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Post by vipe155 on Aug 27, 2014 21:32:40 GMT -6
I've been trying to track down a way for those that are attempting to play Fighting Steel to work around the issues on more modern systems.
I have a Windows 7 system, with a NVIDIA video card. I can start the game, and play, but get mouse cursor/ocean texture soup (have to turn off ocean textures), and missing ships. Unfortunately, this seems to be an issue present on all modern NVIDIA drivers and something that can't be worked around. I've heard AMD cards may still work, but those aren't an option for me because of other incompatibilities with more modern games.
So, the next attempt I made was to use a virtual machine. VirtualBox does support Direct3d and Directx version 8/9. It doesn't support DX7 or earlier. Now, I've attempted to run FSP project on this VBox system, but it doesn't start the game because of this issue. The original game was Directx 6, but it is my understanding from the FSP manual that the game was updated to Dx8/9 for the new material. Therefore, why doesn't FSP work in a 8 or 9 only environment? I can play other DX8 titles on this virtual machine, just not the updated 10.43 version of FSP.
Can anyone that worked on this project shed some light on this? Is there anything that can be done with the program to update it past this issue?
There are a good amount of us out here that would love to play this game again. I wouldn't be bothering you if a newer game like this had ever come along, but it didn't. This game comes up on the SimHQ forums, Subsim, etc. without anyone being able to fix these problems. I'd like for the community to be able to still use this without having to put together a "Retro" box or switch to AMD video cards. Considering that NWS is the last group to work on this game, there isn't anyone else to ask. Thanks
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Post by williammiller on Aug 28, 2014 9:59:10 GMT -6
Hello vipe155,
I was the primary developer of the Fighting Steel Project. While we did patch the graphics engine to run better in DX8+ the (rather serious) root issue was that the game engine was originally programmed using an alternate graphics mode (a subset of the old 'Retained' 3D mode) in Direct-X. Unfortunately, support for this mode was dropped by Microsoft less than 18 months after the game was released (starting with DX 7) and later DX updates have rendered that mode even more un-useable/unstable.
It would have required a 100% complete re-write of the game engine to have solved this issue, the best we could do was to patch the code to make it as compatible as possible - however, given the very serious issue of the dropped support and the massive changes in DX over the last few versions, the game simply is not going to be stable, even when running on some virtualization machines - be aware that such machines may *still* have DX overlay issues that can cause serious corruption to the graphics with retained-mode engines such as FS, while older engines that use other modes may not suffer those issues at all.
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Post by vipe155 on Aug 28, 2014 14:37:00 GMT -6
Well, that's interesting information. That's probably the most detailed explanation that has been put out about the issues with Fighting Steel and modern machines. Unfortunately, that also pretty much explains why the game has not followed the path of other well loved old wargames and been modded/supported all these years. So the issue with the virtualized DX8/9 is that the game really isn't completely compatible and still retains pre DX7 attributes?
Well, at this point, that pretty much makes the easiest choice of playing FS building a Windows 98 or XP box for older games. That's not ideal. I do wonder about the few posts I've seen here and there that mention AMD/ATI cards as still running your version 10 FSP just fine. As a lifetime NVIDIA user, I cannot test that at the moment.
I'll pass this along to others on different boards. Thank you for the response at this point.
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Post by williammiller on Aug 28, 2014 22:28:02 GMT -6
You are welcome vipe155.
I have not tested out any AMD/ATI cards in many years since I too have purchased NVidia cards for my PCs over the past 12+ years at least, so I cannot say if they have fewer issues or not with FS/FSP or other retained-mode games.
The last time I tested FSP (2 years ago or so) was on my 8-year-old Dell P4 laptop with Windows 98 SE OS + DX 6.1 installed (and no updates allowed) - IIRC the game worked with no serious issues noted. I have to agree that the 'old hardware' method may be the only reliable way to play such games.
Thanks...and good luck to you.
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Post by craigeastman56 on Aug 29, 2014 5:36:06 GMT -6
Hello Everyone, I don't know what I am dong wrong but I am playing FSP v 1.87 on my laptop. It is a HP 635 standard with 8 gig of memory. I did not go through the normal ( proper ) install though. Just copied the whole game from my old laptop to this one and run the .exe file. Then created a short cut on desktop. Help what am I doing wrong?
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Post by williammiller on Aug 29, 2014 8:46:58 GMT -6
Hello Everyone, I don't know what I am dong wrong but I am playing FSP v 1.87 on my laptop. It is a HP 635 standard with 8 gig of memory. I did not go through the normal ( proper ) install though. Just copied the whole game from my old laptop to this one and run the .exe file. Then created a short cut on desktop. Help what am I doing wrong? Craig,
The normal process is to first install Fighting Steel on your laptop, then run the FSP installer from your laptop to upgrade the FS installation to FSP. If you do not follow that process you likely will have serious issues with the game.
Thanks.
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Post by Yellow Horror on Dec 23, 2015 8:28:32 GMT -6
I think, i can add some valuable info to this thread.
NVIDIA drop support of old DX functions needed to run FSP correctly since they switch to 1xx.xx version of drivers. This change affects Fighting Steel and some other old games.
The last NVIDIA driver that i know for sure supports Fighting Steel is 93.71. The bad thing is that this driver don't support modern NVIDIA GPU's. So, if you are NVIDIA fan, the only way to play FSP is to use an older video card. I am unsure which GPU is the last really supported by 93.71 driver. The last documented in the driver release notes is GeForce 7950 series. And i know from my own experience that GF9600 don't work with it.
The ATI/AMD support for old games like Fighting Steel lasts much longer. At least, Catalyst 12.1 runs FSP without any glitches. I am stuck at this version because it is the last one that supports OpenCL under Windows XP.
So the latter is not always (or i need to say "always is not"?) the better.
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Post by williammiller on Dec 23, 2015 12:00:38 GMT -6
Yellow Horror,
Thanks for the additional information- indeed it appears that the more modern ATI cards will run FS with fewer issues than with modern Nvidia cards, so players interested in the game will likely have better luck using ATI rather than Nvidia graphics adapters.
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Post by toolsey2 on Jan 29, 2016 5:30:05 GMT -6
Hello Sorry I am a bit late replying to this thread , but I was in the same spot regarding the distorted graphics with Fighting Steel with a nvidia card on a XP machine , but I have just fitted a ATI Radeon HD 5450 card to my XP and with FSP now runs perfect , in fact a lot of older games seem to run with a Radeon card ok also I can run the old Combat mission games as well as the newer versions The other as well is Silent Hunter 2 and Destroyer command still work without the distorted graphics as well as the newer Silent Hunter Games when loading which happens with nvidia cards. I have a newer Win 7 machine but I purchased a reconditioned XP tower unit from ebay for peanuts and it plays with the Radeon a wide range of old and new stuff , the only things which do not play well are the latest Total war games but Medieval 1 and 2 plus Rome 1 are spot on .
Regards Toolsey
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