Abashera Revamped (200X) - Bizarre 3D Game
Window hooker to run fullscreen programs in window and much more...
Status: Beta
Brought to you by:
ghotik
Menu
▾
▴
Sooooo, double whammy of posts today. This is a more complicated situation. Abashera is this strange experimental game from the early 2000s created by a Swedish artist, Max Magnus Norman, and originally it was a game sold for ~10 bucks until eventually the developer made it freeware. The game was coded entirely from scratch and it is an oddity as it is one of the rare Windows games to be OpenGL exclusive (not even any DirectX support or usage like that Psychotoxic game we dealt with that one time).
It's a bit hard finding the game today as the developer's website is long gone and the game wasn't widely known, but here's a link to the one working download I could find: https://abashera-revamped.software.informer.com/download/
Unfortunately, this game does not run correctly in modern Windows. Mostly it seems like it'll work, it opens, the menu is rendered correctly, it even has native Windowing support. The problem is when you get in-game, and suddenly you realize the game screen is just bright white, but actually, if you move around somehow, you notice that actually the game is rendering, but all textures are absent, making the screen white with the occasional bit of lightmap greyscale.
And apparently it is random as to what systems this game will work correctly on. I've seen a couple YT videos online of the game rendering as intended (?) and also with severe graphical glitches worse than the white texture issue. Anyways, I've tried numerous existing OpenGL wrappers prior to Dxwnd, and they all failed with this game. Then I remembered Dxwnd actually does have some OpenGL wrapping features so I decided to try it, but sadly it also seems to mess up the game for some reason, and in the menu no less.
I am a little keen to get this game working correctly, because I'm not kidding when I say that I think this is a game that I spent 2/3rds of my life trying to find it again after finding it one time as a kid and it running like crap on my childhood computer. It's a weird, weird, fascinating game from everything I've seen.
I downloaded the game and wanted to say one thing:
"TOUGH"
Anyways let other members look into it, maybe it may help.
@Albert Hamik
This is an old problem. Do you have Nvidia?
1)
https://web.archive.org/web/20061016194459/http://maxmagnusnorman.com/game_forum/game_chat/10088.shtml
2)
https://web.archive.org/web/20061016194810/http://maxmagnusnorman.com/game_forum/game_chat/10089.shtml
3)
https://web.archive.org/web/20061016194459/http://maxmagnusnorman.com/game_forum/game_chat/10088.shtml
4)
https://web.archive.org/web/20061016194401/http://maxmagnusnorman.com/game_forum/game_chat/10091.shtml
5)
https://web.archive.org/web/20061016194727/http://maxmagnusnorman.com/game_forum/game_chat/10092.shtml
Update:
I think there is a solution, at least for me here in Win7. The game works with Messa3D for Windows without DxWnd. First the OpenGL error appears: could not initialize, so I think it runs in some kind of SW emulation, but the textures are visible. Unfortunately, it's very fast even at the 1% game speed setting. The problem is that I can't start the game with DxWnd and try some speed reduction. It's not that the game won't start, but the menu goes graphically crazy (always).
I have another solution in backup with some specific messa libraries, but I will try that later.
Last edit: huh 2022-09-03
Actually the game has its own built in speed reduction option. Also I had in fact read about those Nvidia issues but I'm shocked to hear that is still an issue that is going on over 20 years later.
I'd be interested in seeing this possible mesa3d fix you speak of.
EDIT: I found this Mesa3D for Windows from the same guy behind the WineD3D for Windows compiles:
https://fdossena.com/?p=mesa/index.frag
It did not work, the game couldn't detect OpenGL AND ALSO it would crash when the game finished loading, unlike what is happening for you. The injector is crashing when I try using it at all.
Last edit: Albert Hamik 2022-09-03
I've also tried this now and the game gives a different error message, error code 91 or something: https://github.com/pal1000/mesa-dist-win
I had a feeling this would be one of those difficult games. It won't even open in Wine for at least two people who've tested it thus far, me and a friend I asked to test it.
Last edit: Albert Hamik 2022-09-03
I tried Mesa3D and had same results as huh2.
@alberthamik I am using v20.1.8 of Mesa3D, it gives an OpenGL error at first, and I have to make sure not to click anything when the game is loading, or it will just freeze.
Oh okay turns out I had simply forgotten to turn off win98 compat option that I had briefly tried earlier. I might test out that other mesa3D option again out of curiosity now.
After many tests and trials yesterday, I got 3 options to run the game in Win7. Unfortunately, neither one is perfect.
1) Messa3D 20.1.8 or earlier. It works without DxWnd. The game is very fast with the speed set to 1%, the more % I added, the slower the game went, paradoxically. However, I noticed some game stuttering at higher percentages. In native mode with DxWnd the game often freezes with Messa. In windowed mode, the game has warped (elongated) textures as if 1 dimension (width) is missing. This happened in all my attempts with the opengl32.dll libraries in window mode with DxWnd.
2) opengl from ioquake3 (without DxWnd). You can use opengl32_noSSE.dll or opengl32_SSE.dll renamed to opengl32.dll. The game is very slow even at 1%. The higher the percentage, the slower.
3) TitaniumGL 2015-03 Hardware accelerated (GPU)-"Windows XP-VISTA-7-8 (without DxWnd). The game is too fast at 1%. You can experiment with 1-30% and maybe you will get the optimal speed. But that's not the biggest issue. The problem is that the game has a problem rendering the menu and this menu is invisible. You will only see the menu when you switch to Windows and back to the game. Apart from this problem, this library appeared to be the most promising solution.
Last edit: huh 2022-09-04
the menu is probably GDI handled. Because changing DxWnd GDI setting causes effect there
Ok, but I was talking about running the game without DxWnd (point 3). I updated my post. With DxWnd I could never get the game to have the right texture in the window, it was always elongated. The texture width was missing.
I gave the game a quick try yesterday night before going to sleep, but sadly I saw that it's a VB6 game. This means quite a lot of difficulties to hook all system calls, but hopefully we'll manage it somehow.
Maybe I could save you some time. Here is my (very imperfect) test configuration.
Last edit: huh 2022-09-04
Thanks. Your configuration works much better than mine, but it gives me a bit of frustration: when I get to the maze selection from the main menu dialog (after a very long loading time!) all buttons work but one: the "Play" button, so I'm stuck here. I can select a different level, I can get back to the main menu but I can't run the maze! It seems something related to the vertical position ...
Uhm... probably because of the VB language, DxWnd has difficulties to properly hook and manage the GDI functions. I got a perfect result by setting the window style to "modal" and the window position to 0,0. This way the coordinates displacement in DxWnd window mode versus the full screen native mode is null and all the problems don't show.
These pictures are taken with Win11 system OpenGL lobs, but it works all the same with mesa last version. No texture problems here ...
Wow, this is interesting:
The window displacement causes mouse problems: it seems that the game can't detect mouse click below the absolute position y=600, so moving the window to 0,0 fixes it.
The window style with titlebar is responsible of other artifacts, including the bad textures: look at this picture, it seems one of yours!!
Only Nvidia cards have had the problem since roughly 2006, when the FX 5700 series began to be sold. This is what a game looks like without Messa with Nvidia
Wow, the modal style really fixed it! Only mouse clicks are a bit of a pain now.
I confirm now that moving to position x0y0 fixed the mouse clicking. Nice. Some textures weren't quite right with TitaniumGL, but more or less it's a big success. In order to have the game in fullscreen with a screen resolution of 1024x768, I had to set one pixel less 1023x767 + Auto hide main panel. This avoided the disappearing menu I have with TitaniumGL. The game seems to also work fine with Messa for me now and doesn't have some occasional texture errors like TitaniumGL.
Last edit: huh 2022-09-04
TitaniumGL doesn't work on Win11, it crashes with error 0x000000142
I am asking something very dumb here. I created this profile very similar to what was described here but with it I get texture problems, menu clicking issue, menu corruption. But if I modify huh's profile, there is no problem.
Can either of you check to see what's different with the profile combined between gho and huh2?
Edit: @ghotik tell me what "flagl0=16809984" does! If I import a profile having value 32768, all the above problems remain as it is. huh2's values above remove the issues.
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2022-09-04
Comparing my profile flags and yours, I see only one difference.
You have the Limit Resolution flag set and my profile has flag Max Resolution (here I have it set to 800x600). Is that it?
Last edit: huh 2022-09-05
Wrong mode to look at the flags value. It would be much easier by using the menu View -> Flags panel ... you can also view the flags of two programs contemporarily and notice the differences. Try it, it's a trick that comes handy very often!
Woah, the main culprit was the Max Resolution flag. Had I not enabled this flag or enabled any other thing, game is bad.
My perfect profile for fullscreen is attached. Can you do anything so that the error of OpenGL, is bypassed (You have to click OK to the error to continue)
Additionally, a serious task, can DxWnd be able to make the unsupported feature (256x256 textures?) in OpenGL ported from Mesa to itself so that Mesa3D isn't required. Mesa3D can be found entirely on GitHub.
You mean you neither needed Mesa3D not TitaniumGL nor any other wrapper/external DLL?
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2022-09-06
Why did you mention unsupported 256x256 textures? I see no reference here ...
He probably means the mention in this link.
4)
https://web.archive.org/web/20061016194401/http://maxmagnusnorman.com/game_forum/game_chat/10091.shtml
Another thing from the link is "how do you do software accelerated OGL?"
Edit: I found sources to go to Troubleshoot tab of Display properties and to change from there. Here's the problem, I don't have any Troubleshoot tab.
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2022-09-06
Since it's a relatively calm period, I added something on my own request. Coming soon, Abashera without fog. Don't try it if you feel dizzy ...
Some initial attempt to change fog color. I need to understand how to map a DWORD RGB value to an array of float.