The Dark Mod For Doom 3 On Linux

When writing earlier this week about the poor state of the open-source id Tech 4 / Doom 3 community even after one year of the id Software game engine being GPL licensed, several readers wrote in and tweeted about "The Dark Mod" having not been mentioned.

For those not familiar with The Dark Mod, it's a total conversion mod of Doom 3 that seeks to remake Doom 3 as a game inspired by Looking Glass Studios' Thief game series. This Doom 3 mod brings in new game-play functionality, unique AI characteristics, new maps, and custom art assets.

Last month marked the v1.08 release of The Dark Mod with audio improvements to make for a more immersive sound experience, AI improvements, revamped training mission, dozens of new art assets, and much more. The Dark Mod 1.08 release came on the project's third anniversary.

The Dark Mod wasn't mentioned in the Phoronix article earlier this week since it still serves as just a Doom 3 mod. The project is ultimately aiming to turn itself into its own standalone game that isn't dependent upon a Doom 3 installation, but they're not there yet. For now you must have a retailed copy of Doom 3 (non-BFG) installed in order to try out the mod. This mod additionally predates the open-sourcing of the id Tech 4 engine that occurred last November.

The Dark Mod isn't expecting its own standalone game release soon and it doesn't sound like they're planning any original game engine innovations atop id Tech 4. "We’d love to have a version of TDM that doesn’t require D3. However, TDM uses a large number of D3 assets, including high quality sounds, particle effects, models and animations. All those assets would need to be replaced before we could release a standalone version, and that requires a lot of (fairly thankless) work that won’t be finished any time soon."

Nevertheless, since this is a game mod that does work on Linux for a high-quality game engine, it's worthy of being mentioned this weekend and can be checked out at TheDarkMod.com. Embedded below are also some clips of the new Dark Mod 1.08 release for those interested.