The Dark Mod (Thief style total conversion)

[nbohr1more]

The Dark Mod is a Doom 3 total conversion mod that converts the game into a gritty Steam Punk style stealth game similar to the Thief series (Thief 1 & 2) from Looking Glass Studios.

Rather than bother the folks in General Discussion I will be providing updates about here.

Please share your thoughts.

Latest news:

Melan's latest mission, "Fiasco at Fauchard Street", was created as a Speed-building exercise. He documented the creation process, diary style, over at The Dark Mod forums.

I have conducted a brief interview to discuss Melan's Thief and TDM design and building processes.

Enjoy:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... e-dark-mod

[Eraser]

Yeah I followed the GD thread. Tough crowd indeed, but it's an interesting looking mod for sure

[VolumetricSteve]

looking at some of the screenshots, it appears that there are pre-compiled lightmaps; are those precompiled or just carefully placed dynamic lights? The texture set almost appears quake 1-esque in some ways (I mean this in a good way).

[obsidian]

Uhhh... those are indeed lightmaps because they are comparison shots with the original game.

[nbohr1more]

There are no pre-compiled lightmaps in The Dark Mod but some of the authors have a very good grasp of the use of ambient lights and decals to achieve a similar look. Ideally someone with Lunaran's spacial perception would come along and achieve something akin to Strombine in The Dark Mod but I'd say that mission 2 from "No Honor Among Thieves" has a city section that is lit as well as you could imagine for it's geometry and engine use (I'd love to be proven wrong)

Thanks for the compliments!

[VolumetricSteve]

Uhhh... those are indeed lightmaps because they are comparison shots with the original game.

....I was never here.

I glanced at it and immediately got excited about the prospect of being able to bake lightmaps into doom 3 engine based maps, thus I herped and derped.

[Eraser]

Why would you want lightmaps in Doom 3 if it can do much more realistic lighting in real time?

[nbohr1more]

Don't feel bad.

I've been puzzling over that idea ever since Sikkpin figured out how to get Cubemap lighting working in December.

My last brainstorm is to change the falloff Image shader to a 2D decode rather than 1D. This will cause pixels in the falloff image map to produce an "X" pattern through a slice of the volume. You could assemble a pattern of these X's such that another complimentary pattern could complete most of the needed 3D vectors to combine to an approximate 3D texture (ala Volumetric Light Mapping).

If an automated tool could generate the 4 textures needed to complete the set of vectors we would have a good ambient light map solution. Of course, you could increase resolution via more lights but that would start to diminish performance.

Other than the fact that a special tool would be needed (unless someone who's even more of a spacial genius than Lunaran came around...) some of the stock textures share the Z projection image with the falloff image. You would need to recreate all the falloff images that aren't 1D by nature.

Essentially that is a half-way between Strombine and Volume Light Mapping.

I also thought of a more down-to-earth extension of Strombine which simply uses clever pairing of lights running parallel to a volume whose ambient effects are modulated via the 1D falloff image to only show in the vertical spaces where they reside. Then create complimentary volumes with the same type of pairings on the alternate side for the completed map.

With both methods I was also thinking of comparing Blend Add blendLights to Ambient lights for additional performance savings.

Doom 3 source is around the corner so my speculations are mostly wasted brain waves LOL

[nbohr1more]

Why would you want lightmaps in Doom 3 if it can do much more realistic lighting in real time?

The main desire for Light Mapping is baking AO (or an Ambient Map) or outdoor scenes with static lighting (for performance).

Then big outdoor areas could be mostly static while the indoor areas are dynamic.

And old Thief fans who claim that "Ashen Age" or "A Night in Rocksbourg" look way better than Doom 3\The Dark Mod will finally have an answer to their baked lighting preference.

[VolumetricSteve]

Why would you want lightmaps in Doom 3 if it can do much more realistic lighting in real time?

I was thinking I'd use it for softer world light, the way doom 3 handles light, to me, doesn't look realistic at all unless you pour an enormous amount of work into your ingame assets and even then they have sort of a weird clay-like sheen to them. Something about how it processes bump maps causes the "bumps" to reflect too much of the color of the light being reflected rather than blending with the surface even a little. All of the shadows in doom 3 are sharp as a razor, although cool looking, 90% of the time shadows have distinctly more softness than that so I figured at least I could get that in a static lightmap based on the parts of the world that never move. I don't know why it piqued my interest as much as it did though with things like UDK being freely available; I sometimes forget what year it is.

[nbohr1more]

The clay-like appearance can be mostly attributed to the lack of specular exponent control (gloss). JC Denton added an algorithmic fresnel based glossiness solution to The Dark Mod's Interaction Shader so it looks much better than vanilla Doom 3.

[VolumetricSteve]

Looking at the screenshots on the Mod's main website, yeah, it does look much improved, but the lighting looks very uniform. The way doom 3 processed light would look great for things that are supposed to be really shiny, so I'd think you'd still wanna use that for water and metal, blood maybe, etc. What you have implemented there looks like it'd be best suited for fabrics and skin. Still looking good though.

[nbohr1more]

JUNE MEGA UPDATE!

The Dark Mod version 1.06 has been released.

Notable additions:

Multi-Mission Campaign Support
Mac OSX support
New Inventor and BlackSmith AI
AI now relight Torches, Candles, and Electric lights
Savegames are now compressed
More support for Multi-Monitor configurations like Eyefinity

Also...

The final "Seasons Contest" entries have been released!!!

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... ega-update

[nbohr1more]

After 3yrs of work, The Dark Mod's Lead Artist, Springheel, has released his first mission "A Score to Settle".

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... s-released

(The quality is through the roof!)

[Bliccer]

You guys are awesome. Need to reinstall D3 and Dark mod again. Only played Lucia and then formatted my computer. Sick stuff!

[nbohr1more]

Thanks!

I'm trying to upload the full package to Moddb for folks who can't use the updater tool. It may error out because I think the package is too big for them now.

You can download The Dark Mod at any workstation just by running the tdm_updater tool inside a directory named darkmod. It's a differential download so it won't kill your system or overload your network connection the way a single-file download would.

And, of course, you can always torrent the file. (the TDM team's last official Torrent was v1.05)...

[nbohr1more]

Springheel, the team's lead artist, has responded to a short interview to follow-up with his mission release:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... -interview

[nbohr1more]

Belated news. (My apologies).

Here are the results for The Dark Mod community's 2011 Seasons Contest:

Winner: Alberic's Curse (by BikerDude)

Scoring:

I used an average of points (x out of 5 voted) for each category then weighted the categories Gameplay x 3, Aesthetics\Story x 2 and Season Theme x 1 ... This is to match the weights for previous contests.

Ranks:

1) Alberic's Curse 81.4%
(weighted average = 4.07 out of 5 )
Author: BikerDude

2) Rake Off 79.62%
(weighted average = 3.981 out of 5)
Author: Jesps

3) Mandrasola 78.5%
(weighted average = 3.925 out of 5)
Author: Sotha

4) Reap as you Sow 70.28%
(weighted average = 3.514 out of 5)
Author: FieldMedic

5) Winter Harvest 57.12%
(weighted average = 2.856 out of 5)
Author = ShadowHide

Moddb article:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... st-results

Further details at The Dark Mod forums:

http://modetwo.net/darkmod/index.php?/t ... 1-results/

[nbohr1more]

September Updates:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... r-updates1

PranQster and Bikerdude have both revised their first mission releases for better game-play and appearance. (PranQster also optimized his mission for better performance.)

The Dark Mod community is engaged in a Halloween Speed-build contest. Big guns such as Melan, Bikerdude, Mortem Desino, Fieldmedic, Stumpy (and possibly Sonsuke?) have entered the fray. Promising newcomers PranQster and Xcen are also on-board...

[nbohr1more]

Stop crying!


Halloween is not over yet!

All the Halloween Speed Build Contest entrants have released their missions.

Samhain Night on Bone Hill (Author: PranQster)
House in Blackbog Hollow (Author: Stumpy)
A Night to Remember (Author: Fieldmedic)
The Creeps (Author: Mortem Desino)
Dragon's Claw (Author: Bikerdude)

Plus, a bonus creepy mission outside the contest:

Let Sleeping Thieves Lie (Authors: Sir Taffsalot and Bikderdude)

Stop by Moddb and check-out the details and screens!

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... ld-contest

Stop by The Dark Mod forums to vote for your favorites.

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/

Now get back to celebrating this important fall occasion!

[nbohr1more]

The Dark Mod v1.07 is out!



http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/ ... 107-is-out

http://www.thedarkmod.com/main

Notable changes:

* International language localization support for missions.
* Translated HUD, GUI and Menus.
* Vine Arrows !!!!
* New combat animations and sounds
* Different Melee damage depending on weapon class
* Un-lockable Mines !!!
* New textures and compression of existing textures to DDS
* New models including Jack-o-lanterns, water tower, cloth doll, custom keys (with skins)
* New AI "waif" models
* Steam fix for problems with game saves and installing missions
* Stealth Score fixes

* Vastly improved AI behavior:

"It’s hard to describe all the ways our AI have become more sophisticated in 1.07, mostly thanks to grayman. AI will now properly notice and comment when suspicious doors are left open. They’ll notice rope arrows left dangling in lit areas, and will come over and look up or down the rope to see if anyone is on it. AI will notice if arrows are left sticking out of things (and will no longer call them “weapons”, or comment casually after getting shot with them). AI will do a better job of warning each other about suspicious events now too... If an AI sees the player but fails to catch him, he’ll warn all his friends that there is a thief in the area. If he sees a dead body, he’ll start warning people about a murderer. This causes the friends to start patrolling with their weapons out, ready for trouble. All the new interactions make the AI seem even more believable and challenging."

[Theftbot]

Needs to be something like doom3world

[nbohr1more]

Folks... Please stop by The Dark Mod's Moddb site and place your vote for Mod of the Year.

(For your vote to count, you need to register at Moddb, otherwise your vote will only be used as a tie-breaker.)

Those hard-working developers deserve some recognition for all they've done and continue to do:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod


Thanks,

nbohr1more

[Eraser]

Kotaku blogs about the mod:
http://kotaku.com/5867156/turning-doom-into-thief

[nbohr1more]

Thanks Eraser!

We've got one more big news item to issue (hopefully) before then end of the Moddb Top 100 MOTY voting is over...