hey guys,is there some way to make Blood 2 run smoothly or do i need to downgrade to 7 in order to run it properly?

The following post was taken from gog's shogo forum, where the gog admins have labeled it as an official solution:


ZellSF
New User
Rep: 7
Registered: Apr 2010
From United States
Posted January 16, 2015

fossilfern: As the title says. Love this game and I really want to play it again but as I'm sure you all know that it does not perform well on Windows 8.1 at all! And I cant seem to find any fixes :/
Enable optimized surfaces (advanced in launcher app), disable light mapping (in game advanced display options) and use this patch:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/post.php?topic=99477&post=1202630

In the beginning areas I played I got 100+ FPS.

We haven't tested with blood2 yet, but given that shogo uses the same engine, it's worth a try. Also know that this may not fix the MFC crashing issue.

eg

that did work on Shogo,but unfortunately not on Blood 2 :( it still runs at a bad framerate even with Light Mapping disabled,sigh i wish there was some sort of fix to this game,from what i know its due to Windows 8.1 emulating DDraw

You could always run in software mode =]p

@4g3nt: Placing ddraw.dll patch made for nolf in my b2 directory worked for me on vanilla win8 (scroll down to *win8 testers needed* for that) but only 2 others claimed it helped, 5 others OTOH said it didn't. I no longer have win8 so I can't test any more.

@dusty: software mode would look okay if the sprite/model skin transparencies were replaced with solids.

i tried placing the ddraw.dll patch and for some reason the game doesn't display any video,only audio,after this i decided to reinstall Windows 7 and now Blood 2 works flawlessly,thank you all who replied

Reinstall win7? Do you know for a fact that you had a bad instalation to begin with? Did it run wirhout any changes once you did this or were there compatibility tweaks?

EDIT:

Okay, your saying that you had to ditch win8 for 7.

I wonder if win10 will fix these issues.

I've seen complaints by win10 beta testers of not just directX1-7 games but directX8 as well. So no, this may actually get worse.

-Got to be a way to get an opengl renderer, either from hyperion, or from the Jupiter gpled code.

Tried dgVoodoo2?

http://dege.freeweb.hu/

Dege has been improving LithTech support a lot the last version.

Are we talking about dgVoodoo featuring 32 bits color depth in a near future? I always looked for a way to play Blood 2 and Shogo in 32 bits. This would be awesome.

textures are still 16bit.

And the widescreen support? Could be a placebo effect but I think I saw the FOV working way better than previously. I will test Shogo later.
Dege is working on a scaling thing.
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=34931&start=340#p399824

No automatic widescreen support for a while. Pity.

Yeah textures are still 16bit unless enhanced manually. So 32bit support would be worthless unless all art was redone.

dgVoodoo seems to help a lot for me, thanks for the info!

Textures look 32bit here (as in 'no colour banding'), but I'm using Win8.1 and dithering issues are gone with this OS (maybe because it's done by the CPU, and it doesn't mess with colours contrary to GPU drivers? - note for those who know Starlancer: it's still ugly, the game is handling things differently).
If you have IntelHD on a laptop, maybe running dgVoodoo/Blood2 on this card will help, as Intel still seems to have some support for old 16bit textures (I tried running Shogo on IntelHD, colours were fine).