Speak Spanish? Play Arcanum and Bloodlines in it!
Sun 10 September 2006, 23:41:09

For those who are interested in a Spanish translation of Arcanum or Vampire: Bloodlines, there are now unofficial Spanish translations available.

I am part of the team that made an unnoficial translation of Arcanum into spanish.

This translation was finally released some days ago, and I'd like you to be most kind in adding the link to it in your site, so other spanish-speaking people can download it.

You may notice Arcanum is not our only translation, we've translated Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Call of Cthulhu, among many other games.

Official Arcanum website has been taken down?
Thu 10 August 2006, 05:33:13

We certainly haven't been able to find it. A search on Sierra for it turned up a far less informative page. So, we've done what we did for ToEE, we've added an archive of Arcanum's official web page up here:

http://www.terra-arcanum.com/sierra/

There are some bits missing and it's not perfect but it'll do, I think. Thanks to mathboy for uploading the files.

Posted by DarkUnderlord
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ToEE Circle of Eight Mod Pack 5.0
Tue 11 July 2006, 06:16:32

There's a new fan-made mod pack for Temple of Elemental Evil out. Read all about it:

Please read the Release Notes if you want a detailed list of what's been changed/added since 4.0.0. And believe me, it's a looong list [Editor's note: Believe him].

IMPORTANT: Read the Installation Instructions carefully. You can't miss them. They're shoved in your face right at the start of the setup. And don't forget to scroll down!

Agetian's ToEE Frontend requires Microsoft .NET. If you install the Frontend, you MUST start the game via the Frontend and choose the module "Co8-5.0.0".

Start a new game. Saved games from earlier Co8 mod pack versions or from the unmodded game will NOT work. You've been warned!

Dimensions of Arcanum downloads available here
Fri 23 June 2006, 03:51:37

The Arcanum files from Dimensions of Arcanum have been added to our own Downloads section.

Thanks to TONGSyaBASS who sent the files to us and to me, mathboy, who uploaded them here.

Link: Dimensions of Arcanum downloads.

Posted by mathboy
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Michael McCarthy to make Space Action RPG
Mon 08 May 2006, 03:16:22

Michael McCarthy, one of the original members of Troika Games has setup his own company called Laid Back Gaming and begun work on a turn-based Action RPG set in space. RPGCodex have an interview with him. What's most interesting are the parts where he talks about how Troika worked. Like this:

Let me give you an idea of what made Troika great. Here are two scenarios, one featuring a regular game idea, and one featuring a Troika game idea:

Regular game idea:

What the player experiences: You were told that the wealthy owner of the Inn can help you find the buried treasure. You walk into a bar. The bartender greets you with a fine "Hello Stranger! Come and enjoy a pint of ale on the house!" You will notice that you when you click on anyone else in the room you get a generic "good day sir", you certainly can't attack anyone, and if the game let you fire off an explosive spell, it wouldn't do any damage in room and no one would notice that anything had happened. You talk to the inn keeper and he says if you give him 10 gold, he'll give you the map to the secret treasure! So you do.

What the developers were thinking: Well, this has to be this way, right? I mean, the bartender has knowledge that keeps the quest moving along so we can't kill him. And what if we attacked someone else in the corner of the bar? We couldn't have that because it would look strange if the people just sat there! And I mean, c'mon, if you can kill this guy, wouldn't that mean you can kill the others too? Oh plus, our publisher informed us yesterday that we have to take out all the kids in the game because we can't sell the game in Germany if it has kid killing. Yeah..... killing people in a friendly town is out of the question.

Troika game:

What the player experiences: You walk into a bar. The bartender greets you with a fine "Hello Stranger! Come and enjoy a pint of ale on the house!" At this point, you shoot an arrow through his neck.... he drops dead, the bar maid and most of the patrons freak out and run for the door... You laugh maniacally until you notice some guy in the corner (who happens to be the bartenders' brother in law enjoying a pint himself) unsheathing his vorpal sword and coming after you with bloody vengeance in his eyes... You kill him too and take his sword. You search the inn and find a key underneath a bottle of whiskey behind the bar. The key opens a lockbox upstairs in his room where you find a map.

What Troika was thinking: Hey, what if I want to shoot the bartender? Yeah, I hate those stereo-typical jolly fat bartender guys. It'll be more trouble, but we'll make sure you can get the map some how. For the people in the room, we'll have them check against your faction and skills, if you attack anyone, they will determine if they are scared, hostile, or unmoved by your actions. If they are scared they'll run, hostile they'll attack, and unmoved they will just sit there drinking a beer while all hell breaks loose. Yeah, we should put at least on guy in the bar who's tough as nails. The tough quiet dude who calmly drinks his beer... The guy you DO NOT want to mess with. Yeah, and if you kill anyone in this inn, the cops in town will attack you on sight. The more neutral shopkeepers will still sell to you, but they will jack the prices up because even they think you are a cold blooded killer.

Troikagames.com lives once more
Fri 05 May 2006, 07:38:28

You may have noticed that with the death of Troika, their official website once located at http://www.troikagames.com/ has now gone offline (server cannot be located). In a few more months, it'll probably be taken over by one of those shoddy spam search sites with ads.

However, with the thanks of mathboy, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and Taluntain, we've been able to salvage the entire site (except for the original rollover menu buttons) and set it up here at: http://www.terra-arcanum.com/troikagames/

So go on over and take a peek if you want to reminisce.

Posted by DarkUnderlord
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Site Maintenance - April 13
Tue 11 April 2006, 00:54:54

Terra-Arcanum will be going offline for a while on April the 13th for server maintenance. I expect we should be down for the day at the most as we're getting a new hard drive put in on the server.

Posted by DarkUnderlord
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Have sex with Jeanette in Bloodlines 2.2
Sat 25 March 2006, 01:13:07

There's a new Bloodlines fan "patch" out. Here's a list of things it "fixes":

• Included the unused histories so that each clan has seven plus none.
  
• Swapped trouble making history conditions with similar limitations.
  
• Provided twenty places for Malkavian voice whispers during dialogue.
  
• Restored welcome lines of Bertram including xp gain and log update.
  
• You will loose a humanity point for making Ash exchange his clothes.
  
• Fixed graphics of baton, VV photo, Megahurtz card and Gary's tapes.
  
• Restored xp gain for entering the Gallery Noir by befriending Chunk.
  
• Made Bruno attack on lockpicking the Giovanni Mansion meeting-room.
  
• Removed respawning at Lotus Blossom, Temple, Ventrue and Giovanni's.
  
• You will loose humanity for taking money after solving Tawni quest.
  
• Making love to Jeanette is now possible regardless of the storyline.
  
• Moved Giovanni loading tips up and added lost lines of the sweeper.
  
• Removed Gallery Noir key after use and made several items droppable.
  
• Lowered additional damage done by all weapons using the zoom modus.
  
• Renamed flaming crossbow to Kuei-jin and lowered the bow accuracies.
  

Bloodlines is fanmodpatched to 2.0 and TOEE to 4.0.0
Sat 14 January 2006, 02:07:02

Bloodlines and TOEE have been fanmodpatched again, and this time they do it the same time, meaning less work for me, thank you fanmodpatchers!

Changes made to Bloodlines:

All dialogues matched to speech and fixed thoroughly by RobinHood70.
Repaired a lot of lines that were not audible to female characters.
Removed Empire key after use and continued standardizing many names.
Made Prince react to Persuasion for money when sending you to Ming.
Restored additional lines of Jack, Imalia, Ming-Xiao and the cabbie.
Fixed money bugs with Bill, Hatter, Heather, Misti and prostitutes.
Made Empire clerk bisexual, responding to Seduction from either sex.
Restored Ventrue specific Prince dialogue and more cut extra lines.
Removed an exploit with Copper and fixed Jeanette taking your knife.
Restored unused Nosferatu and Malkavian lines of Tseng and Wong Ho.
Fixed possibility of Beckett not talking on return from the Society.
Corrected bug caused by 1.9 corruption that broke Chinatown quests.
Restored feeding on rats that would not work for some people in 1.9.
Lessened MAC-10 kickback on firing with increasing firearms skills.
Moved dance spot at club Confession because of the cross-zoom error.
Made crossbow bolts purchasable sooner and added a doll easter egg.
Provided baseball bat and tire iron to anyone skipping the tutorial.
Corrected Hitman quest rewards and added peace-talk lines for both.
Fixed problems with morphine quest and more after angering Mercurio.
Cut exclamation of Nadia that was audible when she was not present.
Removed the annoying sidetable in Gary's lair and hid two map holes.
Changed wrong status display for the power of pump 118a in warrens.

It contains all previous Co8 releases, moebius2778's temple.dll fixes, Livonya's 1.5.1, ShiningTed's 1.2.1 (including Playful NPCs and Desperate Housewives - the latter is optional), and Allyx's ShopMap V2 (also optional).

The list of things added/fixed since Co8 3.04 would be much too long to post here, so here's the gist of it:

- dozens (if not hundreds) of bugs fixed
- lots of craftable items added
- new armour & clothing
- new weapons
- new quests
- new encounters
- new dialog
- new stores
- new locations
- new spells
- new music/sounds
- improved enemy AI
- possibility to use more than 5 PCs
- level cap can be set to any number from 1-20
- customisable starting equipment
- now with Agetian's ToEE Front-End

Prerequisites for the mod pack:
Before installing the mod pack, you MUST install Atari's official ToEE patch 2, available here: ftp://ftp.infogrames.net/patches/toe...ANY-PATCH2.EXE

Atari's ToEE patch 2 includes all the fixes from patch 1; therefore installing patch 1 is usually not required. However, there have been reports from people who could not install patch 2 without installing patch 1 first. If you experience the same problem, install patch 1, then patch 2. Patch 1 is available here: ftp://ftp.infogrames.net/patches/toe...PATCH1_ENU.EXE

You SHOULD NOT install Atari's patch 3. If you have installed patch 3 already and want to get rid of it, just install patch 2 on top of it.

Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 is required if you install Agetian's ToEE Front-End. Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Help Terra-Arcanum stay alive
Tue 10 January 2006, 03:42:51

For those of you who don't know, the hosting for Terra-Arcanum is provided by Taluntain of Sorcerers.net. If you also didn't know, the ad banners pay sweet bugger all (or in fact, a little bit more than nothing) when it comes to actually keeping this place running. Well, the server we run on is in need of a RAM upgrade:

Sorcerer's Place and all our hosted sites have grown and expanded considerably, and the recent server CPU upgrade alone wasn't enough. We need more RAM, badly. I've done all I could in terms of optimization, but overall it doesn't mean much - we still get occasional blackouts, slowdowns, and even complete server shutdowns because the load is simply too high for the server to handle over a prolonged period of time.

So, I'm putting out a call for donations. Money collected here will benefit everyone, as it will directly improve accessibility and performance of SP and our hosted sites. So, if you can, please donate for the cause. The memory upgrade consists of a set-up fee ($75) and $30 every month after that. That makes it about $435 for the first year. I hope we can raise this amount in one go and then forget about it for a year (before we have to raise it again). This money will be used strictly for upgrading the server with another gigabyte of RAM.

Thanks in advance to all who decide to help out!

TROIKA GAMES IS DEAD!
Sun 25 December 2005, 02:57:20

Today on december 24th (it's the 25th in the real world but you Americans are retarded) 2005 Troika Games filed its final tax return (I have no idea what that does but it means they're dead).

Today, the final nail was pounded into the coffin that holds Troika Games, LLC. Today could be considered the date of its closing, or you can pick from one of several dates:

February 28, 2005 - Troika Games closes its doors
September 30, 2005 - Troika Games files with the state for dissolution
December 24, 2005 - Troika Games files its final tax return (the last step in dissolution)

Pick your favorite date, kids. Thanks for your support, and good night.

Tim.

The Tomb of Tol Guldur, now in English
Mon 19 December 2005, 03:07:49

Lord of Halifax has translated his French Arcanum Module into English. It's one of the shorter modules he's created but still worth taking a look if you want something to fill the Arcanum void. You can download it from here: Tomb.dat

Posted by DarkUnderlord
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La société secrète
Wed 14 December 2005, 00:35:05

There's been another French Arcanum module released this week. Called La société secrète, here's a bit about it (thanks to Babelfish):

A man by the name of Lansfeust Gottferdom has contacted you, without a reason. Once at his place, before he could say anything, a black mage suddenly appears. The guards of the town of Eladon arrive (and something about a body?).

Unofficial Vampires turn 1.9
Fri 02 December 2005, 12:53:19

Bloodlines just got a new patch from the modding community. Changelog:

* Made the Hallowbrook hotel's naming consistent throughout the game.
* Let Ra blade cause more damage instead of not working faster attack.
* Fixed a bug with Patty appearing in the alley although she is dead.
* Replaced location labels of the missing sewermap with worldmap ones.
* Put two of the unused female raver models into the club Confession.
* Resized unspectacular lower resolution fonts for better readability.
* Made Hannah actually die at the time that she is supposed to do so.
* Corrected the corrupted Intimidation font "W" at higher resolutions.
* Relocated Pearl of Dubai and cut pulltoy to Kilpatrick's bailbonds.
* Put unfinished dogs at Giovanni Mansion and fixed Mira dialogue bug.
* Removed critical bum cutscene and illogical Pisha feeding cutscene.
* Made Grout's wife fully visible and repaired a Muddy quest shortcut.
* Granted occult hacking powerup as reward for doing Mitnick's quest.
* Placed Obfuscate and lockpicking powerups at Nosferatu and LA haven.
* Fixed a possible quest breaking bug with the Fu Syndicate elevator.

French Arcanum Module: Mystery of the Abbey released
Thu 01 December 2005, 00:46:59

Lord of Halifax has released a new module called Mystery of the Abbey. It's in French so unless you either speak the language or have a French - English dictionary handy you may have some trouble playing it. If you want to give it a go though, you'll find:

• 24 quests,
  
• All dialogs spoken,
  
• 7 original musics,
  
• Voices from the French forum guys.

The real deal behind Troika's bid for the Fallout license
Wed 30 November 2005, 22:57:42

Leonard Boyarsky, one of the key founders of Troika Games has just posted the "real story" behind all that talk about Troika's bid for the Fallout license, in a thread on the RPGCodex:

I would have posted sooner, but you guys seemed to be having too much fun.

For the record:

We never, ever bid on Fallout. One major publisher mentioned Interplay was shopping it around and would be interested in us developing it for them, but they dropped it as too expensive when they found out the asking price (not ours, Interplay's). We never had our own money, and were just beginning to toy with the idea of independent funding near the end of our life as a business - which was after Beth had already gotten Fallout.

I did approach Bethesda about us working with them on Fallout, but they were uninterested. Instead of flaiming them for this however, think about it from their point of view: who among us would want to pay a huge amount of money for a license and then turn it over to someone else? I'm assuming they paid the $$ because they wanted to make a Fallout game, end of story.

Our post apocalyptic game was going to be something new, simply because we loved the genre. We struggled with whether to make it post apoc or not, since Beth already had Fallout, but our love for the genre outweighed other considerations.

I'm not going to go anywhere near the argument of who is responsible for Fallout's greatness, except to say that Scott Campbell never gets the credit he deserves in all these arguments. He wrote alot of the original story and came up with alot of the characters and places as well.

Leonard Boyarsky
----------------------------------
Shameless plug: http://www.leonardboyarsky.com/

Bloodlines Q&A on PlanetVampire
Thu 17 November 2005, 00:02:41

Planet Vampire have had the great fortune of having b mitsoda (also known as Brian Mitsoda), one of the Writer/Designers for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines in their forums answering questions for the games first year anniversary. A lot was asked and there's some pretty good questions like "the Troika Team: Where are they now", as well as some fun details about the game, like this:

Nagloper asked: My fave part of the game is the Ocean House hotel - part, I'd basically like to know anything interesting about the making of that level like for example whose idea the level was, did the level turn out the way you thought it would?

Ocean House – The way I approached that level was by studying up on techniques used in fun houses and hi-tech amusement park rides (like the Back to the Future ride at Universal), and also renting a lot of classic ghost story movies (off the top of my head, “The Changeling”, “The Haunting”, “The Shining” and a couple other “The” movies). Lots of visual/sound tricks to get the player to go exactly where I wanted them to be. I laid it out for build up and suspense with an explosive finale using a quiet, loud, quiet technique, and with the lofty goal of doing a level without any enemies – a lot of people thought I was insane, and maybe that’s true, but I stuck to my guns. So much of the fear in that game was audio-induced and atmospheric – less is more, let the player’s mind do my work for me.

As many people as have enjoyed it, I’m actually disappointed that only about a third of the original design was implemented. I would love to do a “director’s cut” of the Ocean House so to speak in a future game. Something that makes players read a disclaimer before they enter it, something along the lines of: “Warning, by entering this level, you waive all rights to seek dry cleaning compensation from the developers.” That said, I was thrilled to see Gamespy had awarded it PC Level of the Year.

Tim Cain speaks
Mon 31 October 2005, 04:08:16

Tim Cain, one of the three people who started Troika Games. Popped up at RPG Codex and participated in a heated discussion about Fallout's goodness.

Mr Cain who was one of the main people behind the 1997 post-apocalyptic RPG, Fallout, seems to still be interested in its reputation as the best RPG ever and replied to lies about the game made by Volourn ("`Dumbfuck") with the now classic respons:

No.

Bloodlines to 1.8
Sat 22 October 2005, 19:59:53

The modders have now modded up Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines to 1.8. Changelog:

* Continued adjusting locations names by changing bus and sewer maps.
* Restored female Sabbat and put three into the first Hollowbrook map.
* Corrected a wrong dialogue option for female Malkavians with Nadia.
* Made cemetery quest easier and fixed Romero raising female firearms.
* Removed unused subdirectories on two of the Kamikazi Zen computers.
* Fixed several dialogue errors regarding Beckett, Flayton and Hatter.
* Corrected dialogue getting cut of at Fu Labs for Nosferatu players.
* Placed Pearl of Dubai and other cut items in pawnshop and elsewhere.
* Added the missing Dodge II manual to second Giovanni Mansion level.
* Created Justicar guards at Giovanni Mansion and fixed a synchro bug.
* Put the unused male asian nurse model into the Santa Monica clinic.
* Fixed Carson's appartment key not being removed when it's been used.
* Corrected formatting of a few haven pc emails and the Sin Bin note.

Arcanum Modding Tutorial has moved
Sun 11 September 2005, 10:43:53

AMTUT, the Arcanum Modding Tutorial has moved to its new home on Terra-Arcanum. I do hope to one day, eventually, update the tutorial and perhaps even finish it off. Note that I said "one day" though and that's not likely to be any time within the next 5 years or so.

So if you're looking for Arcanum Modding help, you can find the Arcanum Modding Tutorial at its new home as a subdomain here: http://amtut.terra-arcanum.com/

Posted by DarkUnderlord
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