[Kane]

Got this working at last (had to start the game in 98, then I copied it across to XP and was able to run the game). The graphics are.... interesting. Low poly models, not particularly detailed textures, but massive enviorments and environmental bump-mapping. At the time, this must have meen the mac daddy of graphical extravagansas, but as you can see it looks a bit dated now.
I'll put some more shots up later when I get further through the game.
Shots at 1280x1024/1024x768 (switched when I alt-tabbed) 4x2xAA/AF

 

[cooliscool]

You could have ran the installation app in Win98 compatibility mode you know.

 

[Kane]

It's not the install that was the issue. The game would not start in XP. I could get to the main menu, but it quit out when I clicked new game, regardless of compatibility settings. You wouldn't believe how many old games I play in XP which people say don't work. Thus I know when a game doesn't start.
As it happens, I could have got round it....
Long story short, the developer mode needed for displaying the FPS causes these issues with XP. Somthing I only discovered at a later date, but I digress.....

 

[cooliscool]

Ah, I see.

Looks pretty good. But why the such low FPS on your rig? If it runs at 35FPS on that beast..

 

[Kane]

I think it's the view range. I used a fog disabling hack to increase it significantly. Dunno what specificaly is killing it though as my GF3 ran it relatively happily.
/me waits for ChrisRay to suggest a reason.

 

[Valcrist]

I borrowed that game from a friend a few years back, ran like utter crap on my POS PIII 750 128MB ram, Radeon 7000, but ran great when I went to the PIV 1.5 512MB Ram, and Radeon 9500, haven't tried it on my new rig, might ask to borrow it again, I didn't get very far b4 he wanted it back, but it was good for as far as I got.

 

[Kane]

That's odd. I was playing it at pretty much max detail on my GF3 (No AA/AF at 800x600 as was my norm at the time), and the configuration allows you to scale back hte settings quite drasticly. Without the foghack on, I get a good 90FPS in 1280x1024/4x4x

 

[Kane]

Here are some more shots. Just to emphasise how big the levels in this game are, all the shots so far and these are taken from one level. One level which takes 3 seconds to load on my PC. These shots are with the Fog-hack off in 1024x768x32/4x4x. The FPS was jumping from 64 to 128 to 256. No in-between... I figure the FPS calc can't handle my machine . The 42 FPS shot was due to the way I take shots: I had just alt-tabbed in and pressed printscr immidiately so my machine hadn't quite recovered from the switch.

 

[ChrisRay]

Heh I actually have this game. It came with a 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 I purchased a long while back. It was designed to run in pre Transform and Lighting days on 16 bit Voodoo3 cards. I guess I could look at it but I doubt I'd wanna go through the hassle of getting it to run. Makes me wonder if Return to Krondor will run.

 

[Demigod]

Ah, Drakan. This was one of my favorite games during my TNT2 days. I believe it was designed to run on a Matrox G400, which featured hardware bump-mapping.

And yes, the game has massive levels and rich environments. I just loved flying around the map, toasting monsters who crawled around like ants. The sense of scale you get in this game is quite amazing. One minute you're walking around a small cave, the next you're flying around mountains, and both on the same level.

 

[Kane]

I figure the reason it was running so crap was the fog hack did exactly what it said it did: made the card render the entire level, removing the clipping pane. Given, as Demigod said, the scale of the levels, that's a lot of work.
I say this as I'm still getting good framerates in 1600x1200. Pretty much identical to my 1024x768 ones actualy, until I use the foghack

>I believe it was designed to run on a Matrox G400, which featured hardware bump-mapping.

That is indeed correct. Drakan was one of the first games to use Enviormental bump mapping (as opposed to Dot3). I'll demonstrate with my next batch of shots when I get round to playing the next level.

 

[DarkAurora]

Oh my god, I can't believe that game was made in '98. It looks better than the original Everquest graphics (Everquest came out in '99) and Everquest was really advanced for its time.

 

[ChrisRay]

I dunno where you get that. The female model looked like crap now. And it looked like crap then. She never had realistic movements. The enviroments were nice but the actual charactor models were garbage.