zenmaster891 on 2/4/2009 at 22:28

---

I was trying to get System Shock 2 working on my computer again today and ran into a bit of a problem. I got it installed and working fine as I've done in the past (its been awhile) but I've noticed it just looks really weird/awful. At first I thought it was just the old textures so I installed shtup beta 6 and got the nice sharp textures but things just did not look right. Then I thought maybe it was a monitor problem but I tried another and no difference. I got it running on an older machine with a Radeon 9200 and Windows 2000 and it looks fine, and it helped articulate the problem more clearly. It seems that my game just isn't blending colors correctly or something, particularly in darker, shadowed areas. I have posted two screen shots here because its sort of hard to describe, but you can see how bizarre it looks in the first link, particularly on the wall on the left, the crate, and the floor right in front of the player. That's on my current machine which I recently updated the video card to a GeForce 9800 GTX. I suppose that could be the problem, I skimmed the FAQ and saw something about a psychedelic texture color problem which maybe I need to download older Nvidia drivers for, but it also said something about it being in radiation areas or when using the psi amp, which obviously doesn't apply to the screen shots.

(http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/9761/shock2bad.jpg)
(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/2493/shock2good.jpg)

Does anyone know exactly what this is or how to fix it? I've since removed shtup and reinstalled though thats obviously not the problem. I've played around with the gamma and resolutions and things but no luck. Also the machine with the problem is running XP, not 2000. I dunno...any suggestions?

Edit: Ok I'm stupid and should have researched more extensively before I posted this, I figured out that I thought it was the shadow rendering/dithering problem that DDFix could take care of but then I couldn't get that to work. I finally discovered Kolya's SS2Tool and that took care of everything. One followup question: I downloaded the DDFix GUI and extracted it and ran it and it wouldn't do anything, saying that it couldn't find any DDRAW.DLL in my Shock2.exe. But then when I used the SS2 Tool it appeared to use the exact same thing, but worked perfectly fine. Is the DDFix in the Tool any different from the latest one available for download?

Nameless Voice on 3/4/2009 at 11:09

---

As far as I know, C++ uses the .NET framework too, if you're using Windows Forms. Someone needs to write one using the old MFC framework.

I already wrote one, actually. :)