Thief 1/2 & SShock 2: DDFix and Enhanced Resolution Patch - discussion - by bikerdude
Muzman on 19/10/2007 at 17:29
Quote Posted by Calibrator
"Kidnap" (or "Kidnapped"? - sorry, I've got the German version) is the one where you infiltrate Markham's Isle and later the Mechanist submarine.
is what that one is called (don't know about in German). It's got about the best implimentation of fog and weather in the game so should be goof for testin'.
bikerdude on 19/10/2007 at 17:58
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well I got all the way to the bank in life of the party and saw no fog, so Im assuming thatsd the problem, the new fix dosent render any fog..? Also on my test system celeron 1.6 2gb ddr2400 with the 8800GTX on a PCI-Ex1 slot it was very laggy when compared to the vanillia version of thief.
But that all said its a WIP, so Timeslip will Im sure optimise it and make it better etc.
biker
Timeslip on 19/10/2007 at 20:40
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A simple question: What does this patch exactly?
It tries to work around a couple of nvidia driver issues by wrapping thief's D3D calls and making small adjustments to them.
There are two main issues causing most of the problems. The first is a problem with rendering pre-transformed verticies from system memory with a z value of exactly one, which was responsible for the invisible stars. My patch just checks for any verticies with z >= 1 and sets it to 0.9999 before passing them on to D3D. My guess is that this is a driver bug, because with a bit of proding I could not only get the entire sky to vanish completely, but I could get the light gem to disapear behind nearby walls, even though it's rendered with the zbuffer disabled.
The second is the lack of dithering support, which presumably was a deliberate design decision by nvidia. I fixed that by tricking thief into using a 32 bit render target, so the lack of dithering isn't noticable.
The lack of pallatted texture support isn't an issue for thief 2, because it only uses them as a fallback when 16 bit textures aren't available. Given the choice, the only formats it uses are A1R5G5B5, R5G6B5, A4R4G4B4 and, slightly oddly, A8R8G8B8. The sky was A4R4G4B4, iirc.
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Is thereany problem with me/Timeslip including a "DDFIX'd" thief2.exe in his package, as the hex editing approach is beyond some taffers.. I dont see it as a prob as I believe something similar was done in past for thief gold.....
If you can wait till tomorrow, I'll make an installer/GUI.
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the 7zip-compression is debatable, though
I'm surprised that no-one seems familer with .7z's. .zip may be the most popular format on windows, but .7z and .rar are good runners up. They give
far better compression ratios than .zip, and almost any compression software will open either of them these days.
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- no fog whatsoever (tested with "Life of the Party" and "Kidnapped") !!!
- incredibly slow at 1280x1024 (with 32 bit textures and without, w.o. limiter)
Does a newer driver version (or a GF8) eliminate the problems?
I've definately managed to break fog. I've no idea what's going on there; I can see thief setting all the relevent render states, but they don't seem to be doing anything. I'll have a play with it tomorrow and see if I can find what I've broken.
I have no fps problems; I'm averaging ~100 fps with 8x AA and 16x AF turned on. (I have an E6600, 2GB, 8800 GTS) My patch doesn't put much extra pressure on the video card, but it does do a fair amount of cpu work checking the verticies and blanking a few mb of textures 3 times a frame. I wouldn't have thought it was enough to cause problems, but I'll see what I can do to speed it up.
In any case, 1.0.4 is up. I've added an option to disable AF, (it was always on in the original patch,) and added an option to choose which graphics card to use if you have more than one, because if people have an old graphics card installed to play thief with, my patch could be mistakenly using it instead of the newer one. There are also a couple of other changes that may improve performance, so it might be worth giving it another go.
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There are also some serious issues with particle effects having intermittent black squares around some of their particles, as shown in these screenshots:
I have no problems with particle effects, but from those screenshots it looks like alpha blending is getting turned off. I've added an option to force it on at all times, but I've no idea if it will help.
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In addition, returning from DromEd game mode with the patch applied makes DromEd stuck in always-on-top mode, and trying to move it will cause the title and menu bar to disappear and the editor to get stuck in the top-left corner of the screen.
Try setting fullscreen or windowfix to 0
Nameless Voice on 19/10/2007 at 21:23
Sorry, I forgot to mention: it crashes instantly if AA is enabled. The default in your ini was 8. I also set windowfix to zero, but it doesn't seem to cause problems either way.
Setting Windowed=0 solves the problem of DromEd being forced into the top-left corner on return from game mode, but does not fix the always-on-top problem.
Also, it means that game mode is running in a window, of course. :erg:
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;Set to 1 to fix the duel core related crash
DuelCoreFix=1
That should be 'dual core'.
EDIT:
I get this with the new version:
(
http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/8369/screenshot6si0.jpg)
Inline Image:
http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/8369/screenshot6si0.th.jpg(The very start of
Life of the Party)
WET on 20/10/2007 at 02:32
This is excellent news indeed!
Coincidentally, I'd just started working on a similar tack with T1G but Timeslip is waaaay ahead of me on the power curve.
@Timeslip: Any chance of sharing the source code so that we can see the techniques being used? Along the same lines, how are you debugging all of this? I've been painstakingly single-stepping using a remote IDA Pro session but it sounds like you have some higher level tools to see the DirectDraw and D3D stuff directly. PM me if you've got the time and inclination.
Either way, thanks for everything!!!
Muzman on 20/10/2007 at 04:37
I have had Shocked get stuck on top after exiting game mode of late. Perhaps the patch isn't to blame.
(Which reminds me, I could actully try this out)
Muzman on 20/10/2007 at 05:40
Haha. Looking at Thief2.exe in the first free hex editor I could find shows no instances of ddraw.dll (or DDRAW.dll, or DDRAW.DLL) anywhere in the file. Quite a few other dlls get mentioned though.
Oh well, guess I'm out of this game.
smithpd on 20/10/2007 at 06:01
A few more things to report with the DDFIXed version.
Like others, I have no fog. No fog but beautiful stars.:) I test fog in the FM Swamped. The original EXE has proper fog.
EDIT: This is a false alarm. The original EXE fails too.
When hitting escape to quit the briefing movie before Casing the Joint, the DDXFIXed version crashes about half the time and works about half the time. The original EXE quits the movie correctly all the time, so far.
I installed the latest DX 9.C update to get that missing DDL, and now the screenshots work fine. It's very convenient to have the JPGs directly. I did not know that when you installed a DX version updates were provided later that did not bump the version number. I suggest you point this out in the installation instructions.
On a lark, I tried patching Thief Gold with this DDFIX, under the theory that invoking a better DLL would not hurt. It ran OK, but the light gem and the image of the selected weapon disappear behind game textures at a horizontal plane, like a setting sun, when you look down below horizontal.
EDIT: This is wrong. It is masks that has the rain. I was confused by the rain sound and the dry pavement.
I have had a problem ever since buying my 7950 GT that the rain at the start of Casing the Joint did not display, nor does the water in the starting pond display. I do have weather turned on. I was hoping that the DDFIX would correct that, but it didn't. I have lack of rain with two driver versions (84.56 and 163.71 and with the original EXE and the DDFIX EXE.
smithpd on 20/10/2007 at 06:37
Quote Posted by Abysmal
There is no rain or water (or fog) in Casing the Joint, that's saved for Masks. The water sound in the starting pool of CtJ is a known bug.
Thanks! LOL:) You are quite right. I went on to Masks and found rain but no fog with the DDFIX version. Glad to get that squared away. Sorry for the false alarm.
Also, I had the original EXE crash on hitting ESC from a movie, so guess it is not unique to DDFIX but was only bad luck.
That leaves fog as the only real issue for me now.
