**Archived** Shelim's mod for Drakan which celebrates 10 years of the game and adds new features and fixes some bugs. Note this is now rendered obsolete by the Community Patch however if you play single player only you can still use this mod.
This is texture pack for MP Hill Of Fire.
Textures are 512x512
I think this questions for Shelim:
01) Can you add auto mipmaps support, or DDS file format support? Cus we have decreasing of FPS, it dependes of texture size. I think so.
02) Can you add texture blending support?
Yeah, much better than the original textures. The moons look great too. It would be nice to have all the game textures in high res but it would take a lot of work to do that.
By fire and by blood I join with thee in the Order of the Flame! Webmaster of Arokh's Lair
donkeymilk - textures are useful in singleplayer too, but they are mixed with original textures.
Arokhs Twin - yep, it'll take time to make pack for the whole game. But will you play singleplayer with 10-15 FPS? We need Shelim to solve this problem. Cuz if I understand "Riot Engine" processes the whole texture in the field of view, without "mipmaps" or "dds" we can't reach 30-60 FPS.
i used the anniversary mod... i just replaced this tesxtures with the mod ones in overrides folder and its worked.... really good just need to replace the missing ones
I've imported those textures in game databases and it works amazingly, no dramatic performance degradation like with 10th Ann Mod, even on low-end laptop, this is without mipmaps, which the engine also supports, if needed. Ignoring the missing textures, they give Wartok Canyons a whole new breath of fresh air. Just need latest AiO Patch to be able to use them. One would need to create additional alpha map for the moons to not have black box around them. I've skipped the blood and flames textures, for former, not sure which original it replaces and there is also the need for alpha map, at least one of the originals has it, for the latter, they need to be imported in correct order to make proper animation.
"When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence." - Peter Wessel Zapffe
The engine is pretty old school, so the only useful format that is accepted is plain uncompressed bitmap (*.bmp). Mipmaps have actually always been supported, just never actually used in the stock levels, so at the time, not even being familiar a little with the level editor, I assumed DDSCAPS_MIPMAP flag passed to IDirectDraw::CreateSurface function was a bug, as it caused black menu background when you paused the game, I removed it. The current version just checks some condition to decide whether to pass DDSCAPS_MIPMAP or not.
When texture is imported in the level editor, mipmaps can be created within its properties window...Edit->Create Mip Map... Unfortunately, there must be some bug in dgVoodoo that makes the game crash when mipmaps are used. And running the game through Direct3D 6 is a little slower and can even be buggy, particularly on NVIDIA cards. I noticed sometimes everything in-game would just turn black, tabbing out and back in would resolve it, but that's no solution. And you can't play newer games with old drivers. Though the little slower thing isn't much of a problem, but it will become a problem if game levels are updated in the future to have longer rendering distance. You can set Max Fog Depth to 200% in graphics options, which makes this possible.
With 512x512 textures, no mipmaps, there doesn't seem to be any slowdown, it happens when you put 1024x1024 all over the place, at least it happened with what little testing I've done.
Normal maps are not possible without a Direct3D hack like Anniversary Mod. There is another limitation which the mod doesn't solve neither, all textures are downscaled to 16-bit color depth. This probably needs to be addressed in the engine itself. One thing that is available is bump mapping, but that doesn't give the depth effect, I think. Either way, if any of these can be solved, it takes one really clever hacker to do it.
"When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence." - Peter Wessel Zapffe
Damn, so much new information. Thanks allot for explanation, it's very useful . About bump... I remember some sort of it on Arokh's skin and water. So, let's make textures