Thief 1/2 & SShock 2: DDFix and Enhanced Resolution Patch - discussion - by bikerdude
Slynt on 22/10/2007 at 18:45
^ Precisely. I was actually going to post comparison shots the other day but thought nah, it's so minor, it's not worth making a fuss about! But then I started noticing it more and more. Another good point of comparison are paintings. Check out the brightly lit art gallery in Shipping and Receiving. The paintings looks VERY pixelated close up when using the patch.
Nameless Voice on 22/10/2007 at 19:38
Quote Posted by d'Spair
i don't think that it's SUCH a problem to construct new fan missions even with some crappy colors in the rendering mode
But how are we supposed to tell if our work looks good or not, when everything looks awful?
Also, I would imagine having to stare at your mission looking truly awful for hours would not exactly be an aid to motivation.
d'Spair on 22/10/2007 at 20:43
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
But how are we supposed to tell if our work looks good or not, when everything looks awful?
Also, I would imagine having to stare at your mission looking truly awful for hours would not exactly be an aid to motivation.
Well, you can always run the mission from the game (I mean, thief2.exe) and see it at all its glory. Moreover, as far as i can see from the screenshots posted here (i have never seen that crappy colors bug myself because I own gf6600, though i'm planning to move to GF8 series card soon), this bug makes the game look worse, that's right, but not THAT MUCH worse to make it absolutely unplayable or unmoddable at all.
Anyway, this is better than nothing. And I think that if it's possible to make that kind of a fix for thief2.exe\sshock2.exe, there shouldn't be lots of problems to make one for dromed.exe as well. I may be wrong though.
Nameless Voice on 22/10/2007 at 23:40
Quote Posted by d'Spair
Well, you can always run the mission from the game (I mean, thief2.exe) and see it at all its glory.
Very awkward and unpleasant to do. Imagine having to start the mission in Thief2.exe every time you change a little bit of texturing or lighting, to see how it will look.
Quote Posted by d'Spair
Anyway, this is better than nothing. And I think that if it's possible to make that kind of a fix for thief2.exe\sshock2.exe, there shouldn't be lots of problems to make one for dromed.exe as well. I may be wrong though.
The patch works for DromEd.exe, it just has all the bugs I've already listed.
oneof4 on 23/10/2007 at 02:57
When trying to "Apply Patch" in Vista, I get an "Unhandled Exception" error. It says, "Access to the path 'C:\Program Files\Thief2\Thief2.exe' is denied."
What now?
smithpd on 23/10/2007 at 05:19
Quote Posted by Bikerdude
Software:
(I've forgoten how to get thief to run in software mode)
I believe that is because you never knew.:) There is no software rendering mode in T2. Only in T1. And, in T1, software rendering is horrendous. No comparison.
See my note below about filtering, which may be part of the texture story.
smithpd on 23/10/2007 at 05:33
Quote Posted by Slynt
Here's another good example of the texture problem.
It would help if you described what video card / resolution was used . It would also help to see a full resolution screen shot for context, not just a blow up, which by itself is a little misleading.
It looks like the main difference between the door images in your examples is that a blurring filter is applied to the "before patch" image but there is no filter applied to the "after patch" image. The filter could be antialiasing or anisotropic filtering. FYI, I believe you cannot control those filters from the video card driver after this patch is applied. You need to select the AA and AF options in the ddfix.ini file. Did you do that? These options should be the same, one way another, for an apples vs. apples comparison.
The window grate tearing is definitely something of concern. Do you have high quality textures enabled in the ddfix.ini? If so, kindly uncheck it, try again, and report back. Also, are you running with vsync enabled, and if so how? If vsync is not done properly, that can cause tearing.
bikerdude on 23/10/2007 at 07:22
one thing though to consider....
If DDfix is sharpening the textures, then this would also so mean that when authors use higher res textures that they would look far superior....?
Atm I believe thief blur's any high res textures used by authors (sliptip etc..), ddfix would hopefully allow you to see them in all their glory..?
I may download a sliptip mission to test that theory..
biker
Muzman on 23/10/2007 at 07:50
It's not sharpening by the looks. The 16bit (I want to say dithering, but that's not it) smoothing, or something, on textures looks like it's been turned off.
(I don't know if it's the same thing, but the difference between Quake 2 in hardware and software was that is rendered texture pixels as 'circles' via some sort of distributive algorithm to smooth things out)
Well, this doesn't really go to your point but I just wanted to be clear on sharpening vs not smoothing.
-edit-
And notice how it only seems to be on doors (or off on doors, in those shots so far anyway).
