Kilrathi saga owners: beta testers needed

Wedge009 said:
I don't know. I only recall that switching the VGA option sets the screen to 320x240 resolution. SVGA uses 640x480.
Click to expand...

To be precise, the vga option makes it render the 3d graphics in 320x240, scale it up to 640x480, and draw the HUD at full resolution. But it's odd that this only stays on for a second and then switches back to the svga mode.

Maybe it detects an abnormally high framerate or something, but it's still odd that it doesn't respect user options..
 
It sounds like something funny is going on with your hack/wrapper, then? I do know VGA option remains at 320x240 in the original DOS version.
 
'Ere we go again.

http://www.kolumbus.fi/sol/zip/ddhack06.zip

- wc3 -no_interlace option support
- wc3 video blur option
- wc3 small video option
- scan-double should no longer mess up text
- changed the example .cfg file only to contain "halfnhalf" (removed the blur)

Oh, and halfnhalf only affects wc1 and wc2 - with wc3, using halfnhalf is equal to bilinear.

edit: re-uploaded, had some options hardcoded on by mistake. If you downloaded before this edit, download again.
 
It's quite possible that the game always loads the vga mode then (if it can run svga) changes up. Especially given the quality of the win95 support ;) i wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, just made the vga mode switch to svga immediately.

On that line though, that also explains why the hud is a seperate entity and is svga even in vga mode - since the huds are removable in KS (big selling point!) then they have to be seperate, if you're making sure people NEVER run in vga then why make the huds in vga, just make em in svga.

Accordingly, player choose vga. game renders vga screen and blows up to full size of display. now sticks hud on (which is in svga). Game now realises that vga is prohibited and switches to svga and re-renders everything.

Also, I assume the link should actually be:
http://iki.fi/sol/zip/ddhack06.zip
?
 
Madman said:
Also, I assume the link should actually be:
http://iki.fi/sol/zip/ddhack06.zip
?
Click to expand...
Yes. :eek:
Kolumbus is my image dumpbin, hence the mixup.

Anyway, the 'vga' mode isn't prohibited.. it does render in low-res for a second, then switches to hi-res. I just wonder why that is.

Haven't tested this without ddhack, so I can't rule its influence out, but that would be weird.. granted, not the first weird thing, though.
 
This is all pretty awesome. It reminds me of a conversation I had with HCl. He figured it was entirely possible to force wc3 and 4 to use hardware 3D acceleration.
 
Force? How so? You could re-route the video to use OpenGL or DirectX, but I can't see how you could recompile the rendering engine to use 3D acceleration without access to the source code.

Am I missing something obvious?
 
Hmm, what AD was talking about sounded like using OpenGL to do all the transformations, texture mapping, rendering, etc. That doesn't really apply in WC1/2, though. Simple frame manipulation/buffering and the like could be hacked fairly easily, I imagine.
 
Wedge009 said:
Hmm, what AD was talking about sounded like using OpenGL to do all the transformations, texture mapping, rendering, etc. That doesn't really apply in WC1/2, though. Simple frame manipulation/buffering and the like could be hacked fairly easily, I imagine.
Click to expand...

Yes, I understood that.

Anyway, I find that unlikely unless he knows something we don't - the only DLL with wc3 is the video decoder, so hijacking the polygon rendering would be.. tricky.
 
sol_hsa said:
Anyway, the 'vga' mode isn't prohibited.. it does render in low-res for a second, then switches to hi-res. I just wonder why that is.
Click to expand...

That's kind of what I mean, that the programmers didnt remove the mode but instead made the game simply switch back up to svga if you selected vga.
 
I don't recall that behaviour, as I definitely remember experimenting with the lower resolution VGA mode before, without having it revert to SVGA. Maybe it was one of the changes made for Kilrathi Saga?
 
definitely the ks version of the game does not let you use the vga mode, and i've noticed the blink of changing back to svga, just never really bothered me ;)
 
I installed wc4 for the heck of it, and it won't work with the hack dll yet. It does some (more) interesting things, including
- 16bit surfaces
- FlipToGDISurface - which is a very bad thing

What I find funny is that one of the options in wc4 is "small videos" which is identical to the option I did for wc3. =)
 
So anyway, from a little further investigation wc4 looks like it's doable; I'll probably get to it once I've run through wc3.
 
Wc3 finished. Did some work towards wc4, and it's trickiest of the bunch yet. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that wc4w came first, then wc3w, and then wc1 and wc2 windows versions, but I'm not sure in what order those two were done.

This reasoning is based on the complexity of ddraw use; wc1 and 2 are very simple (as nothing more is required out of ANY of these games), wc3 is a bit trickier and wc4 is doing some weird things like gdi blits, which are completely uncalled for.

So far I've managed to get the "installer" to work, can watch the test video and speed test as long as I keep everything in 8 bit.. if I go in-game, it punts down to gdi output and no picture for videos. So, there's still work to do..
 
I don't have much experience with Windows graphical outputs. It's interesting hearing about the various techniques the earlier WC games are using in a Win32 environment, certainly.
 
50th post. Time flies.

wc4 is giving me similar trouble as wc3 was, in that at some point it just decides to start drawing to screen directly - likely just ignoring ddraw and using gdi. I got wc3 working by making the lies I tell to the game a bit better.

So far, everything in the "installer" works (with 8bit), when I leave the installer, the first "loading" screen works, but after I've loaded, wc4 decides to stop using ddraw and pumps tons of FlipToGDISurface for some reason. If I try to play, the videos don't show up (but I can see lots of locks and unlocks), and if I make it through to actual ingame, it starts working again. Back to gdi land after the flight ends though.

So.. either there's some bit of information the game is after that I haven't been able to give it (through device and surface caps, mostly), or it actually DOES use gdi for some parts.

The fact that the first 'loading' screen works with ddraw gives me some hope that I have just messed up somewhere.

Oh, and one thing that wc4 does that the others didn't - it resizes the window to 640x480. I had to figure out how to stop it from doing that.
 
Curiousier and curiousier. wc4 switches to 640x480x16 after load in the above scenario. So one 'load game' screen is in 8 bit paleted mode and the next is in 16bpp direct color. Go figure. Means I have to add the 16bit support at this point in any case.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top