DOS/V Power Report 1998 February/VPR9802A.ISO/P_AND_A/swsw3dfx/3DFXREAD.TXT

Text File | 1997-12-04 | 12KB | 309 lines

11/22/97

Shadow Warrior 3Dfx version Notes
---------------------------------

3Dfx Shadow Warrior files
-------------------------

SW3DFX.EXE   - 3Dfx version of the game
SET3DFX.EXE  - Setup program for 3Dfx.  (Run this one).
3DTMAIN.EXE  - Main setup program for 3Dfx.
3DFXREAD.TXT - This text file.

Fast Start
----------

Want to get 3Dfx Shadow Warrior running right now?

1. You would be well advised to read the troubleshooting section first.

2. You MUST have at least 32 megs of RAM.  More memory will lead to
   much better performance.

3. You MUST have the "glide" drivers installed.  Shadow Warrior
   needs a file called GLIDE2X.OVL to be in the path.  If you don't have
   a glide2x.ovl in your \windows or \windows\system directory, you can
   get current glide drivers here at the 3Dfx site:

     http://www.3dfx.com/download/sdk/index.html

     Try http://www.3dfx.com (and poking around if the site changes)

   You want the Glide2.43 Runtime Drivers (or whatever the current version
   is at the moment.)

4. Make sure to have your Shadow Warrior CD in the drive, or some CD with
   a valid track #2.  (Ignore this if playing the shareware version).

5. Run SET3DFX, and configure the game. (should read troubleshooting)

6. Launch SW from the setup program, or exit and type SW3DFX.

7. The game will load. (Note the "3Dfx" on the title bar).

8. It will take some time to convert various textures the game uses to
   3Dfx format.  Be patient.  On a P300 this takes 10 seconds.  On a P90,
   it will take longer (upwards of 3-4 minutes or more).  This is a ONE
   TIME deal.

9. Play the game.

Notes on the 3Dfx version of Shadow Warrior
-------------------------------------------

The 3Dfx version uses a different setup program (SET3DFX.EXE). So, type
SET3DFX to setup/run the game instead of SETUP.  The first time
you run this, some modifications will be made to your SW.CFG file. We
recommend that you keep two .CFG files, one for 3Dfx Shadow
Warrior, and the other for regular Shadow Warrior. If you don't
do this, then certain settings will be lost each time you convert
the .CFG file.

3Dfx Shadow Warrior does not support 3D sprites like regular
Shadow Warrior does. This was a technical impossibility.  For this
reason, the 3D sprites option has been removed from the options
menu. Be sure to turn 3D sprites off in regular Shadow Warrior
before running the 3Dfx version for the first time. If you do not
do this, then no sprites will appear in the 3Dfx version.

Troubleshooting
---------------

Q: Why can't I see any enemies or decorations in the game?
A: The "3D sprites" option is turned on, which is not supported by
   3Dfx Shadow Warrior. To fix this, either delete your .CFG file
   and create a new one, or run "regular" Shadow Warrior and turn
   the 3D sprites off.

Q: Why does my status bar look garbled?
A: Some of the larger textures (like the status bar) are converted
   to 3Dfx format the first time you run 3Dfx Shadow Warrior.
   Sometimes these textures can become corrupted. Try deleting the
   TX3DFX subdirectory in your Shadow Warrior directory and
   running 3Dfx Shadow Warrior again. It will reconvert the
   textures again.

Q: Why does 3Dfx Shadow Warrior access the hard drive so much?
A: You probably have 32Mb or less installed in your system, and
   you probably have a 2Mb 3Dfx card. Shadow Warrior uses a LOT of
   wall textures and enemy sprites, and these can take up tons
   of memory once they are converted to 16-bit color for use by
   the 3Dfx card. For best performance, you should run 3Dfx
   Shadow Warrior on a system with more than 32Mb installed.

Q: Why is the frame rate so low?
A: Low frame rate is usually due to hard disk cacheing, in
   which case you need more memory as mentioned above. Another way
   to increase frame rate is to INCREASE the screen size (by
   hitting the '+' key or using the Screen Options menu.) The
   status bar tends to slow things down a lot, and getting rid of
   it often helps speed things up. NOTE: Decreasing the screen
   size will only slow things down more.

   Also Shadow Warrior has to do a lot of extra work to get onto the
   3Dfx that a "real" 3D game does not.  We end up having to deal with
   many more polygons per frame than a game like Quake, Jedi Knight or
   Hexen II.  This is detailed more in Scott Alden's 3Dfx notes below.

Q: Why are the colors so "muddy?"
A: Muddy colors are usually due to the gamma settings on your
   3Dfx card. First, make sure that Shadow Warrior's interal
   gamma correction is set to level 1 by pressing the F11 key
   repeatedly or by moving the "Brightness" slider in the
   Screen Options menu all the way to the left. If this doesn't
   correct the problem, then you need to check the gamma settings
   in your 3Dfx Windows drivers. This is normally done by
   selecting the "Display" button in the Control Panel, though this
   may vary depending on the manufacturer of your 3Dfx card. At
   3D Realms we found a gamma value of 1.2 to be optimum, but
   again this may vary depending on the manufacturer of your 3Dfx
   card. As another option, you might try tinkering with the
   BUILD_BRIGHTNESS environment variable as explained below.

Q: Why are sloped floors and ceilings so bright?
A: This is a necessary evil for various programming related
   reasons.

Notes from 3Dfx and environment variables
-----------------------------------------

3Dfx Build Engine Version 1.0
Author: Scott Alden
Date Created: 9/12/1997
Last Update:  11/22/1997

Implementation Notes
--------------------
I had a lot of fun and challenges on working on the
Build engine, not everything went as I wanted it
and many things are workarounds.  Sloped floors
were especially fun ;-) An ideal thing to happen is this
engine is converted to true polygon rendering system.
This could greatly enhance the speed for the 3Dfx hardware.

I currently have the raster layer of the build engine
rendering spans to the 3Dfx hardware. Thus a wall that
fills the entire screen would be made up of X triangles
where X = the horizontal resolution of the screen.
You can set the BUILD_TRICOUNT (see below) environment
variable to see how many triangles are being drawn on
the previous frame.  This is more for seeing how the
tricount affects the framerate.  Since each wall and
floor is made up of hundreds of spans, thus thousands
of triangles are drawn each frame.  For instance if
a single wall was rendered in a frame that filled the
screen, the renderer would have to draw 640 vertical
triangles to draw the wall.

All of the tiles in the game are downloaded to the
hardware as texture maps, and the span is converted
to the 3Dfx format for rendering.  There are 3 types
of primitives that I use: horizontal triangles for
horizontal spans, vertical triangles for vertical spans,
and quads for drawing unclipped sprites.

Also, the lighting/palette effects that the game
uses are achieved by downloading a new palette to the
3Dfx hardware.  This palette downloading happens on
a span by span basis.  Fog and other lighting effects
are all achieved by palette changing.

A span based renderer is slower than the an ordinary
3D based renderer (like GLQuake) on the 3Dfx because
of the conversion of spans involved.  For each vertical
span in a wall, the texture coords must be calculated
specifically  for the span, where as a regular polygon
for a wall only has to provide texture coordinates at
the vertices.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Here are some extra things to know about for
additions I have made to the build engine which
can be set in your environment before running
the game:

Environment Variables
---------------------
The BUILD_640X480 environment variable is used
to run the game in the 640x480 resolution.
The default setting is 0, and the default resolution
is 512x384.
e.g. set BUILD_640x480=1

The BUILD_RESAMPLE environment variable is used
to control how the game and animation textures
are converted to 3Dfx format.  If you set this
variable, the slower method of sampling and blending
is used.  This gives a more desirable image however
it takes a long time to run, and it gives a dark
halo effect surrounding sprites (i.e. the fists
and some menu bar things).  The faster way uses
point sampling, it provides a more grainy conversion,
but is a lot faster than the previous method.
You only need to convert the textures the first time
you run the program, and if you want to recreate
them, delete the "tx3dfx" and animxxxx directories
which contain all the .3df files.

The BUILD_BRIGHTNESS environment variable is used to
brighten the colors of the textures that are used in
the game engine.  The colors will be brightened by this
factor, and will saturate to white.  The default setting
is 2.5.
e.g. set BUILD_BRIGHTNESS=2.8

The BUILD_NOPAL environment variable is used to turn
on palette downloading on a per-span basis.
!!!Warning!!! This will affect the color palette of the game
and the colors may not be correct!  This is only provided
as a speed boost.  The default setting is 0.
e.g. set BUILD_NOPAL=1

The BUILD_NOFOG environment variable allows the game
fog to be turned on/off.  This is provided as a
speed boost.  The default setting is 0.
e.g. set BUILD_NOFOG=1

The BUILD_CONVTEXTURES environment variable is used
to control whether or not textures are cached to disk.
If BUILD_CONVTEXTURES is set to 1, then the textures
will not be cached to disk and will be converted in
memory.  If you are running the game under Windows 95,
then this setting is not recommended. If you are
running the game under DOS, then this setting may help
out because disk I/O access is slower on some
DOS machines than others.  The default setting is 0.
e.g. set BUILD_CONVTEXTURES=1

The BUILD_TRICOUNT environment variable shows the number
of triangles drawn in the last frame.  The default setting
is 0.
e.g. set BUILD_TRICOUNT=1

The BUILD_FPS environment variable shows the current clock
settings, frame number, and a (rough)FPS count.
The default setting is 0.
e.g. set BUILD_FPS=1

The BUILD_VERSION environment variable shows the current
version number of the 3Dfx Version of the Build Engine
and the current version of Glide you are using below that.
The default setting is 0.
e.g set BUILD_VERSION=1

BUILD_MRED, BUILD_MGREEN, BUILD_MBLUE set the colors
of mirrors in the game respectively.  Their range is
from 0-255.  Their default settings are 200, 200, and 255
respectively (gives a blue tinge to all mirrors)
e.g. for dark blue mirrors:
   set BUILD_MRED=0
   set BUILD_MGREEN=0
   set BUILD_MBLUE=200

------------------------------------------------------------
Here's some things I added to the Shadow Warrior code
and specific things in the build engine that are
related to Shadow Warrior.

When you start up Shadow Warrior 3Dfx version, the
program will begin converting the textures in the game
to the 3Dfx format.  This only needs to be done once, and
if you want to recreate the process, then delete the
subdirectories called tx3dfx and animxxxx where xxxx will
be a number and the directory will contain .3df files.
This takes quite a while to convert so be patient :-)
See the above environment variable BUILD_RESAMPLE for
more information on this.

New Keys
--------
ALT-B: Turns on Bilinear filtering ("Blurry" mode)
ALT-P: Turns off Bilinear Filtering ("Pixelated" mode)
F12:   Captures the 3Dfx screen.  Creates files in the TGA format
       with the naming convention of swcpxxxx.tga where xxxx is the
       number of screen captures made.

New Functions
-------------
Transparent Textures based on their intensity.
This is for transparent explosions, etc...

This function has been applied to the following textures
for Shadow Warrior (these are based on the internal
representation of the tile numbers):
  1465-1468
  3072-3225
  1748-1753
  3240-3277
  3280-3300
  3948-3986
  3969-4016
  772 - 776

Note: Cranking up the intensity with BUILD_BRIGHTNESS
will cause less of the textures to be transparent, since
the level of opacity is based on their intensity.