Comments - NewHorizon

It's not the T2 styled bowsite mod that was floating around the forum however. We designed our own original bow site, based on some real life designs.

Yup, we've made it to the top 100 for the last few years. We were the only 'released' Doom 3 mod in the top 100. Yet, I don't even think we've ever gotten an honorable mention. :(

Yes, looking forward to trying this one out as well. Looking great!

We will not officially support any levels that infringe on Eidos intellectual property.

No. It is not a remake of Deadly Shadows, nor do we want it to be like Deadly Shadows.

As Happy Cheeze said, TDM takes place in universe unto itself...similar, yet different. Our goal is to make TDM visually closer to what T3 might have looked like if it were made by Looking Glass Studios on an updated Dark Engine.

1. This isn't FC2.
2. FC2 is a completely different type of engine. It loads smaller chunks of levels and then streams in the rest as you go. The doom 3 engine loads THE ENTIRE level. We didn't design the engine.

You need to understand a little bit about how different engines work before you start throwing insults around. FC2 will of course load faster since it is loading 'less' initially. That's how FC1 worked too. In any case, a faster computer will load the map faster...as some have suggested...not that you should go out and get one. The fact that some others are loading our mod in under a minute speaks for itself.

I'm happy that FC2 loads so quickly for you. Good job. I just don't understand what type of computer you have that it takes 5 minutes to load our map, when it takes 2 to load on my old clunker. Seriously.

Yup, I can imagine. :) I had a 400mhz AMD K62, 64megs of ram...and some sickly little video card that could only run the game in software mode. lol A lot of games have shorter load times now because the developers split the map up into smaller chunks and then have loading zones. TDM, like Thief, is not the type of game that benefits from loading zones. Each map should ideally be a single large map.

So, you get hit with a load time no matter what. Either you sit through it all at once in a single map, or you get hit with smaller load times, but over the course of segments of a single map. I prefer a single load. I also want to repeat what I said above, for anyone else who might have doubts, reloads after dying are fast...because all the assets are already loaded. You only deal with the long load time if you're loading the map from the very start.

As one of the developers of The Dark Mod I appreciate your comment, but load times will vary from system to system Mr. Kadish, sorry. What are the specifications of your system? Back when I first bought the original Thief: The Dark Project, I used to sit and wait for the levels to load...sometimes for up to 4 or 5 minutes. It was acceptable because the levels were large and my computer was slow. It wasn't the programs fault. The developers of Thief had optimized the resources within the game to the best of their ability, as have we. This level is quite large. My own computer is nothing spectacular. I run an old Athlon XP 2800+, with 1Gig of ram and a Geforce FX 5200. The map loads for me in just under 2 minutes and 35 seconds...yes, I timed it with a stopwatch. Quite acceptable for a level of this size and complexity. You only have a long wait the first time the map loads, if you die and restart...all the materials are cached. As for screen res changes, sorry...we didn't code the doom 3 engine. You'll have to take that up with Id software. If you're running a better system than I am, and still experience slow loading times, you may need to optimize your computer....defrag and turn off any unnecessary programs that are running in the background.

Yes, it is a toolkit for building fan missions, that has always been our goal, but there will be a few stand alone missions released when we go public. As you can see, we've already released a small alpha mission.

The Dark Mod does not yet run on Mac, only linux and windows. If we ever find a programmer familiar with Macs, we will have them work on creating a build for it.

We hoping to have a linux version of the pre-beta demo working, but no promises.

Well, you can't say I didn't try to appeal to you for help...but since you insist on starting another project based on Thief, I will say.."good luck". We could have really used your help in getting The Dark Mod finished but our suggestion for you to join in on the work we have already accomplished has gone ignored.

You are still in far deeper than you realize I'm afraid, even with the UT2007 engine. The goal of any 'next generation' Thief inspired mod should be to focus on 'longevity'...something you will have in the short term with UT2007, but not the long term...and you can't expect to pull off the same level of detail to the AI systems with Unreal scripting. Also, Epic doesn't release the source code to their engines like iD does, and that's where the Doom 3 engine is the logical choice. The Thief community will be able to update and maintain it, for years to come. :)

If you or anyone on your team would like to reconsider and help contribute to The Dark Mod...please step forward.

Again, good luck.