I thought I'd just post some additional info for people who are looking to get the absolute best visual settings for ES+MultiRes. This is based on my experience and testing with various graphic settings.
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Some people might have noticed a lot of stutter when running the MultiRes mod at high resolutions like 1080p which many creatures and spell effects on screen. The frame rates can be drastically improved by setting the render mode to DirectDraw(2D) using the 'D2VidTst.exe'.
DirectDraw also seems to improve 'tile-loading' for the game. In D3D mode, often you'll see the black patches in the terrain as you move around (since game was never programmed with a high res field of view in mind). The delay is much improved when using DirectDraw to the point where I hardly notice it.
Lastly, in full screen mode, D3D seems to produce odd graphical glitches where the bottom of the screen may appear blurred out, or random '3D spikes' seem to project out from the screen. DirectDraw has none of these problems.
All in all, I think Diablo 2 was optimized as 2D game, with the '3D perspective' effect just as a later addition. Therefore it's best to use DirectDraw for smooth performance.
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That said however, DirectDraw introduces some problems for modern systems with newer versions of DirectX and 32bit color. (Note: These problems seem to occur only in full screen mode, not windowed)
The first problem many people have noticed is, when launching the game, nothing will display except ascii characters that appear in the top-left corner of the screen in a small black box. It will cycle through the lower and upper case characters which takes a good 2-3 minutes before finally launching the game.
The solution to this problem is simply disabling 'Desktop composition' in the compatibility tab of the Game.exe properties dialog box. (I don't really understand the root cause of this problem, but it's probably related to way Vista/W7 handles the hardware accelerated frame buffer for the Aero interface, which did not exist in XP.)
The second problem with DirectDraw is the 'psychedelic colors' problem once the game has launched, where the game colors will appear 'rainbow-like' and grainy. This problem seems to related to Diablo 2 using earlier DirectX7 DirectDraw calls in 8bit mode, which are not translated properly in 32bit color.
(Edit: For those of you who are interested in the technical details of this problem, The problem is actually caused by Diablo 2 color palette being overridden by explorer.exe call to the WinAPI function 'SetSystemPaletteUse'. More details can be found here:
http://blog.macuyiko.com/2009/07/solvin ... urple.html)
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There are a couple of workarounds found on the net to the 'psychedelic color' problem, such is killing explorer via batch script before launching D2, or using DxWnd to launch D2 (which takes care of the DirectDraw color mapping), but these are clumsy in my opinion. The best solution is to use the inbuilt compatibility fixes in DirectX which can be enabled via the registry.
For example the registry setting on my system looks like this (the second entry is required if you have a 64bit system):
Code: Select all
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\Game]
"Name"="Game.exe"
"ID"=dword:483CB8E2
"Flags"=hex:00,08,00,00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\Game]
"Name"="Game.exe"
"ID"=dword:483CB8E2
"Flags"=hex:00,08,00,00
I'm not sure if the registry setting is the same for all computers, so to be safe, first download and run the DirectDraw Compatibility Tool (Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?nvfsz00hkzudfvu) (VirusTotal Scan:
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/rep ... 1289962663), select your Game.exe (in the main Diablo II directory), then hit 'Create reg-file'. This will generate the registry patch which you can then apply for the compatibility fix.
After this fix, the game menu might still appear rainbow like, but once you enter the game, colors will return to normal. Along with disabling Desktop Composition, you can now play ES+MultiRes is smooth full screen mode at 1080p.
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Hopefully people will find the information useful in improving the play experience for this great mod!
/Darkfire Dragon.jpg)
No challenge at all.