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

[Draconis]

Before I move on, let me state this. I am NOT sure if this will work for others. All I know is that it worked for me, and it may be a possible solution for all involved to give a shot. If it works, fantastic, hopefully my pain and suffering in getting this running will benefit others. If this even helps one other person get DKII running, it was worth taking the time to register and put this up here.


I figured I would post this up for others to hopefully benefit, as I spent quite a great deal of time getting this working.

I like many had the black screen with nothing seen in Dungeon Keeper 2 when I got into the menu. All solutions provided NO help. Not any of the compatibility suggestions, shortcut suggestions, none of it.

All solutions led to Hardware Acceleration being turned off. Something I HATED and did not want whatsoever.

Remembering my struggles with Thief: The Dark Project a year or so back and getting it running led me to try something new.

My testing finally brought me to a working resolution. After I post this, I will reboot my system and see if it still works, but I believe it will.


In general, the problem with the Black Screen, at least on my system, was tied to two issues.

Video Card Settings, and the Z Buffer issue that some know about with DK2. For example, if I set in the shortcut -32bitzbuffer....I would have a world of problems.

Before I go further, my Specs:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
12 Gigabytes of Triple Channel DDR3 Memory
Intel Core i7 930 CPU
Nvidia GTX 480 - Driver version 257.21

Thats the gist of the system specs. A pretty beefy and modern Gaming rig by any stretch.

As I stated, Thief the Dark Project had some issues which were resolved by tweaking some settings in the Nvidia Control Panel. So, remembering that, I decided to do some tweaking once more.

What I found out is this:

Dungeon Keeper II HATES HATES HATES HATES being told by Nvidia what to do. Meaning, in lamens terms, if you have the slider set to max everything, the game will give you the problem of the black screen and nothing else.

So what I did is create a profile in the Nvidia Control Panel under Manage 3d settings, and then the Program Settings tab.

I added the DKII.EXE to the list, and began my tweaking.

What I discovered was pretty amusing, and thankfully, a Fix.


What I found is that basically, DKII gave me the exact black screen problem when I set the following setting as such.

Antialiasing Mode - Override any application Settings.

Having that one option set, would cause the black screen 100% of the time, EVERY time.

Setting that mode to "Application Controlled" or Off or "Enhance the application setting" did NOT give me the same problem. Dungeon Keeper II ran fine. No black screen.

I found I could even set Anti Aliasing to Max settings, and zero issues were encountered.

The ONLY time I ran into an issue, is when I had Anti Aliasing override everything. Then the black screen cropped up.

Also, as a note, you WILL need to set Compatibility for Windows xp service pack 2.

I should note however, this was the ONLY compatibility setting I had to adjust. Nothing else, I literally mean NOTHING ELSE was required for Compat. The game ran fine on my rig.

Just to test things further, I set up a shortcut with -32bittextures and -32bitdisplay to see if those caused problems. No issues were encountered with those parameters.

The -32bitzbuffer however screwed up things massively, I had a huge black bar on the right side of my screen obscuring everything.

So....that, in a nutshell, is it. Everything else in my settings for the game on my Nvidia control panel tied to it, are maxed out.

So, that leads me to believe that somehow the Anti Aliasing overrides settings Dungeon Keeper II needs to set for itself to run properly, much as the z buffer is told to be an issue, which it is.

I sincerely hope all of you here on the site finds this information useful.

[Draconis]

Okay.

Reboot done. All things are working. Game has zero issues.

As a note, I am patched to the latest version of the official build, 1.7

Also, as a further note. Don't try and adjust the registry to do 1280 x 1024. The game crashed every single time I loaded a level in that Res.

Happy Slaughtering!

[Trass3r]

Yeah when I enable HW acceleration in 1600x1200 I get some weird clipping errors ingame.
With SW it's running fine (crashes in windowed mode though as soon as you get from the main menu to a game)

EDIT:
Ah you're right. The Z-Buffer is the problem.
I use "DKII.exe -softwarefilter -32bitdisplay -32bittextures -enablebumpmapping -enablebumpluminance" as the commandline options now.
Compatibility mode is set to XP, nothing else.

Runs flawlessly in 1600x1200 on Win7 x64. Well, apart from that old bug that the menu which appears when you press Esc ingame is lacking text, it only shows the symbols

[FlamingHobo]

Thanks for the information. Tried many work arounds 'til I found this one, game runs fine.

One question though. How do I set custom resolutions for the game?

[Trass3r]

This needs to be changed in the registry.
But you can use a small tool named DK2Tweak: http://dungeon-keeper.net/index.php?...tid=25&id=9449

The bug with missing text I mentioned above seems to be related to all extra resolutions >= 1024.
Now I also got it to run in windowed mode, but not with hardware acceleration.

[DamoN]

Hey everyone.

I want to know if anyone has tried (and succeeded) with this having an ATI card? I've got the HD3something and I'm killing myself getting the main menu screen to become anything else but BLACK!

[A New Room]

Hey everyone.

I want to know if anyone has tried (and succeeded) with this having an ATI card? I've got the HD3something and I'm killing myself getting the main menu screen to become anything else but BLACK!

I get the exact same thing, though I'm not really sure if it to do with the ATI HD cards :S

[DamoN]

Okay, just as an update.

My latest idea was to set up a virtual machine with win98

and

it actually worked - almost

I installed the game, didn't twak anything. Just got into the game and tadaaa it worked. That was until I clicked fo the first time. For some F*cked up reason the mouse cursor is not traced correctly which results in the cursor jumping to the right side of the screen whenever I click. Until that point, the "hand" follows the mouse correctly. One click - gone. Sucks

Any ideas on this one?

[sofakng]

Does the above fix allow to anti-aliasing in the game?

Also, is there any way yet to play at 1600x1200 (or, *gasp*, 1920x1200?)

[DragonsLover]

Phew, okay. I have:

Windows 7 Home 64 bit
8 Gb of RAM
Intel Core i5 750
NVidia GeForce GT 220

I tried the exact same thing as above and it doesn't woooork!!!

Draconis, if you're still there, I would really like to tell me if there are other modifications you brought to make it work.

EDIT: I got it! The "Threaded Optimization" option must also be turned to "Off" to make it work! I also used WinXP SP3 compatibility mode and no command lines. I need to experiment much.