WA Chugging in Vista

[Endyr]

When I run WA in Vista the game runs at roughly 1 frame per second. The menus work fine, but when I actually get into the game it is unplayable. I have the latest drivers for my video card (7800gtx). I do not have the problem when I run it in XP, but I don't want to have to boot to XP just to play Worms.

Anyone else suffering from this condition, or have any ideas of how to fix it?

[MadEwokHerd]

Just to satisfy my curiosity, can you turn off DirectX 10 and/or AERO? And if so, does that help?

[Endyr]

Well I don't know how one would turn off DX10 but turning off Aero doesn't help. I have the latest DX9 from Microsoft but that doesn't help either.

[MadEwokHerd]

You probably can't. It was speculation really (I have reason to believe DirectDraw implemented through DirectX 10 may be slow).

[Cyclaws]

Tried running it in XP compatibility mode?

[Endyr]

Yeah, I have tried XP and Win98 compatibility modes with no luck.

[Muzer]

Could you post your full specs? It might not be Vista's fault, but a fault of eg your graphics card for not handling directdraw very well. There are people who have a normal install of WA working reasonably fine on vista.

Edit: Oh wait, I missed that bit. Any known problems with that card?

As a last resort, if you have a Windows XP CD then you could get the free 2004 version of Microsoft's virtual PC and make an XP machine on there.

[franpa]

quite recently nvidia released newer vista drivers.

[MrBunsy]

have you tried my patch for the x86(32bit) vista patch? If you are using x64 then the only thing i can say is to wait til I have a useable patch working or Cybershadow and Deadcode have one.

Out of interest, what does your vista patch actually do?

[Endyr]

I have the most recent drivers for my 7800, and yes I have tried the x86 vista patch to no avail.

[DeniaL]

have you tried my patch for the x86(32bit) vista patch? If you are using x64 then the only thing i can say is to wait til I have a useable patch working or Cybershadow and Deadcode have one.

where can I get this patch?

[DragonQ]

I would like to try this patch also, if you could provide a download link.

I am having many issues in Vista, non of which are solved using Compatibility Modes:

- Main Menu sometimes has all blacks replaced with browns/greens
- Minimising while in the menu system means I can't restore the game
- The Pie Chart for loading a game, oil barrels, mines, weapons and the sky all have graphical glitches (didn't used to do this in Vista, perhaps the more recent non-beta graphics card drivers I'm using have caused this?)
- Every few minutes the whole screen will just go crazy - for example the whole sky will go red with lots of dots in it, and everything else will go blueish with lots of dots, essentially the colours get very screwed up (screenshots don't reflect this behaviour but I have photos). Minimising and restoring solves this temporarily (although the above graphical glitches are not solved by minimising/restoring).


I have also tried to play on a 98 and XP virtual machine. 98 just isn't having it at all for some reason. XP will START the game (only when Pointer Integration is off, and when not in full screen mode), but going between menus takes a while, as does loading levels. Also, the frame rate of gameplay is about half what it should be when playing at full screen (1280x800 for me). I can play at about 800x600 almost perfectly, although the audio is still fairly shoddy and audio/video sync is sometimes dodgy also.


Basically, running this game in Vista in any conditions is a nightmare - luckily I have a dual boot with XP and it works perfectly under XP...shame it takes so long to boot though :(

[franpa]

maybe a internal part of vista is stealing focus from w:a... have you tried turning off all tho's additional memory management stuff in vista? like how it preloads most used programs etc. into unused memory.

[DragonQ]

Well I don't know how to do that, and nor do I want to really. The having to minimise/restore every few minutes isn't the annoying part, the annoying part is the fact that even before the colours die, they are still glitchy. This is what I get during normal play, from the Colour Bug Thread:


http://dragonq.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Worms%20Crapness%20-%20%20Rainbow.JPG

This is what I get every few minutes until I minimise/restore:

http://dragonq.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Worms Ultimate Crapness.JPG

(Despite what I told my friend there, it turns out it's random and not caused by the phone icon)

[franpa]

both look exceedingly like the games pallete gets stolen...

[DragonQ]

Well yes, but there are no programs (excluding invisible processes obviously) that I run in the background on Vista that I don't in XP, so I'm sure it's a problem inherent to Vista...

[franpa]

hence my post above, as the new memory management is one of the big things with vista imho aswell as some other stuff.... just disable each system service one by one till the problem goes away or something.

[DragonQ]

There is no service or process relating to memory management, according to the names and descriptions.

[DragonQ]

You keep referring to this patch yet I have never seen a download link for it??

[DragonQ]

Hmm I shall try that later.

I'm curious...is the "hole" in "Worm Armageddon CE (Custom Edition) will make Worms Armageddon a hole lot better with many new features." a typo or an intentional pun, lol?

[DragonQ]

Hmm well it made it worse. Graphics are the same, but the main menu's visuals and audio are screwed up now.

I guess I'll be sticking with XP for a while.

[TheLegend]

I'm running W:A on Vista Ultimate with no problems at all. It looks great at @ 1920x1200 res.

[franpa]

mmm, nvidia recently released non beta vista drivers... maybe try them? the drivers dont support SLI yet but they are working on it.

[DragonQ]

I have an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 unfortunately. I am using non-beta drivers.

Well I uninstalled your patch and reinstalled WA and I still have rubbish menu music. I assume you've changed a registry key or something, how do I get it back the way it was??

Don't worry - I forgot to delete the WA folder after uninstalling. It's back to its (crap) normal self.

I tried to reinstall the older beta drivers, but it seems the same thing is happening. Curiously, I managed to play with perfect graphics at 640x480 before I remembered to change the resolution so perhaps if I play in a non-fullscreen mode it will work....I'll investigate now.

[SilPho]

If you can run the game without full screen I'd be impressed, I don't think it's possible.

[DragonQ]

No I mean at anything other than my laptop's screen's native resolution (1280x800) - it seems 640x480 works fine, but 1280x768 and 1280x800 have the wrong colours. Very strange. I shall try more resolutions later.

[DragonQ]

I doubt the XP drivers would install, but I didn't know about the newly released 7.2 (I'm using 7.1, released a month ago), I shall try that now.

Also, what settings in Catalyst could I change?

Aww the new drivers didn't help.

[DragonQ]

Well, I have no idea why, but after I set up my new 24" monitor (BenQ FP241W), Worms Armageddon works perfectly under Vista @ 1920x1200.

[DragonQ]

Hmm scratch that, now it does exactly what it did before. How strange!