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.
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.
report
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.
report
I love this game. I wish they would have made a sequel as there are some problems with it that could have been addresed.
report
So much Startopia talk, I’m gonna have to reload it.
report
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
report
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.
report
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”.
report
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.
report