Dune2K - High Resolution

[Feda]

I'm using Geforce :( But there should be such options also.

But thank you for answers :)

There is. I have Nvidia, I dont remember where exactly I've seen it but there certainly is that option. 

[D2k Sardaukar]

Perhaps this: http://www.overclock.net/t/713241/nvidia-image-scaling

[mlw7]

Is there any way to put the cutscenes at the center of the screen or display them in full-screen?

[D2k Sardaukar]

Not that we know about. I tried several things (like adjusting the resolution of the video files), but it seems too much trouble for little gain.

[Glurak]

Hi  i patched my german version in 1920x1080 but now i cant sell or repair ingame because the icons are not clickable :-(

 

oh and my game is flickering ^^

[Morris]

Can someone make this (and the game itself) work on mac? Please?

[D2k Sardaukar]

Hi  i patched my german version in 1920x1080 but now i cant sell or repair ingame because the icons are not clickable :-(

 

oh and my game is flickering ^^

I thought I fixed the German version, but probably not? Are you sure you patched the game to version 1.6? What you can try is downloading the gruntlord edition: http://gruntmods.com/Projects/Downloads/Dune_2000/

 

That one is English and will work. The flickering might not be fixable... there were some posts on that subject, but I can't remember if there was a solid fix for it.

 

Can someone make this (and the game itself) work on mac? Please?

I have no idea if that is possible. I guess you would need to emulate something... Might perhaps be faster to just have dual boot windows or a virtual machine with windows.

[shai]

Can someone make this (and the game itself) work on mac? Please?

You might be able to get it to work with some kind of Windows .exe emulator. 

[shai]

 

Hi  i patched my german version in 1920x1080 but now i cant sell or repair ingame because the icons are not clickable :-(

 

oh and my game is flickering ^^

You can fix the flickering by capping the FPS at 25, or you could use old hardware. You could use DXtory to cap it, but I've never got it to work right. You can find lots of tutorials on how to do it I'm sure. 

Edited June 28, 2014 by Shai-Gel98

[Zaxx]

You can fix the flickering by capping the FPS at 25, or you could use old hardware. You could use DXtory to cap it, but I've never got it to work right. You can find lots of tutorials on how to do it I'm sure. 

I had a bad flickering issue before and on Windows 7 setting compatibility to Win 98 fixed it. You can also tick the "run as administrator" and the "disable desktop composition" options, they can help with old titles like D2k.

 

As to get back to topic I have to say the game looks amazing in 720p compared to the original resolution. Widescreen Dune 2k, here I come! :D I've noticed a few issues however:

 

- the Arrakis map in the campaigns is on the top left side of the screen

- the game results screen after completing a campaign mission or a skirmish is on the top left side of the screen

 

I've seen that the positional problems with the cutscenes were already reported. Those should be fixed somehow, some questions / suggestions regarding that:

 

- Would it be possible to make the game switch resolutions like RA2: Yuri's Revenge does? Menus, cutscenes etc. could be kept in the game's original resolution to prevent position issues while the actual gameplay could keep the high res.

- Is stretching possible? The videos and the menu assets are all in a 16:10 aspect ratio so stretching them to 16:9 is not that big of a deal (and if someone's using a 16:10 monitor it's already perfect). This way menus could be bigger and the transition videos (menu animation when starting the game, Arrakis map animation when starting a campaign) could stay in their correct position.

- How about re-encoding the cutscenes? I did a little test on the intro vid: extracted it from the game into uncompressed avi, then did a resize to 720p with the appropriate letterboxing to keep the original 16:10 aspect ratio and made another uncompressed avi out of it. There was no noticeable quality difference compared with the original video. I did not figure out how to encode the HD footage back to VQA format (VQAenc only does 640x400) however but if someone could help me with that I could make a full 720p re-encode of all the videos.

 

If only the last solution is possible I think that 720p could be the ideal choice as most people who use the High Res fix do it because they want to have access to widescreen resolutions. In 1080p everything is too small and the 16:9 aspect ratio is the standard these days (of course if this could work and there's a demand for 16:10 I can do a re-encode in 1280x800 too). If that's done there's only one thing left: upscale the main menu and the Arrakis map screens to fit the HD videos and we have a working "Dune 2000 HD" with all the bells and whistles. :)

[D2k Sardaukar]

Yes, map-, result- and cutscene-screens are at top left corner. I looked at trying to fix it, but I did not find a solution and I don't have a lot of time. I once did manipulate the score screen, perhaps with the .uil file, I can't remember. Also, I don't find it that important, the (battlefield) gameplay is in high resolution, it's a minor thing that those screens aren't in the middle.

 

I think stretching is not possible with the game-engine and I don't see much use in that, it distorts the units. Menu's can be stretched, but that means manually editing the background images and the text size will probably be the same.

 

Re-encoding the cutscenes is indeed possible, but not everybody has a fast PC, so re-encoding all the scene's takes a lot of time for little gain. Re-encoding will probably also lower quality. Shipping the whole game (like Gruntlord's edition) with already adjusted cutscenes to 720p (and the game itself also) could perhaps work.

 

720p is indeed nice, but to be honest, you are not running the game in native resolution I think. Because if your videocard does no stretching than all resolutions have the same unit size (text, menus etc). So it should not matter if you use 720p or larger, only the visible battleground area will get bigger.

[Zaxx]

Yes, map-, result- and cutscene-screens are at top left corner. I looked at trying to fix it, but I did not find a solution and I don't have a lot of time. I once did manipulate the score screen, perhaps with the .uil file, I can't remember. Also, I don't find it that important, the (battlefield) gameplay is in high resolution, it's a minor thing that those screens aren't in the middle.

 

I think stretching is not possible with the game-engine and I don't see much use in that, it distorts the units. Menu's can be stretched, but that means manually editing the background images and the text size will probably be the same.

 

Re-encoding the cutscenes is indeed possible, but not everybody has a fast PC, so re-encoding all the scene's takes a lot of time for little gain. Re-encoding will probably also lower quality. Shipping the whole game (like Gruntlord's edition) with already adjusted cutscenes to 720p (and the game itself also) could perhaps work.

 

720p is indeed nice, but to be honest, you are not running the game in native resolution I think. Because if your videocard does no stretching than all resolutions have the same unit size (text, menus etc). So it should not matter if you use 720p or larger, only the visible battleground area will get bigger.

Don't worry about video quality: I don't want to go through the videos with a simple resize filter, I'd like to improve the image quality if I can. Actually the movies will look better at the end I think but of course the original video quality is very poor, however I made some slight adjustments and they are promising.

 

What I'm really curious about is what VQA can do actually. Does it support 720p? Does the game support 720p videos? If so then how can I convert back the videos to VQA?

[D2k Sardaukar]

Good point, even XCC Mixer (http://xhp.xwis.net/) can't seem to do it.

[Gruntlord6]

 

Re-encoding the cutscenes is indeed possible, but not everybody has a fast PC, so re-encoding all the scene's takes a lot of time for little gain. Re-encoding will probably also lower quality. Shipping the whole game (like Gruntlord's edition) with already adjusted cutscenes to 720p (and the game itself also) could perhaps work.

Even that was giving me weird issues, so I'm switching the way that is handled on the next installer. 

If I recall, it depends on your PC whether the screen is stretched or not. My laptop will display the game in a black box without the high res patch, where as my desktop will stretch the graphics to fit. I doubt you would run into playback issues if you had a higher quality VQA, at least not for 720p (even netbooks can playback 720p well enough), not that I would know if it's possible to do so with a VQA. If its possible to have a 720 VQA, I would just have the file uploaded somewhere rather then encoding it on the spot though, for the reasons you mentioned.

[Zaxx]

Even that was giving me weird issues, so I'm switching the way that is handled on the next installer. 

If I recall, it depends on your PC whether the screen is stretched or not. My laptop will display the game in a black box without the high res patch, where as my desktop will stretch the graphics to fit. I doubt you would run into playback issues if you had a higher quality VQA, at least not for 720p (even netbooks can playback 720p well enough), not that I would know if it's possible to do so with a VQA. If its possible to have a 720 VQA, I would just have the file uploaded somewhere rather then encoding it on the spot though, for the reasons you mentioned.

Had a look at the programs that can handle VQA: I couldn't change the video's resolution in the encoding options even when I tried to feed it 720p video. So we need a better encoder or VQA is simply not suited for anything but 640x400. Shame.

 

Anyway I've tried out your Gruntmods edition and the movies were still at the top left corner so guess I misunderstood the notion that your edition would have adjusted cutscenes. Also I have a tiny little request for you: if you make something better (for example with what you did with the mission select screen in Gruntmods), please make that stuff available separately from Gruntmods. Some of us would like to use the original game without your installer and launcher bit with some of the awesome stuff you have for Gruntmods. :)

[D2k Sardaukar]

Had a look at the programs that can handle VQA: I couldn't change the video's resolution in the encoding options even when I tried to feed it 720p video. So we need a better encoder or VQA is simply not suited for anything but 640x400. Shame.

 

Anyway I've tried out your Gruntmods edition and the movies were still at the top left corner so guess I misunderstood the notion that your edition would have adjusted cutscenes. Also I have a tiny little request for you: if you make something better (for example with what you did with the mission select screen in Gruntmods), please make that stuff available separately from Gruntmods. Some of us would like to use the original game without your installer and launcher bit with some of the awesome stuff you have for Gruntmods. :)

You can also get it separately: http://d2kplus.com/mod_missionselect.php

[Zaxx]

You can also get it separately: http://d2kplus.com/mod_missionselect.php

Yep, I already have that but the Gruntmods version has an updated one with a better looking UI and the option to set the difficulty. I was like "wtf" when I saw that and it saddens me that it's not available separately because the installer + launcher is putting me off of Gruntmods. :)

[Gruntlord6]

Yep, I already have that but the Gruntmods version has an updated one with a better looking UI and the option to set the difficulty. I was like "wtf" when I saw that and it saddens me that it's not available separately because the installer + launcher is putting me off of Gruntmods. :)

What about the installer don't you like? You can bypass the launcher if your really dislike it that much by just changing the shortcut to point directly to Dune2000.exe

The majority of the content in the Gruntmods Edition is made available on D2K+, for example, the Debug Menu http://d2kplus.com/mod_debugmenu.php

[CCHyper]

The VQA Engine from TS supports any resolution video. The game might clip the viewport though.

*EDIT: Looking back through this topic, how does the new 'high res' patch work? I wondered why there was not a in-game menu created to list resolutions or a command line option to set it? (This is what I last looked into).

[Zaxx]

The VQA Engine from TS supports any resolution video. The game might clip the viewport though.

*EDIT: Looking back through this topic, how does the new 'high res' patch work? I wondered why there was not a in-game menu created to list resolutions or a command line option to set it? (This is what I last looked into).

Other's will correct me on this if I'm wrong but to me it looks like that the high res patch modifies game files in order to change the resolution. That's not just UI or stuff like that but actually some campaigns maps are modified too (guess that's because the game would crash just like C&C1 and Red Alert does with the high res patches). So seems to me that at this point a resolution change through the options menu is impossible because the games on this engine never supported that (remember the original config tool for C&C1 and Red Alert?).

 

Anyway maybe if TS supports it then Dune 2000 supports it too, it just may have never been used. How to create a high res VQA video so that I could try it out quickly?

[CCHyper]

Someone who goes under Glukv48 hacked ugorden's VQA encoder to allow 800x600;

http://www.ppmsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38148

[D2k Sardaukar]

CCHyper is alive!!11!! OMG....

 

The VQA Engine from TS supports any resolution video. The game might clip the viewport though.

*EDIT: Looking back through this topic, how does the new 'high res' patch work? I wondered why there was not a in-game menu created to list resolutions or a command line option to set it? (This is what I last looked into).

The high resolution patch works by (and now I simply quote my own readme):

 

 

This patcher contains two executables (.exe) that are both needed to get proper high
resolution. You only need to run d2k_patch.exe, because this one will also use the other
executable. You could however only run the dat_patcher_*.exe to experiment with ANY resolution
you want since d2k_patch.exe will show you only those resolutions compatible with Dune 2000.
Run dat_patcher_*.exe and read the description on how to setup any resolution.
Use unsupported resolutions at your own risk. Many things might look wrong but still playable.

The following things are being changed in Dune 2000:

1) Where possible menu background images centered (some *.TGA files in data/UI_GFX/)
2) All menu location's centered (most *.uil files in data/UI_DATA/)
3) Gameplay menu background image cut in parts, copied and put back together (UIBB.R16 in data/)
4) Gameplay buttons locations aligned and graphics 'resized' (UI_***.R16 in data/)
5) Viewport mechanism adjusted in .dat file, this also contains:
    a) Relocation of spice amount, building icons, tactical map and energy bar.
    b) Letterbox mode removed (black borders around gameplay view)
    c) Number of unit/building icons adjusted to fit new resolution.
    d) Various crash fixes which appeared out of high resolution changes.
6) Mission maps, that are too small to fit gameplay resolutions higher than 1024x768, are
   made larger with unreachable black tiles.

So it's simply put; one part changing values in the DUNE2000.DAT and another part changing background images.

[Zaxx]

Someone who goes under Glukv48 hacked ugorden's VQA encoder to allow 800x600;

http://www.ppmsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38148

That's cool but if 720p is not possible then remastering the movies is not something I could do sadly. :( The best thing that can be done about the position issues seems to be simply stretching the videos to full screen (just the videos of course). The difference between the original 16:10 aspect ratio and 16:9 is not that huge, the videos don't look bad especially when compared to having to watch them in the top left corner. :D

 

Anyway as for the 720p resolution being native or not during gameplay, to me it seems native. I did a quick comparison between how the game looks in OpenRA and with the High Res patch and it's pretty much identical:

 

OpenRA:

 

D2K:

 

Notice how much better the game looks with the high res patch... OpenRA has a long way to go indeed.

[Zaxx]

Maybe these will be a bit too many pics on one page, but here are screenshots of the Gruntmods Edition specific problems with the High Res patch:

 

 

Seems like the newly added background images need new position info.

[D2k Sardaukar]

Kinda strange that only the background images are not centred. Might be a bug in the high resolution patch or a mistake in the mod. You could try to run the high resolution patch again, but if that does not work you could try looking at what the patcher says. If it does not contain the names of those background images, something is broken.