GUI
Q: Windows are behaving strangely. They jump around when I move them, I don't like that!
A: It's a feature actually, and is called “Windows snapping”. If it really bothers you, you can turn it off in preferences (GUI tab,
Snap windows checkbox).
Q: All these windows clutter up my taskbar. Is there any help with that?
A: You can try to use palette windows. Turn it on in preferences, GUI tab.
Q: When I switch to the game window from another application, all other windows get lost, and I have to click on each one of them to bring them to foreground. Is there a better way?
A: You may wish to use palette windows, see previous question. Or you can click
Show all windows from Windows menu (shortcut key is F5).
Q: Side windows are missing icons and do not appear in my taskbar anymore.
A: Palette windows must be on. Turn it off in preferences, GUI tab. Don't forget to reopen the program to see the effects.
Q: I find it tedious to click on an inventory item, and then open Command menu to equip it, unequip it, and such.
A: Try to click on an item with the right mouse button and you'll be presented a popup menu containing the most important operations. Also, large number of shortcuts is supported, see file
<Client dir>/docs/shortcuts.txt or this
thread for more details.
Rendering
Q: Text in bubbles is occasionally a bit off. I find that disturbing!
A: Actually, text is not “a bit off”, but centered. This is a feature called “Vertical centering of bubble text” and can be turned off from preferences, Advanced tab.
Q: A player just turned invisible! What was that, is (s)he hacking the game?!
A: Of course not. You must have accidentally set him/her ignored. The sprite should not be entirely invisible, but outlined with black frame. Select player and click
Unignore from
Command menu. What, that's not it you say? Uhm... you better send an e-mail to
gyges@arindal.com then.
Rendering :: OpenGL
Q: I'm having some strange light cycles when using OpenGL renderer.
A: It is due to a number of colors used on desktop, actually, a lack of it. Switch your desktop color depth to 32-bit (right click
Desktop -> Properties -> Settings -> Color Quality) and then start the client. This has quite some influence on OpenGL rendering for windowed games such as Arindal, games that shouldn't change the resolution nor color depth of the whole desktop by themselves.
Q: I have some problems with OpenGL version — display artifacts, nasty black stripes, distorted lights, upside-down pictures, you name it…
A: See right
here.
Q: I can't use OpenGL, and this dithered software night looks horrible, gives me headache, and I can't read other players names well.
A: Try to turn off dithered night in Advanced preferences. That will bring up “non-dithered” night which
might be more acceptable. But don't expect miracles.
Q: I have terrible lag, and everything is slowed down (in movies too). OpenGL is turned on.
A: Your machine can not cope with OpenGL. Turn off OpenGL rendering in options and you will switch to Software renderer which will decrease visual quality, but still allow you to participate in the game.
Q: I'm capturing screen with OpenGL, but there are some rectangular areas on screenshots that are black/white/garbled.
A: It is a limitation of OpenGL itself, when part of the window is overlapped with another window, or partially off screen. More details
here.
Q: When I enter caves, I see nothing but black screen and the bubbles of other players.
A: Too dark contrast/brightness/monitor.
Network
Q: How do I connect to the game?
A: Click
File, then
Select Character (or press
Ctrl-Shift-J). Enter your character name and password. Of course, you must have registered account to play. If there are some problems with your account send an e-mail to
gyges@arindal.com. If you have logged in successfully before and have the client remember password for you, just click
Join Game (or press
Ctrl-J). You will be logged using data from the last successful login (character name and password).
Q: I cannot connect to the game!
A: You should check your firewall settings. Client requires outgoing TCP and UDP access to
server.arindal.com:5010, incoming UDP at local port 5010 (or whatever you set in preferences), and outgoing TCP to
updates.arindal.com:80. If you're using Windows XP check if the built-in firewall is active. Of course, although rare, it can happen that the server is down for maintenance, so it might be a good idea to check
www.arindal.com, and when you're there,
forums too.
Q: I'm experiencing heavy lag.
A: That is a network connection problem. The only thing on the client side that can cause it is prolonged rendering time. It might be a consequence of using OpenGL on lower end machines. Try to turn it off in options and see if the game runs smoother.
Q: I'm running only Arindal on my system with the best 3d card in neighborhood and still have no more than 4.3fps using my 1.21 jigawatt internet connection!
A: 1.21 jigawatts?! Great Scott! You certainly don't need that to play Arindal, a 28kbps modem should be quite enough. 4.3fps is actually all that the server will deliver. It is designed this way for low connection requirements and simplicity, so our artists would not need to make dozens of player and monster poses.
Q: I'm behind a restrictive firewall. Can I use HTTP proxy for playing, auto-update, or disable the search for updates?
A: There is no proxy support for playing since game protocol doesn't allow that, and it shouldn't matter that much to be able to download the client update when you cannot play, right? Anyway, since we're using
wxWidgets library this comes for free, that is, a HTTP proxy
can be used for auto-update procedure through the use of HTTP_PROXY environment variable, so players with bizarre firewall configurations can enjoy all the benefits of auto-update. For example, one might open Command prompt (cmd.exe) and start the program like this:
Code:
c:\games\Arindal>set HTTP_PROXY=my.proxy.server:31337
c:\games\Arindal>start Arindal
If you just want to disable search for updates, you can set it to some non-existent localhost proxy server address, and it should fail instantly then. This is a so called “problem solving” feature, so it's not implemented in GUI or such.
InventoryQ: I'm logged in the game, but my inventory window is empty, although I had some items last time.A: Unfortunately, this happens under some rare circumstances. No worry though, your items are perfectly fine, it's just that the client didn't receive packet containing your inventory. Logging off and on should solve the problem.
MacrosQ: Client macros are not working at all!!!A: First of all, relax a bit. Take a deep breath. Macros are a complicated subject for the uninitiated. Lots of factors might be at act. Client recognizes and parses macro files that are located under directory
<Client dir>/data/Macros. File you should look for and that should be there is a macro file named after your character. It is created automatically for each character at its first login if it does not exist. Macros are largely compatible with Mac client, and if you still have some problems, you can consult
Macro Manuals page for help. There might also be a problem with file encoding — client requires macro files to be UTF-8. In order to facilitate transition to the new encoding, you are provided with a simple macro converter, a mean of transferring your old Mac Roman macros, almost un-editable on Windows, to UTF-8 (go to
Options -> Convert Mac Macro). On the other hand, if you do not plan to edit your old macros from Mac, it is sufficient to give those files
.mac extension — they will be read as Mac Roman then.
Q: Okay, how do I create/edit those UTF-8 files?A: Say Notepad in Windows 2000/XP, or some UTF-8 aware text editor. When creating a new file in Notepad, make sure to select UTF-8 as Encoding from its
Save as dialog.
Q: My German umlauts/French accents and other funky characters are not working in macro files and often the entire file content is ignored!A: Take a look at previous questions. Macro files must be valid UTF-8 files. If you already have a Mac Roman file (macro file from Mac), you can either convert it to UTF-8 from the client or change its extension to
.mac. If you try to open it from Notepad and just click
Save as UTF-8, it will
not work!
SoundQ: Client is working, but I don't get any sound!A: You must have
QuickTime library installed in order to hear any sound in the game. You may also use
QuickTime Alternative, but you won't be able to hear Bard music in that case. If you do have the library already installed, check if the sound is enabled in
Options menu, and see if the sound volume in client preferences and Windows itself is set to adequate value. And of course, first check if you have a working set of speakers/headphones connected to your system.
Q: I see a Music in Options menu. I turn it on, but nothing ever happens. Is my installation correct?A: In this game choice of music is left to the player. In order to hear music while playing, you must create subdirectory
Music in
data directory of the client. Then copy music files to your liking there. All file formats that QuickTime supports will be played randomly.
Q: Sounds interfere with my iTunes playback, they seem to be using the same Quicktime componants. During lots of sounds they stop playing, with iTunes playing in background.A: Yes, this is a known issue, and it happens only on
some machines. Unfortunately, iTunes is a 3rd party application, and its source is not publicly available so we can't see what is it doing and there isn't really much we can do about it. Try upgrading to the latest QuickTime/iTunes.
MoviesQ: I hear that movie files are compatible with Mac client. How do I play my Mac movies on Windows and vice versa?A: To play Mac movies from Windows client you first need to copy the movie file from Mac by copying the raw data fork. Then give the file
.clMov extension. Viewing Windows movies on Mac is a bit more complicated. First you need to copy them to your Mac machine (to data fork), and then to set
Creator and
Type IDs. You can do that manually by copying them from your existing Mac movie, or try with some tool that should do it automagically, such as
CLMovieConverter (untested, so no guaranties).
MiscellaneousQ: I downloaded the client for the first time, but each time I run it, it starts some large download.A: Client requires two files,
CL_Images and
CL_Sounds, with combined size of about 60 megabytes. These two files are crucial for its functioning, and contain data needed to render the world properly. You should allow the client to finish the download, or download those files manually if you plan to interrupt and resume download later, or need to download it on a faster connection. URL for data download is
http://www.arindal.com/downloads/data. Exact file names are
CL_Images.<nnn>.gz and
CL_Sounds.<nnn>.gz, where
<nnn> stands for version number, such as 42002. Always try to download the latest version possible. If downloaded manually, these files need to be placed under
<Client dir>/updates directory, and the client will process them on its next start up. Do not worry that you will have to download those files over and over again, because after every change client will automatically download patches which are usually of smaller size.
Q: Will client run on my Windows 3.11/95/98/ME?A: No, it won't. It is a multilingual program and requires
true Unicode support, something that those operating systems cannot provide, not even with
MSLU. Also those old systems have differences in many other APIs, even networking part of Win9x has some known bugs and issues.
Q: When will Linux version be available? Are other ports planned? Will I be able to play it on my QuiNox 9.2 system (for blind)?A: Perhaps. All we can say is that other ports of the Windows client are not planned at the moment and you might consider using
Java client on operating systems other than Windows and MacOS. Sorry.
Q: I log on to the game, but my language switches to English! I want to use German/French/Dutch!A: This is actually a server problem, which should be fixed by now. But if it happens a lot, report it to
gyges@arindal.com. Simple workaround is to add one of the following lines to your
@login macro:
Code:
/option language German
/option language French
/option language Dutch
If you don't know how to do that, or even don't know what macros are, visit
Macro Manuals page for more information. If you're still having problems, try to ask for help at
Arindal forums, and chances are that someone will help you out.
Q: I log on to the game, but my language switches to German/French/Dutch! I want to use English!
A: You can't play the game itself in English, but you can have a client GUI in English (menus, dialogs, windows, but
not in-game language, inventory item names and such). Delete or rename files under
<Client dir>/lang/<language name> directory and you will have client in English when you set it to that language.
Q: My hand (and elbow) hurts after long time playing, is there a better way to move?
A: Yes, there is. Switch to
Click Toggles movement mode in preferences, or type:
/pref movement toggle. After that you only need to click once to begin moving, and again to stop.
Q: My game window is always in foreground, “doesn't like to share front window status” and is sometimes “bleeding” through other windows on my desktop… I'm using WindowBlinds.
A: It is known that the client isn't working well with
WindowsBlinds, a widely used 3rd party skinning application, because that program doesn't support
everything that “plain” Windows does.
Q: I'd like to see how much fps can Windows client achieve on my machine. (I'm a benchmark freak.)
A: For the highest possible frame rate, perform the following steps. Turn off OpenGL rendering and
Large Window in options, turn on
Use dithered night, and check
Show FPS from
Options menu. Pick a movie without night and with not too many characters in it, and set the replaying speed to
NO LIMIT during the play by pressing
Alt-Right several times. Observe.
Q: Why is that so important, what's the practical use of all that speed? Isn't it an overkill for a 4fps game?
A: Yes it is, but you can use it to amaze your friends and scare your enemies! Also to fast forward very long movies. Seriously, it was necessary to keep the game playable on lower end machines, and as a consequence we have enormous fps on more modern ones.
Q: I don't know if you've been informed of this one yet, but there's a memory leak. I left it on for a few hours and the memory usage is up to 100MB!
A: This is actually a normal thing, not a bug. Memory usage is limited. Memory leak existence could be noted if the quantity of used memory would constantly rise, without stopping, which is not the case here. Due to a specific memory allocation strategy/intelligent caching, you may notice rise in memory consumption for certain amount of time, but eventually followed by decrease. Also, Software renderer which runs quite nicely on old systems uses substantially less memory on average than OpenGL version.
Q: Where can I find a FAQ about the game in general?
A: English version of such FAQ is
here and an introductory guide for fresh players can be found right
here.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
