Character disappears in Direct3D

StillInThe90s · Fri 16/08/2013 03:13:51

I swapped over from DirectDraw to Direct3D to see if my project would still work properly and it did not.
The player character seems to disappear behind game objects in object heavy rooms (many and large objects). Anything obvious that comes to mind?
Project is hi-colour, 320x200. I can't post a file since it is huge and horribly messy.

DirectDraw is appearently close to obsolete and should be avoided in favor of Direct3D. As discussed here.

miguel · Fri 16/08/2013 10:44:27

It happened to me while making Ancient Aliens, if your computer does not support pixel shaders it will produce weird stuff like walk-behinds not working.

StillInThe90s · Fri 16/08/2013 19:08:01

Curious...
I thought my machine supported pixel shaders. It is a standard laptop card with shader 4.1 (at least so I have been told) which is supposed to be backwards compatible.
Anyway, would this mean that my game could work like a charm on other machines? How did you solve this for AA?

monkey0506 · Fri 16/08/2013 19:49:34

If the player is appearing behind objects, I'd say to check their baselines. IIRC the way DD5 and D3D9 handle this is different (at least if the baselines are the same). Could you verify if changing the object or character baselines fixes the issue?

StillInThe90s · Fri 16/08/2013 21:36:59

I think I got it. At least partially. For now.
The room was cluttered with walkbehinds and baselines so a big object in the background had been assigned an IgnoreWalkbehind. Everything seems normal after removing that. The strange thing is that the object has 1 as basline value. So Direct3D is treating game characters as walkbehind areas?

miguel · Sat 17/08/2013 01:15:52

Stillinthe90's, I didn't solve it, I release it as DD5.
Monkey, I'm pretty sure having DD5 or D3D changes things around, specially with object walkbehinds.

StillInThe90s · Sat 17/08/2013 13:19:56

QuoteI didn't solve it, I release it as DD5.

Bummer.

Is any of the code wizards looking into the D3D issues? -This one as well as the ugly scaling, the resolution problems and what not...

edit: This kind of answers my question but it seems to have low priority.

Slasher · Sun 18/08/2013 10:05:13

Hi

There is an issue with AGS concerning DD5 and D3D as we all know. I have had this problem myself.

If your game is set to run with DD5:

Whilst DirectDraw5 is still supported it is wise to ram the fact home to players that the game should be ran in DirectDraw5 and to select that option.

At least until this has been remedied or DD5 becomes obsolete and is removed from the option setup.