VOGONS


First post, by Bosper

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Good Morning all

The game Demonworld II - dark armies is in and of itself rather an unknown and also rather unpopular game. But I love the game myself and would like to make it work.

So far it works great with dgVoodoo. Only during a certain mission does the game suddenly crash while it is half loaded with the message:

"DirectX Error: 2147024809

DDERR_INVALIDPARAMS
One or more of the parameters passed to the method are incorrect.
(dxDispDev -> GetDirectDraw ()) -> CreateSurface (ddsd, Ipsur, NULL) "

DirectDraw ... the error message is probably related to the DDraw.dll. But I understand practically nothing about that. I already googled the error message but couldn't find a solution. That's why I'm here now ... Help?

Without dgVoodoo, it can load the battle with no problem.
Unfortunately, it becomes unplayable during the battle itself.

I have already tried a wide variety of settings. Unfortunately without success.

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Edit: With dgVoodoo the game would look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D4ECQSqnRY&l … _channel=Bosper

Reply 2 of 14, by Bosper

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Good evening FulValBot

Thank you for your answer.
I tried these settings but unfortunately it didn't work either.

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Reply 5 of 14, by Dege

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This is probably a parameter validation incompatibility between dgvoodoo and MS ddraw.
If you could give a savegame for the mission in question and I could get a copy of the game then I could check and fix it out.

Reply 6 of 14, by Bosper

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Hello Dege

Because of the save that's no problem at all. I can send that to you. However, that would actually not be necessary at all. In addition to the campaign, there are also a few single player missions and some of them don't load either. You don't need any saves there.

Reply 9 of 14, by Dege

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Thanks for your help, I think I solved the problem. I didn't enabled 16k size surfaces for DDraw that's why some factoring method fails for this game.

I'll release a minor patch version some day but till that, try this quickfix:

http://dege.fw.hu/temp/dgVoodoo2_73_DD16k.zip

Reply 10 of 14, by Bosper

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You thank me? You are too humble ^^
Thanks to you, it is now working again! You have my gratitude. I hope the game remains stable now.

But I still have one question. For some reason the font is shown in green in some places like this:

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Should actually be completely normal in black. Do you have any idea why? It's ugly but at least the game is still playable.

And thank you again!

Reply 11 of 14, by ZellSF

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The game doesn't render its own fonts, it relies on Windows to do it. It asks for a black font and relies on Windows to give it that, but fonts in newer versions of Windows are by default rendered using ClearType, which utilizes subpixel rendering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering . The font, which the game expects to be greyscale, actually uses RGB and that messes with either some sort of color keying or paletting the game uses.

Use this to disable ClearType:
https://karpolan.com/software/cleartype-switch/
I also recommend disabling font edge smoothing, it doesn't really look good on low resolutions. For desktop use you should leave both on as text looks much better with ClearType, the above utility has commandline switches so it should be easy to automate using it.

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Reply 13 of 14, by FulValBot

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An option to disable ClearType it's already included in windows 10...

Which other games has a similar problem?

Sometimes a compatibility option to disable ClearType i think that is needed... (in windows)

Reply 14 of 14, by ZellSF

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FulValBot wrote on 2021-03-06, 13:04:

An option to disable ClearType it's already included in windows 10...

Yes, but it's difficult to automate and moves around in different Windows versions, which is why I linked to the utility.

FulValBot wrote on 2021-03-06, 13:04:

Which other games has a similar problem?

Blood 2, The Longest Journey, Midtown Madness, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and Panzer General III are the ones I can remember needs font smoothing disabled, maybe not all for color issues. There's probably a lot of them though.

FulValBot wrote on 2021-03-06, 13:04:

Sometimes a compatibility option to disable ClearType i think that is needed... (in windows)

There is one, IgnoreFontQuality:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/depl … d-windows-vista
It is not exposed to end users.