First post, by Nazo
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One of the things that has annoyed me about this game is how badly it has aged 3D acceleration-wise. For the longest time it would bring any ATi videocard that was three or four times more powerful than the game could even fully utilize to its knees crying. ATi finally fixed whatever they had changed that broke things so badly with the game, but only just barely. It still doesn't implement the pixel shader effects well and some things cause serious problems like the capes. All this ran great on hardware of the game's time, but the OEMs don't particularly care about old games and do only the bare minimum to maintain driver support (plus the game is guilty of doing some stuff it shouldn't have of course.)
And then it struck me: what about a wrapper? Wrappers can be great about maintaining backwards compatibility. I've been using Glide wrappers for ages in particular with excellent results (especially in games like Diablo II which actually doesn't just look worse but actually runs worse in anything other than Glide.) In fact, upon googling I immediately ran across WineD3D which sounds like it could be amazing for Direct3D games (saved on the harddrive for later!) I haven't been as successful with OpenGL though. I found TitaniumGL which couldn't enable "shiny water" (shaders) in accelerated mode and had serious issues (texture alignments, blurry, etc) besides. In software mode it could do that, but everything looked really messed up. I found a thread on this forum (yeah, I had forgotten the forum existed I'm forced to admit. Sorry!) about various wrappers and was going through them somewhat, but for the most part didn't have a lot of luck. Except not many had actual links. The SwiftShader one looked pretty interesting and it could run the game, but no "shiny water" and the moment I started the actual game it ran at about 1 FPS. Well, it's software. I guess I need OpenGL to Direct3D wrapping. But something that can implement the stuff it needs for the shaders and such.
Might anyone happen to know of any that might be able to handle this?