One of the first games I tried in DxWnd brought one of the most long-lived puzzles I have to manage: the game seems to play movies using some sort of strange mode that needs splitting and stretching the frames. This mode is no longer supported, so that the movies (that are correctly played by VLC media plaier, for instance) are split in two parts in all modern platforms, but still correctly played for instance in Win98 through Virtual PC.
Now, it wouldn't be a big problem to build a logic that would play the frames correctly if only I could know HOW this damned game IS ASKING for this particular mode: all ddraw parameters seems identical to those in other cases, but still ....
A call for help: anyone knows the answer?
Got it!
I remembered a similar case where the culprit was the missing codec, and I recalled that aqrit gave me the good hint to download an old and compatible codec library, that was included into the DxWnd "redist" folder already.
So, all you have to do to see proper WarWind movies is to copy the ICCVID.DLL file from there to the WarWind install dir, and that's all folks!
Looking better, one can notice that the decoding through my ICCVID.DLL version is not as good as the one VLC (or any other player using the same codecs) is giving.
Apparently, Win7 has better decoding routines, but they are not used by the old v4w calls that support the rendering (ICOpen and ICSendMessage). I'm wondering if one can alter the parameters of these calls through the hooking mechanism to enable a better rendering.
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One of the first games I tried in DxWnd brought one of the most long-lived puzzles I have to manage: the game seems to play movies using some sort of strange mode that needs splitting and stretching the frames. This mode is no longer supported, so that the movies (that are correctly played by VLC media plaier, for instance) are split in two parts in all modern platforms, but still correctly played for instance in Win98 through Virtual PC.
Now, it wouldn't be a big problem to build a logic that would play the frames correctly if only I could know HOW this damned game IS ASKING for this particular mode: all ddraw parameters seems identical to those in other cases, but still ....
A call for help: anyone knows the answer?
Last edit: gho 2015-05-25
This is interesting, two demo versions of War Wind are available:
one that skip entirely intro movie, no trace of problem showing:
http://volftp.tiscali.it/pub/pc/windows/win95/games/strategy/wwd12.exe
another that showing intro movie, plus the problem was clearly:
http://download.cnet.com/War-Wind-demo/3000-2119_4-10002941.html
I upload the log file of version that showing problem. Hope that help.
Got it!
I remembered a similar case where the culprit was the missing codec, and I recalled that aqrit gave me the good hint to download an old and compatible codec library, that was included into the DxWnd "redist" folder already.
So, all you have to do to see proper WarWind movies is to copy the ICCVID.DLL file from there to the WarWind install dir, and that's all folks!
Looking better, one can notice that the decoding through my ICCVID.DLL version is not as good as the one VLC (or any other player using the same codecs) is giving.
Apparently, Win7 has better decoding routines, but they are not used by the old v4w calls that support the rendering (ICOpen and ICSendMessage). I'm wondering if one can alter the parameters of these calls through the hooking mechanism to enable a better rendering.