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Anyone wants to port Drakan 2 PS2 assets to Drakan 1 PC engine and sorta port the game?

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2017 11:38 pm
by Voodooman
Titles say it all, trick like that worked with several games in a past in both directions (not without some disassembly), for example levels and basically entire tomb raider games from 1 to 5 could be backported (with some minor limitations), some people used to port PS2 and Xbox exclusive levels and content to pc versions of games that shared same engines.

So I suppose Drakan 2 has nothing really new, except for levels and story and can be backported to PC without problems, and it can be created as stand alone unofficial port or can be as well integrated into Drakan as continuation of main story (not replacement).
Also some improvements like new model for Rynn https://gamerinfo.net/game/drakan-the-a ... ots&pid=13 can help a lot (textures however looks better in PC version of Drakan 1) could help even Drakan 1 to look a little better.

So, anyone want to try that? I wish I could do that, but I have no time and no experience with riot engine editing, but I think this forum has enough of capable people with time to port Drakan 2 for PC after so many years.

Also some updates for Drakan could be take from updated Riot Engine in Lord of Rings and The suffering.

Re: Anyone wants to port Drakan 2 PS2 assets to Drakan 1 PC engine and sorta port the game?

Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2017 5:57 pm
by Arokhs Twin
Hi there, I think this was tried in the past but was proved to be too difficult partly due to the level editor's refusal to work partly or not at all on anything newer than Windows XP (even then it's best run on Windows 98) and this is why new levels and maps began to decline. I think there were other reasons too but it was a while back.

The only thing I can dig up is that TAG uses a much newer version of the RIOT engine than OOTF and there were too many problems and incompatibility issues using assets stripped from the newer engine and using them in the older one. It's possible to rip assets from TAG yes but getting them to work is another matter. It's probably possible with some modification and extensive hacking skills and a reliable editor, a lot of work for sure.

Porting the RIOT engine version used in TAG to the PC is technically possible as the suffering used the same engine. Practically it isn't; you would need more tools than just the editor and way more skill than what I have. The PS2 architecture is vastly different to a PC / Xbox and that version of the engine was specifically written and compiled for the MIPS R5900 which is the CPU core used in the PS2's EE chip. It would almost certainly need the C++ source code for the engine (not available) and recompiled for X86 processors.

Maybe one of our members who are programmers may have a better idea than me but it would need a lot of time and effort.

I personally used an old PS2 till it broke. There's the PCSX2 emulator which runs the game but has issues with hung animations when using switches & levers plus crashes altogether randomly when using the inventory and skill tree screens.

Ill see what else I can dig up...

Re: Anyone wants to port Drakan 2 PS2 assets to Drakan 1 PC engine and sorta port the game?

Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2017 12:23 am
by UCyborg
I wonder what's the reason for bugs when running under PCSX2. And what usually happens with source code of such projects like Drakan? Still lying in some basement or lost? Shame either way.

I'd say even if you got some assets of the PS2 game, most interesting being levels themselves, they most likely depend on entities/objects that exists only in that game. Even the data representing the level geometry itself might be different.

Oh, Half-Life: Decay made it from PS2 to PC thanks to modders. I don't know how exactly they did, there was definitely some common things between two versions. I think they had to write some of the code on their so the game logic worked like it does on PS2. We're talking about the game that came with SDK though, so that was another important plus in that case. Someone even managed to implement their own version of Half-Life engine (GoldSrc), Xash3D, there's also fork called SDLash3D, making it more cross-platform. Plus the Quake heritage helped as well.

Re: Anyone wants to port Drakan 2 PS2 assets to Drakan 1 PC engine and sorta port the game?

Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2017 5:52 pm
by Arokhs Twin
UCyborg wrote: Thu Oct 19, 2017 12:23 am I wonder what's the reason for bugs when running under PCSX2. And what usually happens with source code of such projects like Drakan? Still lying in some basement or lost? Shame either way.
The bugs is caused by the emulator not fully translating the MIPS functions and software calls to X86. There are various options for the on the fly MIPS to X86 recompiler but they don't help. The PCSX2 emulator seems to be still in development though so this should improve with subsequent versions. I may try the latest version and play the game again.

As for the source code I wonder what happens to all the data stored on servers, PC's etc when a developer goes bust or taken over. I would assume the IT hardware is recycled or if resold the hard drives would be destroyed or wiped in accordance to data protection laws. I would imagine all the Surreal software data is lost by now.

Having worked in the IT industry in order to comply with data protection laws all redundant and or faulty data storage devices are usually destroyed by shredding / smashing up even if they work. Some IT recycling companies use a secure erase program which overwrites the drives several times and a certificate has to be issued stating all data has been irrecoverably deleted. This applies in the UK at least and I would guess the USA has similar laws.

Re: Anyone wants to port Drakan 2 PS2 assets to Drakan 1 PC engine and sorta port the game?

Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2017 6:10 pm
by HeckFluff
If the file formats are simple, do what OpenMW did. Spend a couple of years recreating the engine.

Re: Anyone wants to port Drakan 2 PS2 assets to Drakan 1 PC engine and sorta port the game?

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 6:42 pm
by Arokhs Twin
I think remaking the game with another engine such as Unity using some extracted assets is probably a better idea but even that would be a lot of work. There's a remake of OOTF in the unity engine here https://arokhslair.net/forum/viewtopic ... 532#p32532 but that won't be complete till 2022 unless more people can help. Depending on how many people work on it and depending on how much time can be allocated to it (it would be free after all and most of us have work / college / university) it would take years to port / remake TAG.