FAQ

These FAQs relate to pre-release missions such as Thief's Den and Tears of Saint Lucia:

What Doom versions are supported?

Can I use the Demo version of Doom 3?

No, sorry.

Does it run with the Steam version of Doom 3?

Yes :) You need to install the mod into the directory where Steam put Doom3, this might be under C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\doom 3.

Patching Doom 3 to verson 1.3.1.1304

How can I check whether my Doom 3 is correctly patched?

Open Doom 3 and hit Ctrl+Alt+~ (tilde, ^ on German keyboards) to open the console. You'll see the version printed in the lower left corner of the console. It should read 1.3.1.1304. If your version is ending on 1302, you've got the wrong patch installed.

Where can I get the right patch?

We have the patch hosted on our FTP. See above to find a link to it.

If you have version 1.3.1.1302, you may need to uninstall and reinstall before patch 1.3.1.1304 will let you apply it.

What's that issue with the 1.3.1 patch?

When the 1.3.1 patch was released by Id, they released it a bit too early. Some download sites picked it up quite fast though and started to distribute it. The problem is, that Id replaced that patch with a different one, and, probably thinking that it hadn't spread yet, didn't bother to change the version number. However, you can still find "wrong" 1.3.1 patches and these will not work with the mod. That's why it is important to check the version number in the console to make sure that the right 1.3.1 patch is installed if the mod doesn't work. The link provided here on our own page points to the correct patch, so if you downloaded it from here you don't need to worry about it.

Supported Operating Systems

Which Windows versions can I use?

Doom 3 needs at least Windows XP or Windows 2000. Saint Lucia was successfully run under Windows XP and Vista. Support for 64 bit Windows or Windows 2000 was not tested.

Does it run in Linux?

Yes, Linux is supported. You may need:

• the package libdevil1, use your package manager to install libdevil1 or libdevil1c2
• either Wine or p7zip to extract the contents from the EXE file
• only for Thief's Den: recompile the map via the console, or the pathfinding of the AI is broken

Does it run in 64 Bit Linux?

Yes, Linux 64 bit is supported. In addition to the steps above, you need 32 bit compatibility libraries, since Doom3 is 32 bit only:

• On SuSE, they should be included.
• On Ubuntu/Kubuntu, install the package ia32.
• Since you cannot install 32 bit libraries on a 64 bit system with the normal package manager, you should use getlibs to install libdevil and libmng:

getlibs libIL.so.1

getlibs libmng.so.1

For saintlucia only: getlibs libboost-filesystem1.34.1

What about Gentoo?

Use emerge devil to install the libdevil1 library.

Does it run in MacOS?

No. Or at least not yet. The Doom 3 game itself is supporting MacOS, but The Dark Mod is not - mainly because we don't have anyone developing on Macs. If you can help us getting it to run on MacOS, please [ apply at the forum].

Troubleshooting

It is hard to answer question on why something fails, because wildly different systems cause wildy different symptoms. If the following section does not help you, please ask at out [ forum].

The game crashes on load

Make sure that:

• the downloaded file was really downloaded correctly, and could be extracted completely
• you extracted the contents to your Doom 3 directory
• the DevIL.dll file is in your base Doom 3 directory
• Your system meets at least the minimum system specs
• You have enough free main memory. Try closing a few running programs like Outlook, Anti-Virus or torrent clients

If you get a message like this:

found DLL in pak file: C:\Programfiler\Doom 3\saintlucia\darkmod.pk4/gamex86.dll
copy gamex86.dll to C:\Programfiler\Doom 3\saintlucia\gamex86.dll
could not create destination file

then try extracting that gamex86.dll manually from darkmod.pk4 with Winzip or a similiar program into that folder.

A lot of textures are missing, see mostly black

Look into your DoomConfig.cfg inside your saintlucia or thiefsden folder and check that the following settings are like shown below:

seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "1"
seta image_useNormalCompression "2"
seta image_useAllFormats "1"
seta image_useCompression "1"
seta image_preload "1"

The briefing is very fuzzy

Look into your DoomConfig.cfg inside your saintlucia or thiefsden folder and check that the following settings are like shown below:

seta image_roundDown "1"
seta image_forceDownSize "0"
seta image_downSize "0"

The sky is corrupted

You either see black sky, or fragments of other textures. This seems only to happen on Geforce 6800 cards.

There are two fixes for this:

As a quick fix you can rename the following folder:

env/skyboxes/skybox_darkland_ne

to an different name. That will result in black sky.

Alternatively, edit the file materials/tdm_sky.mat with Wordpad or a different editor and find the sky material named textures/darkmod/nature/skybox/skybox_darkland_NE:

 //Author: Dram
 //skybox_ocean with ocean replaced with dark land
 //Moon moved to north east by Fidcal
 textures/darkmod/nature/skybox/skybox_darkland_NE
    {
    qer_editorimage env/skyboxes/skybox_ocean/ocean_ed
    noFragment
    noshadows
    noimpact
    nooverlays
    forceOpaque
    {
        forceHighQuality
        blend add
        cameraCubeMap env/skyboxes/skybox_darkland_ne/darkland_NE
        texgen skybox
        texgen wobblesky .0 .0 .0
    }
 }

In this declaration, comment out the line that reads forceHighQuality by adding // in front of it:

 // forceHighQuality

That should fix the sky and make it render correctly.

The game is too slow!

Here are a few tips to improve the performance:

First, you can check how many FPS are achieved by opening the console with Ctrl+Alt+~ (tilde, ^ on German keyboards) and type:

com_showFPS 1

Stop running programms in the background

Programs running in the background might either eat up memory that is needed for Doom3, and thus cause swapping to the hard disk, or they might consume CPU time or other resources. This can cause either general slowdowns or hickups' during game play.

Reduce your resolution!

On older cards, Doom3's render engine is very expensive for every per pixel drawn, and reducing the resolution will help the most. For instance, at 800x600 the game needs to draw four times less pixels than when running 1600x1200. The result will not look as bad as one might think but the frame rate improvements might make it much more playable.

Set the ambient shading to "Faster"

• Inside the settings, change the ambient rendering method to "Faster"

Upgrade your hardware

Modern games need a lot of computing power, and while you don't need the absolutely newest hardware to play them, upgrading single components of your machine can help tremendously.

• If you get less than 2Gbyte memory, consider upgrading your memory. This really helps to reduce swapping, which introduces quite noticable slowdowns.
• If you got a graphic card from NVidia older than the GF 7x00 series, consider upgrading it.

Upgrading your CPU will be quite complicated and the cost might be so sadly high that you could rather buy a new complete computer. Upgrading the hard disk will usually not help much with gaming, unless you are running out of free space.

Known bugs

Changing the screen resolution/aspect ratio does nothing!?

These changes require a restart of Doom to work. Currently, our GUI does not warn you about this. You can enter vid_restart in the console to restart the renderer without quitting the game.