The Darkmod

The team here at Broken Glass Studios is very pleased to announce the latest update to TDM!

The update to 2.04 is primarily a bugfix release but has over a year's worth of fixes. Some changes will be noticeable right away, while others will take a while to appear in new maps.

To apply the update, simply run the tdm_update.exe file in your darkmod folder. (Note that saved games from earlier versions will not be compatible with 2.04, so finish any missions you are playing first). Some of the improvements are listed below. To see the full changelog, see below -

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What%27s_new_in_TDM_2.04

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so3hPDySfxw

Better Coordinated Searching:

The changes in 2.03 caused AI to develop a choke-off pattern to more accurately reflect how people in groups would coordinate a search effort. It was found that this change often caused AI to remain stationary around the last known whereabouts of the player (causing the player to wait endlessly for the cooldown process). 2.04 now prompts isolated AI to move around more and investigate hiding spots within a radius of the alert region. This will give players more opportunities to make daring escapes or maneuverability to better reach a point of advantage to the AI.

Ai now noticed dropped weapons!

Even the TDM team developers were surprised to find that no prior release had code support for AI noticing dropped weapons. This has been added so now all your weapon hiding antics are meaningful as expected!

Grid Based Inventory option:

We were fortunate to gain a new mouse navigated grid-based inventory manager thanks to a new forum contributor, Durandall.Thank you! To activate, bind a key to _impulse30 in the console or Darkmod.cfg. For example -

bind t _impulse30

Pickup up stuff without clunking:

In previous TDM versions, players would often create unintentional alerts by clunking candles, bowls, or other moveables against the table-top when trying to lift them. This became so frustrating that Sotha and Goldwell began using stationary snuff-able candles in their missions to avoid this scenario. Now the grabber more smoothly moves objects into manipulation range and with a middle-click centers them on the screen directly in front of the player for easier manipulation.

Improved Breakables:

While developing breakable display cases for an upcoming mission, it was discovered that the whole breakable system was in poor shape. Crack decals would disappear after a small amount of time, rotated models would spawn pre-fractured, objects thrown through glass with zero-health would simply pass through without shattering it, and the fracture code itself caused a memory leak and save-game crash. SteveL spent a great deal of time sorting out these problems and updated the glass shader rendering as well.

Better looking Glass:

Along with SteveLs rendering fixes, AluminumHaste repaired or improved many of the stained-glass materials. Finally, I improved the flask glass shader (using fixes discovered by Obstortte and Arcturus).

Decal Fixes :

One of the oft-mentioned visual annoyances has been decals that seem to pop over distant objects rather than staying on their associated surface. This was tracked to OpenGL depth offset range behavior. It seems that Doom 3 has this set to an absurd 600 units (probably to work with DepthHack particles, which are a precursor to soft-particles in modern engines). 2.04 changes this range to reduce or eliminate this problematic behavior. This will also reduce the likeliness of z-fighting in missions and save on some overdraw.

Quicksave Backups:

A new quicksave safety system has been implemented. Save files are now written with alternating filenames rather than repeatedly overwriting the existing file. For a variety of reasons, the host OS has run into problems with rapid requests to write and overwrite these files leading to either corrupt or lost saves. The new system should be far less prone to this. It currently alternates between two files but can be set to any number you prefer with the com_numSaveGames console argument.

Improved Load Times:

While not a huge jump, it was found that particle bounds were determined via a lengthy Monte Carlo simulation. This has been scaled back to a simpler bounds calculation resulting in shorter map loading.

Sound Fixes:

Sound values are now prevented from being sent to the audio device with negative volume (invalid values) causing popping sounds. A new override system allows mappers to replace the ambient sound easily with another sound of their choice.

Russian & Romanian language improvements:

Thanks to the hard work from folks at the Darkfate Community, we now have better Russian translation and fonts.Similarly, the Romanian translation has been fixed to remove characters which do not have associated fonts yet for a more legible Romanian interface.

(Coming Soon) FREYKS INSTALLER:

For the past few releases, freyk has been creating an installer tool to assist users who are not good with portable file setup in Windows or address dependency issues in Linux. We are now adding this tool to the official installation page as an alternate option.

Bug Fixes:

As with any release, general bug fixes have been addressed. Of major note is the Card Player savegame crash, breakable savegame crash, AI scooting themselves out into the void, and a fix for a memory leak in the SEED system. Logspam has been significantly reduced in both the LOD\SEED system and in DMAP compiling leading to dramatic performance improvement in the latter.