Shadowcat on 18/1/2005 at 13:28

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For those who are interested, there was a new version 0.82b of <a href="http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/">Zeckensack's Glide wrapper</a> released on 30/12/2004, and I'm a bit more outdated on this one, but I've only just seen that <a href="http://dege.freeweb.hu/">dgVoodoo</a> got a new version 1.31 on 25/9/2004 and with this one I'm now running Redguard with very few issues whatsoever, and the oddities I have encountered have been extremely minor, and don't really affect the game in any notable way.

I don't know whether it's the wrapper or something else in my system that's made it work better (and knowing my machine it won't work anymore tomorrow!) but if you had any hassles with Redguard before then make sure you check out this version! Even the sound is fine :)

The main issue I'm having is a very long delay (maybe 30 seconds or so) with a black screen when I quit the game, if I was playing full-screen. A couple of times I got the same thing (similar symptom at least) on start-up. After the desktop reappeared, the "Redguard" application still showed in the task bar, and I found that closing the wrapper application BEFORE going back to the Redguard application (to let Redguard exit fully) was the way to go. I think maybe Redguard runs into trouble when exiting, and you need to kill the wrapper or it can't exit. Maybe dgVoodoo intervenes after a time-out period... Not a serious issue in any case.

Another one to note (due to the common tendency to max these things out with older games) is that I tried running Redguard at 1600x1200, and the bottom of the display was missing (I checked that it wasn't just my monitor settings). You'll notice that the bottom line of subtitles is almost completely missing if this happens to you. This didn't happen in the other resolutions that I tried, however! (800x600 and 1024x768).

Everything else was really minor. I got a little bit of flickering when the contents of a letter were overlayed over the main display, but it went away when the letter was closed again. I also had a little bit of graphical weirdness at the bottom of the screen one time when loading a saved game, but that went away once the game had loaded.

Other things I noted may just be the game, regardless of video hardware. Maybe I should check with the software version, but I'm not sure I can be bothered :) Sometimes it slows down for a couple of seconds, and then 'makes up for it' by speeding up for a couple of seconds. I'm guessing that this happens when the game is loading new stuff. The speed of the game does seem to be affected slightly by the complexity of the scene, as though it tries to keep a consistent frame rate and simply runs the entire game a bit slower when necessary to achieve this, rather than doing it the other way around. Lastly, pressing escape to go to the main menu can take several seconds. Again, none of these are big hassles.

All in all, Yay!! Now all I need is the time to finally play the game! :)

Phatose on 18/1/2005 at 20:04

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Eh, maybe it's just me, but if I feel like playing Freespace 1 with graphical niceties, I just load up the FS2 SCP and the freespace port.

1600x1200 with glowmapping, shinemapping is kinda hard to beat.

Shadowcat on 14/6/2005 at 00:18

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Redguard is still running well with the new dgVoodoo beta, and the delay when pressing escape for the menu is now about half of what it was with v1.31 (just a couple of seconds now, which isn't nearly so annoying). 1600x1200 also seems fine, but strangely I now have no problem with this resolution under v1.31 either. Make of that what you will. I reinstalled Win98SE recently, so maybe that affected things.

Although it seems to run well when working, my machine sometimes locks up when trying to run Redguard under either of these two versions. I initially thought this was restricted to repeated runs, and something must not be being cleaned up properly on shutdown, but I once got a lock-up when trying to run it for the first time fresh after a reboot, so I don't know what's going on there. All I can say is if it doesn't work the first time, try again.

I've also taken to running "rgfx.exe" directly, rather than "redguard.exe" (the launcher app), as the latter stopped cooperating. So there are certainly some oddities, but I'm generally happy :)

I-War still runs beautifully with Zeckensack's wrapper, and likewise still crashes my machine on exit.


edit: Ah, I-War also runs beautifully under dgVoodoo (tested with v1.40 beta)!! Even better, there are no FMV issues using dgVoodoo, and you can make the game run inside a window which is a great advantage if you have crash problems (so that you don't get stuck in a 640x480 or 800x600 desktop!)

Furthermore, the crash problems I've been having aren't anything to do with the wrappers after all. It's actually a known audio bug that affects modern machines. You can disable audio with the -xsound command line option to test this, but I wouldn't worry too much about it when playing properly -- the game is quick to reload, and if it crashes after the end of a completed mission, it *does* (thankfully) still save your progress so you just reload the game and continue...



edit: Just a quick edit to ensure that Redguard players check out the official (http://redguard.bethsoft.com/comic/main.html) origin of Cyrus comic at Bethesda's Redguard site. I guess that was either never included in a printed form, or only in a limited run, as my box certainly didn't include it. I also see from their Elder Scrolls 10th Anniversary pages that the "Pocket Guide to the Empire" which comprises a large portion of the Redguard manual remains the definitive guide to Tamriel...

Uncia on 8/6/2006 at 16:35

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Should have waited 6 more days for a nice round year since the last post. ;)

Shadowcat on 15/6/2006 at 12:12

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Unless Dege has succeeded in adding some exciting new bugs, this will be the first Glide wrapper I know of to run I-War with no issues whatsoever (aside from the infamous SHIFT+Q crashes, which are an audio issue and thus not relevant). Dege has fixed the nasty bug that made you collide with other ships when jumping through L-points :) Zeckensack's wrapper is good, but messes up the FMV cutscenes.

And you can even run games windowed with dgVoodoo (which means that Win9x users are saved from rebooting even if it does crash!)

You can also play I-War in a sort of hybrid high-res mode if you set dgVoodoo to use twice the resolution that the game is running at (i.e. set either 1280x960 or 1600x1200 in the dgVoodoo config panel depending on whether you are running the game at 640x480 or 800x600). The interface graphics will appear identical, but much of the vector graphics will be rendered at the higher resolution. (This isn't unique to dgVoodoo, but is the kind of comment that tends to be worth making from time to time :)