Startopia 1.02 semi-official patch file

2003/11/16:

-Windowed mode is now better supported. It's available from the command-line (use /r640x480x32 or /r640x480x16 for fullscreen, or just /r640x480 for windowed - i.e. don't supply a pixel depth), the cursor doesn't scribble everywhere, etc. Note that although you can Alt+Enter _into_ fullscreen mode from windowed, you can't get out again. It's a bug I haven't tracked down yet. (TomF)

-Slightly faster startup - add /s to the command-line. (TomF)

-Fixed an obscure bug when using state block macros - sometimes the clamp/wrap and mipmapping flags weren't being set up correctly on multitexture blends. (TomF)

2004/08/20:

Actually a lot of changes, I just forgot to write them all down at the time:

-Blueprints definately (well, probably) fixed now. (TomF)

-Shadowbuffering added! It's still very inefficiant, so you'll need a pretty ninja machine to run with the detail slider even set to half, but it does look pretty good even so. Please read the readme.txt for important points about this! (TomF)

TomF wrote: Anyway, recently I wanted to do some research into shadowbuffers - a way of rendering realistic shadows (see the GDC 2004 paper here). And while most shadowing techniques look fine in small demos, they have a habit of not working too well when people put them in real, working games. So I thought I should put them into a real game to prove they work. The game I knew best was StarTopia. And thus, a new StarTopia "patch" was born.

So, you'll obviously need to have the game installed. You'll also need to have the 1.01 patch installed, as that fixed a lot of silly bugs. And then you need to download the HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL 1.02 patch and install that. I'm sorry the 1.02 patch isn't a clever executable and everything - but if you read the readme file in it, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. Please please please remember to keep the old copies of your files if you actually want to play the game - did I mention this version is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL?

You will also need a fairly meaty machine to run with shadows on. Annoyingly, StarTopia is really badly designed for doing these shadows, and it spends a lot of its time doing daft things like re-animating each character multiple time a frame, so it's quite slow. So if you actually want to play the game, I recommend switching shadows off again! But fixing that would take more time than I really have to spend on a side-project.

Have fun