In late April 2010, a user on the Dreamcast Talk forum disassembled the contents of a Dreamcast development kit he had purchased. Fans of the Thief and System Shock series subsequently petitioned the publisher to consider releasing the code. The code was a complete set of the engine's resources, and included the libraries needed to compile the code. In 2009, a complete copy of the Dark Engine source code was discovered in the possession of an ex-Looking Glass Studios employee who was at the time continuing his work for Eidos Interactive. The designer has full control of sound propagation within the level, and the ' artificial intelligence' of the non-player characters (NPCs) allows for three levels of awareness: vague acknowledgement caused by mild visual or auditive disturbances, which only prompts a startled bit of dialogue definite acknowledgement caused by significant visual or auditive disturbances, which causes the NPC to enter 'search mode', and definite acquisition (triggered by visual on the fully lit player, or face-first contact with a player regardless of the light level), prompting a direct attack. In order to overcome this, editors must resort to complicated Rube Goldberg machine-like effects using a combination of its other systems.įor its time, the Dark Engine offered advanced AI and sound features, as well as a powerful object-oriented object system. As such, new modules can be written and plugged into the level editor, DromEd, but are limited due to the scope of the functions made available by the core engine. The engine does not natively support advanced game scripting, with AI and object behavior being controlled by 'Object Script Module' (.OSM) files, which are DLLs that are loaded at runtime. There is a maximum of 216 textures and independent palettes, excluding 8 animated water textures.

Textures are grouped in 'families' which share the same palette. In terms of textures, the game supports palletized PCX and TGA textures, in powers of two up to 256x256. Due to the limited hardware of the time, the Dark Engine was not designed with scalability in mind, and can therefore only display 1024 terrain polygons onscreen at once, as well as various other limits on objects and lights. The Dark Engine's renderer, originally created by Sean Barrett in 1995, supports graphics similar to that of the original Quake, with Unreal-like skybox effects and colored lighting introduced in Thief II. The Dark Engine was a game engine developed by Looking Glass Studios and was used from 1998 to 2000, mainly in the early Thief games.

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