Arcanum High Resolution Patch

Drog Black Tooth · Guest

Arcanum High Resolution Patch is an extensive engine hack and probably the most complex mod I've done up to this point. It rewrites many subroutines to make the engine fully scalable to any resolution, and calculates positions of all elements of the interface (well over 1000 offsets) for the desired width and height by using formulas. Additionally, it adjusts sound positioning, fixes a number of UI bugs and disables sprite mirroring (if used without the UAP).

Features:

Full support for any resolution.
All elements of the interface perfectly centered.
All elements of the interface remain their original size with no custom graphics in any resolution.
Full compatibility with any mods that are based off the 1.0.7.4 version.
Full compatibility with older save games.
Improved Compact UI. Can now be accessed anytime by pressing F10.
Optional larger dialog and logbook fonts.

The patch runs on WeiDU, as it includes a rather flexible binary patcher with support for formulas. Qwinn's search and replace macro is also used.

The project took me many weeks of heavy reverse-engineering and debugging, as I had to go through the whole interface and many other functions to properly adapt the game for higher resolutions and make the engine fully scalable. I tried my best to keep everything as close to original as possible. Thus, the patch features no heavy UI changes, no custom graphics and no upscaling/stretching.

I'd also like to note that unlike the UAP, this isn't a community project, but rather something I've done for my own amusement. Ergo, the community feedback won't have much impact on the project, if any.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO, SCREENSHOTS AND THE DOWNLOAD

professoregon · Untrained Joined: 14 Apr 2009 Posts: 1

I've been looking forward to this for so long. Thanks, it's going to make this game so much more tolerable.

GarmGarf · Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 2:16 am Post subject:

Epic. Thanks a mil, Drog.

I haven't played Arcanum in quite a while, but heck, I'm going to look for the box, like now!
_________________
"or Death and All His Friends"

fatfree · Untrained Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 2

*deep bow*

Is there Drog's fan club around? I'd like to join...

EDIT
Ahem. WeiDU. Somehow reminds me of biggs' widescreen mod.

Xiaxo · Apprentice Joined: 13 Apr 2009 Posts: 11

Thanks for releasing this on my birthday today! Keep up the great work!

The_Bob · Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:52 pm Post subject:

Does the 31-tile freeze include dynamite, time bombs and plastique/detonator ? Say I plant a stick of dynamite around the Tarant University and steamrail to the boil - will the dynamite go off when it enters player's 31 square radius ?
_________________
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Koorac · Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 12:06 am Post subject:

Working fine using Wine on Linux.
Great work!

-dansq- · Untrained Joined: 15 Apr 2009 Posts: 1 Location: Finland

Working fantastic, many many many thx from here finland. It´s realy nice to see that after years there is still people who like to work whit good game like arcanum!

greydrow · Untrained Joined: 15 Apr 2009 Posts: 3

I'm very excited about this patch, however, I'm having troubles. I cant seem to get Arcanum to work correctly. The games loads up, but I cannot interact with it. The pointer doesn't move, and I have to CtrlAltDel to get out of it. I'm running on Vista. Is that the issue, and if so are there any fixes?

TheDavisChanger · Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 11:34 pm Post subject:

Review this Vista thread and post any further issues you have there.

greydrow · Untrained Joined: 15 Apr 2009 Posts: 3

Excellent. This fixed it right up, and the hi res patch is working great! I'm so happy to be able to play this game again! Thanks for the Vista info, and thanks for the upgrade Drog Black Tooth! Good show sirs.

johann tor · Untrained Joined: 16 Apr 2009 Posts: 2

Hello,

Lots of thanks for the effort.

I have a problem with getting the game to run at all after applying the hi-res patch. I run arcanum.exe and it simply fails to load at all. Nothing happens.

Here's what I did:
1.Clean install (English) on Win XP SP3
2.Official patch
3.Unofficial patch
4. Hi Res townmaps
At this point the game loads perfectly.
However after applying the hi res patch the game fails to load.

What have I done wrong? Any help would be appreciated

johann tor · Untrained Joined: 16 Apr 2009 Posts: 2

Ok, I just found out that I was patching to a resolution that wasn't natively supported by my graphics card. Patching to a properly supported resolution fixed it. Apologies for the bother, and lots of thanks for the patch, again.

nske · Untrained Joined: 16 Apr 2009 Posts: 1

Hello,

I'm a big fun of Fallout {1, 2}, but oddly enough I didn't know about Arcanum until a friend of mine mentioned it recently. I'm grateful for this patch, it makes the game so much more comfortable to play!

It works great under Linux and Wine 1.1.19, the only glitch is that scrolling/rendering is a bit slow (annoyingly so at 1920x1200, hardly obvious at 1280x1024) when the game is run without 3d acceleration support via -no3d (which afaik is the only way to play it under wine).

Superb work, Thank you

Xiaxo · Apprentice Joined: 13 Apr 2009 Posts: 11

Seems to be a memory leak. I have the game starting up at around 90 meg then gradually gets up to 650 meg and crashes. I'm running at 1920x1200.

Drog Black Tooth · Guest

Added the changelog section to the page, with the list of upcoming changes.

Xiaxo · Apprentice Joined: 13 Apr 2009 Posts: 11

Tried -no3d option and it just makes the game unplayable by creating 3-5 fps. Thanks for suggestion and thanks for that channel log.

xElatOth · Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 5:45 pm Post subject:

Tee Hee Heee ... Arcanum glorious!

Thanks SO much Drog! Top-Notch work... really!
_________________
"KaPep?! Really? You want a can of KaPep? You gonna stick with that?"

Phadech · Master Joined: 19 Jan 2003 Posts: 142 Location: Turkey

Great job Drog.
_________________

Drog Black Tooth · Guest

Version 1.1 is out. List of changes:

- Fixed the spells/skills buttons on the bottom panel. The spells/skill menu doesn't disappear anymore if the corresponding button is still pressed.
- Added a new optional component: Compact Options Screen. This breaks the options screen into 3 parts (top, middle and bottom), just like with the other menus.
- Fixed mouse cursor detection issues with the character creation menu. Gender, race and background fields now get properly detected.
- Fixed mouse cursor detection issues with many multiplayer related menus.
- The NPC response window now gets proportionally larger when the larger dialog font component is installed. Now all text fits correctly.
- Fixed all issues with the larger logbook font. Now all text fits correctly and page numbers are visible.
- Added size 18 dialog fonts as an option.

Here's a screenshot showing size 18 fonts:

Drog Black Tooth · Guest

Here's a quick update to address a minor bug.

Version 1.1a:

- Fixed a crash when clicking around in character pick/create menu.

Mikado · Untrained Joined: 06 May 2009 Posts: 1

Hello Drog, thanks for the awesome patch! Working great, no bugs found.

Q: Is it possible to display interface scaled up to the screen size (at least for 4:3 resolutions) instead of original?

Drog Black Tooth · Guest

No, it's not possible (without redrawing the graphics for a specific resolution, of course) nor desired. No upscaling/stretching/custom graphics will ever be used in this mod. This is the policy of the project which is reflected in the feature list.

howareyou32 · Apprentice Joined: 11 May 2009 Posts: 11

thanks Drog Black Tooth.

I hate to star new game, but this is worth a try.

also, do you think you can
1. increase the speed of the mouse in game a bit 2. also allow us to move the map further and increase the map moving speed especially with your great invention now.

thanks again.

Minuos · Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 12:14 pm Post subject: