itch.io

Hi  skid,
Thanks for the suggestions.  I'm not sure what version of Blitz3D I've been using up til now, and it's a bit of a nuisance to boot up the computer on which these results were obtained.  But I followed your link and downloaded and installed v1.108 on a Windows 10 machine that has not previously had Blitz3D on  it at all.  I then went out and downloaded a fresh copy of Z_Virus with source and executable.

Alas, results were very mixed, and not at all what I want.

Running the existing executable, of course, the game comes up fullscreen and I still get the black ground, not surprisingly.   Opening the source .BB file in Blitz3D and running it from there, I can't tell, because the game locks up --  the main menu appears, but it doesn't respond to the keyboard, including not responding to Ctrl-F4 -- even when run in Windowed mode rather than fullscreen.   Its an especial nuisance in fullscreen, though, because I had to finagle-finess-and-connive a way to get out of it, when it wouldn't relinquish the screen to Desktop apps!   Alt-TAB had no effect at first but, fortunately, Ctrl-Alt-Del still worked, and brought up a menu that managed to supersede the game screen at least temporarily.  Selecting Task Manager from there returned me to the game screen; the normal Windows Desktop mode did not yet reappear.  But Alt-TAB had become responsive, and I could at least see "thumbnail" views of everything that was running -- large enough, in fact, that I could almost read e.g. the text in a cmd window -- and thereby discover that programs I launched, by blind typing Windows-R and a command, were being launched, and were responding to the keyboard -- they just weren't able to "punch through" the DirectX game screen and become visible, because the gameprocess was jammed up so solidly.   (In Windowed mode, the jammed-up game's window just sits there "in the way" of trying to do anything else; it can't be repositioned, resized, or closed, by mouse clicks or keypresses. )

I managed to  bring up a cmd console behind the game screenand try a taskkill command, but couldn't remember the syntax.  I did, however, happen to do a tasklist command, direct the output to a file, open that file in Notepad, accidentally type stuff into it, and attempt to close it prior to giving up and rebooting -- and that was what saved my butt.  The shutdown phase of the reboot discovered Notepad's SAVE dialog was open (because I had made changes to the file!), and popped up a warning dialog that allowed me to cancel the shutdown/restart -- happily, after it had successfully killed off the stuck Z-Virus game and restored the screen mode!  

SHEESH.

Oh, and somewhere early in all that, the program wouldn't start at all because a new-built .exe couldn't find fmod.dll.   Running the program by its full pathname while cd'd to Blitz3D's bin folder where fmod.dll lives, solved that problem but resulted in the game being unable to find its external data files.  I had to copy fmod.dll from the bin folder to the same folder as the Z_Virus.exe program file.  This is the case only for .exes built fresh from source, here and now, by me -- the .exe supplied in the download does not have this problem.   I have no idea how or whether I can change a setting somewhere and get a new-built .exe that works like the downloaded one.  Do you know?

(Oh, and the very first couple times I tried to run it, it "couldn't get graphics mode," or words to that effect, and finally after a few tries I found lurking behind a couple other windows a dialog prompting me to install DirectX from a supplied link.   But I guess we expect that.)

So.  After the initial debacle outlined above, I figured out the syntax of the taskkill command and created two batch files, one to kill off z_virus.exe and the other to kill off blitzcc.exe, depending on which way I had launched the program.   Unfortunately I then discovered that I had insufficient access / privilege to kill off the process I had launched (which seems stupid) and had to launch that cmd window "as Administratror" in order for taskkill to succeed.  Finally got all the pieces in place to where I could kill off the stuck game process by just Ctrl-Alt-Del to get Alt-TAB working, then using Alt-TAB to select the cmd window and blind-typing the name of the appropriate batch file!

And it's a good thing, too, because most combinations of different values in the fourth parameter of the Graphics3D command, the Debug On? setting, interactive vs compile-and-standalone launch, etc., produced lockup.  Only briefly, running in a window with I don't remember what exact combination of the other factors, did I get an instance of the game that ran with entirely correct graphics, including the ground plane.   Other failure modes, though, included:  (1) Black ground and black background on radar map; (2) NO SOUND (!); and (3) Same old, same old, Windows 10 black ground.  Mostly, though, the thing just locked up.  I have yet to rediscover the combination of things that gave me that one brief moment of perfection, but I do know that I have been absolutely unable to obtain it from a compiled .exe of the program.   Tell me step-by-step exactly what you do, that makes it "work right."

I should probably point out that I'm doing this on a computer that does not have a dedicated graphics card (I don't think any of my three Windows 10 machines do), just the cheap-$#!+ Intel Graphics chip on the motherboard...  But then, that was also true of my XP laptop where this has worked perfectly for years, with "no muss, no fuss," so I have to question whether that could even be a factor.

Anyway -- we're (or at least I'm) not quite out of the woods yet.  Your thoughts?