Vid card problem

[Iced-Tee]

First my system

P3 800EB
i820 mobo
128 megs PC800RDRAM
Geforce256 64meg DDR
Win98SE
DirectX8.0

Now my problem.

My problem has two portions. Firstly, when I start the game and it displays that picture of the Goddess whatever her name is and all the characters around her in awe (at the start screen), the gamma flickers dark and bright (slightly) for a few seconds.

Portion two, my character doll images are outlined in white, which is very annoying looking and ruins the ambience.

I played this game up until December of last year and some how fell out of it. I am now looking to start a new game, because I am too out of it to continue my old game.

The game ran fine graphic wise before. I cant remember what drivers I was using, but I have the new 12.41 WHQL certified drivers now. I was using the straight up 12's to begin with, but then got the 12.41's after experiencing this glitch.

It worked fine yesterday for awhile, but today it is back to the same old tricks. I thought turning off FSAA had fixed it yesterday, which appeared to by the case. But it isn't solving the problem today.

Also note that I have downloaded the beta (beta patch...sheeesh, some good my time away from this game was), and unzipped it to the WW folder C/PROGRAMS/ACTIVISION/>WW<

Any ideas?

(note: I am inches away from falling out of the mood to play this game. In which case I will sell it and never support another sequel, including Wizards and Warriors 2 or Wizardry 8. This is pretty rediculous. I hope you can see where I am coming from)

[This message has been edited by Iced-Tee (edited 07-06-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Iced-Tee (edited 07-07-2001).]

[Wyvern]

Welcome to the board, Iced-Tee!!!

Have you cross posted your message into Saz's techie help desk thread?

Have you tried running the game in software mode?

While Bradley, who wrote W&W, used to write for the Wizardry games, he is no longer associated with them and it would be unfair to not at least consider Wizardry 8 on its own merits. Wizardry is produced by a completely different company than HPI which produced W&W.

Wyv

[Wyvern]

DirectX 8 might be the source of some of your problems. There is some information in the Best Tips thread on this - there is probably more in Saz's help desk thread.

Wyv

[Iced-Tee]

Yeah, I posted it in the other thread too.

So I have to downgrade to DX7?

Man, that kinda bothers me.

Whatever happened to the official patch I heard about back in November when I was on this board and playing full force?

I couldn't believe my eyes when all I found was a 'beta' patch.

What does this beta patch claim to fix by the way?

[Iced-Tee]

Well, problem solved...I guess. Dropped back to DX7.0a and all seems well. Kind of unfortunate though, as DX8 improved performance on all of my other games.

Thanks, Wyv. Oh and on a side note, whatever happened to Freudianslip and his fanfic page?

Anyway. Perhaps you are right about Wizardry 8. But I probably wont support a sequel to this game. After the AO problems lately I just have no sympathy for companies that release a product, take our money, and then leave the product riddled with bugs.

DX8 is nothing more than the previous versions with things built on top of it. My gripe is why would code that this game doesn't even need or use (since it runs fine iN DX7) interfere with stability? It should require a pretty simple fix, and degrading my graphics api is not a very good answer.

I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm just frustrated that the past three or four days I have had free to play this game have been wasted because of 8 month old bugs. Now I have to go to a graduation party today and all I have is Sunday to play, yay.

[axel]

Hey Iced_Tee I'm basically in the same boat as you except I refuse to downgrade my machine from DX8, especially since a couple of my games *require* DX8 (Giants comes to mind). FYI, Microsoft did significantly change some code regarding DirectDraw and Direct3D in DX8 and this could be causing the problems. I'm hoping DX 8.1 will fix this issue. Strangely, many people can play W&W just fine with DX8 installed.

I agree that it's frustrating to have a company release a game, take your money, then not fix the game-stopping bugs they sold it with. Apparently Bradley ran out of money and couldn't justify the time needed to work on the patch.

The people on this forum are very helpful, unfortunately there is no known solution to this problem other than downgrading to DX7 or re-formatting, both pretty ridiculous options in my opinion and should never be offered as advice. A $40 game is simply not worth that mess.