Arokhs Lair – A Drakan fan site

Drakan: Order of the Flame was released in the USA exactly 20 years ago today. Several of us managed to get a few multiplayer matches in however sadly I couldn’t make it but that does not mean that I won’t play again in the future. Drakan’s playerbase has increased thanks to the community patch but it seems to be dwindling now. A handful of us still play so if you are interested in multiplayer check out our discord server. BTW the EU release date was 20th August 1999 so hopefully there will be more matches on that date. There are currently two active servers on which you can play on bringing the total number of players playing at once to 16.

As a side note I have implemented secure HTTPS across the whole site which broke some things. I think I’ve fixed it but if any content isn’t working for you let me know on the forum or email the webmaster address.

Finally I think this will be the last year this website will exist in this form at least. I’ve renewed both arokhslair.net and arokhslair.com but I probably will not do so next year and instead move this website to a subdomain of my personal web space so it will not be lost. I may even host it at home on my netgear NAS box as I’ve already tested this and it works albeit slowly on the forums. I will make my decision on this depending on visitors, forum posts and cost of web hosting.

In addition to the usual assortment of minor fixes, this version of the Community Patch also includes some fairly major usability improvements to the Level Editor – opening up completely new possibilities to Drakan map making for the first time in the last 19 years.

Another major feature is that it now allows patching the Spanish version of Drakan, in addition to the previously supported English and German versions. On top of that, the patch installer received a Spanish translation as well, thanks to Discord user Javixx95.

In fact, in terms of added content, this is easily the most significant patch release to date.

A detailed list of the new features can be found in the CP’s readme file – but for reference, here’s a quick overview of the other major changes which haven’t been mentioned already:

• 32-bit textures are now supported (tested up to a size of 2048 by 2048 pixels!),
• Digital Elevation Models can now be imported directly into the Level Editor, taking most of the tedium out of landscaping new maps,
• Exporting transparent textures has been made possible in the Editor,
• New default settings for dgVoodoo2 mitigate the previous issue of in-game text being blurred when dgVoodoo2 is enabled,
• UCyborg’s fixes now allow the notoriously troublesome “Lens Flare Effects” to work properly in most cases.

The game servers have been updated to the new version. Please remember to apply this update if you want to play Drakan multiplayer; the patch can be downloaded from the usual place.

The latest community patch has been released by Mechanist. This makes changes to several maps which we found to be unbalanced and other improvements have been made to make gameplay more fair. You will need to install this to be able to play on the multiplayer servers. It is not required to update if you have an earlier build if you play only single player.

I have updated the tech support pages as they were out of date and no longer relevant. I have put some information on there for new visitors who would like to play the game and how to install the community patch which replaces the 445 patch.

Speaking of which there is a new version (135.03) which contains updates to some of the multiplayer levels to fix bugs and balancing.

Regarding the previous post about the community patch – there has been a small update so the build number is now 135.02. If you play multiplayer you will need to update to this version.

Also I need to update the tech support page with detailed instructions on how to use the community patch as it’s pretty much a fix all issues patch and renders a lot of things on the support page irrelevant. I should get chance to do this at some point this week but in the meantime the community patch does have a good readme which you can take a look at.

Mechanist has been hard at work creating a community patch which will make updating the game much easier especially if you play multiplayer. The patch contains the latest AIO patch and any updated SP and MP community made levels and bug fixes to existing ones. If you play Drakan single player only you can download the AIO patch but it’s recommended to use the community patch.

To install the patch you will need the full version of the game installed. Note the 445 patch is not required anymore as this patch supersedes it. Then download and run the latest community patch, which can be found on our downloads page and the installer will automatically detect your Drakan installation and update the files as needed. It will work exactly like the 445 patch installer except for it will also update any maps / levels required for multiplayer. Current build 135.01rc0, game version should show 377/447 after install.

Thanks to Mechanist for his hard work!

On a side note I found that the master server query is intermittently not showing one or both of the game servers. If you do not have any servers showing in the available servers list manually add them by clicking on ‘Add Server’ and enter the details for the two multiplayer servers which are 193.93.90.104 (port 38013) and 212.169.37.181 (port 27046). You can also see the status of any multiplayer servers on 333 Network’s website at http://333networks.com/s/drakan

There is also a forum discussion topic which can be found by following this link.

In case you didn’t know what Open OOTF is well it’s a remake of Drakan: Order of the Flame in the unity engine. It remains to be seen if this will be made into a full remake or whether it will be made into a seperate game similar to Drakan but time will tell on that. If the full remake is completed it will be a requirement to own the original Drakan:OOTF PC game.

Here is the link to the forum topic which tells you more about it.

Have fun!

Today was a milestone in Drakan multiplayer; we played for 3 hours and had a few players playing at once without any issues. There are now several of us that will be playing regularly. The match was recorded by two players and is available on Jage’s twitch channel to watch now – the Youtube recording will be posted later.

For now here is the link to the earlier live stream of the longest multiplayer match in years with several players to boot. 🙂

Drakan Multiplayer Twitch Stream 27.05.2018

We are pleased to announce that there are now two Drakan multiplayer servers active; one of them is open 24/7.

They are maintained up-to-date with the newest version of the Community Patch.

Both of them are set up to register with the master servers, so they should be automatically found by the Drakan server browser, without players having to enter the server IP addresses and ports manually. If that fails to work for any reason, try adding the servers manually: they are 193.93.90.104 (port 38013) and 212.169.37.181 (port 27046).

However, if you find yourself unable to connect (server is visible, but refuses connections), this is usually caused by running an older patch version than the server; in that case please update your copy of the game with the AiO patch linked above.

Our servers use a lot of fanmade levels. It wouldn’t be practical to list them all here, so we recommend new players to instead download and use the Drakan Gold Pack Enhanced (also available on the same page as the AiO patch), which already contains all of the player-created levels.

Note that a newly-created level has recently been added to the servers: “Revival” by mage150. Although included in the Drakan Gold Pack Enhanced, it isn’t present in the AiO patch download. Patch users, please download the level here and install it by following the instructions in the included readme file.

There is another AIO patch version released today which will hopefully be the last one for a while. If you wish to play the game online on our two MP servers please update your game with the latest version. As always it can be found on the downloads page.

Edit: nevermind, another release today (21.05.18) please update again.