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The Dark Mod

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
The Dark Mod
The Dark Mod cover
Developers
Broken Glass Studios
Engines
id Tech 4
Release dates
Windows October 16, 2009
macOS (OS X) June 19, 2011[1]
Linux October 8, 2013
Taxonomy
Monetization Freeware
Modes Singleplayer
Pacing Real-time
Perspectives First-person
Controls Direct control
Genres Immersive sim, Stealth
Art styles Realistic
Themes Steampunk, Fantasy, Medieval, Victorian
Series Thief
The Dark Mod on IGDB
The Dark Mod on Wikipedia
Thief
Thief: The Dark Project 1998
Thief II: The Metal Age 2000
Thief: Deadly Shadows 2004
The Dark Mod (unofficial spin-off) 2009
Thief 2014

The Dark Mod is a stealth-based immersive sim developed and published by Broken Glass Studios. Originally developed as a Doom 3 total conversion mod meant to allow map-makers to create and players play maps replicating the gameplay of Thief: The Dark Project and Thief II: The Metal Age, the game is now standalone and freeware thanks to the open-sourcing of id Tech 4.

General information

Official site
The Dark Mod Forums
The Dark Mod Wiki/Game Manual
Official source code repository

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Official website
DRM-free
Use tdm_update.exe to update the mod whenever a new version is available.
Windows
Linux

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\Darkmod.cfg[Note 1]
macOS (OS X)
Linux <path-to-game>\Darkmod.cfg
It's unknown whether this game follows the XDG Base Directory Specification on Linux. Please fill in this information.

Save game data location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\fms\[Note 1]
macOS (OS X)
Linux
Saves are in a savegames folder inside each mission's folder.

Video

Video settings.
Video settings.

Graphics feature State WSGF Notes
Widescreen resolution
Multi-monitor
See Multi-monitor.
Ultra-widescreen
See Multi-monitor.
4K Ultra HD
Field of view (FOV)
Available under Video / Advanced.
Windowed
Can also be toggled by pressing Alt+ Enter.
Borderless fullscreen windowed
Added in version 2.09.
Anisotropic filtering (AF)
Anti-aliasing (AA)
Vertical sync (Vsync)
60 FPS and 120+ FPS
TDM 2.06 has "Uncapped FPS" under Experimental Features. This is actually a cap of 166 FPS.
High dynamic range display (HDR)
Post-process shaders approximate the HDR look (JC Denton's "HDR-Lite" shaders as of v1.03)

Multi-monitor

Edit config file[2]
  1. Go to the installation folder.
  2. Edit Darkmod.cfg with a text editor.
  3. Find a line seta r_customWidth and replace its value with a width of a resolution you want to use.
  4. Find a line seta r_customHeight and replace its value with a height of resolution you want to use.
  5. Find a line seta r_fullscreen and make sure it's set to "1", to make a game work in fullscreen mode.
  6. Find a line seta r_mode and make sure it's set to "-1".
  7. Find a line seta r_fovRatio and change the value according to this table (e.g. for 2.90:1 aspect ratio it's seta r_fovRatio 2.9, for 3.2:1 - seta r_fovRatio 3.2, etc.)
  8. Save a config file and run a game.

Notes

Menu is always stretched.

Disable head bob

Disable head bob
1. Create autoexec.cfg file in your darkmod.
2. Add the following commands:

seta pm_runbob "0"
seta pm_runpitch "0"
seta pm_runroll "0"
seta pm_walkbob "0"
seta pm_bobpitch "0"
seta pm_bobroll "0"
seta pm_bobup "0"
seta pm_crouchbob "0"

3. Save the file.


IMPORTANT:

The above changes will not take effect because the player definition in TDM will set them back to the default values. You can address this by unzipping the tdm_defs01.pk4 and editing the "tdm_player_thief.def" file in the def folder then zipping the contents of the folder and renaming the zip as tdm_defs01.pk4 and replacing the existing file. For Windows users, you will need to change folder options to show file extensions or else renaming the file will cause the file to be named tdm_defs01.pk4.zip with and invisible zip extension. Acquiring the latest 2.11 Dev Build using tdm_installer includes a fixed "tdm_player_thief.def" that will not override the cvar values above.

Input

Audio

Audio settings.
Audio settings.

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Ambient, sound effects, player voice, and narrator volume.
Surround sound
Subtitles
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Always disabled.
EAX support
EAX was replaced by EFX in TDM 2.06. Missions must be updated with EFX reverb settings.
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
Czech
French
German
Italian
Polish
Russian
Romanian
Spanish
Slovak
Danish
Hungarian
Portuguese
Turkish

Issues fixed

A comprehensive list of issues, and their fixes, is listed on the Dark Mod Wiki here.

Game refuses to run on 64-bit Ubuntu

If it complains about missing libcurl version 4, try installing libcurl3 package forcing i386 architecture by issuing the following command:
sudo apt-get install libcurl3:i386

Note: As of TDM 2.6, there is a 64-bit build but tdm_updater is still 32-bit.

No sound in Linux

Ubuntu Linux uses PulseAudio as default backend. To configure Dark Mod for PulseAudio, use the following command:
env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 ./thedarkmod.x86 +set s_driver best +set s_alsa_pcm default
This will re-route game's ALSA output to Pulse and increase its latency a little bit in order to prevent sound skipping.

If you insist on using ALSA however, follow the steps below:

  • get the list of available sound devices using aplay -L (that's capital L)
  • start the game using pasuspender and the parameter +set s_alsa_pcm DEVICE where DEVICE is one of the entries from the list you obtained in the previous step, e.g.:

pasuspender ./thedarkmod.x86 +set s_alsa_pcm sysdefault:CARD=PCH +set NumberOfSpeakers 2

Issues unresolved

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
OpenGL 2.0, 4.3
Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows
64-bit support added in version 2.06.[3]
macOS (OS X)
Linux
64-bit support added in version 2.06.[3]

Middleware

Middleware Notes
Audio OpenAL

Performance tweaks

Performance tweaks can be found at the Dark Mod Wiki and the Dark Mod FAQ.
The game is built on the Doom 3 engine, so the TweakGuide should still be applicable.
Do not tweak the r_lightScale variable as it's used to calculate player's visibility (light gem). It's actually possible to disable all lights in the game by assigning it a value of 0.

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) 2000
Processor (CPU) 1.5 GHz
System memory (RAM) 3 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 4 GB
Video card (GPU) Nvidia GeForce 6 series
ATI Radeon 97xx series
64 MB of VRAM
OpenGL 2.0 compatible
See the official Known System Configurations page for a list of compatible GPUs and CPUs.
Soft Shadows require a GPU which supports the OpenGL 4.3 ARB_STENCIL_TEXTURE extension.
Linux
Minimum
Operating system (OS)
Processor (CPU) 1.5 GHz
System memory (RAM) 3 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 4 GB
Video card (GPU) 64 MB of VRAM
See the official Known System Configurations page for a list of compatible GPUs and CPUs.
Soft Shadows require a GPU which supports the OpenGL 4.3 ARB_STENCIL_TEXTURE extension.


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).

References

  1. What's new in TDM 1.06 - The DarkMod Wiki - last accessed on 2017-07-21
    "#2518: Mac OS X Support (Design/Coding) (greebo)"
  2. Resolutions - The DarkMod Wiki - last accessed on May 2023
  3. 3.0 3.1 The DarkMod Wiki - What's new in TDM 2.06 - last accessed on 2022-11-25
    "Greebo and stgatilov merged 64-bit support from the Dhewm3 branch"