Dungeon Keeper II - How I got it running with Hardware Acceleration turned on in win7

[zivs]

Hi,
I've put the game with "-softwarefilter", did everything as mentioned on first post, but funnily enough - game runs with HW acceleration and .. it crashes just as randomly as I want to pee after 20 beers.

I mean, the game ran fine when it was in total software acceleration only - no crashes, shitty graphics blablabla, but for some reason the game now runs fine with hardware acceleration, but keeps crashing whenever I try to save (or use the menu in general).

Is that something common with the game (using original CD + 1.7 patch) or just "my rig problems"? The rig is AMD Athlon X2 64 and GTX260 graphics card, running W7 64-bit.

P.S.
Bought the game just because of you, guys - saw that there are still few active players left, which is why I just bought the game (with idea that will someday join you on MP games)

[DragonsLover]

The crash bug with the menu is known. You must play the game in 800x600 of resolution to solve the problem.

[zivs]

Problem is that the game crashes NOT in the main menu, but randomly when in game .. Sometimes even mouse movement causes the crash to desktop.

[DragonsLover]

Ok, I just gave this a try again and I still get a black screen, but surprisingly, the game screen seems to reappear after some seconds while on the main menu or in play, I have no idea why.

I didn't make any tweaks using the NVidia Control Panel. I just set the executable to be WinXP SP3 compatible and I also made it to run as an admin.

As for commandlines, like Draconis said, using -32bitzbuffer is not a good idea while hardware acceleration is ON, the right portion of the screen stays black all the time. Using -32bittextures and -32bitdisplay is good.

I'm just curious what causes the game to be black for a certain time, to finally magically reappears for no reason.

[Orionzorz]

I'm just curious what causes the game to be black for a certain time, to finally magically reappears for no reason.

This happened to me to, I thought it worked but when I rechecked my settings it had disabled hardware acceleration.

[DragonsLover]

I'm really surprised that DK2 is lagging so much with Direct3D HAL. Once I totally disabled "Hardware acceleration" through DirectX control panel, the game became so fluid. There was like NO lags at all on the main menu, but it also became very ugly, and it's a shame DK2 doesn't seem to handle today's video cards with multicore processors.

Crappy graphics for a crappy game? So be it.

[Yoghurt]

Okay, I'm not very good with computes so I dunno what to do.
I tried all sorts of things and nothing seems to be working. The beginning cut scene and everything work perfectly..but when I get to the main menu, the flags waving in
the background cause black boxes to appear. Curious, I started a skirmish to see what else was screwy. Everything is fine. The dungeon heart explodes and all is well, but then I scroll to the side and THAT's when things get loopy. Black boxes show up as I scroll.
I dunno if this had to do with hardware acceleration or what.

This is how I have it set up. I dunno what that z buffer stuff is and that 32gig stuff is. Everything else seems to run fine except for those damn black boxes.

[NickLeStrange]

Hey guys.

Well, I found this thread whilst searching for a way to actually enable AA, and I saw that some folks were having problems getting Dk2 to run correctly under Win 7.

I am currently running it in Win 7 Ultimate 32bit, with 2GB DDR 2, 3.0GHz Pentium Dual Core E5700, Gefore 7300 LE, at a res of 1024x768 with hardware acceleration.

Basically, all I did was install the game, leaving my NVIDIA drivers at their defaults, and set compatibility mode to Windows 98. I used it on XP compatibility, and only managed to run it once, and after that it kept crashing. It's been running now the entire time without any problems with the Win 98 compatibility mode. So perhaps you can try that and see if you are successful. 1024x768 is the highest res that the game will run at for me, as every time that it loads a level at a higher res, the gamed crashes back to the desktop.

Also, I run it without any command line parameters. Another thing that I would suggest is that you have the latest drivers installed for you graphics card, make sure that you uninstall your old drivers first before installing the latest ones.

Ciao,
Nick

[DragonsLover]

I did everything you mentioned and guess what? I still got a black screen.

As for uninstalling my old drivers first, that's somewhat too late since I already have the latest version. Anyway, I don't see how keeping just the latest drivers and not the older ones would affect the problem.

[Pyro]

can i get a none lammens terms on what you did i don't understand it well enough for the simple and vague description you gave
i also don't get a black screen persay i get a pixlated black "fog" over everything i believe its the same problem. how do i fix haven't tried to play this game since XP was new and it worked fine on the comp i had back them