Story & Quest fixes

I've been looking to see if anyone's fixed the main game after the patch, but the only ones I've found are for the cargo hold and the mechanized gun. I'm looking forward to learning how to open and modify the .dat files.

What I'd like to see are the following:

Avenge the Queen! Perhaps only a female character is able to solve the Half-Ogre Island Quest? Perhaps by taking her information to the bad guy who wants to undermine Caladon negotiations? I think he hinted about it. Surely that guy would like to take down some gnomes.

Repair Master Quest. I was trying to figure out a way that would force you to repair something, without taking it to a repair person. I imagine you'd go down a pit or something, and you'd lose it from your inventory like the Tulla exam. Someone said it was very complicated to make custom schematics.

Heal Master Quest. (1) Years ago I thought it would be cool if the Heal Master sent you to some leper colony that looks somewhat like the camp on the Isle of Despair where you have to heal everyone. Or it could be on an island in the bay south of Tarant. You get on a rowboat like for Stringy Pete....
(2) Alternatively, you could simply have to heal someone blind like the Dodge Master or that Blind Throwing Master.
(3) Or the Master could wound herself, and you have to heal her using bandages.

Real Stillwater Giant. For the longest time I carried around the magical trap to see if I could capture something besides the blue bunny. I finally found the Real Stillwater Bunny, but its perception must be too high, because I couldn't get next to him/her without him spotting me. Of course I wasn't wearing animal scent (stillwater giant scent is obviously a fraud). I also didn't try stunning or anything either. It would be nice if there was a conclusion to this adventure which leads me to...

Caladon Zookeeper. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a zookeeper in Caladon who sent you on quests to bring back exotic beasts alive? You might need a bigger boat (I mean trap)! I can imagine the dialog saying something like they'd ask Payne but he doesn't capture monsters he kills them.

Lovers' Quest. I always wondered if there was a reward for this kind of stuff besides comic relief. I'd like to see on the kills page a lovers line showing how many "freebies" you've earned. Once you get the max, you should get the reputation "Lover of Arcanum" or something. I'm currently going through to see how many opportunities there are. I scored Min Gorad, but I think I missed the correct Dialog choice to get Raven in the end. Ahem. My current character is female so she also did two "jobs" - Yuck. PS: the woman lobbyist in Caladon didn't fulfill her "promise" after you made things go her way. I'd want to fix that.

Of course there are minor quest issues and dialog quirks that bug me, but I can't think of them now, so they probably aren't worth mentioning.

Finally, I'd like the Bogomir(?) Quest on the Isle of Thanatos to be the baddest beastie (or better yet a group of beasties!) in Arcanum. I recently fought him and he went down in four shots. Meanwhile Stringy Pete and his pirate crew were hideously tough. If I hadn't disarmed them and had 8 followers....

 

Before I forget again: Welcome to the forum!

Check Module Discussion for Arcanum - Work in Progress.
It's an expansion pack I'm trying to do that has most, if not all the bug, dialog, and schematic fixes in place - including a few that were recently discovered. At the moment that's as about as close as it gets to a fully debugged game.

And I've done a print-out of your ideas. The first and last ones are definately do-able; the rest will need someone a hell of a lot more skilled than I am.

 

Thanks for the welcome.

I found your topic http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=13866. I was hoping the more important topics would be "sticky" so that it wouldn't take too long to search for them.

 

Sorry, I downloaded your file (as well as another person's fix file) and I couldn't open or unzip them. I want to see other's fixes because I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel by making my own modifications.

 

Get the latest version of Winzip. I used one from May 07. Older versions can't recognize the higher compression that comes with it.

The company will allow you to install Winzip on a trial basis for free.

 

I think I downloaded it a year or so ago and it expired. I don't know if it will work a second time even after removing the old trial - other trials I've used leave a record on my computer saying they were there before (a registry?).

 

If not, then get a trial version of Winrar or maybe 7zip will open it.

 

Finally got 7zipup or whatever. It took a bit of time to break open your files. Does the game really have to use .bmp's for the area maps? I thought that format has almost no compression. I mean 10,000 4k files really add up. Also, was it supposed to open everything or just leave us with an Arcanum5.dat and Arcanum.patch1 like CarArcanum. My zipper just opened everything.

As to my orginal post here, I've gone almost as far as I can.

Lover's Quest: I figured out how to add moans to all your liasons. But I haven't set a global variable count to keep score. Is there a list of global variables like the list of global flags I found? I'll probably check again myself this week.

Bogaroth: I found him in the world editor and my suspicion was correct: he's weaker than the temporal beastie on the isle of despair (less HP's, no spells). I can fix it for myself, but the only way I could give simple instructions to others would be to make a script modification to its death that would call two temporals (call them parents) like CarArcanum does for the spiders (and which I didn't think was fair).

Windows: Like the Bogaroth I used the editor to make windows in the Ancient Maze and that Northern altar so I could get the stuff. Doesn't work for saved games.

Real Stillwater Giant: I wrote about this in another thread about how to catch it and that I'd considered modifying dialog of three characters to take that unlikely event into account, but didn't finish. I kind of gave up when I couldn't find a script to open the filled trap in front of the Witts.

So a zookeeper was out too. I was also thinking of checking the Wheelclan for a unique dwarf who could be gardner who wants lemons, stems, roots, etc. to fix their arboretum. It would be cool if you give him some and come back a month later to find it has grown (or a lemon tree has produced lemons).

Master_Firearms fix/upgrade: I did fix it so he's talking about Vooriden and marks your map, http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=14189 I haven't finished testing my upgrade to give you the rifle after you're the Master (either by book, altar or blessing).

Weldo Rubin: I fixed his dialog, gave him his own levelling scheme, and gave an interesting/funny upgrade for when you complete his quest. http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=14194

Lloyd Gurloes: Gave up on having him able to take your dwarven gauntlets and fine dagger and giving you back machined gauntlets. Codes wouldn't work. I found I could make him give you a mechanical dagger, and that worked OK! As I got better weapons, I passed it around my followers. By the time I saw the schematic in Tarant, (just before BMC?) I didn't need it anymore! The same would apply for dwarven gauntlets and machined gauntlets. If you can afford war gauntlets, then why bother? Now if they had a bonus like Magnus's!!!

Half-ogre island: just about given up on this when I discovered Willoughsby and Babcock are part of a faction with McGeehan. But no sign of any McGeehan either in special names or under hidden ones (like Winno, Lloyd or Madam Lil). Maybe CarArcanum has something good that I missed.

Maxim Quest: I checked if you can use repair on items outside your inventory, like a broken steam engine. NIX. Perhaps there'd be a script that would check if there's enough HP's on an inventory item. I also discovered that if you ask an NPC to repair something and he doesn't have any skill, he damages it!

More followers: I'm afraid I gave up on fixing Swyft, so I probably won't make a quest for Alice, who's levelling scheme is a bit more tech-happy than Jayna's and uses a bow! I'd have had her hate Jayna since she wouldn't want a rival herbalist travelling with her. But it's beyond my capabilities. I did however change Jayna's script to have her use that autolevelling scheme!

 

Unfortunately, the game insists on using BMPs for the maps.

Your memory is correct, BMP has no compression, which is why the download is so damned big.

And finally, yes, you do end up with two folders which are not compressed into DATs. These work just the same as the compressed ones, but take a little longer to load.

 

Would it be possible to make a third .dat containing the townmaps? IIRC, .dat compression was very good for the time, and ain't exactly bad even today. The time savings on loading/unloading Arcanum alone might be reason enough to try it. It'd also take a considerably shorter time to decompress the AWIP2 executable. Might increase the file size by a MB or two though, assuming that the newer versions of WinRAR eclipse it slighty.*

* Not 100% sure; it's been a long time since I did benchmarks on both.


Another thought: the game insists on .BMPs, but does it insist on 256 colour .BMPs? I tried decreasing the colour depth to 16 colours and saw no perceptible loss of definition. This still won't decrease the amount of wasted disk-space once uncompressed*, although it would decrease the installer's size and possibly decrease Arcanum's loading times to boot.

* This is because clusters are usually freaking huge on FAT32 volumes on modern HDDs, and the default cluster size on NTFS is 4Kb.

 

Probably. The game engine would most likely have no trouble accessing a .patch2 file.
However, even though there's a few thousand BMPs in the townmaps, the part that takes the longest to unpack (for me at least) is the main map.
Do the math: 2000 sectors X 2000 sectors = 4,000,000.
So I'm not sure you'd see much of a time-savings.

The only way to really speed up the unpacking or game start and stop would be to compress the Arcanum5.dat and Arcanum.patch1 folders before creating the zip or exe file.

Everything I ever read about the game's graphics keeps repeating the same thing: 256 color, 8-bit BMP.

 

4,000,000? I count 62,047 in modules\Arcanum.PATCH1. There's only 24,800 files in the modules\Arcanum.PATCH1\maps directory. Datting Arcanum5.dat isn't likely to have much of a noticeable effect (1,436 files), but the modules\Arcanum.PATCH1\townmap folder might (37,190) files. Unless the slowdowns are because you've undatted the entire Arcanum module and that's where you're getting the 4m files from... in which case the slow-down probably is several orders of magnitude worse for you than us.

(Yet...) another thought: you could get the townmaps from AWIP2 and Arcanum and then and use an duplicate-image-finding program to leave you with only the parts of the townmap you have to include.

Honestly, I wouldn't bother myself. Too much work, IMO, and there's always the possibility that it might not even work, but you did complain about load times. Might actually be more of a time-saver when you happen to upload AWIP3 than anything else.

 

Not 4,000,000 files - 4 million sectors on the main map. About 3/4 of those have something besides water as the scenery. Give or take a little.

And for this build, I am not using the completely unpacked game - which is Car-Arcanum. I started with a normal game and built the two folders using Chris' work as a basic guide to where everything goes.