Our second update for 2023 is exciting! Thanks to the amazing work from user “Stone-D” in our Discord the dreaded “Please Insert Play Disk” message has been removed from the game.
We also have a standalone mod for much better looking planets now and a fix for the I-War 2 Unleashed mod.
A full NoCD patch
EoC is an old game which comes with a few old problems. The Dagda and Wolf’s Lair bugs weren’t great, especially since machines have been getting faster and faster, opening up the possibility to make the game crash even more often. While these have been fixed at the end of last year, the game still had another problem that got extremely annoying during the last years: It would spawn a message “Please Insert Play Disk” if you didn’t have CD/DVD drives connected to your computer. Many people use devices nowadays that don’t have any optical drives included anymore, so a lot (and I mean a lot) of people ran into this message and didn’t know what to do about it.
I’ve got to admit, I was a bit rough in my Steam forum replies sometimes, because I got asked about this problem again and again and although a solution with virtual drive software was posted in our Technical FAQ, a lot of people didn’t get to that. Sorry about my harshness, guys – I just felt a bit like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, doing the same reply over and over again and that wasn’t a great place to be in.
The Steam and GOG releases of the game ship with a cracked igame.dll (made by DUCK back in the day) that removes the check for the real game CD. Stone-D was able to complete this and also remove the check for a physical drive. Since the igame.dll file from DUCK is technically still warez we can’t just provide you with a download here – after all, we don’t want to get in trouble with Atari’s lawyers. We have, however, created a binary patcher for the Steam, GOG and retail F14.6 releases of the game that you can run. This ensures you can only run this patch if you own one of the game releases. The retail patcher patches the game with DUCK’s NoCD patch and also includes Stone-D’s final fix, while the Steam and GOG patch only need to apply Stone-D’s fix.
You can download the NoCD patch here.
We have asked the GOG support about including this patch in their digital release of the game.
Better Planets
Remember the Unstable Space mod? This one includes much prettier planets than the base game. IronDuke and Alakelele extracted the textures from that mod and combined it with assets from the I-War 2 Beta as well as some AI upscaling so we can now have really good-looking planets in the base game:
Thanks, guys!
You can download the Better Planets Mod here.
I-War 2 Unleashed – Docking Fix
The “I-War 2 Unleashed” mod has been updated, because it included a bug where the player wasn’t able to dock to Jaf’s rescue ship after they had been destroyed, because it didn’t contain a compatible docking port.
You can download the updated version here or read more about the bug here.
That’s all for now!
-schmatzler
This is great !!!! Long live this community