One Of The Few Games On The Open-Source id Tech 4 Engine Sees Big Update
The Dark Mod open-source stealth video game that started out as a total conversion mod to Doom 3 and migrated to the open-source id Tech 4 engine is still alive and kicking in 2018. That's while the ioDoom3 project has largely been stagnant with nothing major to report in years, contrary to the open-source adoption and successes of ioquake3. The only other notable open-source projects off this id Tech 4 engine code are VkNeo as a Vulkan renderer for Doom 3 and the occasionally still progressing RBDOOM-3-BFG and DEWM3. There are also the other occasional hobbyist projects like rewriting Doom 3 in the Ada programming language.
Anyhow, on the matter of The Dark Mod that is inspired by the Thief game series, the 2.06 update out this weekend finally offers a native 64-bit build as well as OpenAL-based EFX sound support.
Additionally, it also offers multi-core support albeit is limited to two cores at this stage. The update also now allows uncapping the frame-rate.
There is also initial video codec support in TDM 2.06 via FFmpeg and replacing more of their legacy OpenGL usage with more modern OpenGL support.
Rounding out things are new GUI scaling, experimental soft shadows, and a variety of other enhancements. A complete look at The Dark Mod 2.06 changes can be found at TheDarkMod.com.
The work like modern OpenGL use and the beginnings of proper multi-core support are long overdue when compared to modern commercial games, but it's great to finally see it arrive nevertheless and this bit of activity continuing off the open-source id Tech 4 code-base. This latest update comes more than one year after the debut of TDM 2.05.
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