GoG haven't done an awful lot to this game; it runs well, but you can't use windowed mode without changing your desktop colour depth, and on win 7 movies don't work without setting some compatibility options. Combined with some other little UI things that annoyed me, I've tried to make a little patch for myself. It seems to have worked so far, so I guess I might as well share.

It fixes windowed mode for non-16 bit desktops, allows movies to run without needing to use the compatibility settings, gets rid of resolution switching in fullscreen, and (optionally) stops it hogging so much cpu time. There's also a couple of UI tweaks: you can middle click to run and follow the cursor, and click again to stop, (slightly easier on my fingers than double-click-and-hold) and you can right click on the portraits in combat to queue up a next move. (i.e. the character will automatically be selected when the next section of their endurance bar fills up.)

Movies need converting from quicktime format into something directshow can understand. The patch installer will do it automatically if you have quicktime or quicktime alternative installed. If not, you can use something like rad game tools to transcode them manually. Converting the movies to a different format would have made more sense for GoG to do themselves rather than me, (and would have cut 70mb from the download size,) but it's a bit late for that now, and I couldn't get the quicktime movies to play nicely with non-admin mode, so I didn't have any other choice. :(

Tested only on the GoG version of septerra core, and only on windows 7. Windows xp (sp2+ only) and vista probably work, but anything earlier wont. Likewise, disc versions of septerra core updated to 1.04 will probably work, but 1.02 or earlier wont. I'm not particularly far into the game yet, so I may have missed stuff. I'll probably make updates as I go along and bump into more things that annoy me. Finally, since this has so far been tested on exactly one computer, by one person, with one hardware/software configuration, and only for a few days, YMMV.

Grab from near the bottom of the left hand panel here.

It works only in 50%.
What works:
- middle click for running
- right click on hero while battle (I like that)
- removes some serious fatal panic errors (good work!)

What doesn't work
- movies
- small video mode

And I've got one question:
How to use new card "run from battle"? I see it when I enter codes, it wasn't there before.

I don't think I'm responsible for that. I haven't fixed any crashes, at least not deliberately. Did the transcoding step work correctly? Do you have an 'M1.avi' file in septerra's install directory? What happens if you try and play it in windows media player? What's small video mode? Do you mean windowed mode? What doesn't work about it? I'm not responsible for that either.

Pressing space instead of escape to skip the introduction movies causes a crash. Here are the details:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: septerra.exe
Application Version: 1.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 44259dc6
Fault Module Name: septerra.exe
Fault Module Version: 1.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 44259dc6
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00012396
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 4105
Additional Information 1: 61c2
Additional Information 2: 61c29e84cc3b6fe293970def96fece79
Additional Information 3: 5ffd
Additional Information 4: 5ffdd4229cf01090b788173a86dbaf54

More problematic than this, however, is the fact that battles appear to be broken. In two different encounters in the Badlands, I defeated an enemy, but the game never left battle mode. The music ended properly and the camera recentered itself, but the message boxes describing the xp and loot gained never appeared, and the battle portraits and bars disappeared (but reappeared when I moved my mouse down to the lower area of the screen). There appears to be no way out of this situation, and I had to kill the septerra.exe in task manager to make it go away.

Both of your issues are known problems.

for the spacebar movie thing: [url=http://student.fnm.uni-mb.si/~avisnikar/septerra/faq/FAQ.php#spacebar]http://student.fnm.uni-mb.si/~avisnikar/septerra/faq/FAQ.php#spacebar[/url]

For the combat thing: [url=http://student.fnm.uni-mb.si/~avisnikar/septerra/faq/FAQ.php#ctrla]http://student.fnm.uni-mb.si/~avisnikar/septerra/faq/FAQ.php#ctrla[/url]

I never managed to trigger the combat issue myself so I couldn't look into fixing it. You'll have to use the existing fix for it. The movie crash I probably should have done something about, but it's not _that_ hard to avoid hitting spacebar during movies. :p

The weird thing is that both issues ONLY happen to me with your patch. Without it, spacebar simply seems to be disabled during movie playback (maybe that's something you could add to your patch?) and battles end properly.

Interesting. Both issues should occur in the base game too. The end-of-combat thing certainly, because I've done nothing to touch that. For the movies it's possible that GOG made some fix to it that I rebroke with my own movie changes.

ok, updated the patch to fix the spacebar problems, and also a related main menu crash. I still haven't been able to cause myself the stuck-at-the-end-of-combat problem though.

Thanks for the movie fix.

Another thing to note about the battles is that ctrl-a doesn't end them. I'm stick in the battle mode no matter what I do. When I press ctrl-a, I can hear the background wind sound start from the beginning, but it doesn't get me out of that post-battle/pre-exploration state.

That's not good then. :/

I've run through the whole game, and still not been able to trigger it, which makes it pretty darn hard to try and patch... I have no idea what else to suggest, sorry. :(

I get an error in the installer when recoding movies. Nothing happened... Any info you need for a possible fix?

I've also tried playing just now, and I also have the end of combat-issue.

Running Win7, btw.

To anybody else who has the end of battle problem, I'm not 100% certain, but I think I found a fix for it. First, make a backup of septerra.ini and open the file in Notepad or any text editor. Then, under the heading "[Options]", you should see the line "English = 1". Underneath that, try adding a line for "ScaleMode = 0" and another line for "CpuIdle = 5" (without the quotations). Then save it, make sure it saved as .ini, then run the game again. Hopefully the bug won't show up this time.

I only tested a couple times, but it seems that having that CpuIdle line fixes the problem for some reason. Setting CpuIdle to 0 or removing the line altogether caused the bug to show up again, so it's probably linked to something there. I'll keep playing, and post or edit if the bug pops up again. Hope this helps everyone else with this problem!

By the way, I'm running Windows 7 64-bit.

That's interesting, and might explain why I've never seen it; I always play with cpu idle turned on, because a game that old consuming a whole cpu core is pretty silly, and my cpu fan is too noisy.

First of all I didn't have any problems with movies and my gog version. But I wanted the middle mouse button walk mod as well as the scalemode options.
I just tried this patch on my game. I have win7 64bit and a ATI HD4970 video card. 22" monitor 1680x1050.
After it took about 5 minutes for all of the movies to be converted I then tried to start the game.
It wouldn't. Windows just says that the program has stopped working.
So I removed the ddraw.dll that the patch installer installed into my Septerra directory and the game started fine.
However the middle button fix of yours does not work.
So I replaced your ddraw.dll with a copy of the one that was in my windows system 32 folder.
The game still starts fine. But still the middle mouse button fix will not work.

And no matter what value I add to ScaleMode = * in the septerra.ini file my game just goes to fullscreen.

Any ideas?

ps. The zip file version linky seems dead unfortunately as that would be the version I would have preferred to use.

well, yes. You installed the patch, and then deleted it again. Since you don't currently have the patch installed, I would be very surprised if the middle mouse button worked. :p

Those links were a bit outdated, so updated to point at the actual website. The manual install zip version still exists there. I doubt it'll help though; the end result is the same however you do it, except that the manual version will cost you the movies unless you transcode them by hand.