For info, I posted a request to look into the AI sidekick invincibility issue in the Daikatana 1.3 Project, here's the text:

"Hello to the team,

Thank you for the continued work on patching Daikatana. I am almost onboard to start playing the game. I am reporting this here mainly because after installing the latest 1.3 patch yesterday in preparation of my first ever playthrough of the game, I wanted to highlight a potentially serious issue which I came across while gathering info on the game and current state of the community patch: the invincibility of AI sidekicks on the Normal/Medium difficulty setting.

Apparently, on this setting they are supposed to take damage, have no friendly fire and have regenerating health - except they actually remain invincible just as on the Easy setting, according to a late September 2018 Steam review by Foxysen (which goes into a good bit of detail about this). I hesitated to call this new issue a bug, as I will also take this opportunity to make what is effectively a proposal, but seeing as the sidekicks were not meant to be invincible on the Samurai setting I decided to flag this as an actual error.

As for me, I will not play on the Shogun/Hard setting just to get vulnerable (although with 5000HP instead of the vanilla 100HP!) sidekicks, I wish to play the game on the Normal setting the way it was meant to be played - with sidekicks that have no more health than you (100HP), no regenerating health, etc. - but of course with all the debugging, pathnoding, geometry, AI code enhancements provided by the 1.3 community patch. It's not like 1.1 or 1.2 is impossible to finish after all.

Seeing as you may fear that - even with all the improvements to navigation, the debugging etc. - such a default solution for the Samurai setting might scare away the few potential players who may want to give the game a chance (however IMO, most of the few players that may still come to Daikatana would be interested in a fixed-but-as-close-to-the-original-vision version of the game, as I am), I would suggest adding options in the menu (as you have already done for so many other parameters): 1. make it not just a choice of all or nothing with respect to sidekicks, and when the player chooses to have them, don't make their properties hidden, but allow for choosing: 2. whether to have them invincible, 3. whether to activate friendly fire, 4. whether to have regenerating health, and - heck, 5. how much health they should have, starting from 100HP (original - might be good to mention that so that the purists don't need to ask questions), and all the way up to 1000HP in steps of 100HP for instance, or alternatively a more limited option of 100HP, 200HP, 300HP and 500HP (5000HP is right out - might as well make them invincible at this point).

I do not know whether this would be feasible, but that could make everyone happy, myself included.

While I await for a response and see what can be done, I will not play the game as I wish to play it as close to the original vision as possible while of course benefiting from your great job at patching up all the problems that plagued the official versions of the game."

The newest version is currently patch 1.3 2018-12-23.

It includes 64-bit versions for Windows and Linux, 130+ bug fixes, 2000+ sanity checks avoiding many potential crashes, map updates for misaligned textures, node path fixes (for the AI companions), etc.

You can get the new build from the official Daikatana 1.3 project page.

For a vanilla experience of the game with the 1.3 patch, check out the thread in this forum titled "Setup for vanilla Daikatana experience with patch 1.3".

Maybe I just didn't found it, but is it possible to request a quicksave/quickload options? It doesn't seem to exist (unless I missed it) and the manual save is rather tedious (especially in a game where it's so easy to screw up).

You can make that request on the official Daikatana 1.3 Project page (under "Issues").

There are no quicksave/quickload options by default, since the game originally counted on the "save gem" system, and when Ion Storm patched in unlimited saves they just forgot to add the aforementioned options.

When you install daikatana gog version and emediatly use the 1.3 64 bit patch, does it include the better textures as well?

If I use daikatana updater it notes that it adds packs 5 and pack 6 and adds 32 bit textures… So I wonder, if you skip th ue updater (that updates it to 1.3 32 bit including 32 bit textures) and just use the 64 bit patch, does it also include better textures or should I first use the 32 bit updater and THEN apply the 64 bit patch?

Hope someone knows the answer, because I can't really see a difference, though it really does play better and is more ballanced, the game is actually quite enjoyable now!

No worries, if you just grab the latest 64 bit 1.3 full installer and apply it on your GOG Daikatana installation it will do all the work for you :) that is to say yes it includes 32 bit textures. And yes with the latest 1.3 patch the game is better than simply good and almost very good!

The fact that you cannot see a difference (regarding the 32 bit textures vs the original ones) is normal, and here I will quote someone known as Dekonega on Steam who has provided lots of explanations regarding 1.3 in the past:

"I should ask about it from the 1.3 devs but if I've understood correctly the 1.0 release of Daikatana shipped with slightly more compressed and worse looking textures than what the Ion Storm developers were working with due to CD-ROM space restrictions.

Since the 1.3 devs have the original sources for Daikatana they were able to take the original source textures and put them into the game without compromises. These 32-bit textures have marginally better colours and slightly sharper look IMHO. Most people wouldn't notice the difference consciously if they haven't played the game before. (...)

It doesn't mean "better looking" (when understood as more detailed) walls in and of itself. And I've already explained to you that the differences are marginal and largely technical because the source images are the same. This is not some "HQ Texture Pak" like the ones for Doom and Quake and the purpose is different as well.

The differences are similar to (but not the same) as when you have a high quality image in Photoshop's format and then export two versions of it one being PNG and the other one JPEG. There won't be large noticeable differences looking at the images but JPEG as a lossy compressed format can and often will look much worse in closer inspection.

But again... There are not going to be significant visual differences in screenshots. In my subjective opinion the differences are most noticeable on old video hardware (like 3DFX Voodoo) in episode 2 which features a lot of colourful texture artwork."


I think that should just about answer any lingering questions there might be regarding those 32 bit textures ;)

which one do i download? for win 64?

I'm guessing 'Windows 32-bit Beta version from 2019-05-25' is the right one.

Anyone experienced the Icelab bug? About the "ice fluid" not going down after I turn the valve. It's weird because it doesn't seem to happen everytime, it seems locked to the savefile. Oh... been a long time, I remember now... this happens because there's an enemy that moves and touches the fluid, preventing it from moving... After you noclip and kill that enemy, the fluid drains down...
I'm using an outdated version of the patch (early 2018) Is there a way for me to update the patch directly without having to get the game back to vanilla 1.2 ?
edit: Also, I don't remember if I used the 32-bit or 64-bit patch. Sorry. Is there a way to find out which one I'm using?