Another topic I am starting here, but the subject is entirely different so I see no point in doing them at once.

First of all, if the screenshots in the gamecard put you off for some reason, don't be fooled. The configurations for this game make for some amazing results. It even has a cell-shading option which boosts the visuals straight into the next generation and perhaps even beyond. Here, I'll prove it:

http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/Tursas/Blade_of_darkness_screen_zps901d30c5.jpg

It also seems there are texture mods for this made, and I will have a look at them at some point. I think that might be a good idea for a modding spotlight as well (hint hint ;D)

If someone has suggestions for texture packs to use, I'd be interested in hearing them. If someone knows where the textures themselves are located, that is another point of interest, it might be nice to try modding them myself as well.

EDIT: Finally should work!

I loaded the demo and the graphics are good. About Morrowind level.

Wow, the cel-shaded characters, combined with the right-angled & low-res textured (sans bump mapping stuff) really make the characters look out of place in those screenshots.

The graphics do look pretty interesting. It wouldn't fool the eye of a discerning DX11-era PC gamer, but with a dash of polish it could look spectacular compared to the DX9 era modern console games. Astounding when this came out in the days of single-core CPUs, when 1 Ghz was a "big deal" & when "shaders" on graphics cards weren't unified, let alone even en vogue yet. I'm pretty sure that I played this on a graphics card that had ~64 MB of RAM, in a system that had maybe 384 MB of total RAM.

Astounding. And you can beat a guy to death with his own arm in all the "time shifted" graphical splendor that this game has to offer.

Then you will like to know that the texture developer for the game released almost all textures for free in 1000x1000 resolution.

http://blade-of-darkness.bigtruck-canada.ca/tools/textures/textures.htm

http://blade-of-darkness.bigtruck-canada.ca/index.htm

If you want to know how to apply them to the game you will need to go to this forum, is the oldest BOD community that exist today, but know that the BOD engine the Blade Engine has problems rendering textures bigger then 256x256 unfortunately.

http://www.arokhslair.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=12

Thanks!

Surprised to see an active forum for this game still existing. I'll check it out.

The cell shading option you're talking about is this Toon tab in rOpenGL mode?
If so, could you please tell me exact values you choose?

I tried all graphic modes and only rOpenGL works fine. Although changing anything in Toon tab gives me all sort of unpleasant graphic glitches (like no textures at all).

For me
"Line Width": 4
"Shade Mode": Toon Shade + Textures
and the "Toon Colour" not selected works without issues and looks nice.

The only way to play this if you care about having the right aspect ratio, which you should, is with nglide
Toon shaders actually look pretty nice but the stretching ruins it.
Here's an example of what i'm talking about
nglide: http://i.imgur.com/kY3on0p.jpg
openGL: http://i.imgur.com/HZbMtKJ.jpg

edit: for some reason the menu to select the next stage refuses to show up in glide mode
double edit:
it seems like there's no perfect graphics mode for this game, glide is the only one that supports 4:3 at 1080p so there's no stretching, but it's pretty prone to crashing so far, openGL has the mouse bug which you can easily fix and looks nice but it suffers from stretching, d3d screws up the menus and suffers from the same problems as openGL
it's annoying to say the least

Thank You very much. Works perfect. No problem on widescreen.

I love the toon effect (cell shading), it's excellent. Thanks a lot Marcomies for your useful advices !

The graphics deserve a lot of praise. They are decent even now, at present. The reflections on the water, the living lighting effects/shadows, the animations, the squirting blood and the painting of walls and staining of floors with it, the limbs cutting off and rolling away, the traps, the glinting sparks/dust from hitting walls and objects, the little rocks that drop and roll when you hit a stone/solid surface, the details, perfection!

And just for the record, it was the first game ever (if i remember correctly) to use real time lighting effects and real time shadows.

This was a downside also, because machines at the time of its release were unable to either play it at all, or play it decently/to all its glory. This, and bad marketing, turned it to the most underrated game ever, one of the most undersaled games ever, and one of the most easily missed/ignored games that has ever been released. RIP rebelact.

Can anyone give me some tips regarding the graphicsettings?
As for the moment the only way to get the game working properly for me is to start it in r3Dfx Voodoo 1-2 with the maximum possible resolution of 800x600 in this mode.

There are a couple of nice screenshots in here and I actually like the cellshading look but it seems that I can´t get it working properly as I get color issues on the character when I try using another mode.

See the screenshot attached which was taken with rOpenGL and the cellshading settings from above.

Hi there! I can't find any procedure to implement these textures...

Unfortunately I no longer remember the exact settings I used. I do remember I did not have any texture packs installed (I didn't ever install any if my memory serves)

To my memory, the settings people have presented earlier in this topic seem approximately right, using the OpenGL drawing mode and twiddling with the "Toon" options. It might also be worth it to configure contrast and brightness to get best look out of it. It took some twiddling to get the exact results, and it is to be noted that the aspect ratio probably won't display correctly if using the OpenGL graphics that seem to be required for the cel-shading options to function.

Sorry I couldn't be more specific, but I hope I could be of some use!