• Gina Carano

News about this game:the fileplanet demo version ( ) seems much more robust when pressing the red buttons. It seems to work perfectly.More: the full game exe terminates, but does not crashes (which poses a problem when using a debugger: there's nothing actually 'wrong' that gets highlighted by a execution break.)In this situation, I'm afraid it could be interesting to know which exact version of the game we're talking about. It is also possible that there's a game bug fixed by some patch.I'll keep investigating.p.s. Unless you're still on XP, you can set the Emulation to 'primary surface' if you also set the 'Suppress SYSTERMMEMORY on primary'. The crash remains, but the rendering is improved, and you can also set biliniar filtering! Good news: I replicated the problem and managed it.

So, now we just have to hope that it is the very same problem as yours.The problem lays in the FPS indicator in the window border. The PG3.exe program performs a GetWindowText call that is affected by my change in the title message. So, a quick and dirty fix to the problem seems to be turning the 'Show FPS on title' flag off.For a more robust and satisfactory solution, I'll have to wrap the GetWindowText call to recover from the changes I made.P.s. Thank you for signalling this beautiful and technically interesting game! Look at here:it says:If the target window is owned by the current process, GetWindowText causes a WMGETTEXT message to be sent to the specified window or control.

If the target window is owned by another process and has a caption, GetWindowText retrieves the window caption text. If the window does not have a caption, the return value is a null string. This behavior is by design. It allows applications to call GetWindowText without becoming unresponsive if the process that owns the target window is not responding. However, if the target window is not responding and it belongs to the calling application, GetWindowText will cause the calling application to become unresponsive.It seems PG3 is becoming quite 'irresponsive'!!! But the article doesn't suggest how to avoid that. More than this, it seems that this operation may endanger any other game!

I was afraid it could happen.the patch reduces the occurrence of the blocking GetWindowText operation, that now is made just once for every window hendle (the handle could change even if your eye don't notice a window change.). Unfortunately, the problem occurs when the game opens a new dialog box (like the one in turn.png above) so the trick is useless because in that situation the window is changing and the GetWindowText is called again.But maybe there's something wrong in the logic (after all, the program is opening a new dialog window, but the previous one is not changed, so why should it ask for the window title again?) so I'll try to put some logs and check if there are mistakes. If the problem is just the one shown in 2.03.12.PNG, this is caused by the accidental setting of the Direct3D Texture Handling flag set to 'Highlight'. Set it to its default position 'None'and the problem will disappear.I must admit that I never understood why the creation of a new game entry sometimes doesn't set the flags to the default values, so in any case you can blame me for this problem.Talking about 'palette', I made some improvements in the last release, but still something isn't properly working, but this kind of problem can show in 8BPP paletized games only, and this doesn't seem the case. Please hear me gho, there is some technical glitch with Dxwnd which D3DWindower can do better;)Tested with 4 games:Road RashPeoples GeneralHorde 2 The CitadelTotal Soccer 2000.As default, none of 4 games had trouble with Ctrl+Alt+Del which cause black screen.With D3Dwindower hooked, again, none of 4 games had trouble with Ctrl+Alt+Del;)).With Dxwnd hooked, only Road Rash playable after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del.

Three games remaining, the screen gone black and unplayable, process to become frozen though.Aside from that, Road Rash only work with GDI mode, other modes make color looking very weird. Again the rival D3DWindower can run the game smoothly with some graphic problem, sorry;)In summary we have two problems need look into, black screen problem and Road Rash.Thanks for reading, especially for those who have sustained my awful english. Ok, at least this issue of the Ctrl+Alt+Del seems an easy one.Here is what happened:When you press these keys, the primary surface on the video gets lost and the operations with it return a DDERRSURFACELOST error code. According to ddraw documentation, once this occours, you need to recover the situation by calling the surface Restore method.

Gina Carano

The attached dll does this and seems to recover the situation pretty well, in the few cases I tested it.On the contrary, the 'Use GDI' flag does not use a ddraw video primary surface, but blits on top of the window device context, that doesn't seem to suffer of such a problem.Please, unpack the attached archive on top of the last dxwnd release and check if the games are recovered in all situations.By the way, the Ctrl+Alt+Del seem to positively influence also the palette problems, pretty much as Alt-Tab does.updateThis arrangement seems to fix pretty well ddraw 2D games. Things on D3D 3D games get much more complicated, at least by looking at the first experiments.