Arx Fatalis - Fixup Build Attempt

So, I was poking about in Arx Fatalis on Steam, which I bought ages ago and barely touched**...

Tonight, I fired it up once more - only to find that there are one or two issues that I know I didn't have back in the original release days, on a much, much slower PC:-

Issue one: every time any font appears on the screen, the rendering speed dramatically (and I mean dramatically) slows down.

Issue two: casting spells is practically impossible. I know I found it far, far easier when I owned it before in the time of yore, and so am certain this is some kind of modern hardware incompatibility deep in the glyph-tracing code (searching the net, some people have this issue - most believe it is just players not being accurate enough in the tracing. Trust me, as someone who played this game lots on original release: it isn't that.)

After trying various fiddles to try and resolve these issues, I remembered that the Arx Fatalis source code had been released on the 'net some time ago - so I went and grabbed that instead.

So, just a short(ish) blog post to announce my intention to build my own custom version of this fairly old, but still quite cool RPG, that will fix the font problem and (hopefully) the magic problem.

I might even make some other adjustments too (the UI has some real issues that I truly hate, for example), but this depends how carried away I get...

First obstacle, though, is that the source code relies upon DirectX7 APIs and structs that do not really exist in the latest DirectX SDKs... I'm a bit wary about putting August 2007's SDK on a Windows 7 system that I use mainly for work... but I probably will anyway :-D

Watch this space for more updates - I have to stop now, so I am able to get up in the morning and go to the dentist to have my teeth tortured...


** No, scratch that: here's the full, tedious story... I originally bought it not long after it came out, which was years ago, before Steam even existed. I nearly completed it back then, but various clear-outs of old crap later, and I no longer owned the CD version of the game. Then a bargain sale of Arx Fatalis came up on Steam last year, and I grabbed the game again... then forgot about it until now. Phew. Thanks for your patience...