VOGONS


First post, by DaLeX97

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Hi, dege and the dgVoodoo team!

Recently I installed Rainbow Six Rogue Spear on my Windows 7 PC, and so far, the process was quite simple. The game installed normally, I was able to patch it without problems, and I can run the game. However, there are a few issues that I've been trying so hard to solve these past couple of days, and so far I had no luck.

I have written down my experience trying to run the game here: https://rentry.co/9af3q

You only need to focus your attention on the DXWRAPPERS section of the document, so feel free to ignore the other sections, except this part:

Running the game normally as an admin and under Win98 compatibility, and without any third-party tools ---- I get some weird graphical bugs like the main menu having some shadow overlay / ghosting issue. The screen in the game starts "shaking" / flickering. But on the bright side, the game does run smoothly with high FPS.

So, there are two problems that I'm facing in this game:
Main menu shadow overlay / ghosting, and in-game flickering / glitching

So far, from the couple of wrappers that I tried, they either: fix both problems that I have, but induce FPS drops (like dgVoodoo), or fix one problem but the FPS is untouched, like DDrawCompat.

I've noticed that when I use your wrapper, both problems are solved, but my game runs at low FPS (40 or less).

So, instead of talking more about this let me show you how the vanilla game looks like: https://youtu.be/FYF7GNzbTFo

(I'm sorry for sloppy recording, it's hard to play the game in one hand and record in the other)

Anyway, this is how the game looks like when run without any wrappers. If I try to record the game with OBS, it looks totally different, even tho what I recorded with my phone is exactly how I see it when I play the game. Here's a link to the OBS video: https://youtu.be/RGCQmaupe3c

As you can see when the game starts, there is that main menu issue I was talking about, if I click on any of the buttons in the main menu (Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Training, Options, etc.) and come back, the problem seems to be gone, although temporarily.

In-game, when I play you can see how the textures "flicker", how it looks like there is a double image, as can be seen with the shooting targets in the training map.

When I'm done playing and come back to the main menu, the same ghosting issues appear.

Now, when I use dgVoodoo2, both problems are fixed but the FPS has issues. Here's a video on it: https://youtu.be/cNH9mb7yhAo (sorry for not enabling speakers)

Strangely enough, if I record with OBS, I get a flickering black box with audio from the game playing: https://youtu.be/v4T4heiJyvk

Extracting the other .dll files doesn't make a difference, as I've stated back in this document under the DXWRAPPERS section.

One more thing that I noticed is that if I enable"Fast video memory access" within dgVoodoo2 Control Panel, it makes the game's FPS drop insanely low and the game stutters like crazy (4-5 FPS).

Oddly, the MSI Afterburner / Rivatuner works only with dgVoodoo, but not with any other DXWrapper, I don't know why that is.

Anyway, that's it from me. I apologize for making such a long thread, I was hoping I could give you as much info as possible to help me see where the problem lies, and hopefully fix this problem. Nonetheless, thanks for reading this far, if you did 😀

Cheers!

Reply 1 of 9, by Choum

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Hello,

I also play rogue Spear on windows 10.
I recommend to rename the RogueSpear.exe to something else like Rspear.exe to avoid windows to apply compatibility setting on it which prevent the game to run on my system.
You do not need to use any win98 compatibility or admin right on the exe to play, I also don't limit the CPU core.
I limit the game to 60fps in dgvoodoo2 to avoid weird stuff (those old game were not really designed to run at high fps)
I do not have the flickering you have in the menu.
Which resolution setting are you using in the game ?

Reply 3 of 9, by DaLeX97

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Choum wrote on 2022-01-19, 07:47:
Hello, […]
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Hello,

I also play rogue Spear on windows 10.
I recommend to rename the RogueSpear.exe to something else like Rspear.exe to avoid windows to apply compatibility setting on it which prevent the game to run on my system.
You do not need to use any win98 compatibility or admin right on the exe to play, I also don't limit the CPU core.
I limit the game to 60fps in dgvoodoo2 to avoid weird stuff (those old game were not really designed to run at high fps)
I do not have the flickering you have in the menu.
Which resolution setting are you using in the game ?

Hello Choum!

I don't play Rogue Spear on Windows 10, but rather on Windows 7.
Renaming "RogueSpear.exe" to something else does not do anything, because if I rename the exe, and run the game, the game basically runs the same as without any compatibility settings which I noted here: https://rentry.co/9af3q

"Game runs normally, except the mouse sensitivity for some reason goes up. Visual glitches in the main menu and the flickering in the in-game maps are still present"

The resolution I play at is the default 640x480, if I change it to any other the problems I have are still there. The only change I see is my HUD changing to a small size with text hard to read, which is the reason I play at this resolution 😁

Also, how do I limit the FPS to 60 with dgVoodoo2? I can't see an option for it.

ZellSF wrote on 2022-01-19, 08:37:

Try setting dgVoodoo's output to D3D12, for the FPS problem.

I can't change it to D3D12. The most I can change it is to D3D11, and just to be clear this is talking about the "Outuput API" within the general tab? The setting is already set at "Best available one"

I don't know why I can't change it to D3D12, I have GTX 980 Ti, which does support DX12, so maybe it's an OS issue?

Reply 6 of 9, by DaLeX97

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FulValBot wrote on 2022-01-19, 19:26:

Dx12 are available for windows 7 too... (not the same build i think)

Really, how? Also, does anyone know how can I limit games FPS, for example to 60 as Choum did? Is it just "Force vSync" option?

Reply 7 of 9, by Dege

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Sorry for the late respond.

Earlier I got a bug report about Rainbow Six Rouge Spear Urban Operations which I also fixed, but meanwhile I noticed the FPS drops there as well (altough not that dramatically like in your case).
The reason is known, GPU-rendered buffers are accessed by the CPU from the game side, that's what dgVoodoo typically hates and isn't that good at handling it performance-wise, but it isn't a problem with pure sw rendering (though maybe that's why the game is broken even under Win7).
I did a lot of improvements for this type of API driving pattern for other games like Icewind Dale II, or AvP2 (LithTech engine games are terrible in this aspect), even for Urban Operations, but it proved to be unsatisfactory in general.
The only thing I could do is explore the buffer usage in the game and add further heuristics to dgVoodoo to handle that, if possible (I'm not sure).
Till that, I was going to suggest fast-vidmem-access because that can improve such situations... but not in this case.

D3D12 won't really help this problem (except if you play the game on an iGPU with unified memory architecture).
Btw, dgVoodoo cannot use D3D12 on Win7 because only the x64 version of D3D12 is backported to Win7.

Reply 8 of 9, by DaLeX97

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Dege wrote on 2022-01-23, 18:49:
Sorry for the late respond. […]
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Sorry for the late respond.

Earlier I got a bug report about Rainbow Six Rouge Spear Urban Operations which I also fixed, but meanwhile I noticed the FPS drops there as well (altough not that dramatically like in your case).
The reason is known, GPU-rendered buffers are accessed by the CPU from the game side, that's what dgVoodoo typically hates and isn't that good at handling it performance-wise, but it isn't a problem with pure sw rendering (though maybe that's why the game is broken even under Win7).
I did a lot of improvements for this type of API driving pattern for other games like Icewind Dale II, or AvP2 (LithTech engine games are terrible in this aspect), even for Urban Operations, but it proved to be unsatisfactory in general.
The only thing I could do is explore the buffer usage in the game and add further heuristics to dgVoodoo to handle that, if possible (I'm not sure).
Till that, I was going to suggest fast-vidmem-access because that can improve such situations... but not in this case.

D3D12 won't really help this problem (except if you play the game on an iGPU with unified memory architecture).
Btw, dgVoodoo cannot use D3D12 on Win7 because only the x64 version of D3D12 is backported to Win7.

Thanks, Dege for the response! I don't mind it being late.

Anyway, judging by what you've said, is there any hope this problem will be solved or is it a lost cause (at least for W7)?

If there's anything I could do (e.g. provide log files, try out different methods, etc.), let me know. I'd really like to get this game working under stable FPS, but so far all the methods that I've tried proved fruitless, so if there's anything I can do to help you in solving this issue, let me know.

Thanks for all your work on dgVoodoo2 by the way, it's an amazing program 😁

Reply 9 of 9, by Dege

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Whether it's a lost cause or not, I don't know yet. It needs a lot of debugging.
I should have a look at the game myself, or rely on Urban Operations which I already have.

Unfortunately I don't know when I'll have time for that, so, all I can say is don't expect a fix very soon. 😐