Me, Myself, and I

[Holy_Diver]

Unfortunately I have not had a ton of traction in the Som dept. ever since I got my computer back in in business (not including the two weeks or so while I was sans said computer)

I tried to fire up Som today and realized the display drivers I am using seem to flounder completely. In the map editor if I try to go to the 3D view it either crashes or not even the black background manifests or both.

What's worse is when I try to play a game it doesn't get out of 640x480 and the options screen is pretty well locked out with bogus numbers in the resolution setting etc.

I have ordered a new nettop computer I was going to install XP on anyway which I could use, but I found out last night probably the reason I have not received it and the projections are so late is it is out of stock (the board I wanted with no HDD/RAM/OS anyway) "temporarily" even though it wasn't when I ordered it. So no clue when that will come to be if ever.

I could not even manage to connect this HMD I've been trying to find a use for to my PS3 to play KF2 etc. Simplest adapter setup ever. My next attempt will be to connect a USB capture card to that nettop if it ever transpires.


So anyway I'm not gung-ho to look for alternative drivers even though the original ones I had were just fine in all respects (so I know some version is out there) because the latest drivers cause my display to regularly spaz out. On some level the drivers thing has brought to my attention the need to fast track upgrading the DirectX library Som links to. I'm not positive that would be good enough in my case but it would probably help. My current drivers also don't stretch to the wide screen... they put up black bars on the side, which I suppose is technically an improvement, but I figure I should try to look into what is actually going on and see if I can't coax Som to just use the settings in the ini file and stretch all the 640x480 stuff one way or another (depending on what the player wants)

Of course the ultimate goal is to simulate Som from scratch. I'm a bit torn about how to go about that but I will probably start thinking about it asap if I keep having trouble playing with Som stuff. Another weird side effect of these drivers is whenever a game ends Explorer is in a bad state and has to be restarted via Taskmanager. I should probably experiment with other drivers but the download size of each one is like 100MBs which is really ridiculous.

[Holy_Diver]

I tried a ton of drivers and for now have just settled on the best I could get.

In game I can still get in HD resolution by manually setting the ini file. But the options are screwed up / won't budge. I can actually look into where those numbers are coming from when I get a chance.

I have not seen any of the flicker when going in and out of the menu. That was the primary surface being lost/restored I'm fairly sure. I get black bars on the side in 640x480 mode but I suppose that is technically correct, so a good deal. It might be my imagination but everything seems to look a little better than I remember.

With the current driver any game like this... all the PC games I play, which tend to be older, cause Explorer to crash on the way out. The driver I'm using atm is a little better, it at least causes Explorer to promptly restart itself instead of just disappearing.

Map Editor is still a mess. Will have to get used to VM I suppose.



I think I want to go ahead and try to bump the DirectX up to 9 and just skip 8, since 9 seems to be the standard. Mapping the interface is pretty mindless work, which might do me some good. I've been totally log jammed on the Som front and haven't been able to get anything done in weeks. If I don't forget I will try to knockout the compass per request. I figure the easiest way is to just skip any 2D polgons drawn in the top right quadrant of the screen.

I think I noticed the text substitution causing the framerate to slow down in the stored items menu. I should probably formulate a caching framework of some kind. Though it could be it was just all the text drawing -- which can't be very well helped. Would have to run tests to know for sure.