Arcanum Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura High Resolution Patch

[Aleck Cobbs]

Imaginea place of wonder, where magic and technology hold equal sway, and an adventurer might just as easily wield a flintlock pistol as a flaming sword. A place where great industrial cities house castle keeps and factories, home to Dwarves, Humans, Orcs and Elves alike. A place of ancient runes and steamworks, of magic and machines, of sorcery and science. Arcanum is the first game to come from the development house Troika Games, LLC, started by former Fallout team members Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson. This team takes the depth of gameplay and world-building in role-playing games to entirely new levels of realism and excitement. Arcanum creates a compelling new world where magic and technology coexist in an uneasy balance. As Arcanum opens, the mechanical age has only recently arrived in this ancient land where Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and other races have learned to survive in the new sprawling industrialized cities.

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).

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.

COMPATIBILITY

Note: A lot of data in German and French versions is shifted, most probably due to a different copy protection used. However, the English Arcanum.exe should work properly with the foreign versions, provided you can deal with its copy protection one way or another.

Any resolution is possible, if it isn't smaller than the original 800x600. Even non-standard resolutions like, e.g. 1333x789 will work, if the game is run in a window or your video card supports custom resolutions.

The patch adjusts scrolling distance according to the resolution, so that you won't be able to scroll farther than at the original 800x600. At very high resolutions (and especially with low PE) this results in scrolling distance of 1, i.e. you can barely scroll the screen if your character is already in the center (the screen becomes more scrollable as you move closer to the edges). This seems logical, since as everything is already visible, there's no need to scroll. However, if you don't like this adjustment you can run the game with the '-scrolldist:0' command line argument, this will give you infinite scrolling distance, regardless of the resolution and your character's PE. Although it's important to note that if you scroll far enough at very high resolutions you will see inactive objects.

Everything that is 31 tiles away from the PC is inactive, i.e. AI, animation, scripts, etc don't work that far away from the player, so the objects just get frozen. At extremely high (like 2600x1900) resolutions (or with the infinite scrolling option) it may be possible to see such objects. The active radius may be increased later, if there's a demand for such resolutions, although it will have a severe impact on performance, of course.

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