BTW, you should still have just as many lights.There is just more effects regarding the use of shadow vs. light, and where light extends and shadow begins. Some of the jump scares, play on these shadow effects IIRC.

That is to say in directx a room will be consistant lighting, either lighter, or more shadowy. Whereas Glide offered slightly more variation within the same room, with areas that are noticeably darker than others, or 'go darker' if a light fixture stops working.

I bought the game when it was new and only bought it on GOG due to me wanting to run it without the CD. I've beaten this game somewhere around 5 or 6 times in my life. For me, it's more about taking screenshots of neat moments and staying in touch with my friends through Steam.

Now, if GOG Galaxy is good enough and everyone I know migrates over....this won't be an issue.

If you have beaten it 5 or 6 times then that's understandable but still, I always turn off the chat overlay in single player titles that has a decent narrative to avoid distractions. I also use an external application to take screenshots.

I'm not sure why someone has to ask why, the game looks about 5 years younger with Glide. Same with the original Half-Life, it looked better with 3Dfx in the late 90's than it does with the DirectX Valve forced on to it for Steam.

The only downside is the driver packaged with the game is badly optimised and framerates can suffer even on good machines, if you get a good 3Dfx driver the game looks lush, far superior to DirectX.

I've been playing and fiddling with Unreal Engine games for more than 15 years and I call all that BS. S3 Metal was superior because of S3TC and HiRes textures (at least for UT99), but for the rest part, in year 1998+, Glide was outdated, old and obsolete with the prime issue of being 16bit only and with texture limit of 256x256 where other libraries already supported 32bit and also higher resolution textures.

The extra goodies you may see in games like insects getting smeared on windscreen in NFS2 when running Glide has nothing to do with actual Glide capability. It was just an extra goodie, because it was so much faster than software they could afford it. And to promote Glide of course. Same shit NVIDIA is doing with PhysX...

Now I have to get Direct3D or OpenGL working, Glide is rubbish and I don't want it on a hardware that is D3D capable to begin with. That's like emulating Linux on Widnows system so you can run Wine on it for Windows games. Makes no sense.

EDIT:
By removing all the Glide files, changing the renderer to D3D, changing resolution manually to 1920x1080 through system.ini in the game folder and the game works perfectly fine with D3D. I don't get it why one would emulate things that can run in native mode. They could just use a configuration launcher that directly modifies system.ini through a nice menud riven GUI (I've seen it for other games from GOG).

I have to fix few tiny things, but other than that, works perfectly fine.

Btw, damn this game has amazing dynamic shadows. They move and look far better than in many games released just few years ago. They move realistically based on light sources, they have nice soft edges and just feel natural. Amazing.

Remember to use THIS so the journal doesn't get cut off unless GOG implemented the change since the last updates.

Your link displays GOG's humorous "404: oh noes, there's nothing in here" message when I click it.

What was the solution to the journal cut off problem?
(And has the problem been patched out yet?)

Great Archiving of 2015

Here you go.

Mirror.

Credits go to the user drennan.

Thank you both. ^_^

But for me it is the the extra 'atmospheric goodies' is the reason I'd rather play with Glide, it is the most 'complete' version of the game graphically with all the bells and whistles.

If someone was to mod the game and other 3dfx games to include those extra graphics in DirectX then fine. But until they do, I'm stuck having to play in 3dFX mode to get all atmospheric extras.


Of course there are some games where 3dFX is the only mode that gives you higher resolution modes, and where features are removed in the directx mode. Like the less atmospheric features in King's Quest 8 in DirectX, and lower resolution.

It may also have something to do with when 3dfx first came out directx may have been slower. But since then DirectX has been largely improved. But just because modern DirextX has been improved doesn't mean the extra bells and whistles have are automatically activated in the older games.

Nah, the GOG Win8/10 supporting package is much better than GLIDE (and I was a big 3dfx fan for years.) Here's the current GOG D3d configuration file:

[D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
Translucency=True
VolumetricLighting=True
ShinySurfaces=True
Coronas=True
HighDetailActors=True
UseMipmapping=True
UseTrilinear=True
UseMultitexture=True
UsePageFlipping=True
UsePalettes=True
UseFullscreen=True
UseGammaCorrection=True
DetailTextures=True
Use3dfx=False
UseTripleBuffering=True
UsePrecache=True
Use32BitTextures=True
DescFlags=1
UseVertexFog=True
UseAGPTextures=False
UseVideoMemoryVB=False
UseVSync=False
Description=AMD Radeon (TM) R9 380 Series

I swear the game looks great...better than I remember it--hard to believe how good it looks without using a more advanced D3d renderer--GOG absolutely has to have tinkered a bit--no complaints here! Game including textures renders sweet in 32-bits (contrasted with 16-bits for GLIDE.) Well, while GLIDE has remained frozen in a stasis since around 2000 or so (last 15 years), D3d has improved by leaps and bounds. It's certainly true that prior to DX7, GLIDE was far ahead of D3d in rendering quality & performance, but DX7 was the version that hit parity with GLIDE, but even 3dfx, before they went belly up (and were cannibalized by nVidia), had publicly dumped GLIDE in favor of D3d. No question but that D3d is the way to run the game now, at least with the version GOG is now selling. (I'm running Win10x64, build 10586.)

You still can't create what wasn't there, I have DX11 but I highly doubt the game will take advantage of tesselation or depth of field. I'll give this a look too, but the game was written to use Glide, many games such as HL1 still look far far better with 3Dfx because DirectX was only given a brief nod by the developers who knew everyone would buy a Voodoo card.

Yes, the original HL1 does indeed look better in GLIDE--however, Valve's source-engine update for HL1 is by far the best-looking version of the game, today. Yes, I still remember when the only 3d games obtainable were GLIDE and the screenshots on every game box were from GLIDE versions of the game--remember it well. It was from a time before Microsoft had even started with D3d development--which did not reach image and performance parity with GLIDE until DX7. I owned several 3dfx cards--a V1/V2/V3 & a V5.5k. Great memories.

And you are right that if the game doesn't support it you won't be able to render it, etc., but the game engine supports both APIs--and doing GLIDE feature support is trivial in D3d today. I'm not speaking of DX11, either. Just make sure you have DX9.0c June2010 runtime from Microsoft (Microsoft's final version of DX9 & < )installed alongside whatever version of DX your OS now supports natively. (As I mentioned, every gamer should be doing this.)

After getting around to trying it out I can see that they have finally brought D3D support up to OpenGL standards after all, but with the exception of 32bit (which does remove the hideous pixelated coronas around lights), however it doesn't look much different to 3Dfx. They haven't added anything new, they've just made it that D3D now does what OpenGL could do from day one, lightmaps, shadows, anisotropic filtering, etc

It does look much better in 32bit though so for anyone using Windows 8 or 10 whatever GOG did will be a blessing for them, but for those that still get 12fps with D3D while getting none of the features 3Dfx is still there to allow high framerates, full graphics effects, but with only a 16bit palette (which is very noticeable, especially around light sources).