The Dark Mod 2.14 Stability Release
A major focus for The Dark Mod 2.14 development cycle was fixing lingering issues seen with some of the larger 2.13 changes and to complete work started in 2.13.
The new AI visibility feature in 2.13 was found to have a few issues with performance and object awareness that were not seen in 2.13 beta testing
so many players reverted settings to the 2.12 mode. Now the feature is working better than ever with improved performance!
A few longstanding major bugs were finally solved!
- Item Inventory icons no longer randomly show as stacked on top of each other in the HUD
- Frequent saving on large missions no longer results in AI getting stuck in walls or obstructions.
- The entity “suicide” script meant to cleanup unused objects has been fixed or removed from AI and Weapon animation cycles where it was causing random crashes.
Tone-mapping shaders have an ACES style approach!
Tone-mapping is now only applied to the 3D engine so the menus remain legible regardless of what extremity the user configures in the game.
( We had this fix in 2.08 but it was reverted due to other bugs \ issues that it caused. Welcome back! )
Non-Elite AI can be knocked out after a flashbomb blinds them!
The LOD menu has been given a new FULL option which disables all distance optimizations including ones not controlled by the LOD system.
This is a pretty punishing setting on some missions but is offered for players who want a no compromises visual option if they have the hardware.
It also serves as a debug option for visual anomalies are not LOD related and it fixes the brief portalsky bug when exiting underwater while swimming
Guard transition animations have been improved!
A new “Old Man” AI has been added!
Menu GUI’s can now render a snapshot of the last in-game 3D screen. This is used to great effect in the new mission “Displacement”
More Dhewm3 code has been ported into TDM and the Dhewm3 project maintainer has been actively involved in TDM development.
Of note (other than some code stability changes), MD3 and MD5 animations fixes and improvements have been incorporated.
Projected Decals are now light interactive! Footprints, blood splats, projectile holes, all can have normalmaps and lighting interactions!
You can now enable SSAO in subviews such as mirrors / camera views so they will look more accurate. ( r_ssao_insubview )
Geep has been hard at work contributing Font fixes to improve multi-lingual support!
A very large amount of assets have been added, including many new POM enabled textures!
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OPTIMIZATIONS
- Further optimization to the parallel model rendering code have been introduced. Now the operations broken into chunks and load-balanced better. More demanding missions like “Scroll of Remembrance” should run better for most players now.
- Mirror and Remote Render surfaces can now have lower resolution rendering ( this optimization was broken some time after 2.05 )
- Portal distance closure now follows the LOD menu distance settings
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A detailed list of changes can be seen here:
https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What%27s_new_in_TDM_2.14
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 2.14, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!
Also, some missions created prior to 2.14 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.14.
Before upgrading, set TDM to use one of the built-in missions ( Training Mission, A New Job, Tears of St Lucia ) then use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates