VOGONS


First post, by OaklandTower

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First of all, I'm new here so I'd like to say how amazing dgVoodoo is - the resolution force option breathes new life into old games, especially ones with features locked behind lower resolution modes - such as Flight Unlimited II - though I mainly use it for Railroad Tycoon 3 where it increases performance massively, and lets it load high res textures.
In FUII's high-res (1024x768) mode, your plane's radio normally doesn't work and there are no interiors or rain effects, but now I can play in "800x600" mode at 1440x1080 and it looks great - no colour banding either! The performance is also much improved (other than in the menus).

Anyway, the only real problem I have is that no fog or haze effects are rendered in the game when I use dgVooDoo. This can be easily seen in quick flight mode with fog set to "on", haze set to "1 mile", or rain set to "on".

I have attached a cut down version of the game with no ground textures (they are 700mb on their own, all terrain uses the sea texture now) that should be a bit quicker for folks to download and test with. It should work normally on win7 without dgvoodoo if you set compatibility mode to win98 and run as admin (with slowdowns when showing text on screen.). I can delete the link if it is against the rules, but the full game is on abandonware so I hope it's okay.

[removed link] - ~129MB

(Press shift-P to switch to AI planes, F1-F(8?) keys change view, Shift-i returns to player plane, Shift-o switches to nearby objects, Space bar to start composing radio message)

Thanks in advance, dudes.

Last edited by OaklandTower on 2019-06-06, 01:28. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 2, by Dege

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Play this game with an 'old' virtual card type, like Geforce4 / FX5700 or ATI Radeon 8500.
This game renders the scene with exponential w-fog, but causes DirectX to apply z-fog instead (I guess it's the usual lack of setting of the projection matrix).
If I know it correctly, old drivers didn't support z-fog (that's why the game worked on old hardware), so the card types mentioned are forcing w-fog.

Also, this game is continuously writing to the backbuffer by the cpu to render its HUD. This is what dgVoodoo doesn't like too much, so I recommend to enable option 'fast video memory access'. I got much better performance with that.

Reply 2 of 2, by OaklandTower

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Wow! You da man!
That fixes it up a treat! Fog galore! Steady performance! World peace (maybe)!

Silly me - I didn't realise that the old card options made them handle 3d differently as well as limiting memory.

Thanks so much man!