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.
Before ( 2.10 with dither and low sample artifacts, click to view):
After ( 2.11 with the new blur algorithm, click to view ):
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!
