Hello all,

Grabbed Populous 3 as soon as I saw it on GOG and have been waiting to play all day. Finally got the chance and started the game... it's working for the most part pretty well, but I am having some minor graphic issues that are very distracting. Also I have only started up the tutorial so far so I don't know if the issues will get worse further into the game or not.

I'm getting what almost looks like a grid line issue over top of the interface and text boxes. It makes text look slightly garbled and at times a little rough to read. It's also cutting through the mini map and I see the box outline shape going down the edges of all the text boxes that pop up as well. It's been a long time but as I recall there was a similar issue with the original game that I owned right before it became too outdated to play.

I've attached a screen shot so you can see more clearly the issue. I'm running Win 7/64bit with an Nvidia GTX560ti card (have 2 in the PC but disable SLI for this game). I'm running it in hardware mode and have tried disabling any kind of aspect stretching so that the game runs at pure native 800x600 and the issue is still there. I also downloaded and tried the Popres app to fix textures but it didn't work either and was even worse than the GOG version as the menus were a sea of garishly colored sprites when using Popres. Any suggestions on how to get rid of this glitch?

Also, I was hoping to try some different settings in the setup options that came up the first time I ran the game,maybe change the resolution or change to software rendering etc, but I can't figure out how to get the setup to pop up again. It just runs the game now using the previously selected settings without letting me choose new options. I would imagine there is a .CFG file or something I could delete but I can't find the right one 100% for sure.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Looking forward to really getting into this great game, right now though the text glitches etc. are really distracting!

Have a quick update. The menu on the left side is also garbled. In the screenshot it's hard to tell because the tutorial doesn't have much going on, but the panel where you choose your warriors and spells etc is very garbled. You can kind of make out what is supposed to be what but it's really hard to tell and could very possibly be game breaking as it sometimes the glitch obscures too much of the panel to know for sure what it is. Thanks again for any advice guys!

To get the setup to pop again, you have to go into your Populous 3 folder in the start menu and select the setup from there.

As for the graphical glitches, try installing the 1.03 patch, replacing the atiumdiag.dll and using a .bat to kill explorer.exe before the game starts, as mentioned in the other threads.

Thanks for the reply TigerITS,

Unfortunately none of those suggestions solved my problem. I am not using an ATI video card, NVidia here... I do not have the atiumdiag.dll file anywhere in the Poplous 3 directory to change or remove. The game starts fine without it and I'm assuming it only installs if you're running an ATI card?

I installed the unofficial patch and it may have made mouse movement smoother but did not fix the glitches in display when in hardware mode. The custom .bat file also did not have any effect.

Thanks for the heads up about looking in the program files menu for the setup... didn't occur to me, woops! I have played around with the settings there and the game menus and text are correct in software mode, but it's no where near as pretty as hardware mode! I don't have any lags or audio issues in either software or hardware mode. After combing the internet it appears that my issue is a long standing one when using hardware mode on newer systems with Populous 3. Some have got it working by disabling Direct3D but this is not possible to do in Windows 7. If you're running XP you might have great results with hardware mode by disabling Direct3D. It appears for those like me though, Win7 and my video card are both too new and won't allow this. I have also disabled all modern features for this program on my video card and that did not help either.

I have tried several other things including installing the latest version of DirectX9 and nothing works. Software mode everything is fine, but the graphics suffer. Hardware mode the game functions smoothly but there are glitches on the game interface that make it very difficult to play, not the lest of which is the fact that tribe colors on the units themselves can get distorted to and so you have no idea which tribe is which.

There have been no fixes that I have found. I strongly suspect (though I could be wrong) that it has to do with Direct3D implementation on newer cards/OS and that until the coding Guru's at GOG or someone with a lot more coding knowledge than me feel up to diving into the program code itself and modifying it to maybe somehow interact better with newer versions of Direct3D than it's probably just us software mode or put up with glitches in hardware mode... unless you're system is old enough to let you disable Direct3D.

One other option for those desperate enough to try it. Supposedly if you still have a copy of Windows XP you can install a dual boot on your system and install Populous 3 on the XP side and be able to do all the tweaking you need to make Populous 3 run smoothly in hardware mode. I don't want to go through the trouble and will just deal with software mode. I'm definitely open to any great tricks to try though if anyone has a suggestion!

An easier way to run Windows XP would be to install it in a virtual machine. That way you don't need to setup a dual boot system.

The graphics distortion problems can sometimes be fixed with updated graphics card drivers. The Populous Reincarnated matchmaker will sometimes fix messed up textures, but that's only multiplayer

For the color problems, just press the [Scroll Lock] key and Populous will refresh the color palette.

Populous can run fine on Windows 7, so no need for dual boot or virtual machines.

I've had this game for years (since it came out on PC) and I've always experienced this exact same graphical glitch. It's as if you took a screenshot of this game running on my PC.

I've had this glitch using Windows XP, Vista, and now Windows 7 64 bit.
My father-in-law has the same problem.

It's an old bug that has never been fixed due to EA not caring about their customers and Bullfrog going out of business (due to EA being a horrible company).
You just have to ignore it.

Regards,

Yeah, whatever is wrong, it will take more than a simple software band-aid to fix. Something will have to be changed in the engine to make it 100% compatible with all/most new systems in hardware mode.

I agree about virtual machine and forgot to mention that. I don't know if it's necessarily less of a pain to deal with as opposed to a dual boot though, other than it's easier to uninstall. Also, unless they have changed the requirements, you have to have Windows 7 Professional or higher to be allowed to install the virtual machine for free. I had it on my system at one time when I first got my copy of Win7 Pro and wasn't really that impressed. It took a fair amount of time to set up and was annoying copying stuff into it. I tried running 2 older games on it (one was Temple of Elemental Evil before GOG released it) and it was just really slow and not impressive and one of them still didn't work at all, even though the game was made for XP. My system at the time was not a beast, but it wasn't bad either. You're basically running an OS within an OS with virtual machine and it uses a fair amount of system resources. I would say it's a good alternate solution if it's available to you and also if your system has enough RAM and processing power to handle it well. It's been about 2-3 years since then so maybe most computers these days can handle it just fine?

I am using the GOG release version in software mode with fan patch 1.03 at the moment and it's perfectly playable and runs smooth as silk, it just doesn't look as good as it could. My graphics card drivers are the latest available for my rig so no help to be obtained from there. As long as I use the GOG version in software mode I don't have to do any tricks to play the game so it will suffice for me. I tried downloading all the software tweaks and fixers people have created over the years and they didn't make the game run any better and in some cases made it run worse than the GOG version so no reason for me to switch over to an alternate method. The multi-player thing sounds interesting but I never played the game online and have no desire to so it won't help me any.

As I said before all my investigation (about 3-4 hours of chasing info on the net) has led me to believe that it's an issue with how newer versions of Direct3D are implemented and how modern video cards etc handle it. To me, it looks like portions of the game and menu system are setup with old school 2D sprite tiles in those areas the tiles that are being used are not aligned properly. It looks like they are shifted maybe down and to the right and are also repeating more than they should, and most likely the z-index (stacking order) of the images is getting messed up. It's just a visual observation but I do notice that in the game area where the actual 3D world and environment is at, everything that is in 3D is fine. It's only flat 2D images like the units and menu that are getting messed up. I saw a couple places where people with XP had success in fixing all issues by going into Direct X diagnostics and disabling Direct 3D or turning down their hardware acceleration in the "troubleshoot" section of advanced settings on display properties, to the point where Direct3D was turned off. For me these are both disabled options, one because of Win 7 and the other because of my video card. There is no way to do anything about that for me without installing a very risky Microsoft SDK diagnosis pack for Direct3D for developers. They say in bold not to use the diagnostics for compatibility issues with old software. I want Populous 3 back in all it's glory, but it's not worth doing a reinstall from scratch of my PC because I screwed my system up beyond repair. It you have old enough drivers or hardware/ OS to shut these features off definitely give it a try, those are the only occasions I saw anywhere on the net with people having a successful a solution.

I'm just racking this one up to having the right hardware/OS combination to get it working in hardware mode. Because some people seem to be confused I'll say it again, I'm only talking about using hardware mode without visual glitches, not getting the game to run. Hopefully GOG will pull a rabbit out of the hat here and come up with a fix down the road, thanks guys!

Thanks for the info Mattyah, I did download and try PopEnhance before and it didn't resolve my problems or effect them at all as far as I could tell, other than I did get the menu color craziness so I know it was at least trying to do something. Do you think the "BRYNE" command in game would resolve the issue then or is it doing the exact same thing as PopEnhance?

I also tried playing with my video card settings both forcing a total disabling of every modem feature, including AA and AF, as well as forcing them to be used at their highest capacities (If I was able to choose an intensity level) and wasn't able to make anything change. I'm swamped with work so it'll be a couple days or so before I can try the BRYNE command on my own but was wondering if it's any different from PopEnhance, since that one didn't work for me?

Thanks for the info regardless, crossing my fingers and hoping "BRYNE" will work!

Just wanted to update everyeone that for me Mattyah's solution DOES work. I tried the manual way using the "BYRNE" command and the developers cheat menu and it does indeed make the textures in the menu and on the battlefield work and solves pretty much every issue I had with the game in hardware mode! Special Thanks to Mattyah for taking the time to post this solution!

What I don't understand is that I already tried installing PopEnhance and ran it with the texture fixes enabled and it didn't work?! Does it have something to do with the way that GOG adapted the code for their version? I have no idea, maybe if someone has a solution to that one then we can get an autonomous fix. Either way in the meantime I will gladly live with BYRNE and the devs menu!!!

I stumbled on the same issue, and the "BYRNE" command indeed works - but not if you install the 1.03 patch (unofficial).

Have you tried running PopEnhance in Admin mode? You will have to re-check everything here (game path, Hardware mode, resolution and texture fixes) in Admin mode, then run the game from there. It should work.

Thanks for the suggestion Darucas. I'll try it out with the game rolled back and try running in admin mode. When I tried PopEnhance before it was before I installed the 1.03 patch, but I don't believe I tried running it in admin mode because it seemed to work fine without doing so (didn't give me any warnings or freezes).

I'll see what I can figure out next time I get the chance to fire up Populous! Thanks for the info!

Correction:

The BYRNE command does work with 1.03, as well as PopEnhance. Just install Pop3, then 1.03, then PopEnhance (so, with the right path in Settings, and launched in Admin to be sure).

Just use the texture fix and Hardware mode, as using this utility to apply a higher res seems tricky (launch the game Setup and save there if the resolution doesn't change).

With my ATi card, forcing a higher res makes the main menu laggy (cursor and sound), but apart from that and the colour bug (=> Scroll Lock) you should be ok!

The unofficial patch 1.05+ fixes this issue as well (be sure to start the game from the 1.05 exe). I noticed a problem using PopEnhance which was that I got occasionaly black screens that lasted half a second or so. However, I do not get them if I use the Byrne cheat or the 1.05+ patch.