Yes, don't get me wrong magixts. It has nothing to do with your program, it already worked this way without the launcher. I just was curious if you knew something about it.
I meant that vertices show a strange movement, as if there was some kind of precision problem. Just like in the PSX version.
By the way, nice to hear about the black band. Sure you are fast
No idea about the PSX version of FF8, haven't played it from what I can recall. It's probably a bug or optimization in the original engine. With the higher resolutions that the launcher enables it becomes quite apparent that there are more than a few graphical glitches in the game especially in the 3d models. Missing polygons in character models and normals that are turned the wrong way are both pretty common.
Vista "Black screen of death"-issueI've done a bit of debugging in Vista x32 now and I've got a working fix for the black boxes ie. "8-bit Paletted Textures Fix" for Vista. There were a few other bugs and issues, most due to the new code in 1.3, that have been corrected.
As for the "black screen of death" when running the game on Vista; it is 100% an issue with sound hardware acceleration. Here are my notes:
No Creative (Sound Card) Drivers Installed- FF8 Launcher works, custom resolutions work
- FF8.exe launched from within FF8 installation directory (No \Game\ FF8.exe & binkw32.dll workaround needed)
AFTER Creative Drivers are Installed- FF8 does NOT work ("black screen of death")
- FF8 Launcher does NOT work
- D3D/DDRAW/DINPUT log no errors
Here's a quote from the Creative Support Knowledge Base:
3# The Vista audio architecture disables DirectSound 3D hardware acceleration; resulting in legacy DirectSound based EAX game titles not working as they did in XP.
Issues that may be encountered:
Could range from loss of EAX functionality in EAX enabled games to a complete game incompatibility, depending on how the game title was authored. This would only happen with games that render 3D audio using DirectSound, it should not affect games that render 3D audio using OpenAL.
Status:
These issues cannot be addressed by the Creative audio driver, because the functionality was purposely removed by the operating system. We look forward to game titles moving away from DirectSound and toward OpenAL for fully optimized Creative 3D audio hardware and technology support.
There's some good news though. Creative have released a program called "Creative Alchemy" for just this purpose. It relays DirectSound3D calls to OpenAL and tries to emulate hardware acceleration. With this program and a profile for Final Fantasy VIII enabled, the
game runs just fine. The quality of the sound is much worse than in XP with EAX though.
Creative Alchemy is available for both Audigy and X-fi type soundcards at the following link:
http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspxIf anyone has this same problem but do not have a Creative X-fi or Audigy soundcard; the "black screen of death"-issue is very likely to be caused by this incompability with EAX in Vista. Check your soundcard manufacturers homepage and see if they have any workarounds available. If not, it's not impossible that turning of hardware acceleration or EAX in the soundcard somehow could force the game to run using software acceleration and therfore work.