Share your Status / What's on your mind?

[datiswous]

18 minutes ago, revelator said:

many critisized that dark coreners of the earth had weapons in some maps which is kinda ok if you think of it as mainly a survival / horror game. but tbf it does not really ruin the game like many believe.

I thought it was mostly a shooter. The first part of the game is more an exploration type game I think (no combat, story based, first person)?

[datiswous]

24 minutes ago, revelator said:

something like the stem engine from the evil within which was based on idtech 4

I read on wikipedia it's based on idtech 5:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evil_Within

[Diego]

I haven't played any of these games, but maybe I should? I was never really into horror games, as they tend to be too formulaic. I did play the ones I *think* are the most important ones in the genre. Like the amnesia games, one penumbra game, alien isolation. and that's about it.

But VR seems very suitable for horror though. I have an older oculus here, but my office is too tiny to set it up. I wish there were more VR games that treated VR merely as a more immersive display. No flailing your arms around, just put it on your head and use a regular gamepad without moving too much. The moment we start moving immersion leaves the room.

But yeah, game dev is hard. Really, really hard.

[revelator]

2 hours ago, datiswous said:

I read on wikipedia it's based on idtech 5:

my bad yeah was idtech 5  probably the rbdoom3 engine would be better as that one is atleast partially based on it. still it would probably need some modifications to support large open areas.

dark corners is pretty good story wise though it suffers from some rather annoying bugs (also old). to play it on win 10/11 you should get the gog version, but it has major problems with resolutions above 1080p. you can enable developer mode for testing with dcotepatch as the game can be pretty brutal in some maps. might also benefit from using a vulkan wrapper like dxvk on some setups as the game does not like alt tabbing at all (crashes hard) but dxvk can be setup to allow it.

virtual reality can be fun but needs a pretty beefy gfx card. i do have a VR set but it is playstation only. sadly edge of nowhere is xbox only but can possibly stream it to a windows 11 machine in xbox mode.

just be carefull with VR and dont try to lean on fences in game like i did .

and yeah gamedev is really hard  especially when you have no formal education in coding (learned most of what i could from the quake community). when idtech started using C++ i was pretty lost. though i did end up learning a bit, im far from being able to use it to its fullest.

and the move to using hardware shaders pretty much put the cork in for me as i had little prior knowledge working with it.

[revelator]

3 hours ago, datiswous said:

I thought it was mostly a shooter. The first part of the game is more an exploration type game I think (no combat, story based, first person)?

 not really, more like a detective game with horror elements. weapons could get you out of a sticky situation but due to the insanely low ammount of ammo pickups it did not really ruin the dread. you still had to sneak in most places as loosing health was made in a way that really hindered you and could potentially kill you due to sanity loss (morphine lowers sanity in game). also the more dangerous foes were immune to conventional weaponry. had to blow up dagon with a ship cannon and it took multiple hits all while getting attacked by waves of deep ones hehe. shaggoth had to pretty much blow up a factory to end it. star spawn was probably the easiest but it was immune to bullets so had to use a flamethrower on one and poison another . mother hydra could only be killed by the yithian energy cannon which you get at the end.

 

[Diego]

I just spent a couple of hours watching a play through. I really enjoyed how it started! It builds suspense and tension, and you walk around the city like a detective. But I skipped forward and I don't know if it would keep my interest if I actually played it. And Lovecraft struggles outside literature, even movies have a hard time adapting it.

[datiswous]

2 hours ago, revelator said:

not really, more like a detective game with horror elements

The game has a lot of combat scenes. I did stop playing the game quite early in some heavy combat scene becouse it seemed impossible and (console-style) you had to start over the whole scene after a defeat, no quicksaving.

Edited August 17 by datiswous

[revelator]

yeah lovecraft can be a bit hard to adapt in a game  but can be really good if you capture the elements correctly.

intro starts of as more of a sneaking and gathering information sequence, then things heat up in attack of the fishmen with a lot of running and gunning. at the marsh plant it becomes a mix between action sneaking and puzzle solving as well as survival untill you nail the younger marsh brother. at the esoteric order it goes into more sneaking puzzle solving and occasional action while gathering more information. this is where you get the knife which might actually be the most effective weapon in the game, but it requires stealth. you also team tag with another game character.

and yeah the game can be pretty brutal to survive in, maybe something to look into in a remake.

game saves are dependent on signs which are used as save points. while the idea is cool (bit like the save gems in daikatana or the consoles in dead space) it does ruin things a bit cause there arent many of them and autosaves only work by chapter.

if you struggle in some parts, use dcotepatch to enable developer mode and use noclip or yuck god mode. the game was rushed due to the developer going bankrupt (one guy had to finish it up) so it is pretty unpolished gameplay wise.

[revelator]

the dev of the dcotepatch actually managed to recreate the script engine source code from the debug files on the cd.

you can also modify running speed and jump height with the patch as well as sanity thresholds to make it a little less painfull to play.

i use an old tool to patch the game executable to limit cores to 4 since it has problems with todays multicore processors (also needed with the gog version if you have a cpu with more than 4 cores)

the gog version is limited to 60 fps cause unlimited breaks multiple sequences like attack of the fishmen so you cannot escape when they break down the door to your room.

there was an old bug with shaders that caused raindrops to look like diamonds on ATI/AMD cards. this was also fixed by the gog version as well as the invisible sorcerer bug in dangerous voyage.

if you encounter stuttering while moving it is caused by mouse polling acting up (many old games from back then had the same problem on modern machines "F.E.A.R feks.). there is a directinput wrapper on the pc gaming wiki that fixes this though it is for F.E.A.R it works fine with this game as well.

alt tabbing crashes the game, use dgvoodoo2 or dxvk to allow it.

the game also looks kinda bad on widescreen this can be fixed by using this https://github.com/ThirteenAG/WidescreenFixesPack/releases/tag/callofcthulhu

for other bugs that might crop up see  https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Call_of_Cthulhu:_Dark_Corners_of_the_Earth

there is also a HD pack for it though it uses an old version of sweetfx (reshade nowadays) works quite fine though the upscaled textures themself do not up the looks by that much (probably because upscaling filters back then were rather poor "no AI").

if you want to try your hand at upscaling the games texture use this -> https://dcotetools.sucklead.com/p/xbdsplit.html be sure to backup all files just in case.

the game uses dds format so they will have to be converted beforehand if using upscayl as it does not support dds format. afterwards you will have to convert the upscaled images back so be sure to note which dds format the game uses.

[revelator]

forgot to mention the tool used to limit cores on game executables. its called imagecfg.exe easily findable with google.

the format for patching is imagecfg -u game.exe this sets the game executable to uniprocessor mode = 1 core.

then use imagecfg -a 0x01 game.exe to lock it to core 0 or imagecfg -a 0x01 0x02 0x03 0x04 game.exe to set affinity to cores 0 to 3 (overrides uniprocessor mode).

the change is permanent so backup your original game.exe

dark corners runs quite ok using only one core though so just use the -u switch.

[revelator]

i mentioned an OS with a full desktop that fits onto a floppy sometime.

https://www.howtogeek.com/kolibri-the-smallest-desktop-os-youve-never-heard-of/

the one i thought of was menuetos kolibrios is derived from that one and now has quite the ecosystem with tons of games.

it is written in assembler and very very snappy. try it out .

there is also a livecd as well as a hybrid uefi image and work on a 64 bit version is ongoing.

[revelator]

toying with the windows version of wined3d, been some years since i last tried it and back then it was not working to well performance wise but now it does seem to have catched up somewhat. there is still some performance degredation but it is much better now. tried it with dark corners of the earth and it runs well but has the same problem as standard d3d has where the game crashes if using alt + tab. one peculiarity the game is a good deal darker with wined3d than with standard d3d9 or the dxvk variant but it is also a lot more detailed so i dont mind as it fits in with the atmosphere.

if the alt + tab issue could be fixed i would use it instead of dxvk.

it is a bit strange though with the different looks as wined3d is just a wrapper for opengl as dxvk is a wrapper for vulkan ?.

also works fine with blood 2.

EDIT: works with blood 2 if you preconfigure resolution with windows own directx, for some reason wine hangs on enumerating resolutions with this game (lithtech's engine has allways been a bit weird).

[revelator]

so i finally got my old gtx 560 ti SLI setup up and running and some observations that literally made me spew my coffe .

firestrike benchmark in 1920x1200 52 to 60 fps but the cards get so hot that im afraid to run it for more than 20 seconds (95 degrees!). i did remember the cards used to be a hot mess but not that hot  still insanely impressive for a card that is 15 years old. yeah we used to call them thermi or grillforce . 2 in sli were actually a bit faster than a single gtx 580.

mine are the msi twin froozer II models which has very good cooling.

i paired them with one of my unused x99 broadwell boards (6800k cpu). it is more than fast enough for this old card which only supports pcie 2 (for reference even a gtx 780 ti can not max out the cpu you need a 980 ti to even get close to bottlenecking it).

so i been playing a bit on it with some different games to get a feel for how far i could push it, and it can actually be pushed really far. crysis 1 runs on the highest setting no problem except cooking my cards (damn it gets hot), mass effect trilogy also runs flawlessly, witcher 2 was actually playable but i had to lower some vram guzzlers, witcher 3 also playable if i dont install the dx 12 patch allthough i had to lower some settings quite a bit. so all in all for a retro setup not bad at all.

[revelator]

my retro setup runs well so i decided to buy a new case with better airflow for the grillforces .

settled on a be quiet pure base 501 which also allows me to mount an aio for the old broadwell (gets toasty when overclocked to the roof).

the 560 ti came out about the same time as intels nehalem (i know cause originally mine were mounted in msi's first xpower board which used it). the nehalem core i7 models were quite good and the xpower board is pretty much impossible to get your hands on today and if you do expect to pay more for it than a top tier modern board.

the haswell based x99 is a worthy successor with more cores more pcie lanes and quite a bit more power.

it runs better than i expected on the win 7 setup (not much idea hooking it up to win 10 as the gfx cards do not support dx12 anyway "no vulkan either").

xp did run on this board but was hell to setup properly (needed to slipstream AHCI drivers for it to even install) took me days to get it fully updated via legacyupdate, and some drivers did not play nice out of the box so i had to use hacked ones which were not allways the most easy to find. also it does not support > 4gb ram due to 32 bit limitations unless you hack the kernel to enable PAE support (which is not allways stable).

[revelator]

hmm come to think of it i might actually install the stuff from my dev machine in the new cabby instead.

reason: the old setup might still have use for cd or dvd based installs and the old lian li i have it in has a dvd burner (also fits the theme a bit better).

the lian li cabby is also well ventilated so the grillforces should be happy enough.

and i still game occasionally on my dev machine (handles modern titles well enough also due to the 2080 ti).

downside is that the dev machine only has one nvme and no ssd's (4 mechanical harddrives 2 1tb and 2 3tb) so only older games will run will run ok on these.

with ssd prices atm it will be a long time before i can fit it with something a bit snappier unfortunatly so ill nick 2 of the drives for the retro machine where it does not matter as much and keep 2 for the new be quiet case.

[revelator]

damn this was hell to put together... the be quiet case only has space for a 240 aio up top and mine is a 360 so i had to pull the front fans and mount the 360 there. my dev machine i actually had to move to the lian li lancool III which was my gaming machine due to the front panel connector being the new type and i dont have a breakout cable for it. so now my gamer is located in the be quiet case my dev machine was relocated to my lian li gamer (luckily the 2080 ti fits fine in that one) and the old lian li PC-B25F is in use as my retro gamer. had to muck about with the ssd's so i left one in my dev machine for a few games together with two mechanical harddrives and one nvme. the be quiet case got fitted with 2 nvme's and 2 ssd's. i had intended to use an old kingston ssd for the retro setup but the connectors broke so it's thrash sigh... instead i had to use a mechanical harddrive as the system disk with an usb stick for ready boost (still far from ssd speeds). i also replaced the 3070 rtx in my streamer and moved it to the be quiet case, the streamer now uses an amd rx 5700 xt (works fine for that).

so next project is getting a 240 aio for the be quiet case and moving the 360 aio back into the lian li lancool III case.

getting the damn thing of the ryzen 3700x was rather harrowing as the cooling paste glues so tight that you literally rip the cpu out of the socket (the liquid freezer II model i have can not be wiggled so there is no way to avoid it) luckily no damage but ouch.

then ill need a few more ssd's to max out the lancool but with prices as they are atm this might take some time.

[revelator]

found this one which fit the white theme https://compumail.dk/da/p/deepcool-infinity-series-ls520-se-processors-flydende-kolesystem-1-pack-hvid-120-mm-1001056872 also has excellent colling abilities according to reviews and its cheap.

now i just need a hub for the all the light shit (especially since my case fans are 3 lian li unifans which puts me at needing one more connector than my asus rog strix x570-E gaming board supplies.

then i have to move the 360 aio back into the other case, but i think ill check liquid lvls on the radiator before i do that as the liquid freezer 360 has some years on the back now.

the 6950x cpu in the dev machine is overclocked somewhat so the bigger cooler should help keep things stable.