality and quality. Now The Dark Mod is ready to offer a quantum leap in perceived geometric detail with all sorts of surfaces realistically showing 3D parallax rather than the flatter looking normal maps we usually offer. WellingtonCrab also created many texture variants that are tuned to look better with POM enabled.

Other Graphics Goodies!

Now cubemaps \ environment maps respect more stage keywords. This means that faked reflections on water shaders can now move in relation to the water texture movement offering a more convincing illusion! Subviews ( cameras, portals, mirrors, xray, etc ) can now be nested. You can now have a skybox render in a camera view, etc. Volumetric lights and particles now render in mirrors! Alpha-tested surfaces get alpha shadows in Shadow Maps mode. Tone-mapping now supports range compression to prevent unwanted overbright areas. Arcturus has introduced some new metal materials that use improved cubemaps as well as skyboxes with clouds that use POM!

Stability and Performance!

The console variable system ( CVAR ) has been improved to be thread safe. This should resolve some rare crashes that involve weapon scripts that rely on CVAR values. We now automatically detect the number of CPU cores and allocate Jobs based on the detected specifications. Level loading has been given more parallel execution optimizations including optimizations for loading audio samples in parallel. Uncapped FPS is enabled by default so Linux players will not have a poor first time experience and many audio and video playback timing bugs that occur only in classic capped mode are avoided. Finally, Linux vsync support has been greatly improved.

Improved Training Mission!

The Training Mission is supposed to help players understand the basics of Dark Mod game-play and controls. It was created to coincide with The Dark Mod v1.0 and was not significantly altered until TDM v1.08 ( when Bikerdude did some texture replacement for 2.0 standalone and improved the overall visuals ). As such, many new game-play features that were added since 1.0 were never included in the mission. Now the mission has been upgraded to include more game-play features such as the Vine Arrow as well as getting further visual upgrades and EFX Reverb!

Drunken AI!

Now that the AI have better visual accuracy, Amadeus decided to balance things out by fixing many of the broken behaviors of Drunken AI so that they are more reliable and consistent for use in missions by default ( no need to extensively customize the defs or use scripting to improve them ).

Potions!

Dragofer and Amadeus have completed the work on the Slowfall potion prototype started by VanishedOne. They also incorporated the invisibility potion by Kingsal ! These now have pre-defined slots in the gameplay menu as well as the default shop menu design.

Assets Galore!

Along with new POM textures, we now have:
A new modular pipe set
A new Lampion entity
Some new Factory Machine entities
Ornate wood and stone relief textures
A new AI praying animation
A new AI smoking animation
And many fixes or improvements to existing assets

EFX Reverb Location Preset!

Frost_Salamander took some time away from his continued work on the excellent “The Lieutenant” series missions to make EFX reverb setup easier for himself and other mission authors. You can now add EFX preset spawnargs to location entities rather than having to use the EFX def file.

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.

Also Nolok contributed a brand new Catalan menu translation!

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.

A detailed list of changes can be seen here:

https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What%27s_new_in_TDM_2.13

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 2.13, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.13 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.13. Use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates

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!

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:

Max Possible = Total Votes * 5 (Outstanding)

TotalMaxPointsPoss (TMP) = AllCategoryVotecount(ACV) * 30

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!

We are proud to announce the release of The Dark Mod 2.10!

The Dark Mod 2.10 comes with considerable improvements to loading times as well as a slew of new visual and gameplay features for mappers to experiment with, such as volumetric lighting (“god rays”) and more advanced security cameras!

Many of these new features are prominently on display in the six new missions released for the 2.10 Connections Contest that are now officially available in the mission downloader!

A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include:

For Players

Loading Times
Considerable effort has gone into streamlining how textures are loaded, making more effective use of multiple CPU cores, and removing artificial delays. This even includes new handwritten algorithms for normalmap compression and mipmap generation so that TDM no longer relies on graphics card drivers.

Performance Improvements
As part of ongoing performance improvements, soft stencil shadows with anti-alising will be faster to render.

Object Handling
Afraid to grab a candle near a sleeping guard? Handling objects will now produce less noise, or none at all if holding down the “creep” button. You can also now control how far an item is thrown based on how long you hold down the “throw” button. Lastly, dragging unconscious bodies should feel better now (even if rats did their best to spoil the fun a little).

Main Menu Interactions
Tooltips have been added for many of the items found in the settings menu: a long-awaited feature! We’ve also reorganized the procedure for switching between missions to make it more intuitive for newcomers.

Window / Input Changes
The Linux build now relies on the GLFW library to create windows and handle the keyboard & mouse, eliminating many of the issues with OS integration on Linux.
On the Windows side, some minor changes were made to fullscreen/borderless modes.

For Mappers

Entity limit is no more!
What was once the bane of TDM’s most ambitious mappers, the entity limit has now been raised eight-fold to 65,536. No longer will mappers need to spend long hours merging entities.

Compilation Times
To complement the faster loading times, compilation times have been brought down too. Optimizations were made all over the dmap code, adding new algorithms and data structures to improve both speed and precision.

Advanced Security Cameras
Security cameras have been reworked from the ground up with the aim of bringing them to the same level of polish as TDM’s AIs, both in stealth gameplay and customizability. Most importantly, security cameras in new FMs will track the player or AIs and react to bodies. Wiki

Volumetric Lights (“God Rays”)
Unlike adding fake translucent geometry around lights, volumetric lights automatically match their source light, including light volume geometry, projection & falloff textures, and even shadows. Note that shadowcasting currently only works in “shadow maps” mode. Wiki

Xray Screens
Xrays are a Doom 3 feature that has been reintroduced to TDM and developed further. The screens are able to change the appearance of entities seen through them, even making them appear or disappear if desired. Look out for them in future Inventor’s Guild or magical-themed FMs. Wiki

Subtitles
Subtitles can now be assigned to sound files and have been added to the pre-bundled mission “Tears of St. Lucia”. Note that we did not consider localization of subtitles yet. Wiki

Tracking Secrets
Secrets are now easy to designate, with no custom scripts required. They’ll also be shown on the mission statistics screen at the end of the mission if the FM uses the new system. Wiki

Main Menu GUI Customisation
Mappers can change much of the main menu from a single purpose-built “customisation” .gui file instead of having to replace core files. You can find more details in guis/mainmenu_custom_defs.gui inside tdm_gui01.pk4.
Since several missions had to be updated to this new system, their customisations will no longer work in 2.09 or earlier versions.

Location Diagnostics During dmap
Location overlaps should now be much easier to find and fix thanks to new console output and pointfiles created during compilation.

Image Formats
As a compact alternative to TGA for uncompressed images, PNG images can now be used in materials. Note that loading PNG images may be slower than TGA.
DDS images can now be used in image programs, although doing so is discouraged because of the additional quality loss due to compression.

New Script Events
The mapper’s scripting repertoire has been expanded by new script events for dealing with vectors and bounds, setting solidity, detecting surface type via trace, and reading more properties about entities and the player, such as “notarget” or the calibrated light gem value.

New Assets

Fancy Wooden Furniture
A whole new suite of fancy wooden furniture pieces including prefabs has been contributed by Wellingtoncrab. They can be viewed in the release thread.

Automaton AI
The semi-robotic AIs from Sotha’s Ulysses mission have been added to the core mod, together with new prefabs for cosmetic recharging stations to include in patrol routes as well as a camera screen showing what the automaton sees.

Programming

Tracy Profiling
TDM’s rudimentary GL profiling has been replaced with the Tracy profiler, which has its own cool viewer. It has already greatly helped the TDM development team in their optimization efforts.

Mission Database
The mission database has been moved to an SVN repository which automatically synchronizes all mirrors and makes backup copies of old versions of missions.

More Technical Stuff
A generic hash table has been added. “Clear” in the idlib method now works as most programmers expect and unit test integration has been improved.

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 2.10, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!

We are proud to announce the release of The Dark Mod 2.08! 

Long in development, many fixes related to Multi-Core, Uncapped FPS, and the 64-bit migration are now available. TDM 2.08 goes further with the process to modernize coding standards in TDM, replacing legacy OpenGL functions and ARB Assembly shaders with modern techniques. 

Mappers will be pleased to see many new quality assets as well as enhancements to rain, fog, skylight, AIs and visportal diagnostics.

For the eye-candy crowd, new Bloom, 64-bit color mode, and SSAO options have been added!

For Linux users, the project can now be compiled via CMake.

A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include:

Better Visuals: Cabalistic has finally added the much requested SSAO feature to TDM. Using a method called Scalable Ambient Obscurance, now areas with flat ambient lighting come alive with new detail! He’s also implemented a new Bloom method, and brightness and gamma will no longer interfere with desktop brightness.

Better AI: Grayman has refined the AI yet again, for instance ensuring that sitting and lying aren’t thwarted by obstacles.

Better Gameplay: The player’s ability to move and interact with the environment has been improved thanks to fixes to mantling as well as climbing ropes and ladders. Ragdolls are easier to handle and shouldering them is accompanied by an animation.

Better Mapping: The mapper’s toolkit has seen several enhancements. A new X-ray surface and new spectrum spawnargs modify how objects are perceived. Rain is much less taxing and uses static collision detection to limit its fall. New visportal diagnostics make it easier than ever to track down notorious internal leaks.

Better Performance: The dev team has as always been hard at work making improvements to performance and laying the groundwork for even more improvements in the future. Multi-Core’s stability has been enhanced and is no longer listed as an “Experimental” setting.

New Assets: Many quality textures and models were added by both Team members and community contributors. Especially of note is the inclusion of Kingsal’s manbeasts and Springheel’s new zombies, and expect to catch glimpses of the werebeast. If you are a mission author, please take a look here.

New Sounds: The player’s movement is now accompanied by new sounds when mantling, swimming and sliding down ropes and ladders.

To update, simply run the tdm_update.exe file in your darkmod folder. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.08, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!

This hotfix release is intended mainly to fix serious problems with OpenGL that some players have.
The set of differences with the original 2.07 is minimal.
The hotfix release is expected to fully replace the original 2.07, and be called simply “TDM 2.07” in the future.

Unlike the usual case, this release does not break savegame compatibility.
You can load savegames produced by the original TDM 2.07 in the 2.07-hotfix version perfectly fine: no need to do anything.

The changes in 2.07-hotfix:

1) Fixed GLSL shaders not working on the latest AMD graphics drivers.
With original 2.07, players with AMD gpus had to either set r_useGLSL 0 or to download custom shader files.
Everyone who had this problem: please update to 2.07-hotfix, set r_useGLSL 1 back and remove glprogs directory if you have it.

2) Fixed GLSL shaders not working on some Linux drivers.
The same workaround was used to avoid the problem, which should be reverted after update.
It is also possible that shadow maps will start working for some players (due to this fix).

3) Fixed r_showportals 1 to work properly with Multi Core Enhancement and with subviews.
With original 2.07, it had problems like postprocessing being disabled or wrong rendering of portals.

4) Fixed missing tdm_coals_hot_ns material on some maps.