The Dark Mod

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The Dark Mod was once a total conversion mod of the game Doom 3, and now is a free (standalone) Stealth Game!

A dark and moody stealth game inspired by the "Thief" series by Looking Glass Studios.


We have completely revamped the gameplay, AI, graphics, HUD and weapon set to create a game that captures our vision of what a modern version of Thief: The Dark Project would have looked like.
We do not, however, make reference to any IP owned by Eidos, so while the stealth gameplay is very similar to Thief, we have created our own universe and characters.

History

Starting at the end of 2004, The Darkmod(TDM) team has walked down a long winding road.
Many people have been involved in this truly extraordinary project, working in his or her spare time to make their own vision of Thief-like gameplay come true.
Typically modding projects of comparable size can run the risk of stalling before seeing release, but TDM team actually managed to continuously gain momentum towards the end.

The first huge milestone was reached by January 2008, when the TDM team could delivered their first "alpha" mission Thief's Den. At this point, the game was far from being in a feature-complete state, but yet it was already possible to show off the mod's capabilities. The work on the Thief's Den release inspired the team to pull together, and an awesome progress rate was achieved during these few weeks before release. Everybody was pretty excited about the pre-release and motivated to ensure TDM would be as polished as possible.

Seeing the feedback to Thief's Den was a huge boost for the team. Although many had nearly burnt out themselves before release, the team decided to push even harder and deliver another demo - a larger one showing off more features. So development on The Tears of Saint Lucia started in early 2008, with the goal to show off a largely feature-complete mod by Summer 2008. This goal was missed by a few months, but in October 2008 Saint Lucia was finally released to the public. At this point, almost all features in TDM were implemented with the exception of Lockpicking and Melee Combat, and the feedback on Saint Lucia helped pointing out the remaining issues with the mod. Since Saint Lucia, team members have come and gone but continued effort has been made to fix bugs as players and the team find them.

With the release of the Doom 3 source code in 2011, those that remained on the development team worked to untether TDM from Doom 3 (IDtech 4) which would allow people to play TDM without having Doom 3 installed. That required a tremendous amount of work, many D3 assets had to be replaced - especially to replace sounds, models, animations, and other D3 assets that TDM used. All that work eventually culminated in the standalone version of The Darkmod 2.0. The Dark Mod was officially released on October 17th, 2009 and since then has seen several updates.

The latest version is 2.10, which was released on February 28th 2022 now has support for:

  • HL2 style skyboxes
  • Soft Particles
  • 64-bit builds
  • SMP (Multi Core)
  • EFX Reverb
  • HRTF Positional Audio
  • Soft Shadows
  • FFMPEG video
  • Scrolling menus
  • Ambient Occlusion ( SSAO )
  • Parallax Corrected Cube Maps
  • Volumetric Lights ( God Rays )
  • X-Ray Rendering
  • 3Dc \ BC5 ( RGTC ) Normal Map compression
  • SIMD accelerated level loading

What's new in TDM 2.10

Webpage & News

http://www.thedarkmod.com

Dark Mod Forums

http://forums.thedarkmod.com

Bugtracker

http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/