ddhack final - wc1-3ks, wc4cd support

Hi,

I am the person that decided to work on this, since Jari has ran out of time working on this. I set up a SVN on Google Code (link is on sol's site) and started to fix up the remaining bugs I found as well as extending it to other games.

Maybe the black/blue space could become another user option.
Click to expand...

Already added (a ignore aspect ratio option is added). I need to redo the config system though. Would be nice to also allow stretching to higher resolutions (could be done by those image scalers or even fragment/pixel shaders?)...Though I might need to make the texture allocation more robust, or possibly even allow non-power of two textures, if your video card supports it.

Though the biggest issue now really, is some games expect higher resolutions then 640x480, so I need to change the rendering to allow dynamically changed resolutions...Which is a whole can of worms in itself. Plus per game patching to patch any data that any game expects..
 
The color problem with older Windows games on new Windows versions can be solved most of the time when you kill explorer.exe and *run the game executable directly from the task manager.

* File->New Task


It's explorer.exe who tries to reset the color palette on games that use 256 colors. Even if the game runs full screen.
 
That is not a true fix.

It does not fix the underlying bugs Windows Vista+Windows 7 and DirectDraw share.
Emulating pallete operations and blitting via another API, like this wrapper, fixes it properly.
 
I can confirm this works with the CD version, but not the DVD version. Has something to do with the way the cinematics are loaded between gameplay, the game appears to crash every time it goes to load up a movie.

For now, I'm just using the trick with closing explorer.exe, and then opening it again after I close the game.
 
Yes, DDHack doesn't quite work with the WC4 DVD. However, if you buy it from GOG (it's only 6 bucks) it runs with a derivative of DVD hack that was designed to work with the DVD and to run in Win7. I don't think the patch is available separately yet but we will likely eventually post one for people that want to use their existing DVDs.
 
I found that if the game is run windowed, there are no palette problems at all, game is perfect. But this results in a 640x480 window on a 1920x1080 desktop... I'm thinking about just lowering the desktop resolution when I want to play WC4, much easier than killing explorer.exe (which is not even a trouble-free solution).
 
Well for the most part it's trouble free, but I get another issue where parts of the hud blink in and out. Then after I restart explorer.exe, some of my programs (like anti-virus and EVGA Precision) are no longer visible and I have to restart them. But I just lower my desktop resolution to 800x600, and run in windowed mode. It's not perfect either, sometimes the mouse cursor disappears. A few alt-tabs fixes it.
 
How sad to see nobody ever worked on making this hack even better.

I have reported some bugs to the Wiki repository but there's not been any activity there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top