It seems that the cover picture comes from the "Circle of Blood" campaign supplement for 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles, which came out in 1997, so soon before Dark Omen release. The campaign told a story of a clash between invading Undead forces under the command of Red Duke and Bretonnian army defending Aquitaine.
[attachment=1]
Split of Undead into two factions: Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings happened somewhere during the 5th edition, but I don't know whether "Circle of Blood" already implemented it. I'm only sure that the Vampire Counts armybook cemented this divide, but it came out at the very end of 5th Edition, in 1999. It also did away with all ranged units in Vampire roster, such as Skeleton Archers or Screaming Skull catapults, which from that point were moved to Tomb Kings army list.
As far as I'm aware, Dark Omen is based mostly on the 4th edition armybooks, roughly from 1993-1996.
I've decided to check whether there are differences in missions between the PC and PSX versions of Shadow of The Horned Rat. Turns out there are. Below are the screens from "Rescue Ilmarin" mission showing the significant change of Skaven army composition between the two versions of the game. [attachment=1] PC version: 3 x Clanrats 1 x Stormvermin 1 x Ratogre
PSX cersion: 1 x Clanrats 2 x Stormvermin 2 x Ratogre
This affects the balance of the mission as PSX version puts way more weight on Allor (Amber Wizard). The player needs to act quick and have enough points of Winds of Magic to cast and hit two Ratogres with at least one Amber Spear each (the spell which on PSX thankfuly has miles better pathfinding than in PC version). Fail to do so and the beasts will charge the still relatively unexperienced Grudgebringer Infantry and route them off the field. Also worth noting is the fact that Clanrats are comparable in stats to Night Goblins, while Stormvermin are roughly equivalent of Big 'Uns, so the exchange of 2 Clanrat regiments for 1 Stormvermin and 1 Ratogre is quite a good deal for Skaven.
I wonder whether similar changes affecting the mission balance were applied to PSX port of Dark Omen. Maybe some day I'll have enough time to check it all, but it won't be soon
Also note that the PSX version looks way nicer here than on the original hardware. RetroArch allowed me for numerous upgrades not possible on PSX, like: 4x higher rendering resolution, bilinear filtering, texture perspective correction etc.
Is it posible to achive 1024x768? And if so, how would one do this? I'm running Win 10 if that is to any help at all.
Thanks!
I know it's an old thread, but maybe someone will still find the info useful. I'm using dgVoodoo 2, a wrapper simulating the Voodoo era graphics cards to play Dark Omen (see this thread http://forum.dark-omen.org/help-section/3d-mode-in-windows-10-t1452.0.html for more info). There, in DirectX tab, which allows to set up specific graphic settings, is a switch named "resolution" which allows to change rendering resolution of the 3D graphics in the game. Setting it to 1280x960 px effectively doubles the in-game 3D battlefield rendering resolution. [attachment=1]
@Jaroslav has offered great suggestion. I'm trying to complete Dark Omen for the first time (I'm on the "Axebite Pass" now). After setting up the dgVoodoo once more and bumping the resolution to 1280x1080 it looks great.
I couldn't find Dark Omen logo of a reasonable quality, so I decided to use my graphic skills to cut out the one from the original box and make some variants. Cropping is not perfect, but well, it is what it is. Posting it here, because it seems like the most appropriate place. Link: https://sta.sh/zip/2244seyk5x0a
(If posting download links on board is disallowed, please delete this post, thx)
Yup, I have been lookig up the Polish magazines of the late 90's on the net to read the reviews of some of my favorite games and have stumbled upon several of the articles posted here.
PS: Starting with second half of your reply #9, these are actually Slovak magazines, not Polish
PS2: There are some great renders of the models used for SoTHR sprites though!
Guess I shouldn't hold my breath for the extra mission discs
Slightly off-topic: Skimming through the Polish gaming magazines from the 90's, I've learned that both SoTHR and DO were quite big in my country, especialy among the fans of strategy games and RPG's (1st edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was one of the first RPG systems to make it's way to Poland and as far as I know, it's still the most popular one as of 2019).
You're the man With our without the guide regardless
Thanks Evgen, beating the SoTHR was great, but seeing the Dark Omen Reborn project progress is even better. Thank you and everybody on DO Reborn team for your work. It's great to see it getting closer to being a 100% faithful DO recreation with each posted update.
Thanks for the warm welcome I'm most certainly interested in the multiplayer portion of Dark Omen. Unfortunately I won't have much time in the next few weeks, but I should be on GameRanger from the beginning of August.
I've been lurking the forum for a while, and now I've finally registered! I'm a Warhammer fan, especialy interested in the 4-5th edition era due to pure 90's awesomness present in the armybooks and novels of that time (and also quite a bit of nostalgia). My introduction to the Old World (and fantasy in general) was watching my father play Shadow of the Horned Rat somewhere around 1998. Mark Gibbons's Orc depictions in SoTHR bestiary were so good, that first time I saw Lord of The Rings: Fellowship of The Ring I was a little disappointed the Orcs looked nothing like the Warhammer ones In the meantime we've also got Dark Omen, which was even prettier than the SoTHR, packed with cool Undead legions planing to conquer the world, and with it my love for Warhammer Fantasy was born. I've recently bought SoTHR on GOG.com, finished it (although I must admit, without the awesome GameFAQs guide by stratifier I don't think I'd ever make it) and now, thanks to this forum guides and some dgVoodoo magic I was able to install and run Dark Omen on my Win 10 laptop Thanks a bunch for all your work, and many useful threads.
PS. Dark Omen Reborn looks neat! If you ever need any tester, I volunteer!
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