Yeah, you are right. The resent change was to remove seams. Previously there was a seem between every pixel, in effect. The change removed all the seams except the one running down the middle.

Hi there.

I've been playing Anniversary these past few weeks, so I've only just installed version 1.38 of Glidos (with version 0.7 of VDos32).

I haven't noticed any seam in the middle of the FMVs screen, though I have noticed that the loose V-shaped chunk to the left of the screen has disappeared -meaning that everything's playing smoothly now, not that there's a missing piece!
Plus of course the sound issues have also disappeared.

In brief: it seems perfect now.

Thanks a bunch!

Great. That's good to know. Thanks for the feedback.

What do you think of Anniversary, by the way?

Funny you should ask: A couple of weeks ago I started writing a kind of list of my thoughts on the game. I originally intended to address it to the TR teams at Eidos and Crystal Dynamics -including Toby Gard himself, no less!-, but I got over that: on second thoughts it did seem a bit vain. I might still slip in a word or two in a forum or something, but I'm not even sure about that any more.

However, since you ask, here it is in attachment (apparently you can't post .odt documents here so I've converted it into .doc format). I guess it's quite a bit more than you expected, but I actually spent an hour writing a would-be summary post before realising that it would be easier and quicker just to let you read the original as I didn't know where to stop and it was starting to look as if I would just rewrite the whole damn thing anyway. It's unfinished, but you'll get the idea, I think.

Now what about you: any thoughts to share? (That is, if you have played it?)

I often write my own reviews of games I'm really into (or want to be into). I wrote one for Legend, I'm sure I'll do the same for anniversary, which I'mplaying at the moment and am only up to the Folly. Generally, it's good, better than Legend, but still some unforgiveable rubbish in there.

I guess we probably shouldn't be going on about this here, as it's really not Glidos related, but since we've already started...

I just wanted to make it clear that my "letter" (which is unfinished and full of typos) is not intended as a review or anything, really (I've nothing of a critic), it's just my impressions after finishing TRA, which I thought at the time I might share since apparently they have been listening to feedback, and after all feedback must come from somewhere. I have the embarrassing feeling that it is a bit pompous, though (all the more embarrassing as it's been downloaded half-a-dozen times in the course of the night, but what should I expect on a forum), but if so I still mean what I wrote... (And care for the future of the series...)

That said, I'd be interested to hear your detailed opinion. As I said, I enjoyed both TRA and TRL, and I think a mix of the best in both could produce something awesome...

Hmm, this got a bit off topic. Paul pretty much acknowledged the thing is there, so it doesn't seem to be a "happens for some, not for others" kind of thing... although some people might not notice it.

This is a screenshot of the Core logo FMV that I chose because it's not as easy to see the "seam" in still images as it is when it's animated; however the high-contrast diagonals in the name make it more obvious in a static shot. The bottom right of the O and bottom left of the R is most noticeable. It's at 640x480 to keep the image small, but it doesn't appear to matter what resolution you use, presumably because it's all scaled-up anyway.

As for the V-shaped chunk in the FMVs in older versions of Glidos, I reported that before; but I found that if I disabled HyperThreading on my CPU that it went away, so there was possibly some multi-thread issue with that. It was a more noticeable artifact than the seam, but I'm still hoping that a future release of Glidos will eliminate the seam as well. 😀

After that last post, I just noticed something... the width of the screenshot is 640 pixels including the window borders. Paul, could the fact that the client window width is slightly less than 640 lead to this "seam" artifact?

Its just that, for convenience, I render the VESA graphics by generating Glide commands and sending them to Glidos. It's a least hassle solution. Glide cannot define textures big enough to handle the whole screen in one go, so I have to do it in two goes. The seam appears between the two textures.

I must admit I haven't assigned the problem much importance. After all, the FMVs are really low quality to start with.

I suppose it's unavoidable with a texture-based rendering approach. And as you say, it's not an issue of great significance.