Is it possible to have the performance fix WITH the menu visibility fix? Yes!

[Nicholas Steel]

Edit: It's been 5 years and in that time there has been significant progress in getting these games working well on modern operating systems. The current recommended method of getting these games working well is to install this mod in to your games installation folder http://downloads.cncnet.org/TSpatch.exe which is sourced from https://forums.cncnet.org/topic/2606-tiberian-sun-patches-fix-for-the-windows-8-10-menu-problems-and-more/

 

Problems with Tiberian Sun: Firestom (Base game is fine with the ddwrapper and NoVideoMemory option):

 

1) Scrolling the camera around the map during gameplay negatively affects gameplay performance in various ways. Performance is either super slow or super fast while scrolling the camera around the map.

2) Main Menu and in-game Pause Menu don't update visually. This gives the impression that the game has frozen, but the menu did load and it's interactive, it's just invisible.

 

Things I tried to fix both issues:

Tiberian Sun patches - Fix for the windows 8 / 10 menu problems and more

ddwrapper

ie_ddrawfix

Command & Conquer Graphics Patcher

NoVideoMemory and VideoBackBuffer tweaks in the games INI file and various compatibility modes applied to the games EXE files.

 

The compilation patch (1st link) seems to simply provide an easy way to switch between the Windows ddraw.dll file, the ddwrapper version of ddraw.dll and the ie_ddrawfix version of ddraw.dll. It also offers some other options. Overall, this is a cool program and the effort that went in to making it is appreciated, as is the effort various people have spent making the various DirectDraw mods.

 

ddwrapper's NoVideoMemory option works excellently in resolving the performance inconsistency, however I can't seem to fix the menu visibility while using this mod.

ie_ddrawfix fixes the menu visibility issue, but the performance issue is not resolved.

Command & Conquer Graphics Patcher seems to have no effect on the games performance. Performance remains inconsistent.

The INI tweaks and compatibility mode tweaks yielded no effect on performance or menu visibility.

---------------------------------------------

 

Is there no known way to have the performance fix WITH the menu visibility fix?

Edited June 6, 2020 by Nicholas Steel

[FunkyFr3sh]

You have windows 10? All the games were tested with the preview version and it worked fine, but now people having problems. Might be related to the update feature that tries to do some weird stuff

 

I suggest re-installing the game to a different folder and use it with the default settings.

 

Here is another interesting thing REEMER found out:

http://cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=4279.msg31912#msg31912

[Nicholas Steel]

Yeah no, none of those suggestions help. REEMER's suggestion makes no sense because the troubleshooter literally says that the game is incompatible and makes no attempt at fixing it or applying any special settings.

 

I also subscribed to this topic, but I can't seem to figure out how to enable email notifications for it.

[FunkyFr3sh]

Have you tried my patch http://cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=3438.0 without having any other workaround in the folder? It probably won't work that well if you mix up different things

 

Try to get a fresh folder using the Tiberian Sun freeware download, google for officialcnctiberiansun.rar

[Nicholas Steel]

Yes, I did and as I noted above it seems to simply switch in and out different wrappers with no way to combine multiple wrappers or offer a wrapper that provides both the graphical fixes AND performance fix. It should be noted that the graphical issues are ONLY in regards to the Firestorm expansion. The base game seemingly works fine with the wrapper that only fixes performance.

 

I remember looking in to this and finding out that Firestorm uses a tweaked rendering engine that uses various undocumented DirectDraw features for various things (Support of them was dropped in either XP or Vista) where as Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge don't.

 

Anyway to have email notification of new forum replies?

[bygwyllay]

Greetings everyone! First of all this is the greatest and best thing ever.  C&C 24/7!

 

I am currently experiencing the same issues posted here; this either/or scenario while running Windows 10.

Game crashes constantly unless I am running TS-DDraw, and when I do that the mouse disappears on the menus, which means I can't save the game etc.  Default render also has no mouse visibility on menus, and the IE-ddraw lags like crazy.  ddwrapper works but the mouse is only visible in the menus if I scroll really slowly, and it crashes constantly.  I'm happy to provide any further info to help fix this issue.

 

Thanks for your help everyone!

-bygwyllay

[Nicholas Steel]

Updated my first post to clarify the 2nd problem as well as to make the whole post easier to read.

[Nicholas Steel]

For anybody else curious, the below link now has a fully working solution (I dunno how to stop this new forum software auto-embedding previews of URL).

https://forums.cncnet.org/topic/2606-tiberian-sun-patches-fix-for-the-windows-8-10-menu-problems-and-more/

 

Edited April 8, 2020 by Nicholas Steel