Graphical glitches

[happyfunlarry]

Hello all,

Been meaning to try this series of games since I heard about # 2 a few years ago. Just downloaded the demo feeling a bit optimistic and then promptly ran into problems.

It seems the game doesn't like something about my set up.

My computer is much faster than the requirements, geforce 128mb card, gig of ram, 2.8 ghz amd, but according to the test in the preferences I get 1(one) frame per second on the battlemap.

I don't particularly care for graphics in a game like this so I hit the "w" key to turn it all off and see if that helps. It speeds things up quite nicely but often when a soldier receives damage things will go glitchy and sometimes entire armies disappear, which then promptly reappear if I use the arrow keys to move the battle view around. Alt-tabbing also has detrimental effects, causing what appears to be lower resolutions in some game images and generally turning the colour palette inside out, i.e. lots of black where there should be red, sometimes the interface on the map screen disappears, leaving white font on the light background of the map.

Its a shame too because it seems like a good game, its just hard for me to play a game with low-res graphics and 2d sprites at 1(one) fps on my two month old computer. Kind of a deal-breaker y'know?

Anyone know if the patches might fix a full version? Could it be Vista causing problems? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[Edi]

It's probably Vista. Do you have the latest updated drivers from the graphics card manufacturer? Those can often solve the problems. Otherwise you're out of luck. You could also try to install the latest drivers available for Vista from the Nvidia website, since it's their graph card.

[llamabeast]

Agreed that updating drivers is the #1 thing to do.

[lch]

I do agree that the game should be possible to play without any 3D graphics at all. It wouldn't take much to make this possible if one does not care to look at the battle reports, it would only require that the background animations could be turned off completely, together with the fade effects.

[Jazzepi]

I'm pretty sure there's an option in the video options to turn off the animated backgrounds, and the fade effect as well.

Jazzepi

[Kristoffer O]

I thought they could be turned off.

[lch]

Yes, you can turn those things off via the command line (or options even, dunno) but you can't turn off everything so that the game runs as smoothly as it should be. I could disable my graphics acceleration again to look what it is exactly. AFAIK the map screen is still quite sluggish in case it's disabled.

[Gandalf Parker]

Vista is a problem definetly. It seems that your options with pre-Vista games is that they either run normally or badly. Vista has some good things going for it but support of older programs isnt one of them. If your sound and graphics card manufacturers have caught up and created vista-compliant drivers then you should be able to get "like it was before" action from your games.

[silhouette]

happyfunlarry said:
I don't particularly care for graphics in a game like this so I hit the "w" key to turn it all off and see if that helps. It speeds things up quite nicely but often when a soldier receives damage things will go glitchy and sometimes entire armies disappear, which then promptly reappear if I use the arrow keys to move the battle view around.

I can't speak to what new problems may appear on Vista, but the above described problem is not new. This is day-1 ugly behavior, and I am going to feel foolish if this is not already a well known problem. It appears that somewhere a graphical mask or stencil is not handled correctly. If you pause the battle when there are units disappeared, and then scroll the playfield, you can see the units again, but parts of the units which are now on the screen at their location are masked -- it is exactly as if a stencil is made of the units to draw over them, and then when the viewport scrolls, the mask doesn't, and it blanks out whatever else is behind it now. If you scroll the view back exactly where it was before you moved it, you can put the units back directly behind their stencil mask and they disappear again. If I didn't describe it well, let me know and I can try and get screenshots.

I run it with command line "-x", but it also happens without if you use the 'w' wireframe battle replay. It's somehow because of the floating damage numbers, since the masking happens when a unit is damaged and the numbers float up, but when I use "--noarcade -x" it is ok.

I just re-tested the demo installed on a Pentium4 2.8G running RHEnterprise 2.4.21-27 (it might be my work computer, ). Here's the library list.
]> ldd dom3demo_x86 -x
dom3demo_x86:
libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 (0x40017000)
libGLU.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGLU.so.1 (0x4005b000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x400e9000)
libSDL-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 (0x400f9000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x40171000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x402a9000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x402cb000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x402cf000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x402dd000)
libstdc++.so.5 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5 (0x403bc000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x40472000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)


Sill

[happyfunlarry]

You described it exactly Sil. Happens every time you get the attack "animation" or when they're moving about the screen, etc.

I've updated the drivers and now I'm back up to around 30 fps with all the bells and whistles turned on. So thanks for that tip, I should've seen it coming. I'm almost certain, however, that any driver's I've ever had are Vista compliant, whatever that may entail, because the motherboard is a Vista motherboard. And by that I mean it won't run XP setup for some reason, even from a fresh format. If I spent any time trying to figure out that reason I'd probably turn into Lewis Black. Might be my own fault for buying a computer from Best Buy though.

Just curious, does anyone here run Dom3 on Vista?

Still have the graphical mask problem as Silhouette described but only when in wireframe mode. So, no huge deal now that I'm above 1(one) fps.

Thanks guys.