Hi there!
I don't know the answer, since I don't have a Win 11 machine in reach right now.
However, I'm also looking forward to a possible solution/workaround!

PS: I played the first version/episode on my Win98SE machine.
Or rather, the demo of it. I downloaded it from PC Welt or Chip site in ~2000.
At the time, it was as popular as Moorhuhn for a while, I suppose. 🙂👍

I have fond memories of the dial up sound of the 56k modem, to lay that 10m long phone cable up to the mansard, in which the house's TAE box was,
and the Pentium 75 Compaq PC with 24MB RAM. 😉
Boy, loading the game took ages on that system! 😂
I still remember the loading screen thus! 😁
The picture of Sven and the saucer changed from monochrome to colour during loading process.🙂

Windows XP should have an about alright support on virtual machines like VMWare or Oracle Virtual Box.

Try to play it through that if it won't work natively on Windows 11.

VBox: 3D acceleration for XP/Vista broken since v6.1

Your idea wasn't bad, though. It just seems that XP nolonger is maintained well in general. 😔

VMware may still work, not sure.
However, it's future is uncertain, too.
VMware acquisition by Broadcom?

A few years ago, I tried to use Virtual PC 2007 on Windows 10.
Windows 10 deleted it after the upgrade.
Does Windows Virtual PC with XP-Mode still work?

Funny thing is this game works on Windows 11 out of the box:
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Thank you for your answers. Unfortunately it doesn't work.!

I don't know why, but when I start it, the monitor fades to black for a moment (like starting a full-screen application with a low resolution) and then nothing happens again.

Sometimes the game doesn't seem to crash, but simply hangs (black full-screen window with "wait cursor").
Task manager reports accordingly:

How did you get it to work on win 11? Have you made any system-wide settings?

Have you tried x86box yet?

No, but that sounds interesting! I'll try it today.
My problem with virtualization software is that I don't know where to get a win xp iso from.

Can someone help me?

Nope.

You could also give dgVoodoo2 a try:

http://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/

In the folder, copy all the DLL's from the .."MS/x86/" folder into where the .exe of the game is.

Then start "dgVoodooCpl", click on "Add" and choose the game folder you put the DLL's in, then try these settings and see if it helps:

@FattKeks alongside dgVoodoo2, WineD3D, DirectDrawCompat or DxWnd may work as well.

Thanks guys for the hints. So dgVoodoo2 unfortunately didn't bring any improvement. As far as I know it should also overwrite the corresponding DLL file from the game that I'm supposed to copy, right? However, there were none of the four .dll files in the game directory, which means that by copying them from the dgVoodoo2.zip/MS/x86 folder, four more files were simply added to the game directory.

There is another file called "directX3.dll" in the game directory, which has no counterpart from dgVoodoo so far. Do I maybe have to do something with this?

I'll try the other tools mentioned soon...

Well Ive tried DirectDrawCompat as well - it wont help. Also DxWnd seems to contain maleware (https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/f35ab8c71 … 3fa59cfbcbe52ea)

Im quite confused ... 😒

FettKeks wrote on 2022-06-09, 19:49:

As far as I know it should also overwrite the corresponding DLL file from the game that I'm supposed to copy, right? However, there were none of the four .dll files in the game directory, which means that by copying them from the dgVoodoo2.zip/MS/x86 folder, four more files were simply added to the game directory.

No, most of these are system DLL files. By copying these to the game directory, you force the game to load them instead of the system copies. This is how most DLL wrappers work.

The game works fine for me too on Windows 11, with or without DDrawCompat. If you use ddraw.dll from the "ReleaseWithDebugLogs" build in the debug version of DDrawCompat, it'll create a file called "DDrawCompat-Sven2.log", after running the game at least once with it. Compress the file and upload it here, or as an attachment in a new issue on DDrawCompat's GitHub page, and I'll take a look at it.

Alright, I did it exactly as you described.
Here is the log file as ZIP.

Thank you for the effort!

Thanks! It seems to be crashing due to a known incompatibility between G-Sync and DirectDraw exclusive fullscreen mode. Please try again without G-Sync. If it works, use the Release build for further testing (don't play with the debug build, it's gonna be slower and leave a huge log file). If it doesn't work, please upload the debug log again with G-Sync disabled.

All right, I tried that. Unfortunately it still doesn't work. But it seems as if the game no longer crashes directly, but starts in a black full screen and then freezes (according to the task manager).

Here is the new log

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-06-08, 07:50:

Funny thing is this game works on Windows 11 out of the box:

That's the issue with modern systems. For some reason for some old games run out of the box, for others, they are completely broken. Steam reviews of Return to Castle Wolfenstein says a lot of people has issues running it on Windows 10, same for Codename Panzers. For me Manhunt (Steam version at least) was the one that's always crashed and the digital Doom 3 ROE had graphical issues while the retail did not. Modern Windows is just not consistent for playing old games and that makes working out the issues difficult since the one who wants to help maybe cant replicate the problem.

How about DXGL?

https://dxgl.org/

It's a DirectDraw wrapper to OpenGL.

Personally, I tried it many years ago and it indeed worked for some games.

Good luck! 🙂👍

Edit: Alternatively, if that's too much of a hassle or if it doesn't work..
Get a copy of XP's ddraw.dll and copy it into the game folder (NOT the Windows or System folder!).
If you're lucky, this will solve your little problem.
Sven wasn't very picky about the hardware, from what I remember.
It rather is Windows 10/11 that's incompetent.
When I played the game in ~2000, my Win98 PC didn't have any 3D capability.
All it had was an on-board graphics chip with basic acceleration of GDI and DirectDraw 1.0.

FettKeks wrote on 2022-06-09, 22:57:

All right, I tried that. Unfortunately it still doesn't work. But it seems as if the game no longer crashes directly, but starts in a black full screen and then freezes (according to the task manager).

Here is the new log

Hmm, it doesn't seem to get stuck on anything ddraw related... Based on the last logs from the main thread (and comparing it with mine), it's probably stuck in IDirectInput7A::EnumDevices or somewhere shortly after that. Maybe you have some "exotic" input devices it doesn't like. But first let's try to confirm this. When the game gets stuck, open Task Manager, right click on Sven2.exe and choose "Create dump file", then upload that too. Hopefully it'll show a more accurate picture of what's happening there.

Also, as a general advice (though it may not help here), it's not a good idea to install old games under Program Files, it's known to cause issues too.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-10, 05:05:

Get a copy of XP's ddraw.dll and copy it into the game folder (NOT the Windows or System folder!).

This is highly unlikely to work. XP's ddraw is for sure not compatible with WDDM GPU drivers (which were introduced with Vista), and you can't even install the older XPDM drivers since Windows 8.