Arokhs Lair – A Drakan fan site

Just a quick update today just to let you know we are still here. Things have gone well since we changed to the new forum software last year and we have had a lot of new members admittedly most of them Blade of Darkness fans rather than Drakan. There has been a few tech support requests so people are still playing the game and trying to make levels. Other than that there hasn’t been any Drakan news to comment on recently but rest assured any updates will be posted here.

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The move to the new server and forum is now complete. The forum has been tested and is working OK however some problems did occur when importing data from the old Snitz forums. Users with symbols in their username were truncated so if you are one of these users please contact me. All other changes are detailed on the forum announcements page at the top of the forums.

There has been a lot of tutorials from the old Surreal News forums rescued by our forum member Shoprat who has put a lot of effort into finding tutorials and other questions and answers on the web and putting them into a handy zip file which is easy to use and find what you are looking for. Most have also been repeated on the forums so if you are struggling with the level editor, a wealth of info can be found there. If you want to download the zip file, it can be found on the downloads page. Thanks to Shoprat for the hard work! Continue reading →

Just to let you know that I have been doing some work on the website converting all pages & scripts from .asp to .php in preparation for the move from a Windows web server to Unix. This is to save costs on running the site as I don’t make any profit from it and all costs come from my own money. I have successfully managed to change the forum from Snitz to PHPBB and import most of the forum posts – only the archives were lost & users would have to request a password reset. This is all running on a test site so when the time comes next year I only have to import the latest data and I can make the switch.

This will halve the running costs of the web site. I will stick with Windows & Snitz for now until the hosting expires (or sooner if the forum database crashes again) so if the site is down in the future, we have not gone and will be back, just bear with us. It’s something I should have done a long time ago but have been putting it off. The reason I went down the Windows route is originally the site was running off my own internet connection at home from an old Pentium Pro server I kept in the basement. It later moved to a proper host.

Now on to something about Drakan. First of all thanks to the forum member Shoprat the level editor tutorial has been updated with an archive of old posts from the defunct Surreal news forums which will help anyone wanting to make levels or mods for the game. Continue reading →

Added unreleased upcoming player made levels & series to the single player level reviews and downloads page. These probably will never be finished and all are in a playable state so are worth checking out. Aergoth is a stunning example of what can be done with the Drakan level editor so definitely take a look! Also check out Assassin and Vader Darth’s levels which add trading systems, employment and the ability to purchase property to the game. Newest levels are at the bottom. I omitted Joaxin’s Relic as this is still in development and is not ready for public release.

I got rid of the webring links on all pages today as the site keeps redirecting you to their site most of the time when clicking on links within this site. This make the site very annoying to use as when you tried to click on a link you got redirected to some random irrelevant site on webring or got an advert displayed. I will pull out of the Drakan Webring scheme now. Also the subdomain http://levels.arokhslair.net now works.

Shelim has now got a moddb page for his Drakan 10th anniversary modification which brings the game more up to date with current graphics and supports new Direct X 9 features (the original game used Direct X 6) and also fixes some bugs. The mod will hopefully be released soon which adds some replayability to the single player game. You can find all information on the development forum and at the mod db page here. drakan-10th-anniversary

Larian Studios have just announced their new game called Dragon Commander previously known as Project D. There’s a trailer at the moment which gives a sneak preview with more details coming next week at Gamescom 2011. This game should be of interest to Drakan fans. You don’t get to ride a dragon but actually get to be one. Link to website here.