By Kieron Gillen on April 28th, 2008 at 4:34 pm.
A random law of blogging. Things lead to other things. In this case, my piece on Mucky Foot lead to Try.Lee in the Escapist’s comments thread pointing out Ex-Foot-programmer Tom Forsyth released a highly unofficial graphics patch for Startopia, illustrating some Shadowbuffer jiggerypokery we don’t quite understand. He suggests it runs too slow to play, but that was a few years ago, so hopefully the ever-marching power of PC will defeat that problem. He also stresses it’s VERY EXPERIMENTAL. Get it from here. Worth looking at the grabs, if only for Tom’s notes. I particularly approve of the rhapsody about GeForce-1 totting street urchins with tears running down their cheek at the end.
28/04/2008 at 17:44 Gael says:
Startopia … one of the best “manage theme park” game. This guys from Bullfrog really kick some ass. i’ve spent a lot of fun on this, with friends. Really good souvenirs.
I remember how the graphics, with the “circle-shape” station, was really great and impressive. Yeah, one of the best old games.
28/04/2008 at 19:41 po says:
Unfortunately I’ve got the ‘new computer has no sound’ problem with Startopia, that has yet to be resolved by anyone else on teh interweb.
28/04/2008 at 21:13 yxxxx says:
I love this game. I wish they would have made a sequel as there are some problems with it that could have been addresed.
28/04/2008 at 22:38 Rorschach says:
So much Startopia talk, I’m gonna have to reload it.
29/04/2008 at 06:45 Heliocentricity says:
OLD :P
the patch creates some ugliness by painting some things entirely in shadow, but runs quite well on modern hardware (tested only on an 8800gts + e6600 core duo).
Indeed, i did suffer when my police state of 700 security scuzzers were all onscreen at the same time though.
THE PEOPLE DESIRE OPRESSION
29/04/2008 at 08:42 James G says:
It also has the added benifit of including a NO-CD patch.
I was playing it just the other day after The-B’s long play. For some reason the fancy shadows didn’t work on my 8800GT, but its possible that I didn’t tick the correct box somewhwere.
01/05/2008 at 04:19 Pod says:
Startopia is fantastic.
The only reason I bought it was because PC Gamer would never shut up about it, back in the day. I didn’t even know what type of game it was, I just saw it one the shelf, trusted you guys and bought it.
Boy were you right! I hated the cmobat aspect though – it felt massively “tacked on”.
08/03/2010 at 02:58 Chris says:
Solution for the “no sound”-problem:
Edit the Startopia.ini to this … (only changed lines are listed here)
DrivePathMusic=".\data\"
DrivePathSound=".\data\"
SoundPathVoice=".\data\"
It should work now.