I have FS on w10 but graphic and mouse issue - help needed

[agathosdaimon]

Hi!

I have installed the german version of Fighting Steel and added the german FSP mod - FS is now working on my windows 10 laptop but 2 issues persist which interfere with the gameplay - 1. - some screens the mouse lags to an extreme extent - firstly on the screen where one is to select a scenario

secondly in the game the text all have coloured blocks around each letter and this makes for a total message on screen , some other elements of the graphics have blocks too - what is the fix? is there any? or should i just install it all into to VMware player on a virtual windows xp?

cheers!

[williammiller]

Hello,

There are many issues with FS running on modern (post XP) Windows OS, the primary one is that FS was coded to run using the 'Retained Mode' of Direct-X, and that mode of DX has long been depreciated by Microsoft and has not been supported by video card hardware or drivers for quite some time.

I use an old OEM copy of Windows XP running under Oracle VM VirtualBox (an excellent, free VM program) that (the last time I tried it) Fighting Steel ran fairly well under.

[agathosdaimon]

thanks for your reply, i have heard of Oracle VM Virtualbox so i will look into that one.

I have however had an interesting development in that i added the WineD3D files to the FS folder and now the mouse lag and graphics issues have gone however teh game is frozen at the start of battle - so i feel maybe if i go through a process of elimination with those extras files, i might hit upon the right combination

[agathosdaimon]

actually i went to the dgvoodoo site and got the files for it - dgvoodoo_53.zip, along with that D3DRM.DLL and put those in the FS directory and now the game runs well and in very high resolution too - one thing i had to tweak though was that i had to switch off "waves" in the graphics settings in the game as with it left on, the oceanand sky textures were all stretched and mixed together in an unplayable way. - there is still a little graphical anomaly if one has the camera view pan to the behind of a ship - the ships wake textures go all funny it seems, but is really not that big a deal and doesnt interfere with the overall cleaner look and gameplay.

[flying fish]

Is the Fighting Steel Project totally dead now? I know nothing about coding, but I take it that a major rework would be required just to get it to work on Win 10 and modern graphic cards? I bought FS when it was first released back in the day, downloaded the project upgrade here and then bought Thunder at Sea, which really improved the old game. I tried the dgvoodoo site and did a google search and cannot find that dgvoodoo_53.zip file mentioned above. Is there no hope? Mr. Williams, I understand that this is your baby, but as almost no one can get it working on modern machines, have you considered just releasing the game to Steam or others who may be able to make this work. It is reasonable that you wish to continue to make money off of your work, perhaps a deal could be worked out where you got something back when they sold the upgraded game? I'm not sure if any of this would work for you, I'm just desperate to be able to play this game again, or a modern version of it.

[williammiller]

Apr 29, 2018 9:42:45 GMT -6 flying fish said:

Is the Fighting Steel Project totally dead now? I know nothing about coding, but I take it that a major rework would be required just to get it to work on Win 10 and modern graphic cards? I bought FS when it was first released back in the day, downloaded the project upgrade here and then bought Thunder at Sea, which really improved the old game. I tried the dgvoodoo site and did a google search and cannot find that dgvoodoo_53.zip file mentioned above. Is there no hope? Mr. Williams, I understand that this is your baby, but as almost no one can get it working on modern machines, have you considered just releasing the game to Steam or others who may be able to make this work. It is reasonable that you wish to continue to make money off of your work, perhaps a deal could be worked out where you got something back when they sold the upgraded game? I'm not sure if any of this would work for you, I'm just desperate to be able to play this game again, or a modern version of it.

Helllo 152tactical,

Yes, unfortunately the Fighting Steel Project (FSP) is a 'dead' project and has been that way for some time. If one reads over the various threads on this board (as iI think you have done) then you have an idea of the current state of/and issues that the game had when it aged and 'updated' technology passed it by.

Bear in mind that we at NWS do not own rights to the Fighting Steel game itself - we were granted full pemission by Roy Gibson (then President of DBZ games and to whom the copyright reverted back to after SSI folded) to create modifications for it as we saw fit, but we cannot distribute the actual game (or the original game code) itself since we do not own the rights to those.

Also, as I have mentioned elsewhere, it would require about the same effcort to creat a new 3D naval game from scratch as it would to completely revamp the original FS code/game/graphics up to modern standards. Given the fact that NWS is a small company with limited resources we try to take on projects that we are certain that we can complete given this, and so we are very happy/lucky/& proud to be working with Fredrik Wallin on his SAI/RTW series of games...which, while they certainly are not 3D, are (in my own perhaps biased opinion) superb designs and very fun to play.

BTW, I did a quick search and located the "dgVoodoo 2" download page for you if it helps: www.dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2.html

Thanks for your post and I hope the above explains things well enough from our point of view at NWS.

Thanks again!