Gydion, it not about looking for excuses or being lazy, but more about taking unnecessary risks with regard to copyright issues. See, if you look at what happened to the many Halo mods, to the Battlestar Galactica mod for Nexus, as well as MechWarrior: Living Legends, then you surely will understand why it is absolutely out of the question that the team ever touches copyrighted material from Thief. Believe me, with the success of The Dark Mod and the lack of success for Thi4f, Eidos/Square Enix would love to put an end to TDM.

That being said, you can always start recreating the original missions in the TDM engine, provided you don't post the files in their forums. Maybe TTLG.com would be the place to go, but since those goons frown at TDM for existing at all (and therefore "polluting" the memory of T1/2), I have no high hopes for that.

Thief 4 may very well be worrying to them, but <span class="bold">voodoo47</span> addressed that as far as I'm concerned. As long as you require the original datafiles I consider it a weak reason. Which is easy for me to say.

I linked that thread as it's the first one I found, but the devs would feel the same about Thief 3. What with the TafferPatcher and TFix I don't see a particular need for 1 & 2 to be redone.

As for lazy. TDM is a huge undertaking. Then they made it standalone. Lazy doesn't enter into it.

I cannot recommend this game enough. I grabbed it since it went Standalone and it's one of my favourite games this year despite not having any "main" campaign. The good fan missions are great, the game is so faithful to the first 2 Thief games, and the engine is perfect for this type of play with its dynamic shadows. It looks great, plays great, and rewards patience while remaining understated - not flashy but still more impactful than games that are.

A Score to Settle, Return to the City, In the North, three user maps that are great. Check the TDM forums for community votes to find other good ones. I really love "city crawling" maps and the first two I mentioned nail that.

Did I also mention that TDM has awesome vertical gameplay? The climbing/mantling is so intuitive and useful. Screw your contextual rope arrows.

Ahahah... seriously? One of the best thing happened to Thief fan "pollutes" the memories?
I head about unreasonable, but this is a whole new level...

On the other hand I would love a remake of Thief story, no need to -copy- all the levels. Just get inspired; and to avoid copyright issues all eidos data should be given by the player (for example putting the gog installers in place known to the installer). So not only you do not distribute anything from eidos, but you even push players to buy the old Thief.

Mmnn... we should do that :)

I lurk over at ttlg sometimes, and I haven't seen anyone badmouthing TDP.

Now that Deus Ex Revision Mod is now on GOG, do you Thief fans think the Dark Mod deserves a place here too?
I think so if, for any other reason, that it will highlight it to even more people.

We are proud to announce the release of:
The Dark Mod 2.11 !


The Dark Mod 2.11 is primarily a bug-fix release. The majority of development time was dedicated to fixing or improving long-standing bugs or problem areas with the project rather than focusing on new features.

That said, some of the improvements that were introduced to address these issues could very well be classified as new features in terms of the amount of changes required to bring them to life.
A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include:

Major gameplay improvements!

For players, Stealth Score and AI alert behavior has been improved to better detect tactile contact with AI and proximity.
An older TDM release introduced a grace period feature that was overly broad and made some AI ignore players that were right in front of them. This has been substantially improved so stealth scoring and AI reactions should be a lot more consistent and logical.

Players will also have a new Blackjack experience with better cues about whether a blackjack attack will succeed and improvements to the way that the blackjack attack is executed.

Players can more smoothly transition from climbing as the player is now permitted to be crouched during the climb.

There is a new multi-loot feature which allows you to pickup multiple loot pieces by holding down the frob button!

Performance Improvements!

The new volumetric light feature has been improved via a new blur phase. This means that you no longer need to increase the samples to reduce or remove banding and performance should be substantially improved.

Soft Shadows now utilize scissors and tile-based evaluation in stencil mode so that Anti-Aliasing no longer need be applied to the entire shadow buffer.

Shadow Maps have improved mipmap, LOD and texel utilization. There should be fewer artifacts and better performance.

Large models are now evaluated via a BVH structure so that they can be split for lighting and culling optimizations.

AI think cycles have been optimized and perform less work per-frame.

GLSL programs have been rewritten to have better performance on AMD graphic cards.

Included mission improvements!

Mission 1: A New Job now features subtitles!

Mission 2: Tears of Saint Lucia has been improved with EFX reverb and a few bug fixes!

Asset fixes and additions!

Dragofer has fixed hundreds of assets that were missing setup definitions or other components that would cause the console to flood with errors on TDM launch or on the launch of missions. In addition, he has added hundreds of new and old assets from both TDM team members and members of the TDM community.

Improvements for Mappers!

The Engine now supports Obj model format

Material Shaders no longer require you to add frob stages. Frob is now auto-generated. You can still add custom frob effects to materials if preferred

Missions can now include decls that override those in the core TDM without using an override file to replace the entire core file.

GUI scripting has been overhauled with better syntax and error reporting

Dmap precision has been increased and Dmap T-junction performance has been optimized

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 2.11, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first!