Dark Sun Series

Of course,the world is a giant desert for the most part after all,there were some rules concerning water and moving through the desert I think although it has been ages since I last read them

 

An oasis in the desert would be prized territory, and a zone of conflict as various factions battle over the control of resources. Wasn't there a map in the first Dark Sun game that revolved around an oasis? So there's that.

 

Yes, absolutely. Ravager comes from this period at SSI where they became massively incompetent about handling almost everything, including basic coloring, sound samples, and fonts. Like start a game of Eye of the Beholder 3 and see how bad they fucked up the sounds and colors and so on art they ripped directly from Westwood's EoB2. They're a damn sense assault.

 

Coloring, sound samples, fonts... I'm more interested in the game and how it plays. Maybe I don't have very delicate senses.

 

I couldn't find a thread for Dark Sun although I'm sure there are many of them. I've heard people praise this game a lot, and from what I've seen so far it seems to be a flawed jem - combat seems enjoyable, although I hate the fact that I get no feedback on attack rolls and such. Also I have no idea how many action points attacking or casting spells take. I also have no idea whether classes can use all weapons equally well and long as they can equip them. I guess I could read the manual but so far I just checked it to figure our how to camp to renew spells.

I also learned that there are some game-breaking bugs. Could someone please tell me a bit about them so I don't get stuck on my first playthrough?

I'm just about the exit the sewers. Kind of excited to see what the outside world looks like.

 

Awesome game. I played it for the first time recently and didn't encountered any bug. If I remember the topic right, you should carefully keep the items which look like key items, but the bugs are more in the second Darkun game than in Shattered Lands.

Besides the level cap is very low compared to the experience you gain throughout the game, so I regretted a little that I hadn't taken multi-class characters.

EDIT : http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/albion-and-dark-sun-questions.98665/
I'm reffering to this thread.

 

No, I'm old fashioned, I tried the search function, which never works.

 

There is a bad bug where if you place a particular note on the ground, a script doesn't activate and you can't proceed to the game's final battle. I can't remember what note it is, it's one you get towards the end of the game, but I'd be careful about every note you pick up.

 

It works fine if you check the "Search titles only" box.
This is the main Dark Sun thread, with quality input from yours truly.

EDIT: and then they were merged.

 

Thanks for the heads up. Will dedicate one bag exclusively for notes.

 

Shatterd Lands is a great game all around. I replay it every few years and I replay very few games ever.

 

I just love the menu music, always reminds me of Cannon Fodder, which sounds completely out of place in a fantasy RPG, but somehow it still manages to be awesome.



Although I have to admit the Gravis Ultrasound version sounds a bit better than the bare bones DOS version (Soundblaster?)

 

Supposedly it's the note you pick up the screen directly north of the fields of Draj. Not picking it up, or dropping it again, is supposed to be what triggers the bug with the final fight. Speaking of which,

Please do me a favour: keep multiple separate saves as you go, and once you're done with the game, upload them all somewhere that I can download. I want to resolve this final fight bug mystery once and for all, with meticulous trial and error for every possible state that could cause it if it's related to the note, and I've not had the patience to play through the game just to do this.

Gravis Ultrasound version is MUCH better, it's my favourite sound mode for the game. You can configure it to hear it under DOSBox if you're so inclined (it's a bit of an involved process if you're not very familiar with DOS though - you need to install the Gravis drivers under DOSBox and configure the conf appropriately). However Jaesun claims the music is actually a Roland CM-32L composition and from what I've heard of the various modes he's probably right, the CM-32L plays some tones that are otherwise silent in SB, Gravis or General MIDI modes. You can also set up DOSBox to emulate MT-32 mode, it's actually pretty easy to do since all you need are the CM-32L ROMs and they're widely available on the net, as well as changing a couple of settings in the conf.

 

I tried to get the Gravis sound to work, but despite following the online instructions the installation of GUS410 fails because Doxbox doesn't detect Gravis card. Turning GUS to "true" in config file doesn't help. Redirecting the Dosbox from c:\ULTRASND or to a different installation directory doesn't help either. So I'm pretty much stuck, dunno how to get it to work. There's a pre patched zip. file that is supposed to make Gravis work without any installations but it doesn't work either. I haven't tried the MT-32 yet.

 

somehow it always irked me how trivial the game gets if you max your stats and grind in the arena. Everything becomes a cakewalk after that. So now I'm gonna play with only rerolls... not sure if it's gonna make a huge difference, anyway. You'd probably need more limitations than that.

 

Dark sun 2 is absurdly difficult to configure to work ok. It's likely to leave the game hanging and the music repeating unless the cd is ripped absolutely correctly.

I had a lot of trouble ripping the game to work with dosbox ogg support. Eventually it worked after i applied the wakecd11 patch, but mouse movement is still crap.

 

I'm just speculating here, but this could be an explanation for why these two games haven't been released on GOG.com yet (while other SSI games like Pools and EotB have). If their mission is to get old games to run properly on new machines, then they're probably having a helluva time with these two (particularly Wake...)

 

If you see the last pages i DID a huge thread on how to limit yourself in darksun for it to not being just cakewalk.

 

Did you have GUS on true BEFORE you installed the driver? I remember installing it a couple of years ago and not having problems but I can't find that DOSBox installation anymore.

To be fair, getting Ravager to run on old machines was a nightmare too. Pre-patch it needed something absolutely stupid like 620K of conventional memory (out of a possible maximum of 640K), which meant a boot disk with EVERYTHING that wasn't necessary out, and everything that was necessary loaded High if possible. I actually didn't manage to run it at all until 1998 or so, when the internet was A Thing, finding patches was no longer a matter of mailing your floppies back, and I could get the patch that reduced the conventional RAM requirement to something more manageable (IIRC it was still 600K or so).

 

Well the installation gets cancelled before it finishes so I tried starting it multiple times without success. I can't remember if I had GUS turned true before the first attempt, I think it was turned true even then.

 

good list. Basically I just wish XP were limited - in that case it would make sense to have i.e. a single class cleric in your party. It would make for much more varied party building. Sadly, just not taking any multiclasses doesn't feel right for me.

 

Speak of the devil.
http://www.gog.com/game/dungeons_dragons_dark_sun_series?pp=cb4e5208b4cd87268b208e49452ed6e89a68e0b8