Wing Commander 4 screen weirdness

[Mincemeat]

Thanks for your suggestions HCl! I don't have a secondard monitor, so that is ruled out. I've tried setting the desktop colour to 16-bit, but it gave the same crash difference.

Please find attached my DxDiag.txt

Please let me know if you need any more information. Thanks!

 

[Mincemeat]

Oh man, my previous post was almost unreadable

I meant to say that I didn't have a secondary monitor or TV, and that setting the desktop colour depth to 16-bit gave the same crash report.

Just wondering - is this dwrap patch similar to ddhack? I recall I could not use get ddhack to work except by calling it from inside another patch.

 

[HCl]

Just wondering - is this dwrap patch similar to ddhack? I recall I could not use get ddhack to work except by calling it from inside another patch.

Yes it is, in fact dwrap used ddhack as a starting point, but it was extensively modified in order to get it to work with WC4DVD (and in order to get it to play along with Dxmci... which, in turn, had to be altered to be aware of some tricks dwrap was doing).

I recall i could not get the original ddhack to run on my XP machines either. I'm curious however, what do you mean by calling it from another patch? You may want to give your solution a try, to see if it helps.

I've been unable to reproduce this issue on my test machines so far, but from your log and some disassembling, I'm trying to get an idea of what is going wrong. In the meantime, here's a new DLL. It mostly adds some debug messages , which are dumped to dwrap_debug.txt as the game runs. Please try running the game with these and post this file. Also, i made a small tweak for good measure, so let me know if anything happens differently (please post the new crash log as well, so I can check for differences).

 

[Mincemeat]

I tried the latest test dlls, the game no longer crashes under OpenGL mode

Most of the time I get a black screen with no image. The game seems to be running - I have audio and it responds to keyboard and mouse clicks. Here's the dwrap_debug.txt when that happened.

One time the game actually displayed, and I played through a mission. The DVD movies played (I can hear the audio) but no image. When it comes to making a cinematic decision, I don't see the text labels either. Here's the wc4_graph.log when that happened.

I hope this helps... really appreciate you hunting through this (it's not like you can just attach a debugger to my computer, although that would be cool)

 

[Mincemeat]

As for the "calling a patch from within another patch", I was referring to this:

https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/ks-wc3-mash-patch-ddhack-success.25428/

I don't think I can do that here

 

[HCl]

Here's something interesting i came across: from the looks of it, there's two versions of the WC4DVD EXE: on of them, is distributed with Pete's WC4CD to DVD patch and the other is distributed with the GOG release. These EXEs are not identical, and some important memory addresses get shifted around a good number of bytes. The dwrap patch does some in-memory patching that will only work with the EXE from GOG's release.

From the crash log and the dwrap_debug information, you do seem to have the wrong EXE in there somehow. If you installed GOG's WC4DVD over a CD-to-DVD converted install, i'd try wiping everything and re-install everything from the GOG package. This way you'll get the correct EXE and DLLs in place.

Let me know if it helps!

 

[Mincemeat]

Aah, it's always the most basic things that catch me out
Turns out I did indeed somehow mix the two installations together. It works fine after a manual delete-and-reinstall. Thanks!

 

[ShepardRahl]

Greetings all. This is specifically for HCI. I'm trying to play the GOG release of WC4 and I was having the same problem as the OP along with severe gameplay lag. I used your "dwrap 1.0.1 test7" and it fixed both problems. Thank you for that. But it also had the added effect of taking the gameplay from 4:3 to full screen - which normally I would be happy about - but it also took the cinematics and compressed them from full screen (actual full screen - not 4:3....it looked great) to letterbox. I didn't know if you were aware of this. Is there the possibility of a fix for this? It would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I tested it on another rig I have that's running Windows 7 and it works perfectly fine as is. The rig I'm having trouble on is running Windows 8. However your patch does fix the majority of the problems. So I do thank you for that. I can work with the game as it is but the cinematics do look a little compressed after applying your patch. They are still watchable. It's not necessarily a priority, but if you could maybe look into it sometime it would be appreciated. If you need anything from me please let me know.

 

[AD]

Yes, because of switching to different video modes the zoom feature that makes the videos full screen is disabled in that latest version, since the problem causing the screen weirdness is a directx/opengl issue.

The original DVD videos - as seen if you watch them independent of the game - are hard-coded in 4:3 aspect ratio with the larger top and bottom black bars. The patch that HCl created that comes with the GOG version basically zooms the video in till it touches the right and left extremities of the monitor which in turn cuts off the useless black space at the top and bottom. This is the note added by HCl starting with ver 4 of the patch:

- ddraw, which uses Direct Draw for rendering. Does not support a good deal of features provided by OpenGL mode (pillarboxing and video adjusting for widescreen mode, etc), although it should still fix the palette issue in Win7 (which is not really an issue for you anyway, since you use XP).