Don't get too excited about the Level Editor, its 3D viewer engine variant (Engine.exe) uses different codepaths to do some things compared to the actual game version of the engine (Drakan.exe) so a majority of fixes aren't relevant for it so I only ported 3 of them, the patch for bump mapping crash bug, registry fixes and the fix for the glitch with texture filtering drop-down list. Code fixes for other glitches wouldn't make any difference since the same code I fixed in Drakan.exe isn't used in Engine.exe. This is why LOD feature doesn't seem present in there, you always get fully detailed models regardless of camera distance from them and the fogging is also done differently, it seems drawing distance is set very low, presumably because running the level editor with 3D view was very demanding for the hardware of that time.
I also thought maybe that bump mapping bug might have been overlooked because it was apparently a very fancy graphical feature for its time and only fancier hardware supported it so testers couldn't have spotted it if they played without it. But if that bug can be triggered when editing levels, it should be fixed now. Found some old article by Richard Rouse III and this caught my eye:
"One thing about proprietary tools in the gaming industry is that they're often riddled with bugs, and until the level designers learn to work around the crash-bugs their work will be severely hindered. Of course bugs that can't be worked around end up getting fixed. But why fix a particular problem if all the designers can just agree not to do whatever it is that causes the crash? The public, however, expects better quality software than professional game designers. Which is maybe backwards, if you think about it."
Source:
http://www.paranoidproductions.com/gami ... g2_00.html
He didnt't mention anything bad about Drakan's Level Editor, but then again wasn't really involved in making of that game, at least not deeply. He was the lead designer of The Suffering and by that time, Surreal's tech was much improved. I've played The Suffering and there really isn't much to complain about, the only more serious glitch I've noticed is that if you saved the game during one boss fight and reloaded it if you died, the other guy in that room became immortal. Oh and I fell out of the map on the first level when randomly jumping around come chairs. Though we don't have Level Editor for The Suffering to compare.
There's also this, I'd have to learn how to use it to be better able to exploit the bugs and even then it would probably be difficult to fix because I'm just an amateur when it comes to programming and the lack of source code makes these things pretty much impossible. Randomly clicking stuff in the editor itself seems to work, and one crash that happens when you work in 3D can be bypassed by closing 3D view when you don't need it and then open it again. Or this scenario, load a level, open the sequences tab, play one of them, crash few seconds into it. Now repeat the same, but instead of clicking play again, click that first thing on the list on that tab, close 3D view, open it again, initiate playback and BAM, no crash. Some feedback on how to reproduce certain crashes would certainly be helpful, at least in case there was something very obviously wrong. It's not unusual for these things to crash in the middle of some complicated loop doing who knows what.
But on the more positive side, Drakan isn't exactly the worst when it comes to glitches. I still remember beating it on the old XP machine with GeForce4 MX 440 graphics card and the most frustrating thing were the crashes when Arokh got new crystal. At the time I was just a kid with not much knowledge about computer technical stuff, so I just kept retrying until it decided to let me continue. Had no idea I could go to options menu and turn off lens flares. Oh and this was before the game crashed on difficulty menu on just about any computer but the oldest ones, so that also helped.