Remember to check and adjust the in-game settings according to your preferences; especially the key bindings.
To play the player-created levels: hold SHIFT while clicking the shortcut to start Drakan. This will bring up the "Riot Engine Options" window.
Click the "Developer" tab, tick the "Enable developer mode" box, then click OK to actually start Drakan.
While in Developer Mode, clicking "New Game" will instead open a list of all the installed levels.
To select a difficulty level in Developer Mode, hold CTRL while clicking "New Game".
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It's generally OK to set all the graphic quality settings to their maximum, even on low-end systems; this is a 1999 game, after all.
DgVoodoo2 users: you might also want to set "Lens Flare Effects" in the graphical settings to "Enabled". Note that if NOT using dgVoodoo2, then changing this setting won't result in any visible difference on most systems.
If you find that Drakan appears overall too dark to play comfortably on your display device, turning up the gamma setting in the game options should help.
Volume adjustment: unfortunately, due to Drakan's engine limitations, it isn't possible to adjust the speech volume independently of the other sound effects.
Because of this, a music volume setting of around 40-60% is recommended for the optimal listening experience.
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SLI/CrossFire users: if you experience unexpected crashes/BSODs with Drakan, make sure to disable SLI/CrossFire for Drakan.exe - it can't make any use of multiple GPUs anyway, and it suffers from known stability problems on multi-GPU systems unless SLI/CrossFire is disabled in the game's profile.
Windows 10 users: because of the constant Windows updates, Drakan's compatibility with Windows 10 tends to vary quite randomly.
Also, Windows 10 may erroneuosly declare some of the game's files as being "potentially harmful"; this is a false positive, and needs to be manually set to ignore and run the game anyway.
A similar problem happens with some brands of antivirus software; if that happens, add the Drakan installation directory to the exclusion list, and remember to restore any files that might have been quarantined by the antivirus.
If you encounter any stability issues, or Drakan simply fails to start, try the following steps first:
- set Drakan.exe to "Run as administrator" in the compatibility properties tab,
- set the compatibility mode for Drakan.exe to "Windows XP" or older,
- check your antivirus to see if it isn't falsely detecting Drakan as harmful,
- also check the AV quarantine area and restore any Drakan files that might have ended up there.
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Multiplayer connectivity issues:
If you can't see any currently active servers appear in the server list, or they appear to be offline even while they are in fact active - this is typically caused by Drakan getting blocked by your firewall. You need to configure the firewall to allow Drakan both TCP and UDP connectivity.
Servers refusing connection due to "invalid or corrupt files" - that happens when the game data files (including the level files) aren't exactly identical on both the server and client sides.
This is usually caused by a mismatch between the Drakan AiO patch versions on both machines, or - far more uncommonly - by accidentally overwriting some of the level and/or database files through incorrect usage of the Level Editor.
Hosting multiplayer games from behind a router or NAT requires setting up port forwarding first.
There's a guide on how to do that on the Arokh's Lair forums (
https://arokhslair.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3363).
Note that your ISP may also be using NAT, in which case you need to contact them to set up port forwarding on their side, as well. Good ISPs will either do that for free, or charge only a nominal fee for such a service.
Keep in mind that if there's more than 1 router/NAT between Drakan and the Internet, then EVERY device in the chain needs to be correctly set up with port forwarding, or it won't work at all!
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Additional content in the Gold Pack:
Registry settings for the game (graphics and developer settings), 10th Anniversary Mod and editing tools can be reset using the supplied Reset_All_Registry_Settings.reg file.
Remaining settings are stored in Drakan.cfg in your Documents folder, in "My Games\Drakan".
Editing tools are located in Drakan\Editor folder.
Drakan 10th Anniversary Mod can be found in Drakan\Mod10th folder.
Note that this mod is included mostly for completeness only, since it's rather poorly optimized - the performance isn't too great, even on very powerful modern systems, and it's plagued by many unfixed bugs. In particular, it requires disabling "Bump Mapping" in Drakan options to avoid severe graphical corruption/artifacts.
There are also some pre-defined level-list files included, some known special levels (the ones supposedly good for dueling and ones using special arena code (feature since 445 patch)) have been put in separate .lfl files (Arena.lfl and Duel.lfl).
Check out Drakan\Multiplayer folder.
However, be warned that some of the multiplayer levels aren't very good, so be sure to review them yourself before including them on your server.
A few of the levels are also completely broken, and fail to work at all.
The optional mods can be found in the Mods folder, in the installation directory.
Be careful with them though, they could break things. Depending on what files they replace, some cannot be mixed together unless you use the editing tools.
Character model mods also tend to break savegames!