Dege wrote:

However, I have no problems with JK -windowgui. It starts nice within a windowed menu screen in that case.

Starting the game works fine for me as well however when I load a level/enter 3D mode and then go back to the menu it crashes. I think it didn't do that when I started testing 2.41 or at least not always so it might be that something changed on my end.

Hmm... I never try games in multiplayer mode because configuring them for MP always looks complicated (to me). I guess this game […]
Show full quote

Hmm... I never try games in multiplayer mode because configuring them for MP always looks complicated (to me).
I guess this game does not work for you with native DX, but somehow it should be seen if fps drop has something to do with dgVoodoo.
One general thing that can be checked: if fps drops less with lower resolutions than higher ones then it has a good chance that it's rendering related.
I'm not sure, but if multiplayer mode uses network communication then even a "bad" network handling with high implicit time-delaying can cause fps drop.

JK's network coding is somewhat of a relic at this point, and lag times are slightly above the average these days. With some decent internet, everyone usually pings 100ms to 250ms within north America. Even with 12 players in a game, network speed stays consistent. I am sure graphics rendering is not linked to network transmissions in any way with JK, so in my opinion the problem must be the renderer. Additionally, JK's player models aren't very complex and likely do not put a huge strain on the engine. In the past, we have had 12 players in a very highly detailed map, and all machines were holding a steady 60+ fps everywhere in the map with fantastic lag times. This was when everyone used the old ddraw.dll and catalyst 13.1 drivers, but there have been a few reports of bad fps drops with dgvoodoo. The only downside I found while using that old method was the color quality. 16 bit color in the game seemed to have less color information when compared to dgvoodoo. I really love the way dgvoodoo renders the full color quality in JK which is why I would love to keep using it with my AMD video card. Thanks for everything! 😀

BeefCaike wrote:

JK's network coding is somewhat of a relic at this point, and lag times are slightly above the average these days. With some decent internet, everyone usually pings 100ms to 250ms within north America. Even with 12 players in a game, network speed stays consistent. I am sure graphics rendering is not linked to network transmissions in any way with JK, so in my opinion the problem must be the renderer. Additionally, JK's player models aren't very complex and likely do not put a huge strain on the engine. In the past, we have had 12 players in a very highly detailed map, and all machines were holding a steady 60+ fps everywhere in the map with fantastic lag times. This was when everyone used the old ddraw.dll and catalyst 13.1 drivers, but there have been a few reports of bad fps drops with dgvoodoo. The only downside I found while using that old method was the color quality. 16 bit color in the game seemed to have less color information when compared to dgvoodoo. I really love the way dgvoodoo renders the full color quality in JK which is why I would love to keep using it with my AMD video card. Thanks for everything! 😀

Slowdowns in mp games with an increasing number of players are often cpu related. I did a few tests and cpu load seems to be a bit higher in JK with dgVoodoo compared to running the game in native mode. What cpu do you have?

BTW you can still play JK with latest drivers by using atiumdag.dll.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/32380/discussio … 57366680893679/

Dege, one game you could look at is Grand Prix 3; on my graphics card in hardware mode it runs really slowly (press O for occupancy) with many polygons missing/flickering on-and-off, the sort of issues shown here: http://www.grandprixgames.org/read.php?1,1069659

With your wrapper so far you can navigate the menus (though they run in a window!) but it crashes when the game loads, regardless of whether you choose software or hardware rendering.

FYI software works fine.

p.s. I have to apply some compatibility mode (even just Win8) to make the game work on my PC, otherwise it's just black screen when starting, instead of video.

I'm sure Wipeout XL "worked" at some point, but it crashes in 2.4. What are the chances you still have the WIP builds Dege?

I'm sure Wipeout XL "worked" at some point, but it crashes in 2.4. What are the chances you still have the WIP builds Dege?

I have them, just uploaded them back to the server.
http://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodooWIP.zip
http://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodooWIPScaling.zip

Wipeout is a DX2/3 games so it won't work with 2.4 but it has a good chance it works with the wip versions because they support DX3 and do not contains the bug causing messed up ingame polygons. (yesterday I fixed that)
Does it crash at some point?

Dege, one game you could look at is Grand Prix 3; on my graphics card in hardware mode it runs really slowly (press O for occupancy) with many polygons missing/flickering on-and-off, the sort of issues shown here: http://www.grandprixgames.org/read.php?1,1069659

With your wrapper so far you can navigate the menus (though they run in a window!) but it crashes when the game loads, regardless of whether you choose software or hardware rendering.

OK, I will check that.
Currently I'm struggling with Colin McRae, the way its menu screens programmed is a disaster IMO, works only corrupted even with native DX.
I never tought someone on the Earth drew to a paletted surface by the 3D pipeline and that hardwares allowing that existed. 😵

Dege wrote:

I have them, just uploaded them back to the server. http://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodooWIP.zip http://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodooWIPScaling.zip […]
Show full quote

I'm sure Wipeout XL "worked" at some point, but it crashes in 2.4. What are the chances you still have the WIP builds Dege?

I have them, just uploaded them back to the server.
http://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodooWIP.zip
http://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodooWIPScaling.zip

Wipeout is a DX2/3 games so it won't work with 2.4 but it has a good chance it works with the wip versions because they support DX3 and do not contains the bug causing messed up ingame polygons. (yesterday I fixed that)
Does it crash at some point?

Oh I was just sure it worked at some point and wanted to tell you which build it worked with so you knew where the regression (?) was, but if you fixed it so I'm guessing you know 😜

2.40 crashes at starting the game, most likely because of lack of DX3 support.

Edit: fun unintentional effect of forcing fullscreen with dgVoodoo2 in Populous 3: it fixes a bug where the game minimizes itself at level load if the resolution is 1280x720 or above. It's not a bug with dgVoodoo2, the same happens natively and with DXGL, dgVoodoo2 is just the only way I've found to fix it.

I only fixed the messed up polygons. Other than that, this game does not crash for me with any version (ok, didn't try with 2.4).

Those Win8 crashes are looking more and more strange to me.
Just tried quickly Grand Pri3 and it does not crash for me in Win7. It's true that ingame rendering does not work correctly but the game does not crash.

I'm just pondering on what the difference could be between Win7 and 8 in this respect.

Software mode in XWA works now however part of the text seems to be cut off.

Dege wrote:

So, it's the same as with 2.41? I'm not sure if it's a Win8 issue, or you are using an other than original version of the game, maybe?

Dege wrote:

Those Win8 crashes are looking more and more strange to me.
Just tried quickly Grand Pri3 and it does not crash for me in Win7. It's true that ingame rendering does not work correctly but the game does not crash.

I'm just pondering on what the difference could be between Win7 and 8 in this respect.

When you mentioned other versions, I rolled Midtown Madness 2 back to 1.0, the version straight out of the CD-ROM. It works even though I can see through parts of cars that are supposed to be black. Also the game crashes a lot, now even before the game gets loaded!

We're on to something here. I share your suspicion that something about Windows 8/8.1 crashes dgVoodoo 2, perhaps even DXGL and WineD3D in my case. Windows 8/8.1 is either missing something from Vista/7 or has a new feature that gets in wrappers' ways, or even both. It could also be my own PC.

tgomola wrote:

A little offtopic here, I've got this game running smoothly in Windows 8 by putting Wine libraries in its main folder.

I would like to give this a shot. How did you do that?

There is a difference in DDRAW between Win7 and Win8/8.1: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/post.php? … 77&post=1202630
But not sure this affects Dege's work.

ShakirBB wrote:

I would like to give this a shot. How did you do that?

Download this file: http://www.mediafire.com/download/v1m8m2vhr3g … D_different.zip. It contains several versions of Wine libraries compiled to work under Windows. Pick a folder - "Wine D3D 1.6rc4" for example, copy all of its content and paste it into Midtown Madness 2 main directory. It should do the trick.

I'm not sure which version I've used, so I guess you'll have to try different ones and see which one works best.

teleguy wrote:

Slowdowns in mp games with an increasing number of players are often cpu related. I did a few tests and cpu load seems to be a bit higher in JK with dgVoodoo compared to running the game in native mode. What cpu do you have?

BTW you can still play JK with latest drivers by using atiumdag.dll.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/32380/discussio … 57366680893679/

I am running an Intel i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz so CPU shouldn't a problem. I ended up busting down to Catalyst 13.1 drivers last night so we could play a big CTF game. Once I did that, I got a steady 60fps in the whole game with 8 players. Another player in the game who was also running dgvoodoo reported he was only getting 11 - 14fps, and he couldn't play until he went to 13.1. I heard about using 13.1's atiumdag.dll for the latest drivers, but it didn't work for me. Maybe I did something wrong. I'll give it another try... thanks for the info! 😀

My goodness, it worked! Thank you for your fix, teleguy! Last time I tried the atiumdag.dll fix, I must have overlooked the "remove the ddraw.dll" part of your description. It works for me now! Thank you so much!

dgVoodoo can ALMOST run Interstate '82... gets to menus and plays the videos, doesn't show video devices and resolutions in the video options though 🙁

WAHEY, it works! Thank you tgomola!

WineD3D 1.6rc4 works, although cars are missing in the car selection menu and that un-dithered 16-bit colour looks dreadful. All I could see when my car started spewing black smoke was a big black blob on my screen. Keyboard, mouse and joystick inputs respond with reasonably low latency and frame rates at 1600x1200 are high until rendered polygon counts skyrocket, which is normal for Midtown Madness 1 and 2.

I still hope to figure out what it is about Windows 8.1 that kills dgVoodoo 2.

WAHEY, it works! Thank you tgomola!

I was curious if it works for you to see if undefinitely dgVoodoo2 is the problem or not.
I too tried MM2 with WineD3D 1.6rc and it works without any problem, as dgV2.

So now I don't know what to say, because you still have rendering problems even with WineD3D. Either we are using different version of executables, or something with your system, or don't know. 😐

dgVoodoo can ALMOST run Interstate '82... gets to menus and plays the videos, doesn't show video devices and resolutions in the video options though 🙁

Indeed... Not a problem, put on the TODO list.

BTW, I fixed Colin McRae Rally, but need some additional development to have the solution in its final form. 😎

There is a difference in DDRAW between Win7 and Win8/8.1: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/pos ... st=1202630
But not sure this affects Dege's work.

We discussed about that earlier with Lowenz, that dont affect me.

Another player in the game who was also running dgvoodoo reported he was only getting 11 - 14fps, and he couldn't play until he went to 13.1.

Have any issue been reported from an nVidia user? It very seems an AMD driver problem.

Software mode in XWA works now however part of the text seems to be cut off.

Will check it!

Dege wrote:

Indeed... Not a problem, put on the TODO list.

I forgot to say it'll crash if you attempt to play, with an invisible crash window.

Without dgVoodoo it'll just crash when you try to launch it at all.

Dege wrote:

Have any issue been reported from an nVidia user? It very seems an AMD driver problem.

Yes, it is definitely an AMD issue. Everyone who plays JK with NVidia has no probs.

ShakirBB wrote:

WineD3D 1.6rc4 works, although cars are missing in the car selection menu and that un-dithered 16-bit colour looks dreadful. All I could see when my car started spewing black smoke was a big black blob on my screen.

That's weird, I don't have any of these problems... Maybe try an older version of Wine? Anyway, I'm glad I could help 😀