Thief-like free and open source game The Dark Mod 2.13 brings better AI vision and new graphical goodies

By Liam Dawe - 24 Mar 2025 at 10:09 am UTC

The Dark Mod is a seriously impressive project giving us a completely free and open source standalone Thief-like stealth game, and The Dark Mod 2.13 release is another great one.

In this release they've managed to overhaul AI vision system, which sounds lot more impressive and accurate. They go into a bit of detail on the history on why it wasn't great originally, with light previously being calculated as "either cubes or pyramids with perfect exponential falloff" but now they have "a stochastic sampler model that does regular measurements of the actual light volume pixels and builds a running average of how illuminated different entities are". The result? Light works more like actual light with their example video below:

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There's also been an overhaul to Mission Management with a new UI. It has a search filter now that "follows modern conventions of reducing the listed items as each new letter eliminates a possible matching mission name" with new sorting options. You can also now scroll the additional mission details and more.

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They've also added in Parallax Occlusion Mapping and other new graphical goodies, an improved training mission, new potions were added, new assets are available for mission builders and much more.

The Dark Mod | Release Date: 17th October 2009

Official links:

Official Website

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Native Linux, Free Game, Open Source, Stealth | Apps: The Dark Mod

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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2 comments

Pyrate a day ago

I'm in the middle of Thief Gold myself, the game is exceptional as expected, but I dare say it's starting to overstay its welcome with 35 hours of playtime and yet still a couple missions away, the Expert difficulty setting makes each mission considerably longer which lentghens the game's overall playtime. Even though like I said I really like the game, it's just a bit absurd for me to take (I predict) 40+ hours on a game that overall has way less story than something like Deus Ex which took me about 33 hours.

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Hythlodaeus a day ago

Honestly though, The Dark Mod really needs to stop with the backend feature creep and work on its presentation once and for all. The game has a large community of mission makers, yet the team still shows no interest in finishing the official campaign. The tutorial is also bad and many menu and interface features feel clunky and outdated. I believe this is one of the main reasons why TDM has never reached mainstream appeal despite being a free game with high quality assets: it's default package is just not appealing for a standalone game, and it doesn't offer new players enough content to sink their teeth in without having them download user-made missions of varying quality and length.

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