This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Dark Engine" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(May 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

TheDark Engine is agame engine forMicrosoft Windows developed byLooking Glass Studios. It was used inThief: The Dark Project (1998),System Shock 2 (1999), andThief II (2000).

The Dark Engine's renderer, originally created by Sean Barrett in 1995, supports graphics similar to that of the originalQuake, withUnreal-likeskybox effects and colored lighting introduced inThief II. Due to the limited hardware of the time, the Dark Engine was not designed with scalability in mind, and can therefore only display 1024 terrainpolygons onscreen at once, as well as various other limits on objects and lights. In terms of textures, the game supports palletizedPCX andTGAtextures, in powers of two up to 256x256. Textures are grouped in "families" which share the samepalette. There is a maximum of 216 textures and independent palettes, excluding 8 animated water textures.

The engine does not natively support advanced game scripting, with AI and object behavior being controlled by "Object Script Module" (.OSM) files, which areDLLs that are loaded at runtime. 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. In order to overcome this, editors must resort to complicatedRube Goldberg machine-like effects using a combination of its other systems.

For its time, the Dark Engine offered advanced AI and sound features, as well as a powerful object-oriented object system.The designer has full control of sound propagation within the level, and the "artificial intelligence" of thenon-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 2009, a complete copy of the Dark Enginesource code was discovered in the possession of an ex-Looking Glass Studios employee who was at the time continuing his work forEidos Interactive.^[1] The code was a complete set of the engine's resources, and included the libraries needed to compile the code. Fans of theThief andSystem Shock series subsequently petitioned the publisher to consider releasing the code.

In late April 2010, a user on theDreamcast Talk forum disassembled the contents of aDreamcast development kit he had purchased. The contents of the kit included, among other things, items pertaining to ports ofThief II andSystem Shock 2 to that system. By December 2010, it had been discovered by the user and subsequently the greater Looking Glass Studios fan community that acompact disc included with the kit - the contents of which had been uploaded to the Internet - included a second copy of the Dark Engine source, minus the libraries needed to compile the code.^[2]

In September 2012, a significantunofficial update to the Dark Engine was published anonymously in a French forum, most probably based on theleaked Dreamcast source code.^[3][4] Thisunofficial patch extended the limits of the engine, introduced support for recent graphics and sound hardware, as well as better support for newer versions of Windows.^[5][6]

DromEd is thelevel editor for the Dark Engine. It was originally used in the design ofThief: The Dark Project, but after a petition from the fan community it was released to the public, as were later versions.

There are four different versions of DromEd: forThief: The Dark Project, forThief Gold, forThief II, and lastly forSystem Shock 2, commonly called "ShockEd." DromEd forThief: The Dark Project andThief Gold use the same version of the Dark Engine and therefore can open levels created for each game, althoughThief Gold levels may refer to in-game objects that are not found inThief.Thief II uses a revised version of the Dark Engine, and therefore it is difficult to open levels created forThief with DromEd forThief II. ShockEd is not compatible with any Dark Engine games aside fromSystem Shock 2. However, basic level geometry can be moved between editors using a geometry export feature called "multibrush".System Shock 2 levels can be loaded by DromEd 2 with some work.

The name of the level editor, DromEd, is a reference to the original project it was designed for — a game based on the Arthurian legend ofCamelot — the Camel becoming Dromedary and thence Dromed. DromEd has been used by fans to create hundreds of fan missions forThief andThief II, and several missions forSystem Shock 2.

• System Shock Infinite

• 1998 software
• Thief (series)
• Video game engines

• CS1 German-language sources (de)
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles needing additional references from May 2025
• All articles needing additional references