Re: Drakan Remake by YanGez93
Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2018 12:34 pm
I always thought seeing an open-source clone of the original engine would be cool. HeckFluff did some reverse-engineering on some of the file formats, but said he's working on re-implementation of another engine ATM.
Programming is still rocket science to me for the most part, but yet, I managed to come up with a patch for the original game/engine that solves tons of bugs and shortcomings. Check the AiO Patch in the game discussion/technical support section of the forum.
Some parts are implemented in a separate DLL, for which you'll find code on GitHub. It's not current though, the changes since the update featuring the new server browser backend haven't been pushed to GitHub yet.
I have another update planned, in fact it's almost done, I'd just like to look into something before I put it out, hopefully in the near future. Though I said the same thing back in November.
It features possibility to redirect savegames to user specific folders rather than using installation folder, screenshots are redirected to Screenshots subfolder and the issue with the game overwriting the old screenshots has been fixed, the bug with usage of registry functions in editing tools to store list of recent files has been fixed; compatibility shim VirtualRegistry is no longer needed, Riot Engine Options dialog will no longer use 100% of CPU core, the editor's 3D engine no longer creates DebugLog.txt (I don't remember anything ever being written there).
It also makes the game once again work on retro operating systems (Windows 9x family). It turned out my DLL wasn't working due to copy-on-write mechanism not working by default on these systems, though an easy trick exists that makes it work. There's also a fix in there for regression with small visual bug with bump mapping that slipped in some time back.
It'll be the best release ever made! Judging by the view count of that thread, people like it and are using it. It could be better, but hey, I find programming difficult, it takes time to come up with something useful and obsessing over minor details doesn't help neither. So that's all you're going to get from me!
Programming is still rocket science to me for the most part, but yet, I managed to come up with a patch for the original game/engine that solves tons of bugs and shortcomings. Check the AiO Patch in the game discussion/technical support section of the forum.
Some parts are implemented in a separate DLL, for which you'll find code on GitHub. It's not current though, the changes since the update featuring the new server browser backend haven't been pushed to GitHub yet.
I have another update planned, in fact it's almost done, I'd just like to look into something before I put it out, hopefully in the near future. Though I said the same thing back in November.
It features possibility to redirect savegames to user specific folders rather than using installation folder, screenshots are redirected to Screenshots subfolder and the issue with the game overwriting the old screenshots has been fixed, the bug with usage of registry functions in editing tools to store list of recent files has been fixed; compatibility shim VirtualRegistry is no longer needed, Riot Engine Options dialog will no longer use 100% of CPU core, the editor's 3D engine no longer creates DebugLog.txt (I don't remember anything ever being written there).
It also makes the game once again work on retro operating systems (Windows 9x family). It turned out my DLL wasn't working due to copy-on-write mechanism not working by default on these systems, though an easy trick exists that makes it work. There's also a fix in there for regression with small visual bug with bump mapping that slipped in some time back.
It'll be the best release ever made! Judging by the view count of that thread, people like it and are using it. It could be better, but hey, I find programming difficult, it takes time to come up with something useful and obsessing over minor details doesn't help neither. So that's all you're going to get from me!