Battlefield 2

[winged raven]

#showcase message

Status: Partially Playable

All the work done on this game is brought you by xoxor4d

Installation:

#1103606881538277386 message

Issues & Notes:

🚫 Broken UVs on buildings
🚫 Agressive culling
🚫 Most particle effects are rasterized, they don't show up unless marked as ui
🚫 Broken normals
🚫 Main menu is completely broken
✅ Hashes are stable except for terrain and lods

Fixed:

☑️ Wild floating point precision errors Mostly fixed by moving the near plane further away
☑️ Sampling and denoising issues. Partially fixed by setting ignore untextured draw calls to >300

Resources:

https://bf2tech.uturista.pt/index.php/Command_Line_Options
https://bf2tech.uturista.pt/index.php/BF2_Console_Commands

[winged raven]

Be aware that these launch parameters only work on the release versions, not the demo. Tested with v1.51

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Battlefield_2

[pseudo jungle]

Would it be worth it to try an older version of the game? I was testing with the v1.51 too

[winged raven]

I am not sure, someone on Github tried to test the demo version assuming it was based on an older build. He got the same result.

[winged raven]

Did you get anything else like an error prompt?

[pseudo jungle]

not really, only some vague errors in logs

[17:00:38.342] err:   CreateDepthStencilSurface failed on server unexpectedly
[17:00:39.892] err:   CreateRenderTarget failed on server unexpectedly
[17:00:39.893] err:   CreateDepthStencilSurface failed on server unexpectedly```

when I was testing some weeks ago, the logs would fill up with "allocating shadow memory in heap" or something like that

but the main problem I think is that it is not detecting any cameras

info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace but not detecting a valid camera.
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace an unsupported primitive topology [3]. Falling back to rasterization```

[winged raven]

It actually enters into levels now!

Still no render though

[glass zealot]

Sort of related: bf2142 now loads also, audio and controls appear functional, can spawn in and shoot/change weapons etc (confirmed via audio) but it can't find camera much the same as bf2; only cursor visible, no menus etc. Had to use bf2142 unlocker to automate login to openspy and skip the menus to get ingame

[winged raven]

Battlefield 2 and later bf games make extensive use of shaders. I am not sure we'll ever be able to remix it.

[glass zealot]

oh well

there's always desert combat and vietnam

[winged raven]

warn: Requested memory allocation but failed to find space in preferred heaps, this alloc will be demoted to slower memory segments
warn: Size: 122624
warn: Category: 1
warn: Alignment: 256
warn: Mem property flags: 0xb
warn: Mem allocate flags: 0x2
warn: Mem types: 0x1f

BF2_d3d9.log

I took a screenshot via remix dev menu.

d3d9.shaderModel = 0 crashes the game:

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/blog.php?b=482

[granite panther]

i got to this point with the demo

it's just passing through the original render though

this is the latest CI build

[thin vector]

maybe there is a specific way you have to look in order to see ray tracing? like how it was with flatout 1

[granite panther]

no, this is just full rasterization

[thin vector]

is it detecting textures?

[granite panther]

yes

doesn't mean much though

[thin vector]

hmm i know

we can contact some bf2 modders, maybe they know their way around the problem

[kind surge]

https://discord.gg/b2ru8j3r8y

There is somes guys working on shaders on the refractor server

[rapid spear]

I question their understanding. You don’t want any post processing with remix.

The minimum requirements for the game make me believe that it would work fine with some REing and time.

I’ll throw it into the queue

[winged raven]

Like what is porting pixel shaders to ffr, ffr isn't capable of what pixel shaders can?

[rapid spear]

No they’re just thinking of keeping lots of the graphics features working when they’d be replaced by remix

You don’t add things to get it work with remix typically, only subtract

The fact that the renderer is split out to a separate DLL gives me hope that it handles all the things we want there.

[rapid spear]

They mean port things like AO or bloom to FFR. Which you don’t need to do.

I find a lot of the modding communities either dismiss remix entirely, or say it’s impossible to get working, until it does work and then they’re all over it.

[crystal pond]

No its because the renddx9.dll creates the caching functions and the bf2.exe is expecting it as well as the other xpack and shader specific instruction within so unless you have source code to turn off/change the shader caching functions you will have a rough time since the game was built hard coded to expect and create shaders to play. Believe me i would love to see it work and have tried however being under the hood of this for over 13 years unless you are very adept at reverse engineering and maybe dll injection i don't think it will work and if it does likely not reliably or stable. Not trying to poo poo the idea to try to get it working only stating it is a very challenging task.

[thin vector]

@winged raven there's a software linked in the thread known as Dxtweaker

Maybe that will do it

[winged raven]

I have it from geeks

[winged raven]

nothing else?

[thin vector]

nope

even back then, people were asking on the screenshot proofs

I just don't get it, what fix are they referring to

[winged raven]

damn it net 3.5 doesnt work

[winged raven]

so no proof provided?

[winged raven]

So bridge is crashing

[thin vector]

Wait don't run it with remix yet

[winged raven]

ok

[thin vector]

test it with a shaderdump tool

I'll just link it here

[winged raven]

Oh wait there is an activate box

[thin vector]

#general-remix message

Run this to see if PS shaders are 1.3

Are the graphics messed up?

[winged raven]

not yet

[winged raven]

so what I am looking at

CreatePixelShader CRC: 0x8D73652C

[thin vector]

The game should look like this

Maybe that will let remix run it

[winged raven]

The dump tool

[thin vector]

It just dumps the game shaders

[winged raven]

how do I determine the version

[thin vector]

idk know dude, something tells me if it gets to run under dx8.1

we could use a wrapper to make it dx9

And then the latest remix

I hope that works

[winged raven]

I think I am missing something with the dx tweaker

there is no sign of it actually doing something

[thin vector]

are you getting an error?

[winged raven]

Are you on pc

[winged raven]

no

[thin vector]

Nope

I wish I could help but I have no electricity right now

[winged raven]

German and english text overlap each other

And it is extremely buggy

I have an idea

[thin vector]

try dx7 support

[winged raven]

nothing

it doesn't work

I enabled some others that cleary draw info on your screen but they are not shown either

[thin vector]

We're missing the fix then

That old link

expired

[winged raven]

https://web.archive.org/web/20060701000000*/zox.game-deception.com/downloads/Direct3D/BF2ShaderMod.zip

[thin vector]

yep

That site is dead

@rapid spear can you help us?

🙏

[rapid spear]

Maybe

[winged raven]

(tm)

[thin vector]

I found an old thread that explains how you can run battlefield 2 on olden hardware

That isn't supported

people from the past claim to have it running on GeForce 4 Ti 4200s

(the game wasn't made to run on it and apparently people found out a way)

some dll tweaking is required

[rapid spear]

What error is remix throwing when you try to play the game with it?

[thin vector]

better ask @winged raven

[winged raven]

not valid camera

and invalid calls

[rapid spear]

Ruhoh

[winged raven]

probably menus

I didn't checked the timing

[rapid spear]

Yea try loading directly into a level

[winged raven]

I am doing it now

weird

I am on oldest bridge and latest dxvk and I can finally enter the game

but there is 0 errors

info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace but not detecting a valid camera. info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Texture 0 without valid hash detected, skipping drawcall. warn: [rtx-interleaver] Unsupported color0 buffer format (109), skipping color0

[thin vector]

is it not hashing some required textures?

[rapid spear]

I’d try with the latest.

[thin vector]

@winged raven there are some map launchers that doesn't let you load the menu

Maybe try that

[winged raven]

[15:15:41.016] info: Remix UI activated. [15:15:41.198] info: Remix UI deactivated. [15:15:42.649] info: Client window became inactive, disabling timeouts for bridge client... [15:15:42.650] info: DirectInput keyboard unacquired
d3d9.log

[winged raven]

bridge crashes

for me

[winged raven]

I can navigate through menus

I mean there is joining a server by launch argument but it still shows a loading menu

isn't really helpful

I will try with a newer bridge build that doesn't crash

some folks were trying to fix the compatibility issue by forcing shaders, trough DXTweaker or 3D-Analyze, you might wanna try it...

[thin vector]

I'm still confused, is it because of the old remix bridge?

[winged raven]

@thin vector Do you have issues with internet archive, it is unresponsive and browser gives server not found

[thin vector]

Yeah

These forums got nuked

And there's no meaningful archive left of it

[winged raven]

newer bridge builds crash during loading

[thin vector]

Welp....

back to the drawing board

😔

[winged raven]

@rapid spear does d3d9.shaderModel work with float?

So when you die all frames after that will overlap each other

probably caused by dxvk

info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace but not detecting a valid camera. info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Texture 0 without valid hash detected, skipping drawcall. warn: [rtx-interleaver] Unsupported color0 buffer format (109), skipping color0 info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Found a draw call to a non-primary render target. Falling back to rasterization

[rapid spear]

Yes

[winged raven]

anchorlight's fork of dxvk-remix had a way to manually set render target didn't it

[winged raven]

What do you think about this

So now bridge is throwing errors

[15:31:32.637] err: 22a6 -> 0000028DB0C01880 [15:31:32.637] err: 22c5 -> 0000028DB0C08CC0 [15:31:32.638] err: 2322 -> 0000028DB0C04700 [15:31:32.638] err: 248d -> 0000028DBA292290 [15:31:32.638] err: 24ac -> 0000028DBA297F90 [15:31:32.639] err: 24cb -> 0000028DBA29AE10 [15:31:32.639] err: 2509 -> 0000028DBA29A840 [15:31:32.639] err: 2528 -> 0000028DBA294B40 [15:31:32.640] err: 2547 -> 0000028DBA2939D0 [15:31:32.640] err: 2566 -> 0000028DBA2979C0 [15:31:32.640] err: 25d8 -> 0000028DBA296850 [15:31:32.641] err: 261b -> 0000028DBA2A4B00 [15:31:32.641] err: 263e -> 0000028DAE0CED30 [15:31:32.641] err: 2640 -> 0000028DAE0CF8D0 [15:31:32.641] err: 2648 -> 0000028DAE0D6740 [15:31:32.642] err: 2649 -> 0000028DAE0D5BA0 [15:31:32.642] err: 264b -> 0000028DAE0D6170 [15:31:32.642] err: 264c -> 0000028DAE0D6D10 [15:31:32.643] err: 264d -> 0000028DAE0D1BB0 [15:31:32.643] err: 3787 -> 0000028DAE0DA160 [15:31:32.643] err: 3789 -> 0000028DAE0DAD00 [15:31:32.644] err: 2 objects discovered in Swapchain map at Direct3D module eviction: [15:31:32.644] err: 5 -> 0000028D462A4FF0 [15:31:32.645] err: 5c0 -> 0000028D462A4FF0 [15:31:32.645] err: 1 objects discovered in Device map at Direct3D module eviction: [15:31:32.645] err: 4 -> 0000028D46FC8040 [15:31:32.646] info: Command processing loop finished, cleaning up and exiting... [15:31:32.646] info: Shutdown cleanup successful, exiting now! [15:31:32.646] info: [Uptime]: 139s

Seems like no luck today

[rapid spear]

Better than no camera found

[thin vector]

what happened to archive.org

is it down?

[winged raven]

Maybe data scrappers are ddos ing the site

for AI training

[thin vector]

RendDX9.dll is the root of all problems

[rapid spear]

Time to RE it

Y’all should do a string check with imhex or similar and see if there’s any mention of fixed function or a launch option that’s helpful

[thin vector]

can you decompile it

[rapid spear]

Disassemble yea

[thin vector]

the game is not fixed function afaik, but so was most wanted lol

remix is slowly getting in on support

[winged raven]

why snowman doesn't work on 32bit binaries

[rapid spear]

Most wanted is fixed function actually.

[rapid spear]

IDA and ghidra work just fine

Gotta get your hands dirty and really get in there

[winged raven]

so why not try to decompile it

[rapid spear]

I can’t disassemble right now, maybe after work

[thin vector]

our freedom lies here

[winged raven]

Are you doing re professionally or it is a cursed hobby 🙂

[thin vector]

we have to disable all the texture checks

BUT HOW???

im so dumb lmao

[rapid spear]

Super cursed hobby

http://ftp2.sly.hu/index.php3?dr=letolt//battlefield2

[winged raven]

what is texture checks

[thin vector]

the problems we were having here might be tied to said texture checks

but idk what are they

do we have refractor 2 guys here?

maybe they know better

[rapid spear]

http://wftp2.sly.hu/ftpstart/?dl=letolt//battlefield2/BF2ShaderMod.zip&dm=letolt//battlefield2

[winged raven]

wait what

how do you find it

[rapid spear]

They said the game does some shader things that make it difficult for them.

[thin vector]

lets go

[rapid spear]

My googlefoo is excellent.

If it’s on the Internet I’ll likely find it with enough time

[winged raven]

what was your search query

I wonder

[thin vector]

LOL

[rapid spear]

“BF2ShaderMod.zip”

[winged raven]

I can't believe it

[thin vector]

bro test it

[winged raven]

on my way

[thin vector]

everything is on this as well

http://ftp2.sly.hu/index.php3?dr=letolt//battlefield2

[rapid spear]

Straight up download everything on it and archive it/post it here in a big zip

[thin vector]

this is a BF2 goldmine

[thin vector]

righto

[winged raven]

It crashes

immediately

[thin vector]

logs?

[winged raven]

without remix

[thin vector]

try it on the demo version i think

[winged raven]

I don't have the demo right now

I will get it

[thin vector]

http://wftp2.sly.hu/ftpstart/?dl=letolt//battlefield2/bf2demo/battlefield2demo.exe&dm=letolt//battlefield2/bf2demo

[thin vector]

im starting to realize it would be too big to post it here

[rapid spear]

Mega perhaps?

[winged raven]

Uhm the game still looks ok

[thin vector]

this is without remix?

[winged raven]

yes

[thin vector]

and with the BF2shadermod?

strange

it should be doing all sorts of funny business with the graphics

[rapid spear]

Set your d3d9.shadermodel to 1 if this mod does what I think it does.

[thin vector]

👆

i think Kamil is doing something similar

[winged raven]

I can't get the demo working with remix

[16:50:45.153] info: Server started up, waiting for connection from client... [16:51:18.171] err: Timeout. Connection not established to client application/game. [16:51:18.171] err: Are you sure a client application/game is running and invoked this application?

[thin vector]

better report this to the remix devs

[winged raven]

Also if I try to run the game with remix and that mod it just crashes like it did with retail

[thin vector]

try this .dll

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/560b94b2ac908464968f6d0d165a5723b738bd75eac2254d76128497d5e12ced

[winged raven]

demo crashes

retail launches but no difference in visuals

[rapid spear]

Hm

[thin vector]

oh well, we tried...

[winged raven]

with remix as well

[winged raven]

It is really weird

I mean the first one might just failing to inject

But the dll replacement should have an effect

[thin vector]

first try DXTweaker, then TitanumD3D patch, then all settngs on low

this is really strange

[winged raven]

I always try with all settings low, and dxtweaker didn't worked but I will try anyway

[winged raven]

Old net framework I guess

[thin vector]

i have dotnet35

[winged raven]

dotnet35 is for 3.5 and older

this is probably older

So it loads the correct dll

[thin vector]

whatever it is lies in that dll

[rapid spear]

Does dxtweaker apply to d3d9 globally? Or does it modify the game specific DLL?

Another thought, might wanna try using asi loader to load in remixes d3d9

[thin vector]

i think it modifies game specific DLL

today i thought maybe we could get Battlefield 2 to work with remix, sadly not (same cycle we did with ug2 support)

[rapid spear]

Newer version of windows basically use d3d9to10/12 by default so they don’t have a lot of the d3d9 bits

[winged raven]

I have no idea

Probably injects

[rapid spear]

Nonsense. We havent even started ripping apart the DLLs and exes to make it work.

[thin vector]

@rapid spear watch out for glitches

this tool is funny

[rapid spear]

As long as remix hooks and doesn’t complain about not finding a camera there’s hope.

[rapid spear]

If it’s made in dotnet you can use a bunch of tools to mess with it. Like Dnspy

[thin vector]

we got a different set of problems after the patch

[winged raven]

I have dnspy

[rapid spear]

See if it’s .net

[winged raven]

It is

[rapid spear]

[winged raven]

What are you gonna do with that

[thin vector]

this tool is broken for me

and i can't install Dotnet older than 3.5

[winged raven]

When you enable the legacy dotnet it enables 3.5 and below so you have the necessary components

The thing is just broken

Nevermind

Enable reduced colors from compatibility

[winged raven]

Fixes the issues with window

@thin vector set colors to 8-bit

[thin vector]

don't judge me by my game directory naming

[winged raven]

+restart 1 +fullscreen 0 +szx 1024 +szy 578

set arguments to this

skips intros

[rapid spear]

Throw it into Dnspy and see what it’s doing to the DLL

[thin vector]

strange

where are the SHADER check boxes

[winged raven]

modules to load

[thin vector]

only 2 are available

[winged raven]

Mine looks so

Are you sure you extracted all

[rapid spear]

Check dx7 support.

Same with caps changer, wonder if that changes what caps it’s expecting

[winged raven]

I can't find the actual patching process

[thin vector]

i got distracted, played bf2 again

feels refreshing after 2042

[thin vector]

still same

[winged raven]

no custom dlls are loaded and d3d9 dll in the SysWOW64 is not modified

[winged raven]

do you have the plugins folder

[thin vector]

yep

all there

[winged raven]

I am starting to lose my mind

[winged raven]

idk man

@thin vector try to put this into Config folder

[thin vector]

it throws this error before launching

[winged raven]

Don't forget to edit path

[winged raven]

with this?

[thin vector]

i edit path but no options

[winged raven]

here try with this

[thin vector]

yeah

this one works

thank you

[winged raven]

@rapid spear if you start the app with valid command line arguments it will call a start function from this class and return so everything should be happening here

DX9Tweak.dat isn't there though

it should be near game executable

it is nowhere, I searched with everything

should have been generated on the fly

@thin vector Does it work

[rapid spear]

Post it in a gist if you really wanna show it. I don’t see anything interesting in there but I’m not the best with .net.

[winged raven]

what is gist

website

?

[rapid spear]

https://gist.github.com

[thin vector]

Same as before (maybe I have settings on high)

[rapid spear]

Check if controlled file access is on. I’d it is then you might need to add this programs to the exception list

[winged raven]

(App Entry) https://gist.github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/f4c9b0b03b05a2c9baf730b86949090d
(DirectStarter) https://gist.github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/7fc49477d54b8b3084b18962718af1c4
(App Config - the actual process start) https://gist.github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/bc9c49c4705178d4f9ac9da11323bc33

[rapid spear]

What are the dxp files? Are they plain text or binary?

[winged raven]

binary

Here

[rapid spear]

I can’t hex edit on my phone : (

What is a dxp file anyway

[thin vector]

Proprietary file naming for DXTweaker

[winged raven]

I hate nonsense proprietary formats when there is absolutely no need for one

[thin vector]

Welcome to early 2000s

So even with all the tweaks remix still doesn't like it

[winged raven]

I doubt they even work

[thin vector]

maybe we aren't emulating our hardware as a GeForce 4

[winged raven]

I am done for today

[winged raven]

it is off :/

[winged raven]

What about the dll replacement, it should have worked no matter what

[thin vector]

Yeah me too, well it was good to know this game can be tuned to become backward compatible

[winged raven]

I tried all patches with the demo as well still no luck

[thin vector]

maybe it's up to remix to fix this

[rapid spear]

I’ll take a shot at making it work later tonight

[thin vector]

My man 💗

🙌

[rapid spear]

Curious to see what’s in those dxp files

[rapid spear]

My Google-fu has failed to turn up what they could be

[winged raven]

uhm..

[rapid spear]

Not sure why my brain never read this

I wonder if there are any more of these profiles/dxp files for more games

[rapid spear]

Hm... I wanna say the video playing in the background of the menu could be causing issues. Remix handles the UI ontop of it fine but doesn't do anything besides that

[thin vector]

do we have a -novid kind of launch argument for it?

[winged raven]

I mean we can delete them if that would work

[thin vector]

yeah

where are they located

[winged raven]

\mods\bf2\Movies

Also we could modify the flash menu but not sure if that would make a difference

if(gameisRunning && loginStatus != 0) { var loadString = "?menu_loggedin.bik"; dice.bf2.Logic.setStorageString("BGmovie",loadString); _root.bg.flush(); nextPage = "none"; }

[winged raven]

So I removed the videos and recompiled the crappy flash menu

The moment of truth

[thin vector]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1045808296478658590.webp?size=96

[winged raven]

Nope

[thin vector]

with remix?

it should crash

not like

render normally

because you said it didn't find a valid camera

[winged raven]

info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace but not detecting a valid camera. info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Texture 0 without valid hash detected, skipping drawcall. warn: [rtx-interleaver] Unsupported color0 buffer format (109), skipping color0 info: [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Found a draw call to a non-primary render target. Falling back to rasterization

[winged raven]

It never crashed

after the v2 update

[thin vector]

idk, we need to decompile the dll to find out what's really going on

[winged raven]

(except for bridge)

[thin vector]

or we could see the ShaderMod patch

[winged raven]

There was actually no reason for DICE to switch to sm1.4

There was actually a lot of critisism for that

[thin vector]

can this be useful in concluding what's causing it to crash

[winged raven]

Didn't knew discord has syntax highlighting

[thin vector]

seems like pixel shader 1.1 and 1.4 are used by terrain and undergrowth areas

[thin vector]

@winged raven http://www.bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?/topic/14407-editing-shaders/

idk if it helps

but seems like we're dealing shaders as camera was not detected

#if _FORCE_1_3_SHADERS_ #define PS_14 #define VS_NORMALIZE #else //#define USE_FRESNEL #define USE_SPECULAR #define USE_SHADOWS #define PIXEL_CAMSPACE #define USE_3DTEXTURE #define PS_20 #endif #define USE_HEIGHTALPHA

[rapid spear]

Hm.. Looking around in the specialk log of the game running and I'm noticing that the game calls RendDX9.dll and that makes all the api calls.

Thus, our d3d9.dll isn't getting injected properly

No wait, it is

[rapid spear]

I wonder if this game being reliant on d3d9x for so many things is causing problems

[thin vector]

It relies on it for texture checks

[thin vector]

I feel like we need to rename rtx remix d3d9 to renddx9.dll

Or merge their functions if renddx9 had the same dx9 code but with extra stuff related to the game

(I maybe wrong or it's not possible)

(mark if you're reading this, please help us out)

[winged raven]

Mark is not a ex DICE developer

[thin vector]

ik

[winged raven]

Still nothing

[thin vector]

Gotta file an issue then

We tried everything

[winged raven]

Nah, just I wish there is a better way to determine whats the cause

[thin vector]

We know that the shaders won't interfere, it's something else

[winged raven]

I think we could ask Mark -as you suggested-, at least someone else in their team might have a better guess

[thin vector]

Yes that's why I'm saying put up an issue on github

[winged raven]

Github issues should be used for real issues, this one is more like troubleshooting

And Discord allows quicker communication

[thin vector]

Well there is an issue with the game not cooperating with remix

It does hook so that's a start

[winged raven]

I wonder flash player is causing this like Adam suggested

because every piece of ui is flash, and it is done on the cpu

[thin vector]

can flash be uninstalled from the game?

[winged raven]

Before you ask I tried removing ui

[thin vector]

can it be modified to use something else?

[winged raven]

Idk, not easily I assume

[granite panther]

i bet it's possible, just a shit ton of work. tedious work, re-implementing all of the UI elements and the scripting and all that

Fallout 76 still uses flash for their UI, lol. found that out the hard way (lots of crashes)

[winged raven]

Also BF2 is definetely uses pixel shaders, just not all the time

[thin vector]

Kim, can we be allowed to call in the Nvidia devs on this topic

Like ping them

[granite panther]

if you think they can help, and if you've had no responses on it, yes

[thin vector]

It uses PS1.4 for terrain only

[winged raven]

The scanline effect on the tv guided missile cameras

[winged raven]

Pixel shaders for terrain?

why

[thin vector]

I've read in old forums

Folks with Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti were complaining about it

[winged raven]

Now DICE being an early adopter to every piece of new tech is a headcache

Yea why render the terrain traditionally when you can do it on ps shaders which majority of the potential playerbase doesn't have access to

for no reason apperantly

[granite panther]

it doesn't make much sense to do just terrain though?

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

i thought it was used for something else

[winged raven]

It is used for other things

[thin vector]

Texture caching is also one the problems

[winged raven]

I've seen Project Reality is switching to sm3 in one of their blogposts

[granite panther]

i didn't even know that was still going

[winged raven]

It is, they have way more content than any other milsim shooters so it still a solid option

[thin vector]

This is a much better explanation

[granite panther]

i remember trying it long ago, when i got bored with "Play4Free"

and by bored, i mean not wanting to pay to fly a heli or whatever, lol

[thin vector]

kekw

[granite panther]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_Play4Free

[granite panther]

lol

[winged raven]

Yea it is basically a knock off bf2 clone with slightly updated visuals and p2w elemets

There were some chinese ones as well

[granite panther]

yeah, this one's official though. makes it much worse imo

[winged raven]

Ones that show stupid kill marks covering half of your screen

[granite panther]

i couldn't do much of anything in the game

[winged raven]

They're official too, the partner publisher is chinese

[granite panther]

ah

BF Heroes was a lot more fun. afaik that was revived by the community. may be worth a try with Remix

[winged raven]

It is built on top of refractor 2 so if bf2 doesn't work it won't either I think

[thin vector]

Fortnite remix basically

[granite panther]

i have a bit of hope, because i think they tried to retain compatibility for older hardware with Heroes

[winged raven]

Hmm, worth a try then

[thin vector]

Should we call in Mark?👀

[winged raven]

I don't remember seeing this post

maybe I forgot

[granite panther]

i sadly just don't have enough time to test games anymore

hopefully someone tries it

[granite panther]

if/when you ping him, make sure to give a detailed explanation in a single message

[winged raven]

I feel like this is hopeless

like Bf Vietnam works but it has those crazy vertex shaders

[thin vector]

Nothing's hopeless, remember the time when we were banging our heads on underground 2

Just gotta let the devs know

[granite panther]

i feel like the BF games will be among the last to work from this generation

[thin vector]

Sadly that's the case

[winged raven]

https://github.com/lucasluqui/bfheroes-offline

bf hereos revive project is dead

the website redirects to somewhere else

[granite panther]

aw

if anyone ever gets Firefall working again, i'd love to see that with Remix

probably too new though

[granite panther]

no, it's still up

"rising hub"

[winged raven]

?

Hmm mine was redirecting to gambling sites

[granite panther]

weird

[winged raven]

So this one is different. The one I searched for was BF Hereos Revive (just like BF2 revive)

I think it is revived again

[granite panther]

rising hub is the one i remember from years ago

so maybe there were just 2?

[thin vector]

@winged raven can you lay down some of the problems we are having currently?

[winged raven]

Got the link from some random videos from 6 year ago

Oh btw we did tried some community made solutions to get the game working for the older hardware of that time

None of those actually worked tho, without the remix

[winged raven]

Game hooks but is completely rasterized
Trying to raytrace but couldt find a valid camera
UI is flash and rendered on the cpu

What else..

[thin vector]

I gotta clean my keyboard keycaps first, then gonna write all that down

[winged raven]

what lol

[thin vector]

tf

[winged raven]

gotta need debug builds to navigate through the menu

[thin vector]

Bf2?

[winged raven]

Oh now actions download at normal speeds

finally

[winged raven]

hereos

So it doesn't help

gotta take screenshots then

[obtuse anvil]

What the actual actual actual...

[thin vector]

https://mcvuk.com/business-news/pc/when-riccitiello-said-battlefield-players-could-pay-1-per-reload/

comments from EA CEO John Riccitiello:

When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time,” he stated.

[obtuse anvil]

What a vile soab.

[winged raven]

This is a joke right?

[thin vector]

No

EA CEO was actually suggesting this

Before he left

[winged raven]

Alright hereos just crashes

[thin vector]

Refractor problem

It's not allowing remix to interfere

[thin vector]

@oak jay Sorry for the ping but we are having problems with getting remix to work with Battlefield 2

Remix Runtime Hooks with the game but not finding a valid camera to ray trace like this #1103606881538277386 message

The things we have tried so far:

We've tried patching the game with old forum mods that allow us to run the game at Pixel Shader 1.3 and with a tool called DxTweaker

So far, the problems that we are facing are:

⦁ Game hooks but is rasterized, trying to raytrace no valid camera detected :(

Possible reasons for remix incompatibility:

⦁ BF2 uses a flash based UI system that rendered on the CPU (possibly another reason why it isn't working)
⦁ The RendDX9.dll is possibly causing issues due to its shader caching functions that work along the game's executable to use shaders

P.S: This was a last resort/attempt for us because we've tried everything we can to overcome the problem but felt necessary for you guys to know so that we could get the game running with remix

[oak jay]

Have you filed a github issue about it, including full logs?
I'm not too familiar with how the camera stuff works, but generally this happens when the game is doing the view transform via shaders, instead of doing it through the fixed function pipeline.

[rapid spear]

I think the issue is that remix tries to inject into the flash based ui rather than the game.

I think I tried loading directly into a map and it still didn’t hook right though

[winged raven]

I did too

The in game ui is flash as well afair

[rapid spear]

Ahhh

[winged raven]

anchorlight have a build with ability to change render targets, would it be helpful?

[oak jay]

ahh, flash.... I have no idea how flash works in a d3d9 game, are they wrapping it with some library or something?

[rapid spear]

Maybe. I haven’t done an api trace to see what’s going on

[rapid spear]

Render on the cpu and then memcopy into gpu buffer I believe

[winged raven]

@crystal pond Sorry for the ping, is in game ui flash based as well?

[rapid spear]

You get the pre transformed verts and such that way I think

[oak jay]

well if they're just splatting that onto a texture and rendering that as a plane in front of the camera... I suppose you can't really mark it as UI when it changes constantly

[rapid spear]

Prob should read up on how it’s done though, seems like it’ll be worthwhile to understand since there’s a good amount of games that do the ui with flash from this time.

[winged raven]

Hmm nevermind what I did say, it should have messed up as well if in game ui was flash based

Because main menu does

fonts disappear

[rapid spear]

Well flash is rendered on the cpu afaik so it gets all confusing.

[winged raven]

What a beautiful design choice to make flash ui s

[oak jay]

make in the day flash was much easier for artists to make UI in.

[winged raven]

The ui is ugly tho 🙂

[oak jay]

the artists could design it all in a artist friendly tool, then the programmers could just hook up various buttons to various actions

[winged raven]

Like it could've been made without flash as easily

[rapid spear]

The flash software at the time was so nice to use compared to everything else.

[rapid spear]

Nope. More difficult outside of flash at the time imo

[oak jay]

yeah, way more difficult.

flash was the only way for artists to set up all the animations and transitions without needing programmers to code the animations manually

[rapid spear]

Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s like flash player running on top of the game itself.

[winged raven]

Then why only the fonts disappear

It works fine with just dxvk btw

[oak jay]

Do you know if there are any early d3d9 games using flash UI that don't require sketchy mods to use?

[rapid spear]

The movies, but it has no digital distribution

[oak jay]

I don't think we'll be able to install the bf2ShaderMod on our work machines

[rapid spear]

You dont need any mods

[oak jay]

oh, was confused by Happysufigee's post

[winged raven]

Yea there were some mods make the game run on older hardware that doesn't support the latest sm

[oak jay]

oh, and I guess the only way to get battlefield 2 is to have a CD of it?

[winged raven]

I think we couldn't get them working (without the remix)

[winged raven]

I think origin support might give a download

I've seen posts like that

not sure tho

Otherwise yes, the only way is to get a retail copy

[oak jay]

yeah, sounds like it's been delisted from everywhere
https://delistedgames.com/battlefield-2/#:~:text=Battlefield 2 (aka%20Battlefield%202,later%20than%20June%20of%202014.

[rapid spear]

I don’t think cd copies work anymore cause of the drm 👀

[winged raven]

You can get the Project Reality which is a standalone mod tho they made some upgrades which probably make things worse

[winged raven]

DRM was removed in the latest patch 1.51

[rapid spear]

I wonder if you can ask the EA chat to add it to your origin library

[oak jay]

there are posts online saying people used to do this, but EA support stopped doing it

hmm, I'd definitely recommend making a github issue. If there is an actually legal way of getting the game up and running, someone working on compatibility might take a look.

[rapid spear]

Civ 4 had a flash based UI

that’s prob the easiest one to get, but it hooks the launcher and not the actual game

So it never actually injects into the game

[winged raven]

So if I confirm that the in game ui is flash based or not, can we make sure that its not the problem?

[rapid spear]

What’s the ui file names? They came up with a certain software

[winged raven]

@rapid spear Btw the loading screen is flash as well, so no way to enter the game without ever seeing flash is impossible afaik

[winged raven]

Wdym exactly

[rapid spear]

They’re stored somewhere and have a file name.

[winged raven]

UI is inside Menu_client.zip

[rapid spear]

What’s the file extension on them?

[winged raven]

There are multiple ones with no extension, some dds jpg and couple swfs in External/FlashMenu/

I can send the zip if you want

[rapid spear]

https://www.moddb.com/mods/battlefield-2-armored-shield/news/universal-launcher-project

[rapid spear]

Ah so it is just shockwave flash

[winged raven]

This is dead afaik

[rapid spear]

Better than nothing?

[winged raven]

By dead I mean you can't get to downloads can you

I did get via archive.org once but it throwed some random errors, can't remember what exactly

[rapid spear]

Dunno I can mess with it later tonight. Out and about right now

[winged raven]

Oh btw if I die the camera gets broken, multiple overlapping images appear until the animation stops

Have no idea why that might be happening

[thin vector]

not really necessary, i was digging up old forums with people complaining about them not running on their older gpus and then i found this

that magically solved their problems

long story short it doesn't do anything

[oak jay]

have you tried this for civ IV?
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/bridge-remix#using-the-remix-bridge-launcher

[rapid spear]

Yes. The game launches a little loading window that creates a d3d9 instance and destroys it, and then launches the actual game. So the injection doesn’t persist into the actual game.

[oak jay]

but what is the actual game exe that the launcher invokes?

[rapid spear]

I think it’s the same name

[oak jay]

I'm not actually sure how the launcher is supposed to work, but have you tried launching the game without any d3d9.dll replacer, then running the RemixLauncher?

[rapid spear]

I can give it a shot later tonight

[thin vector]

so who's putting up the github issue

[winged raven]

I'll do tomorrow, I don't have access to logs right now

[crystal pond]

No it's based on hudelement nodes etc

At the point of joining game it is no longer flash based

[winged raven]

Is it possible to skip loading screen as well? Or just purify it from the flash

[crystal pond]

Without flash you will not be able to start login or play any map afaik

The flash system would have to be abandoned and rebuilt differently which is likely buried in the swiffplayer.dll rendx9.dll and main exe if I was to guess

[winged raven]

I can join a local server with an launch option tho it still renders the loading screen. Would the game run without a loading menu?

Like if I remove the references or remove the file entirely

[crystal pond]

You won't be able to even log into an account

[winged raven]

It doesn't ask for anything when I join server with +joinserver 127.0.0.1

Does it actually need the flash ui to function at all?

[crystal pond]

As far as I know yes. It will likely shit itself even if, since it's still flash during map load and join game button

The game is expecting a flash menu to be there as far as I know

[crystal pond]

Nations At War is a full standalone clone of battlefield 2 and is closer to vanilla also has online support and ranks gamespy replacement might be easier to test out on. Also has windows server files to match. No Linux tho

[winged raven]

It was for NV team since they only can gather files "legally"

PR is still not totally "legal" but

They switched to sm3 afair so no point

[crystal pond]

Ah ours is SM3 to based on papdankus shaders he made for pr. Just was a thought.

[winged raven]

The original bf2 is sm1.4 right?

[crystal pond]

I think so. Either 1.3 or 1.4 I believe

Legally as far as I know so long as you are not profitting or handing out cd keys etc should be no legal issues. The reason Battlefield Revive got in trouble was using their ea dice logos, offering full installs of vanilla bf2 xpack and 2142 and handing out keys etc. That's what got them in hot water. Even if it's abandonware, those are a huge no no.

[granite panther]

worked for TS2 back in 2015. i doubt they do it anymore as Mark said though

[winged raven]

Now this is "Battlefield"

Wrecks stay forever. The game actually has the tech for this to happen without much catch, it stops processing physics objects unless something triggers it to. It had no impact on my performance

[thin vector]

you had my hopes up for a second lol

[winged raven]

Lets remake the game in source engine

[rapid spear]

I can try beating the game into submission some more. Maybe just disable UI entirely

[winged raven]

Damn, this is gonna be hard

[thin vector]

RendDX9 the suspect isn't it

so is the games exe

[winged raven]

and swiffplayer.dll

[winged raven]

I tried to simply unmount archives responsible for ui but it just crashes upon launch

(continue doesn't work btw)

[thin vector]

what if we rename remix's d3d9.dll to RendDx9.dll (wait nvm its not that simple 💀)

[rapid spear]

Hm, I’m thinking of trying NOPing the call to the UI draw function to see what happens.

[winged raven]

UI is not flash, LtFred corrected me

[rapid spear]

Oh so it’s just wonky

If you’d like, I’d suggest doing a quick apitrace to see how the menu is rendered. https://apitrace.github.io

[winged raven]

Uhm

Game took ages to load with this thing, that might be the reason

[thin vector]

what is this

[winged raven]

I think it logs the draw calls

[thin vector]

oh

Nsight does something similar too

right?

[winged raven]

I think its used as more of a performance profiler

to determine what costs how much performance

Idk

[rapid spear]

Oh yea you only need to run it for a bit, but you can open it with the command line to see every call

[winged raven]

I did run it for a bit, but it took ages to load into the a level

[rapid spear]

It’s only 1GB cause everything associated with each frame is saved.

[winged raven]

What I need to do now

I opened up the ui, I can see individual logs

should I pick one frame and send you?

[rapid spear]

Double click on a frame of the main menu and let’s see what’s going on

[winged raven]

Whoa, didn't expected it to recrate the whole thing

[rapid spear]

Yea that’s why it gets quite large in file size

[winged raven]

What I am looking for

[rapid spear]

Is there a ton of draw calls for the frame?

If it can fit all the drawcalls for the frame in one screen shot you can just send that.

[winged raven]

Yes, around ~500 when in main menu and ~3500 in game

per frame

[winged raven]

definetely not

[rapid spear]

Have you found the calls associated with just the menu ui? Or is it 500 for just the menu ui?

[winged raven]

Up until a point, drawcalls are around 300-900

which is probably the loading screen

Average frame in game is 1000 to 8000

[rapid spear]

Hm. Is your upload good enough to send that file over or would it be faster for me to do a trace?

[winged raven]

Yea, I definetely have no idea how these done so sorry for letting you down

[rapid spear]

All good 👍

[winged raven]

I'll try archiving it

It is 1/3 of the original size now, uploading to file.io

https://file.io/sz13Ct1jIqPv

[rapid spear]

I’ll have a look at it here in a few hours.

[rapid spear]

Not seeing anything out of the ordinary

[thin vector]

Anything unusual

[rapid spear]

Nothing yet

SwifPlayer.dll is used for UI I think

Which is a flashplayer thing from my understanding

Hm I can't get the game to run at all

@winged raven can you run the game with +disable-swiff as a launch option?

[winged raven]

It runs just as normal

[rapid spear]

Damn

[winged raven]

With that argument or not?

[rapid spear]

At all

[winged raven]

Have you tried launching it with +fullscreen 0 ? It should display an error

[rapid spear]

Yea that's what I typically do

I think one of my shader files got borked

Lemme reinstall it real quick

All better now

Trying to figure out where the disable-swiff flag goes

Ohhh it's for the debug build

https://www.moddb.com/games/battlefield-2/tutorials/running-the-debugger-with-bf2-rexe

Lots of debug launch parameters

[winged raven]

Like?

[rapid spear]

Disable swiff was one of them as far as I can tell

Didn’t do anything tho

Still cooking tho 🧑‍🍳

https://gist.github.com/adamplayer/37794a1584bf0b3d52828200e9b500ee

    std::string::string(v171, "lowSpec");```

The UI is gone

"D:\Games\Battlefield 2\BF2_r.exe" +fullscreen 0 +restart 1 +szx 1920 +szy 1080 +loadLevel Midnight_Sun +disableSwiff 1 +ignoreAsserts 1 +developer 1 +debugOutput 0 +lowSpec 1

The UI is gone

Uh no idea how to get into a game now

[rapid spear]

Okay, that's about as far as I can get today

[winged raven]

Is there even a loadmenu option

I got in game by hosting a local dedicated server then joining it by +joinServer 127.0.0.1 when the ui was just like this

[rapid spear]

Whatcha mean loadmenu?

[winged raven]

+loadLevel Midnight_Sun this doesn't work does it

[winged raven]

Before remix v0.2 the main menu was all black like this

[winged raven]

Have you done any other modifications? If not I could try getting in

[rapid spear]

None at all. Fresh install with the editor only

[thin vector]

Did disabling swift player help

[winged raven]

Wth is VtuneApi.dll

What

Is this what simulate older hardware option is for 😄

[thin vector]

I think we can use that bf2 shader mod now

[winged raven]

?

[thin vector]

The one Adam shared

[winged raven]

I can't pass this one

Tried to copy d3d9 from system32 & wow64

[rapid spear]

Run in winxp compatibility mode

[winged raven]

Ah I always forget this

[rapid spear]

Some errors will always appear at the start, just press continue and ignore them

[winged raven]

Weird, it doesn't pick the joinServer argument

the normal executable does, exactly same arguments

[rapid spear]

Yea it’s weird

[winged raven]

Ah thats why

gotta need an older build of server

Battlefield 2 Dedicated Server v1.5.3153-802.0(IA-32)

I think it is BF2HUB patches

gotta reinstall real quick

[rapid spear]

I sleep ping me if there’s any breakthroughs

[winged raven]

Okay it wasn't

nevermind I have a better idea

[thin vector]

Tomorrow's another day

😔

[winged raven]

Okay it doesn't allow me to run 2 instances of it

so I will put one into a vm then connect to it from the local one

[winged raven]

Uhm

But it enters the game just fine

So lets try with remix

Weird, I can't get the joinServer argument working .\BF2_r.exe +fullscreen 0 +restart 1 +szx 1280 +szy 720 +disableSwiff 0 +ignoreAsserts 1 +developer 1 +debugOutput 0 +lowSpec 1 +joinServer 192.168.1.52

but it works with this .\BF2_r.exe +fullscreen 0 +restart 1 +disableSwiff 0 +ignoreAsserts 1 +lowSpec 1 +joinServer 192.168.1.52

which I hope contains everything necessary

(I will set +disableSwiff to 1 after figuring out)

So this is with +disableSwiff 1

But main menu is black

what

anyway now I try with remix

Here it goes!

👀

damn it

Not sure if that was the case before, everything disappears as I turn off capture vertices from shader

If it wasn't, that's a progress

Nothing in debug view 😦

[winged raven]

Bridge logs:

...
[10:45:34.915] err:       2bb6 -> 0000023E30B958B0
[10:45:34.915] err:       3a70 -> 0000023E30B952E0
[10:45:34.915] err:       3a80 -> 0000023E30B96FF0
[10:45:34.915] err:   2 objects discovered in Swapchain map at Direct3D module eviction:
[10:45:34.915] err:       5 -> 0000023DF8B1CFA0
[10:45:34.916] err:       5c0 -> 0000023DF8B1CFA0
[10:45:34.916] err:   1 objects discovered in Device map at Direct3D module eviction:
[10:45:34.916] err:       4 -> 0000023DF9528040
[10:45:34.916] info:  Command processing loop finished, cleaning up and exiting...
[10:45:34.916] info:  Shutdown cleanup successful, exiting now!
[10:45:34.916] info:  [Uptime]: 1155s

BF2_r_d3d9.log

info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace but not detecting a valid camera.
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace an unsupported primitive topology [3]. Ignoring.
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace an occlusion query. Ignoring.
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Texture 0 without valid hash detected, skipping drawcall.
warn:  [rtx-interleaver] Unsupported color0 buffer format (109), skipping color0
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Skipped drawcall, colour write disabled.
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Skipping draw call with shader usage as vertex capture is not enabled.

[thin vector]

This means that shaders are necessary for the game to do world view transform

Need to find that shader so that remix devs can "probably" find a way to support it

(Wishful thinking)

[thin vector]

Did anyone put up a GitHub issue?

[winged raven]

Still not working (0.3)

[rapid spear]

[rapid spear]

I didn’t even look at this till now

[thin vector]

mark said the game might be doing rendering in worldview transform

[rapid spear]

Ain’t no easy way of fixing that I suppose

I need to look at my notes of what each debug command does. I don’t remember if I took a close enough look at low spec.

[thin vector]

https://tenor.com/view/crying-crying-man-black-guy-crying-black-man-crying-gif-21786839

[limpid plume]

your PC is also well up to spec for a game from 2005/6

[limpid plume]

Exactly
and the owner wanted out of the project anyway, so this was a good moment for him to kill it

[winged raven]

I admit that, I don't think the reason why they didn't implement such thing has to do with that tho

They've cared so much about the availability of their game, they used a cutting edge tech which only few had access to with no fallbacks

[thin vector]

Odd seeing you here Danny

[thin vector]

@winged raven I think we have to reverse engineer these texture checks first

Anything out of ordinary and it blocks remix's renderer

The problem is not the pixel shader requirement I think

[winged raven]

👀

[thin vector]

Explain

@winged raven is it merged?

[thin vector]

oh wait nvm the same line exists in DXVK repo

[winged raven]

I wonder a similar approach would work for this game. There are a lot of talented devs in the Project Reality community and they even ported the shaders to sm3 & written new ones.
#1135531755764453477 message
#1135531755764453477 message

[thin vector]

wouldn't that require some 3rd party clients?

the iw3xo client does more than the standard game

[winged raven]

I mean they should know if it is possible indeed or not

[thin vector]

in essence, for battlefield to work with remix we need to rewrite some code regarding matrices in the game

remix can't help that much

[thin vector]

we need to bring in some talented modders who know how to mess with rendering codes of the game

[winged raven]

I just checked the github repo for the cod4, they almost rewritten the whole think I assume :/

[thin vector]

are there any open source BF2 builds?

[winged raven]

#1135531755764453477 message
Wonder what that means, like somehow acquiring camera transform from game's shaders then writing to remix's memory?

[winged raven]

unfortunately no, not I am aware of

https://www.change.org/p/dice-open-source-battlefield-2
lol

DICE might even got rid of the source code after they switched to the Frostbite engine : D

There's this abandoned one: https://github.com/rigred/BattlefieldRespawn

https://github.com/BadSanta12345/RFX
This one is interesting

[thin vector]

oh well

[winged raven]

It says by accessing an internal game class you can acquire basically everything

[thin vector]

for this to work we need to strip down the game and make it remix-compatible

which might require knowing how the game handles its rendering protocol and rewriting the engine

is there any good information on how one frame of bf2 is constructed/rendered?

like with doom 2016 there's a website that tells how it renders https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/

[stiff sedge]

Would be pretty possible in GMod and much simpler thanks to Lua, but you'd still be capped by small max map size which sucks

[winged raven]

#1135531755764453477 message

[thin vector]

@winged raven do you know any PR devs that might know of this?

[winged raven]

I don't know any, I'll just ask on the forums

[winged raven]

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2222145#post2222145
Here's the post. I did my best to explain the overall situation. No other speculations included.
I can't say I am specifically good at public speech so I hope I haven't done any blunders

If someone ever sees it of course

[thin vector]

your post might attract some modders in pursuit of getting remix in project reality

[winged raven]

That's even further from reality than getting the vanilla BF2 working. They spent years to port & write custom shaders and mechanics depend on shaders now we can't expect them to just throw all that out.

[thin vector]

every day there's a new method to make stuff easier, why just stick to one thing forever?

[winged raven]

Likely the reason why they sticked to BF2 and refractor while many devs left to work on Squad

[thin vector]

pedantic behavior

[winged raven]

Don't get me wrong, I would love to get that but it just sounds too good to be true to me

[thin vector]

anyways here's something you can mess around with while we wait for BF2 to get remix support

https://github.com/aap/librw

[winged raven]

I wasn't aware what that means and now I get it. I am really sorry if I sound like that, gotta be more clear about what is my thinking / speculation and what is proven truth.

[thin vector]

i wasn't referring to you lol

its the guys gatekeeping for original PR and its custom shaders and stuff

allow for change and maybe it will look much more than what we have rn

[thin vector]

aw shucks

😔

[limpid plume]

The status for BF2 RTX is still basically non playable right?

[winged raven]

Rasterized

[winged raven]

sad

[thin vector]

No one has the answer

[winged raven]

This is how BF2 without pixel shaders look

I can't believe I missed papakandu's comment on replacing PixelShader = compile(...); with NULL;

Okay, lets try with remix

Ohhh not this again, bridge crashes :/

[thin vector]

basically we can't do anything

Because the camera is projected using vertex shaderd

[winged raven]

I started to believe that it might actually work

if I can get into the game without bridge crashing

[thin vector]

oof

[winged raven]

This looks even more promising lol

Still can't get into the game with remix tho

Now the water is broken too

not sure what I did this to happen

Finally

Uh I hate this game

Oh it turns out the regex I used to nullify pixel shaders doesn't cover all of them

Those are specific to AMD or NV

Still nothing

[winged raven]

I mean at this point I question will it even worth it

[worldly hearth]

bro is deleting every file in the game until it works, you'll end up with only remix in the game files lmaoo

[winged raven]

I am not deleting anything

[worldly hearth]

idk what ure doing but the more you send screenshots the least the game has stuff showing

[thin vector]

the game is suffering from dementia

[winged raven]

This shows that this game relies HEAVILY on shaders, and this is just with pixel shaders disabled

And still 0 blas

And we have the worst possible error:

info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace but not detecting a valid camera.
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Skipped drawcall, colour write disabled.

I believe this issue is similar to what CoD 4 had before and we need a similar solution

[winged raven]

Which won't work with remix anyway

[worldly hearth]

Oh ok

[winged raven]

So even if we got the game working, we'll end up with something similar to this, with rt of course

[thin vector]

mod the camera into a non shader one?

or simplify its shaders

so that remix can capture vertices and textures

there's just no way to capture assets in worldview transform done through shaders

[winged raven]

There doesn't seem to be anything related to camera here :/
It's probably hardcoded into the libraries

[winged raven]

So how to do that?

[thin vector]

its an engine thing i guess

[thin vector]

i don't know

[winged raven]

Me neither

[thin vector]

but yeah i think we need to toy with the camera and how to renders

[rapid spear]

If there’s tooling available, you can just pass the matrices directly to the directx device and then basically remove all the shaders. That’s how CoD works afaik.

[thin vector]

What kind of tooling?

Does that require modifying the engine or reverse engineering

[rapid spear]

Both

[thin vector]

Bring xoxor lol maybe he can carry us in this too

😭

[rapid spear]

Maybe the project reality folks have it but dunno

[winged raven]

That's why I asked them

[winged raven]

And a PR dev told me to do this (I missed his response back then), here's the result

And there's no luck at my forum post

I believe they still use that ancient BF2 Editor

no such fancy stuff like xoxor has

[rapid spear]

Try using +playNow +renderMode 0 on the debug exe.

Not sure if we tried the renderMode setting yet. It accepts 0-5 as a setting. It’s not documented what it does.

https://bftech.darkstormstudios.co.uk/index.php/Main_Page

[thin vector]

What does render mode do

[rapid spear]

Dunno

[rapid spear]

You can modify the shaders that get loaded this way apparently http://www.bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?/topic/14407-editing-shaders/&do=findComment&comment=97635

Also I wonder if setting that dxvk shader model to 1.4 does anything

[winged raven]

I directly edit the original bf2 shader client zip

And there's nothing directly affecting the camera as far as I can tell

[quick kelp]

can you load the game and a map without it crashing on you?

[winged raven]

Yes, with an old build of bridge (v0.2).

[winged raven]

Should do, I saw some conditional statements in the shader code

[winged raven]

https://bf2tech.uturista.pt/index.php/Command_Line_Options

+disableShaderCache

BF2_r +restart 1 +playerName Remix +fullscreen 0 +szx 1366 +szy 768 +ignoreAsserts 1 +developer 1 +lowSpec 1 +disableSwiff 1 +disableShaderCache 1 +NoEffectTextureAtlas 1 +renderMode 0 +loadLevel Dragon_Valley
Anything else?

👀

[winged raven]

Still nothing

With developer 1 it quickly returns to the profile selection menu a seconds after I join the map. This wasn't the case before 🤔

These comments are killing me lol:

//tl: Make this _not_ compile for ps1.3 && ATI because 1.4 is way more efficient in this case.
//    Do, however keep it compiling as ps1.3 for NVIDIA (because it's slower on NV3X in this shader :-|)
//    (yes, this _is_ ugly! kill me! No, really!)

Hmm, that's before it loads into the level

info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Trying to raytrace but not detecting a valid camera.
info:  uitextures - added 5C1C6BA4AC322DB8
info:  uitextures - added C5C3257BD7C86984
info:  [RTX-Compatibility-Info] Skipped drawcall, colour write disabled.
warn:  [rtx-interleaver] Unsupported color0 buffer format (109), skipping color0

[quick kelp]

oh my that is a lot of debug output (RendDx9_r)

[thin vector]

from my knowledge, this specific DLL does a lot of texture checks making it impossible to hook into

[rapid spear]

Feels like anyone who liked the idea of monolithic programming was shunned to shadow realm on this project

It is kinda neat that there’s a Python api for the game logic though.

If I recall correctly, just like id engine, this has a polymorphic rendering system.

[winged raven]

I think it's kinda lacking tho. The modding community mostly revolves around adding additional maps, vehicles, weapons and such. It's rare to see new gameplay features, or things that doesn't inherit all it's logic from the existing stuff. I wonder how much pain was that to implement all that mechanics PR has.

[rapid spear]

Prop hunt bf2 when

[thin vector]

🙁

[dusky pond]

Anyone this active here?

[thin vector]

This is not working properly

Remix hooks but no path tracing

Check d3d9 logs as well as turn on DXVK hud

[dusky pond]

https://tenor.com/view/computer-eyes-blink-blinking-eyes-look-at-screen-stare-gif-26257443

[thin vector]

That's us since last year btw

[dusky pond]

Seriously, there has to be a way

[winged raven]

There is

[thin vector]

?

[winged raven]

remake Battlefield 2 in Source

[dusky pond]

Bruh

[thin vector]

too much work

[dusky pond]

If the camera thing is the only thing in our way, surely we can fix that right?

[winged raven]

Just kidding, Source can't even handle the map sizes of bf2

[thin vector]

it's a refractor 2 problem...everything is rendered in a way remix can't intercept

especially the geo

[thin vector]

Trust me we tried everything we knew

[dusky pond]

So what do we do now? wait for an update or something?

[winged raven]

we don't know enough

[winged raven]

We wait until some nerd comes in, reverse engineers the rendering part in 2 days, ports the rendering to fixed function, takes all the credit (rightfully) and we got BF2 RTX

[dusky pond]

Where can I find these reverse engineers?

[winged raven]

You wait until gods decide to send one in

lol

[dusky pond]

would the dark web have one? lol

[winged raven]

Nah, just someone with the skill and dedication who is willing to get BF2 RTX.

Just like xoxor4d with CoD MW 1

[thin vector]

Starts praying 🙏

[dusky pond]

https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?query=reverse engineer&source=main_banner&ref_ctx_id=b7da6749a6b340f79614c9482fdaed0e&search_in=everywhere&search-autocomplete-original-term=reverse engineer

We can hire someone to do it

[thin vector]

Lmao...this costs money lol

[dusky pond]

Bro, im legit willing to pay lol

[thin vector]

Pretty sure we need to reverse engineer the rendering part

So hire that person

[thin vector]

@winged raven 👀

[dusky pond]

Id rather hire someone to do it rather than waiting till im 50 years old

[thin vector]

uhhhhh

Idk what to say

Can't we get an ex dice dev here?

[winged raven]

What

[thin vector]

He's willing to pay some expert

[winged raven]

They're busy crafting micro transactions for The Finals

[winged raven]

So why ping me

[dusky pond]

Far out

aint cheap

[winged raven]

I don't think you should invest in such thing

[thin vector]

we wait 50 years ig

[dusky pond]

I was about to buy a $1500 dollar steam key for bf2 complete collection

u have no Idea how much I like this game

[winged raven]

If you REALLY want to, get in every subreddit, bf2 forum or whatever and ask if someone could port the game to fixed function

[thin vector]

That or become a nerd

[winged raven]

Sorry but that sounds beyond liking :/

[dusky pond]

Reshade works with this game, thats kinda similar to rtx remix in a way

[winged raven]

If you think so, you won't find much in Remix I should say

[thin vector]

I just want to see a funny path tracer work with bf2, nothing much tbh

reshade is really good for post processing but not equivalent to remix as it changes the renderer entirely

[dusky pond]

I want bf2 too look like aaa titles in 2024

[winged raven]

I just wanna add emissives to the 25 mm armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot round tracers and watch bots fight in nighttime

[thin vector]

I want that too but seems like that's not possible

[dusky pond]

You think ea would sell bf2?

like give ownership to someone else?

[winged raven]

It should be public domain in 70 years

[dusky pond]

bro I cant wait that long

Ill be a grandpa by then

[thin vector]

I'll be dead

[dusky pond]

I dont think ill hire a reverse engineer due to their price, but I will contact EA to see if they would sell ownership of the game

Not that im buying the game, just wanna see if they would sell it

[thin vector]

Yeah unless you guys know any person capable of dissecting the bf2 renderer and explaining what needs to be done to get remix compatibility then this project is on a permanent hiatus

[winged raven]

Don't waste your time

[thin vector]

did we check if there's a custom renderer for bf2 ever made?

from what I understand

You can only add newer features but can't remove from the base

Like adding new and better shaders

[winged raven]

The only thing I know is that Project Reality devs ported the shaders to sm3 and that's it. I asked them about remix and they said nullify shader compilation, which I did.

Pixel shader comp

Vertex shaders are being used to render everything

so I can't disable them

Maybe I can disable all but the essentials but I doubt it would make any difference

[thin vector]

Hmm, don't think we will get necessary information from the assets if we strip these shaders

[dusky pond]

aparrently shaders for BF2 are in a language called "Cg".

[thin vector]

mark did tell something about per game modifications that could allow remix to intercept assets from these shaders

[dusky pond]

dont know if this helps

[thin vector]

I only know hlsl shaders, even those are hard

[winged raven]

It's the camera, remix can't find the camera and I believe we need a solution similar to what xoxor4d did with cod

[thin vector]

You mean the matrices stuff?

[winged raven]

Yes

[thin vector]

how do we do that

[dusky pond]

So what is this camera thing we talk of?

[winged raven]

Before you ask, no I don't know how

I don't think there's a disassemble project going on with bf2

[dusky pond]

https://tenor.com/view/alpacino-godfather-gif-9737911

[thin vector]

Someone needs to find the code where the camera renders the scene

http://www.codinglabs.net/article_world_view_projection_matrix.aspx

(nvm this is way beyond my level of intelligence)

[rapid spear]

I asked xoxor about making a generic DLL that exposes the camera matrices. They said they might look into it after cod waw

[winged raven]

How it would work

[rapid spear]

If feeds remix the camera matrix so it didn’t have to get it through shaders

[winged raven]

How do we get the camera matrices

Is it like a bridge between a game specific tool and remix?

[dusky pond]

my brain rn