Ugly graphics issues with "Tales of Monkey Island".

[ChingisKan]

Whenever I play TMI, Guybrush and all of the animated characters glitch. Many of the planes (in geometric terms) which make up the polygons in the bodies and faces "flash". They appear and disappear at random. I get to see glimpses of Guybrush's eyeballs through the holes made by the missing planes (if that makes any sense).

I would take a screenshot, but whenever I record it with FRAPS (even at the lowest FRAPS frame rate and without recording sound) the graphics look normal, and all of the polygons are solid again and no random planes disappear (although I think frame rate drops a little).

The picture included in the attachments has 3 pictures:

1) a picture of Guybrush as I see him in gameplay.
2) Another picture of him. Ugly, isn't he?
3) A picture I took while I was in MS Paint making this jpg. When I use FRAPS to record TMI (or apparently stop using TMI while in windowed mode), Guybrush et all look normal.

[DjNDB]

There was a thread about it here. It seems to happen mainly on some old graphics cards.

It could be useful to have a dxdiag log to verify that and other possible issues.

Anyway, make sure your graphics drivers (and audio drivers) are up to date and run the DirectX updater as a first measure.

dxdiag
Windows XP: Go to your start menu and click on run. Type in "dxdiag" and hit enter
Windows Vista / 7: Press the windows key on your keyboard or click on the start menu. Type in "dxdiag" and hit enter.

Now click on the button that says "save all information".
It will prompt you to save a file. Save it where you can find it.

Then zip the file and attach it to a reply in this Thread.

[ChingisKan]

One DXDIAG log coming right up.

[Jake]

At what graphics quality are you running the game? (under the games graphics settings menu)

[DjNDB]

Card name: RADEON 9200 SERIES
Driver Date/Size: 5/3/2006 11:51:00, 258048 bytes

Description: Realtek AC97 Audio
Date and Size: 5/18/2005 17:50:30, 2319680 bytes

Your graphics card is from the series in the thread i linked to. There is no fix as far as i know, other than getting a different (preferably newer) graphics card.

You should update your sound drivers by the way.

[ChingisKan]

@Jake: Running them at 1. Barebones. 640x480.

And using a 9200 series ATI card.

@DjNDB: Would an NVIDIA GeForce 2 card work? It's the only other card I have that doesn't suck.

And thanks for the sound driver update.

[DjNDB]

Originally Posted by ChingisKan

@DjNDB: Would an NVIDIA GeForce 2 card work? It's the only other card I have that doesn't suck.

That would be even worse, because it is only DirectX 7.0 compliant.

If you don't want to buy a new AGP graphics card, it's a good idea to ask around if someone still has one.
I won't promise anything, but your chances are best if you pick a card that is even DirectX 9.0 compliant or later.

Check the tables here for ATI and Nvidia in the "DirectX" column.

Performance would be another interesting aspect.

[ChingisKan]

But recall my screenshot. The normal looking picture wasn't a screenshot from someone else's computer. It was from the game when I was using FRAPS to record it.

I thought of something last night. There is something in FRAPS that causes the graphics card to overridden or... something. I'd like to know what it is so I can isolate it and use it without having to throw away gigantic movies every 10, 20 minutes.

[DjNDB]

Originally Posted by ChingisKan

I thought of something last night. There is something in FRAPS that causes the graphics card to overridden or... something. I'd like to know what it is so I can isolate it and use it without having to throw away gigantic movies every 10, 20 minutes.

Can you create a short video (like 10 seconds) of guybrush moving around with fraps and upload it to youtube?
1280×720 @ 30 fps in H.264 should be fine for upload.

I'll probably not be able to help you much with this but i tried to understand what happens. I might be totally wrong of course.

If FRAPS gets the picture correctly, that means that it's rendered correctly. I did a little research, and i assume FRAPS copies the Image Data from the Front buffer using IDirect3DDevice9::GetFrontBufferData.

The question is, what happens between copying the Image to the front buffer and displaying it on the Display that can cause corruption. As you can read here in chapter 4.8 the next step is video scan out.

According to that i would try changing settings that matter in that stage.
- Try different screen resolutions
- Try enabling/disabling vsync
- Try setting your display to different refresh rates

[ChingisKan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4K1mY6QiHg

This is what it looks like most of the time.

I tried enabling vertical synching all the time, but that didn't help.
I shrank the resolution to 640x480. That didn't help, either.
I don't know what refresh rate does or how it affects my monitor, and I'm afraid my monitor will explode if I increase it.

[DjNDB]

It does indeed look quite normal in the video. I don't know any rational way to help you though.
The easiest option is really to get a different Graphics card.

If you really want to dig into it, look at the other thread. Will mentioned that they got one of these cards, but i haven't heard of any result. It might be a driver issue anyway, but ATI doesn't support the cards anymore.
If you are experimental and tech savvy you could try running it with Wine and ATI Drivers under Linux as a last resort.