nbohr1more

I would have posted here about the other updates but I got really busy working on the code and neglected my promotional responsibilities. I figured it was time to bump things since we have finally solved one of the biggest complaints "Loading Times". Maybe someone working on another Doom 3 project will copy our code vanilla Doom 3 will also benefit some day.

Time to poke the bear again? The Dark Mod 2.10 is out! We are proud to announce the release of The Dark Mod 2.10! A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include: For Players Loading Times Object Handling Tooltips Window / Input Changes . For Mappers Entity limit is no more! Compilation Times Advanced Security Cameras Volumetric Lights (“God Rays”) Xray Screens Subtitles Secrets Menu Location Diagnostics During dmap Image formats New Script Events New Assets Programming 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! Moddb article: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/the-darkmod-210-is-here

Thanks GoatLord! We just got an Editor's Choice award at Moddb so that's something...

[size=200]A Campaign for The Dark Mod[/size] We are pleased to announce that we are working on The Crucible of Omens, a full-length campaign for The Dark Mod, the moody Doom 3-based stealth game by Broken Glass Studios. Playing as the thief and adventurer John Welland Hadley, you will embark on a quest to find a powerful artifact inherited from a shadowy past. You journey will take you throughout The Dark Mod universe, discovering new and exotic locations and meeting new and interesting factions and characters. The Crucible of Omens spans multiple large missions and is being worked on by many well-known TDM mappers and team members. Features Include: * A wealth of different environments from the smoke-darkened city of Bridgeport to the icy northlands, from opulent mansions to the cobwebbed depths of forgotten catacombs. * Gameplay centred on stealth, the pursuit of in-game clues and open-ended exploration, utilising the technical possibilities of The Dark Mod to create a complex, interactive game world. * New opponents and characters. What drives the pirates of Wrecker's Reach? Who are the mysterious Urielites? And what lurks in the mind of Lord Blackstone? * AI conversations and player character comments. * A unique story experienced through in-game actions, animated briefings and dynamic objectives. No official release date has been set; updates will continue as the campaign development progresses. Be sure to keep an eye out for future updates. How can I help with the project? We are currently looking for skilled individuals to help contribute to the project in the following areas: * artist and animator (cutscenes and in-game animations) * modeller (campaign-specific models) * mapper (scripting, bugfixes, testing) * voice actors (various) * music composers Main Mappers: Angua, Bikerdude, Dram, Fidcal, Greebo, Jdude, Melan (Note: Images have been reduced to fit board standards. Full-sized samples are available on the TDM boards.) Finally, please remember to register (free) and vote for The Dark Mod in Moddb's Mod of The Year Contest. (Top 100) http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod (Note: Unregistered votes will only count towards tie-breaker conditions.)

The Dark Mod v1.07 is out! http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/the-dark-mod-v107-is-out thedarkmod.com/main Notable changes: * International language localization support for missions. * Translated HUD, GUI and Menus. * Vine Arrows !!!! * New combat animations and sounds * Different Melee damage depending on weapon class * Un-lockable Mines !!! * New textures and compression of existing textures to DDS * New models including Jack-o-lanterns, water tower, cloth doll, custom keys (with skins) * New AI "waif" models * Steam fix for problems with game saves and installing missions * Stealth Score fixes * Vastly improved AI behavior: "It’s hard to describe all the ways our AI have become more sophisticated in 1.07, mostly thanks to grayman. AI will now properly notice and comment when suspicious doors are left open. They’ll notice rope arrows left dangling in lit areas, and will come over and look up or down the rope to see if anyone is on it. AI will notice if arrows are left sticking out of things (and will no longer call them “weapons”, or comment casually after getting shot with them). AI will do a better job of warning each other about suspicious events now too... If an AI sees the player but fails to catch him, he’ll warn all his friends that there is a thief in the area. If he sees a dead body, he’ll start warning people about a murderer. This causes the friends to start patrolling with their weapons out, ready for trouble. All the new interactions make the AI seem even more believable and challenging." **** Folks... Please stop by The Dark Mod's Moddb site and place your vote for Mod of the Year. (For your vote to count, you need to register at Moddb, otherwise your vote will only be used as a tie-breaker.) Those hard-working developers deserve some recognition for all they've done and continue to do: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod Thanks, nbohr1more

Let me know if you have any trouble getting the mod to run. It seems that some Steam changes have caused troubles and we have some workarounds for that. v1.07 with those fixes integrated will be here very soon... (internal alpha testing now).

Many Thief 1 and 2 fans felt that the crippled first-person mechanics, loss of rope-arrows and swimmable water, and the many physics bugs and performance anomalies in Thief 3 were all hallmarks of an inferior (console port) edition. The Dark Mod was conceived at a time when it was unclear whether Eidos would even make a mission\level editor for Thief 3 and the Thief Fan Mission community was up-in-arms about the fact that the editor did not ship with the game. The Dark Mod has set-out to make the next-gen Thief mission platform that mission authors wanted. I think if you compare Thief 3 fan missions to The Dark Mod fan missions you will find that The Dark Mod is the more enjoyable play experience and looks better as well. Try Sotha's "Thomas Porter Series" missions or Melan's "Talbot Series" missions and see for yourself. (That said, I commend the authors of the mini campaign for Thief 3 "The Cabal" for their valiant struggles with the platform and the excellent production of their work.) One of the Team Members from The Dark Mod made a fix mod for Thief 3 that also addresses many of the usability grievances called "The Minimalist Mod".

Stop crying! Halloween is not over yet! All the Halloween Speed Build Contest entrants have released their missions. Samhain Night on Bone Hill (Author: PranQster) House in Blackbog Hollow (Author: Stumpy) A Night to Remember (Author: Fieldmedic) The Creeps (Author: Mortem Desino) Dragon's Claw (Author: Bikerdude) Plus, a bonus creepy mission outside the contest: Let Sleeping Thieves Lie (Authors: Sir Taffsalot and Bikderdude) Stop by Moddb and check-out the details and screens! http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/halloween-speed-build-contest Stop by The Dark Mod forums to vote for your favorites. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/ Now get back to celebrating this important fall occasion!

September Updates: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/september-updates1 Two missions have been radically revised for improved performance. game-play, and visuals. You decide who improved most :) The Dark Mod community is engaged in a Halloween Speed-Build contest. We should have a nice crop of new missions soon...

As far as game-play changes, those can already be done in the current SDK which already provided all the Source Code for AI, and Game-Play areas. There simply hasn't been much interest in Doom 3 as a platform because the Art Assets are all so specific to the game. Nobody but a few dedicated Mod teams wanted to make boat-loads of new textures and models for their mods and the community wasn't too interested in re-using the cramped Alien themed environs of Doom 3 they way they LOVED re-using HL2's environments and art assets. Now, performance is another stumbling block for this engine but you must realize what you have here. A fully dynamically lit engine. We did not see another until UE3 and even there it has lots of gotchas and problems to the point where most UE3 content is light-mapped. With the Source Code release, there is the chance to make Doom 3 a real competitor to UE3. It needs the following ingredients: 1) Deferred rendering 2) Object LOD and Occlusion tech (better Mesh management) 3) GPU calculated shadows All those are well known tech and have public academic example implementations. The real question is not whether Doom 3 could fly with some neat community added rendering features. The real question is whether OpenGL will actually render those features with good performance. John Carmack himself was gonna use Shadow Maps for the shadow tech instead of Stencil Shadows but OpenGL's poor driver support for buffers caused Shadow Maps to be so slow they were worse than Stencil Volumes. So the same might be true of other OpenGL features. The community could try adding Tessellation, Geometry Instancing, etc and find that these features perform horribly. It is fortunate that games like RAGE are coming soon so that ATI and Nvidia have reasons to pay more OpenGL driver staff to fix stuff. But there are many questions... I suppose Chronicles of Riddick DA's engine has helped there too. Quake 3's engine was majorly overhauled in the form of Xreal. Not many game developers have jumped in to build for it nor has the Quake 3 mapping community committed to a full source port. It seems that those interested in the Q3 engine took it and extended it without any care for the Q3 game. Nobody did the nasty (tedious) work of making sure that engine extensions were compatible with stock Quake 3 assets. The Quake 3 community is now focused on some extension tech called "Entity Plus" but they really need someone to re-write the engine or port Q3 to Xreal so that it doesn't live with old CPU bound limitations. Doom 3 may see more care than that. If you think about it, Sikkmod already is a radical upgrade to the Doom 3 engine that works for the existing game. If the same changes were made without the poor performance of having to use hacks like z-buffer capture it would already be a bigger step up than Quake 3 was ever given.

Thanks! Right now a huge task to get the mod internationalized (and possibly Closed Captioned) is under way. The Thief community has lots of fans and mission authors from Eastern European nations so this will (hopefully) expand the pool of mission contributors. That's in addition to reworked Mine behavior, new Vine Arrow feature, better combat animations, fixes to wasted events at map launches, new male and female AI/NPC characters, etc. Then... with Id Tech 4 going Open Source, those guys will be kept busy for quite awhile. :)

Belated news. (My apologies). Here are the results for The Dark Mod community's 2011 Seasons Contest: Winner: Alberic's Curse (by BikerDude) Scoring: I used an average of points (x out of 5 voted) for each category then weighted the categories Gameplay x 3, Aesthetics\Story x 2 and Season Theme x 1 ... This is to match the weights for previous contests. Ranks: 1) Alberic's Curse 81.4% (weighted average = 4.07 out of 5 ) Author: BikerDude 2) Rake Off 79.62% (weighted average = 3.981 out of 5) Author: Jesps 3) Mandrasola 78.5% (weighted average = 3.925 out of 5) Author: Sotha 4) Reap as you Sow 70.28% (weighted average = 3.514 out of 5) Author: FieldMedic 5) Winter Harvest 57.12% (weighted average = 2.856 out of 5) Author = ShadowHide Moddb article: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/2011-seasons-contest-results Further details at The Dark Mod forums: http://modetwo.net/darkmod/index.php?/topic/13019-community-seasons-contest-2011-results/

Do you have an ATI video card? If so, is Catalyst AI enabled? (We recommend that you disable Catalyst AI or disable "Surface Format Optimizations" depending on your video card version and driver version.)(I have heard that recent ATI drivers can produce crashes if the CCC is not enabled.) Do you have mods applied in your Doom 3 base folder? (They may conflict). Where is your darkmod install directory? (Mine= C:\Program Files\Doom 3\darkmod) Try deleting any spare or random gamex86.dll files and let The Dark Mod and Doom 3 rebuild them. Post a console dump if possible.

Performance, Performance, Performance... All of Doom 3's weaknesses with regard to the performance of it's renderer are now well known. I would be VERY surprised to find that major performance improvements are not added in short order. Changing to a deferred renderer alone should about double the performance in GPU limited scenarios. It would be funny if John Carmack added every wish-list extension to the engine before release leaving coders and modders with nearly nothing to improve though. LOL

The whole Doom3world.org and Doom 3 modding community will be all over this. The Dark Mod team is very happy that this has been announced.