Hello!
I played Crimson Skies religiously back in 2002, and recently picked up the game again in an attempt to once more play it.
I was frustrated to discover that, due to NVIDIA's series 6XXX cards and higher lacking support for textures that are not in multiples of 2, Crimson Skies' text is garbled and illegible, and additionally the game will crash after only a few minutes of play.
Adding to my dismay is the fact that Microsoft has ceased to support the game - or even to offer an online lobby for multiplayer games.
I understand that, because the problem arises from NVIDIA's drivers, it is not realistic to ask for your help on this forum to "fix" the problem.
But what I would appreciate would be for you to share your technical knowledge of this issue, so that it can be compiled and stored, and serve as a reference as I take more time to try to find out how I could fix the issue.
While I would ideally like to compile as much information on the technical incompatibility as is possible, so that perhaps someday a programmer may be able to fix the issue directly, I do realize that perhaps in the end I will have no alternative but to go through the game's texture files and increase all of their texture resolutions to a factor of 2 through Photoshop. And so any information that you can offer in aid to this undertaking would be most helpful. But this endeavour would require that you lot point me towards resources that will explain:
1) How to open the ZDB files in which the Textures are Contained (I've tried WinRAR, no luck. Maybe you can download the demo and experiment?)
2) How to increase the resolution of these textures WITHOUT resulting in misaligned textures within the game.
If I could simply find how to do these two things, then I would have no problem sacrificing my freetime to go through the textures and fix them, and then arranging for hosting so that other fans of the game could also use them to play once again. My professional career has me using Photoshop much of the time, so the working of the program are well-known to me and I would not need to ask any further help (unless the Crimson Skies textures require output into a format I am unfamiliar with; then I would need perhaps a little guidance to documentation or utilities that would help me understand how to export in a compatible format.) I simply lack technical knowledge of how to get in at these files and render them in a state that will not cause further incompatibilities.
In searching, I did find some time ago a forum thread on the internet in which much technical detail was given about the issue, including correspondence between an end-user and NVIDIA support, in which they listed the specific DirectX texture flag that was causing the incompatibility. Unfortunately I assumed that this site would be saved in my history, and Internet Explorer did not do this, so I have since lost this website and am not finding it again through Google or Yahoo. But if any of you have the luck to know of this thread, then it would be a great start for compiling information. Of course, however, I am not asking you to search the internet for me; I already have much of that information. Moreso, I am asking for your own interpretation of this problem, according to your own technical knowledge.
Thank you again!
I played Crimson Skies religiously back in 2002, and recently picked up the game again in an attempt to once more play it.
I was frustrated to discover that, due to NVIDIA's series 6XXX cards and higher lacking support for textures that are not in multiples of 2, Crimson Skies' text is garbled and illegible, and additionally the game will crash after only a few minutes of play.
Adding to my dismay is the fact that Microsoft has ceased to support the game - or even to offer an online lobby for multiplayer games.
I understand that, because the problem arises from NVIDIA's drivers, it is not realistic to ask for your help on this forum to "fix" the problem.
But what I would appreciate would be for you to share your technical knowledge of this issue, so that it can be compiled and stored, and serve as a reference as I take more time to try to find out how I could fix the issue.
While I would ideally like to compile as much information on the technical incompatibility as is possible, so that perhaps someday a programmer may be able to fix the issue directly, I do realize that perhaps in the end I will have no alternative but to go through the game's texture files and increase all of their texture resolutions to a factor of 2 through Photoshop. And so any information that you can offer in aid to this undertaking would be most helpful. But this endeavour would require that you lot point me towards resources that will explain:
1) How to open the ZDB files in which the Textures are Contained (I've tried WinRAR, no luck. Maybe you can download the demo and experiment?)
2) How to increase the resolution of these textures WITHOUT resulting in misaligned textures within the game.
If I could simply find how to do these two things, then I would have no problem sacrificing my freetime to go through the textures and fix them, and then arranging for hosting so that other fans of the game could also use them to play once again. My professional career has me using Photoshop much of the time, so the working of the program are well-known to me and I would not need to ask any further help (unless the Crimson Skies textures require output into a format I am unfamiliar with; then I would need perhaps a little guidance to documentation or utilities that would help me understand how to export in a compatible format.) I simply lack technical knowledge of how to get in at these files and render them in a state that will not cause further incompatibilities.
In searching, I did find some time ago a forum thread on the internet in which much technical detail was given about the issue, including correspondence between an end-user and NVIDIA support, in which they listed the specific DirectX texture flag that was causing the incompatibility. Unfortunately I assumed that this site would be saved in my history, and Internet Explorer did not do this, so I have since lost this website and am not finding it again through Google or Yahoo. But if any of you have the luck to know of this thread, then it would be a great start for compiling information. Of course, however, I am not asking you to search the internet for me; I already have much of that information. Moreso, I am asking for your own interpretation of this problem, according to your own technical knowledge.
Thank you again!
