Installation

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Installing Thief's Den?

You can ignore this page. Instead, follow the instructions at this link: Thief's Den Installation.

Installing The Tears of Saint Lucia?

You can ignore this page. Instead, follow the instructions at this link: Saint Lucia Installation.

The instructions on this page are primarily intended for beta mappers and other new team members.

If you're installing either of our public mission releases, Thief's Den or The Tears of Saint Lucia, refer to the links given above.

Windows users

You'll need to install the Doom 3 patch 1.3.1 (mirror) and copy the DevIL.dll (shipped with Darkmod) library to your C:\Windows\system32 folder otherwise D3 will crash.

Requirements

You'll need a machine which is capable of running the Doom 3 game. Although the team is recommending adding more RAM and a bit more CPU to the basic requirements to be able to run the larger maps which can be quite demanding.

In order to install The Dark Mod, you need to have the v1.3.1 patch for Doom 3 installed. See the download section below for links.

Make sure that the install path for Doom 3:

  • does not contain any blanks (e.g. C:/doom3 is ok, C:/Program files/Doom3 is not)
  • is in all lowercase (e.g. /usr/local/lib/doom3 is ok, /home/username/MyDoom is not)

The latter point is especially important for Linux.

Doom 3 currently supports Windows, Linux and Mac platforms, but The Dark Mod currently supports only Windows and Linux.

Space Requirements

This is only an estimation of the space requirements needed to play TDM missions. Keep in mind that development on TDM is going to continue over time and new stuff will be added all the time.

  • For the D3 installation you roughly need 1.5 GB.
  • For the base TDM 1.00 package you need another 1.6 GB.
  • Plus a variable amount of space you need for downloaded FM packages.
  • Plus a variable amount of space for screenshots, savegames, etc.

So the mininum can be estimated to be slightly above 3 GB.

It's difficult to give numbers about FM package size, as this depends on the amount of custom content the FM author is packing in. Usually FMs are very small, if they're using the stock TDM content (1 to 10 MB). Note: FMs are in PK4 (i.e. ZIP) format, so textures and mission files are shipped in compressed form.

Savegames are about 1.7 MB per save (there is a small 700 kB screenshot generated per savegame).

Screenshots depend on the screen resolution you're using (~2 MB per shot).

References

See the article Known System Configurations for a (hopefully growing) collection of system configurations and the corresponding user feedback.

Installing The Dark Mod

Install on Windows

You need a working and patched Doom 3 installation on your hard drive. These steps will assume that you installed Doom 3 in the folder C:\Games\Doom3.

  1. Download the TDM Installer from one of our mirrors.
  2. Save the file to your Doom 3 folder, i.e. C:\Games\Doom3.
  3. Run the file. The installer will connect to one of our download mirrors and start the download process.
  4. Be patient and wait. The download will take a while.
  5. After installation, you'll find an executable tdmlauncher.exe in your darkmod folder, i.e. C:\Games\Doom3\darkmod\tdmlauncher.exe. Use this to start The Dark Mod.

Install on Linux

  1. You need the native version of Doom 3 installed and patched to v1.3.1, see below for download links and install instructions.
  2. Since there is no 64 bit version of either Doom 3 or The DarkMod, on 64 bit systems you also need the 32 bit compatibility libraries installed. On some distributions like SuSE, these are included in the default installation, but on Kubuntu/Ubuntu you need to install the package called ia32-lib and all its dependencies. Otherwise, even the installer for Doom 3 will fail to run.
  3. The downloaded DarkMod archive must be extracted into your own user's Doom 3 folder, which is usually under /home/username/.doom3/ (substitute "username" with your own username, of course). This will create a darkmod folder in there, with all files necessary to run the mod.
  4. If you get an error about GLIBCXX_3.4.9, delete or rename the files /usr/local/games/doom3/libstdc++.so.6 and /usr/local/games/doom3/libgcc_s.so.1.

Running the Mod

Using TDM Launcher (recommended)

Use the tdmlauncher application to run The Dark Mod. This small application will take care of launching the Doom 3 process with the correct command line arguments. TDM Launcher is available for both Windows and Linux.

  • Windows: C:\Games\Doom3\darkmod\tdmlauncher.exe
  • Linux: C:\Games\Doom3\darkmod\tdmlauncher.linux

Passing custom command line arguments to TDM Launcher

Some people like to have custom command line arguments to the game, which is supported by tdmlauncher. Open the dmargs.txt in your darkmod folder and add any arguments you'd like TDM Launcher to pass to the Doom3 command line.

Changing the screen resolution

You can choose from the various screen resolutions in the main menu under "Settings". You'll have to restart the game for the changes to take effect.

Note to widescreen users: Doom 3 resolutions default to 4:3 screen aspect ratios. If you're running wide screens (e.g. 1280x800, 1440x900, 1680x1050) you'll need to set that ratio to 16:10 in the Video Settings.

Loading the mod manually

In order to run The Dark Mod, Doom 3 can be started normally. In the lower right corner you can see a button saying "MOD". Clicking on this button will cause a dialog to appear listing all the mods currently installed. You can select Darkmod by choosing the appropriate entry from the dialog and load it. This will cause Doom 3 to load the mod data and initialze the mod.

Please see also the articles about Doom3 command line and Creating Desktop Shortcuts for Doom3.

Performance Tweaks

See also Performance Tweaks to make TDM run a little bit faster.

Weblinks