Widescreen hack and some other fixes aka AiO Patch

[UCyborg]

The patch is now also available on ModDB.

http://www.moddb.com/games/drakan-order ... cial-patch

[Arokhs Twin]

I did mean to put it on the website front page but I had a hard drive failure in one of my machines and was trying to recover and restore data from it. I will put it up tomorrow unless you want an account for the wordpress so you can submit news?

[UCyborg]

I was going to put it on ModDB either way now that I'm finished with it and there likey won't be any further updates. Put it on this site whenever you can, I think the more places it's available at, the better. Yesterday, I also uploaded updated zip file on my Dropbox, I only changed Readme a bit. Just to let you know to redownload it in case you already have the old file.

PS: I made a thread about in-game server browser issue on Qtracker forums about 10 days ago. No response yet though.

[guestdragon]

Just replying to say thank you Ucyborg!!!

[UCyborg]

I'm thinking about doing a small update. There seems to be the way to make the game's fullscreen mode work correctly on Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 out of the box without messing with compatibility tweaks. Might also patch it to not write its settings in registry system wide, which seems problematic unless it's run as admin.

[UCyborg]

Apparently I've overlooked a small, but important detail when implementing a server-side fix for a problem with sending data back to client through incorrectly assumed port. Server crashes when run on certain Windows versions when someone tries to connect. Will probably fix that and problems mentioned above in a week or two and hopefully not break anything else in the process.

[UCyborg]

I didn't want to release the new version just for one fix, at the time I had some ideas I wanted to realize, but then got distracted by other things and the time just flew by. Releasing new version today, which main highlight is better polish over previous versions. The very first version should have been at least something like this.

Download:
Dropbox

Changes:

• Fixed game server crashing on ancient operating system versions (Windows 2000 and earlier) when player connected to the server due to small assembly level detail I have overlooked when implementing NAT fix. Edit: The issue was also reported on Windows 10. It could have occured on any Windows version with any combination of patches/service packs. The bug is thing of the past now though.
• Game settings that get stored in registry are now stored under local user's registry key instead of system-wide key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE).
• Removed all calls to RegFlushKey API.
• Fixed some codepaths not closing registry key handle after use.
• Fixed Texture Filtering drop-down list in Riot Engine Options not indicating Trilinear Filter was selected.

The only thing that still bothers me a bit is the stretched in-game map on wide monitors, would be nice to fix it somehow.

[UCyborg]

Just updated Readme a bit, added instructions for applying Windows 8/8.1/10 specific fixes (those that don't involve dgVoodoo2) to get around fullscreen and other issues, then tried fixing in-game map stretching on wide screens, I could get it to preserve original aspect ratio, but I have no idea how to center it on screen. I only changed some old fix dealing with Bump Mapping to use the same instruction for checking some flag like the rest of the code there.

[UCyborg]

I've coded a new extension for AiO Patch, which among other things, makes the game work out of the box on Windows 8+ without the need for dgVoodoo or having to manually apply compatibility fixes. Server browser is also functional now. I've also added borderless windowed mode. Check the Readme for details. Some features don't work as intended if used together with dgVoodoo so any feature can be turned off by modifying included configuration file. But, out of the box, without any additional stuff in the game folder, it seems perfect.

Archives on Dropbox and ModDB have been updated. To update, just throw files dinput.dll and Arokh.ini in game's directory.

[Arokhs Twin]

Nice one. I've updated the links and downloads on this site as well.

[Ginko]

I tested your new patch after removing my custom compatibility fixes and it works very well. This is gong to make things easier, nice work.

[Csarli]

Great patch. Can you add options for ultrawidescreen mode as well, please? My monitor runs at 3440x1440. Other ultrawide monitors run at 2560x1080. They aren't exactly 21:9, but come pretty close.

[UCyborg]

I wish I could help you, but I don't have such fancy monitor to test. Theoretically, the game should pick all available resolutions on your monitor, unless maybe there is some hardcoded limit how much resolutions it goes through before it stops or there is some other issue I'm not aware of. Can you tell if the game offers all other supported resolutions except 3440x1440?

I haven't really changed anything regarding resolutions since it seemed the game picks all of them by itself, at least for fullscreen mode, which is probably the preferred mode by most people, I just added the code that sets larger field of view, depending on selected resolution's aspect ratio, so this is definitely an interesting issue.

And there's the fact that nobody with skills is interested in hacking this game, I'm an amateur when it comes to these things, I guess it was luck that some bugs I've been able to fix or bypass in some way were so obvious. The absence of game's source code only makes things significantly harder.

[UCyborg]

I digged up online that old DirectX versions (7 and below) have artificial limitation and prevent using any resolution whose width or height exceeds 2048 pixels. You can try using dgVoodoo 2.

[UCyborg]

Correction, I got the following explanation on VOGONS: That limitation only applies to a surface that is at the same time a texture and a render target, but a surface that is either one or the other can be as big as the driver supports.

I'll put a warning in the first post.