What's the Status on Dark Engine modernization in 2025

jdv on 22/10/2025 at 17:50

With the advent of AI code assistants I feel like I have the energy and agency to take a crack at modernizing the dark engine.

What's the best, most up to date, or ideally actively maintained dark engine source code out there?

I've found this: (https://github.com/volca02/openDarkEngine)

and this: (https://github.com/dima424658/darkengine)

my github is (https://github.com/josephdviviano/) -- I don't check this often, if you want to reach out urgently RE a project ping me there :)

mikjames on 24/10/2025 at 14:49

Quote Posted by jdv

New Dark is as up to date as it gets, but it's not an open source project, and they've already fixed pretty much everything.
I don't think people really care about a.i vibe coded alternatives...
There's nothing gameplay side that needs to be updated, it's pretty much as bug fixed as it's gonna get, and it runs great.
Visually is the only area where there could be quite a bit room for improvement. A.i upscaled texture packs for missions, global bump mapping would be cool to add some texture detail, even if it doesn't react to light like normal maps.
If you want something to do with a.i, by all means upscale the textures in The Black Parade fan mission ;)
Rtx remix looked promising but I'm starting to think it's just a buggy unoptimized mess that produces mostly horrible results.

mikjames on 24/10/2025 at 15:04

I guess if you had the expertise converting everything to 64bit would be a nice improvement for the community, but you'd want to build on the work that's been done in New Dark.

Estel Randir on 25/10/2025 at 05:10

Quote Posted by mikjames

I guess if you had the expertise converting everything to 64bit would be a nice improvement for the community, but you'd want to build on the work that's been done in New Dark.

It would be beyond amazing to be able to port/convert (whatever the method may be) these old games to x64. But from what I have researched, it would require pretty much re-coding every part of the game engine. Which is why there was never an Oblivion x64 update by the modding community. And Oblivion had a massive modding community that did in fact write new x32 extensions to the existing game engine to add new features and improvements. I do not know if anything has changed in recent years to make x32 to x64 conversions possible by ordinary modding communites.

The Thief engine is rather unique from what I have read on these forums, but I wonder if it's possible to update the engine to be able to run with an updated rederer using D3D11 or D3D12. The Gothic modding community has successfully written a new D3D11 renderer for Gothic 1 & 2. It has added a lot of life to the games.

jdv on 28/10/2025 at 04:27

is the newdark source code posted anywhere?

mikjames on 28/10/2025 at 22:41

Quote Posted by jdv

is the newdark source code posted anywhere?

Not so far as I'm aware. The thing you have to understand about this particular community is that many contributors aren't big fans of sharing their work/letting other people build on their work in an open source fashion.
I've never understand that way of doing things myself, especially for content that will be released for free, but some people just have a permanent stick up their ass.
From what I recall some bloke named "Le Corbeau" was responsible for New Dark, but they pretty much shadow dropped the mod and haven't participated on the forum under that name.
Or at least that's the potentially outdated information I gathered ~5-6 years ago.
At least they were nice enough to release New Dark publicly at all.

Newdark is maintained by the creator of TFix though, so they might have more information if you ask in the TFix thread.

Renault on 31/10/2025 at 14:27

The source code is available, but from what I understand, it's incomplete. You can get it here: (https://archive.thedatadungeon.com/thief_ii_the_metal_age_2000.html). There are things missing from it, but it was somehow still used to create New Dark. But I'm not an expert on this stuff.

New Dark is NOT maintained by the creator of Tfix. He only includes it in the Tfix package, which is essentially an installer for Thief Gold.

jdv on 27/1/2026 at 00:32

The newdark source should be hosted on github and treated as a proper OSS project, and I suspect we could do pretty amazing things, such as updating the AI's behaviour to be more realistic and reactive.

HavvicGames on 3/2/2026 at 11:10

NewDark can't be an oss project. The source code is based off a leak and is blatantly illegal to share publicly. Unless explicit permission is obtained from the current Thief copyright holder for the code to become open-source (and there have been multiple attempts at this in the past, all of which failed), NewDark will stay closed.

Separate from that issue, I have little doubt that even if it was public your slopcode attempts to "modernise" it would fail :)

Valet2 on 4/2/2026 at 02:07

My question to the programmers over here which is bugging me over the years: considering the amount of changes to the engine and the editor in NewDark, is it possible to a random person (even a very skilled coder) to make it all using those poor leaked sources and/or reverse engineering? Or more probably it was an ex-LG programmer who knew the engine well because he worked on it back in the days?