The team behind The Dark Mod, a THIEF game that is powered by the Doom 3 Engine, has released Version 2.13. This new version comes with a lot of tweaks and improvements. So, let’s take a look at them.
For those unaware, The Dark Mod is a free dark and moody stealth game, that is heavily inspired by the Thief series by Looking Glass Studios. It’s a great game, so be sure to at least give it a go.
Version 2.13 adds support for Parallax Occlusion Mapping. As such, The Dark Mod can now offer a quantum leap in perceived geometric detail with all sorts of surfaces realistically showing 3D parallax rather than the flatter looking normal maps we usually offer.
Moreover, this new version of The Dark Mod has better cubemaps. Thus, water reflections can now move in relation to the water texture movement offering a more convincing illusion. Volumetric lights and particles can now render in mirrors. Alpha-tested surfaces get alpha shadows in Shadow Maps mode. And finally, tone-mapping now supports range compression to prevent unwanted overbright areas.
And that’s not all. The game will automatically detect the number of CPU cores and allocate jobs based on the detected specifications. As such, level loading has been given more parallel execution optimizations, including optimizations for loading audio samples in parallel.
The Dark Mod Version 2.13 also brings some major AI enhancements. The game uses a light-gem system for the AI. This system allows AI and the player to “know” when something is visible. The problem with this system was that it was too demanding. But now, the game has a stochastic sampler model that does regular measurements of the actual light volume pixel. This means that it performs way better than before. Plus, all AI and loot entities now have their own light-gem.
You can download The Dark Mod V2.13 from this link. Below you can also find a few videos that highlight some of its new features.
Have fun!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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