Arokhslair.net

hi,

If anyone still plays Drakan Multiplayer(On Patch 445), please leave me a message and ill reach out to you.

Thankyou
Sonu(Started playing 1999)

I would like to play but I do not see any server in the list. Or is it just a mistake?

The standard server browser in patch version 445 does not work anymore due to the master server being taken offline when Gamespy went under several years ago. The only way to play online is to manually enter the server IP or use 3rd party tools; I had a list but it's out of date now. However if you patch your game with the All-In-One patch, that does have a working server browser which may show up some servers but I don't think anyone is hosting one full time.

If anyone does host a server (preferably with a fixed IP address) let us know so we can make a database of servers. It would be nice to play again.

Another thing we could do is use the events calendar on the Steam group to try and get a few players together on an arranged date & time.


http://steamcommunity.com/groups/arokhslair

It'd be nice. Few years back, I tried playing Quake 1 online with one of the modern QuakeWorld clients. There were few public servers listed, probably empty most of the time, but one server was always populated in the evening. Drakan needs that one server at least.

Besides the AiO Patch, need to make sure the master servers are setup in Drakan.cfg file:

set MasterServerList "master.333networks.com:27900,master.errorist.tk:27900,master.newbiesplayground.net:27900,gsm.qtracker.com:27900,master.qtracker.com:27900"

The game has the limitation that the server browser only queries the first master server in the list, but if you host the server, heartbeat packets are sent to all of them. The first 3 master servers in the above list are synchronized between each other, so if you register server on one of them, it eventually shows up on the list of other 2 master servers as well. 333networks did some updates this year as noted on their main website. Qtracker also seems to be functioning still, despite the announcement on their website. The forums are still not available since the summer of last year.

BTW, one thing about Qtracker master servers, the difference between gsm.qtracker.com and master.qtracker.com is that the latter cannot be used by server browser to get the server list, it only accepts heartbeat packets from game servers.

Just out of curiosity, how active is the OOTF multiplayer nowadays?

I'm asking because I have plans to do a completionist Let's Play of OOTF (on the Something Awful forums, so it'd be elgible for the LP Archive). Not right now, of course - realistically I expect to get started on it in a few months.

Just doing the singleplayer mode on its own would be perfectly fine for the purposes of the LP, of course - but for completion it'd be nice if I could also show off some multiplayer action. Even if only 1-on-1.

The multiplayer is non-existent unfortunately. The AiO patch makes it playable online but no-one seems to be interested anymore; some of us have tried arranging matches but nothing comes of them.

Sad. But far from unexpected.

Well, I'm not much of a multiplayer type myself, for that matter.
The last multiplayer game I remember playing (over a decade ago!) was Quake 3 - something to the tune of 15 vs 15 IIRC, on a rather small and open map.
That was absolutely hilarious, though: rockets and grenades flying every which way, the floor constantly carpeted with fresh gibs. And of course, far more bullets on screen than in a Touhou game
There was no point trying to aim anything, mostly because it was impossible

Well, in any case, it's too early for me to be worrying about OOTF's multiplayer aspect too much just yet.
By my estimate, doing the LP of just OOTF will take roughly 1 to 2 years with a realistic update schedule, especially since I also plan to show off at least a few player-created levels.
(Of course I plan to then do TAG next - hardware hopefully permitting - but I don't want to make such far-reaching statements yet)

1+ year is a lot of time in which something can be arranged... I hope.
There's also a decent chance that someone from the SA forums might be willing and able to cooperate to this end, especially since the community participation spirit there seems to be fairly strong - and in this case there is little other opportunity to take advantage of it, anyhow.

One way of trying to play some matches in Drakan OOTF is to make event calendar as Arokhs Twin said. If that happens I'm willing to take part in it. Then we can do rankings, tournaments and many others.

I tried in past play with my friend but we failed. Even when we had the same ISP.

What about VPN servers? -Hamachi or GameRanger(if it has this feature). Maybe it will works? It tried with my friend and we played in past some games(but not Drakan) Do you guys tried this?

I believe Hamachi works fine, I used to use it for playing Drakan but did get disconnected quite a lot but that could have been Drakan's buggy netcode. The events calendar is now on our steam group.

Ok, that's cool.
I guess I'll probably also join the Steam community, that looks like it could be useful.

As of right now, I'd estimate that it won't be until early May before I can hope to even think of recording any content for my LP.
That having been said, I might as well start with recording the multiplayer gameplay if a suitable opportunity presents itself; at least this requires very little prior preparation on my part, as opposed to the single player content.

My new hardware is already here - the very last (nonessential) parts due to arrive this week - and the basic groundwork has been laid: OS's up and running, all drivers working - but very little of the most basic software is even installed yet, let alone set up for use.
I need to get the essential software going first, and clone the OS partitions for quick'n'easy recovery if ever required - and then it's time to rumble!

BTW - I presume that with 8 cores @ 4.2+GHz, 32GB RAM, 2x Radeon R7 260x, and 3 SSD's, it should be more than adequate for emulating TAG at full resolution, even while recording the video to disk?
My old hardware (4 cores @ 2.2GHz, 4GB RAM, 1x nVidia 9600GT, + no SSD's) is just plain atrocious for PS2 emulation; also in OOTF 10th Mod I was getting around 5-15fps on medium quality settings - totally unplayable, even without the dreaded "flashing title bar glitch" it was also suffering from.

BTW - I presume that with 8 cores @ 4.2+GHz, 32GB RAM, 2x Radeon R7 260x, and 3 SSD's, it should be more than adequate for emulating TAG at full resolution, even while recording the video to disk?

Probably, Drakan: TAG isn't the heaviest PS2 game to emulate.

also in OOTF 10th Mod I was getting around 5-15fps on medium quality settings - totally unplayable, even without the dreaded "flashing title bar glitch" it was also suffering from.

The mod is simply poorly optimized. In addition, it breaks game's own bump mapping and ability to alt-tab away from fullscreen mode (it doesn't come back properly). I never got the flashing title bar glitch, so can't comment on that.

I posted screenshots showing the performance long time ago: https://imgur.com/a/VfSOU This is with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti and an older AMD Phenom II X4 920 clocked at 3,00 GHz. Performance is awful even though no shaders are enabled. There's also some new 512x512 textures added to the mix, which makes things even slower.

I forgot to turn on dgVoodoo logo for screenshot with dgVoodoo wrapper, but due to raw performance of modern DIrect3D 11 drivers, games wrapped through it often run faster despite the wrapper overhead. Granted, Drakan has glitches at high frame-rates, but the frames being composed faster is always a good thing. Due to an old engine, the game is mostly CPU bottle-necked.

dgVoodoo started out as the Glide wrapper for games that use Glide APIs rather than Direct3D/OpenGL for rendering, the author later developed Direct3D version to translate older DirectDraw/DIrect3D calls to modern versions. It helps with quirks that some old games experience and offers the ability to force higher resolutions for games that don't offer such option. As a side effect of converting games to modern Direct3D, compatibility with overlay software is improved and you can use ReShade to inject shaders into old games that would be otherwise impossible. I've read it also allows usage of discrete GPU on NVIDIA Optimus laptops, where Direct3D 8 and older always use integrated GPU.

As for emulating The ancients gates I ran it fine on my old pc a phenom 2 quad core, 8gb ram and hd4790 circa 2009 so anything newer than that will be fine.

OK, so the prospects for emulation look good then.
Normally I wouldn't touch any such consoles with a 10 foot pole, and my stance regarding console-only games is best portrayed by HK-47's "Prejudice set to maximum!" taunt - but an exception is clearly in order here
I even went and bought a decent gamepad because of TAG.

UCyborg: Interesting results without the shaders - I never thought about testing it that way.
On my current (old) hardware, in the unmodified game, I'm getting around 120-130FPS in roughly that location with fog distance @ 100%, but if I turn around, it drops to 70-80ish FPS. (hmm, this is strange, because I think I had VSync turned on, shouldn't it cap the framerate?)
I never went any further with the 10th Mod than the beginning of Ruined Village, but IIRC it was around 18FPS right at the spot where you start the game, and 6-12FPS walking around the starting area.

Now, as far as OOTF goes, I have 2 important questions regarding the 10th Anniversary Mod:

1. Does it affect multiplayer capability? Or is that just a function of the version of AiO patch used?

2. OK, so the mod is poorly optimized. Actually, I have long since suspected that this might be the case. But, what to do now? I have a bad feeling about this.
Even my new hardware might not be capable to "brute forcing" it to 60FPS.
Is there a way to get some visual improvements, similar to the 10th Mod, by other means?
Preferably something that doesn't entail highly involved stuff, such as recompiling the game files, etc.

On a somewhat unrelated note: is the Steam event calendar actually totally empty, or is it just some sort of problem with my browser? (also, I wasn't logged into Steam, but that should not matter in any case?)

BTW: the flashing title bar is an odd glitch. Rare (for most users) and not reliably reproducible; a very nasty combination.
From what I've read, a few people have encountered it, but no solution is known.
Interestingly, I have tested it on 3 different computers, each with totally different hardware, from different eras (years apart) - and it was present on ALL 3 of them.
Yet the only thing they had in common was the 32-bit XP Pro + some of the installed software. And also maybe the blasted Realtek onboard audio chip, these damned buggy things are everywhere. Never could get any microphone input working on any of them. Ever. Broken drivers, apparently. Bloody rubbish.

My stance regarding consoles; why should I have to use a separate machine specifically for games if I have a computer that offers virtually endless possibilities? Plus gamepads just don't work for me, though supposedly with newer consoles, keyboard and mouse can be used if game developer chooses to support it. Now maybe with a little patience I could configure PCSX2 to give me somewhat comfortable KB + MB experience, you can bind those "I forgot what they're called" buttons for turning the camera to mouse movement, but it's clunky. A native PC port would be nice.

I had fog distance set to 200% on those screenshots. I'd have to check what's it like at 100%, but at the start in Ruined Village, got 29 FPS staring at the house and 21 FPS when I turned around, with 10th Anniversary Mod that is. Also 21 FPS mostly when running around the start area. Game graphics settings don't make much difference. Dropping resolution to 640x480 from 1920x1080 just makes the game spit 2 more frames per second. And the results dealing with lower frame rates are more meaningful; I mean, there are dummies out there that believe the difference between running at 3000 FPS and 7000 FPS when rendering a simple scene is really huge. DOOM (2016) on low resolution (640x480) manages well over 60 FPS on my card. I mention DOOM because it runs well considering my computer is below the official minimum requirements. At least it did when it came out, they could've released the update by now that makes things worse for underspecced machines. But I think it's more likely they optimized it further.

To your questions:

1. No. The game just cares about certain own files (Drakan.exe, Dragon.rfl, current level (*.lvl)) and maybe some other files. If they don't match between the client and server, server refuses to let client in. Files dealing with localization and textures can be different.
2. There's ReShade (also needs dgVoodoo2 so Windows XP won't do), but there's an issue; due to the way Drakan handles input, its in-game configuration interface can't be used. You can activate the interface, but the mouse will still control the game. It's possible to configure it by installing it for another game, enabling things you want and copy its files to Drakan folder, then correct file paths in dxgi.ini and whatever preset ini file you created in the configuration interface.

I tried the 10th Anniversary Mod on Windows XP and got the titlebar flashing glitch. It has to do with the fact that the mod is updating the titlebar caption at regular intervals to show FPS on it regardless of whether the game is running in fullscreen mode or not. DirectX is designed in a way that explicitly changing window styles for borders to disappear in fullscreen mode is not needed. I suppose due to how window management on XP works and the fact that borders are still there behind the scenes, updating title bar caption makes it appear briefly. It's an edge case really, updating title bar caption in fullscreen mode makes no sense. One could NOP out the part of the code updating the caption, the game has its own FPS counter. Starting the game in windowed mode and activating AiO Patch's borderless windowed mode function also make the glitch go away with no need for further hacking.

I wouldn't know about Steam events calendar, 'been ages since I've logged onto Steam and I've never seen that function in action before, but if the calendar in Arokh's Lair group is there for multiplayer matches, then I can say with 200% certainty that it's actually empty.

Tunngle has dedicated Drakan room.

OK, thanks.

So that's a way to inject shaders, good. I do have XP+W7 (both x64) dual boot, so there should be no problem on that front.

Are there any good texture packs available? I see that there was an attempt at one, around 2 years ago, but it's incomplete and abandoned.

Sounds like a proper 20th Anniversary Mod would be in order, but I seriously doubt that it would actually happen.
Hopefully though, OpenOOTF will eventually render the point moot.

UCyborg wrote: ↑Sat Mar 17, 2018 5:20 pm My stance regarding consoles; why should I have to use a separate machine specifically for games if I have a computer that offers virtually endless possibilities?

I agree entirely.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the game developers. It does work out for them, apparently. If I were to take a wild guess, I'd say it's due to $$$...

As for gamepads - well, I've played several PC games where having at least 1 analog stick makes things considerably easier, or at least more convenient; especially if it involves steering vehicles, or similar activities.
I do also have a 3+1 axis joystick, but it's too big to use comfortably with my current furniture arrangement, so I use it quite infrequently; a gamepad is much more convenient in this case.

Finally, good luck trying to play certain kinds of games without a gamepad. Especially the ones where some frequently used inputs require quickly rotating the analog stick(s)... relative to the player character's current onscreen orientation, so that you can't just macro your way out of it.

UCyborg wrote: ↑Sat Mar 17, 2018 5:20 pm Tunngle has dedicated Drakan room.

Um...
"Users: 0"
That's not very reassuring... unless it only refers to who's actually online at the time?