Gabriel Knight 2 No Interlace Patch

Endroz	I have made a game patch for Gabriel Knight 2 to remove the interlace occuring in videos when playing the game. You can find it here: http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlace.zip Right click on the link and choose 'Save As...' I'd like to hear feadback from you about this patch :) Gabriel Knight Forever!!!, Enrico Rolfi
Wintermute	I Just tried out your patch and it worked great. Thank you very much! At first I thought something went wrong, because for same reason the introduction movie is still played interlaced, while the rest works fine. Is this movie being treated differently by the game? By the way, the English patch works for the German version as well.
Endroz	Thanks for the support Wintermute. :) Then I'll write that the German version works in the next release. I'm aware of the problem with the introduction movie still interlaced, apparently that happens even with the english version. I have tested this patch only with the Italian version of the game, where the intro movie works fine. I'll try to figure out what's the problem and will release a patch as soon as I'll have the chance to put my hands on the english version.
Wintermute	Endroz wrote: I'm aware of the problem with the introduction movie still interlaced, apparently that happens even with the english version. Yes, I know. I tried the patch with both the English version from the 'Gabriel Knight Mysteries' Edition and the German version. The only difference patch-wise was, that the English version had already installed the files "11.scr" and "11.hep" which you had to overwrite. I have no idea how you technically did realise the patch. But would it be possible to use your graphic card for stretching the video instead of just line doubling? This way the graphic card (if DirectX is enabled) would automatically apply some blurring filter to the video which would reduce the visual artifacts and pixelation. Or would it be possible to otherwise include such a filter? (All other and more complicated filters don't make any real sense for FMV). By the way, did there really exist an official Spanish version of GK2? I though that it was just an unofficial patch for the English version which was released some time ago by 'Aventura y C
Endroz	Wintermute wrote: I have no idea how you technically did realize the patch. But would it be possible to use your graphic card for stretching the video instead of just line doubling? This way the graphic card (if DirectX is enabled) would automatically apply some blurring filter to the video which would reduce the visual artifacts and pixelation. Or would it be possible to otherwise include such a filter? (All other and more complicated filters don't make any real sense for FMV). Mine is a game script-level patch, it does nothing more than asking the SCI executable to play the movies doubled and without interlace. 8) These are the only two graphics modes supported by the game engine. Badly enough, it is not possible to apply any runtime filter unless you make some serious modification into the SCI executable itself. Which is rather old. Besides, I'm not aware of any filter that could made these movies look like better. The real problem with them is that they're compressed in 256 colours, so lot of arcifacts appear. :( By the way, did there really exist an official Spanish version of GK2? I though that it was just an unofficial patch for the English version which was released some time ago by 'Aventura y C
Wintermute	Endroz wrote: Mine is a game script-level patch, it does nothing more than asking the SCI executable to play the movies doubled and without interlace. 8) These are the only two graphics modes supported by the game engine. OK, in this case, adding extra filter would be too much work. I thought, that you maybe changed the playback routine itself. I remember that it was possible in Phantasmagoria 1 to choose between interlaced and non-interlaced movies. I don't know why they skipped this option for later games (e.g. GK 2, Phantasmagoria 2, Shivers etc.) It may create the illusion of better sharpness (of which I am not really convinced), but I find the constant change from normal non-interlaced mode to movie interlaced scenes somewhat distracting. Besides, I'm not aware of any filter that could made these movies look like better. The real problem with them is that they're compressed in 256 colours, so lot of arcifacts appear. :( The problem isn't that the movies are compressed in 256 colours, but rather that the display engine renders the graphics in 256 colours. If it could be rendered in true colour with a "blurring" filter that interpolates the pixels, the quality could be much better. Of course it would be even better, if the movies had been made with true colour in mind (like Phantasmagoria 2).
Endroz	Wintermute wrote: OK, in this case, adding extra filter would be too much work. I thought, that you maybe changed the playback routine itself. This is a fragment from a script that I had to change: pushib 12 ;distance top pushib 15 ;distance left pushiw 0x95 ;FLAGS pushib 25 ;distance bottom pushib 16 ;distance right pushiw 256 ;number of colours callkb PlayVMD().config FLAGS contains one of the following values: 0x20 = small movie 0x21 = doubled movie 0x24 = small interlaced movie 0x25 = big interlaced movie ...which is ORed with other values such as brightness boosting strength. I find the constant change from normal non-interlaced mode to movie interlaced scenes somewhat distracting. That's another reason that brought me to create this patch. The problem isn't that the movies are compressed in 256 colours, but rather that the display engine renders the graphics in 256 colours. I have tried forcing the engine to display movies in TrueColour, but without success. As for the blurring filter, I'll make a mind note as for a possible future project. ;)
Endroz	Oh, by the way, I have made a new patch to fix the Prologue and the Chapters movie still being interlaced even after having applied the patch. You can find it here: http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlacev2.zip Right click on the link and choose 'Save As...' Wintermute, please let me know if this new version of the patch still works with the German version of the game. ???
Wintermute	Endroz wrote: This is a fragment from a script that I had to change: ... Interesting. How did you come to this information, just by try and error? What happens, if you set the distance informations to Zero (fullscreen)? The problem isn't that the movies are compressed in 256 colours, but rather that the display engine renders the graphics in 256 colours. I have tried forcing the engine to display movies in TrueColour, but without success. Even, if the screen is correctly set to TrueColour, without any different rendering algorithms (like interpolating pixels with different colours), I think you won't see a difference. But this is just guessing. As for the blurring filter, I'll make a mind note as for a possible future project. ;) Make that very far future, I guess ;) By the way, I am unable to download your revised (and your original) patch. It just gives me a "Page not found" (Pagina non trovata) error message. :-\
Endroz	Wintermute wrote: Interesting. How did you come to this information, just by try and error? I have made my own SCI32 Disassembler. 8) I'm using it to fix bugs from Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers, and I'll (soon?) release a patch to solve almost all of the problems in the game. What happens, if you set the distance informations to Zero (fullscreen)? The movie just "moves" to another place of the screen. As far as I have found out, you can't freely resize the movie, you can only display it as normal or double sized. By the way, I am unable to download your revised (and your original) patch. Sorry my mistake, my latest archive was .rar not .zip. Now I have re uploaded it correctly as .zip so the link up there is working now.
Plethora	Hey, I can't seem to be able to download the patch. When I click on the link it gives we a page like this: This is the link it gives me: http://www.tripod.lycos.it/error/referer.phtml?_siteRedirect=http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita&_siteRedirectFile=http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlacev2.zip --- And this is the content of the page: Lycos Tripod Homepage Building Puoi provare a scaricare questo file da una pagina utente ospitata gratuitamente su Tripod : http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlacev2.zip Per accedere a questo file, devi visitare la pagina utente : http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita (sarai reindirizzato in 5 secondi) --- If I go to http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/ I can see this: Index of /gkita/tools Parent Directory GK2interlacev2.zip TraduSCI 1.1.2_update.rar tradusci1.1.rar tradusci112eng.rar And I can download all the tradusci-files but not the GK2interlacev2.zip. What's wrong? I tried disabling referrer logging from Opera and it didn't help (Sometimes some images referred from outside tripod don't like to be shown if you have referrer logging on but with referrer logging disabled they work fine).
Wintermute	OK, I downloaded the patch and now it works perfectly for both the German and the English version. Thanks again. ;) Some suggestions: You should skip the example pictures from the archive, since they take up most of the space. People, who downloads this patch would probably know anyway, what the difference is. Maybe you can relate them to an example website instead. Maybe it would be better to make two separate patches for Italien/Spanisch and English/German versions and skip the directory structure inside the Zip-files. So in this case you could directly unzip the necessary files into your game directory without the need of moving them later. (I know this is a simple thing to do, but from my experience, many people who often don't read instructions correctly get troubled with these kind of things.) Once again, great work. I really like the non-interlaced movies much better than the default mode. The only way to improve the video further would be to hack the VMD-player or write a new one, but this could be quite complicated. :-\
Endroz	Plethora: Make sure that you right click and choose "Save as..." on the latest link which I have posted, not the one in the first post. Moderators: Is there any moderator listening? Would it be possible for you to edit my first post and change the link to the latest one? Wintermute: Thanks for your suggestion, I'm going to put up a whole web page dedicated to the Gabriel Knight subject soon. There I'll include separate archives and lots of other interesting things. About the German version of the game, can you confirm me that the chapter movie player works fine? I mean that little movie tape button near the inventory in the game... I had to patch that in the English version too. Also during the chapter movies is the text "Chapter One: ..." on the top of the screen shown in English or German with my patch?
Plethora	Endroz, I don't know what happened but now I could download the patch. It's probably the order of the towels in the bathroom ;) Thanks anyway! Fixing the bugs in GK sounds great... thanks for doing it!
Endroz	Should you ever find any problems using it, let me know. I haven't tested the English version much.
Wintermute	Endroz wrote: Plethora: About the German version of the game, can you confirm me that the chapter movie player works fine? I mean that little movie tape button near the inventory in the game... I had to patch that in the English version too. Also during the chapter movies is the text "Chapter One: ..." on the top of the screen shown in English or German with my patch? OK, I finally had some time to check the game again and you are right in both your assumptions. The text of the chapter movies is displayed in English instead of German. (although I don't think this matters very much ;) ) Regarding the chapter movie player, it works but the display is not correct. The highlighted text (for movies you had already seen and can therefore select for viewing) is written two lines above the original text, which looks a little bit weird. If you need some files, just tell me (36.SCR and 36.HEP are in the root of the CD, the rest I have to extract, I guess.)
Endroz	Wintermute wrote: If you need some files, just tell me (36.SCR and 36.HEP are in the root of the CD, the rest I have to extract, I guess.) Actually I could use 11s, 34s and 36s to make a specific patch for the German version of the game. I believe that 11s should also be located on the main root of the CD, while 34 should be extracted using SCI Resource Dumper by VAG. It should be contained inside RESSCI.PAT (whose map file is named RESMAP.SCI).
Reckless	Endroz, Excellent work on the GK2 video patch! I'm also looking forward to GK1 patched up - good luck with the work! When you put a GK page together with these files, put a donate button on it - you're sure to get something back for the hard work you've clearly put in :)
JJ	Are you messing with Gabriel Knight III too, by any chance? I remember there was one well known bug there, perhaps it could be removed as well... (Anyway, is GK III an SCI game at all, or is it a completely different engine?)
Endroz	JJ, I'm trying to mess as less as possible. :D And, GK3 it's a completely different engine, and my knowledge is limited to SCI. :( But chances are I'll do that in the future. I still have to complete the game.
kelmer
Endroz	Endroz wrote: There's no official spanish version out there, as far as I know. After reading a few Spanish pages (I don't know Spanish but it is much similar to Italian) I can tell you for sure that the patch from the page you mentioned is related to a guy who made his own translation of the game. That's what I stated in my reply post. Sorry for not having mentioned you Kelmer, but the sites I ran into were not much direct regarding the patch author. May I ask you how did you technically realized the translation? Just wanted to know if you used my program \TraduSCI for this...
kelmer	Not at all, my translation was released somewhere on september 2003, and done about a year before. By that time I don't think you had released your tools. I took some files from the brazilian versions (to add subtitles to the english one, which most spanish adventurers have), then used VAG's Resource Dumper to dump msg files (and some other formats too, I can't remember which ones), then added the header to each of those, then used some utility Cristoph Reichen (I think that was his name) had sent me to convert msg files into plain text, then edited, then recompiled again. I only had one major problem, that puzzle involving some tapes to create a new sentence by Dr. Klingman. I was forced to leave it in brazilian and add a line to the readme with the solution of that puzzle. Anyway, your tool may be interesting to start a new project, such as the translation of SQ6 (not by me, I'm not interested at all :) )
Endroz	kelmer wrote: my translation was released somewhere on september 2003, and done about a year before. By that time I don't think you had released your tools. I did. The first version of TraduSCI was released on March 2003. Shame I wrote about it on this forum only on September! :) What a bad coincidence! You could have saved lot of work by using it. Here's my post, just for the fun of it: http://www.mega-tokyo.com/forum/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=4590;start=0 then used some utility Cristoph Reichen (I think that was his name) had sent me to convert msg files into plain text, then edited, then recompiled again. Tricky. Christoph Reichenbach, thought he was out of SCI hacking stuff. I only had one major problem, that puzzle involving some tapes to create a new sentence by Dr. Klingman. I was forced to leave it in brazilian and add a line to the readme with the solution of that puzzle. You should have left unchanged the order of the words in each phrase in order to do a translation without having to modify the script. Anyway, your tool may be interesting to start a new project, such as the translation of SQ6 (not by me, I'm not interested at all :) ) It's indeed under development a translation from English to Italian. And a few other games too. (Gabriel Knight, Quest for Glory I, Quest for Glory IV)
kelmer	I did. The first version of TraduSCI was released on March 2003. Nope it didn't. My translation was done around sept/nov. 2002 and published on september 2003. You should have left unchanged the order of the words in each phrase in order to do a translation without having to modify the script. Couldn't do a thing with it. Text in that very puzzle is stored as views, not plain text, so I would have needed to edit views, which is still not possible with the utilities out in the internet. Yet, I wanted to leave the puzzle in english instead of brazilian (because it's obviously spoken by more people), but when I didn't include the script from the brazilian version it just screwed up.
Endroz	kelmer wrote: Yet, I wanted to leave the puzzle in english instead of brazilian (because it's obviously spoken by more people), but when I didn't include the script from the brazilian version it just screwed up. That's rather normal, you can't mix up compiled scripts, as they refers to variables and selector by index and not by name. Therefore a slight difference between the two versions would lead to an incompatibility. Chances are I'll be releasing my tools for editing SCI Graphics in September (or that Brian might release his SCI Studio 4 by that time). Being that the case you'll be able to edit those views and release a new version of your transaltion patch. ;) By the way, have you translated other games as well, or just GK2?
kelmer	Yes I did, I also translated Sanitarium, and made adaptations for Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade VGA (around 1999) and LSL6CD using the original translations into spanish. I don't think I will be releasing a new version of my translation, as it is now very generalized and would maybe create incompatibilities with the previous one. Anyway, I would have to create a new installation (the previous one used a modified version of the sierra installer) from scratch, and it's simply too much work. Anyway, I'm very interested in that graphics editing tool of yours, do you have anything done already?
Endroz	kelmer wrote: I'm very interested in that graphics editing tool of yours, do you have anything done already? Not exactly. I've wrote the classes and a few methods but the main program is still missing. It'll be ready around September, though. Being too much busy lately with exams and work. >:( :)