First post, by alberthamik
I've taken to messing with this game recently, and I've had tons of issues on the actual playing the game front, but for this thread I want to make aware some major graphical issues in the game's 3DFX rendering mode when utilizing dgVoodoo 2. First of all is the fact that for some reason, Gunmetal is very particular about how it detects glide support, and if I go into my dgvoodoo.conf file and change any glide variables like anti-aliasing, suddenly Gunmetal no longer recognizes the glide wrapper dll and reverts to it's software rendering support in the resolution options. I can't seem to really force change the resolution either but admittedly I hadn't experimented too much with resolution support in light of unrelated performance issues owing to the games' timing issues on modern Windows.
However, the major reoccurring issue with Gunmetal's glide rendering that I can be certain is a problem with dgVoodoo itself, is that in a couple levels and anytime you're underwater, the game's special use of what I believe to be vertex fog causes many level geometry textures to be pitch black the closer you get, and apparently, based on a older conversation elsewhere on the nGlide forums I have learned that neither nGlide or dgVoodoo are rendering the fog areas correctly in that instead of radiating out in a circular pattern along surfaces like it's supposed to (apparently), it's instead a blanket effect along the entirety of the screen. nGlide on that note has slightly less problems with Gunmetal on the rendering side of things but causes way more crashes for some reason, so I've been a bit annoyed with my hardware rendering options when playing the game's Windows version. These graphical glitches carry over into the DOS version as well, when I've tested using glide passthrough builds of DOSBox.
There are other rendering issues I've noticed but they actually seem to be inherent to the Gunmetal engine itself, like the handling of reflective water surfaces in certain scenarios. These issues appear in software rendering too, so I doubt they're within the scope of what dgVoodoo can do. It's annoying how these are only the minor issues of Gunmetal being more playable on modern machines. Not sure how to go about fixing the timing issues, because as another VOGONS member learned back in 2014, simply tweaking some hex variables to lower the game's internal refresh rate is not enough, it has other timing variables it needs tweaked. I may need to start a separate thread elsewhere for that.