Fighting Steel: World War II Surface Combat 1939-1942
Window hooker to run fullscreen programs in window and much more...
Status: Beta
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Due to the fact that it is not possible to fix games using Macromedia solutions (there is practically no documentation of their project), and I did not find anyone who would know about OpenGL, I decided to focus on another game. The game in question has problems with running on DxWnd. The game starts, but after starting the game, the gameplay screen is gray, only the HUD and the mouse cursor are visible. I tried all the settings and it didn't work. Anyone have any idea? I am attaching logs from this game - https://mega.nz/file/IqxlCaKZ#DSlF7Ds_aMuvaC25KXyIpjrp2uaHm_VH60uyEQayUy8
Link - https://www.old-games.ru/game/download/1882.html
Well, even the "Show hints" flag does not help (when you turn it on, the game does not start at all) so the problem is serious
The logs tell that you didn't start from default options, if I'm not wrong there are some flags missing like SETCOMPATIBILITY and FLIPEMULATION. I tried the game with default options and the result is good, the sea is blue and not green (see screenshots).
Please, start again with a clean new configuration (or the one here in attach). If it doesn't work, well, your computer is cursed, I told you ... ;)
First, I tried the default options, but it was similar without them. Then I tried the options from "DirectX" "DirectX (2)" and "Direct3D", but still the picture in the game is bleak, you can see mouse streaks on it
And this is what it looks like with the same default settings, for the sake of explanation, the graphics are still poorly displayed
It's very difficult to analyze a huge log file without interaction. Could you please capture a screenshot of example of "poor display" and post it here? I suppose you know how to do, but in any case: when the game has the focus press Alt+PrintScreen (sometimes labelled "Stamp") so that the window surface goes into the clipboard. Then open the ol'good paint.exe and paste the image, save and upload.
The log shows strange errors like this one (repeated many times):
in here there is a failed blit operation where a source rectangle of 16x16 pixels (622-606=16, 460-444=16) is blitted to a 49x49 rectangle. Since both rectangle definitions seem good, maybe your video card doesn't have the capability to blit & stretch at the same time?
It looks more or less like in the attachment. Well, I have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER graphics card, so maybe my graphics card can't blit and stretch. Wish you had a computer with some NVIDIA graphics card, it would be easier to check somehow
OMG!
heya for this game - if you want it running well in windows 10 get the "Fighting Steel Project" from NWS online. That makes it run much more easily in windows 10. - just adding this detail.
there is also a campaign expansion addon NWS made for Fighting stell too, but i believe it is something you have to pay for.
Thx. Will this mod also work on Windows XP? I am asking because some users from the old-games.ru forum would like to play this game also on XP and maybe this mod would be a great solution
i image it might, the Fighting Steel Project was created a while back,
certainly before windows 10, possibly before windows 7 even so they should
try it out
Ok, Mr. Pepka, I tried to add a few recovery actions to your blit errors. The solution is far from final, likely it won't even work, but it could be very useful to analyze the reaction of your GeForce to these game conditions.
The instructions are simple: replace the dxwnd.dll, then run this "Fighting Steel" game (very shortly, I pray you: just the time to show the glitches, take a screenshot and kill the game, collect the logs and post all here.
I don't expect to guess the right solution at the first try, so be ready to repeat the experiment over and over!
Here you go, screenshot
And logs
Uhmm... wrong guess, I presume. In the log there are so many errors that it's really hard to imagine what is the cause of the white sea. You had another game with the same problems, if I recall... which one? How is the new dll on the other games? ....
Another game like this is Scooter Pro, but the color palette was bad there (and the textures were also broken)
It's weird, from the logs there are errors in Blit operations between 2D surfaces, but I start to wonder if that fact is relevant at all. After all, both in Fighting Steel and Scooter Pro the problem is always about 3D scenes. In fact, Scooter Pro is a full 3D game, while Fighting Steel, from your screenshot, works fine in the 2D area and fails in the 3D battleship arena.
It wouldn't be the first time where we hunt a problem looking at the logs while it is somewhere else, untraced.
Maybe it's a color palette or something like that? This is what Scooter Pro looks like for me
@ghotik I remembered something. I also had a problem with textures in RPM Tuning. Maybe my graphics card doesn't support some specific color palette used by these 3 games?
No, I don't think it's a palette problem: it seems a RGB555 vs. RGB565 mismatch: in effect some colors are almost good, while other (the clearest ones) instead of staying in the 6bit green range have an overflow to the blue color (or maybe something different, but similar in nature).
Try switching the RGB565 flag or some flag about fixing/unfixing the texture pixel format ...
In any case, it seems a completely different problem from Fighting Steel.
Or you may simply set the game video mode to 32 bit colors: this way there can't be any pixel format mismatch: each color would have its own 8 bits.
Last edit: gho 2021-05-01
Tried the flags for fixing the texture pixel format but it did nothing. The resolution I have set in the game is 1024x768 and a 32-bit color palette, in DxWnd I did not change anything else, the color palette is set to "Current"