Challenges Facing An Arcanum Remaster

1. Legal Complexity

The Arcanum IP — name, setting, world, stories, characters, mechanics — was owned by Sierra, which was purchased by Vivendi, then Activision, and is now owned by Microsoft. Tim notes that while he works at a Microsoft company, the source code is a separate matter entirely.

The code is owned by Troika, which in practice means Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson. Under the original publishing agreement, they cannot simply release it. Anyone wanting to do a remaster (which by definition means working with the original code, not building from scratch) must negotiate with all three founders to their mutual satisfaction.

Tim draws a sharp line: if you don't want the code, you're making a remake, not a remaster — and he has a separate video for that.

2. Code Modernization

Tim has personally recompiled the Arcanum source code and turned it into a Windows 10 application. He encountered several immediate issues:

• SecuROM copy protection — the first thing he stripped out, simply by recompiling without it applied
• Sierra's multiplayer network ("Won") — ripped out entirely since the service no longer exists; his recompiled version has no multiplayer
• Compiler warnings — the code was written for Visual Studio 6; modern Visual Studio (17/18) produces thousands of warnings, mostly trivial issues like using enums as integers that now require explicit casts. Fixable but tedious across thousands of lines.

3. Bugs Everywhere

Tim is blunt: Arcanum shipped "as kind of an alpha." Bugs exist across multiple layers:

• Code bugs — straightforward programming errors in the C++ codebase
• Script bugs — Arcanum used a custom scripting language Tim created called "Sock Monkey." The scripting engine itself seems sound, but the scripts written by designers contain errors
• Dialogue bugs — the dialogue system is highly complex, with embedded op codes that trigger quests, adjust reputation, give items, etc. Designers made mistakes in these dialogue files
• Map/asset bugs — maps contain embedded data like door transitions that sometimes point to wrong destinations or have bad conditions

4. Optimization

Every optimization in the original was tailored to 2001 hardware, which is now profoundly obsolete:

• Art blitter — Arcanum renders with pixel blitting, not 3D objects. The blitter was optimized for hardware that "exploded decades ago"
• Memory management — custom memory management built for the tiny RAM of the era; modern systems could handle far more
• DirectX version — whatever version existed in 2001; modern DirectX has significant improvements and extensions available
• Manual text rendering — even underlining text was done manually pixel-by-pixel rather than through API calls

5. Art and Assets

Tim is not an artist (and is colorblind), but he flags several art challenges:

• Original source art may be lost — Tim has no original art archived. Jason Anderson had the backups, but Tim doesn't know if they're still viable. Tim's own code backups are safely mirrored between cloud storage and a hard drive.
• Higher resolution rendering — a remaster should support higher resolutions, which means re-rendering original 3D source art at higher res. This applies to characters, props, creatures, and especially cinematics.
• More environmental variety — the original had few tree/rock/flower variations due to memory constraints. Modern hardware could load far more, making the world (especially procedurally generated maps) look less repetitive.
• More facades (set pieces) — large decorative art pieces like castles, the crashed blimp, dragon skeletons. Tim would love more of these in random encounters. They didn't have the disk space or memory for more at the time.

6. Game Balance

Since the game shipped in alpha, balance was never properly tuned:

• Spells were never balanced — this is why Harm is "crazy powerful"
• Skill point costs — Tim originally wanted attributes, spells, and skills to cost more points at higher levels (escalating cost). They switched to a flat one-point-per-level system. His community actually convinced him the one-point method works, but he'd still like to offer multi-point as a "Tim's version of Arcanum" toggle option
• Real-time combat was too frenetic — "way too crazy fast, bizarre, uncontrollable." Tim would fix this and improve turn-based with quality-of-life changes like grouping enemy turns (all enemies act together rather than individually) to speed up combat dramatically

7. UI and Quality of Life

Tim lists several modern UI expectations the remaster should meet:

• Hold Tab to highlight items — show all interactable items in the area
• Better combat UI — make targeted attacks, fate points, and companion control more accessible (the features exist but are buried under bad UI)
• Key rebinding — standard now, wasn't then
• Controller support — worth exploring
• Text resizing — the game only ran at 800×600 with fixed text size
• Modular UI layout — break the original UI into repositionable pieces that push to screen corners at higher resolutions
• Semi-transparent UI — the original UI was opaque partly to reduce the drawable screen area for performance. That constraint is gone now.

8. Sound and Voice Acting

• More sound effects — the original couldn't keep many loaded; combat, creature attacks, and ambient sounds all need more variety
• More voice acting — many characters weren't voiced. Since a remaster locks the dialogue (no rewrites), it would be straightforward to have voice actors record existing lines. Potentially every character could be voiced with sufficient budget
• Generated dialogue — Tim acknowledges this needs special handling but says there are ways around it

9. References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFERZ1TuKa4