Tag Archives: The Dark Mod

The Dark Mod 2.12 has been released!

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High Expectations 2.12

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.

A detailed list of changes can be seen here:

https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What%27s_new_in_TDM_2.12

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

The Dark Mod 2.09 has been Released!

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We are proud to announce the release of The Dark Mod 2.09!


TDM 2.09 marks a new phase of performance improvements aimed lowering CPU overhead in the graphics engine.


A whole new graphic backend has been created by Cabalistic which uses modern OpenGL features to eliminate the need for the CPU to constantly issue commands to allow the Graphic Processor to render scenes.

This gives TDM some of the performance advantages of rendering using a low level API like Vulkan.


Stgatilov has been very busy this release cycle. He has put heroic efforts into improving the way that TDM upgrades and hosting operate in addition to the vast improvements to TDM itself. (He also refactored the entire particle engine and created a link system to connect TDM to Dark Radiant.)


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


Better performance:

A brand new Backend that uses UBO, Persistent Mapping, Bindless textures, and Multi-Draw has been added.

“Frontend Acceleration” (Multi-Core job based rendering based on Doom 3 BFG) now works as expected.

Normal Map compression now uses RGTC resulting in lower storage, VRAM requirements, and less artifacts ( load times should improve in future TDM versions when pre-compressed RGTC textures are added )

Background texture loading has improved. This should shorten load times and reload.


Better visuals:

A new Sharpening Filter has been added. It can make 70% Render Scale look almost like native resolution (more performance).

( It also cleans up some blurry textures for all Render Scales. )

Bumpmap lighting is smoother, so that lighting does not instantly flip to off when getting close to edges of occluded objects.

Particle physics have been substantially improved for both accuracy and performance.

Borderless Fullscreen works properly on Windows.

Water and other GUI effects that did not respond to Gamma now brighten properly.

AMD and Intel fixes have been added for SSAO rendering


Better gameplay:

Experimental Gamepad support has been added.

Creep works in alway-run mode


Better mapping:

A new linking system allows The Dark Mod to act as a real-time preview of Dark Radiant

The redesigned particles now have improved setup and configuration.

Automated fixes have been created for “rotation hacked” models

Prefabs have been seen numerous fixes and reorganization to make them easier to use


Better Sound:

Conversation and other sounds are no longer stopped by saving or going to main menu.

EFX reverb has been added to “Mission 1: A New Job”

Extinguished gas lamps are no longer noisy when doused


New Assets:

Dragofer, Epifire, Bikerdude, LDAsh, Kingsal, Dram have all added substantial asset updates ranging from updated Werebeast animations, Steam Engines, fireflies


More stable:

A huge number of fragile code areas have been overhauled to either fix crashes or prevent likely crashes due to risk of divide by zero, uninitialized values, or dangling pointers (leftover settings) on entities and functions.


We recommend that you upgrade using the new “tdm_installer” available here. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.09, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!