It would be great if it worked in dgVoodoo2, but out of curiosity: what's wrong with DxWnd?

A number of things. For many players including myself, it doesn't hook on when a game is launched through GameRanger. There's many settings and it's very inconsistent with different players and their setups. If you use a high resolution but a lower one inside TA, it doesn't look very nice.

If TA truly worked and all ESC features worked through a single dll file it would be ideal. It could also be packaged with any further ESC releases, install and play, no messing around! Always the ideal scenario when installing an old game.

Hoping someone, if not Dege, can help with this!

I have no idea for the moment, I should try it myself, to see what's going on. 😖

What are the problems with TA and windows 10?

Dege wrote:

I have no idea for the moment, I should try it myself, to see what's going on. 😖

Yes please 😀

willow wrote:

What are the problems with TA and windows 10?

FPS is locked at 60 and drops massively from there when mulitple units are on the screen. It's somewhat playable until later in games and can quickly become unplayable in team games. You cannot alt + tab, you can but to get back into game, you have to either type a gamma command "+gamma 10" for example, or remember the shortcuts to the options menu to move the gamma slider: F2, O, V, left/right arrow. Sometimes alt + tab will crash the game as well.

As far as Escalation's features, there is a mega map which is a full screen mini map. This suffers a massive FPS drop and randomly crashes the game as well. You can place markers and draw lines. Lines work ok but if you place a marker, FPS drops while it is on the screen and if you add a text label to that marker it drops even more.

None of this was present in Windows 7 and it ran just fine. The TA community is dying for a fix!

Venom wrote:

A number of things. For many players including myself, it doesn't hook on when a game is launched through GameRanger. There's many settings and it's very inconsistent with different players and their setups. If you use a high resolution but a lower one inside TA, it doesn't look very nice.

Couldn't you just package a already set up version of DxWnd to wipe out almost all of those inconsistencies? If DxWnd works great for some people, it's obviously possible to make it work great for everyone. Computers aren't just magically different.

I use a high resolution desktop and a lower resolution in TA, so it wouldn't be ideal for me. Some players all tried the same settings and some of them reported it hooking onto a GameRanger launched game, others reported that it didn't, myself included. I never said computers are "magically different" but there's many variables. Hardware, Windows (and updates?), software installed, registry, nobody knows why it didn't work every time.

Anyway, dgVoodoo would be a far better solution if it would work, that's why I'm here

Again, I realize this is a bit off topic and don't think I'm trying to say this shouldn't be fixed in dgVoodoo2, but I'm sure Dege can scan through this off-topic conversation quickly and see it is irrelevant to him.

But...

A: There really aren't that many variables. Have the really obvious variables here been ruled out (compatibility mode settings for all three programs, running privileges of all three programs, DxWnd profile)?

B: You can mix high resolution desktop and lower resolution in Total Annihilation with DxWnd in two ways, first is sticking to integer scales. If your desktop is 3840x2160, run the game at 1920x1080 (or 960x540, but I get the impression Total Annihilation Escalation does not support this) and tell DxWnd to scale to desktop. Second is using DxWnd's bilinear scaling which got improved a lot in performance like a year ago. It might be a viable option (I get 75 FPS on a high end system when scaling to 2560x1440, but scaling to 3840x2160 dropped FPS to 40). Obviously you can also just temporarily change desktop resolution and let your GPU do the scaling, I can see why you don't want to do that but it's still a perfectly valid option.

I followed the instructions here:

http://taesc.tauniverse.com/?p=faq

But I can only run this game in windowed mode when trying natively. Fullscreen crashes in nVidia driver at launch.
Also, I can only play Skirmish because New Campaign results in an error message (Maps\AC01.TNT).
Somewhere I read that shortcut for megamap is F4 by default but I cannot invoke it (I don't know if it's available in Skirmish).

However, looking at what happens, TotalA.exe loads directly Esc's EDRAW.DLL which relies on DDRAW.DLL. EDRAW always loads DDRAW from the system folder, so I renamed dgVoodoo's DDRAW.DLL to FDRAW.DLL and copied it into \System\SysWOW64\, along with D3DIMM.DLL. Then changed the string 'ddraw.dll' to 'fdraw.dll' inside edraw.dll with a hex editor. 😀

Now EDRAW loads FDRAW, so this way both dgVoodoo and Esc mod is loaded into the process, I can play it in full screen. But I simply cannot invoke mega map, neither way.

It uses TAESC.ini for settings inside TA Escalation folder. I think it's on by default but I will check and confirm this later. Thanks for checking it out

Inside TAESC.ini, try changing this line:

UseVideoMemory=FALSE;
to
UseVideoMemory=TRUE;

That's what stops my game crashing. There's also a "hotfix" dll file on the downloads page which I need to use as well. But whichever file I use, it hooks on to your file, but won't load any of ESC's extra features.

This is the mega map:

FullScreenMinimap = TRUE;

Which seems to be on by default. Mine works but can't get it to work while using your file

Update on this. We tried your idea but with a Dxwnd dll file and it runs super fast. 1300fps for me. All ESC features work. The only thing that doesn't work is alt tab. You can normally get back into game by changing gamma but with this dll it doesn't work. I've disabled my windows key in case I hit it by accident.

So between all these different files, it seems a full fix is possible. Seems there are fixes for different things inside different files?

The GOG version works for me. No problem with alt-tab, no need to replace any files.

Azarien wrote:

The GOG version works for me. No problem with alt-tab, no need to replace any files.

There's some special features in modded versions of the game the base game does not have that's incompatible with dgVoodoo2.

Venom wrote:

So between all these different files, it seems a full fix is possible.

A full fix is already possible with DxWnd with some effort from your side.

If Dxwnd was the solution the community needs, I wouldn't be here. Don't mention it again please

Venom wrote:

If Dxwnd was the solution the community needs, I wouldn't be here. Don't mention it again please

Why not work on implementing a fix that works now (DxWnd) now and eventually move on to dgVoodoo2 whenever it does get support? Doesn't not having a solution in the meantime hurt the player base? Even when (and if) dgVoodoo2 gets support wouldn't it be nice to have an option for people with DX9- GPUs?