VOGONS


First post, by klappa

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Running latest version of dgVoodoo and while it works it has serious texture problems where certain surfaces have problems displaying correctly, they are too blurried and also with very bad framerate. It looks very bad, so bad even a 1997 compatible direct3d graphics card would've looked nicer back when this game came out.

Playing around with the different settings in dgvoodoo nothing have worked.

Strange thing is that the game has a framerate counter and it shows 60fps but in reality it feels like 25fps.

What's wrong?

Reply 1 of 7, by ZellSF

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The camera seems to be locked at 30 FPS and the weapon animations are unlocked. I'm guessing it was supposed to be the other way around (since weapon animations are way too fast at 60 FPS), but no one could run it at 60 FPS when it was released. Probably needs some dedicated modder to fix it... I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the game and not dgVoodoo2. A quick Google search suggests capping to 45 FPS is actually optimal, I have to do some experimenting to figure out if that's true.

As for textures (surfaces), screenshots would be helpful here, but remember, textures were very low quality in 1997. Quake 2 was the high end, Jedi Knight due to larger areas would be using worse textures than that. Your problem could be due to the game engine automatically reducing texture quality for far away textures (there's a mod to fix that) or that you're not playing with the same texture filtering you remember. You might have played without texture filtering which would make it look blurry now, or you might only be playing with bilinear texture filtering now which would make far away textures look bad. Force better filtering.

Reply 3 of 7, by Dreadmoth

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Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith use a pretty aggressive texture and model LOD system that hasn't scaled well to modern resolutions - fortunately there is a mod that disables it. With it, the game can look pretty sharp (at a distance 😉), especially if you add some SSAA / SGSSAA and a bit of negative LOD bias: screenshot

Framerate is a bit weird - some of the scripting (and possibly physics) system(s) used by the game appear to be limited to 47Hz. First-person animations speed up at high FPS. Player and enemy movement seems to be relatively smooth. Camera rotation is inconsistent - when testing some time ago it seemed that at 60 FPS it updates at 30Hz, at 120 FPS, 40Hz. It seemed a bit smoother with the game capped at 47 FPS, but any small fluctuations in frametime resulted in heavy stuttering...
Curiously, the idle camera (which pivots around Kyle / Mara if you do nothing for a while) seems much smoother than regular camera rotation.

edit: late

Last edited by Dreadmoth on 2023-04-11, 12:44. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 4 of 7, by ZellSF

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Peixoto wrote:

try this:
Peixoto's patches for a few old games

but don't combine it with dgvoodoo

Are you saying that helps with the framerate limit (i.e framerate problems is a compatibility problem or a dgVoodoo2 problem)? Or just that it might help the game run "better" otherwise?

I tried your patch and while it worked better for me (dgVoodoo2's not great at dealing with Jedi Knight's menus), I ran into this:
Peixoto's patches for a few old games

Dreadmoth wrote:

Framerate is a bit weird - some of the scripting (and possibly physics) system(s) used by the game appear to be limited to 47Hz. First-person animations speed up at high FPS. Player and enemy movement seems to be relatively smooth. Camera rotation is inconsistent - when testing some time ago it seemed that at 60 FPS it updates at 30Hz, at 120 FPS, 40Hz. It seemed a bit smoother with the game capped at 47 FPS, but any small fluctuations in frametime resulted in heavy stuttering...
Curiously, the idle camera (which pivots around Kyle if you do nothing for a while) seems much smoother than regular camera rotation.

edit: late

Oh so the 47 FPS thing isn't just a random guess (like the post I read indicated it was), but the game tick rate, though there's nothing solid to say the camera should be locked to that. 47FPS locked here gives very juddery framerates (it does not seem like a smooth 47 FPS at all).

Have anyone been able to run Jedi Knight at a smooth framerate ever?

Reply 5 of 7, by klappa

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ZellSF wrote:

The camera seems to be locked at 30 FPS and the weapon animations are unlocked. I'm guessing it was supposed to be the other way around (since weapon animations are way too fast at 60 FPS), but no one could run it at 60 FPS when it was released. Probably needs some dedicated modder to fix it... I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the game and not dgVoodoo2. A quick Google search suggests capping to 45 FPS is actually optimal, I have to do some experimenting to figure out if that's true.

As for textures (surfaces), screenshots would be helpful here, but remember, textures were very low quality in 1997. Quake 2 was the high end, Jedi Knight due to larger areas would be using worse textures than that. Your problem could be due to the game engine automatically reducing texture quality for far away textures (there's a mod to fix that) or that you're not playing with the same texture filtering you remember. You might have played without texture filtering which would make it look blurry now, or you might only be playing with bilinear texture filtering now which would make far away textures look bad. Force better filtering.

That's why the weapons animations looks so much smoother. Well i can't check that now but i am pretty certain it ran a lot better on my old system with a ATI Rage card than it does now. Regarding the texture problem i have i no idea. It seems most ppl is running JK Enhanced and that's why i thought the original looked awful using dgVoodoo. An example how it would look is in this walk through.

https://youtu.be/12qU8Ol2xa0

The first big open up area where you i have to dive in a pipe to access a room where you have to use the two wrenches. It looks frankly downright awful. Is it supposed to look like that?

Peixoto wrote:

try this:
Peixoto's patches for a few old games

but don't combine it with dgvoodoo

Thank you will check!

Dreadmoth wrote:
Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith use a pretty aggressive texture and model LOD system that hasn't scaled well to modern res […]
Show full quote

Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith use a pretty aggressive texture and model LOD system that hasn't scaled well to modern resolutions - fortunately there is a mod that disables it. With it, the game can look pretty sharp (at a distance 😉), especially if you add some SSAA / SGSSAA and a bit of negative LOD bias: screenshot

Framerate is a bit weird - some of the scripting (and possibly physics) system(s) used by the game appear to be limited to 47Hz. First-person animations speed up at high FPS. Player and enemy movement seems to be relatively smooth. Camera rotation is inconsistent - when testing some time ago it seemed that at 60 FPS it updates at 30Hz, at 120 FPS, 40Hz. It seemed a bit smoother with the game capped at 47 FPS, but any small fluctuations in frametime resulted in heavy stuttering...
Curiously, the idle camera (which pivots around Kyle if you do nothing for a while) seems much smoother than regular camera rotation.

edit: late

That's the Jedi Knight Enhanced mod that make everything sharper?

Yea the weapons animations and water animation looks like it is 60fps but everything else is not. How can i raise the 30 FPS cap?

Reply 6 of 7, by ZellSF

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klappa wrote:
ZellSF wrote:

The camera seems to be locked at 30 FPS and the weapon animations are unlocked. I'm guessing it was supposed to be the other way around (since weapon animations are way too fast at 60 FPS), but no one could run it at 60 FPS when it was released. Probably needs some dedicated modder to fix it... I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the game and not dgVoodoo2. A quick Google search suggests capping to 45 FPS is actually optimal, I have to do some experimenting to figure out if that's true.

As for textures (surfaces), screenshots would be helpful here, but remember, textures were very low quality in 1997. Quake 2 was the high end, Jedi Knight due to larger areas would be using worse textures than that. Your problem could be due to the game engine automatically reducing texture quality for far away textures (there's a mod to fix that) or that you're not playing with the same texture filtering you remember. You might have played without texture filtering which would make it look blurry now, or you might only be playing with bilinear texture filtering now which would make far away textures look bad. Force better filtering.

That's why the weapons animations looks so much smoother. Well i can't check that now but i am pretty certain it ran a lot better on my old system with a ATI Rage card than it does now. Regarding the texture problem i have i no idea. It seems most ppl is running JK Enhanced and that's why i thought the original looked awful using dgVoodoo. An example how it would look is in this walk through.

https://youtu.be/12qU8Ol2xa0

Not going to watch the entire video, but that looks perfectly normal to me. Though if you're uploading to Youtube you really should apply some basic graphic improvements (fov patch, high detail mod and JK HUD Revamp are all essential IMO).

klappa wrote:

That's the Jedi Knight Enhanced mod that make everything sharper?

Yea the weapons animations and water animation looks like it is 60fps but everything else is not. How can i raise the 30 FPS cap?

Jedi Knight Enhanced is something else.

The cap isn't 30 FPS, but 47, apparently if you don't cap it to 47 it might limit itself to 30.

klappa wrote:

Well i can't check that now but i am pretty certain it ran a lot better on my old system with a ATI Rage card than it does now.

Assuming this benchmark is correct, your memory is faulty:
http://vintage3d.org/rgraph/jedi320ave.php
The ATI rage cards at the time could do 60 FPS stable, but that's on 320x240, most people probably played at 640x480.

Reply 7 of 7, by Osprey

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klappa wrote:

That's the Jedi Knight Enhanced mod that make everything sharper?

He's referring to the High Detail Mod. It forces the game to use its highest quality textures and models at all times, rather than use lower quality versions at medium and long distances. Naturally, this also eliminates "popping" that would ordinarily occur when the game switched between qualities. This mod doesn't add any textures or models to the game, so it improves the game's graphics while still being "vanilla."

Jedi Knight Enhanced replaces some of the game's models (and their textures) with higher quality ones taken from Jedi Knight II. In other words, things like Stormtroopers and the blaster rifle, which both games have, will look as good in JK as they do in JK2.

Jedi Knight Retexture Pack replaces many of the game's textures, mostly textures for surfaces (ex. walls), which aren't covered by JK Enhanced.

If you want the absolute highest quality graphics, apply all three mods. Each one improves things that the other two don't touch. For example, JK Enhanced and JK Retexture Pack do not replace every model and texture, respectively, so the ones that they don't replace will still benefit from the High Detail Mod. Note, though, that JK Enhanced and JK Retexture Pack require the Unofficial Patch (get it from PCGamingWiki.com) to be installed, since they use higher resolutions of textures than the original game executable supports.