How to pack your Mission

An easy way to release maps is to provide a PK4 archive, which can easily be dropped into the mod folder.

All your unique assets should be packed into an archive with the same directory structure as the main mod (ie, your map file should be in the "[archive name]/maps/" folder, materials go in "[archive name]/materials/" etc). The archive must be a zip. RARs will not work. (You can of course use WinRAR or other RAR archive programs to create an actual ZIP file, just check the correct option - the most important thing is that the file is in ZIP format).

You can name the archive whatever you want. Once it is packed you just rename the zip extension to pk4. So your archive will look like my_map_v001.pk4. The result can be dropped either in the darkmod directory or in the base folder of your Doom 3 installation.

Make sure that the packed folders are not contained within a top folder, otherwise Doom3 will not be able to find anything in it. It has to look like this:

maps/
models/
textures/
xdata/

Please check this by extracting your PK4/ZIP into another location and see if the maps/ folder gets created in the correct position.

Overriding Default Dark Mod Content

Files that exist outside of PK4s take precedence over the packed files. So, placing a tdm_player_thief.def file into your PK4 won't do anything, because the file in the "real" filesystem will override the one within the PK4. This situation might change by the time The Dark Mod is released, but I thought this might be worth mentioning.

If you need to override default Mod content (the tdm_player_thief.def might be one of the few occasions where this might be appropriate), the files must be extracted from the PK4, possibly overwriting the vanilla Mod files. So be sure to warn your users about this, as long as no dedicated Dark Mod loader is available (which again might be obsolete by the time the Mod is released).