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The Dark Mod 2.0 Standalone: Id Tech 4 GPL Yields a Free Thief-a-Like Game
An anonymous reader writes "After nine years of development, The Dark Mod is now a standalone game. Thief fans can now enjoy over 60 fan made missions which capture the essence of the Thief 1 / 2 games. Originally created as a reaction to Thief 3; with the upcoming release of Thief 4, many are comparing what was done here (a faithful extension of the old gameplay) to what Eidos has shown thus far. Can a little Doom 3 mod compete against a blockbuster AAA title? Should we even compare them?"
All code in the The Dark Mod is GPLv3+, and the art assets are all CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported which means it, unfortunately, cannot be distributed by even Debian. Still, an impressive feat!
cannot be distributed by even Debian
I think that should say "cannot be distributed by entities that require commercial-use permission, like Debian." Debian has very strict rules on what it will redistribute, not because it must have those rules, but because it chooses to.
The -NC option prevents anyone from taking The Dark Mod's assets and publishing them in a commercial game. This annoys some pure-freedom-loving folks (like the Debian project and RMS) because they feel it's important that information be free for anyone to use in any way. On the other hand, for the "it's my work, so it's my choice" crowd, the -NC option ensures that nobody can copy their work and make a profit.
Debian's choice is theirs to make, as is any other distributor's, and has nothing to do with The Dark Mod. There's no reason to put such pointless slant in a summary.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Free, Standalone TDM 2.0 Now Available!
Posted on October 8, 2013 by Springheel
We at Broken Glass Studios are happy to announce the release of TDM 2.0, a free, open-source, completely standalone stealth game!!
Standalone: First and most importantly, The Dark Mod is now completely standalone, which means you no longer need to own Doom3 to play it! We have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy replacing all the sounds, textures, particle effects, and models that we had been using. Hopefully this will open up a whole new audience of people who didnâ(TM)t want to have to purchase a different game in order to try The Dark Mod.
In addition to going standalone, the following improvements have been made:
AI Improvements: There have been lots of additions and fixes to AI behaviour; characters will now greet each other more regularly, and will properly call for help when theyâ(TM)re in trouble. Guards can now hear slightly better, and we have included a new AI Vision slider to the menu, so the player can adjust how sensitive they want AI vision to be. Characters react to bodies in more varied ways now. A bug that made AI very easy to kill has been fixed. Archers will draw melee weapons if the player gets too close. Guards will turn towards doors that open unexpectedly. There are new vocals for specific situations, like when guards are getting shot at and canâ(TM)t see their opponent. Searching behaviour has been improved. Plenty of old bugs, like the one where AI would sometimes attack with an empty fist, have been fixed.
New Gameplay: AI can now hear collapsing bodies, especially if the body is wearing plate mail and falls on a hard surface. No longer will a guard stand oblivious while his friend collapses to the ground two feet behind him. The player will have to give some thought to where they take down opponents if there are other guards in the area.
Audio Improvements: In addition to replacing dozens of Doom3 sounds, two new vocal sets have been added to the game. Footstep sounds have been improved. Big changes have been made to the sound propagation system that will allow mappers a lot more control over how players hear sound; for example, mappers can now make doors block different amounts of sound depending on their thickness, or can control how much sound passes through windows or small holes.
Graphical Improvements: You should notice a number of improvements to some character models, especially the skeleton, townsfolk, and beggar characters. Arrows will now leave blood-stains.
There have been plenty of other bug-fixes, like removing the ability to hide in the shadow of an object youâ(TM)re carrying (no more sneaking under a crate umbrella). See the full change-log here.
Updates to Missions:
Because of the removal and replacement of Doom3 assets, some missions that used them are no longer compatible with TDM 2.0. About two dozen missions have updated .pk4s to fix these issues. New players can ignore this, but if youâ(TM)re playing missions that you downloaded before 2.0, you may have trouble trying to run them. Most are fine, but a few missions will just crash while loading, and others will load but will have odd visual problems. It is highly recommended that you delete all previously downloaded missions after updating to 2.0!
Going standalone has been a mammoth undertaking. There were literally hundreds of assets that needed to be replaced, and around seventy maps that had to be checked to see whether any of those replacements broke anything. Weâ(TM)ve been testing for months, but itâ(TM)s almost certain that we missed something, somewhere. If you see a black texture, a model buried in the floor, or something else unusual in a map, please let us know. If it was caused by 2.0 changes, weâ(TM)ll make sure we fix it in the next update.
To update your TDM installation, simply run the tdm_update.exe file in your darkmod folder. Your darkmod folder no longer needs to sit under Doom3, an
...you friggin' taffer.
About 10 minutes after this went up on Slashdot, the dark mod website started timing out on page loads. I guess they weren't expecting traffic.
http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/9024163/THE_DARK_MOD_Version_2.0_-_Standalone_Release
Make sure to rename the folder containing the files to "darkmod" for now, until it is fixed in 2.01.
Missions can be found on the website or the in-game downloader. Or this torrent I guess. Have fun!
Oh yes, more Thief is always good.
Thief Gold, Thief 2 and Thief: Deadly Shadows are available DRM-free on GOG.com. Those plus DarkLoader for fan mission and you have a virtually unlimited amount of gameplay.
Go get it, you taffers!
Trolling is a art,
Obviously the EA version is going to be better!
I mean, yeah, it'll have gameplay that would make calling it "Battlefield: Sneaking of Honor" more honest, and actually-useful arrows will be consumable DLC items you purchase with real money, and you'll have to install Origin for it to work, and the game will demand the right to post promotional messages on any and all social media accounts you have access to; but it'll be AAA, man!
Fans, heatsinks... trying to find a joke somewhere
Holy Initialisms, Batman! Can someone spell that out and explain why Debian couldn't use it?
Unfortunately I had not had to run tdm_update.exe previously, so I had no mirror data saved away. So, now I have to wait for the site to come back up so I can update my installation :(
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
For most users this will work:
http://pirateproxy.net/torrent/9024163/THE_DARK_MOD_Version_2.0_-_Standalone_Release
For Virgin and other shitty ISPs that illegally block websites and censor what you can view online:
http://malaysiabay.org/torrent/9024163/THE_DARK_MOD_Version_2.0_-_Standalone_Release
Are there any open source, free content games based on id Tech 4 that support multiplayer yet?
I'd absolutely love to run an id Tech 4 server. I wouldn't even care if it's empty all the time.
I would have set up an iodoom3 server already, except Doom 3 isn't free.
Site appears to be down - will I be able to run this on my SandyBridge-based laptop (i5-2410, HD3000 gfx)?
I think a lot of people just reflexively tack the "noncommercial" clause on there without thinking about it, because exactly as you say, they figure "nobody will make money off my work this way".
The "Share Alike" clause all by itself should prevent any profit abuse, while allowing (for example) someone to charge $0.10 to cover the cost of burning the CD with the creative-commons work on it, or in the case of music it would allow a restaurant to play the work as background music for their guests (but require them to share it if the guests ask for it!).
(To be fair - those cases are arguably not "primarily" about making money and therefore are arguably okay within the scope of the "Non-Commercial" license clause, but that "arguably" part is a big problem in an era with so much litigiousness going on over people's and corporation's Intellectual Precious, so I think most potential users - like Debian - will just stay away anyway because it says "non-commercial".)
If some dork wants to take the game, make fancy new labels, and "sell" copies commercially for $60US each as though they'd written it, the Share-Alike clause still means that anyone who "buys" a copy can legally give out free copies to their friends and everyone else anyway. If they're worried that EA or somebody will trespass on the artwork and they'll find one of the character models wandering around in some unrelated blockbuster game at GameStop(tm) someday, consider that the Share-Alike clause would almost certainly stop a company like EA from doing that, since they hate to share.
And if you figure "but they'll just ignore the Share-Alike clause and make a fortune from my work!", consider that if they're willing to ignore "Share-Alike", why wouldn't they also be willing to ignore "Non-Commercial" anyway?
(In a lot of cases, the "No Derivatives" clause would be a better substitute for "Non-Commercial" with the share-alike clause, I think (i.e. "You can distribute my amazing genius musical works but you cannot incorporate them into the soundtrack for your $500,000,000 blockbuster Hollywood movie"), but that's probably not appropriate here since I assume The Dark Mod developers intend for people to be able to remix and add to it.)
Obligatory Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer, so if anyone reading this is unsure about whether their intended use of a CC-BY-NC-SA work counts as "non-commercial", go find a professional to pay a few hundred dollars an hour to figure it out for you (which is why don't really like the Non-Commercial clause for most uses at the moment...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Can anyone recommend a portable DOOM 3 Engine fork, that is likely to run on Solaris, *BSD, IRIX and the likes?
Since the site is down, you can also checkout the moddb presence: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod
We appreciate the exposure folks, thank you for stopping by and considering all our hard work. :)
This does not, however, prevent others from packing the .deb and putting up a repository that you can add to your apt config (or just download/install the .deb for that matter).