About

The Dark engine mod manager (DMM) lets you install and organize mods for System Shock 2, Thief, and Thief II in a straightforward manner.

Requirements

Game	Version
System Shock 2	v2.4 or later
Thief	v1.19 or later
Thief II	v1.19 or later

DMM requires Windows Vista SP2 or later to run.

For Linux support, use Wine.

Installation

DMM is part of SS2Tool and is installed alongside it.

For a manual installation, download the latest release and preferably copy it to your game’s main folder.

How to use

Install mods

Launch DMM. If the game is not yet detected, press Select game folder… and select your game’s main folder.

Press Install mod archives… and select the mod archives (see Mod format) to install. You can select multiple files at once using Shift and Ctrl. Confirm by clicking Open. Mod archives in the main mod folder (DMM by default) are installed automatically.

Activate mods and arrange their priorities as needed via buttons or drag & drop. You can select multiple mods via Shift / Ctrl + left-click. Mods that are higher on the list override every mod below them.

When finished, press Apply changes and Launch game & exit to play.

If you want further information about a mod, you can press Lookup (WWW) to open a Google search or Open a ReadMe file if present. If you have no further use of a mod, you can Delete it, which removes the mod from both DMM and your hard drive.

Mod profiles

To save your current mod order for later re-use, open the profile manager via Manage profiles….

Press Save profile… to save your current profile or Load file… to load a previous profile.

The result window shows a preview of your loaded profile. Mods which were deleted in the meantime cannot be loaded and are marked as such.

Press Use to apply the loaded profile, or simply close the window to discard your choice.

Shortcuts

Function	Key
Increase priority	Alt + ↑
Decrease priority	Alt + ↓
(De-)Activate	↵
Pause/Resume	Space
Delete	Del
Apply changes	Ctrl + s

Configuration

Configuration values are stored in a file dmm.cfg in the same folder as DMM. The most important values are detailed here.

Key	Value (default)	Function
game.modPathSuffix	.\patch_ext	Path appended to mod_path in cam_mod.ini
game.modPathPrefix		Path prepended to mod_path in cam_mod.ini
game.baseMoviePath	.\cutscenes+.\Data\cutscenes	Path appended to movie_path in game installation config
game.modsFolder	DMM	Main mod folder. Installed mods are automatically copied to it
game.archivesFolder	DMMArchives	Folder that automatically installed mod archives are copied to
game.dataOverrideSubfolder		Files contained in this subfolder will override files from the parent mod folder

Mod format

A mod may come in two formats - archived, or as a folder.

In archive form, e.g. as a 7z or zip file, all main game files (*.mis, *.dml, *.gam, … ) and folders (\obj, \mesh, …) should be placed at the root of the archive.

In folder form, those same files should be collected in one single folder and placed in the DMM folder.