Reply With QuoteOkay, but does the bow aim look straight like it does in the old classic Thief games? Or is there a way to change it from angled to straight? Same with arrows: do broadheads, water and rope arrows (i.e the normal ones) arc in flight or no?
We are proud to announce the release of:
The Dark Mod 2.12 !
The 2.12 development cycle introduced many large code overhaul projects. Most of these were to lay the groundwork for future fixes and optimizations.
The final release is yet another leap in performance over the already impressive 2.10 and 2.11 releases.
A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include:
The Dark Mod 2.12 is a major step forward for mission designers!
The culling system has been extensively overhauled to ensure that your CPU and GPU are not wasting resources rendering unseen geometry, lights, and shadows.
Some of our best map optimization experts have achieved similar performance gains to what this new culling system does but it is a rare skill
and we have even managed to improve performance on missions that were generally regarded as “well optimized”.
Mission authors both new and old can follow standard mapping practices with no need to dive deep into sophisticated optimization techniques
even for some pretty challenging scenarios such as wide open areas and long views.
Players will immediately notice many missions that have made their system struggle with FPS now may be running much more smoothly!
Smoother controls for players!
Also during the 2.12 development cycle, work has been done to make controls more seamless and accessible.
Frob can now use hold or click actions to use items. Once you get used to the mechanic, it will be hard to go back to using a separate “use key”.
Mantling is now smoother, faster, and less prone to cause the player to clip through geometry.
Leaning is now more subtle and less prone to cause motion sickness.
To reduce the tedium of shuffling knocked out AI around to search for loot, you can now configure TDM to automatically loot any frobbed AI.
(Overall, many of these changes make TDM control more like Thief 1/2 and were evangelized by veteran Thief players on Discord )
A special thanks must go out to community member Geep!
Over the course of 2.12 development, Geep has created subtitles for nearly all AI barks along with developing testing tools and procedures for this gargantuan task!
You can see these changes in action by changing the Subtitles setting to "On" ( rather than "Story" ) on the Audio settings page.
Geep also provided substantial feedback for our GUI and subtitle design process and edited font data to improve text quality overall.
Datiswous has complimented the massive work by Geep (to create AI subtitles) by creating mission story subtitles for a large number of missions. Thank you!
Turrets are now natively supported in The Dark Mod and can be paired with Security Cameras! This is a completely new feature with no previous implementation in missions or otherwise.
https://youtu.be/IWX-cOMAmA8?si=SuJUX_ZpmQ4Dls8K
Finally, the nasty 2.11 bug that caused AI to allow arrows to pass through them at certain angles was fixed by Joebarnin! Your assassin style play-throughs should be far less frustrating.
Moddb Article with more info:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-...od-212-is-here
See also, our 2.12 Feature discussions:
https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index....ssion-threads/
To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder.
Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet.
Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.12, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!
Also, some missions created prior to 2.12 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.12. Use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates.
Last edited by nbohr1more; 28th Mar 2024 at 16:21.
Okay, but does the bow aim look straight like it does in the old classic Thief games? Or is there a way to change it from angled to straight? Same with arrows: do broadheads, water and rope arrows (i.e the normal ones) arc in flight or no?
Bow hasn't been touched and would require someone creating a new animation with the arm / bow assets.Originally Posted by zil
The arrows have always had an arc in flight but perhaps not quite as exaggerated as in Thief. The greater the distance, the more you have to adjust by aiming upward to compensate.
Gameplay settings allows you to configure the "Bow Aimer" feature if the default behavior is hard to manage
Just downloaded - a huge thankyou to all the Taffers who contributed to this update, It really does seem much nippier than before.. I can't wait to test it on some of the maps that used to make even my AMD workstation chug a bit. Brilliant work alround!
Thank you for taking the time to update this great game never get sick of playing Thief and looks great in HDR using the new NVIDIA App.
Glad you're enjoying it!
I wonder if HDR would show in a screenshot if you used the "Print Screen" key and pasted the results to a paint program?
May I'll get an OLED during my next PC upgrade and see for myself.
Might want to fix that sort of thing in your official announcements.
Thank you!
Not sure why Wordpress is replacing quotes with diacritics on copy / paste...
Thanks! I didn't realize this was out, looking forward to it downloading now.
Glad to serve!
Please report on any observations ( positive or negative ). Thanks!
Hard to believe just how much this mod has improved over the years.
I've noticed the movement physics are a bit better than they used to be, jump distance is increased, gravity has been reduced.
I wonder is there a place to edit those values directly? As well as a movement speed modifier it would do a lot to bring it more in line with Thief 2.
Garrett still seems to be a touch more nimble with the jumps and a bit faster in general (less lead in his boots).
Namely the mantling mechanics have been improved (sped-up). That's been a major improvement for me, personally.
You should be able to tweak all of that in the cfg files. darkmod.cfg contains a lot (if not all) of the stuff you can tweak, which even includes the view-bobbing (I always get rid of the weird view tilting that's there by default). I'm not the best person to tell you exactly what commands to change, though.
Though I would advise you to create an autocommands.cfg, and put your personal tweaks in there, because darkmod.cfg can be overridden by the game or the installer. The autocommands.cfg gets executed automatically when the game launches.
However, keep in mind that TDM is not Thief, so you will be trying to force one game to be another game it was never meant to be, so the results may not end up satisfactory, and you may end up missing out on what this game has to offer on its own merits.
I personally prefer Thief's faster paced and more lenient gameplay myself, but I still enjoy TDM for other reasons.
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