Troika’s Temple of Elemental Evil – if you’ve ever talked to diehard Dungeons & Dragons fans – is considered to be the penultimate example of computerized tabletop gaming and the best CRPG that the industry has ever created. As deep and engrossing as it is, the game came saddled with several horrible deficiencies that prevented it from achieving anything more than cult status. With Atari treating it (and Troika) as a redheaded stepchild and causing the developers to work on a final patch “off-the-clock”, so to speak, the game was released in a horribly buggy state. So buggy, in fact, that many of its problems still exist to this day. Whether it’s the fact that enemies spawn inside walls or the “elemental nodes” run so slow that even modern PCs chug when trying to render them, it can make playing this great D&D simulation a battle in and of itself.

That’s where Cattletech’s new mod comes into play. It’s mission isn’t to add new content the way The Circle of Eight mod does, but instead aims to completely fix the engine itself. Essentially, it is rewriting the core of the game and bringing it up to modern standards.

Since the last update, testing has identified a weakness we felt obligated to correct, and that is – ToEE’s poor render performance on modern systems. Although technically “not our fault”, a few users using lower end systems complained about sluggish performance, and we decided to fix it in order to have a rock solid release.

To that end, Pugmeister has started working on a major rendering reform, during which we have discovered that the main culprit was the Shadows. Now that it’s supported with a more modern rendering pipeline, the frame rates have improved dramatically! We are quite pleased with the result. However, there remains some work to be done, which means the first release will be postponed to early next year (probably mid to late January, depending on how testing goes).

Meanwhile, I’ve been giving the pathfinding an overhaul, fixing some obvious weaknesses in the present system and tackling various issues based on a case study I’ve been conducting. This resulted in faster pathfinding and less errors when trying to navigate long distances, allowing us to conduct more PF polls for the AI and hopefully make it a bit smarter!

Aside from that, we’ve made various improvements to the game, such as adding 8 portrait slots in character generation (this always confused Co8 users!), soft shadows for characters, Middle Mouse Button scrolling (press and hold, and move the cursor in the direction you want to scroll), more generous scrolling margin for Windowed mode, replacing the outdated keyboard input system, and several other fixes and improvements.

We’ll soon be rolling out test builds with the new rendering on the forum – hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do!

No doubt Temple of Elemental Evil fans will benefit greatly from the new rendering, pathfinding, and GUI additions available within this mod when it releases next month.