Arcanum High Resolution Mod Released

Devoted Arcanum fan Drog Black Tooth has released a new “engine hack” mod that adds support for any and all resolutions to Troika’s original CRPG.

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.

Awesome.