When i play The Thing i can't see any textures. Most time anything looks like a silver screen movie. When there are light sources like LED's etc they are colored (green, red, etc) as well as the whole screen. The snow and the fire outside seem to be textured but i may be wrong. I tried different options of 3da but with no luck. Any ideas?

Regards,
Andreas

P.S.
The game is still playable and very good! Doom 3 for old systems ;-)

Minimum Specs:
Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP
PentiumII 400MHz or equivalent
64MB RAM
8MB 3D video card with DirectX® 8 support
DirectX® 8 compatible soundcard
600MB Hard Drive space
4xCD-ROM

That what i can see on my screen is very fast.

Regards,
Andreas

I'm not the only one who has this 'Feature', i call it so because i don't expect the vision to be better in a real artic snowstorm, with a Voodoo 3 (german): http://www.forum.sierra.de/showthread.php?s=37501f868b612c7653ba82c3a9435f72&threadid=5794

You are right patience. Everyone who likes Bodysnatchers, Alien, The Thing and similar films must be addicted to this game!

Regards,
Andreas

P.S.
I got the game on the cover-dvd from the german pc-games magazine.

wrote on 01.08.04 at 16:51:11:

A problem with the textures on a Voodoo 3 might mean more 256*256 textures,

Quake III has textures larger then 256*256 on a few levels, they just look fuzzy.

Thats just Q3 of course, other games might not be as forgiving.

In the options screen you can select resolution, 16/32 color depth (i can't select 32 so the game recognises that my V3 can't do 32 bit rendering) and refreshrate - no more.

I try that magical numberpad +- keys now.

Regards,
Andreas

Might be a voodoo 3 limitation, works on my 5500 windows 2000 system using amigamerlin 3.0 drivers.

Although this game did not have the best review's, I personally enjoyed it  ;D

wrote on 01.08.04 at 19:07:14:

Although this game did not have the best review's, I personally enjoyed it  ;D

I'll have to see if I can find a copy on ebay..

Probably get it cheaper on ebay, but it's still available retail ($14 Canadian) here in Toronto at local Best Buy's and Future Shop's.

Let's search for the reason columbo like. What does a V5 have that a V3 does not have?
FXT1 Texture compression=only opengl=no
T Buffer effects=only opengl=no
AA=only after rendering image enhancement=no
32bit rendering=v3 can only 16-game can 16/32bit=no
32bit textures=v3 can only 16-game has no option=no?
s3tc texture compression=
i've seen the same 'feature' in 3dmark when i was still using the 1.07.00b who's d3d core reports the V3 can do s3tc (dxt?) textures altough V3's can't=
I strongly assume yes?

@patience
you can buy the game on the cover-dvd of the german 'PC Games' magazine 09/04. Thats where i got it from.

Nearly forgot: The +- keys only change the view distance.

Regards,
Andreas

I forgot:
...
bigger than 256x256 textures-then i would at least see some of the smaller mips-no
...

And i forgot:
...
the game has only 6 display related options which are in the registry (no cfg file). The 4 DisplayMode options in the registry can be selected by the 3 ingame video options.
"AutoTextureLODFlags"="8"
"AutoTextureLODBias"="-2"
"DisplayModeWidth"="640"
"DisplayModeHeight"="480"
"DisplayModeBPP"="16"
"DisplayModeRefreshRate"="75"
...

Here are some snaps of my strange vision:
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/1.jpg
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/2.jpg
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/3.jpg
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/4.jpg
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/5.jpg
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/6.jpg
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/7.jpg
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/8.jpg

Regards,
Andreas

If you are outside in the artic winter then it's really very dark. You have to follow the blue lights that are placed all 5 meters between the buildings. Inside it's only dark when no or less (2) lights are on. But if there is some light from above or if the light is on in a room (6) then it looks absolutely normal to me on my monitor. If something explodes (3) then there is absolutely more light than i wanted ;-)

Regards,
Andreas

I fiddle around with these two options first. Then i try the b driver. But s3tc(dxt) does not work with neither version. The b version only reports it is available by fault.

By the way there is a lot of light flashing in the game (electricity, shots etc) that are hard to snap.

Regards,
Andreas

The 1.07.00b makes even more trouble. The mouse cursor in the menus is a square. And also snow, and some lights are half-transparent squares. I revert to the 1.07.00 d3d core.
http://people.freenet.de/nudge.goonies/9.jpg

Regards,
Andreas

Using the SFFT alpha 12 driver  ;) the game runs perfectly on my system (athlon 2400 with 512 mb ram, Voodoo 5500) @ 1152 X 864 X 32 bit, 2X AA.  ;D

Using the Amigamerlin 3.0 driver I would have to change the colour depth every time I started the game (16>32 or 32>16) from the games menu screen to get rid of wavy lines.

This is another under rated game much like Clive Barkers Undying that did'nt receive a lot of attention/hype after being released, but in my opinion/taste has a great story line and very nice graphics, I would highly recommend it to any one, especially if you liked the movie  ;)

@vodoo5500
Could you post a screenshot so i can see what's missing on my voodoo3000?

Regards,
Andreas

@nudgegoonies,

Will try to get a few shots up tonight after work.

@nudgegoonies,

Check out the following link for a couple shots (THE Thing) plus a few others using SFFT alpha 12 drivers

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1129&whichpage=10

I stated earlier in this topic that my 5500 was running on windows 2000, I'm assuming nudgegoonies wanted to see what the game looks like when its running correctly.

Thanks for the link to the snapshots. These sfftv3 alpha 12 driver is a v4/5 based driver without 3dfxtools. From what i can see two files (3dfxvs.dll 3dfxvsm.sys) are patched or selfcompiled and two utils (SetDX7Mode.exe SetDx8Mode.exe) are added. But i can't test it as this is a win 2k/xp driver and not a 9x* one.

Regards,
Andreas

:o ::) ;D :D ;) :)  ...now i have my own windows  ;D :D ;) :)

How is windows 9x and and windows millenium edidion written in short?

win 9x / me
win9x/me

How does this look:

win 9x / you
win9x/you

:-*,
Andreas

P.S.
This is the power of /  ;)

I did a nvdxt -outsamedir -overwrite -u1555 *.dds on all textures in the resource files but still no luck. And before you ask. 471 textures seem to be smaller than 256*256 and 924 are bigger. I hope that nvidea tools supports resizing. But snow looks much different. Or could it be that the 1555 texture format is wrong? From what i know DXT1 Textures are 16BIT with Alpha. I think i try 4444. See you 2 hour's later.

Regards,
Andreas

P.S.
Resource files are ordinary ZIP's (no compression) renamed to PAK.

Damn  >:(

Some textures have from the main menu have DXT1 and others have DXT5 tags in the DDS header but they aren't copmpressed. I give up. F*** you Sierra!

Regards,
Andreas