Thief inspired FOSS stealth game The Dark Mod has a massive new release

The Dark Mod, a free and open-source first-person stealth game inspired by the Thief series has a huge new release up.

Powered by the open-source id Tech 4 game engine (the Doom 3 engine), The Dark Mod is an impressive stand-alone project that has quite a lot of community-created mission packs available. The Dark Mod 2.08 has been in development for over a year, and it's quite an impressive boost with lots of underlying modern tech upgrades like using more modern OpenGL techniques.

Highlights of the new release include:

• Better Visuals: Cabalistic has finally added the much requested SSAO feature to TDM. Using a method called Scalable Ambient Obscurance, now areas with flat ambient lighting come alive with new detail! He’s also implemented a new Bloom method, and brightness and gamma will no longer interfere with desktop brightness.
• Better AI: Grayman has refined the AI yet again, for instance ensuring that sitting and lying aren’t thwarted by obstacles.
• Better Gameplay: The player’s ability to move and interact with the environment has been improved thanks to fixes to mantling as well as climbing ropes and ladders. Ragdolls are easier to handle and shouldering them is accompanied by an animation.
• Better Mapping: The mapper’s toolkit has seen several enhancements. A new X-ray surface and new spectrum spawnargs modify how objects are perceived. Rain is much less taxing and uses static collision detection to limit its fall. New visportal diagnostics make it easier than ever to track down notorious internal leaks.
• Better Performance: The dev team has as always been hard at work making improvements to performance and laying the groundwork for even more improvements in the future. Multi-Core’s stability has been enhanced and is no longer listed as an “Experimental” setting.
• New Assets: Many quality textures and models were added by both Team members and community contributors. Especially of note is the inclusion of Kingsal’s manbeasts and Springheel’s new zombies, and expect to catch glimpses of the werebeast.

On the Linux side of things for people compiling for distribution packages, the project can now be compiled with CMake. No need to if you're just a player though, as they supply a pre-made updater you can grab from the official site to have it get everything you need.

See more on the official site.