Hello everybody,

I recently started to play Alien Nations again and I had some problems with the game itself. For one it renders in many different resolutions throughout its run. For one videos are rendered with 640x480, the menu only renders in 800x600 and the game can be rendered in 800x600 or 1024x768.

It also renders in those resolutions by switching the display resolution of the monitor which also causes some problems. For example if you play the game in 1024x768 and you want to read the mission objective you need to go back to the menu which in turn causes the monitor to switch back to 800x600. That is really annoying in a multi monitor setup and also causes the game to sometimes crash.

I tried to mitigate the problems with dxwrapper and I could get it to work to run in a native resolution window but some other problems occured (wrong mouse positions) while doing that. So I had to roll my own dxwrapper version.

Long story short, I had a go and wrote some modifications that satisfied my needs.
If someone is interested, you can try to use it as well under:

For some reason I cannot post it as a link so I post it as Base64 encoded text:
aHR0cHM6Ly9naXRodWIuY29tL0RlclJNL2R4d3JhcHBlci9yZWxlYXNlcy90YWcvdjEuMC42NTQyLjIxX3ZvZWxrZXJfZml4

Best,
DerRM

PS: If someone knows more about D3D or DirectDraw, maybe it's also possible to inject custom resolutions into the game somehow...

Hello!

Thank you!

I have tried this on Windows 7 and on debian with lutris / wine.
(Remember to set dll overrides in wine config.)

The result is the same:
(See pic.)
The game area is rendered to FullHD, but to keep the aspect ratio, you get black bars on the sides.
DerRM hacked the cursor to move properly inside the game field, but there is a problem with scrolling with the mouse wheel.
I have to place the cursor in the middle of the game window to be able to zoom in / out.
The right hand menu does not scroll up and down (like when the school is opened) if the cursor is directly above it.
Instead it has to be a bit right from the middle of the screen.

This is a bit disappointing, but unfortunately fixing this scroll issue probably needs a lot more hacking...

I'm not sure how much this hack helps - other than zooming out more - still you should give it a try.