Arcanum Arcanum Multiverse Edition

[Drog Black Tooth]

Just FYI, while I do sometimes include some balance fixes (especially when they're the result of a fixed bug), but changing the basic gameplay mechanics and swapping schematics around is not really the point of the UAP. Sure, some things could go in the Extra Content pack (basically Patch Plus) or the future Combat Overhaul module, but for the moment being I'm mostly interested in fixing bugs and adding long requested features to the engine code.

Perhaps, the Multiverse guys will take some of your considerations.

 

[hell bovine]

ANOTHER SURVEY

How does Arcanum perform on your version of Windows and what wrapper do you use if any? GOG and Steam versions come with a simple wrapper that alleviates some of the issues on Win 8/10, but is still buggy as hell. Windows 7 and XP users, please try deleting/renaming ddraw.dll in your Arcanum folder and post results.

Well, I don't see any difference (Win 7, gog version) between the game with ddraw / without. Admittedly, I don't have much time to play, so I just killed a few poor critters around the crash site with a few characters. Is there anything specific to look for?

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Well, I don't see any difference (Win 7, gog version) between the game with ddraw / without. Admittedly, I don't have much time to play, so I just killed a few poor critters around the crash site with a few characters. Is there anything specific to look for?

Not really. The game either lags and/or glitches out, or it doesn't.

Nice, I guess there's probably no need for a wrapper on Windows 7. What's your GPU btw?

 

[hell bovine]

Well, I don't see any difference (Win 7, gog version) between the game with ddraw / without. Admittedly, I don't have much time to play, so I just killed a few poor critters around the crash site with a few characters. Is there anything specific to look for?

Not really. The game either lags and/or glitches out, or it doesn't.

Nice, I guess there's probably no need for a wrapper on Windows 7. What's your GPU btw?

You are a) too fast and b) ask difficult questions. I have no idea what the following means: Intel Core i5-3230 M CPU, but this is what I have.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

You are a) too fast and b) ask difficult questions. I have no idea what the following means: Intel Core i5-3230 M CPU, but this is what I have.

I mean the video card, like GeForce something something.

Doesn't really matter tho, I do remember Arcanum running mostly fine on Windows 7 when I tried it. It's a completely different situation on Win 10 tho.

 

[hell bovine]

You are a) too fast and b) ask difficult questions. I have no idea what the following means: Intel Core i5-3230 M CPU, but this is what I have.

I mean the video card, like GeForce something something.

Doesn't really matter tho, I do remember Arcanum running mostly fine on Windows 7 when I tried it. It's a completely different situation on Win 10 tho.

Well, when I say I am computer illiterate, I do mean it. It says GeForce GT 640M. (on a side-note: got a new job in order to buy shiny new stuff to play, and as a result I have no time play... )

 

[Goral]

Around a year ago I've finished replaying Arcanum on Win 7 (Radeon R9 270 X) and there were no issues, I could alt+tab without problems and the only bug I got was this problem: http://www.terra-arcanum.com/forums/index.php?threads/stuck-on-half-ogre-island.16396/

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Around a year ago I've finished replaying Arcanum on Win 7 (Radeon R9 270 X) and there were no issues, I could alt+tab without problems

Good, good. So what I'm currently thinking is, recommend the user to install the DDraw Compat wrapper if on Win 8/10, otherwise set the wrapper to none. Still gotta show the wrapper select screen tho, just in case.

and the only bug I got was this problem: http://www.terra-arcanum.com/forums/index.php?threads/stuck-on-half-ogre-island.16396/

Already fixed that for the next release. For whatever stupid reason Troika set the captain to NOT spawn if on screen, yeah ok, understandable right, except for the fact that the player's spawn point on that map is like 10 feet away at most. It barely worked at 800x600 and even 720p breaks that script.

 

[OracleX]

Running on Win 7 myself too. No lag problems (not useing wrapper)
Game does lag when the PC party becomes to big, but that's probably related to the limits of the engine?

 

[Old One]

the bonuses for Firearms just aren't that useful. Part of it though is that most of the firearms in the game are just weak and always leave you running away and then turning to fire a shot or two and then running some more. Considering the Firearms mastery quest also forces you to commit an "evil" act you'd think it would give a more noticeable bonus.

Firearms in Arcanum are fundamentally flawed due to the fundamental flaws in the combat system itself, but I've always thought they could improved, at least in some cases, by lowering their rate-of-fire (by a lot) and increasing their damage potential (by a lot).

 

[Pots Talos]

How does Arcanum perform on your version of Windows and what wrapper do you use if any?

I just installed on WIN10 with Steam version and it ran perfectly. Which was surprising because I remember having lag issues in the past, but that was with GOG version.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

How does Arcanum perform on your version of Windows and what wrapper do you use if any?

I just installed on WIN10 with Steam version and it ran perfectly. Which was surprising because I remember having lag issues in the past, but that was with GOG version.

What about in-game, that's where the problems arise usually, did you check that?

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Also, the high resolution patch is mostly finished and ready for release. I just need to compile new fonts, etc.

Looking for people with 4K displays to test the NEW SHIT version of the high resolution patch. Tag me in a post or just PM me.

 

[Arcanchosin1]

Hey Drog i was wondering would it be possible to add any of the quest modules people have made over the years to the base game? or at the very least the vormantown and dungeon of lost souls modules.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Hey Drog i was wondering would it be possible to add any of the quest modules people have made over the years to the base game? or at the very least the vormantown and dungeon of lost souls modules.

All those official modules are p shitty to be honest. They were made as straight up dungeon crawls for the failed multiplayer component. Think about Vormantown for example. You talk with NPC A, he sends you to a long ass dungeon A, then you talk to NPC B and go to dungeon B, when done you talk to NPC C and access the final dungeon with a boss. Roll slides, game over.

But yeah, I thought about moving Vormantown to the Isle of Cattan, since that place is vacant anyway. And I've heard plenty of good things about Dusty Dunes.

Anyway, currently the UAP 2.0 includes all 7 official modules as an optional component that you can choose to install. Current improvements include:
-- Vormantown receives its own HQ Townmaps, will maybe compile the same for the other modules if I'm not lazy/you buy me more games on Steam
-- Music is now available in all modules, not just Arcanum

 

[Pots Talos]

How does Arcanum perform on your version of Windows and what wrapper do you use if any?

I just installed on WIN10 with Steam version and it ran perfectly. Which was surprising because I remember having lag issues in the past, but that was with GOG version.

What about in-game, that's where the problems arise usually, did you check that?

I started a new game and went quickly to Shrouded Hills, it was pretty smooth with just a few jitters here and there while in Shrouded Hills.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Just found this nice piece of concept art. "No mages allowed", ha!. Anybody got this in better quality?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

That was an ad in a game magazine that I saw. I read that fucking thing and bought it ASAP.
Loved the game.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Hi Drog, when you scale something I assume you scale the sprites?

Am I correct to assume that they have two rendering paths, one that uses CGI and another that uses DirectDraw? And that the only things they do with that is blitting bitmaps in the video buffer (after setting it up)? And the calls to DirectDraw all go through ddraw.dll, right?

So, if you had a ddraw.dll wrapper, you could intercept the initialization of the viewport and scale all the blits directly. No need to change the exe.

Or is that already what you do, or is there some reason why that wouldn't work?

 

[FeelTheRads]

arcanum1.com

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Hi Drog, when you scale something I assume you scale the sprites?

Am I correct to assume that they have two rendering paths, one that uses CGI and another that uses DirectDraw? And that the only things they do with that is blitting bitmaps in the video buffer (after setting it up)? And the calls to DirectDraw all go through ddraw.dll, right?

So, if you had a ddraw.dll wrapper, you could intercept the initialization of the viewport and scale all the blits directly. No need to change the exe.

Or is that already what you do, or is there some reason why that wouldn't work?

Dunno, I'm not a graphics coder.

Anyway, it's actually possible to scale the UI in the engine, I tried it the other day, for the main menu background. Basically the game usually pushes 4 vars, e.g. window x/y position and width/height, but the bitmap is always drawn at 0, 0 (usually) and with its actual width and height. Well, you can intercept that and render a smaller bitmap to be the same size as a big window. Or a smaller bitmap at the center of a big window if you intercept the x, y position. I'm not sure what kind of scaling is used, and while it's not bilinear it doesn't seem to be nearest neighbor either. It looks acceptable, actually.

I'm not doing this tho. I can't actually think of an implementation where this would work properly. You either need to inject code like fucking everywhere or change the draw_art function to use window width/height for the bitmap's width/height which is again problematic because a lot of UI screens are made up of several smaller bitmaps, if every bitmap gets blown up, then nothing will fit together.

Maybe somebody more clever than me can think of something. Maybe you could read the ID of the window being rendered and just scale the whole thing up on fly, I dunno. But then again you'd have to account for mouse cursor detection, etc.

Anyway, I've simplified and streamlined a lot of the code in the high resolution patch and in this upcoming release the scripts will no longer be obfuscated, on the contrary all code will be extensively commented, so that somebody else can continue my work in the future.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Also, does anybody here know anything about binkw32.dll call parameters?

The game uses Bink video for all of its movie clips, and most of them are 800x400 (except for one that is 800x600) and would look p good in widescreen if rendered fullscreen. Currently, the game renders them as is, just centered. You can p much put any .bik movie in the game and it will always be shown at its native resolution, just centered. So obviously, it only asks binw32.dll to center the clip. I'm p sure if we knew the scaling parameter we could upscale the movies on fly.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

I don't know about Bink, but I do know something about graphics.

Probably the main reason that stuff isn't scaled (much) in the engine is because StretchBlt around that time used nearest-neighbor for the scaling. But nowadays they get properly scaled. If your drivers and DirectX versions are up to date, it's probably bilinear, or something close. If it isn't, that's because you're either using software rendering or a color depth of less than 24-bit. (Depending on if they used CGI or CGI+ for the software renderer. CGI+ should be pretty good.)

Btw, the stuff you describe about the scaling is why there's actually multiple coordinate systems. The actual pixel coordinates are only calculated at the last moment.

 

[Israfael]

Bink header file here, although I'm pretty sure the game does the output itself, the DLL only decodes the video and (probably) converts it into proper colorspace

https://github.com/grayj/Jedi-Outcast/blob/master/code/win32/bink.h

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

I don't know about Bink, but I do know something about graphics.

Probably the main reason that stuff isn't scaled (much) in the engine is because StretchBlt around that time used nearest-neighbor for the scaling. But nowadays they get properly scaled. If your drivers and DirectX versions are up to date, it's probably bilinear, or something close. If it isn't, that's because you're either using software rendering or a color depth of less than 24-bit. (Depending on if they used CGI or CGI+ for the software renderer. CGI+ should be pretty good.)

Btw, the stuff you describe about the scaling is why there's actually multiple coordinate systems. The actual pixel coordinates are only calculated at the last moment.

Actually Arcanum is running in 16 bit color depth. I've tried setting the game mode to 24 or 32 bit, but it just doesn't load.

I came across this post of Crypton's, a somewhat weird modder persona from Czech who has a pattern of starting and immediately abandoning a myriad of v0.1 "original project do not steal" Arcanum mods. In one of his blog posts from 2011 he says:

As you probably already know, this game is using "standard" 256 color palettes, where every color is saved in X8R8G8B8 pixel format. What you probably also know, is that Arcanum is using DirectDraw for the rendering, and there is no support for windowed mode in Arcanum.

Anyway, I just found out that there are a huge design flaws regarding the color palettes and DirectDraw usage.

First of all, Arcanum isn't using IDirectDrawPalette interface at all, and all the color index to pixel conversions are done on CPU. This slows down whole level loading process, but that's still okay, no big deal.

Secondly, the game is running in 16bit fullscreen mode. Yes, you read that correctly, 16 bit color depth, not a 24bit! What does it means? It means, that 8 (or even 9 bits) are removed from every color from the color palletes in pixel format conversion, so the range of possible color shades is significantly reduced, from 16 777 216 to 65 536 (or even 32 768), thus the overall graphics quality is reduced significantly as well.

It's 16bit color depth, but it doesn't mean that it's R5G6B5 pixel format. The DirectDraw also supports X1R5G5G5 pixel format, and it's up to driver which pixel format it chooses for 16bit color depth.

Anyway, few year back, I made a mod for Arcanum, that forces the game to run in windowed mode, which was disabled in Arcanum in release version, because it wasn't finished and fully working feature.

What's surprising, is that when the game is running in windowed mode, there are no pixel format conversions, and game uses a full 24 bit color depth range. That's great, because it means that it's possible to force the Arcanum to run in 24 bit fullscreen mode.

If my time allows it, I'll fix this problem in January, and release it as .exe patch. I found this issue thanks to my DirectDraw emulator, and hopefully it will be useful for finding bugs in other games as well