Tech support

Game technical support & help

I have removed most of the content of this page as it was related to getting the game to run on Windows 2000 / XP and was very out of date and is no longer relevant. There exists community patches which enable the game to run on Windows 10 with multiplayer fully functional and nobody should be using Windows XP or older now so it’s gone šŸ™‚ But if you still want to use Windows XP you will be pleased to know the patch has been tested and works perfectly fine on Windows XP.

Long and short of it, Drakan needs to be installed from the original game disk and then patched with the latest community patch to enable it to work including multiplayer. Please see the step by step instructions below for updating the game. You can alsoĀ read the patch readme file which gives some more details.

Game won’t install on a PC that uses an Nvidia graphics card and Windows 10

It has been noticed that the combination of the latest Nvidia drivers and Windows 10 prevents the game from installing even from the original CD. If you find that running setup.exe from the original CD does absolutely nothing and you are using an Nvidia graphics card and windows 10 then you need to follow the steps below:-

  • First of all open task manager and kill the currently running 32 bit installer process by right clicking and selecting “end process” then open a command prompt or powershell prompt as administrator. You do this by right clicking on the cmd.exe and selecting run as administrator or select powershell (as admin) from the start menu.
  • Type “net stop NVDisplay.ContainerLocalSystem” without the quotes and wait for confirmation the service is stopped.
  • Run the installer again however nothing will happen again. Open task manager and kill the Nvidiacontainer process then the game installer will then run – please follow the step by step instructions below.
  • If not kill the 32 bit installer process and try again.
  • Once the game is installed go back to the command prompt and type “net start NVDisplay.ContainerLocalSystem”.
  • Reboot your machine.

Step by Step instructions for installing & updating Drakan

  • Obtain full copy of the game and install with the ‘full’ option which includes the single player and multiplayer portions. Do not install Mplayer if installing from the original disk as this is obsolete and the Mplayer service no longer exists.
  • Download the latest community patch which can be found on the downloads page and install by running the installer package. The installer will check to see if you have a legal copy of the game installed and then proceed to update it. If you have installed a pirated copy the installer may fail. Also the installer will fail if you have any other unofficial patches installed such as the 10th anniversary patch. Note the 445 patch is not required as the community patch supersedes it. Currently the patch is in English, German and Spanish and the installer will use the appropriate language depending on the language version of your game detected during the legal copy check.
  • There is also the option to use DGvoodoo during install which uses a 3DFX Direct 3D wrapper and may work better for some users with certain video cards. I found it was not needed running on Nvidia GTX970 hardware but it’s recommended you install it and see what option is best for you.
  • After install the game should run. Graphics options are pre-set but you may have to adjust your screen resolution.
  • The community patch includes good single player maps and a selection of the best multiplayer maps. Any additional maps can be found on this site. It also included any required add on files that are needed for some maps such as the sky common database.
  • Note that the game saves are stored in a different location after patching. If installing over an existing install you will need to move your save games. There is an extensive readme explaining everything which can be be found here and the latest community patch can be found on the downloads page.

Other notes post-install

For general issues such as CTD, locking up, no sound, video issues 95% of these bugs have been fixed in the AIO patch / community patch. There has been several revisions of this patch and the latest version can be found on the downloads page. However this patch makes some some significant changes to the game files and paths so you will need to move your savegames to c:\users\<your_userID>\My Games\Drakan.

Users of certain onboard Intel video chipsets may encounter graphical glitches. This cannot be fixed at this time as it is a limitation of the graphics hardware. If driver updates do not fix we suggest buying an AMD or Nvidia graphics card if possible or try the DGvoodoo option as this may work better for you especially if you have a fast multicore CPU such as an I5 or I7. Laptops especially do not have high end graphics cards but have good CPU’s so this may be a good option for laptop users.

The well known crash after exiting Alwarren has been fixed in the community patch along with many other bugs. The community patch contains the AIO patch plus all known good single player and multiplayer maps.

There is also the 10th anniversary patch which fixes some issues and improves performance but this has the opposite effect if used with the community patch hence this is now obsolete & installing this is not recommended. It can be used to play the game single player and for testing purposes but you really shouldn’t use it for multiplayer.

Although ‘official’ technical support for this game has been discontinued there are members of the community who will be glad to help. Please search the forums if you do not find what you are looking for on this page as many questions have been already answered in the forums. If you still need help, please post on the forum or use the discord chat.

Multiplayer server info

As above multiplayer now works. You now needĀ to install the community patch rather than just the AIO patch as this does not include some dependencies. Also if you use the AIO patch you will have to manually install all the player made levels. The community patch does this for you automatically. Both the AIO and CP can be found on the downloads page. The patch fixes 95% of the bugs, crashes and enables multiplayer to work. Note that the master servers have changed but the CP includes the fixed config file with the updated master servers so you don’t really need to edit it. For reference the line that needs to be changed in drakan.cfg is SetĀ MasterServerList which needs to be changed to

“master.333networks.com:27900,master.errorist.tk:27900,master.newbiesplayground.net:27900,
gsm.qtracker.com:27900,master.qtracker.com:27900”

I have listed the current server addresses below if you want to manually add them to your game.

  1. Arokh’s Lair (UK) 212.169.37.181 Part time server used for arranged game matches. Has a discord chat channel which is joined by invitation. Please ask on the forums or PM me for an invite.
  2. Arokh’s Lair (Poland) 193.93.90.104 Full time server running more or less 24/7. Uses the same discord channel as the UK server. Organised matches may be run on this server too as each server is limited to 8 players.
  3. Axe’s server (Netherlands) 50.70.103.140 (normal games, used for private games Wednesday and Saturday) Not seen for some time but kept in the list as this is the most recent.

As with almost all custom add on levels you will need the 445 patch of which the English version can be downloaded here. For some levels you may also need the sky common add on which can be found here. Also you may get a crash when browsing the servers. This appears to be the game trying to connect to a non existent server. If this happens try deleting the obsolete servers from your servers.txt file. Please note you will also need the AIO patch or repack as well as patch 445 and sky common.Ā  These issues have been fixed in the AIO patch / community patch which replaces the 445 patch.

If anyone else runs a dedicated server which has a fixed IP address, please let me know.

A point well worth mentioning is that if you do run a dedicated server leave the priority in task manager to normal; do not set it to high or above normal. This will cause certain levels not to load. Mechanist spent over a day trying to figure out why some levels could load and some could not. This was simply because drakan.exe (engine.exe) was set to above normal priority.

Multiplayer levels can be downloaded from this site. There was another site in Russia but it was infested with viruses and malware and has hence been removed.

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