Windows 8: Can JJ2 survive?

[Sean]

Windows 8 is an entirely redesigned (from scratch, it is claimed) OS for the Windows line, though it's still in development. Lots of pre-existing code that has presumably allowed JJ2 to survive through the many instances of Windows from Windows 95-Windows 7 has been scrapped and redone, with a decent chance of framework that JJ2 relies on being changed.

What do we do in the chance that happens?

WHAT DO WE DO?

<span style="font-size: 3pt;"><b>(although if JJ2 uses C++ then I'm just being paranoid and you can berate me for being totally ignorant)</b></span>

[KRSplat]

im using 8 preview and only difference for jj2 is widescreen functionality (stretched window)

[Nonomu198]

im using 8 preview and only difference for jj2 is widescreen functionality (stretched window)

That is truly horrifying, and I'm not even being sarcastic you guys.
Stretched format is from the devil.







:god:

[MrAlextov]

Hmmm... I Had played JJ2 on Windows 8.
GPU drivers does not need. But when i switch to Fullscreen some things will start to be broken. The Network play will not work (list will show, but will display all servers as pinging.) and will start lags. To work again normally, JJ2 Need restart.

[DarkB]

Hmmm... I Had played JJ2 on Windows 8.
GPU drivers does not need. But when i switch to Fullscreen some things will start to be broken. The Network play will not work (list will show, but will display all servers as pinging.) and will start lags. To work again normally, JJ2 Need restart.

Don't play at fullscreen :)

[Slaz]

Don't play at fullscreen :)

I always play fullscreen. ;)

And Windows 8 is by no means build from scratch, it is built upon Windows 7 SP1. And I'd be surprised beyond believe if Win8 breaks JJ2 and/or DirectDraw. :devan:

[Hare]

I use Windows 8. I was on Jazz 2 last night.

Windowed mode is not too bad on a 32 inch 720p HDTV. I can imagine a 640x480 window gets pretty small at higher resolutions though. I haven't tried full-screen.

[Slaz]

Sorry for reviving this old thread. The previous posts are too informative to justify a new thread.

I have just upgraded one of my PC's to Windows 8 to see how well it goes, and of course tried JJ2. The findings posted above appear to be correct. Windowed mode works fine, but pushes the FPS counter up to 110/120-ish numbers, which can't be right at all. Then when I switch to fullscreen (JJ2 relies on DirectDraw for that) it suddenly stucks at 30 FPS max which creates very visible lag.

And to make it worse, network play appears to be stuck right after joining. Chat will work, and I can see all players and their positions in the level, yet they keep blinking as if there is a CTO. I can however stay in this 'stuck' game without timing out. Both Windows Firewall and my router's NAT are still open to JJ2's traffic.

I'm indeed surprised beyond believe... Anyone who could share some findings and/or solutions?

[Grytolle]

So network play doesn't work in window mode?

[GoldRabbit]

The findings posted above appear to be correct. Windowed mode works fine, but pushes the FPS counter up to 110/120-ish numbers, which can't be right at all.

That's the way it's supposed to be. JJ2+ removed the hardcoded limit of 70 fps, so now the standard for windowed mode if you have a good computer is ~120 fps.

[Slaz]

That's the way it's supposed to be. JJ2+ removed the hardcoded limit of 70 fps, so now the standard for windowed mode if you have a good computer is ~120 fps.
I never noticed since I always play fullscreen, haha. Thanks for pointing that out. 8D
So network play doesn't work in window mode?
Nope, network play doesn't work in fullscreen. I tried some ALT+TAB switching in Zeal Alpha and everything works fine in windowed mode, but from the moment I switch to fullscreen, the FPS gets locked at 30 and apparently the netcode doesn't like that and gets out of sync, or something.

So JJ2 isn't broken at all, it's more likely the DirectDraw feature itself. I'll try to find out. If other fullscreen DirectDraw games get locked at 30 FPS, it'll make the problem way more widespread. :rolleyes:

[Grytolle]

So network play does work in window mode? If so, JJ2 should have no problem surviving :p

[Slaz]

So network play does work in window mode? If so, JJ2 should have no problem surviving :p
Yes, network play works fine in windowed mode. So JJ2's survival isn't a problem indeed.

I'm likely in the minority of fullscreen players, so I'd need to do some troubleshooting to find out what's causing Windows 8 to lock fullscreen at 30 FPS.

[ShakerNL]

I've installed Windows 8 about two months ago via MSDNAA and never noticed the network error in fullscreen mode. I haven't tried it until I read about it here. And yes, I'm losing connection. Also having 30 fps when I play in fullscreen mode and 3 fps when I have hardware acceleration enabled in fullscreen mode.

[Jerrythabest]

Maybe a silly question, but do you see any differences between 1.23 and TSF and between Plus and non-plus?

[Slaz]

Maybe a silly question, but do you see any differences between 1.23 and TSF and between Plus and non-plus?
Little to no difference. I tried both plusified and non-plusified 1.23 and TSF on Windows 8, and here are the results:

Plusified 1.23/TSF: Windowed: 120FPS - Fullscreen: 30FPS + lost connection.
Non-plusified 1.23/TSF: Windowed: 70FPS - Fullscreen: 28FPS + lost connection.

Plus improves 2 FPS on Windows 8, hooray! :lol:

[Jerrythabest]

Thanks for trying! :) Then at least it's not Plus breaking it. Maybe someone could have a look at this to get a fix into Plus or so. But I don't have Windows 8 :p

[Jgke]

That's the way it's supposed to be. JJ2+ removed the hardcoded limit of 70 fps, so now the standard for windowed mode if you have a good computer is ~120 fps.

As far as I know, the limit wasn't removed, it was only put to 140. At least I can't get anything going faster than that.

[Slaz]

And btw, I also tried and confirmed wat Shaker said above: enabling hardware acceleration in fullscreen mode will dramatically decrease FPS to 3.

Every issue discussed in this thread has to do with fullscreen. I wonder if other games using JJ2's engine have the same problem, and what about other games that rely on good old DirectDraw for fullscreen mode? I will experiment a bit as soon as I'm on my PC!

I kinda hope the problem is just with DDraw mode, that way other game communities might make a universal DDraw fix before we know it. :D

[Jerrythabest]

If other games are not suffering, we'll probably have to dig really deep to find out what is taking so long.

Though with the right approach it shouldn't be too hard to pinpoint the problem. I figure some function call is taking a lot of time. So by disabling certain drawing functions one at a time we might quickly run into the one that is breaking things.

[Slaz]

Ok, as said yesterday I've expermimented a bit and here's some info that might be of interest:

I tried another JJ2 engine game, Animaniacs A Gigantic Adventure, and the same issue happened there. Windowed works fine, Fullscreen is slow, fullscreen with hardware-accel is sloooooowww. :p

Next I started the GBA emulator Visual Boy Advance, since it has many rendering settings. And choose to use DirectDraw. And yes, same FPS drop occured! But in full suprise, disabling Triple Buffering for DirectDraw made it run at 100% speed! I'm not very technical on this, I have no idea how triple buffering could interfere with frame processing in such a matter that it drops more than half.

A Google search didn't gave me anything usefull last week, but now it gave me a link to this thead (http://www.eightforums.com/gaming/9508-directdraw-games-performance.html) on some Windows 8 discussion board, which describes the exact problem. Unfortunately, the advice in that thread didn't fix JJ2, yet it sure pointed at the right direction.

Just like Windows Vista/7, Win8 comes with an integrated version of DirectX (11.1?) and is missing some libraries from good old 9.0c. Some games rely on those libraries, and installing a DirectX package using the web installer or a standalone package always did the trick. With Windows 8 however, it's the first time the web installer detects a higher version on the system and aborts the installation of the 9.0c package. So we're forced to manually download and install the stand-alone package now. Thank you, Microsoft!

So to get back to the point, does JJ2 use triple buffering in fullscreen? And can I disable it somehow?

[djazz]

So to get back to the point, does JJ2 use triple buffering in fullscreen? And can I disable it somehow?

http://www.jazz2online.com/wiki/List+of+Jazz+Jackrabbit+2+Command+Line+Arguments

Use the -NOTRIPLE command line flag maybe? Might try some other flags too.

[Jerrythabest]

If that would fix it, I guess for now Plus could have a workaround to detect Windows 8 and disable triple buffering in that case.

[Slaz]

I'm afraid that didn't fix it. Just tried it, among with several related flags. No visible changes in fullscreen. WTF? I also tried some options from my NVIDIA control panel on JJ2, like disabling triple buffering and Vsync, but no results. Then some compatibility options (WinXP/98/nothemes etc.) again without results. I guess I'd need to run some more DirectDraw based games then...

Perhaps someone could try Windows 8 and JJ2 on a different set of hardware, such as ATI/Intel graphic adapters? Or maybe I'd wait for better optimized driver support on Windows 8 or some Windows update from M$ themselves? Hardware is still very unlikely to be the culprit here since DirectDraw is supposed to be a software rendering standard.

[KRSplat]

JJ2 stopped working on Windows 8 Consumer preview about the time Windows 8 was released. So I know not what to do, maybe get an emulator for Windows 95.

[Jerrythabest]

Since people are saying JJ2 works (more or less) on Windows 8 RTM, I figure the problem you have might just be Microsoft purposefully crippling the Consumer Preview to make you buy the full product.

[Slaz]

Just tried another program with DirectDraw support, ZSnes, and got the same framerate drop again, and a strange DirectDraw error message on startup.. Surprisingly, turning Triple Buffering off fixed it entirely for ZSnes too!

I'm wondering, does anyone here know of some method to see if JJ2 is actually triple buffering even though the -notriple flag is on? Some benchmarking program maybe?

[Torkell]

Check your graphics card settings - you may be able to force triple buffering off with that.

[zardav]

The answer is yes.

[Jerrythabest]

Yes, as in, that fixed the slowness of JJ2 in fullscreen?

[burnout92]

I never be played JJ2 on Windows 8 because not compatible for Windows 8. I be wait Patch or anything else for fix this full screen problem.

[Slaz]

Yes, as in, that fixed the slowness of JJ2 in fullscreen?

That never fixed it for me. I'm using a Geforce GTX 260 with the latest drivers, and forcing triple buffering to 'No' on JJ2 doesn't change even a single frame.

[burnout92]

Disable DirectDraw in the game use -noddraw in the command line.

[Slaz]

Disable DirectDraw in the game use -noddraw in the command line.
That will disable fullscreen as a whole, as ddraw is the only screen output JJ2 supports. The goal I'd like to achieve is to save JJ2's fullscreen play in Windows 8. :rolleyes:

Anyway, I've tested some screen output features with DOSBox and found that the same slowdowns happen with DDraw and Double Buffering! That might explain why using the -notriple flag doesn't fix it for JJ2..

[burnout92]

What your video card are you using?

[DiamonduS327]

That is, the problem extends to the FPS online game, and single?

...However, the answer is obvious...

[Slaz]

As I said yesterday, I hereby post this excellent workaround I found on another forum that discussed the same problem with a DDraw based game.

1: Go to the DirectX Settings. Appears to be hidden in Windows8, download this cpl component shortcut: directx.cpl (http://we.tl/1StbtWisIe)
2: Make sure you open this applet with admin rights, proceed if you have.
3: Go to the DirectDraw tab and untick the checkbox Use Hardware Acceleration.
4: Make sure you do this on DirectDraw only, as disabling hardware accel on Direct3D will likely break modern games. Just don't casually tick anything else. :p
5: Press OK to apply settings. If you have JJ2 open, restart it to take effect.

It should be noted that this will come with a strange side effect. It pushes the fullscreen FPS to 120 while normally that would've been 70. It'll make screen movement slightly more wobbly somehow, but at least it plays lots and lots better than the 30 FPS you're otherwise stuck with on Windows 8.

And to clarify for those interested to look further into the problem, it's proven with several setups (by me and other folks) that this Win8/DDraw bug only happens while using DDraw with either double or triple buffering, but not with a single buffer. Even though JJ2 has a -notriple flag, it'll make no difference as it apparently just double buffers instead.

[Jerrythabest]

The 120 FPS is not really a 'strange side effect' but rather a feature of JJ2 Plus. If you play vanilla JJ2 I bet you'll get the 70 FPS cap just fine ;)

Looks like this workaround is indeed a fully-working fix. Though it's about time Microsoft starts unbreaking their products.

[Slaz]

Ah thanks for noting that Jerry! I always seem to forget about Vanilla JJ2 (a.k.a JJ2- according to some peeps in the Bash :p) and the hardcoded 70 FPS limit.

And yeah, Microsoft should be more carefull concerning backwards compatibility. I believe it has always been one of their pros, adding new features while carefully making sure older software remains compatible through some way. Not this time apparently.. :(