Anachronox - fixed effects, ruined textures

[Hunter]

I was playing Anachronox, when I came upon a graphics error primarily categorized by opaque glass where there should be transparent glass, and also the absence of certain fog/mist effects. So I decided to try the Glide wrapper.

Well, I am impressed to find the glass transparent and the mists working. But, the game only runs in "Low res" mode (3) which is an omnibus package of 640x480 and I am guessing highly compressed textures. Anachronox doesn't let you pick texture quality directly. The Glide wrapper doesn't run at 640x480, but it must tell the game it is, and I suppose that is where the texture thing comes in.

Because I can see out of windows now, but textures look like garbage! See the picture for an example. Glide sign on the top, OpenGL sign on the bottom.

I don't know what to do. I guess play the game in OpenGL unless I know there's a lot of glass somewhere

[Gamecollector]

Anachronox Hi-Res mode is 1280x960. Not supported by the glide API (or glide hardware). So - yes, you swap the high-res mode to the correct transparency and the fog.
And yes, all Voodoos except Voodoo4/5 have the 256x256 texture size limit. Try to play MDK2 with nGlide 1.03 (1.04 and later supports the TEXFMT extension and use large textures, same as Voodoo4/5) to see the "garbage textures"...

[Hunter]

Got it. I also found some sort of problem with shadows (I can see shadow gradients easily in Glide, and they look pretty much like shadows in Direct3D). sigh

I guess the correct way to play this game is with a 10 year old card and drivers (but not MY 10 year old card and drivers; I read the Radeon 9800 PRO also has the same transparency issue. Also that card is loud.)

[Gamecollector]

Radeon 9800 PRO also has the same transparency issue.

Have tested with Radeon 9100 + WinME + Catalyst 6.2.
Of course both Catalyst bugs are here - subtract blending and table fog are broken.

[Hunter]

Wow, that's an old card; really close to the release date. What does work correctly? Some NVIDIA maybe?