[img]http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/4/4000/thumb_620x2000/Trans_6.jpg[/img]

Hi folks.

I am creating this tread on behalf of The Dark Mod team to spread the word about this project.

The Dark Mod is a total conversion mod for Doom 3 which makes the game look and play like the classic Thief series games (Thief 1 & 2).
Since it's a Doom 3 mod, the typical FPS fans who own the game generally don't show much interest while many Thief fans are reluctant to
go out-on-a-limb to purchase Doom 3 so they can have a modernized Thief. Since Oblivion has thieving guilds and is set in a historical period I thought that this
might be a better place to provide updates a promote the mod. Many have even compared the look of The Dark Mod to Oblivion so there seems to be a natural
affinity there that just hasn't been brought to the surface much.

The Dark Mod "Training Mission" (often compared visually to Oblivion ):

[img] http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/4/4000/thumb_620x2000/training1.jpg [/img]


Please let me know if you are aware of this mod and what you think of the project.

Thanks,

nbohr1more


The Dark Mod site: www.thedarkmod.com

The Dark Mod at Moddb: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

Impressive. The important question here is...does the stealth work? I may be interested in this, though a lot of the magic of Thief may be difficult to recapture (IE, the atmosphere, sounds, voice acting, etc). If it's aiming to recreate both classic Thief games, then I estimate a release in 2020.

Looks great!

Oh the stealth works very well thank you :yes:

It's a little more difficult than Thief as it was designed by Thief veterans. Plus the added element of dynamic lights and a 3D light detection system (light gem) make the game-play more advanced.

As you may be aware, there are over 900 "fan missions" for Thief 2.

Currently, The Dark Mod has no official campaign but instead acts as a tool-set to allow Thief style fan missions to be created and played.

There are over 35 fan missions currently available including a large 3-mission campaign "No Honor Among Thieves" and a 5 mission "Thomas Porter" series by author Sotha.

That's excellent news. While a recreation of the classics would be incredibly taxing, the ability for people to create fan missions like this is awesome. I'll be sure to look into this, because the Stealth genre has been...svcking lately, to put it bluntly. And since I already own Doom 3 on Steam, I can start checking it out immediately.

Yes, that's how the TDM team feels. They are hardcoe classic stealth fans.

You can launch TDM like any other Doom 3 mod from the Mods menu but there are Steam specific shortcut instructions if you want to launch it directly:

http://modetwo.net/darkmod/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#Does_it_run_with_the_Steam_version_of_Doom_3.3F

Interesting stuff. I hadn't heard of it before, but I'll be taking a look at that. I'm impressed by what can still be done with the venerable Doom 3 engine.

Heh, this convinced me to reinstall Steam. I was holding off until my new PC, but this is too good to pass up. I'll definitely spread the word around to friends and people who like Thief or stealth games in general. Got my dad's and soon my best friend's support. Projects like this don't deserve to fail.

I wouldn't ever underestimate Id Tech 4: http://lunaran.com/page.php?id=165

As far as The Dark Mod's technical achievements:

1) Swim-able water (Thief: Deadly Shadows team couldn't get this working for their commercial game)
2) Rope Arrows (See Thief: DS comment above)
3) Extinguishable candles, torches, etc
4) An Object LOD manager and Procedural content generator
5) Improved fresnel based specular interactions and HDR-Lite post processing
6) An Ambient Light system (no more pitch-black unplayable shadow areas)
7) Volumetric Lightgem visibility system
8) Audio zone system

(And all this before Doom 3 has gone Open Source)... :biggrin:

I've heard of it before, but kinda forgot about it. Good to hear it's still being worked on.

Nice work.

Currently there is a community mapping contest happening. The theme is "Seasons"... essentially anything that evokes Summer, Winter, Spring or Fall.

The first submission "Mandrasola" has already been released the remaining entrants have until June 1st to complete their missions.

If you want a taste of the game, one of the veteran players "lowenz" has made some videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/moddercove#p/c/5D1711305C72AA96/11/oKAKIv-QLcg

This looks amazing. I never played Doom 3 though. This reminds me of a total conversion that was being worked on for Unreal Tournament 3, http://www.night-blade.com/, but that was from a long time ago. I still have Thief 2 on my computer and need to play through it first before I try out any of the conversions.

I've been watching this project for years: I love it. Keep up the great work, helping keep a brilliant franchise fresh and fun to play.

I know this might sound blasphemous here, but the TTLG modding community rivals the TES community imo. There are countless FMs of the highest quality for every Thief game, and this on top. It's just great. :thumbsup:

QFT. I just wish the first two games were a little easier to get running on a modern machine. I got the first game working fine at one point, but forgot how I did it. Considering how many fan missions exist for the old games, I feel really cheated out of greatness.

But just in case I never get those working again, TDM is around to save the day. Hell, even if I get them working, I'll still play TDM.

There's certainly cross-over, TTLG has dedicated TES threads over there too :wink_smile:

Try "Tafferpatcher" for Thief 2:

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=131106

Out of curiosity, do any modders frequent these forums or mostly just players?

The reason that I ask is I am wondering whether to post updates regarding the mission editor, called "Dark Radiant".

The editor has far reaching implications for not just TDM but Id Tech 4 and related engines can use it (it has Xreal support for example).

Version 1.6.1 is now out and is a bugfix update of 1.6 which introduced Quake 4 mapping support and has considerably faster rendering
for the "Light mode" (essentially a close approximation of in-game lighting).

The big thing we always try to stress is how easy this editor is compared to mapping that requires lots of static modelling (or even Id's native BSP brushwork editors).
So if you want to get your toes wet with level design, The Dark Mod is a great place to start. For Dark Mod specific mapping, there is a growing library of "Prefabs" so you wouldn't need to start from scratch for all the buildings (etc).

Also, if you want to move-on, you can still export you brushwork as ASE models to be used in your favorite modelling software then import into your engine of choice.

As you can see, I am pretty psyched about Dark Radiant but I would understand if this isn't the venue to discuss it :sweat:

Screenshot looked pretty impressive. Maybe I will check this one out after I have my new computer situation figured out.

Thanks.

The hardware requirements range from mission to mission. Most authors are pretty merciful and try to stay around the target low-end specs but some missions with lots of AI can be pretty taxing. On the bright side, Melan's "Return to the City" used to be the poorest performing mission and would bring high-end Core2Duo cpu's to their knees. Bikerdude and Melan worked on optimizing the mission and it now performs smooth even for my old Pentium 4 3.0ghz and HD4650 AGP. That's a 9yr old CPU folks. Most 5yr old an newer PC's with mid-range video cards can run the virtually every mission very smoothly.

Hmm, I'm running a Pentium 4 2.8. Are there any missions that would be unplayable? Oddly enough, I'm also using exactly an HD4650 with it.

Anyway, I am loving this mod so far. It took ages to get working correctly, since Steam was giving me a fit over the mod, but I got it working in the end. The graphics are fantastic and the training mission only dips to about 30 fps in the archery range. I really like how lockpicking works. At first it seemed tedious, but I quickly got used to it, listening for the "silence" and reacting to it even on doors whose tumbler patterns I hadn't memorized.

Can't wait to start playing some real missions. Many thanks for bringing this mod to my attention. I may also be interested in developing my own levels, but I'm quite a newbie at this stuff, so I'll require some in-depth tutorials for the tools.

Oh, another quick question..Does the loot in the missions have any effect within the missions or even outside of them? I'd hate for all the loot to have absolutely no use outside of "just acquiring it".

I know that Fieldmedic's mission "Betrayal" is loaded with AI and it is pretty hard on my P4. I could probably struggle through it but it's also fairly tough... The parts that are playable are BRILLIANT so I am pretty disappointed that I don't have the muscle to play it. One of the new developers, Grayman, has speculated that there may be places that the AI pathfinding can be optimized so I will cross my fingers and toes in the hope of playing that.

The "No Honor Among Thieves" campaign has some places that are pretty heavy though it was tested on a P4 2.8ghz and deemed playable. My rig must have something odd about it because it should be faster than the baseline minimum system used... but even newer PC's have struggled with areas in those missions so they are the up there requirement-wise. Beautiful missions though.

(A word of warning, NHAT is packaged in one zip file but you must extract and install each mission pk4 individually.)

I get about 10FPS inside the Cathedral in St Alban's Cathedral but the mission is otherwise pretty smooth.


Right now the loot is self-contained within missions. There has been discussion about adding persistent loot when the mod officially supports multi-mission campaigns (right now you must "manually" play campaign missions in their intended sequence rather then automatically transitioning from mission to mission).

I'll be giving this a shot tonight. Thanks for the link!

Processor would probably be fine for this. Though I am running on-board graphics, thus I really,really need a new computer.

Which on-board chip?

I believe that Intel's 945 is the first chipset that could "play" Doom 3 but it wasn't pretty. I don't recall the sequence but I believe the next on-board chip from Intel was worse than the 945 performance but had DX10 support. After that things picked-up but I'm not sure where we would call it "good Doom 3 performance" except for the latest version that is built-in to the CPU. But I know a couple of TDM players have reported using Intel graphics so there were at least a couple of generations that could play it (though they probably had the resolution and settings as low as possible...).

Your motherboard doesn't have a PCI-E or AGP slot?
Or you have a laptop?