When I was a young warthog, I bought a Commodore 64 with a whole library of software for $40 at a garage sale. The gold box with the fancy art (RIP Keith Parkinson) was particularly intriguing. Champions of Krynn was really fun. The load times on those old 5 & 1/4 floppies was excruciatingly slow, and fervent prayers were often utter with each new area in the hopes that they would load at all.
Shall we never play Champions of Krynn in the Infinity Engine? Last year I installed Near Infinity in an effort to transfer my Baldur’s Gate character for play in Icewind Dale, and suddenly lost many hours combing through the IE database just to see how all those files worked together. Now is the time.
As a manageable (I hope) goal for Devember, I aim to recreate the CoK narrative, through the end of Throtle, in the Infinity Engine. Part of the goal is to write a script that can take the dialog from the Gold Box Engine DAX files and import them into dialog.tlk. Every effort will be made to preserve the 1st edition AD&D rule-set used in CoK. That would make it more of a total conversion for rather than a mod.
AI Disclosure: I run Hermes Agent with Qwen3-8B-Q4_K_M on my internet quarantined EOL Windows 10 QWMU/KVM with a passed through STRIX-GTX1080TI-11G and 32GB RAM from a Threadripper 1950X system running a Fedora hypervisor/workstation. (With Looking Glass of course, many thanks @gnif) I only get about 1/3 tps, but at least its local. So far it has been helpful in outlining the project.
Others have already figured out how to extract the dialog from the ECL#.DAX files Hacking and rebuilding DAX-files I am just waiting for the admin to approve my registration. I also sent an email to Simeon Pilgrim to see if he still has the compiled list of dialog. I’ll give that a few days.
In the mean time I will look at how to create the ARE files
I remember covering up the 5&1/4” drive with a pillow so the parents wouldn’t come complain about me using the computer at 6am. One step below a dial up modem on the noise scale.
Enjoy the journey, so many cool games from the past that are well worth preserving!
This post brings back so many memories. I fondly remember the SSI “Gold box” games myself, and played Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, and Dark Queen of Krynn on an Amiga 500.
My favorite series from that era was “Gateway to the Savage Frontier” and “Treasures of the Savage Frontier”. Unfortunately, that series never got a third game.
What do the denizens of this forum think about using the style of the attached jpg—which is spatially true to the combat terrain in CoK—vs an truly isometric translation of the grid from the Gold Box Engine GEO file? All criticisms and other ideas are invited and welcomed. Perhaps using the color pallet from exploration mode was a bad idea.
, many thanks @gnif) I only get about 1/3 tps, but at least its local. So far it has been helpful in outlining the project.