Dark Engine

The Dark Engine is a game engine used for the Looking Glass Studios games Thief: The Dark Project (1998), Thief II: The Metal Age (2000), and the Looking Glass/Irrational Games title System Shock 2 (1999).

Features

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. 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. In terms of textures, the game supports palletized PCX and TGA textures, in powers of two up to 256x256. Textures are grouped in "families" which share the same palette. 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 are DLLs 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 complicated Rube Goldberg machine-like effects using a combination of its other systems.