schmatzler, who runs https://i-war2.com/, has posted three news items since October 2022 that will make I-War 2 fans happy:
https://i-war2.com/news/181-dagda-and-wolf%E2 … -after-21-years
https://i-war2.com/news/182-welcome-to-2023-n … r-exciting-news
https://i-war2.com/news/183-better-planets-an … real-nocd-patch

Reverse Engineering: Dagda and Wolf’s Lair bugs fixed after 21 years

I am so excited to share today's news with you: We’ve been able to patch the two most glaring bugs this game had since its release over 21 years ago.

Thanks to our community member ZeroPipeline the proprietary .pkg files (which contain the mission logic) have been disassembled into useable source code. Fixes to this code have been made by other members of our community and then put into a community patch mod. Read on for further details.

Where can I get the patch for my game? […]
Show full quote

Where can I get the patch for my game?

All of the fixes made to the game (there are even more) have been put into a Community patch, which can be installed just like a regular mod.

Since Wolf’s Lair has been fixed, you won’t need the „Bypass Wolf’s Lair“ mod anymore. ❤️

You can get the mod from our download section or Github’s release page of the project.

If you want to help out by fixing other bugs that are already documented, visit Github’s issue tracker here.

Better Planets and a real NoCD patch […]
Show full quote

Better Planets and a real NoCD patch

Our second update for 2023 is exciting! Thanks to the amazing work from user "Stone-D" in our Discord the dreaded "Please Insert Play Disk" message has been removed from the game.

We also have a standalone mod for much better looking planets now and a fix for the I-War 2 Unleashed mod.

A full NoCD patch

EoC is an old game which comes with a few old problems. The Dagda and Wolf's Lair bugs weren't great, especially since machines have been getting faster and faster, opening up the possibility to make the game crash even more often. While these have been fixed at the end of last year, the game still had another problem that got extremely annoying during the last years: It would spawn a message "Please Insert Play Disk" if you didn't have CD/DVD drives connected to your computer. Many people use devices nowadays that don't have any optical drives included anymore, so a lot (and I mean a lot) of people ran into this message and didn't know what to do about it.

I've got to admit, I was a bit rough in my Steam forum replies sometimes, because I got asked about this problem again and again and although a solution with virtual drive software was posted in our Technical FAQ, a lot of people didn't get to that. Sorry about my harshness, guys - I just felt a bit like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, doing the same reply over and over again and that wasn't a great place to be in.

The Steam and GOG releases of the game ship with a cracked igame.dll (made by DUCK back in the day) that removes the check for the real game CD. Stone-D was able to complete this and also remove the check for a physical drive. Since the igame.dll file from DUCK is technically still warez we can't just provide you with a download here - after all, we don't want to get in trouble with Atari's lawyers. We have, however, created a binary patcher for the Steam, GOG and retail F14.6 releases of the game that you can run. This ensures you can only run this patch if you own one of the game releases. The retail patcher patches the game with DUCK's NoCD patch and also includes Stone-D's final fix, while the Steam and GOG patch only need to apply Stone-D's fix.

You can download the NoCD patch here.

We have asked the GOG support about including this patch in their digital release of the game.

Better Planets

Remember the Unstable Space mod? This one includes much prettier planets than the base game. IronDuke and Alakelele extracted the textures from that mod and combined it with assets from the I-War 2 Beta as well as some AI upscaling so we can now have really good-looking planets in the base game:

Thanks, guys!

You can download the Better Planets Mod here.

I-War 2 Unleashed - Docking Fix

The "I-War 2 Unleashed" mod has been updated, because it included a bug where the player wasn't able to dock to Jaf's rescue ship after they had been destroyed, because it didn't contain a compatible docking port.

You can download the updated version here or read more about the bug here.

That's all for now!

-schmatzler