The Dark Mod 2.07 Stability Release!!!
We admit it! 2.06 was a little "rough around the edges".
Players could ignore the new features like Soft Shadows, Multi-Core and Uncapped FPS
and have a mostly unchanged experience from 2.05.
But we all know that wasn't going to happen...
Players stumbled into issues with these new features rather quickly.
In 2.07 you no longer need to worry about these things!
2.07 Fixes!
Soft Shadows with real MSAA
In 2.06, we sorta faked AA when Soft Shadows were enabled.
Instead of rendering true MSAA, we simply increased the internal resolution to
something higher than the native resolution.
This resulted in a HUGE performance hit when enabling AA.
In 2.07 this is fixed. You can use AA without any huge performance loss or screen artifacts.
Multi-Core without Crashes
2.07 has improved the way that multi-core rendering works.
Now the Vertex Buffer (VBO) is much more friendly to multi-core operations
thanks to Cabalistic, Duzenko, and Stgatilov working to make the VBO more like the one in Doom 3 BFG.
Glass effects with no line artifacts
Shaders that use the Depth buffer were causing feedback loops and line artifacts in 2.06 when Soft Shadows were enabled. This is now cured.
Bumpmap artifacts eliminated
The new GLSL shaders in 2.06 looked very much like our old ARB shaders but somehow we forgot to clamp the math for some areas. This lead to many artifacts around lighting with bump maps.
Now the shaders are closer to the ARB versions and many artifacts have been cured.
EFX Reverb only where it belongs
EFX reverb is now only applied to appropriate in-world sound emitters. No longer will you reverb where it doesn't belong.
Mission Statistics Fixed
Somewhere around 2.05 a bug was introduced that caused the Mission Statistics to render all Zeros if you got 100% loot in missions that skip the "Shop" at the start.
2.07 now shows all the correct totals in this scenario.
ENVSHOT \ CUBEMAPS are now FIXED
Mappers can now capture cubemaps for in-game mirrors and reflective surfaces
Editing Debug Tools work with Uncapped FPS
Now mappers can debug entities, look at surface info, check light counts, check tri counts,
etc without having to go back and forth to the menu to disable uncapped FPS and multi-core;
In short, TDM 2.07 has tackled the worst bugs from 2.06
and has made the whole project significantly more stable!
NEW 2.07 FEATURES!!!
Along with the many fixes a few new features crept into 2.07!
Mantling Low and Medium objects
Late in the TDM 2.07 release cycle, STiFU decided
"Enough is enough!!!! Mantling small objects is silly in TDM and must be fixed!!!"
He then proceeded to improve mantling in a number of ways including different behaviors for different heights and added code support for more sounds related to mantle actions!!!!
Frob Helper
Now you can enable an indicator that shows you the center of the screen to help you frob small objects or frob objects cluttered among other frob-able objects.
HRTF Audio
Without even knowing about the old forum thread about modding TDM to use HRTF audio, our Lead Developer stgatilov added it to TDM to fix a positional audio bug. Now TDM has much better positional audio with better 3D presence when wearing headphones (and the bug is fixed).
EFX 2.0 PRESETS!!!
Imagine you are a mission author, and you want to add EFX reverb to your mission.
Now look at this:
// reverb maintenance
reverb "maintenance" {
"environment" 26
"environment size" 5.0670
"environment diffusion" 0.6030
"room" -411
"room hf" -685
"room lf" 0
"decay time" 1.7360
"decay hf ratio" 0.8030
"decay lf ratio" 1.0000
"reflections" 96
"reflections delay" 0.0080
"reflections pan" 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
"reverb" 27
"reverb delay" 0.0050
"reverb pan" 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
"echo time" 0.0750
"echo depth" 1.0000
"modulation time" 0.2500
"modulation depth" 0.0000
"air absorption hf" -5.0000
"hf reference" 5000.0000
"lf reference" 250.0000
"room rolloff factor" 0.0000
"flags" 56
}With the new EFX Preset feature, you no longer need to parse all that and can simply choose a preset with the desired sound preconfigured:
eaxreverb "myclassroom" {
preset auditorium
}
Whew! Now it will be much easier for mission authors to add EFX to their missions!
Contact Hardening (PCSS) Shadow Maps
The Soft Shadows in 2.06 are really good but one thing that the developers couldn't quite get right is "Contact Hardening".
In real shadowing, the closer the shadow casting object is to the receiving surface the harder the shadow. In 2.06 we could only get half way there. Objects that were closer to the light source had harder shadows but all shadows became blurrier as the shadow casters were farther from the lights.
To make it easier to achieve this feature, Shadow Maps were added.
In many scenes, Shadow Maps also boost performance because the CPU no longer has to skin the shadow casting objects and determine the silhouette.
OLD
With Stencil Shadows in 2.06 we could only make shadows blurrier as they got farther from the light.
NEW
Va Va Va VOOM! Look at these more realistic contact hardening shadows in 2.07 (shadow map mode).
Notice the ceiling and AI shadow and how they are either softer or harder than the Stencil mode versions. This is more true to the way real shadows behave!
Performance
In 2.06 the 64-bit executable could be substantially slower than the 32-bit version because it lacked low level SIMD optimizations. In 2.07 both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions now offer AVX acceleration for SIMD code. Now performance is matched between the versions and they both have better performance
AI Improvements and Gameplay Improvements
- AI react properly to flashbomb attacks while seated
- AI properly return to seated coordinates after being interrupted from patrol routes
- Improved the way that AI respond to the player escaping to dark ledges
- AI can now handle bodies (ragdolls) obstructing door closure
- Remote listening support (related to security camera features)
- Doubled air regaining speed after dive (Full refill now takes about 8 seconds)
- Mantling no longer allowed when "under water"
Soft Gamma
Many old applications change Gamma by directly telling the video card what gamma ramp to offer the screen. While this works great in-game, it often causes your Desktop to inherit these Gamma changes if the program closes unexpectedly. We now offer 2 Gamma modes that use shaders to adjust Gamma so this problem can be avoided. Further, Soft Gamma does a better job of reducing banding than Hardware Gamma.
(See cvars r_ambientMinLevel and r_ambientGamma.)
New Trap Prefabs
2.07 now ships with pre-made Traps so that mission authors can easily add all sorts of interesting traps to their missions.
"Select All" in the Mission Downloader
With one click, you can choose every available mission for download rather than needing to choose them one-by-one.
See further details in our Change Log.
Mission Releases since 2.06
Braeden Church
Grayman gives us a history lesson about what happened in the past for many of the characters and places that populate his William Steele series.
William Steele 4: The Warrens
After a recap about the past of the William Steele adventures, Grayman releases one of his largest William Steele missions yet. A revenge plot and mystery await you here.
Mission of Mercy
joebarnin's first TDM mission! Find the cure to a new plague that has hit Bridgeport.
The Night of Reluctant Benefaction
Biene offers another quality mission for The Dark Mod. This time with a Holiday twist.
Hidden Hands: Initiation
JackFarmer's first TDM mission! An absolutely enormous mission. Try and become a member of the mysterious "Hidden Hands" crime group.
Wow, amazing work
did you guys cancel the steam release?
No news about a release on Steam?
Still running on windows xp, right?
We compiled with XP flags but we have no confirmation that it will run because nobody tested it. None of the team owns XP and no beta testers were on XP.
If VC++ 2017 redist can install on XP then it should work.
This will be the last release where we compile with any XP specific flags.
TDM 2.08 and newer will mark XP as unsupported.
Thanks for the reply.
We hit a snag with Steam.
In order to put TDM up there, we must designate someone to be "legally responsible" for The Dark Mod.
We're an Open Source project and have no "owners" or "responsible parties" other than the long time contributors who host our files and site.
Designating someone as the "owner" is not something anyone wants to broach.
Nor do we want to incur any possible legal repercussions by "incorporating" then having Square Enix sue the "TDM Corporation" for "selling" The Dark Mod.
Even though we've made sure to steer clear of any infringements and don't have any "sell" anything, Square could argue that we are offering some sort of "free to play" product and we somehow indirectly profit from their copyrighted game design.
There has been some discussion about setting up a non-profit organization and seeing if that would pass the muster but we'd still need someone who lives in the Country where that non-profit exists to be a "responsible party" for the non-profit.
This challenge isn't impossible to overcome but it's been demotivating to the prospects of this happening.
If only Steam were like Moddb. Just post your project and let people know it exists. No contract to sign.
"There has been some discussion about setting up a non-profit organization and seeing if that would pass the muster but we'd still need someone who lives in the Country where that non-profit exists to be a "responsible party" for the non-profit."
Can you clarify what do you mean by this? So you just need a person to set up the non-profit? Or are you guys still reluctant with the idea?
What a great Update! Thank you so much
"If only Steam were like Moddb. Just post your project and let people know it exists."
If only people would wise the **** up and stop letting these middlemen (miserable profiteering scumbags) -- these useless "distributors" -- get in between themselves and the games they can just as (if not even moreso) easily download from Moddb... or Jack's goddamed OneDrive; or Torrential Torrent MagnetoLand; Or TheDarkMod.Net; Or HEyYOUfUck.Org...
Good god, how long?
No way to directly download 2.07 (instead of 2.0 and then update this version to 2.07 with the Updater which is quote slow)?
I'll look into a direct download option. The last time I tried to provide one, Moddb timed out.
Done!
You guys are rock stars for an old Thief fan like me.
Hi.
I wonder if theres any difference in launching regular or x64 version of the DarkMod?I guess i should run x64 since im running windows 10?
Thanks.
The x64 build is able to access more than 4GB of RAM.
Missions typically don't require that much RAM but we sometimes see weird malloc errors in older OS versions that don't properly restrict RAM ranges for 32-bit builds.
For now, 64-bit mostly only benefits Linux users but some Windows claim to have seen better performance on it. Until I see hard evidence, I'll chalk that up to placebo effect.
Thanks.
But theres no downside to using only the x64?
Cheers.
Right.
In 2.06 the 64-bit was slower because it lacked SIMD assembly optimizations.
In 2.07 both 32-bit and 64-bit have AVX optimizations and they perform the same. You can completely ignore the 32-bit binary if you are on a 64-bit OS.
Thanks,i appreciate it.
Just started the game, and the graphics are flashing ! any ideas please.
Kanui.
r_useFenceSync "0"
in Darkmod.cfg
What an awful mod.
The AI is terrible, it sometimes spots me for no reason at all. How can anyone enjoy a game that is so rng dependant?
Huge disappointment