Tales of Monkey Island - no 3d

[Paljas]

Hi all,

New to the forum, but if you have time/knowledge, I could use your help.

I'm trying to run Tales of Monkey Island with 3DVision, but I'm only getting 2D display.

I'm using 3D Fix Manager to take care of drivers.
Other games work OK; some that need a fix (e.g. Quantum Break), others that don't (Trine 1-4).
At first, when starting the game, it didn't even trigger 3D mode at all.
Then I copied in a fix from another Telltale game, which did trigger 3D mode.
But I'm not sure that really was what did it, because after removing the fix files, it still triggered 3D mode, haven't stopped ever since...

However, while the glasses were active, and Ctrl-Alt-I showed the NVidia overlay (and the Ctrl-F3/F4 etc. shows the 3D settings overlay etc.), the game was shown in 2D, no depth in the GFX nor GUI, anything at all.

I know this game displayed in 3D before, a long time ago before NVidia EOL-ed 3DVision in their drivers.

Based on a few other threads in here, I tried:
* Setting compatibility mode to W8;
* Disabled full screen optimizations.

I used process explorer to check if it was using that fix I copied from another Telltale game, and it showed up in the DLL list, but it also showed the ones in the W10 install directory (both d3d9.dll files below one another).

Any suggestions?
Much appreciated.

[Paljas]

Attaching Process Explorer, suggesting D3D9 is used.

[Feisty_Fernando]

Attaching Process Explorer, suggesting D3D9 is used.

Game uses Dx 8.1 according to the wiki

[Vaeltaja]

@Paljas I just tried Steam version of Tales of Monkey Island and I had to make one profile change with Profile Inspector to make it work. Set StereoProfile to "Yes" and that should do to trick. I didn't need to disable fullscreen optimizations, use as administrator or run in compatibility mode.

Text seems to be at screen depth, so that can be little bit distracting. I remember reading from old Nvidia forum that in the game settings you should set the graphics quality option to some specific number to get best results. I don't remember what it was, but I think it was some of the middle numbers (4-6) - I guess it will remove some post processing that might be broken in 3d.

[Paljas]

Hi Vaeltaja, thanks a lot. I’ll try and figure out this profile thing, hoping this is not something Steam specific since I have the GOG version. And I was the one to poston that forum you refer to . Set it to level 6 for best trade off.

[Vaeltaja]

Aah, it was you, thank you for reminding for that exact number!

Game profiles are universal Nvidia thing. Most of the games get a profile from GPU drivers and there's a program named Profile Inspector that you can use to change certain values in those profiles. Game's exe file is bound to profile and with that profile you can adjust settings for things like stereoscopic 3d, refresh rate, antialiasing and texture filtering. Very useful program and quite easy to use. But beware, there seems to be at least one other program with same name.

At 3D Vision Discord's general channel there was some talk about Profile Inspector and different versions just couple of days ago. Unfortunately I don't remember where I downloaded mine, so I can't help you with that, at least at the moment.

[Paljas]

Sir, you are my new best friend . I accidentally got the right version, or at least one that lets met change these profiles, specifically for this game even. Worked immediately!
It has a lot of flaws esp. with the menu/UI, but that's a small price to pay for the added value of 3D Vision in this game.
Thanks again!!

[Vaeltaja]

No problem, glad you found the right version and got it working!
I take a look at the game when I have the time and see if there's anything I can do to fix it.

[Paljas]

Don't bother, it's very enjoyable the way it is now.
The occasional eye-bleeders are text overlays, and close up cut-scenes.
When you have nice depth+conv settings for normal play, the cut-scenes are almost inside your head .

[skyrimer]

Really interested in this, care to share a few pics?

[Paljas]

Sure thing, least I can do to return the favor.

104001+002: menu, text is offset, and also it seems that it is split inside a bounding box and then cut off when exceeding the boundary.
104003: reference picture, I really like what the game looks like with these settings.
104004+005: same setting, but now in dialog (earlier referred to as cutscene), makes my head explode.
104007+008: again up-close dialog, the text shortcircuits by brain.

NVStereoscopic3D.IMG.zip

[skyrimer]

Thanks for sharing! I'll check them out later, I'm an old fan of Monkey Island 1 and 2 and never played Tales of the Monkey Island, so working in 3d makes me really interested.

[skyrimer]

The game looks great in 3d, particularly the image in the tavern looks fantastic, it always amazes me how 3d makes old games look great again, great find.

Would you please add this game to the 3d vision database here?: https://airtable.com/shrE9MBnBLfpiefLh , and please add everything you can think of to make it work, it would be extremely useful for the community to know that the game works and what you did to make it work.

[3DNovice]

It's a pain in the arse, but you could very likely get those menus to work using a different profile.

There might be a stereo cut off or less at screen value that works for the hud or even a stereo texture enable that rectifies the issue.


http://wiki.bo3b.net/index.php?title=Dr ... e_Settings

344.75_NVIDIA_Profiles-cleaned.txt

DarkStarSword, added definitions to the settings and it makes it quite a bit easier. (the text file above)

Sometimes you have to make a custom profile, because none of the existing profiles contain the correct setting combination.

[Paljas]

Thanks Novice, I'll give that a try. I'm not looking forward going back and forth to refine the values , but I intend to give it a shot.
Skyrimer there's already an entry, not sure what to do there. There's not much to it than this one Profile setting, and set the detail level to 6 in game.
So far that is, until I find the courage to mess with those profile settings Novice proposed. I already see one that seems to cap the stereo depth based on distance. That might just help for the dialog scenes.
Not sure about the text thing though.

[Paljas]

So, I've tried:

StereoCutoff (0x709a1ddf / 0x704fcf5c / 0x7053569a) = 0x00000002 Use StereoCutoffDepthNear

Then for StereoCutoffDepthNear (0x7050e011 / 0x704ef483 / 0x7031de06), I've used various values.
What I notice is that, if faces are closer to the camera than this distance, they will not be separated.
It seems to do so irrespective what things are (text/UI/game objects/etc.), so it's always a trade off:
If I set it too high, the game becomes mostly flat.
If I set it exactly to the level that up-close scenes are not split anymore, part of the geometry that is just as close for scenes that are otherwise not up-close, also get flattened/clipped.
Which makes sense, because the driver doesn't know the difference. The game would have to tell it to switch the value on the fly, depending on whether it's an up-close scene or not.

PS: I noticed that some of the eye bleeding is due to the fact that text is printed on top of object which are rendered closer, i.e. the text should be behind the object but still drawn on top. My eyes return syntax error.
Another issue is that the dialog border around the text that sometimes appears is split while the text is not.

I guess these issues cannot be addressed in driver settings, but need a helixmod fix. I'll need to find even more courage for that , for now I'm good with the default settings.

[Paljas]

Tried the HelixMod debugger. I can scroll through the shaders, but I can't dump them with DumpAll, nor numpad 3+6. I can see the dump folder structure, no shaders.
Without it.. dead end for me. Not practical without this (what otherwise seems awesome) tool.

[Paljas]

I should not dare ask.. is the d3d9.dll / 'HelixMod' source code available? I could only find DX11 3DMigoto on GitHub.

[Vaeltaja]

I don't know about the source code but if HelixMod gives you trouble when fixing games you could always try to convert the game to use DX11 with dgVoodoo and then use 3dmigoto to fix the game.

[Paljas]

Number of layers are piling up, but works like a charm Vaeltaja, thanks!

[bo3bber]

I should not dare ask.. is the d3d9.dll / 'HelixMod' source code available? I could only find DX11 3DMigoto on GitHub.

Nice find for this game, 3D really brings the old games to life.

We do not have source code for HelixMod, we asked Helix multiple times, but he never was forthcoming with the code.

[3DNovice]

Tried the HelixMod debugger. I can scroll through the shaders, but I can't dump them with DumpAll, nor numpad 3+6. I can see the dump folder structure, no shaders.
Without it.. dead end for me. Not practical without this (what otherwise seems awesome) tool.

I'm pretty sure there is a setting that you can change in the ini that will often rectify the issue of shaders not dumping on some dx9 games. Unfortunately, I can not remember what it is.

I assume that you know about bo3b's school for helixmod and the associated youtube videos?
http://wiki.bo3b.net/index.php?title=Le ... g_HelixMod
http://wiki.bo3b.net/index.php?title=He ... ature_List

[Paljas]

I assume that you know about bo3b's school for helixmod and the associated youtube videos?

I sure do, we owe that man a lot of credits, his vids have been the main contributors to what I know now, since the information is quite scattered otherwise, and direct links to posts on the NVidia forum don't work anymore since they seem to have migrated to this God aweful new system.

Nice find for this game, 3D really brings the old games to life.

It sure does. Older games usually have simpler graphics, and since stereoscopy doesn't come without challenges, they often display better than more modern games.
Hey nice of you to take notice of the thread, as said above, thanks so much for sharing your wiki and vids, they've been a great help!

We do not have source code for HelixMod, we asked Helix multiple times, but he never was forthcoming with the code.

Right. Placing myself in that position, I could think of several good reasons not to. When I look at the two mods, I would guess one is a continuation of the other. Perhaps one author even handed over to the other at some point. 3DMigoto has advanced in the meantime, I suppose this stacked solution is good enough for these cases. While helixmod is still used of course, I would say it serves it purpose still in most cases, and I'm sure the author has more things to do than to support this until the end of days.

In the meantime.. I've advanced a bit using 3DMigoto, perhaps I can do the hunting with that, and port the fix back to HelixMod later, but that's at low priority to me at the moment.

First, I wanted to remove a dialog window (that is rendered at infinite depth) around the dialog text boxes.
With great help of Bo3b's tutorials, I was able to find the associated pixel shader and override/skip it.
But it skipped more than I wanted in the scene. I figured out that the index buffer was able to isolate it from all other objects.
I was unable to find any information on Bo3b's site on how to use that index's Hash to effectively skip only that object.
Then I stumbled on this great vid by one DarkStarSword that showed me how. This worked, and only the dialog border disappeared.
Done! At least I though I was... but then when I moved back to the menu screen, it had also removed something there.
Turns out on this other 'scene' (the menu) both ps + ib hashes were reused for another object.
I tried messing around with DarkStarSword's approach using frame dumps to find this first index attribute.
Many files were dumped with the same hash, but they all had the same first index attribute value.
So.. will need to do some more hunting and learning (== time..) to isolate the object.

If that succeeds, next on my list is try and see if I can alter the depth of the dialog text (closer), to increase the chance that it renders in front of all else.
All in due time