Great to hear that. Looking at the screenshot, this looks like a blend of dgVoodoo2 and Native Ramp, a white to blue color transformation from left to right. whatever may be, these results are definitely encouraging. I will test on Win98 again go see if this phenomena is repeated
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Here is the new build with cull mode option.
The new tweak to enable the tunnel inner texture is "d3d:CullModeOff".
The good news is that the tweak works perfectly on both game executable files. In attach the picture from the Tunnel level 1 with 3DSR.EXE (note the sunset sky).
Ok we are getting close. I attached screenshots from Win98 as well. The blue color should be on both sides instead of white to blue... (or it should be white on both sides?)
Congratulations, this is a significant achievement. If you look at the native Ramp images, you can see that the color transitions in the tunnel are there as well, and matching the lighting and shadow.
There is a great variability of effects in the inside of the tunnel. This should be not surprising, it is probably due to the lack of specifications that every card / driver / system interprets with a different default reaction.
In my opinion, the situation is this: the tunnel is drawn with a single texture of white concrete and there must be some blue light that colors it. The lack of cull specification made the inside become transparent and the light effect seems to depend heavily on the video card.
In these two screenshots I got close to the left and right side of the tunnel. You can see the very same grainy texture, but colored in white on the left and in blue on the right.
I don't think there's more to fix here: the matter is that this game is probably rendered in different ways depending on the video card even in its original native version.
I just ran the Cull tweak in Windows 7. Without this tweak, the tunnel is blue, but with the tweak, it's just the white to blue transforming color as in Windows 10/11. I think @huh2 sent the wrong screenshots.
Also the behaviour matches Windows 95-Windows 7. So I find it hard to believe it was something as a major change. There must be something else more...
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I disabled all textures with the "3D / Disable texture" flag and you can clearly see that there must be a blue light that is responsible for the blue shade inside the tunnel.
I sent good pictures. I clearly wrote that it is a native Ramp ie, no new flags. I wanted to point out the alternation of light and shadow in the tunnel.
Here are pictures from a native launch in WinXP with an Ati Radeon 3000 graphics card. Notice there are no shadows.
@ghotik@huh2 Okay I can verify these images look proper. Maybe the driver or Win7 ddraw was broken. I'll test on Winxp and verift as well when I get home
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Be aware that the final effect could depend both on the software (the OS, the ddraw release) and the hardware (the video card, its drivers and its capabilities).
For instance, in Huh's WinXP screenshot what's missing is not the light (otherwise the tunnel wouldn't be blue) but rather a correct diffusion of the light depending on the distance. Apparently, that system can define a colored light, but it's not able to diffuse it (I hope I'm using the correct terms, but probably I'm not ...)
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@ghotik 's Windows 11 experiment RGB+noCULL on my Windows XP, 7, 11 matched
Basically what I am seeing is Windows 98, XP and 7 are having the exact same result ON RAMP. Even my VMware driver, which has different architecture for Windows 7 and XP behave the same. My Windows 98, with two different GPUs present exactly the same thing. @huh2 also probably has tried on ATI 3000 on XP and GeForce 400 card (where did I see that?) and achieved the exact same result.
Bringing DxWnd into the force, everyone's result matches with noCULL, as I explained above. But they don't necessarily match the non-DxWnd result, and is quite safe to say after multiple hardware tests, ARE NOT HW OR OS<7 DEPENDANT.
At this point, I am probably asking too much. How do you make noCULL color transition to match the result with RAMP, something which hasn't been possible? This was discovered by @huh2 and experimented by me and matched above.
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2022-08-12
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It's not clear to me what is your target.
So far, I saw that all the effects are a combination of two variables:
1) texture visible (CULLMODENONE) or transparent (cull mode not specified)
2) blue light shading supported or not supported
and we got all of them. The only impossible case seems a non-shaded blue light (so, with fixed color and intensity) when the shading is supported.
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Well, I mounter a game RIP + crack from Razor1911, this is the comment in his ,nfo file:
Unzip CRACK.ZIP (contained in first disk) into the game directory
So, I suppose that the game may have some further protection in addition of the file checks and in this case the Virtual CD is no help.
Let me try an experiment ...
Last edit: gho 2023-01-13
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I made a quick test and this is what happened: I have the Avast Antivirus that implements a quick sandbox to test the program will, then if everything is ok it re-runs the program from the beginning outside the sandbox. When I start the game with DxWnd I get a fullscreen CD protection screen (see picture), but when the AV has finished and released the program, then I see the game running perfectly with the fake CD. So my guess is that the fake CD is working, but probably your AV is interfering with the initial File operations and the fake CD is ignored. The logs could tell more, perhaps.
The game searches in all CD drives (GetDriveTypeA: ret=0x5(DRIVE_CDROM)) until it finds F:\ that is my fake CD drive. In there it checks again that it is not possible to create a file (CreateFileA: FileName="DATADATA.DAT" ) and if the operation fails with the proper error code then it opens the texture file (CreateFileA: FileName="steel\textures\psb.sdf" ).
It is possible that the game doesn't poll other CD drivers after the first one. If you still have failures you may try to set the "Hide empty CDRom drives" flag.
Anyway the dxwnd logs should clarify what's wrong.
Last edit: gho 2023-01-13
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Here is the log from DxWnd 2.05.86.rc1.build, where I tried it last time. Disabling antivirus had no effect.
Enabling the Hide empty CDROM Drives flag also had no effect on the problem.
I'll give it another try with the new version of DxWnd.
Update:
It is the same with version 2.05.92.rc6.
It works with my VirtualCD, but not with FakeCD.
In the log file 2.5.92.rc6.log there's no FAKECDDRIVE flag. Probably you made the same mistake that sometimes I do, you set the CD drive letter and path but you forgot to set the flag in the checkbox to the left.
Anyway I saw some oddities that I should fix, though they should not interfere with the behavior (I got the same errors in my logs).
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The new log tells that the CD control has passed successfully and then the game has blitted something for a while, I presume until you killed or terminated it. What was the final effect? Maybe a black screen? The log shows no errors, so I trust you when you say it didn't work, but the log doesn't help.
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Great to hear that. Looking at the screenshot, this looks like a blend of dgVoodoo2 and Native Ramp, a white to blue color transformation from left to right. whatever may be, these results are definitely encouraging. I will test on Win98 again go see if this phenomena is repeated
Here is the new build with cull mode option.
The new tweak to enable the tunnel inner texture is "d3d:CullModeOff".
The good news is that the tweak works perfectly on both game executable files. In attach the picture from the Tunnel level 1 with 3DSR.EXE (note the sunset sky).
Last edit: gho 2022-08-11
Ok we are getting close. I attached screenshots from Win98 as well. The blue color should be on both sides instead of white to blue... (or it should be white on both sides?)
Congratulations, this is a significant achievement. If you look at the native Ramp images, you can see that the color transitions in the tunnel are there as well, and matching the lighting and shadow.
Are these Screnshots with no culling enabled. How is mine and ghos culling effect color on left diff from you
There is a great variability of effects in the inside of the tunnel. This should be not surprising, it is probably due to the lack of specifications that every card / driver / system interprets with a different default reaction.
In my opinion, the situation is this: the tunnel is drawn with a single texture of white concrete and there must be some blue light that colors it. The lack of cull specification made the inside become transparent and the light effect seems to depend heavily on the video card.
In these two screenshots I got close to the left and right side of the tunnel. You can see the very same grainy texture, but colored in white on the left and in blue on the right.
I don't think there's more to fix here: the matter is that this game is probably rendered in different ways depending on the video card even in its original native version.
... and a snowy tunnel: different texture and white light!
No I believe there's something else as well.
I just ran the Cull tweak in Windows 7. Without this tweak, the tunnel is blue, but with the tweak, it's just the white to blue transforming color as in Windows 10/11. I think @huh2 sent the wrong screenshots.
Also the behaviour matches Windows 95-Windows 7. So I find it hard to believe it was something as a major change. There must be something else more...
I disabled all textures with the "3D / Disable texture" flag and you can clearly see that there must be a blue light that is responsible for the blue shade inside the tunnel.
I sent good pictures. I clearly wrote that it is a native Ramp ie, no new flags. I wanted to point out the alternation of light and shadow in the tunnel.
Here are pictures from a native launch in WinXP with an Ati Radeon 3000 graphics card. Notice there are no shadows.
Last edit: huh 2022-08-12
@ghotik @huh2 Okay I can verify these images look proper. Maybe the driver or Win7 ddraw was broken. I'll test on Winxp and verift as well when I get home
Be aware that the final effect could depend both on the software (the OS, the ddraw release) and the hardware (the video card, its drivers and its capabilities).
For instance, in Huh's WinXP screenshot what's missing is not the light (otherwise the tunnel wouldn't be blue) but rather a correct diffusion of the light depending on the distance. Apparently, that system can define a colored light, but it's not able to diffuse it (I hope I'm using the correct terms, but probably I'm not ...)
Okay that was a lot to hear... Basically I tried to reproduce everything possible:
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/general/thread/4f7e13659e/?page=3#c6ca
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/general/thread/4f7e13659e/?page=2#f59b
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/general/thread/4f7e13659e/?page=3#cda2
@ghotik 's Windows 11 experiment RGB+noCULL on my Windows XP, 7, 11 matched
Basically what I am seeing is Windows 98, XP and 7 are having the exact same result ON RAMP. Even my VMware driver, which has different architecture for Windows 7 and XP behave the same. My Windows 98, with two different GPUs present exactly the same thing. @huh2 also probably has tried on ATI 3000 on XP and GeForce 400 card (where did I see that?) and achieved the exact same result.
Bringing DxWnd into the force, everyone's result matches with noCULL, as I explained above. But they don't necessarily match the non-DxWnd result, and is quite safe to say after multiple hardware tests, ARE NOT HW OR OS<7 DEPENDANT.
At this point, I am probably asking too much. How do you make noCULL color transition to match the result with RAMP, something which hasn't been possible? This was discovered by @huh2 and experimented by me and matched above.
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2022-08-12
It's not clear to me what is your target.
So far, I saw that all the effects are a combination of two variables:
1) texture visible (CULLMODENONE) or transparent (cull mode not specified)
2) blue light shading supported or not supported
and we got all of them. The only impossible case seems a non-shaded blue light (so, with fixed color and intensity) when the shading is supported.
Well I got some answers from Dege, don't know if it is benefecial:
https ://www. vogons. org/viewtopic.php?p=1094153#p1094153
If it means "Windows 7 Ramp, no DxWnd visuals", yes that's what I mean.
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2022-08-12
@gho
Could you please take a look at the FakeCD issues I described here?
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/general/thread/4f7e13659e/?page=1#7c45/39c6
Maybe it's just some stupidity...
Well, I mounter a game RIP + crack from Razor1911, this is the comment in his ,nfo file:
So, I suppose that the game may have some further protection in addition of the file checks and in this case the Virtual CD is no help.
Let me try an experiment ...
Last edit: gho 2023-01-13
I made a quick test and this is what happened: I have the Avast Antivirus that implements a quick sandbox to test the program will, then if everything is ok it re-runs the program from the beginning outside the sandbox. When I start the game with DxWnd I get a fullscreen CD protection screen (see picture), but when the AV has finished and released the program, then I see the game running perfectly with the fake CD. So my guess is that the fake CD is working, but probably your AV is interfering with the initial File operations and the fake CD is ignored. The logs could tell more, perhaps.
This is the protection sequence:
The game searches in all CD drives (
GetDriveTypeA: ret=0x5(DRIVE_CDROM)) until it finds F:\ that is my fake CD drive. In there it checks again that it is not possible to create a file (CreateFileA: FileName="DATADATA.DAT") and if the operation fails with the proper error code then it opens the texture file (CreateFileA: FileName="steel\textures\psb.sdf").It is possible that the game doesn't poll other CD drivers after the first one. If you still have failures you may try to set the "Hide empty CDRom drives" flag.
Anyway the dxwnd logs should clarify what's wrong.
Last edit: gho 2023-01-13
Well, you're answering a very old question :-)
I don't know what that was about anymore, I'll check it when I get home.
Here is the log from DxWnd 2.05.86.rc1.build, where I tried it last time. Disabling antivirus had no effect.
Enabling the Hide empty CDROM Drives flag also had no effect on the problem.
I'll give it another try with the new version of DxWnd.
Update:
It is the same with version 2.05.92.rc6.
It works with my VirtualCD, but not with FakeCD.
Last edit: huh 2023-01-13
In the log file 2.5.92.rc6.log there's no FAKECDDRIVE flag. Probably you made the same mistake that sometimes I do, you set the CD drive letter and path but you forgot to set the flag in the checkbox to the left.
Anyway I saw some oddities that I should fix, though they should not interfere with the behavior (I got the same errors in my logs).
Damn you're right. However it still doesn't work, here is the new log for 2.5.92.rc6.
The new log tells that the CD control has passed successfully and then the game has blitted something for a while, I presume until you killed or terminated it. What was the final effect? Maybe a black screen? The log shows no errors, so I trust you when you say it didn't work, but the log doesn't help.
The result is the same picture as in my previous post:
Please insert the 3D Scooter Racing CD-ROM.
Update:
Before this screen appears, the game menu will appear for a tenth of a second.
Last edit: huh 2023-01-14