SpaceSimCentral

Russian space sim from 1997.Any one ever played this, pretty much unknown out side of Russia as it was never translated into any other language.

Never heard of this one, I only knew about Parkan: Iron Strategy. Which I thought was the first game in the series, which it is not the Chronicles is.

According to moby games it was the first Russian made space sim.

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Russian space sim from 1997.Any one ever played this, pretty much unknown out side of Russia as it was never translated into any other language.
Actually it was. But it was never released, as far as I know. Nikita kindly sent it to me, after asking for it. Having played a bit, I think that Parkan II, was a remake of Imperial Chronicles.

CaptainKal wrote:
Actually it was. But it was never released, as far as I know. Nikita kindly sent it to me, after asking for it. Having played a bit, I think that Parkan II, was a remake of Imperial Chronicles.
An English version my turn to be jealous I found the Russian version on a dodgy Russian download site a few years back.

Hi guys, do anyone have english version pleason?Thanks a lot

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An English version my turn to be jealous I found the Russian version on a dodgy Russian download site a few years back.

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Hi guys, do anyone have english version pleason?Thanks a lot
I will try to find both versions then. Although it may take a while.

Hi,I'm new to this forum and really appreciate to see a topic here about the first game in the Parkan series.Without exagerating, I will just say that Parkan The Imperial Chronicles is the *BEST* space game ever made, unaware of the 1990's grafics (which are decent anyway). This game will survive the time by its excellent gameplay with space and FPS elements as well. It's a free-form space game where you can follow the storyline and ignore it whenever you want, it has puzzle elements, strategy, space combat, FP mode on planets, you can board ships instead of blowing them up, and, and, and... The very huge game universe is randomly re-created each time you start the game. All in all, no other modern space game comes wiht all these features which I always wanted, but never was able to find. This game was a bestseller in Russia, and the english version that comes without any manual or doc whatsoever is very difficult to find. I have gathered and put together a sort of installation and game guide which I can share if you want.A good description and a short FAQ can be found here:http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=9631There is an interesting discussion of this game here where a major developer of the genre is commenting Parkan II, the next game in the series (2005), with also some comments on this game (Parkan I).http://www.3000ad.com/forum/topic/37000391-parkan-ii/Some thoughts about Parkan II:Nikita, the same developer has also released Parkan II which came out in 2005. I'm still playing the game and find it attractive, although it's a far cry away from the original: much too short and repetitive actions, the game scripts don't allow too much deviations from the storyline: If you deviate and go conquer some planets, you may not find the scripted missions anymore... Also, it's pointless to conquer some "little equiped" planets, because there is a most unnoticed bug in the game: pirates can take over your planet (which makes sense), but if you are more than 1 system away, you won't have the necessary time (only 5 seconds) to fly there and combat in order to avoid the take-over. So, your conquering efforts were just futile... The most annoying aspect is: If not in scripted missions, the outside of the planets are always empty, nothing to combat apart that stupid tower gun; inside the buildings, the robot enemies are always placed in the same location, it's challenging to combat them the first time, then you've seen it all. There should be a way to manipulate the scripts however. Is there any LUA editor? I would make an *object randomizing* script which would certainly catapult the game^s playability... If you have any ideas, don't hesitate to reply...If you read the critics reviews, you will instead often read the trash: "All the buildings look the same.." and such nonsense. Come on! Should Nikita do 500 different buildings and 500 different interiors just to satisfy some cretins?! Even the top-noch FPS Crysis whith really demanding grafics has its repetitions in the 3D layout, all games have such limitations.But back to Parkan I:You can know about all the keyboard commands (or at least the most important ones) inside the game: walk in your ship, go left in the room, walk up the narrow stairs, and just in front of you is the ship's computer. Here you will find a description of the game's screens and keyboard commands. The same is located in parkane.hlp, but the charachters are porked because of the formatting that has to fit the ship's computer.Some open questions:In absence of any manual or walkthrough, I'm still figuring out how to handle the ship's console, how to know about my status with the clans, and a lot of other little things.The russian version has very nice videos that will however NOT work with the english version. If you know how to make them work, please feedback !! I highly appreciate your feedbacks on about how you play the game.XenonS

Hello XenonSYou will probably get some augments about the best space sim. You don’t happen to have a list of keyboard commands for the game do you.

Hi Pinback,here an extract of my personal readme which will grow when I learn more about this game. Following my instructions below you can easily go through the keyboard commands.Have fun!
START
Parkan: The Empire Chronicles************************************Introduction from the 3D Shooter Legends pagefrom Mobygames:In this first Russian-made space sim, you control the spaceship Parkan, which means boomerang, that has been sent on a rescue mission to find a lost research vessel when due to an accident it becomes stranded in a remote corner of the universe. It locates some war-ravaged planets where robot clans still mine fuel, produce weapons, and make factories to repair starships. In order to survive, you must trade with them, colonize planets or even pirate shipments. You can enter some of the 3D locations such as different planets and starships and shoot out in combat from first-person view.The stellar map and bases on planets are generated randomly except for a few planets with pre-designed bases.. There are seven races: Hammer, Oberon, Xenon, Dagger, Matubo, the player's Parkan droids and the Astron pirates. Each race has its own constellation, named by color, different fighting capabilities and their own ships, shaped as first letter of their race name (i.e. H-cruisers for Hammers, looks like letter H letter). Planets have four parameters - temperature, atmosphere, organic and resources. Factories when built can repair robot-pieces, make two types of rockets, four types of drones and even ships. You can convert free planets by placing robots from planet menu console or take over an occupied planet by destroying its orbital defence fleet and all robots on the planet. If you dock with other ships, you can extract info from their computers or find items within their hull.Installation, configuration, starting the gameRead all this before installing!Unpack the zip files to a directory C:\Parkan, select all files, right-click and UNTICK the "Read only", if you don't do that the game will not run!Run parkan.reg. (or parkan_win7.reg if your Os is Windows 7). If you want to place the parkan files into another directory, you will have to modify accordingly the last line in the reg file before running it.With the entries of parkan.reg in the registry, you will be able to run the SETUP.EXE to configure the game and CHANGE THE KEYBOARD COMMANDS if you wish or reset them to Default. You can also chose BETTER GRAFICS and ALL SOUNDS for the 3D First Person mode.DO NOT RUN THE GAME FROM THE SETUP WINDOW, instead make a shortcut with the Parkan.exe.Here some important notes to start the game:DON'T run the game in Dosbox (it's a Windows DirectX 5 game), also DON'T run it in VMWARE with Windows XP, otherwise the game will turn in a black screen when switching from Space to the First Person mode (inside ships etc.). Also the Weapon's Marker will not work (hit 4 to turn it On/Off).Instead, surprise, surprise, the game runs very fine on modern machines and Windows 7. But you must do the following:If you use Windows 7:1) Make a shortcut of Parkan.exe2)Right-click on the shortcut, chose Properties > Compatibility, tick the first box and chose "Compatibility with Win 98", also tick the 5th and the last box which will deactivate Desktop transparency and activate Administrator run.You can now run Parkan.exe or use its shortcut to run the game. There will be no glitches whatsoever.Keyboard commands, access to a game manual (sort of)You also have access to the keyboard commands INSIDE THE GAME together with a full description of the different screens and game modes, all with their corresponding commands with the mouse or the keyboard. To access this help, go walk inside your ship in the room where some narrow steps go up to the left, and just in front of you there will be the Ship Computer. Just walk into it and you can read the most important instructions for the game. The same description is located in a file called parkane.hlp, although the file's charachters are porked up, this is because of the special format to fit the ship's onboard computer.The Russian version of Parkan is shipped with a complete PDF manual, but there is NO written manual for the English version. Although I don't speak russian, I will try to translate it converting the PDF to Word doc and use Babelfish to translate; I then have to edit the results to make sense. Be patient! In the meantime, get familiar with the keyboard commands, read the ship's computer instructions and the little FAQ here below.Game description with short FAQI've found this on http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=9631
END

I will localize this game in English using the tool Passolo, aarghhh...I just DON'T want to miss these videos... Without them, the transitions are too crude.. My English rip version is just sh.., I will retouch all that soon...XenonS

Please let us know when you are done and I will get it uploaded to the file area.

Found my zip of the Russian game as it’s only 50 meg, I take it that the video have been taken out or maybe it just the demo of the game.Haven't got the time at the moment but will try and get it up and running at the weekend.

Pinback,the video files are all .NAV files in your main game directory and amount to approx. 320 MB. With these videos, the game has a *totally* different, positive athmosphere. They work with my russian version, and, not understanding russian, I wouldn't really mind playing with this version as the gameplay would be the same (and I would escape some questionable english translation !!), but the difficulty comes when I have to accept missions: then I will be definitively stopped... My english version contains all the NAV files with 0 bytes in size because they must be there, otherwise the game wouldn't start, I've transfered all the russian ones, but no go with the english executable parkan.exe; doing the contrary, putting the english parkan.exe in the russian files will start the game but, again, without playing videos..My conclusion is: the only way is to replace the russian dialogs and pure "texts" that are all located in parkan.exe in english text. I need a good Hex editor and still it would leave me with a corrupt exe file, because there's a lot of code alongside with the text, damn...There is a professianal tool called Passolo that extracts text from exe files to be translated and then rebuild the exe, but it doesn't work with parkan.exe, too bad...XenonS

Hi,good news for all fans of Parkan The Imperial Chronicles: I was able to modify and build a special English version of the game that will also play music & video without flaws. All in Windows 7!If DarkOne agrees, I will upload it with together with a Readme and a Walkthrough of the game. The pure game files will amount to 87 MB; the video files amount to 371 MB. If you already own the Russian game with the videos, you can of of course skip the video download.Here some history and notes of the different versions of the game, as far as I could reconstruct it:1) Original Russian versionThe game was published in Russia with an original release as of Parkan.exe - 16.07.1997; complete CD with in-game videos & PDF manual2) Patch releasedThe patch fixes various crashes and issues with FP mode; release date: 09.12.19973) English Beta-versionParkan.exe - 09.08.1998. Although this version exists, I don't think it has ever been published by Nikita, the game developer.The version comes without the in-game videos, the video files are present as 0-Byte size per file as otherwise the entire game wouldn't start.I found out that the videos do not play because of memory reasons. I was able to fix that with the help of a special game's MOD (see below)The game is correctly and professionally localized in English (interface + in-game language). No game manual is shipped with this version.4) Modded version (Russian + English) by Adger44Adger44 has made an incredible modification of the game which he finished in 2005 (?). As the above english version didn't yet exist, he personally has translated all dialogues of the game from Russian to English with the help of Machine Translation, so please be tollerant! All FP problems, the high elevator speed, bluring grafics, movement speed in FP, all fixed.The overall result is very decent, although the version is still buggy:- The Music will enter a loop, not stopping anymore (I was very close to throw all away!)- While the videos will play, only the first video of each one possible will actually play5) My personal modified English versionResolves the flaws above, playing all videos and also enabling some hidden music tracks and sounds. ToDo list / Remaining issues:- 2 red messages on the computer consoles will not show up; I have to edit WALK3D.DLL ("not enough fuel to carry out operation" + "You don't have enough cash!")- Some interface grafics are still in Russian; very hard to change because probably part of Parkan.exe; have not located these in the packed grafics- Reducing size of SPWAV.LIB to free memory; bring FONDEMO1.WAV + FONDEMO2.WAV to play in neutral situationsSo far, I was able to play the game up to the Wanderer ship; I didn't yet succeed staying in that "Red" sector...I like very much the Parkan series. I was able to decompress the LUA files of Parkan II, so I should be able to modify the scripts, maybe I'll make those Hammers do a square dance...This could improve their AI...That's it so far. I will re-post when uploading the package.HAPPY NEW YEAR ... XenonS

Excellent work XenonS. Keep up the good work.

Great work Xenons, look forward to being able to play this game.

I'm just doing the final "polishing", still I hope I can extract the russian interface grafics somehow. I will use the English beta version as much as possible.In the meantime, here the little fun ending of my walkthrough...[JOKES, CHEATS AND EASTER EGGS - YEAH, READ THIS IF YOU ARE *NOT* STUCKED...]Cheats: So far, I didn't find one, but there are 2 trainers for the game: Go visit http://www.parkanfans.narod.ru/ where you can download them together with other goodies of Parkan, Parkan II and Parkan Iron Strategy, although chances are the trainers (in Russian) will not work with this English version, just try. Oh, if you don't speak Russian, just use Google Translate to translate the various webpage sections...You can get some robots to walk inside your ship before leaving a planet...It's possible, just try hard...How many robots can you get inside ?! They will finally go into the cockpit and fly your ship away, with or without you...and should you be that skilled to remain on the planet, you'll have to wait for some miracle ship to come, or better wait for Obama comming on a skateboard Else you will be, hum...STUCKED...damn, not again...In the meantime, go visit the planet's restaurant and play some Poker with other robot buddies...Oh sorry, that's all in Parkan II or Space Rangers 2 (without Poker) or Star Trek Enterprise, "Casino Royale" with Data playing Blackjack instead.Don't mind, it's a joke. There are indeed restaurants on the planets and it's really possible to 'capture' robots that way, but they don't play Poker, won't fly anywhere and will vanish as soon as you go in the cockpit and enter inside your ship afterwards. The dimensions in space are really a mystery.XenonS

Hey Xenon, how's that special english version coming along, and is it ready to be uploaded yet?

Look what I got Brand new and still sealed until I opened it.It the German version will be having a go XenonS instruction and see if I can get it up and running.If you are out there XenonS are you still doing the English version.