Arcanum Would you be interested in a remastered version of the Unofficial Arcanum Patch?

[Drog Black Tooth]

If you go to the half-ogre Island while using the hi rez patch the ship's captain (or helm of your ship) don't spawn, making you stuck there.

Yeah I know it's a problem with some resolutions, it's been reported a few times.

Short story: the captain should appear once you walk around his spawning location a bit. Or save and then reload on that spot.

Long story: Arcanum has very annoying "in sight" scripting commands, basically the script goes thru all the objects on screen until it finds whatever it was asked to find. When I was making the high resolution patch I quickly found out that this function has a limit of IIRC 127 objects, after which it craps out. So basically this would break quests like fixing that altar in Vooriden when playing in a high resolution. Even at 1024x768 there would be too many objects on the screen so the altar never gets fixed. I was faced with a problem, like how the fuck am I supposed to fix this, did I just debug the whole UI and write hundreds of lines of code for nothing. WTF, fuck my life.

So I came up with a solution. Instead of letting that function scan the whole screen I hijacked it and fed it fake width and height, 800x400 to be precise, cause this was the original drawing area resolution of Arcanum (the original HUD takes 200 vertical pixels and actually nothing is drawn behind it). This worked, the altar could be restored at any resolution. However, the caveat was that this 800x400 rectangle is only drawn around the player (which was okay in that altar quest since you're standing right next to the altar when it gets fixed), so yeah you have to imagine you're still playing in that tiny box and walk all the way over to the captain to make him spawn.

Same goes for, for example, that dude who lost his ring in the sewer in Tarant. Once you give him the ring and walk a few steps away he'll disappear in a poof, cause the scripting engine still thinks you're running the game in 800x400 and are already off screen. This is intentional.

Maybe I could up the object limit, increase the stack or something in the future, I dunno. Then I would be able to remove this shitty workaround.

P.S. And another thing, everything that's 31 tiles away from the PC is frozen solid. The pedestrians won't move, fire/torch animations won't play, no scripts, no AI, no nothing. This could be seen at very high resolutions. We could potentionally remove this limit too (should be p easy to do since the number is p small anyway, I just wasn't able to pin point where the fuck in the code is it stated), but this would heavily affect the performance of this already p shitty running game.

 

[Black]

Is TimCain going to work on this too?

Also

*Its

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Yeah, maybe we should ask TimCain about all these limits and how feasible is it to remove them.

But then again is he ever going to post on the Codex again after my revelations about his past??

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

*Its

Hmm, I thought we got them all.

There was a proofreading community effort back in the day, we fixed hundreds of typos. The original game was like not proofread at all. It was like reading somebody's Tumblr page, fancy looking but poorly written.

I remember there was one dude, an English major or something, with a bondage mask user pic from VtmB submitting tons of typos in the original UAP thread. I wonder how that dude is doing nowadays.

Man, this shit really takes me back.

EDIT: oh I member! That was MaskedMan! Cheers bro.

 

[Severian Silk]

There is the following turn-based mode quirk where a critter that attacks you starts running towards you and the turn-based mode starts when it stops next to you. Can it be fixed so that the turn based mode starts the moment the enemy spots you? This will make playing gunslingers more appealing.

This.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Hell, I'd love to know what Tim Cain was even doing nowadays.

Anyway, back to Arcanum. Funnily enough I read this thread on the bus this morning and was playing the Arcanum Soundtrack just at random on my phone. First time I'd actually listened to it in years. Still love that string quartet.
Drog Black Tooth What is first on your list to discover and break into with the engine? I feel like us seeing a plan of attack could definitely help with what would be easiest to fix etc.

 

[Tom Baker's Arse]

I'm considering remaking it with more modern technology. You'd have a launcher/settings app where you can turn things on/off, like high resolution, windowed mode, software rendering, level cap, sprite mirroring, combat music, intro movies etc. Or turn additional mods on/off, like Virgil's Debug Menu, extra effects for the Pyro bow, annoying spell effects remover, extra riddles for the ancient game quest and many other loose mods I still have on my HDD.

Everything would be patched on fly, so there would be no need in running installers and/or moving files back and forth.

But I'd need an additional coder to help lay down the framework. Apply here!

Sounds like a superb idea. I have 20 yrs of QA exp in high-tech so I suppose I could be of aid with testing if you want. This does sound like a noble effort.

 

[puppyonastik]

Sup Drog

Hah. An interesting proposition of Drog reporting bugs and typos in forum posts to himself in the patch thread.

Edit: It looks like we've acquired the attention of Blackhart's erection. This can only be an omen of good things.

 

[Jazz_]

Hell, I'd love to know what Tim Cain was even doing nowadays.

He's apparently working on a secret project with Boyarsky.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Sup Drog

Hah. An interesting proposition of Drog reporting bugs and typos in forum posts to himself in the patch thread.

Wouldn't put it past him (you).

 

[puppyonastik]

Wouldn't put it past him (you).

True.

 

[Grotesque]

Tim Cain helped me overcome my disaproval of homosexuals!

 

[Black]

Since Arcanum and ToEE share the same engine get Sitra Achara to help implementing ToEE combat in Arcanum.
Boom, I'm so smort.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Saying ToEE is running on Arcanum's engine is like saying that Half-Life and Quake run on the same engine too.

Yeah, they started with that game as a base, but so many things have been changed it's barely recognizable.

 

[Black]

Still, when it gets done I'm gonna take full credit.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Hell, I'd love to know what Tim Cain was even doing nowadays.

He's apparently working on a secret project with Boyarsky.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Drog Black Tooth Stop wasting time on these half-assed fixes. You know what must be fixed to escalate Arcanum into decent combat territory.

1) If possible, remove real time mode altogether, making turn-based mandatory.
2) Have combat start the moment enemy aggros, similar to Fallout 1/2. By default, the combat starts only when you manually start it or when the enemy is attacking, which either disadvantages ranged attackers or forces a real time component into turn based combat (making the player quickly initiate combat manually).
3) Combat balance changes: Nerf retarded spells (Disintegrate, Harm, Mass Stasis, etc) to where they actually work, make throwing cost Action Points, nerf melee attacks, buff guns. Change enemy immunities, eg golems. Balance combat values to encourage and reward cc, spell/ability/weapon variety, and tactics.
4) Make fewer sensational statements to allow more time for the steps above.

 

[Severian Silk]

There is the following turn-based mode quirk where a critter that attacks you starts running towards you and the turn-based mode starts when it stops next to you. Can it be fixed so that the turn based mode starts the moment the enemy spots you? This will make playing gunslingers more appealing.

This is how it works in FO and JA2.

 

[vortex]

Question. A long time ago, there was balance mod for gunslinger class which adds more bullets in the game. Will this also be included in the remastered version ?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

If we could do that PLUS add in some sort of reloading mechanism into the game, you'd see a big jump of incline. Probably impossible to do though unfortunately. Or it needs so much coding might as well as be crap.

 

[Junmarko]

Anyone wanting to do another play-through, be sure to use this DDraw replacement.

Fixes all performance issues on Win 10/8/7 (Abnormal loading times etc...) It's a must! :D

Download: "DDrawCompat v0.2.1"

DDrawCompat

Introduction
DDrawCompat is a DirectDraw wrapper aimed at fixing compatibility and performance issues with games based on DirectX 7 and below on newer versions of Windows (Vista/7/8/10). Games using DirectX 8 and above for rendering are not affected as they don't use ddraw.dll. DDrawCompat does not use any external renderer (such as OpenGL), nor even a newer version of DirectX. It only changes how DirectDraw (and GDI) is used internally. Since older versions of Direct3D (v7 and below) also rely on DirectDraw, DDrawCompatmay be useful for those renderers as well.

Installation
Download the latest binary release from the repository's releases page. Unzip the file and copy the extracted ddraw.dll to any DirectDraw based game's installation directory, next to the main executable file. If the main executable is in a subdirectory of the installation directory, you must put ddraw.dll in the same subdirectory.

EDIT: Also, right-click on the arcanum.exe (desktop shortcut if GoG), hit Properties, then edit your Target window to this, including the quotation marks:

"C:\GOG Games\Arcanum\Arcanum.exe" -no3d -scrolldist:0 -scrollfps:70

 

[Severian Silk]

If people like Drog are willing to develop tools that enable us to easily repair and mod the game further than currently available, speaking of AMTUT (http://terra-arcanum.com/amtut/amtut.htm) and WORLDED. I could definitely see a Codexian Circle of Eight (TTOE) style Mod pop up. Hell TTOE and Arcanum are on the same engine; Maybe we can fix the combat everyone bitches about.

No way. Codexians are way too lazy.

 

[Black]

^
I wanted to post a witty retort but meh

 

[Junmarko]

Just stumbled on this Arcanum Multiverse Edition [ENG]

Appears Drog has been beaten to-the-punch.

 

[Anthedon]

Was a willing coder found?