Arcanum High Resolution Patch *Source Code*

I was rummaging through archives of our late ogre friend and found the high resolution patch backups.

The high resolution patch runs on WeiDu (since it has excellent binary patching capabilities), so the actual patch basically consists of several scripts. For some reason, Drog decided to obfuscate his code (how selfish of him!), so the patching scripts included in the public version of the patch have all comments cut out, as well as spaces and paragraphs. This results in them being unreadable by a human (it's basically just a really, really, really long string of hex addresses). The original main patching script is about 1400 lines long and has each and every change commented (the comments are rather short, though), so you get the idea.

Well, since the patch isn't going to be updated by Drog, I thought why not release the original commented scripts. At least they won't get lost forever. And maybe (just maybe) somebody will update the patch and fix the remaining bugs.

Speaking of bugs, there was also a file named "High Res TODO.txt" in the folder. Its contents are:

Code:

- 'Find game' menu (Server List UI): mouse cursor detection issues.
- Splash screens aren't centered horizontally.
- A black backdrop should be added to the following UIs:
  Main Menu
  Slides
  WorldMap (when traveling)
- Optional scaling of movies (?)

You can get the fully commented scripts here or here. You still need to download the full public version of the patch to make use of them, however.

WeiDu documentation is available here.

 

Interesting, I've never imagined that so many bytes were patched in this patch, and it seems that he was working on this patch for months at least... plus PE Patcher was not needed after all.

Video scaling is possible, the easiest way is to resize them while patching, create small batch that will use bink tools. Or the harder way, is to rescale them while playing them, patching Arcanum's executable, especially bink calls.

Anyway, thanks for source code.

PS: Do you know if he is going to release source codes for unofficial patch too?

 

tnx Elder Drog, I'm sure this will be handy to someone in someway at some moment

 

Danken!

 

Tanke wol!