What I can say, based on testing Thief II on real hardware, is that the stars render correctly on the following cards:

• Nvidia TNT2
• 3DFX Voodoo 3
• ATi Radeon 9000, 9550 and 5450
• Matrox G400 and G550
• S3 Savage 4
• VIA UniChrome IGP
• Trident Blade

On the other hand, the stars do not render at all on these cards:

• Nvidia GeForce (the first one) and any later GeForce cards

I can also say that it isn't a driver issue. For example, if I use the same driver version (like 12.41) on a TNT2 and a GeForce 2, the end result doesn't change. Meaning, the TNT2 renders the stars correctly while the GeForce 2 does not.

I should clarify that I'm talking about the retail CD release of Thief II + latest official patch 1.18. The GOG and Steam versions integrate some third-party fixes and mods which correct this. Dege, if you need to reproduce this, you can use my savegame and instructions from here. The important thing is that Sky Detail needs to be set to High under Options.

I must also add that the 'Sky Detail' - Low will actually render the stars, but those stars have always been there and not problematic. The problem is with 'Sky Detail' - High, also seen as 'enhanced_sky 1' in cam.cfg.

I should also add that the stars are there with dgVoodoo2 since 2.42 version, the earliest that I got to work (2.4 crashes with an empty box and 2.41 has a black box in corner). That's impressive because you fixed something that nobody even knows how to cope with.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-12-15, 14:57:

I must also add that the 'Sky Detail' - Low will actually render the stars, but those stars have always been there and not problematic. The problem is with 'Sky Detail' - High, also seen as 'enhanced_sky 1' in cam.cfg.

Yup, I can confirm that Sky Detail = Low renders the (simplified) stars correctly on real (GeForce) hardware as well.

IIRC, the sky becomes completely static at the low setting, meaning that some other elements like the moving clouds also get removed. Basically, the low detail sky looks like it was made in MS Paint. 😁

TBH, I don't have an idea. When you reported it I checked it out and I had the stars on the sky, I didn't make a fix for it.
(And this game has the old DX7 renderer and the DX9 one, I'm not sure if there is difference between the two in this regard.)

Dege wrote on 2022-12-15, 15:56:

TBH, I don't have an idea. When you reported it I checked it out and I had the stars on the sky, I didn't make a fix for it.
(And this game has the old DX7 renderer and the DX9 one, I'm not sure if there is difference between the two in this regard.)

The vanilla game uses the DX7 renderer. I think the GOG version, probably using NewDark mod, uses D3D9 but there are many shortcomings with that.

NewDark mod fixes things for modern PCs, but the problem we have is with the vanilla game. That game, although difficult to get working on a modern machine, can work correctly with the stars, table fog as well as dithering if the driver still has proper support for it (e.g. old Intel).

I assume you kept things fixed since 2.4, since the initial support for D3D5-7. Now this is something no other wrapper, and driver are capable of drawing on screen.

So the question basically is why is it working with dgvoodoo? I mean what weird rendering technique/texture/whatever the game uses to render the stars?

Dege wrote on 2022-12-15, 19:19:

So the question basically is why is it working with dgvoodoo? I mean what weird rendering technique/texture/whatever the game uses to render the stars?

yes

What I found is, the stars don't come from a texture. Each star itself is a one pixel size polygon, so my guess is, if for any reason they don't get drawn at the expected precise coordinate position on any hardware, then the polygons won't include the pixel center which means nothing gets rasterized.