UCyborg wrote:ALL-IN-ONE UNOFFICIAL PATCH FOR DRAKAN: OOTF
For new users: To put it briefly, this is all-in-one patch containing every known bug fix for the game and the editing tools. Please read the included Readme for the most up-to date information about the patch as it contains everything you need to know (list of fixes, installation procedure and more). The patch also increases game version number to distinguish it from vanilla Drakan. If you have any further questions, you can post them here.
Because all-in-one may sound confusing, it's meant as all-in-one when it comes to unofficial improvements to the game not made by the developers who made the game, but rather the community/fans of the game. Therefore, official patch 445 must be installed before applying AiO Patch. It would be possible to literally make All-in-One Patch including the official fixes, but would require distribution of patched game data files that official patches also alter, compared to AiO Patch, which only alters some of game's code.
Last update: 7/31/2016
Download:
(Final) release, Second Edition (377/447)
Arokh's Lair,
Google Drive,
Dropbox,
ModDB
MD5: 64583FC83046639CACD5B8E8DFE7C505
CRC32: 131F75D5
Bonus:
Hill of Fire - HD textures (credit goes to Mauva Malhar)
Complete list of changes compared to vanilla Drakan:
- Fixed black menu background bug (occurs on newer graphics hardware).
- Fixed crash after selecting difficulty or pressing ESC while on the difficulty selection screen.
- Fixed crash after exiting Alwarren.
- Removed special camera rotation mode from 'left' special combo (left-forward-attack).
- Removed special camera rotation mode from 'back' special combo (forward-backward-attack).
- Added 2 active 'hitting intervals' for 'left' special attack.
- Removed 'stuck in block' bug.
- Increased amount of allocated memory for one of rendering routines (increases FPS a bit in more complex levels).
- Removed part of problematic code that has to do with lens-flare effects, prevents the crash during gameplay when there are lots of lightning effects, but you should still disable Lens Flare Effects under Graphics options, they cause quite significant lag spikes.
- Level of detail (LOD) value is set to zero -> fully detailed in-game objects regardless of camera distance, small performance decrease, original LOD feature wasn't exactly doing miracles neither when it comes to excessive polygon counts in certain player-created levels, also fixes crash when setting FOV to a higher value.
- Added code that adjusts FOV based on your selected resolution's aspect ratio, so you see more things at once and actually utilize extra horizontal space if you have a wide monitor.
- Session creation failed error will no longer occur if running server on anything newer than Windows XP or under WINE (Linux) or when setting up listen server AFTER playing a multiplayer game on someone else's server (assuming ports server intends to use aren't in use by some other program).
- Fixed crash that occurs if Giant grabs you just after your death. Note that I only added an extra safeguard that prevents the crash, but doesn't fix the actual bug. Should the situation occur, the screen won't start fading to black like it normally would and the game won't end, but you can reload the last save and move on like nothing happened.
- Fixed ice effect not showing up on Arokh after being frozen by an enemy and game crashing the moment he is supposed to blow into pieces. This bug only occurred when bump mapping was enabled.
- Increased Max Fog Distance that can be set under Graphics options up to 200% (same as 'foghack' cheat), also overriding Max Fog Depth setting defined by level designer.
- Dedicated server stores graphics settings (the ones in Windows registry) separately. Useful because dedicated server window size is defined by game resolution setting and can't be resized.
- Minimizing the game when in fullscreen mode and connected to online game no longer causes disconnect after 30 seconds.
- NAT fix - server has been patched so that it no longer responds back to the client using the UDP port that was used on the client side to establish connection, but rather the port visible on the server side as the originating source of the first packet sent by client. This eliminates the most notorious 30s disconnect bug.
- Fixed crash that occurs when game contacts running machine that has no server running (no more crashing in multiplayer menu or while running server if contacting master server fails).
- Added some common resolutions for use in windowed mode.
- Fixed crash due to stack buffer overrun that occurs when entering Graphics menu on machines whose graphics hardware exposes a lot of available resolutions.
- Default value of MasterServerList variable in Drakan.cfg has been changed to "gsm.qtracker.com:27900" since GameSpy is gone.
- 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.
UPDATE 12/1/2015: Added proxy DLL with following features:
- Automatically applies compatibility fixes required for the game to work properly on Windows 8+.
- Fixes game not remembering windowed/fullscreen setting if changed in-game.
- Populates windowed mode resolution list with the ones detected in the system.
- Adds borderless windowed mode, when window is in that mode, it will also minimize when it looses focus.
- Enables resizing of dedicated server window.
- Makes the game able to get the server list from Qtracker.
UPDATE 6/15/2016:
- Ported relevant engine fixes over to Level Editor's Engine.exe.
- Changed borderless window settings to off by default, they're kinda hacky.
- Borderless windowed mode code now places the window on correct monitor if you move it from the primary monitor and afterward set the correct resolution.
- Added option to set whether borderless window minimizes when it loses focus.
- Added option to make borderless window topmost.
- Added Direct3D resolution limit remover, the game can now run through the old Direct3D API at resolutions above 2048 pixels, if the hardware supports it.
- Added mini AiO Patch for the demo version.
UPDATE 6/20/2016:
- Fixed Direct3D resolution limit remover so it doesn't crash the game anymore on some Windows versions.
- Fixed the bug with quick-save not saving the correct music track ID to the save file under certain circumstance.
- Restored engine's original LOD feature, crash-free, with LOD factor configurable by the user.
- Skip FOV calculations unless the aspect ratio is actually greater than 4:3.
- Added compatibility database with some additional fixes for the game and the Level Editor.
UPDATE 7/1/2016:
- 2 forgotten fixes for the Level Editor 3D Viewer.
UPDATE 7/2/2016:
- Respect Max Fog Depth property of the level, permanent 'foghack' is now optional setting, upper limit is still 60 (200%), vanilla Drakan has this at 30 (100%).
- Min Fog Depth lower limit decreased from 12 (40%) to 5 (16%).
- Added FOV multiplier setting.
- Fixed memory leak caused by original patch that fixed Level Editor 3D view crash.
UPDATE 7/8/2016:
- Restored mipmapping feature, lost with a patch that addressed black menu bug.
- Increased maximum texture size limit to 1024x1024 (was 256x256).
- Made executables Large Address Aware, maybe it proves beneficial in the future.
UPDATE 7/12/2016:
- Level Editor Texture View Options dialog updated to accept maximum view size of 1024.
- Level Editor now releases handles to the 3D Viewer process and its thread on close.
- Added registry config with correct settings for running the editor through WINE.
UPDATE 7/17/2016:
- Fixed Level Editor crashes and bugs that were caused by recursive calls to SendMessage API (SendNotifyMessage FTW!).
UPDATE 7/23/2016:
- Fixed 2 memory leaks in the Level Editor, one occured when communicating STOMP time, the other when painting in 3D window.
- Changed default Level Properties regarding fog depth to be consistent with new engine limits.
- Changed default value of Fog Limit in Calculate Layer Visibility window to be consistent with new engine limits.
UPDATE 7/31/2016:
Wishlist:
- Fixing in-game map to not stretch on wide monitors would be nice.
Some information below this point aren't relevant anymore. They're here only for historical reasons.
Hi everyone!
I recently got into Drakan again. Seeing community managed to squash most annoying bugs occuring on modern PCs, game pretty much works nicely with 445++ patch. Anyway, one thing that still bugged me, game offers every possible resolution your hardware can manage, but field of view remains at 80, which is OK for 4:3 resolutions, but kinda low for wide resolutions, everything's zoomed in. Command "fov" was also a no-go, since it crashed the game plus it's not fun to manually fix FOV every time. Oh, and there is also a slight problem with hosting multiplayer server, even with 10th Anniversary Mod, but more on that later.
So I decided to fire-up OllyDbg, hoping to figure something out. Long story short, I located the function which takes FOV as the parameter and some sub-function, which, among other things, calculates model Level of Detail value using some number calculated from FOV. 0.0 is maximum detail, higer values mean less detail as the camera moves away, anything negative is catastrophic, which is exactly what happens when you try to set FOV higher than 93.
Then, knowing what's the problem, I coded a small hack DLL with the following features:
- Alters the model LoD calculation so it always returns 0 which fixes FOV related crash and makes characters, trees,... look nicer if looked at from the distance.
EDIT: This is now part of patched Drakan.exe.
- Automatic FOV adjustment for wide monitors.
- Fixes "Session creation failed!" error on Vista and newer.
- Ability to apply any combination of unofficial game patches on startup, configurable via configuration file.
EDIT: Realized that the whole memory patching thing was stupid so all patches are now part of patched Drakan.exe and Dragon.rfl.
About that multiplayer bug...the problem is within inet_addr function. On Windows XP and earlier, it returns INADDR_ANY if empty string is passed to it, which is what Drakan does when setting up the server. But in later versions, the behavior was changed so it returns INADDR_NONE, which sorta tells the server to not listen on any network interface. Take a look
here. This is easily solved by detouring inet_addr function and returning INADDR_ANY when empty string is passed. Also, the binary patch in Drakan.exe that comes with 10th Anniversary Mod only partially solves the problem, once the server is up, anyone who joins is kicked right after 30 seconds.
Before I move on to instructions on how to use the hack, I'd like to address something about Drakan's compatibility with modern flavors of Windows. It seems that patched Drakan doesn't require any compatibility fixes applied. But Windows is actually set to apply 3 so called compatibility shims to Drakan, which are:
- EmulateCDFS - patched Drakan doesn't use CD in any way so this one is completely redundant.
- IgnoreAltTab - this one is meant for applications which don't handle alt-tabbing well. Drakan does it perfectly well.
- IgnoreLoadLibrary - don't know which DLL it's trying to ignore, but it also seems unnecessary.
These can be quickly disabled using registry fix I provided within archive. Now, let's assume you want to try out the hack right away, you have fresh installation of Drakan patched to 445 and admin rights in Windows:
- Extract Arokh.dll, Drakan.exe and Dragon.rfl from attached archive to your Drakan directory.
- You'll now need something to inject the DLL into Drakan when it starts, my favorite method is to set Windows to automatically do it every time the game is started, so extract Drakan.sdb from archive to Desktop.
- Go to Start menu->Programs->Accessories, right click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.
- Command window should open in your user profile directory, so now you just need to navigate to Desktop by typing in following command without quotes: "cd Desktop"
- Now that you arrived at your Desktop, type in the following command without quotes: "sdbinst Drakan.sdb"
- Message "Installation of Drakan SDB complete." should appear, meaning all went well and you have successfully installed custom compatibility database for Drakan which tells Windows to load Arokh.dll everytime you want to play.
- You're done, start Drakan as usual and enjoy!
These steps should work out-of-the box for Windows Vista and 7. You might need to adjust them a bit for Windows XP or Windows 8. In XP, you probably won't need to worry about running as admin unless you have limited user account, as for Windows 8, can't say anything about that since I sticked with 7.
You could achieve the same thing by downloading Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit from
here and using Compatibility Administrator to create custom compatibility database with a special shim for Drakan called InjectDll and specify Arokh.dll as a parameter. In case you're familiar with the program and are using it to fix some other problematic programs/games, you'll probably want to add this fix to your existing database. WinJect 1.7 can also be used for DLL injection.
Any kind of feedback is appreciated!
PS: I forgot about compilation requirements, nothing fancy: Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 or newer and Microsoft Detours 1.5
Edit: updated instructions for those who have User Account Control enabled since apparently you can't open command window with admin privileges right from the Desktop. Hopefully they will work for everyone now.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: I discovered alternative possible way to implement 445++ patch, not only solving crashes, but also fixing black menu background bug. Details in 14th post.