Thief-like open source game project The Dark Mod 2.14 released

Inspired by the classic stealth game series Thief, the free and open source project The Dark Mod has a new release out. With this release there's no massive gameplay changes, as their focus has been on cleaning up and fixing issues since the 2.13 release from last year. There are still some goodies in this one though.

The Dark Mod is as much a game engine as it is a game, the community have been building up maps and campaigns to play through for everyone after a modern Thief-like experience. Completely free too with support for Linux and Windows. It's been a while again since the last release, but they're always working on the background on various features and fixes.

From the release notes for version 2.14:

The new AI visibility feature in 2.13 was found to have a few issues with performance and object awareness that were not seen in 2.13 beta testing so many players reverted settings to the 2.12 mode. Now the feature is working better than ever with improved performance!

A few longstanding major bugs were finally solved!

• Frequent saving on large missions no longer results in AI getting stuck in walls or obstructions.
• The entity "suicide" script meant to cleanup unused objects has been fixed or removed from AI and Weapon animation cycles where it was causing random crashes.
• Item Inventory icons no longer randomly show as stacked on top of each other in the HUD

Some of the other bits that came with this release:

Tone-mapping is now only applied to the 3D engine so the menus remain legible regardless of what extremity the user configures in the game.
( We had this fix in 2.08 but it was reverted due to other bugs \ issues that it caused. Welcome back! )

Non-Elite AI can be knocked out after a flashbomb blinds them!

The LOD menu has been given a new FULL option which disables all distance optimizations including ones not controlled by the LOD system.
This is a pretty punishing setting on some missions but is offered for players who want a no compromises visual option if they have the hardware.
It also serves as a debug option for visual anomalies are not LOD related and it fixes the brief portalsky bug when exiting underwater while swimming

Guard animations have been improved to better handle transition states. Also a new "Old Man" AI has been added!

Menu GUI's can now render a snapshot of the last in-game 3D screen. This is used to great effect in the new mission "Displacement"

More Dhewm3 code has been ported into TDM and the Dhewm3 project maintainer has been actively involved in TDM development.
Of note (other than some code stability changes), MD3 and MD5 animations fixes and improvements have been incorporated.

Projected Decals are now light interactive! Footprints, blood splats, projectile holes, all can have normalmaps and lighting interactions!

You can now enable SSAO in subviews such as mirrors / camera views so they will look more accurate. ( r_ssao_insubview )

OPTIMIZATIONS

• Further optimization to the parallel model rendering code have been introduced. Now the operations broken into chunks and load-balanced better. More demanding missions like "Scroll of Remembrance" should run better for most players now.
• Mirror and Remote Render surfaces can now have lower resolution rendering ( this optimization was broken some time after 2.05 )
• Portal distance closure now follows the LOD menu distance settings

Source: Changelog